Genesis32chapter 32

Genesis 32:1-2

the angels of God met him: Angels stand at both ends of the exile. They went up and down the ladder over him the night he fled the land in chapter 28, and here they meet him on the road back into it, with Laban's twenty years lying between the two sightings. He names the place Mahanaim, which means two camps, and camp is the word this chapter keeps counting with.

Genesis 32:3-5

God sends his messengers to Jacob and Jacob at once sends his own, and Hebrew uses one word for both, which is why Gill has to stop and explain that these are servants rather than angels. The message he writes for them calls Esau my lord and himself thy servant, though Isaac's blessing in chapter 27 had said his brethren would bow down to him. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read him as leaving that promise to God to fulfil and bowing in the meantime.

Genesis 32:6-8

the messengers returned to Jacob: They come back with a number and no answer. Esau is on the road with four hundred men and the text records not one word from his mouth, which leaves Jacob to supply the meaning himself, and he supplies the worst. He then splits everything into two bands so that half may escape, which makes a second Mahanaim out of his fear on the ground where he had just been shown God's.

Genesis 32:9

O God of my father Abraham: This is the first prayer of Jacob's that Genesis records, and it opens on a covenant made with two dead men rather than on anything he can claim for himself. He then hands God back God's own command, Return unto thy country, and to thy kindred, spoken to him in chapter 31. Abram's call had been to get out of his country and from his kindred, and the grandson is sent back into both.

Genesis 32:10

The Hebrew behind not worthy is katonti, I am small, which Clarke renders I am less than all the compassions and all the faithfulness thou hast shewed unto thy servant. He measures the twenty years by what he carried across the water each way, one staff going out and two companies coming back. Hebrews remembers him at the end of his life worshipping while he leaned on the top of that staff.

Genesis 32:11-12

What he names is not his own death only but the mother with the children, which Clarke reads as a fear of extermination and which would be the end of the promised line. So he closes by holding God to the sand of the sea, the promise the killing would cancel. Genesis has run this before, with the mother of the seed inside Pharaoh's house in chapter 12 and inside Abimelech's in chapter 20, and each time the promise survives what the man carrying it has done to it.

Genesis 32:13-15

The present is counted out animal by animal and the first two lines of it are goats, two hundred she goats and twenty he goats. Jacob had taken Esau's blessing wearing the skins of two kids and carrying a dish cooked from them, and what he sends back to Esau now is a herd of the same beast. Clarke reads the whole gift as restitution for the injury done to his brother, and Henry notes that the man prayed first and then went to work with means.

Genesis 32:16-18

Every drove goes separately with a space left between them, so that Esau meets the gift again and again rather than once. Each servant is handed the same script, and the script ends every time on the same line, that Jacob is behind us. This is the staging of a man who has finished praying and is still arranging the answer.

Genesis 32:19-21

The reason he gives himself in the next line, I will appease him with the present, uses the verb kaphar, the word that stands behind atonement, and its plain sense is to cover a face. Face runs through that one verse four times in Hebrew: the present goes before his face, it will cover Esau's face, afterward he will see his face, and perhaps Esau will lift up his face. Before morning he will name a place for having seen God face to face, and in the next chapter he tells Esau that seeing his face was like seeing the face of God.

Genesis 32:22-23

He counts eleven sons over the ford, and the twelfth is not born yet, since Rachel dies bearing him three chapters from here. Then he sends over everything else he owns and keeps none of it back. Twenty years of gain go to the far bank and the man who gathered it waits on this one with nothing.

Genesis 32:24-25

This is the second night in the book he spends alone in the open, the first being the night the ladder stood over him on his way out of the land. A man wrestles him until daybreak, and when the man cannot prevail he touches the hollow of the thigh and the match is finished, so the strength was never the question. Ambrose reads the stripping away of everything as what put him in a position to wrestle at all, and Henry, following Hosea, says the weapons were weeping and supplication.

Genesis 32:26

The wrestler asks to be let go and Jacob answers by holding on, which is where the night turns. He fought while he could fight and he prevails now by refusing to release a man who has already crippled him. The blessing he once took by disguise he asks for out loud this time, from someone he cannot deceive.

Genesis 32:27-28

The last time a man who could not see him asked Jacob who he was, it was his blind father in chapter 27, and the answer was I am Esau thy firstborn. Here he says Jacob, which is the name Esau spat back at him in the same chapter, is not he rightly named Jacob, for he hath supplanted me these two times. The confession comes first and the new name follows it, Israel, a prince having power with God and with men.

Genesis 32:29-30

Jacob asks for a name and is refused one, and Henry reads the refusal as a check on a man who might think he had won something. He calls the place Peniel because he had seen God face to face and kept his life, and Jerome notes that the Hebrew is Phanuel, the form the later books use. Who the wrestler was has been read several ways: Hosea calls him an angel, Clarke takes him for Christ appearing before the incarnation, and Calvin holds that God showed himself here in the person of a mediator.

Genesis 32:31-32

The sun had gone down on him the night he left the land in chapter 28, and it comes up on him as he crosses back in, which Clarke connects to Malachi's line about the Sun of righteousness rising with healing in his wings. He walks into the meeting with his brother limping. Israel keeps a rule about what it will not eat, dated to this night and held unto this day, so the nation carries in its table the memory of the night its father was crippled and renamed.