Genesis33chapter 33

Genesis 33:1-2

These are the same four hundred men reported to Jacob in 32:6, and the night of wrestling stands between the report and the meeting. Jacob divides the household by how much he can bear to lose, the handmaids and their children in front, Leah and hers next, Rachel and Joseph hindermost. Adam Clarke asks the question the arrangement raises, whether the ones set foremost were the ones least esteemed. The ranking is the household's own order written down, and it is the order that produces the coat in chapter 37.

Genesis 33:3-4

Isaac's blessing had said let thy mother's sons bow down to thee, and the man who took that blessing is the one on the ground, seven times, before the brother he took it from. Esau answers with four verbs before the verse says anything about speech, he ran, embraced, fell on his neck and kissed him, and then they wept. Genesis opens with a man killing his brother in a field, and this is the road back from it, the road Joseph walks again when he weeps on the brothers who sold him in 45:15. John Wesley notes that nothing Jacob had prepared did the work, since God holds the hearts of men and turned this one before a word was spoken.

Genesis 33:5-7

Esau asks about the women and children and Jacob answers that God has graciously given them to his servant, taking the lower place for the second time in three verses. The families then come forward in the order he had set, so the ranking is acted out in front of Esau rather than hidden from him. Joseph is the only child named, and he is named ahead of his own mother, which is the first sign in the text of the place he holds in that house.

Genesis 33:8-9

The droves are the present Jacob sent ahead in 32:13-21, saying he would appease his brother with it and afterward see his face. Esau has to ask what they are for, which means he had come without knowing he was owed anything. He refuses them, and the word he uses first is brother. John Gill reads the refusal as the proof that the reconciliation is real, since a man who still counts a debt does not send the payment back.

Genesis 33:10

The night before, Jacob had named a ford Peniel and said I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved. Now he tells Esau that seeing his face was like seeing the face of God, and he has come through the second meeting as he came through the first. Matthew Henry takes it as Jacob reading God's favour in his brother's, a sign that the prayer at the ford had been answered. Adam Clarke supplies the custom underneath the pressing, that a gift accepted in that country settled a friendship, so Jacob is asking for the one proof he can see.

Genesis 33:11

Jacob calls the gift my blessing, and blessing is the word Esau cried over in 27:36 when he said he hath taken away my blessing. What was taken then cannot be handed back now, so what is pressed on Esau instead is livestock called by that name. John Gill notes that Esau's answer in the verse before is literally I have much, while Jacob's word here is all, the larger claim made by the poorer man. He urged him, and he took it, and the account between the brothers closes on that line.

Genesis 33:12-14

Esau offers to travel with him and Jacob gives the pace of the tender children and the nursing flocks as his reason, which is true on its face. He then says he will come on to Seir, and Genesis never records that he went. Adam Clarke takes the promise as sincere and undone by later circumstances, while Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read the whole refusal as prudence, the brothers being now too unlike each other to travel well together. The text gives the words and withholds the motive.

Genesis 33:15-16

Esau offers an escort out of his own four hundred and Jacob wants none of them. Two chapters earlier the angels of God had met him and he had called the place Mahanaim, which is read as two camps, and John Wesley takes the refusal as the answer of a man who already has a guard. Esau turns back to Seir that same day, and the brothers are not shown together again until they stand at their father's grave in 35:29. Isaac and Ishmael had buried Abraham the same way in 25:9, sons long divided meeting once at the burial.

Genesis 33:17

Jacob builds a house, and Hebrews 11:9 remembers all three patriarchs as men who dwelt in tabernacles in the land of promise as in a strange country. Jerome places Succoth beyond the Jordan in the region of Scythopolis, so the house goes up on the far side of the river from the land he was given. The name means booths, and Israel will keep a feast of booths every year to remember the season when it had no house at all.

Genesis 33:18

Adam Clarke and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown both read shalem as a word before it is a place, that Jacob came whole, or safe, or in peace. His vow at Bethel had been made on the condition that he come again to his father's house in peace, and the word he used there stands on the same root. He is back in Canaan unharmed, and he has stopped short of Bethel and short of his father's house.

Genesis 33:19

This is the second and last piece of ground any patriarch owns in the land of promise, after the field and cave at Machpelah bought for four hundred shekels in 23:16-20. Matthew Henry notes that the country was already his by promise and Jacob pays for the plot anyway, rather than raise a dispute with the men living on it. Hebrews 11:13 says they died in faith without receiving the promises, confessing that they were strangers on the earth. Joseph's bones are buried in this parcel in Joshua 24:32, and it is the ground beside the well where Jesus asks a Samaritan woman for a drink in John 4.

Genesis 33:20

The altar is named God, the God of Israel, and Israel is the name he was given at the ford two chapters back, so the first use he makes of it is to fasten it to God. Matthew Henry puts it that an honour becomes an honour when it is turned back to God's honour. Abraham had built at Shechem and then at Bethel when he first came into the land, and Jacob has now built at Shechem. God has to tell him in 35:1 to go up to Bethel and pay the vow he made there twenty years before.