Jacob and the Night at the Jabbok

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Full script

It is nearly morning, and there is a man at the edge of a river, sitting on a stone, and he cannot stand up.

His hip is wrong. Not broken, exactly. Out of place. Every time he tries to put weight on it, the whole leg tells him no. His clothes are wet to the waist, his hands are scraped, and his hair is full of river-bank dust. And yet, if you were close enough to see his face, you would see a thing you would not expect. He is not frightened any more. He looks like someone who has put down something very heavy, and has not yet noticed that it is gone.

Now, across the river, a long way up the road, there is a cloud of dust. And in the dust there are four hundred men.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story comes from the book of Genesis, chapters thirty-two and thirty-three, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture, and we will tell it as it is told there. A few of the small conversations, and the weather, and what a man might have thought while sitting by a fire, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will say at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let us start with the man, because you may have met him before.

His name is Jacob. If you have heard the story of the ladder at Bethel, he is the young man who lay down on a stone one night, on the run, and dreamed of angels going up and down a ladder between earth and heaven. If you have heard the story of the blessing, you will also know why he was on the run. He had, to put it as kindly as the book allows, got ahead of his brother by a method that was not entirely honest. His brother's name was Esau, and Esau, understandably, had been very angry, and had said some things about what he planned to do once their father was gone.

That was a good while ago. The book tells us, a little later in the story, that Jacob spent twenty years away from home, working for his uncle Laban, who turned out to be a man who could cheat as well as anyone, and rather better than most. I do not say it was fair. I say that if you spend twenty years being outwitted by your uncle, you may find yourself thinking a good deal about the last person you outwitted.

And in those twenty years, a number of things had happened to Jacob. He had got married, twice, which, in his case, was not at all what he had planned. He had a wife called Leah and a wife called Rachel, and each of them had a maid, and the maids were called Bilhah and Zilpah, and between the four of them, the book says, he had eleven children. He had flocks and herds so large that nobody could count them. He had servants, and tents, and donkeys, and camels, and a great deal of luggage.

And one day, God said to him: Go back. Return to the land of your fathers, and to your kindred, and I will be with you.

So he went. And that is where the road begins.

Now, I want to give you the journey, because the journey is quite long, and a long journey with a large family in the old days was not a thing you did by getting into a car.

Imagine it. At the front, perhaps, a boy with a stick, driving the goats. Behind the goats, the sheep, a great grey-white river of them, going slowly, stopping, going on. Behind the sheep, the cattle, with their big patient faces. Then the camels, who do not look at anybody. Then the donkeys, loaded up with tent poles and cooking pots and bundles tied with rope. Then the women and the children, some walking and some riding, and the smallest ones carried. And at the back, or in the middle, or running up and down the line, depending on how the day was going, Jacob.

It was not a quick procession. If you pushed it too hard, as Jacob would say later in this story, the whole thing would go wrong. And so it moved at about the speed of a lamb that has just been born. You would see where you were going a good while before you got there, and you would smell it, too.

And as they came to the edge of the country where Esau lived, which the book calls the land of Edom, the field of Seir, Jacob did the careful thing. He sent messengers ahead.

He said to them: Go to my brother Esau. Say to him, this is what your servant Jacob says. I have been staying with Laban, and I have been there until now. I have oxen, donkeys, flocks, male and female servants. And I send to tell my lord, so that I may find favour in your sight.

I want you to notice that. It is a small phrase, and it is also a very large one. He calls Esau, my lord. He calls himself, your servant. He is the one who ended up with the blessing, the birthright, the flocks, the wives, and the long walk home, and he opens with, my lord, your servant. I do not think this is only politeness. I think a man who has spent twenty years thinking about it has found out where he stands.

So the messengers went. And Jacob and the long procession went on, at the speed of a lamb.

And then the messengers came back.

Now, they were good messengers, and they gave him a short report, as good messengers do. We went to your brother Esau, they said. And he is coming to meet you. And four hundred men are with him.

That is the whole of it. No more than that. They do not say whether he was smiling. They do not say what he said. They do not say whether four hundred men are coming for a feast, or for a fight. They say: he is coming, and he has four hundred men.

I should like to be fair to Jacob here, because it is easy to be clever about him, and I do not think he was clever just then. The book says that Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed. And I understand that. For twenty years he had thought about this moment, and he had always, I think, imagined it as a conversation. A conversation, and perhaps a speech. What he had not pictured was four hundred men.

So what does a careful man do? He does what he always does. He makes a plan.

First plan. He divided the people with him, and the flocks, and the herds, and the camels, into two companies. And he said, if Esau comes to the one company and attacks it, then the company that is left will escape.

It is not a brave plan. It is not a stupid one either. You will notice that Jacob is, as ever, thinking about how things could go wrong, and arranging to have something left over at the end.

But the book does not stop there. And this is the part I want you to hear, because it is the heart of the first half of the night. Having made his plan, Jacob did not rely on it. He prayed.

And it is a good prayer. It is short enough to remember. He said: O God of my father Abraham, and God of my father Isaac, O Lord who said to me, Return to your country and to your kindred, and I will do you good. I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant. For with only my staff I crossed this Jordan, and now I have become two companies. Deliver me, I pray, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I fear him, that he may come and attack me, the mothers with the children. But you said, I will surely do you good, and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.

Let me say a word about that prayer, because I think it is one of the most honest in Genesis. He begins with who God is, he names his father and his grandfather, and he reminds God of what God said. He does not say, I deserve this. He says, I am not worthy of the least of it. He says, with only my staff I crossed this river, and look what has happened. He says, I am afraid. And then he says, but you promised.

If you are ever stuck for how to pray when you are frightened, you could do worse than to borrow that. I am afraid, and you promised. It is not complicated. And I think it may be the first moment in this story when Jacob is not making a plan.

But he did not stop making plans altogether. He was Jacob. So he spent the night there, in the camp, and in the morning he chose, from what he had, a gift for his brother.

And what a gift. I will give it to you as the book does, because the book likes lists, and this one is worth hearing. Two hundred female goats and twenty male goats. Two hundred ewes and twenty rams. Thirty milk camels with their colts. Forty cows and ten bulls. Twenty female donkeys and ten male donkeys. That is five hundred and eighty animals, if you are counting, and I am afraid I was.

Now, a gift like that is not a thing you hand over at the door. It is a small kingdom. And Jacob does something rather clever with it, and I would like you to appreciate it, because it is the sort of cleverness that is trying to be kind.

He did not send it all at once. He put each kind of animal in its own drove, with a servant in charge of each, and he said to the servants: Go on ahead of me, and put a space between drove and drove.

And he told the first servant: When Esau my brother meets you, and asks, to whom do you belong, and where are you going, and whose are these before you, then you shall say, they belong to your servant Jacob. They are a present sent to my lord Esau. And moreover, he is behind us.

And he told the second the same. And the third. And all the rest. You shall say the same thing to Esau when you find him. And you shall say, moreover, your servant Jacob is behind us.

I like to picture it. Esau on the road, with his four hundred men, and the first drove comes up. A boy with a lot of goats. He says his piece, and Esau, I imagine, looks at the goats. Then, a little further, a second drove. Sheep, and a servant, and the same speech. Then camels. Then cattle. Then the donkeys. By the time the fifth or sixth drove comes round the corner, I think a man might begin to wonder what he was angry about.

Because that was the plan, the book says. Jacob said to himself: I may appease him with the present that goes ahead of me, and afterward I shall see his face. Perhaps he will accept me.

Perhaps he will accept me. I find that a very moving little sentence. Not, I will win him over. Not, I will outplay him. Perhaps he will accept me. It is the first time in the whole story that Jacob has said something like that, a thing that depends on someone else.

So the gift went on ahead. And Jacob stayed behind, in the camp, that night.

And now we come to the night.

The book gives us the night in a few lines, and it gives it with very little decoration. It says: the same night he arose, and took his two wives, and his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok.

Let me tell you about the Jabbok, so you can see it. It is a stream, a tributary of the Jordan, running down from the hills on the east side. In some places it is a deep, quick river, and in some places it is a place where you can wade across at a ford, and the ford was where Jacob crossed. I do not know how deep it was that night. I imagine it was cold, and I imagine it was dark, and I imagine that a good many of the children were being carried, and that at least one of them was awake and asking what was happening.

And the book says: he took them, and sent them across the stream, and everything else that he had.

That is a sentence, for a sleepy listener, to go slowly over. He sent them across. His wives, his maids, his children, all of it. Everything he had. And he was left alone.

You can see him there, I think. The camp is empty. The fires are low. The people he loves are on the far side of the water. The gifts are on the road toward Esau. The plan has been made, and the prayer has been said, and everything that can be done has been done. And Jacob is standing on the near bank, in the dark, with nothing in his hands. And that, I think, is where the real night begins.

The book says: and Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day.

That is all it says. A man. It does not tell us where he came from. It does not say there was a sound, or a light, or a voice. It says there was a man, and the man wrestled with him, and it went on all night.

Now, I want to be careful, because people have told this story in many ways, and thought about it for a long time. Later in the Bible, the prophet Hosea looks back on this night and says that Jacob strove with an angel, and prevailed. And the Fathers of the Church, in the East and in the West, have said a great deal about who the man was, and what the night meant. We are not going to settle that tonight. We are going to keep to what the text says: a man wrestled with him until daybreak. And we are going to let the story do the work it was written to do.

So. There they are, in the dark, on the bank of the river. And it is not a short fight. Jacob, as we know, is strong. He had rolled a stone off a well, by himself, the day he met Rachel. He had spent twenty years minding sheep in all weathers. He is not a man who gives up.

And the stranger did not seem to be winning, either. The book says that when the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh. And the hollow of Jacob's thigh was put out of joint, as he wrestled with him.

I would like you to notice what that means. The man could have ended it at any time. The man ended it with a touch. And it was not that Jacob lost his strength, exactly. It is that, from the moment of that touch, he could no longer stand on his own. He had nothing left to push against the ground with. He could only hold on.

And he did. That is the amazing thing. He could not stand, he could not wrestle, he was in great pain, and Jacob held on.

And the man said: Let me go, for the day is breaking.

And Jacob said: I will not let you go unless you bless me.

I think that is the line at the centre of the whole story. All his life, Jacob has been getting blessings. He got a blessing from his father, by a trick. He has been blessed in his flocks and his family and his fortunes. And now, in the dark, in pain, with nothing to bargain with and nothing to hide behind, he asks for one more. Not by a trick. He asks straight out. Bless me.

And the man said to him: What is your name?

And he said: Jacob.

You may remember that name has a meaning, in the old language. It sounds like the word for heel, and also like the word for someone who trips another up, or gets round him. When Jacob was born he had hold of his brother's heel. And all his life people had been saying his name with a certain look. What is your name? is not only a question. It is a question that puts a man on the spot. He has to say out loud, to a stranger, in the dark: I am the one who gets round people. I am the one who took it.

And he said it. Jacob.

And the man said: Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.

Israel. A new name. Not heel-grabber, not trickster. The one who strives with God, and holds on.

And now Jacob does what we would all do. He asks: Tell me, I pray, your name.

And the man says: Why is it that you ask my name?

And that is all the answer he gets. But the book says: and there he blessed him.

So there is the blessing. Not a speech. Not a lot of words. And Jacob, the book says, called the name of the place Peniel, which means, the face of God. For he said: I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.

And the sun rose upon him as he passed Peniel. And he was limping because of his thigh.

I love that. The sun rose upon him. All night it was dark. And now, as he turns toward the road and the dust and the four hundred men, the sun comes up, and it falls on a man who is limping.

I want to say something about that limp, and it is the one piece of commentary I will allow myself, because I think the book itself invites it. Jacob came out of that night with two things. A blessing, and a limp. He did not come out with one and not the other. And I think the book wants us to know that. That a man can be wounded, and blessed, in the same night, by the same hand, and walk away in the morning knowing both.

Many generations later, the book says, the people of Israel, who were named after him, did not eat the sinew of the thigh which is upon the hollow of the thigh, to this day. Because he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh, at the sinew. A custom, to remember a night. I do not know how it feels to have a custom like that. I imagine it is a little like a family that still sets a place at the table for someone who once sat there.

Now. The morning.

And the morning, of course, is where we started, so you may as well know that the next part of the story is the one for which all this was a preparation.

Jacob lifted up his eyes, the book says, and looked. And behold, Esau was coming, and four hundred men with him.

There they are. The dust, the men, the heat beginning to rise. And Jacob, who could not stand without leaning on something, and who was walking on one good leg.

I want to tell you what he does. Because after the night he has had, you might expect him to run. Or send somebody. Or make one more plan.

He does make a plan, as it happens, and I do not think you should hold it against him. He divides the children among their mothers. He puts the maids and their children in front. Then Leah and her children behind them. And Rachel and Joseph last of all.

Do you see the order? The ones he can most afford to lose, first. The ones he loves most, last. It is a careful, anxious, human arrangement, and the book does not comment on it. It does not say he was right. It does not say he was wrong. It says he did it, and I think you will agree that it is a very Jacob thing to have done.

But then comes the surprise. Because the book says: he himself went on before them.

He went in front.

Not behind, not in the middle. He went out ahead of all of them, the man with the limp, to meet the man with the four hundred. And he bowed himself to the ground seven times, until he came near to his brother.

Seven times. I think we are meant to picture it slowly. A step, and a bow. A step, and a bow. Seven times he goes down on the ground, on that bad hip, in the dust, with his brother's men watching from the road. It must have hurt every time. And I think that is what makes it so strong. It is not a performance. It cost him something to get down, and something to get up again, and he did it seven times.

And now we come to the moment. And I will read it to you as the book has it, because I do not think I can improve on it.

But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.

That is the whole of it. Esau ran. Not walked. Not rode up slowly with a sword across the saddle. Ran. And the arms came round his brother, and the face came down on his shoulder, and they wept.

Four hundred men. And I think, by the time the dust cleared, they must have been rather confused. Their master had come all this way with a grudge as big as a mountain, and had put it down, in the road, in front of everybody.

I do not know what changed Esau's mind. The book does not say. It does not say whether it was the gift, or the twenty years, or something that had happened in his own heart that Jacob knew nothing about. It does not say, and I think that is as it should be. Some things in a story are put there for us to admire, and not to explain. And people have noticed, over the centuries, that the running of Esau has something in it of another story, the one Jesus tells in the Gospel of Luke, of a father who sees his son a long way off, and runs. We will not make more of that than the book does. But it is there for anyone who hears it, in both our traditions.

Then Esau lifted up his eyes, and saw the women and children, and said: Who are these with you?

And Jacob said: The children whom God has graciously given your servant.

And they came forward, one by one. The maids with their children, and they bowed. Leah with hers, and they bowed. And last of all, Joseph and Rachel, and they bowed. I picture some of the smaller ones getting it a little wrong, and a mother whispering, lower, lower, and Esau, who was a big loud outdoor man, trying very hard not to laugh.

And then Esau said: What do you mean by all this company which I met?

Because of course he had met them. All the droves. Every single one. The goats and the sheep and the camels and the cattle and the donkeys, one after another, each with a servant saying the same thing. And he had been wondering, no doubt, for the better part of a day.

And Jacob said: To find favour in the sight of my lord.

And Esau said: I have enough, my brother. Keep what you have for yourself.

I want you to hear that. I have enough. It is such a plain and generous thing to say. It is the voice of a man who has, in all those twenty years, found out that he does not need what he once wanted. I have enough, my brother. And I think some of the best sentences in the Bible are the plain ones.

But Jacob says: No, I pray you. If I have found favour in your sight, then accept my gift from my hand. For truly, to see your face is like seeing the face of God, with such favour have you received me.

Now, you might be thinking that is a little much. To see your face is like seeing the face of God. It is a bit of a flourish, even for Jacob. But remember what he has just done. He has just spent a night at a river, and the book has told us he saw God face to face, and survived. And now he looks at his brother, who has run to meet him and cried on his shoulder, and he says: this looks like that. And I do not think he is flattering. I think it is the most honest thing he has said all day. He has been forgiven, and it looks like God.

And he said: Please accept my gift, because God has dealt graciously with me, and because I have enough.

Do you see what happened? Esau said, I have enough. And Jacob said, I have enough. They both said it. Twenty years, and a river, and a night, and now two men standing in a road, each telling the other that he has all he needs. It is the nicest reversal in the book, I think, and it is done in two sentences.

And Jacob urged him, the book says, and he took it.

There is a small coda, and it is a gentle one, so let us stay for it.

Esau said: Let us journey on our way, and I will go ahead of you.

Which, again, is kind. He is offering to lead them. To take them home, perhaps, with his four hundred as an escort. And Jacob, who has not entirely stopped being Jacob, says: My lord knows that the children are frail, and that the flocks and herds, which have young, are a care to me. If they are driven hard for one day, all the flocks will die. Let my lord pass on ahead of his servant, and I will lead on slowly, at the pace of the livestock and the children, until I come to my lord in Seir.

There is a lot of tenderness in that, if you hear it right. The children are frail. The ewes have lambs. If you hurry them, one day, you lose everything. Let me go at the speed of the smallest. It is an excellent principle for a journey, and I think it is an excellent principle for a good many other things.

Esau offers one more thing. He says: Let me leave with you some of the men who are with me.

And Jacob says: Why should you? Let me find favour in the sight of my lord.

Now, whether that was wise or not, the book does not say. Perhaps he did not want four hundred men's worth of company. Perhaps he did not want to be that much in his brother's debt. Perhaps, after the night he had had, he simply wanted to be, for a little while, with his own people, and walking slowly. And the book says: so Esau returned that day on his way to Seir.

And Jacob journeyed on to a place called Succoth, and built himself a house, and made booths for his livestock. That is why the place is called Succoth, which means booths. And that is where, for tonight, we leave him.

And now the wind-down.

Let me tell you what I think it was like, the last part of that day.

The dust has settled. The four hundred have gone, in their long line, back down the road toward Seir. And on the other road, the one that goes the other way, there is a slow procession. The goats that were not given away, and the sheep, and the cattle. The camels, who do not look at anybody. The women and the children. A very small child asleep on a donkey. And in the middle of them, or at the front, or running up and down the line, a man with a limp.

He walks slowly. He has to. But I do not think he minds. He has been slow before, because of the lambs, and he has found out that there are worse things than being slow. He is going to a place where he will put up a house, for the first time in his life, and make shelters for the animals, and let the children run about on grass that nobody has ever told them to stay off.

It is evening, perhaps. The light is long and low, the way it is in that country, and it comes across the hills, and picks out the colours of everything. The dust is gold. The sheep are gold. And the man's shadow, going slowly in front of him, has a small unevenness in it, where the leg does not quite keep time.

I think that is the last thing I would want you to see. Not the wrestling, and not the running. A man with a limp, in the evening, going slowly, at the pace of the smallest. A man who has been given a new name, and does not yet quite know what to do with it. Who has been forgiven, by his brother, and does not yet quite know what to do with that either. He will work it out. The book is going to take him a long time, and a great deal of trouble. But for tonight, he is walking home, and the children are asleep, and someone has put the kettle, so to speak, on.

Now. Notes for the curious.

Everything that happens in tonight's story follows the book of Genesis, chapter thirty-two and chapter thirty-three, verses one to seventeen. The messengers sent to Esau and what they report, Jacob's fear, the division into two companies, his prayer, the gift of five hundred and eighty animals in separate droves, with the servants and their instructions, the crossing of the ford of the Jabbok, the man who wrestled with him until daybreak, the touching of the thigh, the demand for a blessing, the question about names, the new name Israel, the naming of Peniel, the limp, the custom of not eating the sinew, the order of the family, the seven bows, Esau's running and embracing, the meeting of the women and children, the exchange about the gift, the offer to travel together, the slow pace, and the journey to Succoth, are all in the text. The prophet Hosea looks back on the wrestling in chapter twelve, and the Fathers of the Church have reflected on it at great length.

What we invented is small. The procession at the speed of a lamb, the boy with the stick, the talk among the servants, the weather, the fires and the quiet of the camp, Jacob's thoughts on the near bank, the narrator's guesses about how the droves met Esau, the laughter held back by Esau, the light on the road at the end, and the small jokes, are our own. We have also left out what comes after Succoth, in the rest of chapter thirty-three and in chapter thirty-four, which are not for bedtime.

Two things are worth being careful about. First, the identity of the man. The text calls him a man, Hosea calls him an angel, and Jacob says that he has seen God face to face. Christian readers in both traditions have thought hard about this, and we have not tried to settle it. Second, the echo of the father in Luke's parable. The Gospel does not tell us to hear Esau in it, and we have only said that readers have.

Jacob, who is named Israel, is honoured by both traditions among the patriarchs. The Orthodox Church remembers him with the forefathers of Christ in the weeks before Christmas, and the Catholic Church reads his story in its Lectionary; we will not give a calendar date we cannot vouch for. Neither Church holds him up as a model of everything. They hold him up as what the book shows: a man who was wrestled with, and held on, and was blessed.

That's the story of Jacob for tonight. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing. May you have, tonight, someone who runs to meet you. May the things you did a long time ago be put down, in the road, in front of everybody, and may nobody mind. May you find that you have enough, and may the person beside you find it too. May you hold on to what is good when you cannot stand. May you go at the pace of the smallest ones, and may the sun rise on you, limp and all. May the God who blessed Jacob in the dark bless you.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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