Jacobs-Name-Change
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Remember the following truth from our
beloved Torah!
“Ye shall NOT ADD TO THE WORD which
I command you, NEITHER SHALL YE DIMINISH FROM
IT, that ye may keep the commandments of אֱלֹהֵיכֶם יְהוָה - the LORD your Eloleichem,
which I command you”. Davarim - Deuteronomy 4:2. (JPS-1917).
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With Rabbi,
Dr. Reuven Ben Avraham-Goossens, PhD.
One fact about this study is that it has perplexed
many commentators. After his wrestling match with the unnamed adversary, יַעֲקֹב - Jacob was told: “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but יִשְׂרָאֵל - Israel, for you
have striven with beings ‘Divine’ and ‘human’, and have prevailed” (Genesis 32:29, JPS-1917 translation). Or “Your name will no longer be said to be Jacob, but
This change of name takes place not once but twice. After the encounter with Esau, and the episode of Dina and Shechem, אֱלֹהִים - Elohim told Jacob to go to Beth El. Then we read:
“After Jacob returned from Paddan
Genesis 35:9-10
Note, first, that this is not an adjustment of an existing name by the change or addition of a letter, as when אֱלֹהִים - Elohim changed Abram’s name to Abraham, or Sarai’s to Sarah. It is an entirely new name, as if to signal that what it represents is a complete change of character. Second, as we have seen, the name change happened not once but twice. Third and this is the puzzle of puzzles having said twice that his name will no longer be Jacob; the Torah continues to call him Jacob. אֱלֹהִים - Elohim Himself does so. So do we, every time we pray to the Elohim of ‘Abraham’, ‘Isaac’ and ‘Jacob’. How so, when the Torah twice tells us that his name will no longer be Jacob?
Let us suggest that “your name will no longer be called Jacob” means, “your name will no longer only be called Jacob.” You will have another name as well. This is ingenious, but hardly the plain sense of the verse. The future tense, as used in the Torah, means the near future, not the distant one, unless explicitly specified.
This is just one mystery among many when it comes to Jacob’s character and his relationship with his brother Esau. So difficult is it to understand the stories about them that, to make sense of them, they have been overlaid in Jewish tradition with a thick layer of the ‘Midrash’ that makes Esau to be perfectly evil and Jacob almost perfectly righteous. There is a clear need for such ‘Midrash’, for educational purposes. Esau and Jacob, as portrayed in the Torah, are too nuanced and complex to be the subject of simple moral lessons for young minds. Thus the ‘Midrash’ gives us a world of black and white. Rather sad really! The biblical text itself, though, is far more subtle. It does not actually state that Esau was bad and Jacob being good.
Or it may
be that Esau represents the ‘Hunter’, considered a hero in many ancient cultures,
but not so in the Torah, which represents the agrarian and pastoral ethic of
farmers and shepherds. With the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer and
herdsman, the Hunter is no longer a hero and instead is seen as a figure of
violence, especially when combined, as in the case of Esau, with a mercurial
temperament. It is not so much that Esau is bad and Jacob good, but that Esau
represents the world that was, while Jacob represents, a new world about to be
brought into being, whose spirituality would be radically different, new and
challenging. The fact that Jacob and Esau were twins is
fundamental. Their relationship is one of the classic cases of sibling
rivalry.
That is what the name Jacob signifies. It is the name he acquired because he was born holding on to his Brother Esau’s heel. That was consistently his posture during the key events of his early life. He bought his brother’s birthright. He wore his brother’s clothes. At his mother’s request, he took his brother’s blessing. When asked by his father, “Who are you, my son?” He replied, “I am Esau, your firstborn.”
Jacob was the man who wanted to be Esau. Why so? Because Esau had one thing he did not have: his father’s love. “Isaac, who had a taste for wild game, loved Esau, but Rebecca loved Jacob.”
All that changed in the great wrestling match
between Jacob and the unknown stranger. We are taught that this stranger was an
angel in disguise. After they fight, he tells Jacob that his name would now be
‘Yisrael’ – ‘
How then are we to understand what, first the
stranger, then אֱלֹהִים - Elohim, said to Jacob? Not as a statement, but as a
‘request’, a ‘challenge’, an ‘invitation’. Read it
not as, “You will no
longer be called Jacob but
Often, Hebrews have
been content to be themselves. But from time to time, they have come into
contact with a civilisation whose intellectual, cultural and even spiritual
sophistication was undeniable. It made them feel ‘awkward’, ‘inferior’, like a
villager who comes to a city for the first time. Hebrews lapsed into the
condition of Jacob. They wanted to be someone else, and rabbis did that and
renamed us ‘Rabbinic Judaism’, which later became just ‘Jewish’. But according
to Elohim, we are ‘Israelites’ and ‘Hebrews’, and not just from the tribe of
The first time we hear this is in the words
of the Prophet Ezekiel: “You say, ‘We want to be like the nations, like the peoples
of the world, who serve wood and stone’. But what you have in mind will never
happen” (Ezekiel. 20:32). In
We hear it
again in the days of the Greeks. Some Hebrews sadly became Hellenised. We
recognise that in the names of High Priests like Jason and Menelaus. Something
similar happened in the days of
It happened
again during the Enlightenment. We the Hebrews fell in love with European
culture. With philosophers like ‘Kant’ and ‘Hegel’, poets like ‘Goethe’ and
‘Schiller’, and musicians like ‘Mozart’ and ‘Beethoven’. Some were able to
integrate this with faithfulness to our Hebraic creed and deed! The combined
impact of intellectual challenge, social change, and incendiary anti-Semitism,
was immense. Yet this was a Jacob response, not an
It is
happening today in large swathes of the Hebrew world. We have somehow have
overachieved. Hebrews, with some notable exceptions, has underachieved. There
are some at or near the top of almost every field of human endeavour today, but
all too many have either ‘abandoned their religious heritage’ or are sadly
‘indifferent to it’. For them, being a Hebrew is a slender ethnicity, too thin
to be transmitted to the future, too hollow to inspire.
We have
waited so long for what we have today and have never had simultaneously before
in all of our Hebraic history: ‘independence’ and ‘sovereignty’ in the state of
The fact that the Torah and tradition
still use the word Jacob, not just
I believe the
challenge issued by the angel still echoes today. Are we Jacob, embarrassed by
who we are? Or are we
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