"Twenty years after fleeing to his uncle Laban in Haran, undertaken at his mother Rebecca’s urging, Jacob has an experience that rivals Menelaus’s encounter with Proteus. It occurs on his return to Canaan, during the long and anxious night before his fateful reunion with Esau, now a powerful chieftain who is just then approaching with 400 men—a standard number (as Robert Alter notes) for a war party. The unfinished business between the two now also stands between Jacob and the land God had promised to him two decades earlier as he slept at Bethel and dreamed of angels ascending and descending a ladder to heaven.

And [Jacob] rose on that night and took his two wives and his two concubines and his eleven boys and he crossed over the Jabbok ford. And he took them and brought them across the stream, and he brought across all that he had. And Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn. And he saw that he had not won out against him and he touched his hip socket and Jacob’s hip socket was wrenched as he wrestled with him. And he said, “Let me go, for dawn is breaking.” And he said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” And he said, “Not Jacob shall your name hence be said, but Israel, for you have striven with God and men, and won out.” And Jacob asked and said, “Tell your name, pray.” And he said, “Why should you ask my name?” and there he blessed him.

The text is as opaque and portentous as a dream. Who is the anonymous “man”—a double so well matched with Jacob that they fight to a draw? Why do they contend with each other? “And he saw that he had not won out against him and he touched his hip socket”: the very language flips around so that we cannot tell who is who, and even the name given to him by the man is ambiguous. He calls him Israel, “for you have striven with God and men and won out”; but Alter notes that Yisra’el, “he strives with God,” might also mean “God will rule” or “God will prevail.”

Some things are clear enough, however. If Menelaus wrestles the sea-god at noon, a time of maximum visibility, Jacob comes to grips with his strange double when the black of night veils all appearances. More importantly, Menelaus wears a disguise and has three strong sidekicks to help him in the struggle with Proteus, but Jacob is alone, raw with fear and guilt, and with nowhere to hide when the mysterious man appears. “Odyssean” strength and cunning have gotten him where he is, but what characterizes him in this encounter with the divine is his great moral vulnerability—a vulnerability underscored by the crippling wound to his hip socket sustained in the struggle.

Yet even in his pain, he will not release the man until he is blessed. What does this mean? A psychological interpretation confirms our sense that the mysterious man is something more than human—some haunting spiritual power. On this reading, the man is on one level a figuration of Esau, whose blessing Jacob needs if he is to let go of the guilt and fear he incurred when he wronged him. No less important, Esau’s blessing, which in the sequel Esau does deliver, will allow him finally to let go of his own anger toward Jacob.

Only moral boldness can dispel the fratricidal curses that hang over both men, the feelings toward each other that harm and undermine them. Jacob will go forth healed in soul, if also limping like a wounded warrior. And Jacob is a hero—a distinctly Israelite one, whose victories are achieved not (or not simply) on the battlefield but in the realm of the spirit.

Jacob thus looks to the future in a way that Menelaus does not. That Greek hero grapples with Proteus so that he may learn how to get back home, while Jacob insists on hearing the word of blessing that will allow him to go forward. This fundamental difference points toward the metaphysical and spiritual gulf that separates Genesis from the Odyssey.

The first thing in Homer is nature, while the first thing in the Bible is God, the “source of living waters” and the author of nature itself. And God’s authority or agency is manifested also in the linear, goal-directed process of history: a concept foreign to the Greeks. Nature is cyclical or repetitive—Menelaus speaks of “the circling year”—but history, forged in the interaction of God and man, advances along an untrodden path.

There is nevertheless a deep commonality that binds Jacob’s night at the Jabbok with Menelaus’s days on Pharos. These come together in the middle ground of something like Rabbi Yishmael’s twilight. For Jacob’s wrestling, too, seems to be an allegory of reading. Jacob is called Israel, but so are the people of the Book, the people who paradoxically strive with God so that God may prevail. They do so in the first instance by coming to grips with the Bible, the God of which hides His face and will not be named but speaks to those who are ready to hear. That would also be those who tenaciously struggle with the text; who open themselves to being transformed, even wounded by it; and who boldly demand its blessings even though—or perhaps just because—the fullness of its meaning will always exceed their grasp."

 

"Should Jews Read Homer?", Jacob Howland (here)