Today, I am reading and commenting on  Genesis 31-32.

The first thing I want to comment on is that the passage said that Jacob tricked Laban by taking his wives and flocks and heading for Canaan while Laban was with his sons shearing his sheep.  I want to make note that sheep shearing was a time of celebration which would have kept Laban and his people busy for a few days.  So, we understand that Jacob almost certainly chose that time to flee on purpose.  When we see how Laban reacted when he learned that Jacob had fled we should understand why Jacob did so when Laban would be distracted.  Laban gathered his kinsmen (who were likely with him for the sheep shearing celebration) to pursue Jacob.  Laban did not bring all of his relatives with him in order to bid farewell to his daughters and grandsons.  However, I don’t really view what Jacob did to Laban as a trick.  What I really wanted to focus on was the account of the “man” with whom Jacob wrestled before he met with Esau.  We generally say that the “man” was God or an angel of God.  Jacob certainly seems to believe that to be the case.  The passage itself does not say that.  Reading that part of the passage and trying to decide if the writer was trying to tell us that the “man” was God, or if he was an angel, or if the writer was saying that he did not know who it was that Jacob wrestled that night, made me notice something about Jacob’s name change to Israel.  The name Jacob meant “heel-catcher” and was a euphemism for a cheater.  The fact that his name was a euphemism for cheater has colored the way we think about Jacob in the passages about him.  However, if we think about what Jacob did from the perspective of the new name which he was given, we can see them a bit differently.  The “man” who gave Jacob the name Israel says that he does so because Jacob strove against God and man.  Jacob strove against Esau and he strove against Laban.  As I was reading the stories about Jacob this year, I saw them less as Jacob tricking people into doing things which benefited him and more as him striving to make his way in the world when others had the upper hand over him.  Jacob did not give in to depression when things went against him.  He trusted in God, dug down into his soul, and tried harder.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.