The Textual Evidence For Jacob Wrestling An Elohiym

A late response to a very good question.

what is your textual evidence for Jacob wresting an "elohiym" besides the presumed implicit water god references regarding the river, morning, etc.

In v. 6 we know that Esau is coming to meet Jacob. In vv 7-8, Jacob panics when he learns of Esau’s approach. Fearing an attack, he divides his caravan into two groups. In v. 9, Jacob prays to God for help, “reminding” God of His promise and that He has told Jacob to go back home to the land of Abraham and Isaac. Now all his servants and family go on ahead and Jacob remains the night just outside the border of his families land at Peniel. Peniel (Penuel) is the just outside of the land of promise and the utmost extent of the land that David conquered.

Jacob is basically returning to the land that will be his inheritance and which was promised to him by God and which he stole from Esau. He is alone and outside of his inheritance and the night before he is about to cross over into that land, someone wrestles with him at night keeping him from entering into that land (There is one theory that Jacob was actually wrestling Esau. It’s an attractive theory but I’m not convinced.).

I am offering 3 credible possibilities to what this “man” (iysh) who wrestled with Jacob was.

1) It is argued that he wrestled with Yahweh. Here are some reasons why I doubt this interpretation.

a) If this was Yahweh that Jacob wrestled with, it is odd that the writer uses the term elohiym or “god”. If this was the Lord, it was an anthropomorphic God. Usually, when God is portrayed with anthropomorphic features He is referred to as Yahweh and not elohiym.

b) The “man” who struggles with Jacob is referred to as a “man” (iysh), which would be unusual to refer to God in that way (but see Genesis 18 for an exception).

c) It’s not at all keeping with the portrayal of Yahweh to behave in this way. Why would Yahweh wrestle with Jacob? How could Jacob wrestle the Creator to a standstill so that Yahweh had to “cheat” in order to win? It seems out of character.

d) Why would Yahweh want to keep Jacob from reaching the land that He promised and in which He told Jacob to go to? This would be even odder because Jacob just spent the previous day praying to Yahweh for help in reaching the land and recalling Yahweh’s promise. Nowhere is Yahweh portrayed as one who tries to break His promise.

e) In the book Hosea, the prophet is interpreting the life of Jacob and refers to the fact that Jacob “wrestled with an angel” (12:4). Only when he later went to Bethel, did Jacob meet God. Hosea wrote his prophecy only some 200 years after the Genesis 32 was written down. It seems that by this time the “angel” interpretation was already common.

2) It is argued that he wrestled with an angel. Here are some reasons why I doubt this interpretation.

b) In Genesis 32:1-2, when at Mahanaim, Jacob sees angels of God and recognizes them as such. The wrestling incident is only a short time later, he refers to the “man” as a “god” and not an “angel”. If he had just seen angels then we presume he would know another one when he sees it.

c) If an “angel of God” was wrestling with Jacob and preventing him from entering into the promise land it would be theologically tantamount to God trying to prevent Jacob from entering the land because “angels of God” do God’s bidding.

d) I doubt that a mere man like Jacob could overpower an angelic being who was doing the will of God.

3) It is argued that he wrestled with an elohiym. Here are some reasons why I prefer this interpretation.

a) That the “man” was trying to prevent Jacob from fulfilling God’s promise suggests to me that it was a malicious being.

b) Jacob refers to the “man” as an elohiym which suggests that this was not a human but a god or spirit of some sort.

c) Hosea refers to this being as an “angel.” This suggests to me that the being was some sort of spirit being, like an angel, only malicious. Probably some form of “fallen angel”.

d) Looking at Canaanite mythology, in the era in which this story takes place, the people of this age and culture did believe in such spirits.

i. Night time was the understood time for spiritual attacks.

ii. Localized spirit-demons were believed to exist in these times. There was an ancient belief the Jabbok river was protected by a localized deity.

iii. Such deities were said to give blessings if they were caught, sort of like the fairy tales of catching gnomes, fairies or leprechauns.


These are the reasons why I think the Scriptures suggest that Jacob wrestled with and elohiym and neither God nor ones of His angels.

For more info on this episode, I suggest reading Nahum Sarna’s book Understanding Genesis.