People of the Bible

Jacob

The patriarchs and matriarchs · Around 1900 BC (traditional) · Appears in Genesis 25 to 50 · Also known as Israel

Jacob is the son of Isaac, the grandson of Abraham, and the father of the twelve sons who became the tribes of Israel. His name means supplanter, and he lived up to it, buying his brother's birthright and stealing his blessing, until God wrestled with him and renamed him Israel. His life is a long story of a schemer being slowly changed by grace.

And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.Genesis 32:28 (KJV)

The grasping twin

Jacob and Esau struggled even in the womb, and the LORD told their mother Rebekah that two nations were within her and that the elder would serve the younger. Jacob was born gripping his twin brother's heel, and his name marked him as one who grasps and supplants. Esau grew into a rough hunter, the favorite of his father, while Jacob was a quiet man dwelling in tents, the favorite of his mother, and the divided love of that home would poison it for years.

The grasping showed itself early. Coming in famished from the field, Esau sold his birthright to Jacob for a single bowl of red lentil stew, despising the very inheritance that carried the covenant. Later, with Rebekah's scheming help, Jacob disguised himself in his brother's clothes and goatskins and deceived his blind old father Isaac into giving him the blessing meant for Esau. He won what he wanted, but at the cost of his brother's murderous hatred, and he had to flee for his life with nothing.

The ladder and the long exile

Alone and afraid on the road to Haran, Jacob lay down with a stone for a pillow and dreamed of a ladder set up on the earth whose top reached to heaven, with the angels of God ascending and descending upon it, and the LORD standing above it. God repeated to this fugitive the promise made to Abraham and Isaac, and said, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest. Jacob woke in awe and called the place Bethel, the house of God, vowing that the LORD would be his God.

In Haran the deceiver met his match in his uncle Laban. Jacob loved Rachel and served seven years for her, but on the wedding night Laban gave him Leah instead, and Jacob had to serve seven years more. Through Leah, Rachel, and their servants he fathered eleven sons and a daughter, and Laban cheated him and changed his wages ten times, so that the man who had tricked others was himself tricked for twenty long years. Yet God blessed him, and he grew rich in flocks, until at last he fled homeward with his family to face the brother he had wronged.

Wrestling with God at Peniel

As Jacob neared home, terrified that Esau was coming to meet him with four hundred men, he sent his family and flocks across the ford of Jabbok and was left alone. There a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the stranger saw that he could not prevail, he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh so that it was put out of joint, yet still Jacob clung to him and said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

The one who wrestled him was no mere man, and he gave Jacob a new name: Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel, for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed. Jacob called the place Peniel, saying he had seen God face to face and his life was preserved, and he limped away into the sunrise a changed man. The next day he met Esau not with tricks but with humility, and the brothers wept and were reconciled, and the long war of the household was ended in grace.

The twelve sons and the tribes of Israel

Out of Jacob's tangled household came the twelve sons who would become the tribes of Israel. Leah, unloved but blessed with children, bore Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, and later Issachar and Zebulun, and named them out of her longing to be loved and her praise to God. Through the servants Bilhah and Zilpah came Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. And Rachel, long barren, at last bore Joseph, and later died giving birth to Benjamin, the twelfth son, on the road near Bethlehem.

The names of those sons would be carried on the breastplate of the high priest, engraved on the gates of the holy city in the vision of the prophets, and spoken in every generation of Israel's history. From the strife and heartache of two sisters and their servants, God wove the beginnings of a nation, and from one of them, Judah, would come the royal line of David and at last the Messiah. It is a vivid picture of how God brings his purposes to pass through flawed and struggling people, and even through their sorrows.

His character and struggle

Jacob is one of the most human figures in the whole Bible, a man who grasped and schemed and yet longed for God's blessing above all else. He was capable of deep love, of long patience through twenty years of hard labor, and of terrible favoritism that would tear his own family as his parents' favoritism had torn theirs. God did not choose him because he was good but shaped him through years of being deceived exactly as he had deceived.

His later life carried real sorrow: the death of his beloved Rachel as she bore Benjamin, the loss of his favorite son Joseph, whom he believed devoured by a beast, and the long grief of an old man who thought his brightest hope was gone. Yet the grasping man who once stole a blessing became the one who clung to God all night and would not let go, and who, at the end, could bless his sons and Pharaoh, and die in faith looking for the promises still to come.

Where Jacob points to Christ

At Bethel Jacob saw a ladder joining heaven and earth with the angels of God upon it, and Jesus later told Nathanael that his disciples would see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man, naming himself the true ladder, the one living bridge between God and us. What Jacob saw in a dream, Christ is in the flesh.

Jacob's whole story is the gospel written in one life, a sinner who deserved nothing, chosen and changed by grace, given a new name and a new heart he could never have earned. He prevailed not by his strength but by clinging to God and refusing to let go, which is faith itself. And from his twelve sons, and above all from Judah, ran the line that led at last to the King of Israel, the Son of David, in whom the God of Jacob keeps every promise he ever made at Bethel.

A note on the sources: everything above is drawn from the biblical text itself. Where a detail comes from later tradition rather than Scripture, it is named as tradition. Dates for the earliest figures are traditional and approximate, and Scripture does not always give them. The aim is to tell each life honestly, and to let it do what the whole Bible does, point to Jesus Christ the Lord.

Related: Isaac · Joseph (son of Jacob) · All the people of the Bible