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He Has Struggled With God
Been thinking a lot lately about the Biblical story of Jacob from the Book of Genesis. As one of patriarchs of that faith, there are quite a bunch of stories about him, but my favorite one is about his wrestling match. Apparently, he was to meet his brother Esau in battle the next day and had withdrawn from his family to commune with God. What he got instead was a strange dark figure who appeared and fought Jacob hand and tooth until the break of day. At daybreak, the man simply touched Jacob’s hip and instantly dislocated it. Jacob demanded a blessing from the man, which the man granted by re-naming Jacob to “Israel” which translates to “God contended” or “he has struggled with God.”
Various interpretations of this story describe the dark stranger as a projection of Jacob’s own fears and doubts about his life and his faith in God. Others say that it was an angel (perhaps the Angel of the Presence), or even God himself. In Genesis, Jacob names the place where he fought Peniel, “for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.”
Looking around online about this, I happened across a nice bit about this little story with big implications:
This is significant (to me, at least) because the Jews are known as b’nai yisrael, or the Children of Israel, the man who struggled with G-d. They are not the Children of Abraham, who had everything figured out and believed in G-d to the point where he would sacrifice his own son for Him. They are the children of the man who wrestled with his internal misgivings all night and did not even conquer them, but walked away wounded. What I take from that is that we are not supposed to accept G-d blindly, but instead to argue and struggle with Him and with ourselves, perhaps for all of our lives, even if we do not get a clear answer.
And there’s a great quote in an MSNBC interview with fantasy author Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkler In Time, etc) about her Christian faith:
L’ENGLE: Such as I sometimes think God is a shit—and he wouldn’t be worth it otherwise. He’s much more interesting when he’s a shit.
MSNBC: So to you, faith is not a comfort?
Good heavens, no. It’s a challenge: I dare you to believe in God. I dare you to think [our existence] wasn’t an accident.Many people see faith as anti-intellectual.
Then they’re not very bright. It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity.
Whether or not you are comfortable with Christianity, Judaism or even the idea of God, I really like this way of looking at life. It seems to me to not only be much more realistic, but also to somehow be a lot more hopeful: because it says that our struggles aren’t an accident or a failure, but that they are a sign we are on the right track.
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October 12th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
If I happen to come into a cutely decorated room where there is a debate raging about God, I leave the room. (No one is interested in moving their consciousness into the giant funhouse) It gets to the mystical point where one is not stimulated or enriched by those debates, and the arguments like most arguments are a waste of energy and effort.
I have heard mostly all sides, have taken all sides, taken nobody’s side. I agree it is frustrating where people’s idea of God is simply this stern patriarch who likes to fart on telephone poles/ or when some say that faith is anti-intellectual because it is not empirical. They could both be right though.
I am open to God to the reality of Gods. And approach God through an inner connection- inner experience (what does that mean?)….(I would be scared witless to truly have a mystical experience that burned away my ego consciousness) but I am not interesting in forming a theological conception other than the fact Jesus offers a face to the divine. Some Zen people can see the divine in a cow shitting. Yay Jesus!
October 12th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
It is ironic that the Exodus and an array of other stories , to which the Hebrews fell heir upon their settlement of the land, and which lacking traditions of their own, they appropriated.
One batch of tales centered upon an “ancestor” called Abram. Another revolved around the figure of a Canaanite leader Jacob.
As the Sojourn and Exodus narratives is an adaption by Israel of an earlier Canaanite tradition, so the Joseph story is the Hebrew exemplar of a widespread story line in use in Egypt and the Levant at the time the Pentateuch was being committed to writing. There is no reason to believe it has any basis in fact- The absence of the story from the earlier tradition in the “prophets” speaks against such a belief - and to read it as history is quite wrong headed.
October 12th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
I’m reading through Karen Armstrong’s biography of the Buddha, and in the introductory chapter she talks about the evolution of the religious mindset at the dawn of the Axial Age — a mindset which welcomed struggle, confusion, and perhaps futile curiosity in place of the inherited “answers” which were not to be challenged.
October 12th, 2006 at 2:04 pm
When my old testament teacher talked about this story of Jacob fighting the angel til morning, he made the case that towards the end of the fight the angel decided to just kick him in the balls.
I am not sure if this was based in any kind of etymological research, but I like this version for sure.
(Hebrew Bible was my teacher’s forte, but he did like to spin a lot of the stories. For instance, he thought the story of Lot screwing his two daughts was really a story the Hebrews were telling about their neighboring tribes (the descendents of Lot). Basically, “yeah, those Edomites over there to the west are a bunch of inbred motherfuckers”).
Isn’t it weird that the “angel” had to leave before morning? Is this our old buddy Lestat?
October 12th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
How about the one where they tricked the other bunch into getting their foreskins cut off , and when they were all sore still , they attacked and chopped them into little pieces.?
One daughter maybe.? Two daughters.? Mmmm, what a great story.
The bible is full of blood , guts , incest, terror, murder, everything. Maybe the return of O.J. could be as a bible story narrator on fox.
Ofcourse we all have a little edomite in us so this makes this story a classic.
October 12th, 2006 at 4:01 pm
you know i read yesterday that in those days “hip” or “thigh” was synonymous with “groin,” or even “pecker.”
maybe jacob got himself circumsized (or worse) with that angel’s “touch.”
that would have a much deeper symbolic significance than merely dislocating a hip.
just sayin.
October 12th, 2006 at 5:37 pm
My point has always been that it doesn’t matter what you believe; faith is universal. When you really do have faith then belief becomes irrelavent. Beliefs are simply ideas plus emotion; emotion being the “glue” that holds the idea to yourself. Faith is beyond all of this. Think of a “leap of faith” as that is what I am talking about. I am fine not knowing what everything is about. I believe as little as possible about the unknown so there will be less “noise” interfering with me when I pass on and so I can just accept whatever happens to me.
Also to me you can’t just say one thing is holy or one place is holy. To me everything physical is from the same source, so you’d have to say everything is holy…
Just my 2 cents.
-some guy
October 12th, 2006 at 9:35 pm
There is also no reason to believe that it was ever *meant* to be taken as fact. Many scholars have suggested that Biblical literalism is a thoroughly modern invention. I tend to agree.
If you read that L’Engle interview, which I forgot to link to, you’ll also see her address this in a more useful way, I think:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4926262/site/newsweek/
Oh wait, no, this is from a different interview, though she does touch on that there. Here’s a better link:
http://www.timboucher.com/old/2004/11/21/madeleine-lengle-on-facts-truth/
October 12th, 2006 at 9:36 pm
Awesome! I just might quote this in an upcoming podcast!
October 13th, 2006 at 12:45 am
Seek and ye shall find. Hold on, contend, and ye shall gather the shards of yer family jewels from the dust!
Could the point be persistance? open willingness and patience?
Thanks, I needed a good kick in the ‘hip’!
October 14th, 2006 at 2:27 am
On one level, I do think we should interpret the bible literally, but only so it has another layer of meaning to be tossed in with the metaphorical readings.
October 14th, 2006 at 9:36 am
The bible is mostly contrived to appeal in different levels to different people.
The gullible , easily led , people think the stuff actually happened.
The skeptical , show me people, think it is clever or unclever allegory.
The old joke ;
It was 3 o’clock in the morning on a Sunday morning and a musician asked another musician after a gig, if he knew a place were they could go and get ribs.
The musician said , you want ribs at 3 o’clock in the morning . ?
Yes I do know a place.
The first musician said , great, where .?
The other musician said, in the Bible. You can find any damn thing you want in the bible. Even ribs at 3 o’clock in the morning. ~!~
October 14th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
Well, on one level, I think that any myth only “works” if you’re able to believe it literally. Because when you do, your mind believes it is really happening to you and it has a different effect than if you simply take it as an allegory, which may be valuable too of course.
The way I like to think about it: Have you ever been going up or down a staircase in the dark? When you reach the end, you go to step on another stair, only to find out it’s not there, and your foot sort of jolts down to the floor unexpectedly? It’s because you physically believed there was another stair and thus it had a literal effect on your body…
October 15th, 2006 at 12:56 pm
I love the “This is significant because…” quote. Where did it come from?
October 15th, 2006 at 2:19 pm
Shoot! I lost the link to it! I will try to look around some and find it