This presentation was given on Saturday the 31st of January 2026 at Wollaston Theological College, for the Summer Days unit within the Wollaston Certificate.
Texts:
Today I’m going to reflect upon our text through a lens of presence and embodiment, taking my starting point in a verse that is often overlooked: Genesis 25.27.
“When the boys grew up, Esau was a skilful hunter, a man of the field; while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents.”
This contrast in the character of the two men serves to explain the split affinity of their parents. Isaac loves Esau simply because he’s fond of game, of the meat that his son brings back to the camp. And yet the reason for the affinity of Rebekah is left more open.
In all the major English translations, Jacob is described as being “quiet” or “mild.” But the plainer sense of the underlying Hebrew word is “innocent”, or “upright.” And the idea of an innocent Jacob opens up a deeper contrast with Esau.
We have Esau the wild man, a type common in the myths of the ancient near east, pointing back to before agriculture broke in and deeply changed modes of human relationship.
And we have Jacob as an exemplar of that changed humanity. Jacob the pastoralist, the person who travels from camp to camp, who would rather be inside than outside; who would rather engage in games of the mind, than games of the body.
I was so glad when Dr Warner asked me to present at this session, because this is one of my favourite texts from the Bible, one that I have wrestled with for years, and come back to time and time again – and each time I do, I find something new. And this time, that’s a deeper affinity between Jacob and myself.
At times I find myself frustrated that I’m stuck in this body, frustrated that I’m enfleshed, frustrated that I must attend to reality and cannot simply drift off into a world of intellect and imagining, of infinite possibility. And I imagine that Jacob was that sort of person as well.
After all, Jacob is a trickster figure: indeed, a trickster amongst tricksters. The other day I read through the Jacob cycle, tracing on a page the web of deceit that is spun. Rebekah, Leah, Rachel, Laban, tricksters all.
These are people who seek to further their goals through work of the mind. But how does that actually work? Well, we imagine the future of our desires, and then we imagine the path to its realisation. We imagine joys to come, and conflicts to come, and then we respond to those imaginings.
We anticipate, we plan, we scheme. This is at the core of being human. And yet I at least feel uncomfortable with that. Scheming has a negative sense: it doesn’t seem like a righteous and worthy activity.
All of this imagining that we do, this scheming, takes us away from the present, from our embodied fleshiness – away from the physical reality and contingency of life. Yet, when our hearts cease to beat, when our lungs no longer bring us air, then those imaginings, those worlds of our invention, meet the same end as our mortal bodies.
Let’s return to our text, to Jacob standing by the river.
He has imagined the future – the coming encounter with Esau. He offers that imagining to God through prayer, picturing the vengeance and wrath of Esau and asking that he be delivered from it.
But Jacob doesn’t leave it at that. He responds to his imagined future.
Off to Esau go the goats, first the female, and then the male. And then go the ewes, and the rams; the camels and their colts; the cows and the bulls; the donkeys, female and male.
Off they go, wave after wave of livestock, wave after wave of offered wealth.
And following each ripple in the wave comes a person, a messenger of Jacob who is to engage in a formulaic encounter with Esau, offering each set of creatures to him as a gift, and then offhandedly mentioning that Jacob follows directly behind.
And so we find a cunning plan.
The Esau of Jacob’s imagining meets the goats, then feels fury as the messenger mentions his detested brother. Then glee swiftly follows: glee at the coming opportunity to put Jacob to an end.
And then Esau meets the ewes, and then the camels, and then, and then, and then. With each wave of ostentatious bribery, his anticipation is shifted from relishing approaching vengeance, to the prospect of the arrival of further walking riches.
Jacob’s plan is to retrain his brother: a brilliant, manipulative grift.
And yet – Jacob still finds himself standing alone, with no more cards to play, waiting for the future to break upon him. He cannot escape the vulnerability of his human form, the collapse of his imaginings into the messy present.
I’ve mentioned the difficulty of translating this passage of Genesis. And I promise that this is not a paid advertisement, although you should absolutely study Hebrew with Meg.
Part of the difficulty comes because the text embraces the fleshy reality of how human beings communicate, with aspirated sounds, with vocal chords, with our messy mechanisms of flesh and water and air.
When we speak we don’t transmit text, coldly and precisely encoded, to each other. We make sound. And with that comes ambiguity and the possibility of confusion, and following that – rather delightfully and surprisingly – comes interplay between sounds, myriad meanings held in tension, and the possibility of comedy and irony and more.
Jacob and Jabbok. A person and a place joined by sound: perhaps a person in a place where he meets himself, or where he meets the consequences of his own actions.
Jacob, wrestling, with a mysterious man: in Hebrew, the action of wrestling, that verb, is a seeming echo of his name, of his character, of his intellect, trickery, and ambition.
Jacob, the man of tents, perhaps finding a strength and determination he never knew he had. Jacob very much in the present, fighting for his life.
Hearing this story for the first time, we might assume that the man who jumps Jacob is his brother Esau, although later it is revealed that it is God, or some agent of the divine.
Realising that he cannot overwhelm Jacob through strength alone, this man does something underhanded – he cheats, striking Jacob on the hip, dislocating the joint. Gordon Wenham offers this wonderful paraphrase of the event: “The man Jacob’s him!”
So what is the consequence of this encounter on the river bank?
Is Jacob transformed, into a new, better Jacob? A more honest Jacob, someone who no longer tricks, and deceives? Is this a story of reformation, or even replacement? Jacob does, after all, get the new name ‘Israel’: he who strives, he who contends.
In his book “Jacob and the Divine Trickster,” John Anderson argues against this view. He reminds us that after his night of wrestling, Jacob meets Esau, who reconciles with him. And yet Jacob still tricks him: Esau wishes Jacob to come to his home, but Jacob finds a way to defer the trip, promising instead to follow on – a promise that he doesn’t keep.
Building upon Anderson’s work, I’d say that what actually happens is a remembering, with all the theological significance that word holds.
Jacob remembers who God is. Jacob remembers God’s fidelity to the covenant – that God keeps God’s promises, and means the words of Genesis 31.3: “Return to the land of your ancestors, and to Egypt, and I will be with you.”
Jacob remembers that he is flesh and blood, and that there is a sanctity and holy vulnerability to that. And he is given a new perspective on his nature, a new comfort with himself. To quote Anderson, “Jacob is and remains a trickster because the God who calls him and wrestles with him is a trickster as well.”
In this incident there is redemption: not a narrow redemption of Jacob, but of the human experience itself. We are schemers, we are tricksters, we are people of imagination. It’s in our nature, and it’s not inherently bad.
A few minutes ago I drew a line from Esau, the wild person, to Jacob, the person of tents, to myself: and I confessed that at times I find myself frustrated by being embodied, by being limited, frustrated at having to leave behind realms of imagining and return to wherever I actually am. In the kind of cyberpunk science fiction that I enjoy, it’s sometimes referred to derisively as “meatspace.”
I’m not alone in that – and there are people alive today who go far further, seeking seriously after immortality won through refinement of the body, or even an escape from the body to another vehicle for consciousness, something that can be sustained indefinitely. Wealthy billionaires are even being transfused with the blood of young and healthy people so that they might stretch out their lives just long enough to grasp that goal of human-wrought immortality.
These people imagine a future of disembodiment. They scheme for it. And in the deepest sense that is sinful. They look to remake themselves in their own image, and erase the image of God. They look to tear humanity away from its flesh.
So today this story matters to me because it reminds me that my fragility, this flesh and blood and mess, is not something that to be escaped. I should not desire the divorce of mind, or spirit, from body, even when my body aches, even when my body gets inconveniently biological.
And I don’t have to be ashamed of my capacity to imagine, or to scheme, or even to trick: so long as I imagine the Kingdom, so long as my subversion is the subversion of injustice.
God wrestled with Jacob because of an unbreakable covenant of love; and through this text, God wrestles with me and with you, because that covenant remains, and ever will. I’ll finish with the poem Art, by Herman Melville.
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.