When we look at a name, we usually stop at its meaning and go no further, rarely asking where it came from. I prefer the opposite, tracing a name back to its root, because a name often hides more than the story it carries on its surface. I’ve been turning the name Yisrael over for a long time now. Following its trail has taken me somewhere I never expected. Who Jacob wrestled with that night is a question Jewish tradition left open for centuries, never quite closing it. The text names no one, calling him only a man. In the seventy-seventh chapter of Bereishit Rabbah, Rabbi Chama bar Chanina identifies him as Esau’s guardian angel. But over time, that angel came to carry something far larger than Esau alone.

Even before anyone gets named, the text itself is woven through with a pun. The river Jacob wrestled beside is called Jabbok, and the verb wrestled is vayeavek in Hebrew, both drawn from the same root, as though the river’s own name already carried what would happen on its bank. Jacob’s own name sits close to that same sound too, the same consonants arranged in a different order. The text ties a man, a river, and a verb, three separate words, into a single knot of sound.

The Torah tells this same night once more, in a very different place, in the twelfth chapter of Hosea, and there the story picks up a detail Genesis never mentions. Hosea calls Jacob’s opponent an angel outright, and adds that Jacob didn’t only wrestle that night, he wept, he pleaded. Genesis told a struggle. Hosea adds a tear to the same night.

In the second century, in the very years Betar was razed by Rome and the Bar Kochba revolt was crushed in blood, Rabbi Akiva became the first to identify Esau directly with Rome. He read the verse the voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau as a prophecy of what Rome’s hands would do to the Jewish people. That identification spread and swelled across the centuries, covering pagan........

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