Names, Idioms and Pictures

Genesis 32:22-32 is one of the strangest nights in the Bible. Jacob has sent his family and flocks across the Jabbok and is left alone, and a man wrestles with him until dawn. The man cannot overpower him, strikes his hip, and asks to be let go; Jacob will not let go without a blessing. Then the man asks a question. In the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) it is מַה־שְּׁמֶךָ (mah-shemekha, what is your name?), and the answer is one word, יַעֲקֹב (Ya'aqov, Jacob). Note that Hebrew Bibles number the verses of this chapter one higher than English Bibles, because the verse English Bibles number Genesis 31:55 is Genesis 32:1 in Hebrew; your interlinear will show the anchor as 32:29 if it follows the Hebrew numbering, as the first lesson of Module 2 warned.

Many readers have noticed what that one-word answer costs. Twenty years earlier, when his blind father asked, Which one are you, my son? (Genesis 27:18), Jacob answered, I am Esau, your firstborn (27:19). Now, asked his name by someone stronger than he is, he gives his own. The narrator does not comment, but a name in Genesis is often a summary of a life, and Jacob's name, as section 2 shows, had already been turned into an accusation.

Then the man speaks the anchor verse. The Hebrew begins לֹא יַעֲקֹב יֵאָמֵר עוֹד שִׁמְךָ (lo Ya'aqov ye'amer od shimkha, not Jacob will be said any longer as your name). יֵאָמֵר (ye'amer) is the niphal imperfect, third person masculine singular, of אָמַר (amar, to say): it will be said, it will be called. Then כִּי אִם יִשְׂרָאֵל (ki im Yisra'el, but rather Israel). Then the reason: כִּי שָׂרִיתָ עִם אֱלֹהִים וְעִם אֲנָשִׁים (ki sarita im-elohim ve'im-anashim, for you have struggled with God and with men). שָׂרִיתָ (sarita) is the qal perfect, second person masculine singular, of שָׂרָה (sarah, to struggle, contend), a rare verb. Last comes וַתּוּכָל (vattukhal, and you have prevailed), the qal wayyiqtol, second person masculine singular, of יָכֹל (yakhol, to be able, to prevail). The same verb appeared three verses earlier, where the man saw that he could not overpower Jacob (32:25). The one who could not prevail against Jacob now tells him that he has prevailed.

Jacob asks the man's name in return and is refused: Why do you ask my name? (32:29). Then Jacob names the place פְּנִיאֵל (Peni'el, face of God), because, he says, I have seen God face to face, and yet my life was spared (32:30). In the next verse the same place is spelled פְּנוּאֵל (Penu'el), and the tagged WLC gives both spellings one Strong's number, H6439. Who the man was is a real question. The narrator calls him a man, Jacob says he has seen God, and Hosea 12:4 calls him an angel. Some Christian readers since the second century, Justin Martyr among them in his Dialogue with Trypho, have taken him to be the Son of God before the incarnation; others read him as an angel through whom God himself met Jacob. The text does not settle it, and neither will this lesson. What the text does settle is that Jacob, the man who grabbed, ends the night limping and blessed, with a new name.

When the Old Testament explains a name, it is usually not giving a dictionary etymology, an account of where a word historically came from. It is making a play on sound: it hears the name, catches a word that sounds like it, and ties that word to the story. Scholars sometimes call this a folk etymology, meaning an explanation that rests on sound rather than history. The term is not an insult and not an accusation of error. A narrator who explains a name by a pun is doing what Hebrew storytellers did, and he expects his readers to hear the pun, not to consult a lexicon. The honest preacher keeps two questions apart: what the story makes the name mean, and what scholars think the name originally meant. Often the answers differ, and both are worth knowing.

Israel is the clearest case. The story hears in יִשְׂרָאֵל (Yisra'el) the verb sarah, to struggle, and the word El, God: you have struggled with God. That is the meaning the Bible gives, and Hosea 12:3 repeats it: in his vigor he wrestled with God, using sarah again. But the grammar of names like this points somewhere else. In Hebrew names built from a verb and El, God is normally the subject. יִשְׁמָעֵאל (Yishma'el, Ishmael) means God hears, as Genesis 16:11 explains: for the LORD has heard your cry of affliction. Ezekiel means God strengthens; Jezreel means God sows. On that pattern Israel would mean God struggles, God fights, or, as a wish, may God contend. Other scholars connect it with the root שׂרר (sarar, to rule), giving God rules, and some with יָשָׁר (yashar, upright), noting the poetic name Jeshurun for Israel in Deuteronomy 32:15. Lexicons and commentaries list these proposals and do not agree. Even Hosea's retelling shows the uncertainty: his second verb, וַיָּשַׂר (vayyasar, and he struggled) in Hosea 12:4 (12:5 in Hebrew numbering), is pointed oddly, and the tagged WLC files it under a different root, Strong's H7786, from the one behind sarita in Genesis.

Jacob works the same way. The story explains יַעֲקֹב (Ya'aqov) by the heel: he came out grasping Esau's heel, בַּעֲקֵב עֵשָׂו (ba'aqev Esav, by the heel of Esau, Genesis 25:26), and עָקֵב (aqev) is heel. Esau then turns the name into a verb: Is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has cheated me twice (27:36). The Hebrew for he has cheated me is וַיַּעְקְבֵנִי (vayya'qeveni), the qal wayyiqtol, third person masculine singular, of עָקַב (aqav, to grab by the heel, to overreach), with the suffix me. Hosea 12:3 gathers both: In the womb he grasped his brother's heel. Scholars, however, note that names built on the same root appear outside the Bible in texts of the second millennium BC, and many take Jacob to be a shortened form of a name like Ya'aqov-El, may God protect. If they are right, the name Jacob's parents gave was a prayer, and the story hears in it the sound of a heel. Both are in the Bible's world, and neither needs to be hidden.

Once you see the pattern you find it everywhere. Leah names her first son רְאוּבֵן (Re'uven, Reuben), which sounds like see, a son, and explains it with רָאָה יְהוָה בְּעָנְיִי (ra'ah YHWH be'onyi, the LORD has seen my affliction, Genesis 29:32), a phrase that echoes the sound without spelling the name. Lamech names his son נֹחַ (Noach, Noah) and says, May this one comfort us (Genesis 5:29); the verb is יְנַחֲמֵנוּ (yenachamenu), the piel imperfect, third person masculine singular, of נָחַם (nacham, to comfort), with the suffix us, while the name itself most likely comes from נוּחַ (nuach, to rest). The sound carries the meaning, not the root. Babel is explained by בָּלַל (balal, to confuse, Genesis 11:9), though the city's own Akkadian name, Bab-ili, meant gate of god; the pun turns Babylon's boast into a judgment. Pharaoh's daughter names the child מֹשֶׁה (Mosheh, Moses) and explains, I drew him out of the water (Exodus 2:10), מְשִׁיתִהוּ (meshitihu), the qal perfect, first person common singular, of מָשָׁה (mashah, to draw out), with the suffix him; many scholars also hear an Egyptian word for son or born in the name, the one found in names like Thutmose and Ramesses. Sometimes a character speaks the play aloud: Abigail says of her husband נָבָל (Naval, Nabal), he lives up to his name: His name means Fool (1 Samuel 25:25), and נְבָלָה (nevalah, folly) is with him. Some scholars doubt that parents named a child Fool and suggest the name once had another sense, but in the story Abigail's line is the point. And Naomi, whose name means pleasant, asks to be called מָרָא (Mara, bitter) in Ruth 1:20.

Three cautions follow. First, a name means what the text makes it mean only where the text makes it mean something. Most names in the Old Testament, including most in the genealogies, are never explained, and a sermon that preaches the meaning of every name in a list is preaching a dictionary, not the passage. A popular claim online reads the ten names from Adam to Noah as a hidden gospel sentence; several of the meanings it needs are strained or guessed. Second, check where a meaning comes from. Some free sites include old name dictionaries, such as Hitchcock's from the nineteenth century, whose meanings are often guesses; a modern lexicon or a good commentary will tell you when a meaning is uncertain. Third, do not overcorrect. When Genesis says Jacob is Israel because he struggled with God, that is what the Bible teaches about the name, and you may preach it with confidence. Saying that the name's origin is debated does not take anything away from the story. It lets your hearers see how the story works.

פָּנִים (panim, face) occurs about 2,100 times in the tagged WLC, one of the commonest nouns in the Hebrew Bible. Lesson 1 of Module 3 noted that it is always plural in form. Much of the time you will not see it in English, because it is built into Hebrew prepositions: לִפְנֵי (lifnei, before, literally to the face of) and מִפְּנֵי (mippenei, from before, because of). When a tool shows you panim where your English has before, in the presence of, because of, or nothing at all, that is why. Do not preach the face into every one of those; a preposition built from a body word is still a preposition, as before in English no longer makes anyone think of the front of a body.

Where panim is a real word, it carries a person's presence, attention and favour. The night at the Jabbok is framed by faces. Before it, Jacob plans how to meet Esau, and Genesis 32:20 in English hides four uses of panim in one sentence. In the WLC it reads אֲכַפְּרָה פָנָיו (akhapperah fanav, I will cover his face, appease him), with a gift that goes לְפָנָי (lefanai, before my face), and after that אֶרְאֶה פָנָיו (er'eh fanav, I will see his face), and perhaps יִשָּׂא פָנָי (yissa fanai, he will lift my face, accept me). Then Jacob sees the face of God and names the place Peniel (32:30). The next morning he meets Esau and says, I have seen your face, and it is like seeing the face of God, since you have received me favorably (33:10), in Hebrew רָאִיתִי פָנֶיךָ כִּרְאֹת פְּנֵי אֱלֹהִים (ra'iti fanekha kir'ot penei elohim). The man who feared his brother's face has met God's, and finds grace in both. This is the key-word technique of Module 5's lesson Key Words and Repetition at work in a single noun, and only a reader who checks the Hebrew will see it.

To lift the face, נָשָׂא פָנִים (nasa panim), is an idiom with two sides. Lifting someone else's face means accepting them, granting what they ask. The picture is of a person bowed low before a superior, whose face is lifted when the request is granted. The angel says to Lot, נָשָׂאתִי פָנֶיךָ (nasati fanekha, I have lifted your face), which the BSB renders I will grant this request (Genesis 19:21). God says of Job, פָּנָיו אֶשָּׂא (panav essa, his face I will lift), I will accept his prayer (Job 42:8). Malachi 1:8-9 asks the priests whether a governor, or God, would show you favor if they offered him blind and lame animals. But the same act in a courtroom is corruption. You must not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the rich (Leviticus 19:15) is, in Hebrew, לֹא תִשָּׂא פְנֵי דָל (lo tissa fenei dal, you shall not lift the face of the poor). And God himself is the one who לֹא יִשָּׂא פָנִים (lo yissa fanim), showing no partiality and accepting no bribe (Deuteronomy 10:17). The New Testament carries the idiom into Greek. When Peter says that God does not show favoritism (Acts 10:34) and Paul writes the same in Romans 2:11, the Greek words are built from face and receive, a word-for-word copy of the Hebrew phrase. James 2:1 uses the same family.

Lifting one's own face toward someone is different again: it is to look at them with favour. The priestly blessing asks that יִשָּׂא יְהוָה פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ (yissa YHWH panav elekha, may the LORD lift His face toward you), where יִשָּׂא (yissa) is the qal jussive, third person masculine singular, of נָשָׂא (nasa), the form of a wish or blessing (Numbers 6:26). The opposite picture is a face that falls. When God has no regard for Cain's offering, Cain became very angry, and his countenance fell (Genesis 4:5), וַיִּפְּלוּ פָּנָיו (vayyippelu panav, and his face fell). God asks him why, and then says, If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? (4:7). The Hebrew behind accepted is the single word שְׂאֵת (se'et, a lifting), from the same verb nasa. A fallen face can be lifted. Read side by side, the story of Cain and the blessing of Aaron answer each other: what the sinner cannot do for his own face, God offers to do with his.

אַף (af) means nose or nostril, and it also means anger. It occurs about 276 times in the tagged WLC, and the lexicons list it under a root meaning to breathe hard or to be angry. Its dual form, אַפַּיִם (appayim), the two nostrils, is common. In Genesis 2:7 God breathed the breath of life בְּאַפָּיו (be'appav, into his nostrils). In the Song of Moses the sea piles up at the blast of Your nostrils (Exodus 15:8), וּבְרוּחַ אַפֶּיךָ (uveruach appekha, at the breath of your nostrils). And in Psalm 18:8, smoke rose from His nostrils as God comes to rescue David. The picture behind the idiom is usually explained as the hot, hard breathing and flared nostrils of an angry person, which is why the same word can be both the organ and the emotion.

The commonest anger idiom joins this noun to the verb חָרָה (charah, to burn, be hot). Then the anger of the LORD burned against Moses (Exodus 4:14) is, in Hebrew, וַיִּחַר אַף יְהוָה (vayyichar af YHWH, and the nose of the LORD burned). In Numbers 11:1, His anger was kindled is וַיִּחַר אַפּוֹ (vayyichar appo, and his nose burned), with וַיִּחַר (vayyichar) the qal wayyiqtol, third person masculine singular, of charah. The verb and the noun stand together in some fifty verses. Sometimes the verb is enough on its own: when Cain became very angry in Genesis 4:5, the Hebrew is וַיִּחַר לְקַיִן מְאֹד (vayyichar leqayin me'od, it burned for Cain greatly), with no nose at all. Hebrew also has other words for anger, among them חֵמָה (chemah, heat, wrath), עֶבְרָה (evrah, overflowing fury) and קֶצֶף (qetsef, wrath). So do not tell a congregation that Hebrew had no abstract word for anger and could only speak of noses. It had several, and it also had the picture.

Now the idiom promised in the second lesson of this module. In Israel's creed God is אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם (erekh appayim, slow to anger, Exodus 34:6). אֶרֶךְ (erekh) is an adjective, long, in the construct form, long of, and appayim is the dual of af: long of nostrils. The nose that takes a long time to grow hot is patience. The opposite is קְצַר אַפַּיִם (qetsar appayim, short of nostrils), A quick-tempered man in Proverbs 14:17; and Proverbs 14:29 sets the two side by side, A patient man has great understanding, but a quick-tempered man promotes folly, where patient is erekh appayim again. Some interpreters explain the long nose as long breathing, the slow breath of a person who is not provoked, rather than slow heat; either way it is the same picture of a body that does not flare. The phrase recurs about a dozen times, often where the creed of Exodus 34 is echoed, as in Numbers 14:18, Psalm 103:8, Joel 2:13, Jonah 4:2 and Nahum 1:3.

Two practical points follow. First, the picture can be preached, briefly and accurately: the God of Israel is not short of nostrils; his anger is real, and it is slow. That is exactly what the creed teaches, and the picture makes it memorable. Second, the picture must not become the point. Erekh appayim in Hebrew was an ordinary way of saying patient, as quick-tempered is in English, and an ancient hearer was no more thinking about noses than an English speaker thinks about temperature when he says someone is hot-headed. Say once what the words are, and then preach what they mean.

The Old Testament gives God a face, a nose, eyes, ears, a mouth, a hand and an arm. He smells the aroma of Noah's offering (Genesis 8:21), comes down to see Sodom (Genesis 18:21), and walks in the garden. Describing God in human bodily terms is called anthropomorphism, from Greek words for human form. Describing him with human feelings, grief, anger, delight, regret, is called anthropopathism, human passion. Hebrew uses both freely, and the free tools let you see them under English that sometimes softens them.

On the body language there is very wide agreement. God is Spirit (John 4:24), and Israel saw no form of any kind at Horeb (Deuteronomy 4:15). The Old Testament itself shows that face language is idiom, not anatomy. Exodus 33:11 says the LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend, פָּנִים אֶל פָּנִים (panim el panim, face to face), and nine verses later God says, You cannot see My face, for no one can see Me and live (33:20). The narrator saw no contradiction, because face to face meant directly and personally. Numbers 12:8 confirms it: the BSB's face to face there stands for Hebrew פֶּה אֶל פֶּה (peh el peh, mouth to mouth). Jewish readers held the same view. The ancient Aramaic translation called Targum Onkelos often softened bodily language about God, the Talmud preserves the saying that the Torah speaks in human language, first used of the wording of laws, and Maimonides, in his Guide for the Perplexed in the twelfth century, applied it to the bodily words about God and devoted much of its first part to explaining them. Christians from the Fathers onwards have said the same. Whatever else the nose of the LORD means, it does not mean that God has one.

The live disagreement is over the feelings, and especially over God's changing his mind. Genesis 6:6 says the LORD regretted that He had made man, וַיִּנָּחֶם יְהוָה (vayyinnachem YHWH), the niphal wayyiqtol, third person masculine singular, of נָחַם (nacham, to regret, relent, be comforted, the same verb as Noah's comfort in section 2). The same verb is used when the LORD relented in Exodus 32:14 and when God relented in Jonah 3:10. Yet Numbers 23:19 says God is not a son of man, that He should change His mind, and 1 Samuel 15 holds both together in one chapter: the LORD says, I regret that I have made Saul king (15:11); Samuel says the Glory of Israel does not lie or change His mind, for He is not a man, that He should change His mind (15:29), using לֹא יִנָּחֵם (lo yinnachem, he does not relent), the niphal imperfect of the same verb; and the chapter ends, the LORD regretted that He had made Saul king (15:35).

The first position, held by most of the church's teachers through history, reads the regret texts as accommodation. God speaks of himself in terms we can grasp, as a nurse stoops to speak to an infant; Calvin used that very image in his Institutes (1.13.1) and treated God's repentance this way (1.17.12-14), and the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646) confesses God to be without body, parts, or passions. On this view the regret texts are true, but they describe God's dealings from the human side: when Nineveh turns, God's settled will to spare the repentant comes into view, and he does not discover something new. Its defenders point to Numbers 23:19, 1 Samuel 15:29 and Malachi 3:6, I, the LORD, do not change, and they argue that 1 Samuel 15 itself teaches the reader to hold the regret language and the unchanging God together, as Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin did. To the reply that body language and feeling language should be treated differently, they answer that Scripture itself marks the difference here: Numbers 23:19 and 1 Samuel 15:29 deny of God the very changing of mind that the regret texts seem to affirm, so the Bible itself tells the reader how to take them. They add that this view does not make God cold. The systematic theology lesson The Attributes sets out modern defences of divine impassibility, including the argument that the Fathers used it to distinguish God's love from creaturely passion, not to deny that he loves.

The second position takes the regret texts as revealing something real in God's relation to the world, while still denying that he has a body. Terence Fretheim's The Suffering of God (1984) argued from the Old Testament that God genuinely grieves and responds, and that metaphors of divine repentance are given to disclose what God is like, not to be explained away. Open theists, among them Clark Pinnock and others in The Openness of God (1994), John Sanders in The God Who Risks (1998) and Gregory Boyd in God of the Possible (2000), go further: God has chosen to make some of the future depend on creatures' free choices and on prayer, and the regret and relenting texts mean what they say. They point to Genesis 6:6, Exodus 32:14, Jeremiah 18:7-10 and Jonah 3:10. They read Numbers 23:19 and 1 Samuel 15:29 as saying that God does not go back on a particular word, his blessing of Israel or his rejection of Saul, rather than that he never relents, since the same chapter twice says he regretted. And they argue that if body language is idiom, that does not prove feeling language is idiom too: Scripture denies that God has a form, but it never denies that he grieves. Many who reject open theism still hold a version of the first half of this view, that God's grief over sin is not merely a figure of speech. The debate is not one a word study can settle. What the Hebrew can do is show you that the same verb, nacham, stands under regret, relent and change his mind, so that you see the whole question in your own Bible rather than a translation's choice hiding half of it.

Take the page headed Body words that you began in the last lesson, and your passage. In Blue Letter Bible or STEP Bible, go through the passage and its chapter and mark every personal or place name, and every body word: face, nose or nostrils, hand, arm, eye, ear, mouth, heart. For each name, write whether the text itself explains it. If it does, copy the explanation and find in the interlinear the Hebrew word that the explanation sounds like. If it does not, write not explained, and do not preach a meaning for it unless a modern lexicon or commentary gives one without a question mark.

For each body word, write which of three things it is. Is it part of a preposition, like lifnei, before, which you should not preach as a face? Is it an idiom, like a burning nose or a lifted face, whose plain English meaning you should give? Or is it a picture of God, like his arm or his face, which your congregation needs to hear as true speech about a God who has no body? Then compare the BSB with one other translation you can read, and write down any place where one keeps the Hebrew picture and the other turns it into plain English.

Finally, write two sentences you could say on Sunday. The first should give one name or idiom in your passage and what the text makes it mean. The second should say one thing your hearers might wrongly assume about it, and correct that gently, for example that a name's story is a pun and not a dictionary entry, or that the nose of the LORD is an idiom for his anger and not a claim that God has a body. Keep the page with your passage notes; the next module asks where the Hebrew text you have been reading came from.