What Is Your Name?

Jacob becomes Israel. Who have you become?

AI generated: It seems to have trouble depicting wrestling. But in the end I enjoy this image that seems to focus on the first contact between the two as they begin their contest. Also, wrestling, not high-fiving.

“What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.”

Above all is always the question of who Jacob was wrestling in Genesis 32—God, angel, another man, himself, or other? I used to enjoy the image of Jacob going toe to toe with an angel, who has been given specific parameters with which to fight. Obviously no human can successfully wrestle with God or an angel all night long unless that entity is holding back. And yet, perhaps because of this very thought, while we read it over this weekend, I could not help but be transported back to my senior seminar as a religion major at Samford University with Dr. Paul Holloway. My topic was on how Paul (the biblical one, not my professor), and those pretending to be Paul when writing, used athletic imagery in the Bible. Research quickly took me into reading stoic authors because the apostle Paul’s letters are infused with many stoic ideas, and due to the fact that stoic philosophers also used athletic imagery in their own writing.

I can still remember how excited my professor became when I shared with him my progress on the connection between how stoic philosophers used athletic imagery to depict their struggles with things like desire that would hinder their overall aim, just as Paul then used the same concept of himself as an athlete to show how he contends against sin in a pursuit of Christ. “Yes,” my professor exclaimed. We then went on to discuss how Hercules was not slaying monsters, but that every struggle where the hero defeats a mythical creature was actually the philosopher destroying some obstacle in their effort to reach their goal in real life. It sure is fun to think of a real life hero stepping up to kill Cerberus, a three-headed hell hound that guarded Hades, but it is even more interesting to open a doorway to where I can see my own personal struggles as such. I mean that is really fucking interesting! Suddenly a normal person has context to see that, not only is their shit a real contest, but that in the arena they are the only one who has the ability to prevail. So you better be ready to fight!