Why Jacob's Name Was a Warning Israel Had to Hear (Genesis 25:19–26)

The name Jacob is a picture of a hand on a heel, and the Hebrew Bible never lets the reader forget it.

Why is Jacob's name connected to the heel?

Jacob's name is built on the Hebrew word for heel, so it says, in effect, he grabs the heel. Jacob is Yaaqov (H3290), and the heel his hand closed on in Genesis 25:26 is aqev (H6119). The English "grasping Esau's heel; so he was named Jacob" (Genesis 25:26) keeps the event and loses the pun the Hebrew hearer could not miss.

Follow the word back. The first heel in the Bible is in Eden, where God tells the serpent about the woman's offspring: "He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel" (Genesis 3:15). From then on Genesis follows that promised offspring line by line, and the heel is where the enemy strikes. In Genesis 25 the line runs through one womb where two boys crush each other, and the son God names comes out with his hand on a heel. It ends with Jesus, the offspring whose heel was struck on the cross, and Paul promises the church, "The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet" (Romans 16:20).

The verb from the same root, aqav (H6117), means to come up from behind and overreach. Esau uses it when he loses the blessing: "Is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has cheated me twice" (Genesis 27:36). Cheated me is yaaqveni, he has Jacobed me. Jeremiah turns it on the whole nation centuries later. The BSB reads "every brother deals craftily" (Jeremiah 9:4), and the Hebrew is kol ach aqov yaaqov: every brother is a heel-grabber, every brother is a Jacob.

So the name the nation carried was a warning as well as a name. God changed it in Genesis 32: "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel" (Genesis 32:28). The heel-grabber's family became the people God named, and that renaming began with a question his mother asked before he was born.

What does it mean that Rebekah inquired of the LORD?

It means she went to God for an answer about her own situation, and Genesis 25:22 is the first place the Bible uses that phrase for a person seeking the LORD.

It began with a plea already answered. Isaac "prayed to the LORD on behalf of his wife," and "the LORD heard his prayer" (Genesis 25:21). Both verbs are athar (H6279), to plead. Isaac pleaded, and the LORD let Himself be pleaded with.

The answer brought a pregnancy that hurt. "The children inside her struggled" (Genesis 25:22) uses ratsats (H7533), to crush. When the Ammonites "harassed and oppressed the Israelites" (Judges 10:8), oppressed is ratsats. Rebekah felt two boys crushing each other inside her, and her question, "Why is this happening to me?" (Genesis 25:22), is the question of a woman who had waited twenty years for this child.

So she went to ask. The verb is darash (H1875), to seek, to ask after. Later it is the word for coming to God through His prophet, as when a king of Israel says of Micaiah, "There is still one man through whom we can inquire of the LORD" (1 Kings 22:8). Rebekah asked the LORD, and He answered her in poetry.

Why would the older serve the younger?

Because God chose it, and He said so in words that cut straight across the law Israel lived by. The oracle reads literally the great one will serve the little one: rav (H7227) and tsair (H6810). The firstborn's rights were written into Israel's own law: a father must honour the firstborn "by giving him a double portion of all that he has" (Deuteronomy 21:17). Israel heard that law read out, and heard God say before birth that the second twin would carry the promise.

Genesis does this again and again, down to Jacob crossing his hands to put his right hand "on the head of Ephraim, the younger" (Genesis 48:14).

That same law explains the hardest line about these twins. Malachi hears God say, "Yet Jacob I have loved" (Malachi 1:2), and then, "but Esau I have hated" (Malachi 1:3). The verbs are ahav (H157) and sane (H8130), and Israel's inheritance law uses exactly that pair. A man with two wives, "one beloved and the other unloved" (Deuteronomy 21:15), has unloved written senuah, from sane. Leah is the same: "When the LORD saw that Leah was unloved, He opened her womb" (Genesis 29:31). In the language of a family's inheritance, loved and hated name which son receives the portion. Malachi answers a people asking, "How have You loved us?" (Malachi 1:2), by pointing back to a choice God made in a womb.

How did Israel first hear the story of Jacob and Esau?

Israel heard it as the story of their own name and of the nation across their southern border.

The Hebrew names the place in the birth. Esau came out red, admoni (H132), the sound of Edom (H123). He was covered with hair, sear (H8181), the sound of Seir (H8165), the mountain where "Esau (that is, Edom) settled" (Genesis 36:8). An Israelite hearing verse 25 heard the hills of Seir across the Arabah.

Moses sent word to the king of Edom, "This is what your brother Israel says" (Numbers 20:14), and Edom refused them passage. The law still told Israel, "Do not despise an Edomite, for he is your brother" (Deuteronomy 23:7). Generations later, under David, "all the Edomites were subject to David" (2 Samuel 8:14), and the oracle given to Rebekah stood in the history books.

The prophets read the birth back to them. Hosea preached it to a nation drifting from God: "In the womb he grasped his brother's heel, and in his vigor he wrestled with God. Yes, he struggled with the angel and prevailed; he wept and sought His favor; he found Him at Bethel and spoke with Him there" (Hosea 12:3–4). Hosea told Israel the heel-grabber's story so they would remember how their father came to know God, by seeking Him and being spoken to.

What does Jacob's birth show about knowing God?

It shows that God speaks first, and that knowing Him is a lifetime of coming to hear what He has already said. God answered Isaac's plea, answered Rebekah's question, and named Jacob's future before he was born. Jacob grabbed at a heel for years before he met the LORD at Bethel and heard, "I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac" (Genesis 28:13). The word in the womb came first, and the knowing caught up with it.

We are the people who read back what God has said, the way Israel heard Hosea read their father's story to them. Write down what God has said to you in the Doxa app with the date, so you can read back how He spoke before you understood, and watch Him keep it.

This goes with today's Doxa Daily Lift: Jacob and Esau: God Spoke Before the Twins Were Born (Genesis 25:19–26)