With whom did Jacob wrestle, and what is the significance of the wrestling? Both questions have long been debated and both have received manifold answers. But in the context of the patriarchal narratives, neither issue is overly mysterious.

In this parsha’s narrative, we are told at the outset that “Jacob was left alone and a man wrestled with him until the dawn.” But as the story unfolds, Jacob is told that his name will be changed to Israel, “for you have striven with beings divine and human and have prevailed.” We know that the human with whom Jacob has struggled was Esau, but who is the divine being? Finally, Jacob names the place of the struggle Peniel, “meaning ‘I have seen a divine being face to face, yet my life has been preserved.’”

So goes the JPS translation. But the Hebrew for “divine being” in both instances is “Elohim” and “Elohim” is conventionally the Hebrew term for God, as is clear, a few verses below, when Jacob tells Esau that seeing his face is like seeing “the face of God,” where the Hebrew term for God here is, as we would expect, “Elohim.”

So what begins as a wrestling match with “a man” ends with Jacob’s dawning awareness that he has in fact been wrestling with God — not an angel, not a malign force as the commentators would have it, but God.

The same transformation occurs in the case of Abraham. When he is sitting at the entrance of his tent in Bereishit 18, we are told that the Lord appeared to him, but what does Abraham see? “Three men.” As the story unfolds, when the men tell Abraham that Sarah is to have a child, and Sarah laughs, it is no longer the men who ask, “Why did Sarah laugh?” but rather “the Lord.”

And at the end of the chapter, after Abraham’s mind-boggling debate with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorra, “When the Lord had finished speaking to Abraham, He [i.e. the Lord] departed, and Abraham returned to his place.”

What begins as an encounter with “three men” ends with Abraham’s realization that all along, the encounter had been with God, as the narrative voice had informed us at the outset.

So also with Joseph. At the outset, when his father sends Joseph to visit his brothers, we are told that “a man came upon him wandering in the fields” and asks him, “What are you looking for?” The “man” directs Joseph to where his brothers can be found, so that this encounter with “a man” launches Joseph on his fateful meeting with his brothers, Israel’s sojourn in Egypt, and the rest.

At the very end of the Joseph story, after Joseph has revealed his true identity to his brothers, after their father dies, and when the brothers plead that Joseph forgive them, he reveals to them — and to us — that the master hand guiding the entire story was God: “Although you intended me harm, God intended it for good….”

So it was not “a man” who met Joseph wandering in the field, but God all along.

There is an elusive quality to the biblical God. Very rarely in the biblical narrative is God seen in an unambiguous way. According to one tradition, Moses does see God “face to face,” though in another tradition, he sees only God’s back. Isaiah sees God, as do the elders after the Sinai covenant. Much more frequently, biblical personalities see “a man” or “three men,” or, as with Joseph, the seemingly natural course of events. Only later, after the fact, do we catch their dawning awareness that it was God all along.

So is it in our own experience. We too have a dawning awareness of God’s presence in our lives, often, like our ancestors, after the fact. We too learn that we can only discern God’s presence in and through God’s natural manifestations.

Finally, why does Jacob wrestle with God? Because never is the encounter with God trouble-free. Everyone who seeks God must wrestle. Abraham’s relationship with God was tested 10 times, beginning with God’s command that he leave his father’s home, and ending with God’s command that he sacrifice his son Isaac. Isaac, for his part, had to gaze upon his father, holding a knife to his throat at God’s command. And Joseph had to confront the reality that some of his brothers were prepared to kill him.

Jacob’s wrestling with God pales when compared to the trauma of his ancestors’ experiences. He emerges wounded, but with God’s blessing and, after separating from Esau, he arrives “safe and sound” — the Hebrew term is “shalem” — in the city of Shechem.

Faith in God is never a sinecure. We struggle, attain a measure of insight, lose it, and regain it. Faith is never a sinecure because life is never a sinecure, and our personal relationship with God is part of our own struggle to find meaning in our life experience.