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Updated: June 6, 2025
The floor of the loft is covered with cotton-seed. A wheelbarrow is in the middle of the floor. Jacob takes off his jacket, and with it brushes the cotton-seed away from one side of the wheelbarrow, lays the jacket down for his master to kneel upon, and goes to the other side. Like Jacob at Peniel, he has power over the angel, and prevails; he weeps and makes supplication unto him.
It was this world which Jacob saw on the first night of his exile, and again when he wrestled in Peniel until the break of day. It was this world which Elisha saw with open eyes; which Job knew when darkness fell on him; which Ezekiel gazed into from his place among the captives; which Daniel beheld as he stood alone by the great river, the river Hiddekel.
As the petition died away in Agnes's physical exhaustion, the venerable man thought to himself: "When Jacob wrestled all night at Peniel, his angel must have been a woman like this; for she has power with God and with men!" Calvin Van de Lear had been up-stairs with Duff Salter, and on his way out had heard the voice of Agnes Wilt praying.
That is the path of transformation. The road passes through Peniel, and Jacob must become Israel before he is Jeshurun. He must hold communion with God in Christ before he is clothed with righteousness. How different that path is from the road which men are apt to take in working out their own self-improvement!
Now, when troubles come, when fightings without and fears within assail her, when household cares make her weary, and the thought of guiding wayward hearts and wandering feet makes her afraid, the remembrance of this room comes back to her as the remembrance of Bethel or Peniel must have come to Jacob in his after-wanderings, and her strength is renewed. For there she met God face to face.
Then he sailed on a whaler and thus became acquainted with the Esquimaux. He was converted from a life of drunkenness and debauchery though one fancied his character was not really ever so bad as he painted it at a "Peniel" mission in a Californian town.
I have no doubt that some of you have spent and I would not say wasted, but it has been almost so years of life, not without many an honest effort, in the task of self- improvement, and are very much where you were long ago. Why have you failed? Because you have never been to Peniel.
Wherefore Manoah said, 'We have seen God. Long after these early visions, a psalmist knows himself safe because 'the angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear Him. Hosea, looking back on the story of Jacob's wrestling at Peniel, says, first, that 'he had power with God, yea, he had power over the angel, and then goes on to say that 'there He spake with us, even Jehovah. And Malachi, on the last verge of Old Testament prophecy, goes furthest of all in seeming to run together the conceptions of Jehovah and the Angel of Jehovah, for he says, 'The Lord whom ye seek shall suddenly come to His temple; and the angel of the covenant ... behold, he cometh. From this imperfect resume, we see that there appears in the earliest as in the latest books of the Old Testament, a person distinguished from the hosts of angels, identified in a very remarkable manner with Jehovah, by alternation of names, in attributes and offices, and in receiving worship, and being the organ of His revelation.
Similarly the "man" who wrestles with Jacob at Peniel is identified with God. In Isaiah vi. the seraphim, superhuman beings with six wings, appear as the attendants of Yahweh. Thus the pre-exilic literature, as we now have it, has little to say about angels or about superhuman beings other than Yahweh and manifestations of Yahweh; the pre-exilic prophets hardly mention angels.
Given a belief in the constant presence of the unseen and its frequent manifestation, such a story as that of Peniel might well arise from an unexplained injury to the sciatic muscle, while more than one ailment of the heart or liver might perhaps suggest the touch of a beckoning god. There is of course no connexion between the Sumerian and Hebrew stories beyond their common background.
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