To the historian, Jacob is above all an eponymous ancestor, the figure through whom a people explains its own origin and unity. The renaming to Israel, the birth of the twelve sons who correspond to the twelve tribes, and the encounters at named sanctuaries such as Bethel (where Jacob dreams of a ladder set between earth and heaven and the angels ascending and descending upon it) all function to root the later nation, its shrines and its structure in the life of a single patriarch. The narratives were shaped over a long period and are not straightforwardly biographical.
In Jewish tradition Jacob-Israel is the last of the three patriarchs invoked in prayer, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the immediate father of the nation; the wrestling at Peniel is read as the archetype of Israel's own striving with God through history.
Christianity received the ladder at Bethel as an image of the link between heaven and earth, applied in the Gospel of John to Christ himself. Islam honours Ya'qub as a prophet and the father of the prophet Yusuf (Joseph), and the Qur'an, calling the Israelites the Children of Israel, preserves his second name as the name of the people descended from him. From a single trickster-patriarch, in each telling, a nation and a covenant descend.