The Dotted Word Over a Kiss

The Masoretic text of Jacob and Esau's reunion carries an unusual scribal feature: dots are placed over every letter of the word vayishakeihu, 'and he kissed him' (Genesis 33:4), one of a small, deliberately preserved set of dotted words across the Hebrew Bible whose meaning the Masoretes transmitted without explaining. Midrashic tradition offers two rival readings of the dots, one holding they mark the kiss as fully sincere despite Esau's history, a reconciliation worth underlining precisely because it seems so unlikely, the other, associated with Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, holding they signal suspicion that Esau meant to bite rather than kiss and that Jacob's neck was miraculously hardened against him; both readings are preserved side by side in classical compilations rather than one being declared correct.

Source-critical scholarship generally reads the wrestling and renaming episode as older, poetic material reworked into its present prose setting, and treats the surrounding Jacob-Esau reconciliation narrative as substantially Yahwist. The Quran and Islamic tradition, which honour Jacob (Yaqub) as a prophet, do not narrate his wrestling by the Jabbok or this reunion with Esau, so the episode's specific imagery of struggle and renaming belongs to the Jewish and Christian textual tradition without a parallel Islamic retelling.