Vayishlach

In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Vayishlach ('And he sent', Genesis 32:4-36:43) recounts Jacob's night of wrestling with a mysterious figure, after which he is renamed Israel, his fearful reunion and reconciliation with Esau, the violation of Dinah and its aftermath, and the death of Rachel giving birth to Benjamin.

Jacob's night of wrestling with a figure the text leaves ambiguously identified, described only as 'a man' (Genesis 32:24), is read by rabbinic tradition, following an interpretation attributed to the sage Rabbi Judah, as an encounter with the guardian angel of Esau, so that the physical struggle enacts symbolically the historical struggle between Jacob's and Esau's descendants that the Torah elsewhere treats at the political and national level. The renaming of Jacob as Israel, 'for you have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed' (Genesis 32:28), gives the nation its enduring name, and rabbinic law derives from the episode's closing detail, the sinew of the hip that was touched and made to limp, the traditional Jewish prohibition on eating this particular sinew in meat, one of the dietary laws whose origin the Torah itself explicitly narrates rather than simply legislating.

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.