Four Armies of Angels Fought Esau in the Dark for Jacob

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The Night He Sent the Goats Ahead

Jacob had twenty years of Laban behind him and four hundred armed men coming up the road in front of him. He cut his household into two camps so that if one was destroyed the other could run. Then he stood in the dark and argued with God like a man reading a contract back to the party who wrote it.

"You put it in Your own Torah," he said. "A cow and her calf are not to be slaughtered on one day. If this man comes and takes my children together with their mothers, who is left to read the scroll You mean to hand down at Sinai?"

Then he counted out the bribe. Two hundred she-goats and twenty he-goats. Two hundred ewes and twenty rams. Thirty nursing camels with their young, forty cows, ten bulls, twenty she-donkeys, ten donkeys. He put each drove under its own servant and told them to keep a gap between one drove and the next, and inside that piece of livestock management he hid a second prayer. When trouble comes for my children, do not send it in one wave. Space it. Let them breathe between blows.

The droves went over the ford. The women and the children went over. Jacob stayed on the near bank, alone, which is where the night found him.

What Esau Met in the Dark

Four armies of angels went out that night and fought Esau's men on the road.

To Esau's men they looked like an army of forty thousand coming out of empty country: infantry, riders, chariots, no herald, no warning. The first company reached them and asked whose men they were.

"We are the sons of Isaac," they shouted.

The blows kept falling.

"We are the sons of the sons of Abraham."

The blows kept falling.

"We are the brothers of Jacob."

The angels stopped where they stood. "For the honor of Jacob, we will let you go." One of them said the rest of it aloud as they pulled back into the dark. "Woe to us if our master hears that we laid a hand on you."

Esau's four hundred came out of that night alive and shaking, and none of them could say who had hit them.

The Man at the Ford Was a Shepherd

On the empty bank a shepherd walked up to Jacob and took hold of him.

He was Michael, and he was the size of a third of the world, and the dust the two of them kicked up went as high as the throne of God. Jacob got him down and held him down. On the way to the ground the angel hooked a hand into the socket of Jacob's hip and pulled the sinew out of place, so that when the grip finally broke, Jacob could not stand straight.

Then the sun came up two hours early, burning the way it had burned in the six days of creation. The same light did two jobs at once. It closed the injury in Jacob's thigh, and it came down on Esau and his princes on the road and very nearly burned them where they rode.

Jacob's sons would not eat the sinew of the hip after that. They had left their father alone on the wrong side of a river all night, and they knew it.

Esau Ran, and Asked About the Other Camp

Jacob lifted his eyes and there were the four hundred men of war, close enough to count.

He split the children among their mothers and set them in order of what he could bear to lose. The handmaids and their sons in front, where a man looking for women would reach first and buy the rest of them time to arm. Leah and her children behind them. Rachel and Joseph at the back. Jacob walked out ahead of all of it himself, on the ruined hip, because it was better that they came at him first. Joseph broke the order. He stepped in front of his mother and stood there, because he knew what his mother looked like and he knew what his uncle was.

Esau ran. He had sworn he would not kill his brother with a bow, he would use his teeth, he would bite through his throat and drink. He got his arms around Jacob's neck and his mouth on it and the neck went hard as ivory under him, and all he could do was grind his teeth and weep with the pain of it. The two of them stood there holding each other and crying for entirely different reasons.

Then Esau pulled back and asked his question. "That whole camp I ran into. Whose was it?"

Not the camp I saw. The camp I ran into.

Jacob thought he meant the livestock. He said the right courtier's thing, that it was all sent ahead to find favor in the eyes of my lord, and he pressed the gift on him until Esau stopped pretending to refuse it. Half the animals never arrived. They had bolted on the road rather than change owners, and the ones slow enough to be caught were the lame ones.

Jacob went on to Succoth believing that two hundred she-goats had bought his brother off.