When Dr. Kalman Kaplan had only just begun practicing as a psychologist, his uncle made an observation that Kaplan remembers to this day.

The term “psychology,” Kaplan’s uncle noted, is composed of two Greek words meaning “soul” (psyche) and “mind” (logos)—a linguistic compound that suggests mental processes and well-being are somehow separated from the body. Kaplan’s uncle contrasted this with the Hebrew word nephesh. Although it is often translated as “soul,” nephesh integrates body and soul and encompasses meanings as diverse as “living being,” “self,” “throat,” “mind,” and “passion.” As Kaplan’s uncle pointed out, “Body and soul are not separate.”

Throughout his many years working as an academic and clinical psychologist, Kaplan has come to appreciate his uncle’s insight and to see the importance of reclaiming Hebraic (biblical) ideas about psychology in a world often shaped by Greek ones. In an interview with the CHT, Kaplan shared some of his conclusions about how the Bible offers psychologically sound guidance for a happy and fulfilling life.

Greek vs. Biblical Exemplars for Modern Psychology

Empirical evidence within the social sciences highlights key stressors that can contribute to deteriorating mental health and devastating responses. These stressors are wide-ranging, including being adopted, being a refugee, coming from an incestuous family of origin, being afflicted with a terrible malady, depression, problems of identity, and more. Kaplan noted that the ancient Greeks grappled with all these stressors—in their tragedies, for example—and that all appear in the Bible as well. Yet the Greek and Hebrew worlds had starkly different approaches and responses to such stressors.

Kaplan offered several examples. Both the ancient Greek world and secular modern psychology are shaped to some degree by the notion of the “Oedipus complex,” which views father-son relationships as conflictual and competitive. The term “Oedipus complex” comes, of course, from the Greek tragedy of Oedipus, immortalized by the playwright Sophocles. As the story goes, King Laius hears from an oracle that his son Oedipus will one day kill him and marry his wife. Thus, Laius attempts to kill Oedipus, putting into motion a series of events that eventually lead to the oracle’s fulfillment and a tragic ending. Castration occupies a prominent role in Greek father-son narratives: for example, Kronus and Uranus. For Kaplan, this negative and competitive relationship between father and son contrasts with the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. There, God covenants with both father and son, symbolized by circumcision, such that Abraham has a vested interest in seeing Isaac succeed and indeed develop fully. The Hebraic story provides a healthy model of how fathers can support and encourage their sons, considering the broader chain of generations, rather than fathers blocking sons out of the fear that their sons will surpass and displace them.

Kaplan provided a number of other such Greek-Hebrew contrasts: Antigone vs. Ruth (both born out of incest); Coriolanus vs. David (both refugees), Oedipus vs. Moses (both adopted). In each case, the same stressor exists in both the Greek and the Hebrew stories. But, Kaplan affirmed, biblical stories offer a prophylactic against the stressors, providing a life-affirming alternative to the Greek tragic ending.¹

Today, most psychologists, psychoanalysts, social workers, and even pastoral counselors learn a psychology based on the Freudian system (psychosexual stages, Oedipus complex, narcissism, etc.) which in turn reflects the pathology in Greek thinking without providing a Hebrew corrective. This is true even for newer approaches such as client-centered, existential, humanistic, and even multicultural approaches. As Dr. Eric Wellisch, medical director of Grayford Child Guidance Clinic in England, argued almost seventy years ago,

The very word “psyche” is Greek. The central psychoanalytic concept of the formation of character and neurosis is shaped after the Greek Oedipus myth. It is undoubtedly true that the Greek thinkers possessed an understanding of the human mind which, in some respects, is unsurpassed to the present day, and that the trilogy of Sophocles still presents us with the most challenging problems. But stirring as these problems are, they were not solved in the tragedy of Oedipus. In ancient Greek philosophy, only a heroic fight for the solution but no real solution is possible. Ancient Greek philosophy has not the vision of salvation. . . . There is need for a biblical psychology.²

A Life of Purpose

One of the key biblical stories to which Kaplan often points is that of Job, who suffers the loss of his possessions, children, and personal health in a rapid series of brutal blows. Despite his losses, Job remains purposeful in life, maintaining his “sense of who he is.” Kaplan contrasts Job’s story to that of Zeno the Stoic who, upon merely stubbing his toe, concludes that the gods are sending him a sign and commits suicide. In other words, Zeno “catastrophizes” a minor stressor.

For Kaplan, there is an important difference here between Job’s sense of purpose and Zeno’s senseless search for meaning. Individuals desperate to find “meaning” in their lives may end up attempting to save the world while abnegating their simple daily responsibilities. Such discontentment with our simple lives can lead to misery, disaster, and even suicide, as the Greeks themselves demonstrated.

In his own clinical practice, one story stands out to Kaplan, involving a woman whom he calls “Charlotte.” Many years ago, Charlotte wrote to Kaplan, arguing that between life and death there is a third state, that of “miserable existence.” People in this state should, Charlotte argued, be allowed to choose physician-assisted suicide. In their informal correspondence, Kaplan attempted to help Charlotte find a deeper purpose in her life—not necessarily something grandiose, but “living her life in a decent, good way; being a grandmother.” Sadly, however, Charlotte ultimately concluded that her life lacked meaning and committed suicide with the help of the infamous Jack Kevorkian. Kaplan believes that psychologists today, learning from the biblical model, could help their patients by encouraging them to match their aspirations with who they are rather than seeking some non-existent “ideal form” (language from Plato, another famous ancient Greek).³

Psyche-logos vs. Nephesh

Kalman believes that the emerging field of biblical psychology has the potential to transcend the limitations of earlier waves of psychology. It differs from humanistic modern psychology in being open to the spiritual concerns of faith communities. It differs from both psychodynamic theory and behaviorism in its emphasis on the integration of inner processes and outer behavior, reflecting the fact that humans are not simply psyche-logos but also nephesh, and avoiding the overly cognitive and emotion-repressing Greek approach.

The importance of the physical as well as the mental emerged in Kaplan’s musings. Reflecting on his engagement with Charlotte, Kaplan wondered if he should have done more to try to help her, beyond his letters and attempted phone calls. Despite the fact that Charlotte was not actually his patient, Kaplan wondered, “Maybe I should have just gone to her house.” Later in his interview with the CHT, Kaplan summarized the plotline of the movie The Sunset Limited, in which a janitor stops an academic from committing suicide by jumping in front of a subway.  He takes him to his apartment, “but he doesn’t give him any food,” Kaplan added. And the academic leaves, presumably to complete his suicide. Kaplan’s comment about food sounded a little funny at first, but his recognition of food’s importance points to something deeper. After all, when the biblical figure of Elijah is depressed, God sent an angel to feed him and stay with him while he rested.  In contrast, when Ajax is depressed, his brother asks those around him to stay with him—but they don’t, and Ajax falls on his sword and dies.

Physical presence, physical touch, physical food—these elements are all important to our mental well-being, because we are each a nephesh, not simply a psyche-logos detached from a body. As a Christian reflecting on Kaplan’s comments, it strikes me that his message is surely strengthened in the Hebraic reasoning of the New Testament. There, Jesus Christ is given to us not in an abstract series of truths to be grasped by soul and mind but in an incarnate physical body, and in bread and wine.

Kalman J. Kaplan, PhD, is professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, A Fellow of the American Psychological Association, and a member of the Faith Communities Task Force of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention. He has been awarded in the past both Fulbright International Fellowships and a Start-Up Grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Visit Dr. Kalman Kaplan’s website at biblicalpsychology.org.

Footnotes

Studying Scripture: Anyone Can Do It, According to Nechama Leibowitz

Nechama Leibowitz was born in 1905 into a religious Jewish home in Latvia.¹ Her engagement with the Bible started at a young age, when she and her brother competed in their father’s Bible quizzes. Nechama completed a doctorate in Berlin and then moved to Israel with her husband where she began training teachers and, much later, taught as a Bible Education professor.

For Nechama, however, teaching was not confined to the classroom. She taught—and learned from—others in unexpected circumstances. Nechama “traveled around the country on buses, in taxis and on airplanes teaching Bible and commentaries to teachers, new immigrants, soldiers, kibbutzniks and thousands of ordinary people.”²

One year, a number of her students wished to continue studying even over the summer, so Nechama began preparing worksheets which combined biblical texts and Jewish commentaries. These worksheets, or “gilyonot,” contained questions which forced the students to look closely at the texts and commentary and draw their own conclusions. The students would mail their answers back to Nechama, who marked each worksheet individually.

Others soon wanted to join the study, and for over thirty years, Nechama supplied worksheets to thousands of correspondents of all ages and backgrounds. One of her students records, “When she reached 40,000 responses, she stopped counting.”³

In one case, Nechama found herself corresponding with an earnest but anonymous student. When Nechama finally asked for the identity of her correspondent, she learned that this committed student was a waitress at a restaurant.

The diversity of Nechama’s students points to one of the most revolutionary aspects of Nechama’s life: in studying and teaching Torah, Nechama had stepped into a sphere that had historically been occupied by men. Biographer Yael Unterman claims that Nechama was the first “serious female Jewish Bible interpreter”⁴ and that Nechama’s “unique achievements changed Orthodox society’s perception of a woman’s capabilities and undoubtedly opened doors for the female Torah scholars who followed.”⁵

Studying Scripture: With Rigor

In addition to her influence as a female exegete, Nechama’s approach to studying Scripture also revolutionized the Jewish exegetical world. She engaged with biblical commentaries that other scholars of the Bible were not considering at that time. Yael Unterman notes that the Jewish religious scholars of Nechama’s day studied the Bible almost exclusively through the lens of the Talmud, while secular scholarship on the Bible was dominated by what is known as Biblical Criticism,⁶ an approach that focuses on the potential sources and historical context of the Bible and often denies its truth, coherence, or divine origin.

In the face of these two approaches, Nechama Leibowitz introduced a third method by revitalizing the use of classic Jewish commentaries, a move that Unterman suggests to be revolutionary. Despite being an Orthodox Jew herself, Nechama even drew from some non-Orthodox commentaries. Each commentary was “subjected to a rigorous analysis and evaluated for [its] faithfulness to the text.”⁷

Nechama believed in closely examining the details and apparent difficulties in Scripture to discover the lessons hidden in the text.⁸ For example, in a worksheet examining a few verses in Deuteronomy 26, Nechama demands, “What is the difficulty in our verse that our two commentators are addressing?” “What is the weakness in [one commentator’s] answer?” What reasons caused each translator to punctuate the text as he did?⁹ Nechama described a close reader of Scripture this way:

And if previously he was like a person who sits in a car while the views fly past unseen, now he is like someone climbing a mountain with the view unfolding before him as he sweats and toils, increasingly with every new ascent.¹⁰

Many of us read the Bible quickly, looking for a quick message of encouragement or instruction; Nechama’s rigorous attention to the text reminds us of both the challenge and the richness of Scripture, calling us to careful textual interpretation.

Studying Scripture: With Genuine Care

But Nechama did not she see study of Scripture as simply an academic exercise. Rather, she looked for the ethical implications, the current application, of the passages she examined. Nechama recorded a conversation that she had on one occasion with a taxi driver.¹¹

“I’m so upset,” the driver told her. “I didn’t sleep the whole of last night.”

When Nechama asked the reason, the driver told her that he had been upset since the time of daily prayers. Nechama writes:

He said, “Tell me, did He forgive them? ” “Who?” I said. “What do you mean who? Nineveh? Who else?”

When Nechama assured her driver that God had completely forgiven Nineveh, the taxi driver then pointed to the verse at the end of Jonah: “Then why . . . does it say at the end of the book of Jonah, ‘While I will not spare Nineveh, that great city’?” Christians may not notice these sorts of complexities in our Bibles, where punctuation has been inserted that guides us toward certain readings. Nechama helped the taxi driver realize that it is possible to read God’s words as a question, challenging Jonah, rather than a statement expressing an intention to destroy Nineveh.

The taxi driver’s attentiveness to the text is inspiring in itself, but Nechama was impressed by a different aspect: “See that?” she wrote. “Thousands of people sit through the reading of Jonah and what do they care? Nothing! They’re busy looking at their watches and wondering when it’s all going to be over. . . . But he listened to the haftarah [Scripture portion] and it pained him.”

Upon realizing the alternate reading of the passage, the taxi driver exclaimed, “So it’s a good thing!” Nechama concludes, “I was so impressed! Here was a person reading the Torah and actually caring what he was reading.”

The example of Nechama and those who studied with her reminds us that any and all of us can study Scripture—not simply pastors, priests, professors, theologians, or our retired friends. Men or women, academics or non-academics, pastors or lay people, young or old—all of us have the opportunity to engage with God’s Word. Moreover, Nechama demonstrated the importance of reading Scripture closely and rigorously, but also with genuine concern for what it means, practically, to us and to the world.

Footnotes

The book of Revelation rolls forward as a series of visions full of exhortation, judgment, and finally the beauty of the New Jerusalem. In the midst of the book, chapter 12, John is confronted with the vision of a heavenly woman who, despite her shining glory, is burdened with labor pains (Rev 12:1–2). A dragon waits to eat her offspring, who is prophesied to “rule all the nations with a rod of iron” (Rev 12:5),¹ but the male child is rescued, being swept up into heaven, and the woman flees into the desert (Rev 12:3–6). There follows the battle of Michael and his angels against the dragon and his angels; the defeat of the dragon; his continued attack on the woman; and the ultimate (though not yet fully realized) triumph of the woman’s offspring, a triumph won because they are smeared with the blood of a Lamb (Rev 12:7–17).

What are we to make of these images? Some readers have sought to identify a one-to-one correspondence between the details of Revelation and real historical events and figures, where each image is viewed as having a single meaning.² Alternatively—and, I would argue, appropriately—we might read this passage “christologically,” that is, as pointing to or speaking of Christ. So, we could see the woman of Revelation 12 as Mary (or Israel), from whom comes the child, Jesus.³ The child’s birth and rescue, Joseph Mangina suggests, is a picture of Christ’s death and later ascension,⁴ which defeats the dragon, Satan (Rev 12:9).⁵ After all, Revelation is really “The revelation [Greek: apokalypsis] of Jesus Christ” (Rev 1:1), suggesting in itself that more is going on in Revelation than simply a flurry of end times images.

Such a christological reading, while perhaps helpful and informative, somehow seems isolated from the rich corpus of Scripture. More is going on here. Far from standing alone, Revelation 12 engages a vast series of Scriptural images and allusions that span the whole gamut of the Bible from creation to consummation. We turn now to identify some of these intertextual links—that is, links between different texts or books of the Bible.

Scripture in the ‘Apocalypse’

Links between Revelation 12 and the rest of Scripture appear as early as the beginning of Genesis. The first woman is told she will suffer pain in childbirth (Gen 3:16), and thus the woman in labor in Revelation 12 can remind us of Eve.⁶ God also speaks a curse over the serpent: its head will be bruised by the woman’s offspring (Gen 3:15). Christian exegesis has often located the fulfilment of this promise in Christ’s defeat of Satan by the cross, a defeat which reminds us of Revelation 12 and the defeat of the serpent (another name in Rev 12:9 for the dragon). Later in Genesis, Joseph dreams of the sun, moon, and twelve stars (echoed in the description of the woman in Rev 12:1); the twelve stars of the dream point to the children of Israel (Gen 37:9–10).⁷ Thus we can see in the woman of Revelation 12 echoes not simply of Eve but also of Israel.

The connections continue through the next biblical book, Exodus. Most obviously, God sends plagues in both Exodus (Exod 7–10) and Revelation (Rev 8-9, 16). In Exodus, God delivers His chosen people out of Egypt from Pharaoh, whom Ezekiel refers to as “the great dragon” (Ezek 29:3). Just so, in Revelation He delivers His chosen people—whether viewed as Israel, the Church, or both—from the dragon. In Exodus, God describes His act of deliverance by saying, “You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself” (Exod 19:4)—reminding us of God’s deliverance of the woman in Revelation 12:14 by providing her with eagles’ wings. Both Israel, fleeing the dragon of Egypt, and the woman, fleeing the dragon of Revelation 12, take refuge in the desert.⁸

Revelation 12 is also linked with the prophetic books. For example, in both Daniel 8:10 and Revelation 12:4, a terrifying figure hurls stars out of heaven. In Isaiah 27:1 and 51:9, God defeats a dragon.⁹

These and other intertextual links suggest that Revelation 12 is woven together in a whole constellation of Scriptural images, allusions, and pictures of Christ. It transports us through creation; curse; Israel; Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection; church history; the final consummation. Far from operating on its own, isolated “apocalyptic” terms, the “Apocalypse” is made up of salvation history.

The “Apocalypse” in the Christmas Story

But equally, salvation history is interspersed with apocalypse—with cataclysmic, eschatological, revelatory events. Here, I want to turn specifically to identify the apocalyptic thread woven through the nativity story of Luke 1. The connection may seem odd, but Hanns Lilje, strangely enough, describes Revelation 12 as “a Christmas scene.”¹⁰ (Perhaps we should add another verse to “Silent Night”?)

In Luke 1, we meet Zachariah and Elizabeth, whose struggle to birth a child connects not just backwards to Abraham and Sarah (Gen 11:30ff) but also forwards to the woman’s labours in Revelation 12. Luke 1 recounts two visitations of the angel Gabriel, whose presence reminds us of the angelic involvement of Michael in Revelation 12. Gabriel’s words to Zachariah contain eschatological prophecies drawn from Malachi.¹¹ Gabriel’s prophecy that Mary’s child will rule on the Davidic throne (Luke 1:32-33) harkens not just backwards to David but also forwards to Revelation 12, where we are told that the woman’s child will rule the nations. Moreover, just as Revelation is “profoundly Jewish,”¹² so is Luke 1, with its echoes of Samson and the book of Numbers.¹³

Moving beyond the borders of Luke 1 to the full Christmas story, other links appear: as the dragon in Revelation 12 seeks to kill the woman’s child, echoing the dragon Pharaoh drowning babies in the Nile,¹⁴ so also Herod kills the babies of Bethlehem in an attempt to destroy the child who threatens his ruling power.¹⁵ Just as the woman in Revelation 12 and the Israelites in Exodus fled to the desert, so Jesus and his parents must also take flight (Matt 2:15).¹⁶

Thus, Luke 1 (and the nativity story in general) is yet another instance of the intertextuality and inseparability of the apocalyptic from the rest of salvation history. Even more, the incarnation and birth of Christ is in some ways the apocalyptic event—the moment when heaven and earth, natural and supernatural most substantially intersect. The incarnation of Christ launches the cosmic conquest in time: “God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form.”¹⁷ In the incarnation, God is “revealed” (apokalypsis) in human flesh.

Thus, Christ grounds the fantastical, figurative chaos of Revelation in real history. For while Michael fights in heaven, Christ fights on earth¹⁸—fights with the weapon of weak human flesh and conquers the dragon through the defeat of the cross. Christ breaks into a broken world: the real world of war and weariness, barrenness and blindness, debilitating addiction and demonic assault. The supernatural intersects with the natural, and this is the “good news of great joy” (Luke 2:10) that Christmas proclaims. By being “Immanuel,” “God with us” (Matt 1:23), Christ triumphs for us: as Luther says, “we see here in [Revelation], that through and beyond all plagues, beasts, and evil angels Christ is nonetheless with his saints, and wins the final victory.”¹⁹

The Triumph of the Baby Dragon-Slayer

Thus, the Christmas story is an apocalypse and the Apocalypse a Christmas story. In some sense, all of Scripture is a series of wild intersections between Israel and Church and past and future and natural and supernatural and God and man. Revelation 12 images the birth of the Christ Child, offspring of Mary and Eve and Israel, who enters the Jewish people’s history (which somehow also becomes ours) to enact a cosmic conquest by His death and resurrection, which secure an ultimate but not yet consummate victory.

The visions of Revelation opened the way for early Christians—and for us—to locate ourselves in the movement of Israel’s history and beyond, to see our suffering within the cyclical yet steadily progressing movement of God’s gratuitous involvement in time.²⁰ The story of the good news that was preached in Genesis, with the promise that the woman’s seed would crush the serpent, and that was actualized in the world with the birth of Christ, concludes in Revelation with the consummating, ultimate victory of Christ, tying up the apocalyptic thread in triumph.²¹ Revelation does not admit simple resolution, but neither does it admit despair. It tells each new generation of Christ-followers that our faith will be attacked; our weapons are “the blood of the Lamb and . . . the word of [our] testimony” (Rev 12:11); and our victory is already won.

“There’s a dragon in my nativity,” writes Glen Scrivener, “Dreadful and immense.”²² But though the dragon may continue to rage, the nativity story reminds us that the infinite God has entered our finite world and has secured the final victory:

And so at this nativity, Arose another player.
The baby wrapped in swaddling cloths—
He was a dragon slayer.²³

Footnotes

According to legend, Achilles is the son of a mortal father and a goddess mother, Thetis, and is invulnerable except for his heel (or ankle). He becomes the foremost Achaean warrior, the model of heroic virtue. Achilles’ feet are famous not only for his legendary heel: Homer frequently describes Achilles as “swift-footed.” After eventually re-entering the battle, Achilles is ultimately killed by an arrow to his ankle (or heel). In what follows, I will focus on the presentation of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad while drawing upon the myth more generally.

Achilles’ Heel and the Dictates of Fate

The legend of Achilles’ heel presents Achilles as a man whose fatal weakness is a result not of some character flaw in himself but rather of the foibles of the gods and the dictates of fate. Achilles’ life is overshadowed, through no fault of his own, by the prophecy of an early death. As Thetis tells Achilles, “death, with the strong hand of fate, is already close beside you.”² Kalliopi Nikolopoulou notes, “Physical quickness in this story goes hand in hand with the brevity of life.”³

The [Greek] gods care more about piety—the proper fulfillment of propitiatory rituals—than about anything like the Hebraic concept of righteousness.

Achilles himself suggests he can avoid the fate of an early death not through prayers or through living more piously but rather through manipulating circumstances—namely, by giving up the quest for heroic glory: “If I stay here and fight, I shall not return alive, but my name will live forever. Whereas, if I go home, my name will die, but it will be long ere death shall take me.”⁴ Yet when Hector, the leading Trojan warrior, kills Achilles’ beloved friend Patroclus—a death which Homer attributes to “the counsels of Zeus [which] pass man’s understanding”⁵—Achilles yields to his mortality⁶ and his fate. He returns to battle in a bloodthirsty rampage which ends with his slaying of Hector. Yet Hector’s death also is guided by a fate even beyond the gods, as Zeus holds his golden scales to determine the warriors’ lots.⁷

At the end of the Iliad, Priam, Hector’s father and king of the Trojans, sneaks into the Achaean camp and falls at Achilles’ feet, begging for the return of Hector’s body. Surprisingly, Achilles yields—a yielding which Homer seems to suggest is due both to the threatening command of Zeus and to Achilles’ own pity and reverence for Priam. Achilles tells the aged man, “We will hide our sorrows in our hearts, for weeping will not avail us. The immortals know no care, yet the lot they spin for man is full of sorrow.” Zeus, Achilles goes on to suggest, at best gives a man a lot of mixed evil and good, never only good.⁸ The Iliad ends with this quiet hopelessness of mortals in the face of the immortals and fate. Only in the Odyssey do we learn from Homer that Achilles has died and entered the miserable world of the dead.⁹

The Hellenic gods operate on a system of merit, a system where they love the mortals that please them—those who are beautiful, wise, pious, or spawned (adulterously) from their loins. Zeus credits his love for Hector to the fact that “his offerings never failed me,”¹⁰ while Achilles’ elder tells him that the gods can be appeased (perhaps even manipulated?) by prayer and sacrifice.¹¹ Thus, the gods care more about piety—the proper fulfillment of propitiatory rituals—than about anything like the Hebraic concept of righteousness. They generally seem interested in their own good, not that of “miserable mortals.”¹² Ultimately, mortals are subject to the arbitrary will of the gods and the fates, to which even the gods themselves are subject.¹³ Thus, Achilles’ heel points to his weakness—a weakness not moral but mortal, that of a human who wrestles with and is ultimately crushed under the weight of aloof and arbitrary gods and heartless fate.

Jacob the Heel-Grabber

Like Achilles, the biblical patriarch Jacob also wrestles with weakness, fate, and the mysterious will of the divine.¹⁴ But Jacob’s story is very different. Smooth-skinned and a bit of a mama’s boy, Jacob does not strike us immediately as a comparison to Achilles, though as the biblical narrative unfolds, he performs more than one “‘Homeric’ feat of strength.”¹⁵ Moreover, Jacob does not enter the world fighting fair in face-to-face combat.¹⁶ Rather, the Biblical narrative records the birth of Jacob and his twin brother Esau in this way: Jacob, born second, “came out with his hand holding Esau’s heel, so his name was called Jacob.”¹⁷ The name “Jacob” itself means “heel” or “supplanter.” Notably, up to this point, only one other figure in Genesis has been associated with attacking the heel: the “cunning”¹⁸ serpent, whose deception of Eve led to the Fall and who is told by God, “[the woman’s offspring] shall bruise your head, / and you shall bruise his heel.”¹⁹ The cunning, heel-grabbing Jacob grows into a man who continues to try to make his own way in the world “underhandedly.”²⁰

Jacob bribes his brother Esau to sell him his birthright, and later he deceives his father, Isaac, to steal Esau’s blessing. Exploiting Isaac’s blindness and Esau’s absence while hunting, Jacob brings meat to his father, claiming, “I am Esau your firstborn.” When Isaac asks him, “How is it that you have found [the game] so quickly, my son?”, Jacob replies, “Because the Lord your God granted me success.”²¹ Leon Kass renders this, “God has sent me good speed.”²² Like Achilles, Jacob relies upon swiftness of feet and of words²³ (that is, for Jacob, lies) to accomplish his ends. Esau responds to the news of the stolen blessing with the outburst: “Is he not rightly named Jacob? For he has supplanted me these two times.”²⁴ Faced with Esau’s murderous anger, Jacob must swiftly foot to a distant land where he continues to grapple cunningly, struggling against his deceptive uncle Laban in the matters of marriage and business.

But Jacob does not only seek to manipulate other humans. When Jacob is fleeing from Esau, God meets him at Bethel and gives him an unconditional promise:

The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth . . . and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.²⁵

Rather than simply receive the promise and yield himself to God, Jacob sets up conditions, “bargaining with God”²⁶: “If God will be with me and will keep me . . . then the Lord shall be my God.”²⁷ Jacob tries to manipulate God Himself.²⁸ Even more, Jacob does not seem to trust God’s promise and would rather wrestle his fate into submission by his own power. Jacob the “Heel-Grabber” remains “the man who seizes his fate, tackles his adversaries, with his own two hands.”²⁹

But what exactly is Jacob trying to achieve through his supplanting? Is he simply greedy for material gain? Perhaps he is seeking to bring to pass the prophecy God gave his mother before the twins’ birth: “The older shall serve the younger”?³⁰ But the text does not tell us this—or even whether Jacob knew of the prophecy. And either way, the story of Jacob’s grandparents, Abraham and Sarah, has already cast a negative light on those who would seek to force the promise of God through their own less-than-upright means. When Sarah sought to bring about the promised offspring through giving her maidservant Hagar to Abraham, God would have none of it: “No, but Sarah your wife shall bear you a son.”³¹ The Apostle Paul exegetes this narrative in his epistle to the Galatians: “The son of the slave [Ishmael/Hagar] was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman [Isaac/Sarah] was born through promise.”³² Reliance upon human effort—“flesh”—stands in contrast to trust in the promise of God.

Wrestling with God

But promise throws off human calculation, and thus the God of the Bible, like the Hellenic gods, is mysterious. God’s choices often stand in the face of convention. Often He unexpectedly chooses younger sons instead of older, but not always: neither Reuben (Jacob’s eldest) nor Benjamin (Jacob’s youngest) but rather Judah becomes the father of Israel’s preeminent tribe. The chosen of God are the children of the promise, not of the flesh. But in this, God is unlike the Hellenic gods: He does not choose the most pious, beautiful, wise, heroic. And His choosing differs from the arbitrary and partisan politics of the Olympians. In His promise to Jacob, as in His calling of Abraham, God adds, “In you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”³³

Whereas Achilles’ heel is a mortal but not moral weakness, the Bible presents Jacob’s heel-grabbing manipulation as morally problematic

In Jacob, however, we see a man who would rather work out his own fate than rely upon God. Jacob seems to prefer an economy of merit to one of grace, of “flesh” rather than “promise”—an economy where God, as well as man, will be judged based on whether He produces. Thus Jacob, like Achilles, strives in some way to manipulate his fate (or God). But whereas Achilles’ heel is a mortal but not moral weakness, the Bible presents Jacob’s heel-grabbing manipulation as morally problematic—where “moral” designates not simply a set of rules but a righteousness bound up with a relationship of covenant, grace, and trust. And unlike the Achilles story, which is pervaded by the hopelessness of divine ambivalence and heartlessness, the Jacob story is transformed by a God who steps in to grapple with the heel-grabber. Jacob wishes to remove life’s mysterious element, but God forces him to wrestle with it—literally.

When returning to Canaan, Jacob is warned that Esau is approaching with four hundred men. Terrified to see his brother’s face,³⁴ Jacob finally seems to come to the end of his rope. No swiftness of foot can save him now. Like Achilles, Jacob finds himself face to face with his mortality. Unlike Achilles, he responds not in despair but by crying out to God and (finally) acknowledging his unworthiness:

O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, O Lord who said to me, “Return to your country and to your kindred, that I may do you good,” I am not worthy of the least of all the deeds of steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant. . . . Please deliver me from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I fear him.³⁵

In Jacob’s words we might finally see a willingness to hold God to a promise, to operate on an economy of grace rather than of merit.³⁶

Jacob wishes to remove life’s mysterious element, but God forces him to wrestle with it—literally.

One might have expected God to respond eagerly to such a show of humility from Jacob, but the narrator records no response.³⁷ However, that night, after Jacob moves his family and servants to the other side of the river, a mysterious encounter takes place:

Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.”³⁸

The wrestling match might seem a preeminent example of Jacob operating on the level of flesh. Kass calls it Jacob’s “one shining and heroic—Achillean—moment.”³⁹ Jacob’s physical preeminence allows him to demand a blessing from his opponent. Is this yet another attempt by Jacob to control his fate, to wrest a blessing out of God just as he has out of Esau and Isaac?⁴⁰

In fact, there is another way to read this passage, which Kass phrases as follows: “Jacob acknowledges both his own neediness (for a blessing) and the higher standing of his opponent.”⁴¹ As in his prayer the day before, Jacob suggests a willingness to operate in an economy of grace. He finally faces “the limits of his own shrewdness”⁴² and his own weakness and mortality.⁴³ Moreover, Jacob understands himself to have been wrestling with God Himself: “I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.”⁴⁴ In the prophet Hosea’s retelling, Jacob’s opponent seems to be presented as both God and angel, while Kass affirms that perhaps “Jacob has here been wrestling simultaneously with man and God.”⁴⁵ Even if Jacob was wrestling only with a “man” or an angel, we must not miss the radical nature of his survival: the episode still witnesses to divine involvement and supernatural struggle which ends in life rather than death, the fatal expectation in the Tanakh for those who see God’s face.⁴⁶

Jacob’s opponent renames him “Israel,” offering the following etymology: “you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.”⁴⁷ Jacob, we might say, has gone from being a “supplanter,” a snaky attacker at the heel, to a wrestler in fair, face-to-face combat. Yet, unlike Achilles, Jacob does not end with a swift and blazing show of glory. He is given not just a blessing and new name but also a limp. “Swift-footed” Jacob will, as Kass puts it, “forevermore remember that the Lord has permanently slowed him down.” Jacob’s “self-sufficiency” is humbled. “The man who limps gets along only with the help of grace.”⁴⁸ As in his prayer he recognized his own unworthiness, so after his fight perhaps he realizes that Esau is not the greatest danger: God is—a God whose holiness and transcendence is so great that to look on His face would be fatal but for grace.

Unlike the Hellenic gods, who have little interest in the growth and good of mortals, God refuses to allow Jacob to remain a heel-grabber. Jacob’s wrestling match forces him to confront his spiritual “Achilles’ heel”—his attempt to supplant even God Himself by seeking through cunning to control his fate. To truly encounter God, Jacob must accept his own mortality and reliance upon grace. He must receive the blessing as blessing: a gift from God. Thus, at the heart of Jacob’s wrestling is an encounter with God as Savior. And a God who does not wound cannot save.

Achilles’ Heel vs. Jacob’s Hip: Saved by Wounds

To conclude, both the Achilles’ heel and Jacob’s heel are points of weakness. Achilles’ weakness is mortal—that of a finite man confronted by the heartlessness of fate and the gods. Jacob’s weakness is moral—that of a finite man who seeks to supplant the living God. Both men must ultimately yield to the mystery which is the divine. But whereas Achilles’ wound kills him, mortal life spilled out under the distant gaze of immortal apathy, Jacob’s wound saves him: or rather, his wrestling encounter with the living God injures not just his mortal flesh but also his hope in flesh,⁴⁹ driving him finally toward the promise of an uncontainable God.

A Christian exegesis might find in this passage a God who wounds us only because He, too, was first wounded. Mercifully, the snaky, heel-grabbing Jacob does not have his head crushed (c.f. Gn 3:15); rather, he encounters the God-Man who graciously leaves him with a limp.⁵⁰ But this wrestling match typifies the greater struggle to come, when the God-Man—offspring of the woman—will finally crush the heel-biting serpent’s head, but only through His own bruising. As Augustine puts it, Christ was overcome at his crucifixion, yet “precisely when he was overcome, he overcame for us . . . because when he suffered, he shed the blood with which he redeemed us.” Thus, as Jacob demanded a blessing from the one he overcame, so in Christ we see a “grand and splendid mystery! Overcome, he blesses.”⁵¹ The God who wounds in order to save does so only because He, too, was also wounded:

Jacob came cloth’d in vile harsh attire But to supplant, and with gainful intent: God cloth’d himself in vile man’s flesh, that so He might be weak enough to suffer woe.⁵²

Footnotes