Summary of the Parasha

Jacob sends messengers to his brother Esau, who comes to meet him with 400 men. Jacob is afraid; according to Rashi he prepares in three ways: with gifts, with prayer (“I am unworthy of all the kindnesses”) and for battle, splitting his camp in two. He sends Esau flocks as a gift, wave after wave.

That night, alone at the ford of the Jabbok, he wrestles with a man until dawn; our Sages see in him Esau’s angel. The angel touches his hip and blesses him: his name becomes Israel. Jacob names the place Peniel, “for I have seen God face to face”. From here comes the prohibition of eating the gid hanasheh, the sciatic nerve.

The meeting: Jacob bows seven times, Esau runs to him and embraces him; the brothers part in peace, and Jacob settles in Sukkot and then in Shechem, where he buys a field. There, Dinah is abducted and violated by Shechem son of Chamor. Her brothers Simeon and Levi require the townsmen to be circumcised, then attack the city; Jacob rebukes them.

God sends Jacob to Beit El: he tells his household to put away foreign gods and builds an altar. Deborah, Rebecca’s nurse, dies there. God confirms the name Israel and the promise of the land. On the road to Ephrat, Rachel dies giving birth to Benjamin; she is buried near Bethlehem, where, Jeremiah will say, “Rachel weeps for her children”. Next comes the episode of Reuben and Bilhah, then the list of Jacob’s twelve sons. Jacob rejoins his father in Hebron; Isaac dies at 180, buried by his two sons. The parasha ends with the generations of Esau and the kings who reigned in Edom “before any king reigned over Israel”.

Summary of the Haftara

“Chazon Ovadiah” (“The vision of Obadiah”)
Text in Obadiah 1:1–21

The shortest book of the Tanakh, entirely directed against Edom, the descendants of Esau. Edom thinks itself unreachable “like the eagle that nests among the stars”, but God will bring it down. The prophet rebukes Edom for joining in the misfortune of its brother Jacob on the day Jerusalem was destroyed. He announces that “the house of Jacob will be a fire, the house of Joseph a flame, and the house of Esau straw”, and concludes: “Saviors will go up on Mount Zion to judge the mountain of Esau, and the kingdom will be Hashem’s”. According to the Talmud (Sanhedrin 39b), Obadiah was an Edomite convert: one who had seen the house of Esau from the inside was best placed to prophesy against it.

Parasha-Haftara Connection

The parasha tells of the meeting between Jacob and Esau and ends with the kings of Edom; the haftara announces the end of Edom’s story and God’s kingship in Zion. The night struggle with Esau’s angel reaches its conclusion at the end of days.