101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

146 101 Myths of the Bible
receive a blessing. The stranger blessed Jacob by changing his name to Israel and
declared him a prince of power.
Jacob asked his opponent to identify himself, but the stranger declined, and since
Jacob believed that he had looked into the face of God, he named the place Penuel,
“Face of God.” (The story uses both Peniel and Penuel as the name of the place. Subsequently,
the Bible just refers to Penuel.) The sun then rose in the sky and Jacob began
to limp. Immediately after his confrontation with the unidentified stranger, Esau
appeared. The two brothers professed peace, hugged, and were gracious to each other.
Then, Jacob made a rather curious statement, “I have seen thy face, as though I had
seen the face of God” (Gen. 33:10). The statement implies that Esau had been the
stranger that Jacob wrestled.
In the earliest Egyptian myths, as recorded in the Pyramid Texts, Horus the Elder
and Set, the twin Egyptian deities, constantly fought with each other. Horus represented
the force of day and light, Set the force of night and dark. Egyptians believed
that the sun traveled a circular path between the light and the dark. At the end of the
light there resided a huge serpent that sought to devour the sun. The Egyptians
divided the full day into twenty-four periods, twelve day and twelve night. As the
solar barque entered into the night realm, it confronted a series of challenges
through twelve zones.
The myths sometimes depict Set as the serpent that tried to devour the sun.
Horus functioned as a solar deity, and in Egypt’s earliest times may have been the original
Creator deity. In any event, the fighting between Horus and Set signified the daily
battle between the sun and its enemy.
The various icons in the story of Jacob’s wrestling match correspond to the Egyptian
symbolism. Jacob, the Horus figure, wrestled all through the night with a stranger.
He believed the stranger to be God, although the story does not make that direct
claim. He named the location“Face of God” because he believed that he looked on the
face of god during his wrestling match. But because the night was dark, he could not
have seen much. The first person he saw when the light appeared was Esau, the Set figure.
And he said to him,“I have seen thy face, as though I had seen the face of God,”
identifying him with the stranger.