Primal Wound

Primal Wound June 25, 2015

During the night before Jacob returns from his sojourn with Laban in Haran, a man confronts him and they wrestle (Genesis 32). Jacob refuses to let the man go and the man touches him in the yerekh – usually translated as “socket of his thigh.” He returns to the land, but he returns limping. He’s a victor in his encounter with the Angel of Yahweh, but he’s a wounded victor.

In her contribution to The Covenant of Circumcision, editor Elizabeth Wyner Mark connects Jacob’s wound to circumcision, going so far as to suggest that it is a “phallic” wound (13). I don’t buy it. It’s not at all clear what Jacob’s “limping” would mean in that case. 

Yet her comments are suggestive nonetheless: “the phallic wound marking the moment of the final establishment of the Israelite patriline suggests a kind of male birth pang, if you will. As a genital injury, it parallels the genital injury of circumcision that is linked to the previous divine bestowal of new names on Jacob’s grandparents. Thus the wounding touch of Jacob’s yerekh could be understood as an echoing reaffirmation of the covenant of circumcision, this time with the matriarchal line eliminated from central focus.”

Though Jacob’s wound is not phallic, it does make sense to connect it with circumcision, and with the “male birth pangs” that Mark suggests. Circumcision is, after all, a symbolic elimination of potency, a confession of the weakness and deadness of flesh. Circumcised, Abraham “limped” toward the fulfillment of the promised seed; wounded, Jacob limps to receive the promised land. The seed of Jacob is that people marked by wounds in the flesh, that people that limps triumphantly.


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