Angels, Honor and One God

Who are the angels of God?  They're around since the very beginning since they point the way out of the Garden of Eden.  These are minions of Yahweh?  The Sodomites wanted to rape them.  They must be beautiful. 

Jacob is quite the strategist.   In Genesis 32 he devises an elaborate show to appease Esau upon his return with presents, but still arranges a worst-case-scenario in case it fails.  He wrestles all night with some man (a dream?) who renames his Israel in the morning, for 'he has struggled with God and men and prevailed'.   It is never stated that the man was Yahweh, but Jacob believed that he was.  The man touched his hip socket, and this is given as the reason why Jews don't eat the muscle from the hip socket in an animal.    After meeting Esau (who is a genuinely nice guy) with much self-deprecation and servility, Jacob goes to Succoth and makes booths for his animals. This must be the origin of the holiday?

Dinah and Family Honor

Leah's daughter, Dinah was seduced by Shechem.  There's no indication it was actually a rape, and the man and his father did propose marriage and invite Jacob and his people to settle in the land and intermarry with them.  Dinah's brothers Simeon and Levi told them that they would do so if all the men would get circumcised.  They did, and on the third day when then were healing, Simeon and Levi went into the town, killed all the males, took the women and children captive, and looted the place.  Jacob rebuked them saying that now all the locals would be angry with him and mistrust him.  It's interesting that the response to the perceived violation was revenge on the perpetrator, as one would find in European chivalric culture, and not on the woman herself as you find in the Arab culture of honor killing.  Also, only her full brothers felt the need to respond this violently and deceitfully to the(ir) perception that their sister had been made into a whore. 

Purification and Monotheism

In Genesis 35, Jacob is scared of the locals and needs to start anew.  He gets a call from Yahweh to go back to BethEl and he admonishes his people to

“Put away the foreign gods that are among you, purify yourselves, and change your garments.  Then let us arise and go up to Bethel; and I will make an altar there to God, who answered me in the day of my distress and has been with me in the way which I have gone.”  So they gave Jacob all the foreign gods which were in their hands, and the earrings which were in their ears; and Jacob hid them under the terebinth tree which was by Shechem.

At BethEl, Yahweh talks to him directly, re-naming him Israel and renewing the promises he had made to Abraham and Isaac before him.