drove us to himself. In Jacob’s case it took God twenty years to bring Jacob to this point of surrender on the border of the promised land; the Lord is not in any hurry, crucial as the transaction is. But when his time comes the transformation is complete: it is a transition from death to life, from self-help to faith in the God who cripples Jacob in order to bless him. In the Old Testament Jacob/Israel, the individual, came to stand for the people of God, called by that name. In the same way as