What does the name Israel mean?

Given twice

Jacob receives the name twice. The first time is at dawn by the river Jabbok, from the stranger he has wrestled all night (who that was is a question of its own).

He said, “Your name will no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have fought with God and with men, and have prevailed.”

The second time God himself gives it, at Bethel, with no wrestling at all.

God said to him, “Your name is Jacob. Your name shall not be Jacob any more, but your name will be Israel.” He named him Israel.

The new name answers the old one. Jacob comes from the Hebrew for heel: he was born gripping Esau’s (25:26), and Esau later turned it into an accusation, “Isn’t he rightly named Jacob? For he has supplanted me these two times” (27:36). The heel-grabber who won by tricks becomes the man who strives with God and holds on.

What the Hebrew says

Yisra’el has two parts. El is the old Semitic word for God. Yisra comes from a rare verb, sarah, to strive or persist. Genesis uses it in the explanation, sarita, “you have fought,” and Hosea uses it again: “in his manhood he contended with God” (Hosea 12:3).

The grammar holds a twist. In Hebrew names built this way, God is usually the one acting. Ishmael means “God hears,” because “Yahweh has heard your affliction” (Genesis 16:11). By that pattern Israel would first have meant “God strives,” “God persists” or, as some scholars argue, “God rules.” Genesis reads it the other way around, with Jacob as the one who strives. Both senses live in the name.

Other old explanations

• Prince with God. The King James Version heard sar, prince: “for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed” (Genesis 32:28, King James Version, 1611).
• Upright of God. Some link it to yashar, upright, and to Jeshurun, a poetic name for Israel in Deuteronomy 33:5 and Isaiah 44:2.
• The man who sees God. Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish writer of the first century, explained Israel as a man who sees God, a reading that suits Peniel, the place where Jacob saw God face to face (On the Change of Names 81).

From a man to a people

Unlike Abraham, Jacob keeps both names. God still calls out “Jacob, Jacob!” to him in a vision of the night (46:2), and the Bible goes on using the two side by side (compare Abram’s new name). The altar he builds at Shechem already carries the new name: El Elohe Israel, “God, the God of Israel” (33:20). His descendants are the bene Yisra’el, the children of Israel, as Exodus calls them from its first verse.

Outside the Bible, the oldest mention of Israel is on a victory stele of Pharaoh Merneptah, about 1208 BC, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which lists Israel among peoples defeated in Canaan. After Solomon the name passed to the northern kingdom, while the south became Judah. The Mesha Stele of about 840 BC, now in the Louvre, names Omri as king of Israel. Assyria ended that kingdom in the 720s BC. On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion read the declaration founding a new state in Tel Aviv, and it took the patriarch’s name.