What does the name Jacob mean?

Born holding a heel

Genesis names the twins in the delivery room. The first boy comes out red and hairy, and they call him Esau. The second comes right behind him and will not let go.

After that, his brother came out, and his hand had hold on Esau’s heel. He was named Jacob.

The Hebrew name is Ya’aqov. Its root is ’aqev, heel, so the plainest sense is “he grabs the heel,” or “heel-holder.” Genesis likes names that work as captions. Esau gets a second one, Edom, “red,” from the stew he gulps down (25:30), and the reader is meant to hear the story inside every name. Centuries later the prophet Hosea could still sum up the birth in half a line:

In the womb he took his brother by the heel

From heel to cheat

A heel is also where you trip a man. From the same root Hebrew has a verb that means to come up from behind, to trip, to overreach. English has a close match: supplant comes from the Latin supplantare, to bring someone down by the sole of the foot. So when Jacob takes the blessing too, Esau turns the name into a charge: “Isn’t he rightly named Jacob? For he has supplanted me these two times” (Genesis 27:36).

The prophet Jeremiah plays on the same word to paint a town where nobody can be trusted. In Hebrew, his verb for supplanting is spelled exactly like the name.

don’t trust in any brother; for every brother will utterly supplant

The root can also mean crooked. “The heart is deceitful above all things,” says Jeremiah 17:9, and his word for deceitful is ’aqov. So does Jacob mean deceiver? Not by itself. Its first meaning is the heel. The cheat is what Esau, and later Jeremiah, heard in it.

What the name may have meant first

Many scholars think Ya’aqov began as a short form of a longer name, Ya’aqov-El, with God, El, as the one acting. Names built this way are known in the region in the second millennium BC. In that older sense the verb means to follow close behind, the way a guard walks at your heels, and the name is a small prayer: “may God protect.” Genesis tells a less flattering story about the sound of the word.

It does not leave him there. At the Jabbok he is renamed Israel (what that name means), yet the Bible never drops the old name. God introduces himself to Moses as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exodus 3:6), and a psalm sings, “The God of Jacob is our refuge” (Psalm 46:7). The heel-grabber’s name ends up in God’s own title.

James, Santiago and Yaakov

• Hebrew and Arabic. Modern Hebrew says Yaakov. The Quran calls the patriarch Ya’qub.
• Greek. The Septuagint writes Iakob for the patriarch, and the New Testament gives the same name, as Iakobos, to two apostles and to James, the brother of Jesus.
• James. Latin Iacobus also took the form Iacomus, and that became English James. Every James in the New Testament is a Jacob in Greek. Jacobean, for the age of King James I, and Jacobite, for the supporters of James II, keep the older Latin form.
• Santiago. Spanish Sant Iago, Saint James, gave its name to Santiago de Compostela and to many cities of Latin America.
• Jacob itself. In the United States it was the most popular name for baby boys every year from 1999 to 2012, by Social Security records.