The third patriarch, and the one the nation is named for — born gripping his twin's HEEL (aqev), so called YA'AQOV, 'heel-holder,' a name that becomes a byword for the supplanter who trips and overreaches (25:26; 27:36). He buys Esau's birthright for stew, steals Esau's blessing with his mother's help, and flees to Laban in the old country — where he is out-tricked in turn (Leah for Rachel) and fathers eleven sons and a daughter over twenty hard years. Wrestling a stranger at the Jabbok, he is renamed ISRAEL, 'he strives with God' (32:28); his twelve sons become the twelve tribes. A flawed, grasping, unforgettable man whom God chooses anyway — 'the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob' — and whose story fills the rest of Genesis (chs. 25–50).