Still hedging, even now. Jacob has wrestled God and been renamed, but old habits die hard: seeing Esau and his four hundred men, he arranges his family by how much he can bear to lose — the maidservants and their children in front, Leah's children next, and Rachel and Joseph last, in the safest place. It is a father's love, and also the first open sign of the favoritism that will one day tear this family apart (ch. 37). Then Jacob goes out ahead of them all and bows to the ground seven times — the man whom the stolen blessing had made lord, "let your brothers bow down to you" (27:29), now on his face before the brother he cheated.

Grace outran fear. And the whole twenty years of dread dissolve in a single verse: "Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him; and they wept." This is the same Esau who had said in his heart, "I will kill my brother Jacob" (27:41) — and here he runs, and falls on his neck, and weeps. The scene is so complete a picture of forgiveness that Jesus will reach for its very words to paint the father of the prodigal, who "ran and fell on his neck and kissed him" (Luke 15:20). Whatever Jacob deserved, what met him was mercy.

The face of God, again. Esau waves off the enormous gift — "I have plenty (rav), my brother; keep what is yours" — but Jacob insists, and his reason reaches back to the night just past: "for I have seen your face as one sees the face of God, and you have received me favorably" (v. 10). The night before he had named a place Peniel, "I have seen God face to face" (32:31); now, forgiven by the brother he wronged, he says looking on Esau's merciful face is like that. Reconciliation with the brother mirrors the wrestling with God — he has survived both faces, and lived.

Restoring the blessing. And notice what Jacob calls the gift: not minchah, "present," as before, but birkhati, "my blessing" — "take my blessing that is brought to you." It is no accident. The one thing Jacob ever truly stole from Esau was a blessing (27:36, "he has taken my blessing!"), and here, in the plainest language, he tries to hand a blessing back — a quiet act of restitution. He adds a line that quietly out-measures his brother: Esau has "plenty" (rav), but "I have everything" (kol, v. 11) — abundance against contentment. (The KJV renders both men's words "I have enough," blurring the point that Esau has much and Jacob has all.)

The peace that is real, and not a merger. Esau, warm and generous, wants to travel on together and even to leave an escort; Jacob gently declines twice over — the children are frail, the nursing flocks can't be driven hard — "let my lord go ahead, and I will come slowly… to Seir." But Jacob does not go to Seir. He turns the other way, to Succoth and Shechem, and the brothers will not meet again until they stand together at their father's grave (35:29). The old caution outlives the reconciliation: the embrace was true, the tears were true, and Jacob still keeps a careful distance from a brother he cannot quite trust. It is not entirely to his credit, and the text does not pretend otherwise — but it is, perhaps, its own kind of wisdom, two men who have made peace choosing to make it from a little way apart.

Booths, and a safe arrival. Jacob stops first at Succoth, and the place-name is its own footnote: he built booths (sukkot) for his cattle, and "therefore the place is named Succoth" — the same word that will name Israel's festival of Sukkot, "Booths." Then he crosses at last into Canaan and "came in peace (shalem) to the city of Shechem." The word shalem — whole, safe, at peace, the cousin of shalom — is the perfect close to the crossing: he went out a fugitive with a stone for a pillow and comes home whole. (The KJV heard shalem as a place-name, "to Shalem, a city of Shechem"; the plain sense is that he arrived safe and sound.)

An altar, in his new name. And Jacob does two things his grandfather did here first. He buys land — the parcel where his tent stood, for a hundred kesitah (an old unit of money; KJV "pieces of money") — only the second patch of the Promised Land any patriarch has owned, after the grave at Machpelah; and he does it at Shechem, the very spot where Abraham built his first altar in Canaan (12:6-7). Then he raises an altar of his own and names it El-Elohe-Israel, "El, the God of Israel" — using the new name the angel gave him, and claiming the God of Abraham and Isaac, at last, as his own God. The vow he made fleeing this land — "then Jehovah shall be my God" (28:21) — has quietly come true.