The name Israel appears for the first time in this section of the Torah. Jacob is named after the mysterious being with whom he wrestled until dawn on his way back to the land of Canaan.
What Jacob did not know at the time is that this name, through his descendants, would become the emblem of a great nation that would endure through the centuries and millennia.
The name Israel was used from the most remote times in which the tribes settled in the Land under the leadership of Joshua, until the present times in which a completely secular movement such as Zionism, chose for the ancestral Land the same name that Jacob received on that distant night.
From the first man who was called Israel, constituting himself as a nation and eventually settling in a land, through the prophetic declarations and promises of blessings to come, to our times when a modern state exists in the world, with millions of people who identify with it, the name of Israel will remain throughout the ages, as a testimony to the God of Jacob.
