Meaning Hebrew "supplanter" (from the heel-grabbing at birth, Genesis 25:26) or "may God protect."
Figure Patriarch; renamed Israel after wrestling at the Jabbok (Genesis 32).
Traditions CATHOLICORTHODOXANGLICANPROTESTANT
In the Christian tradition
Jacob is the third patriarch, son of Isaac and Rebekah, whose renaming to Israel after the wrestling at the Jabbok (Genesis 32:28) gives the people of Israel their name. The English form James derives from the same name via Latin Iacobus and is the form used for the New Testament apostles.
The wrestling at the Jabbok in Genesis 32 is one of the principal renaming-after-encounter passages in the Hebrew Bible. Jacob, the heel-grabber whose name pointed toward supplantation, becomes Israel ("one who strives with God"), and the people who descend from him take this name. Christian tradition has read the passage as a model of prayer and struggle. The English name James (and its many variants: Iago, Jaime, Diego, Hamish, Seamus) all derive from the same Hebrew Yaakov through Greek Iakobos and Latin Iacobus; the apostle James in the New Testament carries this name. Modern Christian families use both Jacob (the Old Testament form, preserved in most Northern European languages) and James (the New Testament apostolic form) freely.