‘And Jacob was left alone and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he did not prevail against him he touched the hollow of his thigh, and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was strained as he wrestled with him.'
Jacob was left alone with his thoughts. The approach of Esau lies heavily on his mind and he feels the future is very much in doubt, the future that was linked with the covenant of Yahweh. This is why he has come here alone. This is something that he must resolve.
Then he experiences a vivid and continual theophany that makes everything else relatively unimportant. Very little of the detail is actually provided. This is one of those times in Scripture when euphemisms are used to indicate something far deeper. Jacob describes it in terms of wrestling with a man all night but we are probably wrong to totally literalise the description. It signifies some awesome experience of the presence and might of God, possibly appearing, as to Abraham, in human form (see Genesis 18:2), or possibly appearing in some dream or vision of the night, an experience which we can never grasp or understand, possibly a combined physical and spiritual wrestling of awesome effect. Certainly he is aware that he is somehow wrestling with God and so powerful is the impact on his body that his thigh is put out of joint.
There can be little doubt that this wrestling is related to his seemingly doubtful future in the light of Esau's approach. It is the depth of his uncertainly and fear about the future that brings him to this point. He had had such hopes for the future, but now he is fearful that they will all fail. It is this that results in this pneumatic experience.
To picture it in terms of some strange man who arrives and wrestles with him whom he afterwards discovers to be God is to trivialise the whole scene. It is quite clear that Jacob knows from the start that he is dealing with God Himself. Thus it may be that we are to see it as some vivid dream which portrays a spiritual reality that is unfolding. Jacob is clearly a man who receives dreams and visions (Genesis 28:12; Genesis 31:3 with Genesis 31:10-11). Or it may be that God does appear physically in some unique way for some unique purpose. We remember how He so appeared to Abraham (Genesis 18:2). We can never finally know. What we can know is that God came with an offer to Jacob that demanded extreme effort and sacrifice and that Jacob finally prevailed.
“When He saw that he did not prevail against him.” The first ‘He' is God. This can hardly be in the wrestling. No one would suggest that God could not defeat Jacob. The point was that though Jacob could not defeat God he clung to Him and would not himself accept defeat. God could not, as it were, escape because Jacob was so desperate. He was clinging to God.
“He touched the hollow of his thigh.” That is, God touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh. The touch need not have been physical. It simply means that God disabled him to further bring home to him his weakness.