Genesis 35:10 Daily Devotional & Meaning – Thy Name Shall Be Called Israel
Daily Verses Everyday! Day 227
“And God said unto him, Thy name is Jacob: thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name: and he called his name Israel.”
There is something deeply significant about God repeating here what had already been declared to Jacob at Peniel. Genesis 32:28 records, “And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.” God had already given Jacob the name Israel, yet here at Bethel God says it again: “Thy name is Jacob: thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name.” God was not giving Jacob information he had never heard before. He was reaffirming an identity that had already been given to him. That matters because sometimes God tells us something once, and then in His mercy He reminds us of it again. Jacob had already been named Israel, but he had not always lived as though he understood what that name meant. So God repeated it. The repetition was not unnecessary. It was confirmation.
Jacob had spent most of his life living under a name that described so much of his character. Genesis 25:26 tells us that when Jacob was born, “his hand took hold on Esau's heel; and his name was called Jacob.” Even from birth, the name became associated with grasping, struggling, and seeking advantage. Jacob’s life repeatedly reflected that pattern. He obtained Esau’s birthright in Genesis 25. He deceived Isaac in Genesis 27. When Esau discovered what had happened, he said in Genesis 27:36, “Is not he rightly named Jacob? for he hath supplanted me these two times.” Esau himself connected Jacob’s name with Jacob’s behavior. The man had lived up to the reputation carried in his name.
Yet God had something greater for Jacob than allowing the failures of his past to become the permanent definition of his future.
That does not mean God pretended Jacob had never been Jacob. Notice how the verse begins: “Thy name is Jacob.” God acknowledged who he had been. He did not erase the history. He did not rewrite Jacob’s past as though the deception, manipulation, fear, and failures had never happened. Jacob was Jacob. His history was real. The consequences of some of his actions were real. The wounds within his family were real. But God was not going to allow Jacob’s old identity to have the final word.
“Israel shall be thy name.”
There is tremendous grace in that.
God is able to look directly at what a person has been and still declare what He intends that person to become.
We saw something similar when God dealt with Abram. Genesis 17:5 says, “Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee.” Abram became Abraham because God was attaching his identity to the covenant promise. His new name spoke of what God was going to accomplish through him. Later in Genesis 17:15 God said concerning Sarai, “As for Sarai thy wife, thou shalt not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall her name be.” Again, God exercised His authority by naming according to His purpose.
Now God does the same with Jacob.
Jacob did not choose the name Israel for himself. God gave it to him.
That distinction matters because identity in Scripture ultimately belongs under the authority of the One who created us. We live in a world that constantly encourages people to define themselves entirely according to their own desires, achievements, failures, relationships, occupations, possessions, or experiences. Scripture points us toward something far greater. Our deepest identity is not something we manufacture; it is something understood in relation to the God who made us.
Isaiah 43:1 says, “Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.” Those words were originally spoken concerning Israel, the nation that would descend from this very man. The connection is beautiful. Jacob receives the name Israel from God, and generations later God speaks to Israel and says, “I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.”
The One who names has authority over the one who is named.
That principle appears from the beginning of Scripture. Genesis 1 repeatedly shows God naming elements of creation. Genesis 1:5 says, “And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.” Genesis 1:8 says, “And God called the firmament Heaven.” Genesis 1:10 says, “And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas.” Naming is not incidental. It demonstrates authority and establishes identity.
When Adam named the animals in Genesis 2, it was connected to the dominion God had given mankind over creation. When God Himself renames someone, therefore, we should recognize the seriousness of what is happening. God is asserting His authority over that person’s life and attaching that person to His purposes.
Jacob had spent much of his life trying to determine his own future.
He grasped Esau’s heel.
He negotiated for the birthright.
He participated in the deception of Isaac.
He attempted to manipulate the breeding of the flocks while serving Laban.
He divided his family into groups when he feared Esau.
Again and again Jacob tried to secure outcomes through his own intelligence, planning, maneuvering, and effort.
Then at Peniel, God brought Jacob to a place where all of that grasping finally collided with the sovereignty of God.
Genesis 32:24 says, “And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.” Jacob had spent a lifetime wrestling with people and circumstances, but finally he found himself wrestling with God. Genesis 32:25 says, “And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh.” Jacob’s strength could not prevail. God did not need to overpower Jacob through a long contest of equal strength. One touch was enough.
Jacob left that encounter limping.
But he also left with a new name.
That is important. The old Jacob was associated with grasping in his own strength. Israel would be a man whose very walk reminded him that his strength was insufficient apart from God. Every step Jacob took after Peniel could remind him that the blessing of God was not something he had seized through human cleverness. His life was dependent upon grace.
Yet even after Peniel, Genesis continues to call him Jacob at various points. Even after Genesis 35:10, Scripture will continue using both names. That helps us understand that the statement “thy name shall not be called any more Jacob” does not mean the word Jacob would literally never again be spoken. The text itself proves otherwise. Rather, God was establishing Israel as his covenant name and reaffirming the identity and calling attached to it.
This is different from Abraham, whose former name Abram almost completely disappears once God renames him. With Jacob, Scripture moves back and forth between Jacob and Israel. Sometimes the choice appears particularly meaningful. The old name remains visible beside the new one, almost like a reminder that the man God was using still carried the history from which God had called him.
There is something profoundly encouraging about that.
God did not need Jacob to erase his entire past before He could use him.
God transformed him in the middle of a real history.
Jacob had deceived.
Jacob had feared.
Jacob had schemed.
Jacob had failed.
Yet God said, “Israel shall be thy name.”
The new name did not make the old history disappear, but the old history could no longer determine the limits of what God would do.
That principle reaches far beyond Jacob.
Second Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” Salvation does not mean that our earthly history suddenly ceases to have happened. The consequences of former choices may remain. Memories remain. Scars remain. Other people may remember what we once were. Yet in Christ, the believer receives an identity that cannot be reduced to his former sins.
Paul told the Corinthians exactly that.
First Corinthians 6:9-10 lists a variety of sinful identities and practices, but verse 11 says, “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.”
“And such were some of you.”
Were.
There is enormous power in that word.
The past was real, but it was no longer the controlling identity of those whom Christ had redeemed.
That is similar to what we see here with Jacob. God does not say that Jacob had never been Jacob. He says, in effect, that Jacob will not be the final definition of the man standing before Him.
“Israel shall be thy name.”
There is also something striking about when God repeats this declaration. Jacob had recently gone through one of the ugliest episodes in his family’s history. Genesis 34 contains the violation of Dinah, the deceit of Simeon and Levi, and the slaughter of the men of Shechem. Jacob’s household had been surrounded by spiritual compromise as well, which is why Genesis 35:2 records Jacob saying, “Put away the strange gods that are among you, and be clean, and change your garments.”
Then Jacob obeyed God and returned to Bethel.
He built the altar.
He worshipped.
And God appeared again.
Now God says, “Israel shall be thy name.”
What mercy there is in the timing.
Jacob had just emerged from a chapter in which his family looked anything but like the covenant family through which God would bless the nations. If we had only Genesis 34, we might wonder how this household could possibly become the nation through which God would fulfill His promises. There was violence, deception, idolatry, and disorder.
Yet Genesis 35 shows God restoring order.
Put away the strange gods.
Be clean.
Go to Bethel.
Build the altar.
Remember who I am.
And now: remember who you are.
“Israel shall be thy name.”
God was reaffirming His purpose after a season of terrible failure.
That does not mean the events of Genesis 34 did not matter. God never treats sin lightly. Simeon and Levi’s violence would have consequences that Jacob himself would address near the end of his life in Genesis 49:5-7. Grace does not mean that sin becomes unimportant. Grace means that sin does not possess greater power than the purposes of God.
This is a distinction we desperately need to understand. When we fail, there are two opposite errors we can make. One is minimizing the failure and acting as though it does not matter. The other is allowing the failure to become our entire identity. Scripture permits neither.
Sin matters.
Repentance matters.
Consequences matter.
But God is greater.
Jacob was not permitted to remain comfortable with the strange gods in his household. They had to go. He was commanded to return to Bethel. Yet after Jacob returned, God did not stand before him merely repeating every failure he had ever committed.
He repeated the name.
Israel.
That is the grace of God.
God corrects His people without surrendering His purposes for them.
Hebrews 12:6 says, “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.” Divine correction is not evidence that God has abandoned His people. Often it is evidence of exactly the opposite. God corrects because He is committed to making His people what He has called them to be.
Jacob’s life demonstrates that transformation is often a process. God had already renamed him in Genesis 32, yet Genesis 35 repeats it. Jacob had received the new name, but he still needed to be reminded of it.
How often is that true of us?
We can know what Scripture says and still need Scripture to say it to us again.
We know God is sovereign, yet fear causes us to forget.
We know God is faithful, yet uncertainty causes us to question.
We know we have been forgiven in Christ, yet guilt can cause us to live as though our sins remain over our heads.
We know our lives belong to God, yet we can drift back toward living for ourselves.
We know that Christ has called us to holiness, yet the old patterns remain tempting.
Therefore God, in His mercy, reminds us.
Peter understood the importance of repetition. He wrote in Second Peter 1:12, “Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established in the present truth.” Peter knew his readers already understood the truths he was teaching. His response was not, “Then there is no reason to say them again.” He said he would keep reminding them.
Sometimes the truths we know best are the truths we most desperately need to hear again.
Jacob knew God had named him Israel.
God said it again anyway.
Perhaps Jacob needed to hear that after everything that had happened.
Perhaps he needed to stand at Bethel and hear the voice of God declare that Peniel had not been forgotten. The name God gave him in the darkness beside the river still stood in the daylight at Bethel.
God had not changed His mind.
That speaks powerfully to the faithfulness of God.
Human beings can say things emotionally and later withdraw them. We can make commitments and fail to keep them. We can speak highly of someone one day and condemn them the next. God is not unstable like us.
Numbers 23:19 says, “God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?”
God named Jacob Israel at Peniel.
At Bethel, God confirmed it.
What God had declared still stood.
This also connects directly to God’s covenant faithfulness toward Abraham and Isaac. The renaming of Jacob was not merely a personal encouragement. The name Israel would become the name of an entire people. Jacob’s twelve sons would become the foundation of the twelve tribes of Israel. Throughout the remainder of Scripture, the name God speaks here will appear again and again.
Israel will go down into Egypt.
Israel will multiply there.
Israel will be enslaved.
Israel will cry unto God.
Israel will be delivered through Moses.
Israel will cross the Red Sea.
Israel will receive the Law at Sinai.
Israel will enter the promised land.
Israel will establish a kingdom.
From Israel will come David.
And from the line of David will ultimately come Jesus Christ.
When God said, “Israel shall be thy name,” He was saying something whose implications extended far beyond Jacob’s individual lifetime.
Jacob could not possibly understand everything that name would eventually represent.
That should remind us that when God works in a person’s life, His purposes are often far larger than that person can see.
Jacob might have heard “Israel” and remembered Peniel.
God knew Israel would become a nation.
Jacob saw his household.
God saw generations.
Jacob saw sons.
God saw tribes.
Jacob saw the land around Bethel.
God saw the unfolding history of redemption.
This is one of the reasons we must be careful not to judge God’s work only according to what is immediately visible. God told Abraham in Genesis 12:3, “in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” Abraham never lived to see the full fulfillment of that promise. Jacob would not live to see everything connected to the name Israel. Yet God’s promises are not limited by the lifespan of the person who first receives them.
Galatians 3:16 points us ultimately toward Christ when it says, “Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made,” and then identifies that ultimate Seed as Christ. The covenant story passing through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was moving toward something far greater than any one patriarch could fully comprehend.
So when God says, “Israel shall be thy name,” we should hear far more than a simple change in vocabulary.
We are watching God identify the man through whom the covenant family will take its enduring name.
The deceiver becomes Israel.
The heel-grabber becomes the patriarch whose name will be carried by a nation.
The man who once fled from the promised land becomes the father of the tribes that will inherit it.
Only God can write a story like that.
And perhaps one of the most important lessons for us is that God’s calling is greater than the labels produced by our failures.
People may remember Jacob.
God says Israel.
Others may know the worst chapter of our lives.
God knows the entire story He is writing.
That does not mean we get to invent grand identities for ourselves or ignore accountability. Jacob did not walk around one day and decide that he deserved a more impressive name. God named him. The foundation of biblical identity is not self-exaltation; it is submission to what God has spoken.
For Christians, that identity is centered in Christ.
Galatians 2:20 says, “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” Paul understood that belonging to Christ fundamentally changed the center of his existence.
First Peter 2:9 says of believers, “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people.” Then Peter explains the purpose: “that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.”
Our new identity is never given merely so that we can feel important.
It is given so that our lives might belong to God.
Israel’s name was connected to God’s covenant purpose.
The Christian’s identity is connected to Christ’s glory.
That means we must resist the temptation to continue defining ourselves exclusively by what God has called us out of. If Christ has forgiven us, we should not celebrate our former sin, but neither should we allow Satan to convince us that our former sin possesses more authority over our identity than the blood of Christ.
Romans 8:1 says, “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus.”
That does not say there was never guilt.
It says there is now no condemnation in Christ.
The gospel does not deny what we were.
It declares what Christ has done.
Jacob was Jacob.
God knew it better than anyone.
Yet God said, “Israel shall be thy name.”
And then the verse ends with this beautiful statement: “and he called his name Israel.”
God Himself confirmed the name.
Jacob did not have to earn it again after Peniel.
God reaffirmed it.
The covenant identity stood because God had spoken it.
There is a tremendous security in anything that rests ultimately upon the word of God rather than the unstable opinions of men. Human beings may misunderstand us. They may remember us according to an old season. They may refuse to believe that God has changed us. They may define us by a failure long after repentance has taken place.
But the opinion that ultimately matters is God’s.
Paul asked in Romans 8:33, “Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It is God that justifieth.”
If God has justified, who has authority to overturn His verdict?
Jacob’s name had been spoken by God.
That was enough.
Yet we should also remember that receiving a new identity creates a responsibility to live consistently with it. Jacob was called Israel, and Israel would now be expected to live as one who belonged to God. Grace does not simply tell us who we are; grace calls us to live differently because of who we are.
Ephesians 4:22-24 tells believers, “That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.”
There is an old way to put off and a new way to put on.
Jacob had a new name.
Now he needed to continue learning how to live as Israel.
That process would not be completed overnight. Even after this verse, Jacob would still experience fear, grief, favoritism, and weakness. Scripture does not suddenly present him as a flawless man. Transformation is not the same as instant perfection.
But God had established the direction.
Jacob's failures were no longer the only story being told.
The story was now about what God was making of him.
That gives me hope because the Christian life is also a process of being conformed to what God has declared us to be in Christ. Romans 8:29 says that believers are “predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son.” God is not content merely to forgive us and then leave us exactly as we were. He intends to transform us.
Philippians 1:6 gives us confidence in that process: “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ.”
God had begun a work in Jacob long before Genesis 35.
He was still performing it.
Bethel had not been the end.
Padanaram had not been the end.
Peniel had not been the end.
Even the name Israel was not the completion of the process.
God was still working.
That is why I find the repetition in this verse so meaningful. God does not merely remind Jacob of his name; He reminds Jacob that the work begun at Peniel still stands. The limp remained. The name remained. The covenant remained. The calling remained. God remained.
We often need the same kind of reminder.
When we fall into old patterns, we need to remember who we belong to.
When guilt pulls us backward, we need to remember what Christ has done.
When fear convinces us that nothing has changed, we need to remember that God is still working.
When we are tempted to define ourselves according to our worst moments, we need to remember that God is the One with final authority over His redeemed people.
Jacob may have heard people call him Jacob for the rest of his life.
Scripture itself would continue calling him Jacob.
But God had spoken another name over him.
Israel.
A name connected to struggle.
A name connected to grace.
A name connected to covenant.
A name connected to an entire future Jacob could not yet see.
And behind that name stood the God who had chosen him before he was born, met him while he fled, protected him in a foreign land, brought him home, wrestled with him, humbled him, blessed him, and now reminded him once again that his past would not have the final word.
“Thy name is Jacob.”
God knew exactly who he had been.
“But Israel shall be thy name.”
God also knew exactly what He was doing with him.
That is the difference grace makes.
God does not have to deny our past to redeem our future. He can take a Jacob and make him Israel. He can take a frightened fugitive and make him the father of a nation. He can take a man known for grasping and deception and place him directly into the covenant line through which the Savior of the world would eventually come.
The glory of that transformation does not belong to Jacob.
It belongs entirely to God.
And perhaps that is the greatest lesson of the verse. When God changes a person, the new life becomes evidence not of how great that person is, but of how powerful the grace of God is. Jacob could never stand at Bethel and boast in his own transformation. His entire journey testified that if God had not been with him, he would have been nothing.
But God had been with him.
God had changed him.
God had named him.
And now God said it again:
“Israel shall be thy name.”
If you would like to explore Genesis in a sustained, verse-by-verse way with space to reflect, journal, and trace how these foundational truths unfold through Scripture the Verse by Verse book expands these reflections into a unified reading experience. The book gathers these meditations into a structured journey through Genesis, designed to help readers linger in the text and engage God’s Word more deeply over time.
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