When business gets brutal | The Jacob principle

When business gets brutal | The Jacob principle
This lesson discusses the strategy Jacob employed when dealing with the broken business contracts of his father-in-law. To say the least, the personal and business relationship between our patriarch Jacob and his father-in-law Laban can be viewed as the biblical version of the odd couple. Our father Jacob was the paragon of truth and was an individual immersed in spirituality.

Jacob is the third patriarch of the Jewish people, son of Isaac and Rebecca, and grandson of Abraham, whose story is told in the book of Genesis (25:19 to the end of the book). On the critical view, the Jacob saga in Genesis is an amalgam of various sources and traditions. For all that, most critics believe that there is a core of historical fact to all the traditions; only a very few accept the notion that Jacob and the other two patriarchs are fictitious persons. From the point of view of the Jewish tradition, it is not, in any event, the historical Jacob who matters most but Jacob as he appears in Genesis as the progenitor of the twelve tribes constituting the “children of Israel.” In the Genesis narrative, Jacob, Yaakov in Hebrew, is so called because at his birth he seized hold of the heel (akev) of his twin brother, Esau (Genesis 25:25), while the name Israel was given to him by the angel with whom he wrestled (Genesis 32: 25-33).