Genesis 32:2: Two camps: the one he is shown, and the one he makes the next morning

"And when Jacob saw them he said, 'This is God's camp!' So he called the name of that place Mahanaim." The name is a dual — two camps, not one — and the verse names it for a camp Jacob did not pitch. He has just left Laban at the heap of stones and is coming down out of the Gilead hills, and the angels of God meet him: the first and last time in Genesis that the phrase is used of a meeting on the road rather than at an altar or in a dream. He gives the ground a name on the strength of it and moves on. What makes the name work is what he does with it nineteen verses later. Word comes back that Esau is coming with four hundred men, and Jacob divides everything he has into two companies, so that if one is struck the other can escape. The place named for God's two camps is the place he makes two camps of his own out of fear. The text does not comment; it does not have to. The ground is real and well attested. 552 of Mahanaim's 737 votes go to Tell edh-Dhahab el-Gharbi, the western of two mounds that stand a few hundred yards apart in a loop of the Jabbok — the eastern one, at 641 votes, is where the same sources put Penuel, which is where Jacob spends the following night. Two hills, two nights, two names, and the whole of the rest of his life decided between them. Mahanaim outlives the story. It is a Levitical town in Joshua, Ish-bosheth's capital for two years in 2 Samuel, and the town David runs to when Absalom takes Jerusalem.