Genesis 32:30: A place named for a face, on the mound across the water from the last one

"So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, 'For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.'" He has named ground twice before on his own account and both times for what he was shown on it: Bethel for the house of God, Mahanaim for the camp of God. This is the third and the closest. Peniel — face of God — is a name given by a man who expected to be killed by what he had just met and was not. The naming is the second half of a night that also gave him a new name of his own, and the two are set against each other deliberately. He asks the name of the one he has been wrestling and is refused it; then he gives the ground a name of his own making, out of the refusal. Israel is what he is called from here; Peniel is what the place is called; and the one thing nobody in the chapter is told is the name that was asked for. The site is the eastern of the two mounds in the loop of the Jabbok, Tell edh-Dhahab esh-Sherqiyeh, with 641 of its 777 votes; the western mound, a few hundred yards off, is where the same sources put Mahanaim, and 136 votes want Peniel there instead. So the two nights of his life that changed everything were spent within sight of each other. The spelling shifts in the next verse — Penuel, as the sun comes up on him — and that is the form the town keeps: Gideon pulls its tower down in Judges 8, and Jeroboam rebuilds it in 1 Kings 12. The verse holds no movement, and the map draws none. He is limping when he leaves it.