The main extant part, Fragment A, is preserved in Origen's 'Commentary on the Gospel of John, II.31(25).186-192 along with the title. Fragment B, a single sentence, has been found in the Praeparatio Evangelica, Book VI, of Eusebius; in the Commentary on Genesis of Procopius of Gaza; and in an anthology of the writings of Origen compiled by Saint Basil the Great and Saint Gregory Nazianzus usually named Philokalia. Fragment C, also found in Philokalia, paraphrases the other fragments.
Fragment B is only one line, where Jacob says:
.."For I read in the tablets of heaven all things that shall happen to you and to your sons"
Fragment A begins as follows:
Thus Jacob says: "I, Jacob, who speak to you, I am also Israel, I am an angel of God, a ruling spirit (pneuma archikon).
"Abraham and Isaac were created before any/every work (of God); I am Jacob, called Jacob by men, (but) my name is Israel, called Israel by God, a man seeing God, because I am the first-born (πρωτογενός, prōtogonos) of every creature which God caused to live."
The last part aligns with Exodus 4:22, “Israel is my firstborn son” (πρωτότοκός μου Ισραηλ (prōtotokos) in the Septuagint),* where it's widely considered that Israel refers to the people of Israel.
* (cf. 4 Ezra 6:58; Sir 36:17; Pss.Sol 18:4)
There's also an alignment / parallel with Paul's Epistle to the Colossians 1:15-16
He [Jesus] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn (prōtotokos) of all creation ... all things have been created through him and for him
"a man seeing God" is not found in any ancient Hebrew text, yet it is found in Philo's writings and in Greek hellenistic texts. Thoigh here it may reflect an independent play on/of words here in this 'prayer' (and, if originally in Aramaic or Hebrew, a play in that original language).
Note also it states that Abraham and Isaac were created before anything else.
Th last half (or so) of Fragment A:
"When I was coming from Mesopotamia of Syria, Uriel, the angel of God, came forth, and said, I have come down to the earth and made my dwelling among men, and I am called Jacob by name. He was angry with me and fought with me and wrestled against me, saying that his name and the name of Him who is before every angel should be before my name. And I told him his name and how great he was among the sons of God; 'Are you not Uriel my eighth, and I am Israel and archangel of the power of the Lord and a chief captain (archichiliarchos) among the sons of God? Am not I Israel, the first minister in the sight of God, and I invoked my God by the inextinguishable name?' "
This channels Genesis 32:24-32 with the unnamed angel of the Genesis passage name Uriel in the Prayer of Joseph. In Genesis 32:28, the man-angel changed Jacob's name, saying, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”
In the Prayer of Joseph they both have higher status than in Genesis 32: they're both archangels. Uriel appears in 1 Enoch 72–82 and guides Enoch in several other heavenly journeys (1 Enoch 19:1; 21:5, 9; 27:2; 33:3-4). 1 Enoch 20:2 identifies him as one of the angels ruling over Tartarus.
Moreover, Peter Schäfer has noted:
The conflict between the angel Jacob/Israel and Uriel brings to mind Enoch entering the celestial hierarchy as the highest angel Metatron, and the opposition to this from established angels in the Third Book of Enoch, but that is not all. The distinctive feature of this short fragment consists above all in the fact that the angel Jacob/Israel is not only a particularly high angel but [as noted above] also that he claims to be the firstborn in creation. His ancestors Abraham and Isaac are also pre-existent, or more precisely they were created before the creation of the world, but Jacob/Israel, the third patriarch in the biblical genealogy, is in reality the firstborn before all creation: “a supreme pre-existing spiritual being . . . , which takes human form in Jacob and becomes the tribal ancestor of the people of Israel” [Martin Hengel, The Son of God, p.48]. This is absolutely singular and lifts him up far above the common angel hierarchy ...
Because Jacob is also Israel and as such provides his services in heaven, it is to be expected that a concrete relationship to creation and especially Israel was established in the lost portion of the text. When looking back at the early Jewish tradition, we can observe an obvious similarity to Daniel—Israel’s angel Michael as the “one like a human being” corresponds to the angel Israel as the highest heavenly authority next to God—as well as to the Son of Man in the Similitudes of the Ethiopic Enoch. The Son of Man, like the angel Israel, is a heavenly being created before the creation of the world.
And if we look ahead to the further course of tradition history, it is certainly not by chance that Jonathan Z Smith recognized also the Prayer of Joseph to be a Jewish predecessor to New Testament Christology: “.. it would appear that the Christians borrowed already existing Jewish terminology” [Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Prayer of Joseph,” in Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, ed. Jacob Neusner (Leiden: Brill, 1968), 272].
Two Gods in Heaven, p.60
Interestingly, Justin Martyr channels Genesis 32:25 and perhaps aspects of the Prayer of Joseph in Dialogue c Trypho 125 in which he elaborates on, “the force of the name Israel”, firstly via reference to the Parable of the Sower, “in the hope of finding good ground somewhere,” then says -
... Accordingly the name Israel signifies this, A man who overcomes power; for Isra is a man overcoming, and El is power. And that Christ would act so when He became man was foretold by the mystery of Jacob’s wrestling with Him who appeared to him, in that He ministered to the will of the Father, yet nevertheless is God, in that He is the first-begotten of all creatures. For when He became man, as I previously remarked, the devil came to Him—i.e., that power which is called the serpent and Satan—tempting Him, and striving to effect His downfall by asking Him to worship him. But He destroyed and overthrew the devil, having proved him to be wicked, in that he asked to be worshipped as God, contrary to the Scripture; who is an apostate from the will of God. For He answers him, ‘It is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shall thou serve.’2438 Then, overcome and convicted, the devil departed at that time. But since our Christ was to be numbed, ie. by pain and experience of suffering, He made a previous intimation of this by touching Jacob’s thigh, and causing it to shrink. But Israel was His name from the beginning, to which He altered the name of the blessed Jacob when He blessed him with His own name, proclaiming thereby that all who through Him have fled for refuge to the Father, constitute the blessed Israel. But you, having understood none of this, and not being prepared to understand, since you are the children of Jacob after the fleshly seed, expect that you shall be assuredly saved. But that you deceive yourselves in such matters, I have proved by many words. https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf01/anf0 ... .cxxv.html
"Israel was His name from the beginning, to which He altered the name of the blessed Jacob when He blessed him with His own name, proclaiming thereby that all who through Him have fled for refuge to the Father, constitute the blessed Israel" seems a bit murky (in English, at least) ...
The titles which 'Jacob' identifies himself as — 'ruling spirit', 'Angel of God', 'a man seeing God', 'the firstborn of every living thing’, 'Chief Captain among the sons of God', 'the First Minister in the sight of God' — are used (i) for Michael by the rabbinic literature, (ii) for the Logos by Philo, (iii) for Metatron by the Jewish mysticism, and even (iv) for Christ by early Christians [Gieschen, Charles A. (1998) Angelomorphic Christology. pp. 138–139].
Moreover, these titles relate the Prayer of Joseph with the early Merkabah tradition [Smith, J.Z. (1985). "Prayer of Joseph, a new Translation with Introduction". In Charlesworth, James (ed.). The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. Vol. 2.].
Bibliography
https://readingacts.com/2018/06/28/the- ... of-joseph/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_of_Joseph