Jacob  ·  Yaqub

Jacob in Islam

Jacob is Yaqub in Arabic, written يَعْقُوب. The two names belong to the same person, and the two traditions tell his story differently enough to be worth reading side by side.

English
Jacob
Arabic
يَعْقُوب
Read as
Yaqub
Status
Prophet in Islam
Where the English comes from
Hebrew Yaakov, read as heel-holder or supplanter.
What the Arabic carries
Yaqub, the Quranic form of the same name; also called Israil.
Full name page
Yaqub on AsrNaam

Is Jacob the same as Yaqub? Yes. Jacob is the English form and Yaqub the Arabic form of one name. He is the father of Yusuf and the Israil whose descendants the Quran calls Bani Israil.

Yaqub in the Quran

Yaqub is the son of Ishaq, the grandson of Ibrahim, and the father of Yusuf. The Quran gives him a second name, Israil, and the children of Israil who appear throughout the book are his descendants, which makes his name one of the most structurally important in the Quran.

His own story is told mostly through his grief. He knows from the start that the dream must be kept from the brothers. He does not believe the shirt or the wolf. He says that beautiful patience is what remains to him, and he goes blind from weeping, and he never stops telling his sons not to despair of the mercy of God.

The sight returns when the shirt is laid on his face. It is the only miracle in the chapter, and it is given to the father rather than to the prophet who has been the subject of the story.

Using the name

The full entry for Yaqub carries the Arabic spelling, the Urdu, the pronunciation, the lucky number and the letter-by-letter Ilm ul Huroof reading, along with every romanisation the name is written in.

Open the full Yaqub page →

Questions about Jacob and Yaqub

Is Jacob the same name as Yaqub?
Jacob is the English form and Yaqub is the Arabic form of the same name. They refer to the same figure.
Is Yaqub the same as Jacob?
Yes. Yaqub is the Arabic form of the Hebrew Yaakov, father of Yusuf and grandson of Ibrahim.
Why is Yaqub also called Israil?
The Quran gives Israil as his second name, and the phrase Bani Israil, the children of Israil, refers to his descendants.
Can a Muslim family use the name Yaqub?
Yes. Yaqub is used as a given name across the Muslim world. AsrNaam carries its full page with the Arabic spelling, the pronunciation, the lucky number and the letter-by-letter Ilm ul Huroof reading.

Other names the two traditions share

Every one of these is one figure under two names.

Jesus and IsaMoses and MusaMary and MaryamAbraham and IbrahimJoseph and YusufDavid and DawudSolomon and SulaymanNoah and NuhJohn and YahyaJonah and YunusJob and AyyubAaron and HarunIsaac and IshaqIshmael and Ismail

Or start from the full list of Biblical names in Islam.

The letters of Yaqub

Ilm ul Huroof reads a name through the Arabic letters it is written with. Each carries a traditional numeric value and a principle. Yaqub is written يعقوب, and reads as follows.

ي10the hand and the bondع70the eye, the spring of waterق100strength and standingو6joining, the link betweenب2the house, the vessel that contains

The values total 188, which reduces to 8. This is a reading of the name's written structure in the letter-science tradition, not a claim about anyone who carries it.

How one name became two

Jacob and Yaqub are not translations of each other. They are two descendants of the same Semitic word. The Hebrew is יַעֲקֹב (Yaakov), meaning one who follows at the heel. Hebrew and Arabic are sister languages built on shared three-letter roots, so the name passed into Arabic as Yaqub with its consonants largely intact. It reached English by the longer road: Hebrew into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into English, each language reshaping the sounds it could not make. That is why Jacob and Yaqub look unrelated on the page and are the same name underneath.

The same name, other languages

James, Jaime, Giacomo, Yaakov, Yakup, Yaqub, Yacoub.