Jacob Called Benjamin a Ravenous Wolf and Named Two Rulers to Come

The Strangest Blessing of the Twelve

Jacob was moving through his sons. He had delivered Reuben's accounting of lost crowns, had spoken of Simeon and Levi and the sword they had used too freely at Shechem. He had blessed Judah with the scepter and the lawgiver's staff. He had spoken to Zebulun and Issachar and Dan. Now he came to his youngest.

He called Benjamin a ravenous wolf. The full phrase in the Torah is plain and without softening: Benjamin is a ravenous wolf, in the morning he devours prey, in the evening he divides spoil. No tenderness. No note of the beloved youngest son. Just a predator, described in two time periods. The rabbis looked at this and heard a compressed prophecy about everything Benjamin's tribe would produce.

Saul in the Morning

The wolf that devours in the morning: that was Saul. The first king of Israel, born of the tribe of Benjamin, who rose to power when Israel was young and demanding its first king, who went out against the Philistines and the Amalekites, who fought the wars of a new nation finding its borders. Saul operated in the morning of the monarchic period, when everything was raw and first and the rules had not yet been written. He was fierce and consuming and he moved fast against enemies, which is what a wolf does in the morning when it is hungry and the land is open.

He also seized spoil. God had commanded him to destroy the Amalekites entirely, to take nothing. Saul returned with Agag the king and with the best of the livestock. He had devoured and then held back some of what he had devoured, and the tradition traces to that act the later license that Haman, a descendant of Agag, would have to threaten the entire Jewish people in Persia. The morning wolf's incomplete obedience would create the conditions for the evening wolf's work.

Esther in the Evening

The wolf that divides spoil in the evening: that was Esther. She came from the tribe of Benjamin. She entered Ahasuerus's court as an orphan raised by her cousin Mordecai, married into the most powerful position in the Persian empire without revealing her identity, and waited. When the decree came from Haman, that man of Agag's line, the one Saul had failed to destroy, Esther moved.

She divided the spoil. The property of Haman's household was given to Mordecai. The offices he had held were redistributed. The power he had accumulated and wielded for annihilation was reversed and assigned to his enemies. Esther, in the evening of Israel's Second Temple era, completed the task the morning wolf had left undone. She divided what Saul had failed to divide correctly. The evening, in the rabbinic reading, is not a lesser time than the morning. It is the time when the morning's incomplete work is finished.

The Temple on His Land

Saul and Esther were the explicit prophecies in Jacob's blessing. But the tradition found a third: the Temple. The sanctuary that stood in Jerusalem was built on the border between the land of Judah and the land of Benjamin, with the altar itself falling within Benjamin's territory. The rabbis asked why the youngest and most unlikely tribe received this particular honor.

Benjamin had been the only brother present at Jacob's deathbed who had never wronged Joseph. He had been in the house of study while his brothers went to the fields. He had been too young to participate in the sale. He had been struck on the shoulder on the road to Egypt and had answered once, precisely, and then gone silent. Of all the sons of Jacob, he was the one whose hands were clean. The tradition says the Shekinah rested on his land because his land was the only land it could rest on without complication.