Each One Thought His Plan Was Cleverer

There is a pattern to the schemes of Israel's enemies, and the rabbis noticed it long before historians did. Each tyrant studies the one before him, finds the flaw, and announces that he has solved the problem. Each one is wrong in exactly the same way.

Rabbi Levi laid it out plainly in Esther Rabbah, a collection of rabbinic commentary compiled in the early medieval period: accursed are the wicked who counsel against Israel, for each one believes his counsel is better than the last.

Esau was the first to make the mistake. He watched Cain murder Abel and called it foolishness. Cain killed his brother during their father's lifetime, not understanding that Adam would simply have more children. "I will not be so stupid," Esau said. "Let the days of mourning for my father come, and then I will kill my brother Jacob" (Genesis 27:41). He would wait until there were no more heirs to be born. He had solved the problem.

He had not solved anything. He was still thinking like a man who believes killing one person can end a people.

Pharaoh saw through Esau's error immediately. Esau had waited for the wrong reason. The real danger was reproduction, not inheritance. "If you kill the father after the sons are already born, you have accomplished nothing," Pharaoh reasoned. Kill them at birth. Kill them before they can produce more. "Every son who is born, cast him into the Nile" (Exodus 1:22). Pharaoh had improved on Esau's plan. He was targeting the next generation before it could exist.

But Haman looked at Pharaoh and shook his head. The Nile decree was still thinking too small. "Pharaoh was a fool," Haman said. "He ordered every son cast into the Nile. Did he not know that girls grow up and marry and have more sons?" The children not yet born of the daughters Pharaoh left alive would multiply and replenish everything. Haman's own decree, recorded in the Book of Esther, was total: "to destroy, to kill, and to eliminate" (Esther 3:13). Men, women, children, every age, every province, all 127 of them. He had closed every loophole. He had perfected the plan.

He was wrong in a way none of them had been wrong before. Not wrong about tactics. Wrong about the problem itself.

The midrash then imagines Gog and Magog, the forces of the end of days described in Ezekiel 38 and 39, who are destined to study all these failures and announce that they have found the true solution. "Those who came before us were fools," Gog and Magog will say. "They attacked Israel directly. They did not understand that Israel has a patron in Heaven. We will confront the patron first. Attack God, and Israel falls on its own." The verse they quote is from Psalms: "The kings of the earth have assembled, and rulers gather together against the Lord and against His anointed" (Psalms 2:2).

And this is where God finally speaks in the midrash. Not with grief, not with a command to the angels, not with a flood or a plague. With something that sounds almost like incredulity. "Wicked one," God says. "You come to confront Me? How many divisions stand before Me? How many lightning bolts? How many thunder claps? How many seraphs and how many angels?"

The tradition promises that God's power will meet Gog and Magog directly on the field, citing Isaiah (42:13): "The Lord will emerge like the valiant one, He will arouse zealotry like a man of war." And after that: "The Lord will be King over the entire earth" (Zechariah 14:9).

Each schemer in this chain believed he had found the missing piece. Esau blamed timing. Pharaoh blamed scope. Haman blamed comprehensiveness. Gog and Magog will blame everyone for attacking the wrong target. But the midrash's real argument is not about military strategy. It is about the nature of the error. Every enemy of Israel, from Esau to the final war, has tried to outthink a covenant. And the covenant, the rabbis suggest, is not a thing you can outthink.