Every Generation Plots Against Israel. Every Generation Fails.

The rabbis noticed something about history: the enemies of Israel do not just fight. They hold councils. They convene advisors. They deliberate. And then they explain to each other, at some length, why their plan is superior to every previous plan that failed.

This is the portrait in Midrash Tehillim 2:4, a rabbinic commentary on Psalm 2 compiled in late antiquity. Rabbi Berachiah, citing Rabbi Levi, describes a succession of plotters, each one critiquing the errors of his predecessor while making new ones of his own. The series begins with Esau and ends at the edge of time.

Esau Studies Cain

The first council Midrash Tehillim examines is not Egyptian or Babylonian. It is a private calculation by Esau, sitting somewhere in Canaan, nursing the wound of Jacob's blessing. The text presents his reasoning with unusual specificity. Esau considers Cain's mistake: Cain killed Abel while their father Adam was alive and could produce more children. The murder accomplished nothing. The covenantal line simply continued through Seth.

Esau resolves not to repeat this error. He will wait. Let Isaac die first. Then kill Jacob. If there is no father to produce another heir and no existing heirs left alive, the problem is solved permanently. This is cold, patient strategic thinking. The flaw in it is theological rather than tactical: the covenant had already been transferred. Esau's decision to wait only gave Jacob time to leave, to survive, to become Israel.

Pharaoh Expands the Plan

By the time Pharaoh faces the question, the people he is trying to suppress have already multiplied for four hundred years. His council, the same advisors depicted in Exodus, assess the threat and propose a solution that goes further than Esau's private patience: kill the male children as they are born. Do not wait for them to grow. Interrupt the continuity before it begins.

The plan is systematic and documented. It is also, in the Midrash's telling, critiqued by Haman from the future. Pharaoh's error, Haman argues, was that he targeted only one generation of males and left the women alive. The women had children. The people survived. A more comprehensive approach was needed.

Haman's Perfect System

Haman does not improvise. He uses the king's seal, the empire's legal apparatus, and the communication network of 127 provinces. The decree goes out to every corner of the Persian Empire: on a specific date, the thirteenth of Adar, every Jewish man, woman, and child throughout the kingdom is to be killed and their property seized. The date was chosen by lottery, the method of divination Haman trusted, and it seemed to him auspicious. The plan is total, bureaucratic, and signed by the highest authority in the world.

The Midrash Tehillim does not dwell on what went wrong with Haman's plan. The Book of Esther handles that. What the Midrash does is place Haman's scheme in a sequence, as the most sophisticated version yet of a recurring pattern. Each iteration is more elaborate. Esau relied on timing. Pharaoh relied on biology. Haman relied on law and empire. None of it worked.

The pattern the rabbis are tracing is not about Jewish military strength. Israel was not militarily superior to Egypt or Persia. The point is different: the plans fail at the level of design. Something in the architecture of each plan contains a fault that the planner cannot see. Mordecai had dreamed of two dragons and their battle before any of this happened. Esther was in the palace before the decree was issued. The reversal was already prepared.

What Gog and Magog Understand That the Others Didn't

The final entry in the sequence is Gog and Magog, the apocalyptic coalition described in Ezekiel 38-39 and interpreted through centuries of rabbinic imagination as the last coalition of nations to rise against Israel before the end of history. The Midrash Tehillim depicts their council differently from all the others. They are not dismissing their predecessors as naive. They are trying to learn from them.

Their analysis, as the Midrash presents it, is that every previous enemy failed because they fought against Israel without first securing an alliance with the divine power that protects Israel. Their strategy is therefore to approach God first, to make a kind of alliance, and then turn on the people. They believe this is the insight that has eluded every previous generation of enemies.

The Holy One's response, quoted from Isaiah 42:13, is direct: "The Lord will go forth as a mighty man, he shall stir up jealousy like a man of war: he shall cry, yea, roar; he shall prevail against his enemies." The assumption behind Gog's plan is that God's protection of Israel is a separable quality, something that can be obtained or circumvented. The Isaiah verse says otherwise.

What David Saw from the Beginning

All of this is the rabbinic answer to David's question in Psalm 2: why are the nations in an uproar? The Midrash is saying: they are in an uproar because they are running the same calculation over and over, in increasingly sophisticated forms, and it keeps failing, and they cannot quite work out why.

The verse that closes the Midrash's discussion is from Zechariah 14:9: "And the Lord shall be king over all the earth." This is not the end of Jewish military victory. It is the end of the councils. The point at which nations stop gathering to plan against Israel is the point at which they finally recognize what David recognized from the beginning, sitting with his harp and watching history repeat itself. The recognition itself is the redemption.

Four plotters. Four failures. And the same mistake at the center of each one: the belief that a plan thorough enough, signed by authority high enough, can override something that was written into the structure of history before any of them were born.