Three Hebrew Letters in One Psalm Predicted Three Empires

The rabbis did not read the Psalms the way a literary scholar would. They read them the way a cryptographer reads a coded message, convinced that every repeated letter, every unusual spelling, every apparent redundancy was placed there by divine intention and pointed at something specific in Israel's history or future.

In Psalm 9, the text contains the phrase chananeni Hashem, grace me O Lord, written with a word that contains not one but three instances of the Hebrew letter nun. Three nuns in a single word in a single psalm. For the rabbis of Midrash Tehillim, the collection of interpretations on Psalms compiled across several centuries in late antiquity, this was not a coincidence of Hebrew orthography. It was a map.

What Do Three Nuns Signal?

Midrash Tehillim on Psalm 9 connects the three nuns to the verse from the same psalm: see my affliction from those who hate me. The word for affliction shares its root with ideas of being oppressed, pressed down, subjugated. Three instances of the letter pointing to three distinct experiences of oppression. Three kingdoms, three historical periods in which Israel would be ground down by foreign domination.

The Midrash identifies the three kingdoms. The first is associated with Esau, a code name in rabbinic literature for Rome, the empire that destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE and drove the Jewish people into their longest exile. The second is Ishmael, a code name for the Arab world as it expanded in the seventh century CE. The third is Greece, the Hellenistic empire that preceded Rome's domination of the land of Israel and whose cultural assault on Jewish distinctiveness the rabbis experienced as an existential threat.

Why Is Esau Rome?

The identification of Esau with Rome requires explanation. The Legends of the Jews, drawing on centuries of midrashic tradition, explains the equation through a reading of Edom, the nation descended from Esau, and the geographic and genealogical connections the rabbis traced between Edom and the Roman Empire. The founders of Rome were said in some traditions to be descendants of Esau's line. More importantly, both Edom and Rome were characterized, in the rabbinic imagination, by a particular kind of power: physical dominance, military conquest, the rule of force over spirit.

Jacob and Esau, in the rabbinic reading, are not merely brothers. They are the representatives of two principles. Jacob is Torah, study, spiritual striving, the covenant. Esau is force, appetite, the world's power arranged against those principles. Rome, which destroyed the Temple and exiled the scholars, was Esau updated for a later century.

Are Three Kingdoms Three Phases of the Same Exile?

The Zohar, the central text of Jewish mysticism published in thirteenth-century Castile, Spain, developed the four-kingdom schema it inherited from the Book of Daniel (chapters 7-8) into a comprehensive theory of exile and redemption. In this framework, the sequence of dominant world empires, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, Rome, corresponds to four aspects of cosmic disorder that must be resolved before the redemption can come. Midrash Tehillim's three-kingdom reading from the three nuns operates in the same register, though with a different list: Rome, Ishmael, Greece.

The difference is not contradiction; it reflects different historical vantages. Midrash Tehillim was compiled at a time when the rabbinic community was experiencing both Roman domination and the rising power of the Arab world. The three nuns were decoded from the vantage point of those lived realities, mapping present and recent past onto the Psalm's language of affliction.

The Letter Nun and the Memory of Falling

The letter nun carries its own set of associations in the midrashic imagination. One of the most striking is drawn from the Book of Amos (5:2): fallen is the virgin of Israel, she shall rise no more. The word for fallen in Hebrew begins with nun. The Talmud in tractate Berakhot discusses why the Ashrei prayer, which is an acrostic of the Hebrew alphabet, omits the verse that should begin with nun. The answer given is that nun opens a verse about Israel's fall.

If three nuns signal three kingdoms of affliction, they are also three instances of a letter associated with falling, with defeat, with the lowest point before the reversal. Midrash Tehillim reads the three nuns as a prediction and also as a promise: the psalm does not end with affliction. It ends with the plea for grace answered, with the psalmist declared heard, with the nations falling into the pits they dug for Israel.

What the Patriarchs Saw That the Nations Could Not

Bereshit Rabbah, the great midrash on Genesis compiled in fifth and sixth-century Palestine, contains a tradition about Jacob seeing the angels of the four kingdoms ascending and descending the ladder in his dream at Beth El (Genesis 28:12). The angels of Babylonia ascended seventy rungs and descended. The angels of Persia ascended and descended. The angels of Greece ascended and descended. Then the angel of Edom, of Rome, began ascending and kept going, rung after rung, beyond the count Jacob had watched the others reach. Jacob grew afraid. God told him not to fear: even if this kingdom ascends as high as I am, I will bring it down.

The three nuns in the Psalm, three letters that the rabbis decoded as three kingdoms of oppression, exist within a text that is itself a plea for rescue, a request for grace, a declaration that the God who sees affliction will also lift the speaker from the gates of death. The cryptography of the nuns does not produce despair. It produces the knowledge that the afflictions were known in advance, encoded in the sacred text, seen by God before the first empire rose, and already held within the same Psalm that promises their end.