The Four Empires Coiled in the Chaos Before Creation

Click for full size

The Verse That Held the Whole of History

Resh Lakish bent over the second verse of the Torah until the letters seemed to shift under his eyes. The earth was unformed and void, it said. Darkness lay over the face of the deep. And the spirit of God hovered above the water. Other men read weather in those words, the raw morning of the world before light. He read a warning set down before there was anyone alive to warn.

He was an Amora of the third century, a man who carried in his bones the memory of the Temple burned and the weight of Rome pressing on the land in his own day. When he looked into that first darkness, he did not see mist rising off new seas. He saw four kingdoms crouched in the chaos, each waiting its turn at Israel, all of them there before the first morning ever broke.

Rabbi Berekhya had taught that nothing begins as a blank page. "Even a boy is known by his deeds," he quoted, and reminded his students that a young plant shows its nature before it flowers, pushing out small thorns while it is still tender. The unformed world was no clean slate. It already held the shape of everything that would grow from it, the fruit and the thorn alike. Resh Lakish took that thorn and named it four times over.

Four Kingdoms Coiled in the Dark

"Unformed," he said, tohu, and that was Babylon. He reached for the prophet Jeremiah, who had stared at a ruined land and cried, "I have seen the earth, and behold, it was unformed and void." Not rubble only. A hollow where a people's life had been, the first emptiness that Israel would be marched into in chains.

"And void," vohu, and that was Media. He heard inside the word the sound of vayavhilu, they hastened, the same word the scroll of Esther uses when the king's men come running for Haman. "They hastened to bring Haman," it says, and in that rush Resh Lakish saw the whole Median kingdom, a power that moved too fast, impatient on its rise, hurrying its favorites up the ladder and then hurrying them off it.

"Darkness," and that was Greece, because Greece darkened the eyes of Israel with its decrees. He could hear the cruelest of them, the demand that a Jew take the horn of an ox and write upon it, "We have no portion in the God of Israel." They did not only want to kill. They wanted a man to sign away his own God with his own hand, in daylight, on the horn of a beast. That was the darkness, a night poured straight into the eyes.

"Upon the face of the deep," and that was the wicked kingdom, Edom, which the sages knew as Rome. Why the deep? Because the deep cannot be measured. Drop a line into it and the line never finds bottom. So it was with this kingdom, its cruelty past sounding, its reach past counting. Just as no one can calculate the deep, Resh Lakish said, no one can calculate the wicked.

The Spirit Above the Abyss

Four kingdoms, and the verse was not finished. Over that same black water, where the last and worst empire spread itself like a sea without a floor, one more thing moved. "And the spirit of God was hovering," the verse said, and Resh Lakish would not let it pass as wind. This, he declared, was the spirit of the Messianic King, hanging above the abyss before the first light was ever spoken.

He set beside it the words of Isaiah, "The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him." Before Babylon, before Media, before the darkness of Greece and the fathomless cruelty of Rome, before any of it had a name, the redeemer's breath was already there, waiting out the whole long night above the deep. The ruin and the rescue lay folded into the one dark verse together.

The Water That Cools and Cleanses

How would that hovering spirit ever come down into the world? By the water it hovered over, the sages said, and the water was repentance. They heard it in the cry from the book of Lamentations, "Pour out your heart like water before the face of the Lord." Turning back was a thing a person poured. It soaked and it washed, and it could carry a whole people out of exile the way water carries anything set upon it.

Rabbi Hagai, in the name of Rabbi Pedat, said a covenant was cut with the water at the beginning. Even when the heat is savage, a wind is sent to move across the face of the water and cool it. That was why the verse chose the word merahefet, hovering, in the present tense and not the past. The hovering never stopped. It was happening still, over every generation's deep, a breath kept moving above the water so the water would not fail.

The Sage Who Looked Too Long

One man leaned too far into that mystery. Ben Zoma stood in the road one day so deep in thought that he did not answer when Rabbi Yehoshua greeted him, and did not answer the second time either. When Rabbi Yehoshua pressed him, Ben Zoma said he had been staring at the act of Creation, at the space between the upper waters and the lower waters, a gap so thin it was barely a gap at all.

The spirit did not blow across that water, he said. It hovered, "like a bird flying above its young, its wings beating, touching and not touching." He had climbed up into the narrowest seam in the world and stood inside it. Rabbi Yehoshua looked at him and said quietly to his students, "Ben Zoma is already gone." Not long after, Ben Zoma died. He had put his eye to the crack between the waters where the spirit of the King still hovers, and he did not come back down.