How Egypt and Babylon Fell by the Loopholes They Trusted

Two empires sit across a long stretch of Jewish memory, and Shir HaShirim Rabbah places them side by side as a single lesson. Egypt at the Nile and Babylon at the banquet hall both believed they had outwitted heaven. Each searched for a fold in the cosmic contract that would let cruelty pass uncountered. The midrash shows how each empire fell through the mechanism it trusted, and how the Song of Songs, read as a coded chronicle of exile, holds the receipts.

How Egypt Hunted a Loophole in the Flood Oath

The sages open with the wedding song's cry to catch the little foxes that ruin the vineyards. Egypt, in this reading, is the fox. Other empires arrive in heavier metals and taller trees. Assyria stands as a cedar of Lebanon. Babylon glitters as a head of fine gold in the dream tradition discussed in The second passage. Persia and beyond appear as fierce beasts climbing from the sea. Egypt is small and sly, the fox that glances backward before it strikes.

That glance is the heart of the story. The Egyptians, says Rabbi Elazar son of Rabbi Shimon, scouted their punishment before choosing their crime. Fire was ruled out, since prophecy promised the wicked would burn. The sword was ruled out, since prophecy promised all flesh would meet it. Water, however, looked safe. Heaven had sworn after the days of Noah that no flood would ever again sweep the world, and the Egyptians read that oath as a license, reasoning that drowning Hebrew infants in the Nile placed them beyond divine reach.

The midrash answers with precision in The first passage. The oath protected the world from a flood, not a single nation from its deserved sea. Each Egyptian would be drawn to a private drowning. The Sea of Reeds split for Israel and closed for Pharaoh, and the element Egypt thought safe became the instrument of its end.

Why the Foxes Were Dragged to the Sea

Word play carries the verdict. The sages read the psalm about the wicked as a portion for the foxes and hear inside it a phrase meaning "they sought the sea." Egypt sought water as escape, and water took it. Rabbi Berekhya notices that the word for foxes appears once full and once defective in the verse, and he turns the defective spelling into a sentence of its own. The foxes will go down into the seabed. Spelling becomes sentence. Cunning becomes coffin.

What Belshatzar Read on the Wall

The second passage moves the scene from the Nile to a Babylonian dining hall. The Song of Songs verse about seeking the beloved at night becomes Daniel hunted by Chaldean watchmen during the final night of Belshatzar. Some sages place Daniel at a fast, pleading for the ruined Temple. Others place him at the feast, called in to read the writing on the wall. Both readings make him the soul Israel sought when the world looked finished.

The cryptic letters, mene mene tekel ufarsin, draw a small symposium of decoders. Rabbi Hiyya the Great arranges them in columns of three so the message must be read top to bottom, signaling that the words came from above. Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta solves them by the at-bash cipher. The Rabbis reverse each word. Rabbi Meir reads them plainly and says only the script was foreign. Each method reaches one verdict. The years of Babylonian rule had been counted, weighed, and divided, and the kingdom was already given to the Mede and the Persian.

Israel, gathered around Daniel, asked the question hanging over the exile. Jeremiah had promised seventy years and redemption after them. The dire prophecies had landed, and the bright one had not. Daniel called for the scroll of Isaiah and read the oracle about four kingdoms likened to four beasts, showing his community that the redemption clock was still ticking.

How Heaven Preserves Both Oath and Justice

The fourth thread binds the two passages. Heaven keeps its oaths and still settles accounts. The Noah promise stands intact, since the cosmos does not return to chaos by global flood. Egypt is judged anyway in a sea that does not violate the vow because the verdict is local, named, and aimed. Babylon receives parallel treatment. A merit had been banked when Merodach Baladan stood from his throne in honor of the God of Hezekiah and took three steps. That gesture purchased three world rulers. Once those three blasphemed, the merit was spent, and the kingdom could be peeled away without breaking any divine word.

This is how the midrash thinks about preservation. Memory of an oath is not amnesia about justice. The category of Shir HaShirim Rabbah excels at this bookkeeping, reading love poetry as legal record so one verse can comfort and condemn at once. Even Belshatzar's fall fits the pattern. He commanded his guards to kill any man entering the hall by night claiming to be king. When his bowels failed him, he left and returned through the wrong door. The guards obeyed. A branch from the lampstand pierced his brain. The decree he wrote to save himself executed him.

Where the Vineyard Stands Today

The two passages close a circuit. Egypt and Babylon bookend Israel's earliest exiles, one before the giving of Torah and one before the Second Temple. By placing them in one garden of allegorical Song of Songs verses, the sages tell a single story about empire. Empires study the divine word for exploits, and heaven answers by honoring the word so completely that the exploit collapses inward.

Moses sits at one edge as the silent counterweight to Pharaoh's calculation, since the Song at the Sea supplies the lead-and-straw imagery the midrash uses. Noah sits at the other edge, the figure whose flood was a singular event and whose oath now shields the world even as it permits this Nile and that Sea of Reeds. Within those markers the foxes are still caught, the vineyards are still tended, and the watchmen still walk the city looking for the one whom the soul of Israel loves.