Israel Will Not End Even When Its Punishments Do

There is a verse in Deuteronomy that the rabbis read as a kind of guarantee, embedded in the structure of the Hebrew itself. The verse threatens the accumulation of evils upon Israel (Deuteronomy 32:23), but the Midrash Aggadah notices something in the grammar: the Hebrew does not say the evils will gather upon Israel, it says they will end. All of the punishments will be exhausted before Israel is. The verse reads, in this interpretation, not as a threat but as a limit on how far the threat can go. The word that typically means to heap up or accumulate is read instead as to complete, to exhaust, to finish. The difference in Hebrew is a single vowel pointing, and the rabbis knew exactly which vowel they were choosing and why.

The same point is made in the following verse, which says that God's arrows will end in Israel. The rabbis refuse to read this as God destroying Israel with arrows. They read it as God's arrows running out while Israel remains. My arrows, God says, will be exhausted before My people are. The arrows of famine, the arrows of punishment, the arrows of exile: all of them have a limit. Israel does not. This reading appears in the Sifrei Devarim, the tannaitic midrash on Deuteronomy from the school of Rabbi Ishmael, compiled in the second and third centuries CE, and it represents one of the most defiant theological positions in all of rabbinic literature: the instruments of divine punishment are finite, and the people they are aimed at is not. Ezekiel 5:16 is cited to identify the arrows: the evil arrows of famine are God's arrows. Even these will be spent before Israel is.

The second text, from a midrashic collection on Jeremiah, approaches the same idea from a completely different angle. It begins with the question of bread. Did the workers and consumers of the nation not know they were eating bread? The question sounds strange until you realize what it is pointing to. Jeremiah 2:3 says that Israel is holy to the Lord, the first of His harvest. The midrash interprets this to mean that anyone who eats from the property or possessions of Israel has, in effect, tasted sacred bread. Those who do not are as if they have not tasted bread at all. The holiness of Israel extends to everything it touches and owns, and that holiness is not transferable.

The image is startling. The holiness of Israel is not a matter of its internal practice alone. It radiates outward into the material world. When Israel's enemies took the tattered clothing from the chamber of the perpetual lamp, and the bread arranged on the table, and consumed them, they were consuming something they could not properly digest, something that was not meant for them, something the text of Jeremiah marks as first fruits consecrated to God. The nations who destroyed the Temple and plundered its contents did not simply commit theft. They ate sacred bread without knowing what they were eating. And God, in the midrash's reading, did not call them to account for it in that moment, not because it was permitted, but because their eating it was itself the evidence of their confusion about what they held.

Put these two teachings next to each other and a single argument emerges. Israel cannot be eliminated because the punishments aimed at it will exhaust themselves first. And Israel cannot be absorbed or consumed by the nations because what Israel carries, its holiness, its covenant, its sacred properties, does not transfer to those who seize it by force. The arrows run out. The bread is indigestible to those who take it wrongly. The people remains. What the enemies believe they have captured is something they are constitutionally incapable of holding.

This was not an abstract theological proposition for the rabbis who formulated it. The Sifrei Devarim was compiled in the same centuries as the great persecutions of the Bar Kokhba period and its aftermath, when Rome's power over Israel seemed absolute and permanent. The midrash on Jeremiah emerged from communities still living with the memory of the Temple's destruction, communities that had watched their sacred objects carried through the streets of Rome in Titus's triumph. These were not comfortable times in which to assert that Israel's punishment would end before Israel did. It was an act of interpretation that required something beyond optimism. The rabbis said this not because the evidence of their daily lives supported it but because the grammar of Deuteronomy, read with sufficient care, demanded it. Midrash is, among other things, the art of finding structural limits inside threatening verses, and the rabbis were very skilled at this art. Their reading was not wishful thinking. It was close reading: the same textual discipline that generated legal decisions also generated theological guarantees, and the guarantee here is built directly into the conjugation of the verb.