The Kings and the Star of Fire Shown to Shimon in the Cave

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Forty Days in the Mouth of the Cave

For forty days and forty nights Shimon bar Yochai stood in the mouth of the cave and would not sit down. Outside, the soldiers of Caesar, king of Edom, were still hunting him through the hills, and the stone at his back was the only wall between his throat and their swords. He did not pray for his own life. He pressed his forehead to the rock and cried the same words until his voice cracked. "Lord God of hosts, how long will You be angry against the prayer of Your people?"

On the fortieth night the rock seemed to thin. The sealed things opened. The end of days lay spread before him the way a valley lies under a man standing on a ridge, and he began to speak aloud what he saw, the way a man reads a scroll that is unrolling itself.

Metatron Answers the Cry Against Ishmael

First the kingdom of Ishmael rose in the east like dust off a road, and his heart went cold. "Is it not enough for us," he said into the dark, "what the kingdom of wicked Edom has done to us? Must the kingdom of Ishmael come as well?"

A voice answered him before the fear could finish. Metatron, prince of the Presence, stood in the vision at his side. "Do not fear, son of man," the angel said. "The Holy One brings the kingdom of Ishmael for one reason only, to save you from this wicked one. He will raise over them a ruler who takes the land and holds it in greatness, and there will be bitter enmity between him and the sons of Esau." Shimon turned toward the voice. "And how do I know they are a rescue for us?" The angel reminded him of the prophet's chariot of an ass set before the chariot of a camel, the poor king who rides on a donkey, and told him that Ishmael's coming would clear the road for that rider the way a servant clears a threshold.

Then a second king out of the sons of Ishmael walked the ruined courts of the Temple, a lover of Israel. He closed its breaches with his own hands. He set stone against stone where Edom had torn them open, and he marched out to break the armies of Esau.

A Line of Kings Passes Before Him

After that the kings came one behind the other, and Shimon named each as it passed. A man called Marwan who had herded donkeys, dragged out from behind his animals and crowned, until the sons of Edom rose and killed him. A king after him who had peace on every side, who loved his flocks and died quietly in his bed. Then a harder man who held the throne by his sword and his bow and made war on all four winds at once, in the east and the west and the north and the south, and knew no rest.

He watched the western pillar fall on the sons of Ishmael in Damascus, and the whole kingdom of Ishmael fell with it. A rebellion boiled up out of the northeast, slain men dropping first at the Tigris, then at the Euphrates, then in the land between the rivers, and a king fleeing while his own sons were caught and hung on the trees. Last came men from a far country, ugly and bitter and hasty, dressed in black, all of them horsemen, riding up onto the high mountain of Israel to breach the Temple again, put out its lamps, and tear its doors from the hinges.

The Star With a Rod of Fire

Then the years themselves marched past him in a single week of harvests. The first year without rain. The second with hunger biting at half the land. The third a great famine and a sky shut like iron. The fourth middling, the fifth heavy with grain. In the sixth year it rose. One star climbed out of the east with a rod of fire at its head, like the tip of a spear laid across the sky. The nations of the world looked up and said, "This star is ours." It was not theirs. It burned for Jacob. It rose in the first watch and held its place fifteen days over the east, then turned and stood fifteen days over the west, and while it burned Shimon knew the redeemer was near.

The Fast That Followed and the Weeping

He went back into his prayer and his fast another forty days, until the angel stood before him again and said, "Ask of me one thing." Shimon asked, "What will the end of all this be?" The angel showed him the last wars, the armies of the west swallowing the armies of the east, Egypt made a desolation, the Euphrates running red, a brazen-faced king who would rob the rich and murder any man who spoke the words of the Shema (Hear O Israel) or named the God of Abraham, who would try to strike the Sabbath and the festivals out of the world for three years and a half.

Shimon covered his face and wept. "The children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will have nowhere to run in his days." The angel did not soften it. "Put flesh on the fire and you cannot save it from the smell," he said. "So it is with Israel. But whoever slips into an inner chamber and shuts the door will live, for it is written, Come, my people, enter into your chambers." Then the vision let him go, and Shimon bar Yochai stood alone again in the mouth of the cave, in the dark, with the whole shape of exile burning behind his eyes and the door of the chamber still open in his mind.