Moses Said You Lacked Nothing. Children Begged for Bread

Moses was in the last year of his life, on the plain of Moab, telling the second generation what the first generation had received.

The Lord your God has blessed you in all the work of your hand. He has known your walking through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you. You have lacked nothing (Deuteronomy 2:7). He wanted them to understand, before he died and they crossed without him, how completely God had been carrying their parents. Manna every morning. Clothes that never wore out (Deuteronomy 8:4). Feet that never blistered. The cloud of glory that laundered their garments, the tradition says, and kept the sandals from wearing down no matter how far they walked.

Not a single thing lacking.

The Verse Placed Beside It

The cruelest pairing in the Yalkut Shimoni, the medieval compilation of rabbinic material assembled by Rabbi Shimon HaDarshan in thirteenth-century Germany from earlier Talmudic and midrashic sources, places Moses's boast directly beside one of the most wretched verses in the prophetic literature. The rabbis did not sequence these verses by accident. They put them side by side because the contrast carries the weight.

The verse from Lamentations (Lamentations 4:4): The tongue of the suckling child cleaves to the roof of his mouth with thirst. The young children ask for bread, and no man breaks it for them.

Moses spoke over the plenty. Jeremiah watched the children's mouths dry out. Forty years in which God provided everything, and then, after the kings and the Temple and the prophets and the whole long arc of the monarchy, a moment in which children held out their hands and no one had anything to put in them.

The Two Departures

The Yalkut reads these two texts as a matched pair about two departures of Israel. When Israel went out of Egypt under Moses, they went out into abundance. God was providing before they could ask. The generation that left Egypt received the manna while they were still complaining about Egypt's food, before they had demonstrated any particular worthiness, before they had done anything to merit supernatural provision. The abundance preceded the deserving.

When Israel went out of Jerusalem, driven from the city by Nebuchadnezzar's army in 586 BCE, the picture reversed in every detail. Not provision coming before the need. Need present and provision absent. Children asking and no one answering. The city that had been the site of forty years of miraculous wilderness provision was now the site of starvation.

What the Legends of the Jews Remember About Hunger

The Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's synthesis of rabbinic tradition, preserves a scene from the wilderness period that belongs in this context: Jacob's sons coming back from their first trip to Egypt, having bought grain but now returning with empty hands again and their father's children crying. Give us bread, that we die not of hunger before thee. These were the words that brought scorching tears to Jacob's eyes. He had lived through the wilderness memory. He knew what it was to depend on the hand of God for daily bread. He also knew what it looked like when that hand withdrew.

The juxtaposition the Yalkut builds is not only between two historical moments. It is between two modes of divine relationship. In the wilderness, God was present in a way that overrode human failure continuously. The provision did not stop when Israel complained. It did not stop when they built the golden calf. It continued for forty years through extraordinary faithlessness because the mercy of the wilderness period was unconditional in a way that later history was not.

The Weight of Lo Chasarta

The Hebrew of Moses's boast is almost embarrassed by its own completeness. Lo chasarta davar. You have not been short of a single thing. Not one thing. In the grammatical structure of biblical Hebrew, the negation is as absolute as negations get. Moses is not saying that they had enough. He is saying they lacked nothing at all, which is a different claim. Enough is relative. Nothing lacking is total.

Jeremiah's verse is also total in its own way. The tongue of the suckling child cleaves to the roof of his mouth. This is not a child who is hungry. This is a child whose mouth has gone dry. The deprivation is past hunger and into something more fundamental. Moses's abundance and Jeremiah's drought are both described in their most complete form because the contrast needs to be total to carry the weight the rabbis want it to carry.

They placed these verses together to say: this is what the relationship between Israel and God looks like across time. There was a moment when no one lacked anything. There was a moment when children begged for bread and no one had any to give. Both moments are in the record. The people who inherit the record have to carry both.