Rabbi Ishmael Prophesied Three Wars and the Messiah From Edom

Rabbi Ishmael began from the beginning. In the book of Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer. the early medieval midrash compiled around the eighth century CE and attributed to the circle of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus. there is a chapter on what will happen at the end of days that starts with Balaam and ends with blood on the road out of Edom.

Balaam, the non-Israelite prophet who could not curse Israel no matter how hard Balak paid him to try, had observed something that disturbed him. Among all the nations God had created, only Israel bore God's name directly. the divine name embedded in the name of the people itself. But God had made the name of Ishmael, Abraham's son and the ancestor of other nations, similar enough to Israel's that it formed its own kind of echo. Balaam's lament. "Alas, who shall live when God establisheth him?" (Numbers 24:23). was, according to Rabbi Ishmael's reading, a recognition that the relationship between Israel and the descendants of Ishmael would define one of history's most consequential chapters.

Rabbi Ishmael then enumerated fifteen specific things that the children of Ishmael would do in the land of Israel in the latter days. Some were physical: measuring the land with ropes, planting gardens, fencing broken walls. Some were moral: falsehood multiplying, truth being hidden, statutes removed far from Israel. One was architectural and contentious: a building rising in the holy place. And then, amid the chaos, something else. an act of rebuilding, the desolated cities restored, the roads cleared. Even the darkest prophetic catalog in this text contains the acknowledgment that renewal runs alongside destruction.

The prophecy from Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer reaches its crisis in the three wars that Rabbi Ishmael drew from the prophet Isaiah. Three conflicts, each more terrible than the one before. The first in the forest of Arabia. drawn swords in the wilderness. The second on the sea. bent bows, naval battle, the clash of empires on water. The third in Rome itself, the great city that had served as the symbol of worldly empire throughout Jewish history, and this war "more grievous" than all the others, a conflict severe enough to make the previous two look like preambles.

It is from the ruins of that third war that the figure appears. Rabbi Ishmael quoted Isaiah 63:1: "Who is this that cometh from Edom, with crimsoned garments from Bozrah? This that is glorious in his apparel, marching in the greatness of his strength?" Edom in this rabbinic tradition is Rome. the empire that replaced Babylon as the power against which Israel measured its exile. Bozrah is a city associated with judgment and its aftermath. The figure walking out of the direction of Rome in garments stained crimson is the Mashiach, the descendent of David, arriving after the third war has exhausted the competing empires. He comes not from Jerusalem but from the direction of the oppressor, which is either paradox or prophecy: the redemption arrives precisely from where the suffering had its source.

The Heikhalot Rabbati, the great palace-mysticism text of the same period, illuminates why the sages were so focused on this sequence. In its passages on Rabbi Ishmael's assembly of the Sanhedrin and his return from before the throne of glory, the proclamation is identical in spirit: God's name, Zoharariel the radiance-of-God, would wreak wonders upon the wicked city Rome. The mystic's vision from heaven and the prophet's reading of history arrived at the same destination.

The text from Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer closes with Daniel 2:44: "And in the days of those kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed." Two brothers, two princes, in their days the Son of David will arise. The sequence is not hopeful in the soft sense. It does not say the suffering will be brief. It says it will have an end, and the end will arrive from the direction no one expected, in garments that show the cost of what came before it.