When God Gives Power to Other Nations, Israel Pays the Price

The verse is (Deuteronomy 32:31): "For not as our rock is their rock, our enemies are judges." The Song of Moses puts this complaint directly into the mouth of Israel. Our relationship with God is not the same as their relationship with their gods. And when God places our enemies in the position of judges, we experience the difference in our own bodies.

Sifrei Devarim, the tannaitic commentary on Deuteronomy compiled in Roman Palestine during the second century CE, interprets this verse with unusual directness. It refuses to soften the disparity between how Israel experiences divine authority and how the nations exercise authority over Israel when God grants it to them.

What "Not as Our Rock is Their Rock" Actually Means

The Sifrei opens by translating the verse into its theological content: "Not as the authority you give us is the authority you give them." This is not primarily a statement about the comparative quality of deities. It is a statement about how divine authorization operates differently depending on who receives it.

When God grants authority to Israel, the Sifrei implies, that authority operates within the framework of Torah, with its protections for the vulnerable, its limits on punishment, its requirements of due process. When God grants authority to the nations over Israel, those nations use it differently. The Sifrei does not claim this is what God intended; it describes what actually happens. The text pulls no punches about the historical reality: "they kill us, burn us, and crucify us." This is Roman-era testimony. The rabbis compiling Sifrei Devarim in the second century CE were living within a generation of the destruction of the Second Temple and the Bar Kokhba revolt's catastrophic aftermath.

The 3,205 texts in the midrash-aggadah collection contain dozens of passages wrestling with the experience of living under foreign imperial authority as a consequence of the broken covenant. The Sifrei's commentary on this verse is among the most unvarnished of them.

What the Sifrei Says About Divine Intention

The text does not resolve the tension it creates. It does not explain why God grants authority to nations that will use it destructively. What it does instead is insist on a distinction that the experience of persecution might seem to erase: the "rock" of Israel and the "rock" of the nations are not the same. Even when the nations are winning, their victory does not mean their version of divine power is equivalent to Israel's.

This distinction matters because it preserves a theological asymmetry. The nations can be given authority. They cannot be given the specific quality of relationship that Israel holds. "Their rock" is whatever source of power the nations attribute their success to. "Our rock" is the God of the covenant, whose treatment of Israel, even in moments of punishment and withdrawal, operates within a relational framework the nations do not have access to.

The original passage in Sifrei Devarim connects this verse to the long history of nations who opposed Israel's sacred institutions. The Cutheans, who opposed the rebuilding of the Second Temple, and the Sodomites, who embodied the principle of cruelty institutionalized as law, both represent nations whose "rock," whose source of authorization and power, operated on principles incompatible with the covenant.

Sodom as the Extreme Case

The wicked judges of Sodom codified cruelty into law, according to the Book of Jasher, an ancient text preserved in late medieval compilations. Sodom had magistrates. It had rules. It had procedures. The problem was not that Sodom lacked law but that its law was designed to maximize the suffering of the vulnerable. A stranger who came to Sodom seeking hospitality would find the city's legal system deployed against him.

This is what the Sifrei means when it uses the language of "their rock." The nations have sources of authority and systems of power. The question is what those systems are for. The Sodomite answer, and the answer of any empire that uses its authority to destroy rather than protect, is that power exists to maintain the advantage of those who hold it. The covenant answer is that authority is held in trust, accountable to a source that requires justice.

What Israel's Enemies Inadvertently Confirm

The verse ends with a strange phrase: "our enemies are judges." The Sifrei reads this not as a statement of injustice but as a statement of inadvertent testimony. When the enemies of Israel judge, and even when they judge harshly, they confirm the theological reality. Their judgment is only possible because God authorized it. Their authority is derivative. The fact that they exercise it destructively does not change its source.

This is a difficult theology to hold under persecution. It requires believing simultaneously that what is happening to Israel is real, that the cruelty is real and the suffering is real, and that the framework within which it happens is still the framework of the covenant. The Sifrei does not pretend this is easy. It records the raw complaint of the verse alongside its interpretation, and does not resolve the tension into comfort. The nations exercise a different kind of authority. Our rock is not their rock. And yet both rocks exist within the same universe, both derive their power from the same source, and the end of the poem, which the Song of Moses reaches, is not the triumph of the nations but the vindication of Israel.