The Banner of Love and the Woe That Came With It

Most people picture the dedication of the Tabernacle as pure celebration. Trumpets, incense, fire from heaven, a people finally home with their God. The medieval rabbis who compiled Midrash Rabbah around the twelfth century read the same scene and heard something else underneath the music. They heard God groan.

And before the groan, a love song. Bamidbar Rabbah, the volume that walks chapter by chapter through Numbers, opens with one of the strangest declarations of affection in rabbinic literature. God, the rabbis say, is the wealthy man whose entire cellar has turned to vinegar. One barrel of wine remains. That barrel is Israel.

The vinegar cellar and the one good barrel

Rabbi Abahu, working in third-century Caesarea, builds the picture out of a single verse from Song of Songs. "He brought me to the banquet house, and his banner of love is upon me." In his retelling of Bamidbar Rabbah 2:3, Abahu counts seventy nations in the world, matching the numerical value of the Hebrew word for wine, yayin. Sixty-nine of those casks have soured. Only Jacob's house still tastes the way the vintner wanted.

It is a brutal image, and the rabbis do not soften it. The wealthy man walks down his own steps, lifts lid after lid, and finds rot. Then he turns to the one cask that still smells like fruit. The banner over Israel is not a parade flag. It is the cloth a merchant drapes over the only thing in the shop he cannot bear to lose.

Other voices in the same passage push the metaphor in different directions. Rabbi Yehuda hears the banquet house as Sinai, where Moses received a Torah that can be turned forty-nine ways. Rabbi Hanina, working a pun the English cannot hold, says the banner (vediglo) is really the finger (vegudalo) of a child in the study hall pointing at God's name. In any other empire, pointing at the king got you killed. Here, the finger is the love.

Why does God groan at his own wedding?

Then comes chapter twelve, and the music breaks. The verse describing the day Moses finished erecting the Tabernacle begins with the word vayhi, "and it was." Rabbi Avin, quoted in Bamidbar Rabbah 12:7, refuses to read it as a neutral opening. Vayhi, he says, sounds like vai haya. Woe. There was woe on that day.

His parable is short and devastating. A king has a difficult wife who complains about everything. He asks her to sew him a purple robe. She works in silence. The robe is finished and presented. The king takes it in his hands and cries out, "Woe!" Not because the work is bad. Because the work is done, and she will go back to being who she was.

That difficult wife is the people who complained at the bitter water, grumbled about the manna, and accused Moses and Aaron of killing the people of the Lord. The robe is the Mishkan. The king's groan is God's, on the afternoon the cloud comes down.

The firstborn, the angels, the nations

Bamidbar Rabbah will not let one explanation stand. The same passage lists three other voices that cried woe when the Tabernacle was raised, and each one loses something the moment the building is finished.

The firstborn sons lose their priesthood. Before the calf at Sinai, they had served at family altars, sending up the burnt offerings of Exodus 24. Rabbi Abba bar Mamal says the calf cost them the role. Aaron's line takes it from here. The firstborn groan because something that was theirs by birth is no longer theirs at all.

The angels groan too. They are convinced that the moment God moves into a tent of goat-hair curtains, He is moving out of heaven. God reassures them with one verse and then, according to Rabbi Simon in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, quietly contradicts Himself with another. Psalm 148 places His glory on earth first and the heavens second. The angels are right to be nervous. Their unique closeness has just been shared with a people made of dust.

The nations of the world cry the loudest. While God was a free agent, He fought their wars. Now He lives inside one camp. They understand, before the Israelites do, that a God with an address is a God who has chosen sides.

Pinchas, Zimri, and the price of being chosen

The same volume of Midrash Rabbah turns, a few chapters later, to what being the one good barrel actually costs. In Bamidbar Rabbah 20:25, the rabbis retell the killing of Zimri and the Midianite princess Cozbi by Pinchas, son of Elazar.

Numbers 25 says Pinchas saw, took a spear, and acted. The Midrash asks a harder question. Did only Pinchas see? Moses saw. The whole congregation saw. The rabbis answer that Pinchas saw the act and recalled the halakha, the specific ruling that zealots may strike one who openly takes a foreign woman during apostasy.

Then the Midrash counts twelve miracles inside one stab. An angel holds the couple together so no one can claim they were not in the act. He shuts their mouths so they cannot scream. He stretches the spear, gives Pinchas the strength to lift two bodies on its tip, and raises the lintel of the tent so the corpses ride out in plain sight of the camp.

What does the wine taste like now?

Read together, these passages from Bamidbar Rabbah refuse to let Israel's worship be simple. The God who calls them His one unspoiled barrel groans when they finish His house. The chosen status that earns the banner makes them the camp where angels drive a spear through two bodies to stop a plague.

The wealthy man still loves the wine. He knows what it cost to keep it from turning. The banner of love and the cry of woe are stitched into one cloth, and the rabbis hand it over without smoothing the seam.