The Man Who Survived Every Animal

The prophet Amos wrote one of the strangest verses in the Hebrew Bible. He described a man who runs from a lion, only to be attacked by a bear. When the man finally makes it home and leans against the wall to catch his breath, a snake bites him (Amos 5:19). Amos intended it as a warning about the Day of the Lord, a day that would bring no comfort even for those who survived the first disaster. But the rabbis of Esther Rabbah, reading in the early medieval period, looked at this verse and saw something larger: the entire arc of Jewish history compressed into a single scene.

The man is Israel. The lion is Babylonia.

Rabbi Huna and Rabbi Aha, transmitting a teaching in the name of Rabbi Hama bar Rabbi Hanina, matched each animal to an empire using Daniel's vision of four beasts. The first beast in Daniel's dream is described as being like a lion (Daniel 7:4): that is Babylon, the empire that destroyed the First Temple and carried Judah into exile. The second beast resembles a bear (Daniel 7:5): that is Medo-Persia, the empire of Cyrus and Ahasuerus, of Esther and Haman.

Rabbi Yohanan pressed deeper. He noticed that the Hebrew word for "bear" in Daniel could be read as the Aramaic word for "wolf," and this opened a different path. In the book of Jeremiah, all four empires appear in sequence: "a lion from the forest smote them" (Jeremiah 5:6) is Babylonia; "a wolf of the deserts will plunder them" is Medo-Persia; "a leopard lies in wait near their cities" is Greece; "everyone who emerges from them will be mauled" is Edom, meaning Rome. The man in Amos's parable keeps surviving. Keeps getting attacked. Keeps not quite being destroyed.

Then the midrash overlays the Song of Songs onto the same sequence. When God calls to Israel, "Open for me, my sister, my love, my dove, my faultless one" (Song of Songs 5:2), each term of endearment maps to a different exile. "My sister" is the Babylonian period. "My love" is the Median period. "My faultless one" is the Greek era. "My dove" is the Roman period, though here the midrash offers a poignant explanation: during the Greek era, the Temple was still standing and Israel was still offering doves on the altar. Even under foreign domination, the Temple functioned. Even under the Greeks, God's house remained. So "my dove" belongs not to the period when birds could be offered, but to the later exile when they could not, because by then the Temple was gone and the doves had nowhere to land.

A second interpretation in the same passage assigns names to the animals. The lion is Nebuchadnezzar. The bear is Belshazzar. And the snake who bites the man in his own home is Haman, who is compared to a serpent because of the particular quality of his threat: like a snake, he struck from close range, from within the Persian court, from inside the structures of power that should have offered protection.

And Haman's descendants carried the poison forward. The midrash notes that after Haman's execution, his sons wrote letters to the Persian king urging him to stop the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. The king complied and canceled the work (Ezra 4:21). When the people saw the order carried out, they began screaming "Woe!" And this is why, the midrash concludes, the Book of Esther opens with a word that contains that same cry. The Hebrew vayhi, "it was," sounds like vai, "woe." The very first syllable of the book is a groan.

Amos was talking about a man who could not find safety anywhere. The rabbis saw in him every generation that had survived one catastrophe only to face another. But the image also does something else. The man is still alive at the end of the verse. The snake bites him and the verse ends. It does not say he dies. He has been chased by Babylonia, mauled by Persia, driven through Greece and Rome, and he is standing, still, at home, against the wall, bitten but not finished.

The midrash begins the Book of Esther with this verse for a reason. The story of Purim is exactly that: the man who survived the lion, survived the bear, and then stood in his own home while the snake coiled.