Three Wars and the Figure Walking Out of Edom

Rabbi Ishmael rose without explanation and sent for every member of the court. Great and small, he said. All of them. The summons went out to the third entrance of the house of God, and the sages came.

He sat on a chair of pure marble. His father Elisha had given it to him, brought from his mother's dowry, and the weight of that lineage was in the seat itself, cold stone worn smooth by the hands of the family. Around him the full assembly gathered: Rabban Simon ben Gamliel, Rabbi Eliezer the Great, Rabbi Elazar ben Dama, Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Judah ben Babba, and the others whose names filled the study halls of the age. They took their places. Between the gathered sages and the assembly standing behind them, torches of light appeared, and spiderwebs of fire, a partition neither side could cross. The teacher Rabbi Nehunya ben Hakkanah sat and began to set in order the teachings of the Merkavah, the descent and ascent, how one goes down and how one rises, and this assembly of marble and flame was his classroom.

It was inside this gathering, insulated from the ordinary world by fire and marble and the weight of consecrated company, that Rabbi Ishmael brought forward what he had learned about the end of days.

What Balaam Heard in His Grief

The source of the prophecy ran further back than the assembly. Balaam, the seer Balak hired to curse Israel, had noticed something in the structure of nations that disturbed him. Of all the peoples God had created, only one bore God's name embedded inside it. Only Israel. But then Balaam looked again and saw the name of Ishmael, Abraham's eldest son, ancestor of peoples beyond count. Close enough to Israel's name to echo it. Close enough to create a kind of shadow.

Balaam's cry was a recognition, not a curse. "Alas, who shall live when God establishes him?" (Numbers 24:23). Who survives the days when the children of Ishmael rise? The lament sat inside scripture for generations, waiting for someone to pull the thread.

Rabbi Ishmael pulled it.

Fifteen Signs Before the End

He enumerated them, one after another, in the order he had received them. Fifteen things the children of Ishmael would do in the land of Israel in the latter days.

They will measure the land with ropes. They will change a cemetery into a resting place for sheep, a dunghill. They will measure from the tops of the mountains. Falsehood will multiply and truth will be hidden. Statutes will be removed far from Israel. Sins will increase. The worm-crimson dye will appear in the wool, and insects will cover paper and pen. A rock of the kingdom will be hewn down. The desolated cities will be rebuilt and the roads swept. Gardens and parks will be planted. The broken walls of the Temple will be fenced in. A building will rise in the holy place. Two brothers will rule as princes at the end.

And then, after the two princes, a branch. The Son of David (Daniel 2:44).

The sages in the assembly were quiet. The signs were not all ruin. Roads swept, cities rebuilt, gardens planted. It was the building in the holy place that no one could fully look at, and the two princes, and then, after, the branch. Fourteen things before the fifteenth. Destruction woven into construction until you could not say where one ended and the other began.

Three Wars on Three Fronts

From Balaam's lament and the fifteen signs, Rabbi Ishmael moved to the final convulsions. He drew the image from Isaiah's vision (Isaiah 21:15): "For they fled away from the swords." The word cherev, sword, but plural. He read the three plurals as three separate wars, each one with its own theater.

The first war in the forest of Arabia. "From the drawn sword." A desert war, the drawn blade meaning a conflict begun, a force in motion, an army already past the heart of it of return.

The second on the sea. "From the bent bow." Fleets and coasts, nations fighting over water, the bow drawn but not yet released, everything suspended above the surface.

The third in the great city, which is Rome. "From the grievousness of the war." More grievous than the first two combined. The city that had burned the Temple, held Israel's exiles in its belly for generations, sat at the end of the sequence as the place where everything converged. The third war was not just greater in scale. It was the culminating pressure, the weight that would finally crack Rome open.

The Figure from Edom

And from that cracked city, from the smoke of the third and most grievous war, a figure would emerge walking toward the land of Israel.

Isaiah had seen him too (Isaiah 63:1): "Who is this that comes from Edom, with crimsoned garments from Bozrah? This that is glorious in his apparel, marching in the greatness of his strength? I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save."

Edom was Rome's name in the tradition. Bozrah was its heartland. The crimson on the garments was the residue of war, the color of what a man carries when he walks out of the last battle of history. The figure would see the destruction of the armies, both the first and the second and the third, all the wars witnessed and survived, and then he would come into the land.

The Son of David coming not from the east or the sky or the sea. Coming from Edom. Walking out of Rome's wreckage in red.

Rabbi Ishmael offered no consolation speech, no exhortation. The torches of fire still stood between the sages and the assembly. The marble chair held its cold weight. He had named what was coming: fifteen signs, three wars, one figure. The session of the Sanhedrin at the house of God did what any proper court does with testimony. It received it, and the assembly stood in silence.