What Jacob Saw When He Looked at Israel in Exile

There is a verse in Ecclesiastes that sounds like defeat: “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding; but time and chance happen to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11). Kohelet Rabbah, one of the oldest rabbinic collections on Ecclesiastes, compiled in the early medieval period, uses this verse not as despair but as a lens. And the figure it places under that lens is Jacob.

Jacob, who wrestled an angel until dawn. Jacob, who ran from Esau and bargained with Laban and built twelve tribes from nothing. Jacob, who should have been the swift one, the strong one, the wise one. And yet Jacob’s descendants were enslaved. Jacob’s people went into exile. Time and chance happened to them too.

But Kohelet Rabbah does not stop at the reversal. It pivots. The same collection that acknowledges how much Israel suffered turns immediately to what God declared through the prophet: “He declares His words to Jacob, His statutes and ordinances to Israel” (Psalms 147:19). The dispossessed nation, the text insists, was also the nation that received something no other people received. Not consolation. Not sympathy. Law — which the tradition understood as a form of election, not punishment.

Shemot Rabbah, a collection of rabbinic interpretations on Exodus compiled in late antiquity, picks up this verse and builds an argument. What was given to Jacob’s descendants was given to no other nation. Not law as burden. Law as distinction. Every other nation received commandments from a human sovereign who often did not observe them himself. God, the Midrash argues, kept the same statutes He commanded Israel to keep. That symmetry, that reciprocity, made the covenant something different from ordinary legislation. It made it a relationship.

Then came the Golden Calf, and everything pivoted again.

Shemot Rabbah, in one of its most striking passages, makes a claim that should stop any reader cold: had Israel not built the Golden Calf, there would have been no exiles at all. Not Babylon. Not Rome. Not the long centuries of displacement. The angel of death would have had no dominion over them. The tablets of the Ten Commandments, carved in divine fire, carried within their letters some quality that would have made death itself retreat. The calf did not just break a commandment. It broke a whole future.

And yet, even in exile, something remarkable persisted. Vayikra Rabbah, a midrash on Leviticus from fifth-century Palestine, finds a prophecy hidden in the sales law of Leviticus 25:14. Rabbi Hiyya reads the Hebrew word for “sell” not as “if you sell” but as “when you are sold” — a single-letter shift that turns a commercial regulation into a map of history. You will be sold to the nations. It is coming. But the text does not end there. Because even then, God would not leave. Like Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah who walked through Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace and came out the other side with a fourth figure beside them, Israel in exile would never be entirely alone.

The rabbis who compiled these collections were writing in the centuries after Rome destroyed the Temple and scattered the Jewish people. They were not engaging in abstract theology. They were trying to understand their own moment. The Ecclesiastes verse about time and chance was not a philosophical puzzle. It was the question of a people who had done everything right and still lost everything.

Jacob’s name became a nation’s name. A nation’s name became a record of displacement. And the displacement, the rabbis insisted, was never without a witness. The God who commanded Jacob to walk the land went into exile with his children when the land was taken. The covenant was not void because the land was lost. The covenant went with them, and God went with the covenant.

Time and chance happen to them all. But they do not happen alone.

The three midrashim — Kohelet Rabbah, Shemot Rabbah, Vayikra Rabbah — were not written in peaceful times. The rabbis who shaped these collections were living under Roman and Byzantine rule, watching their communities pay heavy taxes, facing periodic restrictions on Jewish practice, and trying to sustain a coherent religious life without a Temple, without a priesthood, without the institutional center that had organized Jewish worship for centuries. When they wrote about Jacob’s name becoming synonymous with exile, they were writing about themselves. When they insisted that God went into exile with Israel, they were not speaking theoretically. They were describing what they needed to believe in order to keep going. The God who follows his people into slavery, who walks into Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace, who is sold into exile along with the people — that is the God the rabbis could pray to in a world without the Temple. The exegesis was also pastoral. The theology was also survival.