Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel drew a startling comparison between two empires — Egypt after the Exodus and Rome in its prime — to illustrate how completely the departure of Israel had gutted Egyptian power.
Look at Rome, Rabbi Shimon said. Consider the wealth and grandeur of that guilty kingdom. Not a single one of its legions is idle. Every unit of the Roman military machine is active day and night, engaged in conquest, patrolling borders, maintaining the vast apparatus of imperial control. Rome never sleeps. Rome never stops.
Now contrast that with Egypt after Israel left. All of its legions — every military unit, every regiment, every chariot division — sat idle. The entire Egyptian war machine ground to a halt. Without the Israelites, Egypt had no labor force to sustain its economy, no productive base to fund its armies, no capacity to project power. The legions that had once terrorized the ancient world simply stopped functioning.
The comparison is deliberately provocative. Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel lived under Roman occupation and knew firsthand what an active, aggressive empire looked like. By holding Rome up as the standard of imperial energy and then showing Egypt as its opposite — paralyzed, idle, emptied — he made the point viscerally. Israel's departure did not merely inconvenience Egypt. It hollowed the empire out entirely.
The teaching carries an implicit warning for Rome as well. If Egypt, the greatest power of the ancient world, was reduced to nothing when it lost the Jewish people, what fate awaited the empire that currently oppressed them?