Rabbi Yochanan once taught that the royal mount of King Yannai (the Hasmonean Alexander Jannaeus, who reigned 103 to 76 BCE) contained sixty myriads of cities. Each city held a population equal to the number of Israelites who left Egypt at the Exodus, roughly six hundred thousand adult men and their families. Three of those cities held double that number, and each bore a name that explained its character.
The first was Caphar Bish, the Village of Evil. It earned the name because it had no hospice, no inn, no open table for the stranger who arrived after dark. Hebrew tradition measures a town's goodness by how it treats travelers, and this town failed the test by simply closing its doors. The second was Caphar Shichlaiim, the Village of Water-cresses, so called because its inhabitants lived mostly on this humble herb from the streams. And the third was Caphar Dichraya, the Village of Male Children, because, the tradition explains, its women first bore only boys, then later bore only girls, and then ceased bearing altogether, as if the village had completed its allotted work in a single surge.
Ulla, the Babylonian sage, heard these claims and snorted. I have seen that place, he said. It could not hold sixty myriads of sticks, let alone sixty myriads of cities. A Sadducee, hearing this, took it as proof that the Rabbis lied. Rabbi Chanina answered with a verse. The inheritance of a deer (Jeremiah 3:19), the verse calls the land of Israel. And just as the skin of a deer, after the body is removed, shrinks and contracts, so too the Land of Israel, when emptied of its people, contracts. The numbers were honest. The land itself had shrunk. This passage, preserved in Harris's 1901 Hebraic Literature, offers a mystical geography in which exile is not just a loss of population but a literal shriveling of the ground.