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TWO PASSAGES OF REBUKE
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If they fail to obey the teachings of the Torah, they will be punished with the fall of the Temple and with exile.
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Many verses in the Torah warned the Jews living in the Holy Land that the time would come when the Holy Temple in Jerusalem would be destroyed, and the People of Israel would be scattered to the four corners of the earth.
"But if you will not hearken unto Me, and will not do all these commandments; and if ye shall reject My statutes, and if your soul abhor Mine ordinances, so that ye will not do all My commandments, but break My covenant" (Leviticus 26:14-15)
And I will make your cities a waste, and will bring your sanctuaries to desolation, and I will not smell the savour of your sweet odors. And I will bring the land into desolation; and your enemies that dwell therein shall be astonished at it. (Ibid 31 and 32)
In another instance, G-d warned His people:
Take heed to yourselves, lest your heart be deceived, and you stray aside, and serve other gods, and worship them; and the anger of the L-rd be kindled against you, and He close up the heaven, so that there shall be no rain, and the ground shall not yield its fruit; and you perish quickly from off the goodly land which the L-rd is giving you. (Deuteronomy 11:16-17)
"Because of our sins, we have been exiled from our Land…" (from the prayerbook).
Sad to say, these and other prophecies of exile and suffering have come about and been completely fulfilled. In the times of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, no one could believe that the Sanctuary, which was the focal point of all Israel, and of many gentiles as well, might one day fall to our enemies. Despite the fact that it was a "given" in the people's minds that the Temple would always be there, and, needless to say, always remain in Jewish hands, Heaven decreed otherwise. As we know, in the year 422 B.C.E., and again in the year 70 C.E, the Temple fell. With the destruction of the Second Temple, hundreds of thousands of Jews were slaughtered, the survivors were sold as slaves, and the people banished from their land.
The Torah contains two distinct passages which rebuke the people and state in no uncertain terms that if they fail to obey the teachings of the Torah, they will be punished with the fall of the Temple and with exile. One of these passages appears in Chapter 26 of Leviticus, the other in Deuteronomy 28.
Each of the two passages refers to a different period. The verses in Leviticus predicted the fall of the First Temple, and the subsequent exile, while the rebuke in Deuteronomy clearly foretold the fall of the Second Temple and the exile which followed.
Let us take a closer look at each one, and discover how they differ.
In Leviticus we read:
And I will scatter you among the nations, and I will draw out the sword after you; and your land shall be a desolation, and your cities shall be a waste.
Then shall the land be paid her Sabbaths, as long as it lies desolate, and you are in your enemies' land; even then shall the land rest, and repay her Sabbaths.
As long as it lies desolate, it shall have rest – that same rest which it did not have on your Sabbaths when you dwelt upon it. (Leviticus 26:33-35)
We learn from here that this exile is intrinsically connected to the "Sabbaths" which were not observed when the people were living in their homeland. What is the meaning of the word "Sabbaths" here, and how does a desolate land "observe" them?
In these verses, the word "Sabbath" refers not to the seventh day of the week, but rather to the seventh year, as described in the previous chapter of Leviticus:
And the L-rd spoke to Moses at Mount Sinai, saying:
Speak unto the Children of Israel, and say unto them: When you come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a Sabbath unto the L-rd. Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the produce thereof.
But in the seventh year shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath unto the L-rd; you shalt neither sow your field, nor prune your vineyard. (Ibid. 25:1-4)
Here, and in the verses of rebuke that follow, the Sabbath mentioned is the sabbatical year, when the land is to lie fallow. While living in their homeland, the people of Israel were commanded not to cultivate the land every seventh year, but to let it lie, unplowed and unsown.
Furthermore, any crops which grew of themselves were not to be harvested by the owners of the fields, but left for one and all to gather for their own use. Similarly, the fruits of the orchard, grove, and vineyard could not be used for commerce by the owner of the land. He was required to allow access to anyone who wished to pick the fruit for non-commercial use.
Another form of "Sabbath of the land" was the jubilee year, which occurred once every fifty years. After seven full cycles of six years plus a sabbatical year, the jubilee year was declared. Just as in the sabbatical year, the land was not to be cultivated or the crops harvested for commerce.
When the Jewish People failed to observe these laws completely, they incurred the punishment of exile. For how long? The verse in Leviticus clearly tells us:
As long as it (the land) lies desolate, it shall have rest – that same rest which it did not have on your Sabbaths when you dwelt upon it. (Leviticus 26:35)
The exile would continue until the land had been compensated for all the years that the fields should have been left to lie fallow. Calculations show that the total number of Sabbatical years and jubilee years in the period is seventy.
It is striking to note that the exiles in Babylonia were given permission to return to their homeland precisely seventy years after the destruction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.
This corresponds precisely with what is reported in Chronicles II 36:17-21:
Therefore He brought upon them the king of the Chaldeans, who slew their young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary… And all the vessels of the House of the L-rd, and the treasures of the House of G-d, and the treasures of the king and of his princes, all these he brought to Babylon.
And they burnt down the House of G-d, and broke down the wall of Jerusalem, and burnt all her palaces with fire, and destroyed all her cherished vessels.
And he exiled to Babylonia all those who had escaped the sword, and they were servants to him and to his sons, until the reign of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the L-rd, by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had been paid her Sabbaths, for as long as she lay desolate she rested, to complete seventy years.
It is worthy of note again that the portion of rebuke in Deuteronomy, which refers mainly to the destruction of the Second Temple and the exile which followed, does not mention any period of time in connection with the events it describes. It is only the section in Leviticus, which refers to the Babylonian exile when the First Temple fell, that states a specific number of years that would elapse before the people returned to their homeland.
And, indeed, we see that this has come true. The exile following the destruction of the Second Temple has plagued us for nearly two thousand years, and continues yet today, when over half of the Jewish population of the world is still dispersed over the face of the globe. Even those who were fortunate enough to return to Israel's homeland cannot claim to be living in full peace and security. We have not yet merited to rebuild the Holy Temple, and we have not yet been privileged to witness the full redemption as it is promised in the Scriptures, when peace and harmony reign supreme.
It is instructive to compare the two sections in question, and to see just how each one applies to the period to which it refers.
In Leviticus, we find mention of the sword, wild beasts, plague, famine, and last of all, exile. In his commentary to these verses, Rabbi Moses Nachmanides (the Ramban) writes that each of the tragedies mentioned in the text actually materialized in the period immediately prior to the fall of the First Temple. The descriptions in the Book of Kings and in Jeremiah substantiate his statement; everything happened just as had been predicted thousands of years beforehand. In Leviticus, the text does not state that the exiled Jews will be enslaved by their captors, as stated in Deuteronomy. This clearly corresponds to the events of the fall of the First Temple.
Although there was a degree of submission to Nebuchadnezzar before the First Temple fell, it did not take the form of outright slavery. Rather, the crown was required to pay tribute to the Babylonians, and was subject to Nebuchadnezzar's approval in certain matters.
Regarding the Second Temple, the text in Deuteronomy warns:
"And you shall serve your enemy whom G-d will send against you in hunger and in thirst and stripped of everything and lacking all." (Deuteronomy 28:48)
In the case of the First Temple, Judea continued to be an autonomous state, subject to its recognition of Babylonia, right up to the destruction of the Sanctuary. The people did not suffer crippling restrictions and oppression such as those which Rome imposed on them with a cruel, iron hand before the fall of the Second Temple. Even after their Temple had been destroyed and the survivors taken into exile, the Jewish people were able to continue as a consolidated national unit, albeit displaced, in the land of the Tigris and the Euphrates.
The situation was drastically different in the time of the Second Temple, as is intimated by the verses in Deuteronomy. Under the Romans, the curses of the rebuke were fulfilled amidst barbaric oppression and heartless persecution.
In the Holy Land, the Romans ruled with arrogance and brutality. Gessius Florus, appointed procurator of Judea by the Romans in the year 68 C.E., used the power of his office to rob, murder, oppress, plunder, and mercilessly exploit the Jews. Unlike his predecessors, he had no shame at being caught persecuting the innocent. During his office, bands of thieves roamed the land without restriction, knowing that Florus would grant them impunity for any form of theft and murder so long as he was given an ample portion of the spoils.
Josephus, who witnessed the events first-hand, describes Florus' rule in his Wars of the Jews:
Now Gessius Florus ... filled Judea with abundance of miseries. He ... brought along with him his wife Cleopatra, who was no way different from him in wickedness. This Florus was so wicked, and so violent in the use of his authority, that the Jews took Albinus (the former procurator, who was far from kind to the Jews) to have been a benefactor, (in comparison to Florus), so excessive were the mischiefs that he brought upon them. For Albinus concealed his wickedness, and was careful that it might not be discovered to all men; but Gessius Florus, as though he had been sent on purpose to show his crimes to every body, made a pompous ostentation of them to our nation, as never omitting any sort of violence, nor any unjust sort of punishment; for he was not to be moved by pity, and never was satisfied with any degree of gain that came in his way … (He was) a partner with the robbers themselves ... depending on him, that he would save them. ...there were no bounds set to the nation's miseries...
In another instance, when a delegation of respected Jews sought to placate the irate procurator, their words fell on ears that were not deaf, but contorted by animosity and avarice. Rather than ameliorating their precarious situation, the hapless Jews brought more violence upon themselves and their people. Josephus describes the scene:
Florus … called out aloud to the soldiers to plunder ... and to slay (whomever) they met ... So the soldiers, taking this exhortation ... agreeable to their desire of gain, did not only plunder the place they were sent to, but forced themselves into every house, they slew its inhabitants…
...and no method of plunder was omitted; they also caught many of the quiet people, and brought them before Florus, whom he first chastised with stripes, and then crucified. Accordingly, the whole number of those that were destroyed that day, with their wives and children ... was about three thousand and six hundred.
And what made this calamity the heavier was this new method of Roman barbarity; for Florus ventured then to do what no one had done before, that is, to have men of the equestrian order whipped and nailed to the cross ... although they were by birth Jews, yet they were of Roman dignity notwithstanding.
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