Q&A: And No One Will Covet Your Land When You Go Up to Appear Before the Lord Your God. But They Certainly Did Covet It, Didn’t They?
And No One Will Covet Your Land When You Go Up to Appear Before the Lord Your God. But They Certainly Did Covet It, Didn’t They?
Question
The Torah promised: “And no one will covet your land when you go up to appear before the Lord your God” three times a year.
And the Romans came up on Passover, and part of Jerusalem’s rapid downfall was precisely the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who overloaded Jerusalem’s limited infrastructure, and many died of hunger and thirst, from epidemics spreading, etc., and within a few months everything collapsed.
In any case, the Torah’s promise turned out to be unreliable…
How do you explain that away?
Answer
Are there no explanations lacking? The promise is that the pilgrimage would not be exploited so that people would seize our property while we had left home. But an ordinary war is still possible.
Discussion on Answer
It’s enough that the pilgrimage itself did not hold up as promised
That already raises a serious question mark…
Eshkol,
As far as I know, many Jews from the Galilee went up to Jerusalem in order to fight the Romans, who massacred the northern settlements after Florus’s humiliation and the outbreak of the revolts, unrelated to the commandment of pilgrimage. More generally, Josephus says that the Jews could have withstood the siege had they not fought one another (“Jerusalem was destroyed only because of baseless hatred”?) and burned their own food storehouses.
I wouldn’t build on the claim that the cause of the destruction was the pilgrimage.