Breaking the Historical Line

Had Blücher been a little late at Waterloo,
or Cleopatra’s nose been just a little shorter,

as speculated counterfactually by Blaise Pascal,
or had there been a lot of Jews, not just a few,
Napoleon and Mark Anthony would have been

seen as heroes, and the Jewish people as a bigger rascal.

If from Jerusalem God had not turned back all the forces of Sennacherib,
the history of the world would never have included
its fundamentally important three

monotheistically inspired, mostly intolerant religions,
of which Monty Pythonic members of them all regard the others

as stool pigeons,
treating those that aren’t their own as being as deluded
as those misogynists who seem to wish that God to Adam

would give back a rib.

Willian H. McNeill, late University of Chicago Professor History, once stated that the failure of  Sennacherib’s forces  to capture Jerusalem-shaped the history of the world far more than any other historical event he knew. According to the Sennacherib Prism in the British Museum they were only able to “shut up Hezekiah in Jerusalem like a bird in a cage,” phraseology which Rabbi Meir Soloveichik has pointed out echoes the way that before the exodus God hovered over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt like a mother bird, preventing the destruction  of the Israelites’ firstborn while He destroyed all the Egyptian firstborn.