Per ardua ad astra,
through adversity Jews reach the stars,
and with luck often Venus, although Mars
is thought by the diaspora
sometimes politically
incorrect, a view that can’t be changed
by those who’re from reality estranged,
hypocritically,
far too often, claiming
that in the hunt for land they have no dog,
living in what I would call the fog
of peace at which they’re aiming.
Deuteronomy implies, in the Septuagint.
that Jews’ diaspora would be a curse,
producing a prediction that is hardly worse
than lies their enemies polemically still print.
In “Scattered Seeds: The Origins of Diaspora,” Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2025, Malka Z. Simkovich points out that the Bible’s first reference to the diaspora of the Jews is made by the Septuagint’s translation of Deut. 25:28. She writes:
Whenָ the Septuagint’s translators arrived at a verse in which Moses predicts that the Israelites would become a horror (za’ava) before the foreign nations if the terms of God’s covenant were violated, they searched for the right Greek word to describe the Israelites’ condition. Although they were not emissaries of the high priest of Jerusalem, the translators seem to have had personal ties to the Land of Israel, which influenced the word they chose. In fact, it was one that didn’t yet exist in that form: “diaspora,” from dia-, meaning over or through, and -sperein, meaning to scatter like seeds (the modern word “spore” is also derived from the verb).
The crucial verse in Deuteronomy is one in which Moses predicts that if the Israelites violate the covenant, God will respond by ensuring that they are vanquished by their enemies and humiliated before other nations. The New JPS translation reads:
The LORD will put you to rout before your enemies; you shall march out against them by a single road, but flee from them by many roads; and you shall become a horror [za’ava] to all the kingdoms of the earth. (Deut. 28:25)
Eleven verses later, Moses clarifies the nature of this humiliation by forecasting that the people will be expelled from their land: “The Lord will drive you, and the king you have set over you, to a nation unknown to you or your fathers” (Deut. 28:36). The Septuagint scholars read this horrifying vision of expulsion back into the earlier verse, and za’ava became “diaspora.”
Simkovich’s article suggests to me that the hateful statement made by Nazi antisemites, “the Jews are our misfortune” was implied by its translators in their transformation of the plain meaning of Deut. 25:28.
Meanwhile, fires have been destroying large areas of Los Angeles County, where I live. This has caused me to realize that the survival of the diaspora identified by the Septuagint’s translation of Deut. 25:28 is comparable to the א֖וּד מֻצָּ֥ל מֵאֵֽשׁ, a brand plucked from the fire, that Zechariah described in Zech. 3:2:
וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יְהֹוָ֜ה אֶל־הַשָּׂטָ֗ן יִגְעַ֨ר יְהֹוָ֤ה בְּךָ֙ הַשָּׂטָ֔ן וְיִגְעַ֤ר יְהֹוָה֙ בְּךָ֔ הַבֹּחֵ֖ר בִּירֽוּשָׁלָ֑͏ִם הֲל֧וֹא זֶ֦ה א֖וּד מֻצָּ֥ל מֵאֵֽשׁ׃
But [the angel of] GOD said to the Accuser, “GOD rebukes you, O Accuser; GOD who has chosen Jerusalem rebukes you! For this is a brand plucked from the fire.”
The comparison of the survival of the diaspora, which survived the dire fate predicted by the Septuagint in Deut. 25:28, to survivors whom Zech. 3:2 applied the term “ a brand plucked from the fire,” reminded me of survival after fires in Los Angeles of victims who had taken the precaution to fireproof their homes (see the article by Eli Saslow in “They Built Their Fireproof Dream Home. Even if It Lasted, Would They?” NYT, 1/19/25).
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
