The Blogs: PART II Paras (Persia, Iran) Versus Edom (Rome) — The Last Tempering Before Dawn | Yael Chaya Miriam Gray

There are hours in history when the world seems to lean forward, as if listening for hoofbeats that have not yet begun. The prophets knew these hours. They felt them in the bones of the earth, in the restlessness of nations rising for reasons they do not fully understand. In these hours, distinctions blur: political actors become archetypes, empires become symbols, and nations take their place in a choreography older than their borders, older than their languages, older even than their gods.

Paras (Persia, Iran) and Edom (western civilization springing from Rome) stand in that place now. Not because of the daily noise of news, but because the sages said that these two would clash at the end, and that the clash would not be their own doing.

The sages saw that history is not a straight line but a spiral: everything returns, but higher, sharper, nearer the fire.

It begins with a strange and terrible intimacy between the two kingdoms. Already in the Zohar, the entanglement of Paras and Edom swells like a dark tide:

וְיִתְעָרֵב מַלְכָּא דְפָרַס בְּמַלְכָּא דְאֱדוֹם וְיִתְעָרְבוּ תַּרְוֵיהוּ

“The king of Paras will provoke the king of Edom, and the two will be entangled.”

וְיִתְגַּלְגְּלוּ עַד דְּיִתְעָרֵב קָדוֹשׁ בְּרִיךְ הוּא בְּהוֹן

“And they will writhe until the Holy One becomes entangled with them.”

Here the Zohar whispers of a struggle that spirals out of human control. Paras and Edom do not merely war; they twist into each other until heaven itself descends into the fissure they have opened. The sages did not speak of geopolitics. They spoke of energies: the inner structure of judgment, the collision of ancient root-forces that once contended in the womb of Rivkah and now contend again on the stage of nations.

In Yalkut Shimoni, the prophecy sharpens. It is not metaphor now, but a world-shaping event:

בִּשְׁעָה שֶׁמֶּלֶךְ הַמָּשִׁיחַ בָּא, עוֹמֵד מֶלֶךְ פָּרָס וְמֹעֵר מִלְחָמָה בְּמֶלֶךְ אֱדוֹם

“When the King Messiah comes, the king of Paras rises and provokes war with the king of Edom.”

הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ־הוּא אוֹמֵר: אֲנִי מַשְׁמִידֵם תַּחְתֵּיהֶם

“The Holy One says: I will destroy them underneath them.”

The image is stark. Paras rises first. Edom answers. Their clash is not a side story but the prelude to redemption. And when their weapons lock and tremble, the prophecy says that God Himself steps into the fissure they have opened and overturns them both, each according to its measure, each according to its ancient seed.

Nothing in these prophecies is sentimental. Nothing is simple. Neither nation is “good.” Neither is “evil.” Each is a vessel for an older drama, one that began before either of them existed. The Talmud records this in the language of empires, but behind the language lies thunder:

רַבִּי יְהוּדָה אוֹמֵר פָּרַס מַפֶּלֶת אֶת רוֹמִיָּא

“Rabbi Yehuda says: Paras will overthrow Rome.”

Here “Rome” means Edom: the civilization built on the legacy of Esav, the empire of disciplined iron, the power that shaped the exile. And “Paras” means more than a country. It means a spiritual configuration: a nation with the strange and fated task of striking the last blow against the long shadow of Edom.

Yet the Talmud never stops with the visible. It leans forward and whispers a darker truth: every empire that becomes a rod of judgment in the divine hand ultimately becomes the judged. Nothing built on power escapes the reckoning. No kingdom remains upright when the wind of the end sweeps in.

This is why the sages emphasized an ambiguity: Paras rises against Edom, but Paras does not remain standing untouched. The midrash does not say that Paras is destroyed. Nor does it say they are spared. It says something far more mysterious:

אֲנִי מַשְׁמִידֵם תַּחְתֵּיהֶם

“I will destroy them underneath them.”

Underneath whom? Underneath what? Some read these words as the collapse of empires into the ruins they themselves have shaken. Others hear the quieter chord: that the destruction is not total, but internal, structural, the breaking of pride, the dismantling of a spirit that could not survive the revelation that follows.

So what remains? Only this: Paras rises in the final hour not because of its merit, but because of its role. Edom stands as the last great power in the long night of exile; Paras rises to break it. And the breaking is not a victory but a turning, a hinge in the architecture of redemption.

When they collide, the world will tremble in its foundations. Their clash is not political; it is cosmic, the echo of the struggle between Esav and the dark figure that wrestled him until dawn, the echo of the tension between the fourth beast of Daniel and the quiet endurance of those who walk in exile without surrendering their light.

When the dust settles, neither Paras nor Edom stands unchanged. Both become vessels emptied of their pride. Both become instruments spent in the hand that wielded them. And from that emptiness, a new voice rises, the voice that has waited since the first covenant was spoken into a world that had not yet learned to listen.

The prophets called this hour “the end of concealment.” The sages called it “the birth of the world.” In this hour, the nations fall not because they are hated, but because they have completed their purpose. The fall is not humiliation but release. And into the silence left in their wake, the beginning enters, like a dawn that has always been hidden behind the veil of history.

Paras and Edom are not villains in this story. Nor are they heroes. They are stages in the unfolding of a deeper truth, the scaffolding that is dismantled once the house is built. The sages did not speak of their rise and fall to curse them, but to prepare the soul for the moment when the world tilts and revelation rushes into the empty spaces that remain.

In the end, their war is only the cracking of the shell. The fruit is what follows.

~ YCM Gray, “הדיבור אינו שלי”

22 Cheshvan 5786