Deliverance Foreshadowed?

There are significant differences between reading the Torah and reading, say, a novel. One of them stems from the fractalized and interconnected use of language in the Torah. Every verse, phrase and word is there for a reason – and that reason can be discovered by connecting those usages across the text.

For example: we know that the idea of predestination and fate, while present in the Torah, are quite rare. For all of Genesis, it is clear that man has free will, and G-d rarely intervenes. The text presents most of Genesis without commentary (at least, not at the time). The big exception is the Covenant Between the Parts, when G-d tells Avraham that his descendants would be slaves for 400 years. Nevertheless, this is the exception that seems to prove the rule: we are not merely actors in a play, reading the lines and making the choices that G-d has in mind for us. We are not puppets whose strings are merely pulled by our Creator: we have free will, and that free will means that we can change our futures through our actions in the present.

So it is intriguing when we come across other, subtler, examples of foreshadowing. Here’s one we just saw:

The word for “deliverance,” yeshua, is not common in the Torah. The very first time it is used is for Jacob’s blessing of Dan:

Dan shall be a serpent by the road,
A viper by the path,
That bites the horse’s heels
So that his rider is thrown backward.

I wait for Your deliverance, O G-d !

The next time the word is found is when the people stand on the edge of the Sea of Reeds:

But Moses said to the people, “Have no fear! Stand by, and witness the deliverance which G-d will work for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today you will never see again.

And then, in the Song at the Sea, Moses and the people sing:

G-d is my strength and might;
He is become my deliverance.

Jacob prophecies a deliverance (Dan means “judgement”) – a reckoning wherein the rider will be unhorsed. And the next two times the word is used in the text, that reckoning takes place!

P.S. Yeshua only occurs one more time, much later in the text:

So Jeshurun grew fat and kicked—
You grew fat and gross and coarse —
They forsook the God who made them
And spurned the Rock of their deliverance.