‘A drop in the bucket’
Stuck between the mighty pharaohs on one side, and a succession of great Mesopotamian empires on the other, Israel was always destined to be a small fish in a big and dangerous pond. By the middle of the sixth century BC, the Jewish kingdoms had been conquered repeatedly, and a decent chunk of the population was living in painful exile in Babylon. Amid all this geopolitical gloom, the Book of Isaiah had some words of comfort.
Compared to God, says the prophet, ‘the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance.’ These days, in keeping with the modern enthusiasm for ‘super-sizing,’ the ‘bucket’ is often replaced with the ‘ocean.’
