Commentary for Leviticus 26:26

מטה לחם THE STAFF OF YOUR BREAD: מַטֵּה — This expression denotes [a source of] “support”, similar to “staff (מַטֵּה) of strength” (Jeremiah 48:17).

עשר נשים, meaning “many;” the number “10” is not to be understood literally. It is used in the same sense in Job 19,3 עשר פעמים תכלימני, “time and again you humiliated me.”

ואפו עשר נשים, “and ten women will bake (in one oven).” This number is not to be understood literally, but is an example of an unusually large number, not appropriate for the subject under discussion. We find an example of this in Job 19,3 where he said: “you humiliate me ten times.” It means that Job complained about being humiliated time and again. The reason the number “ten” is used to illustrate such concepts of something occurring frequently is because this number is the conclusion of a number of digits which are all included in it. The number “seven” has similar properties as it includes all the days of the week, a recurring phenomenon. When Solomon writes in Proverbs 24,16 that a righteous person can fall seven times and recover, this does not mean that he cannot recover an eighth time, but that he can recover after having fallen many times. The Torah describes Yaakov as prostrating himself before his brother Esau “seven times” in Genesis 33,3. The number “seven” need not be understood literally but is a metaphor for “many times.” The reason that that number has become the symbol of “many times” may be that the only sequential combination of letters in the aleph bet which produces the number seven are the letters ג and ד, a combination of these two numbers as letters yields the word דג, fish, a species whose rate of multiplying is described as ישרצו, in Genesis 1,20 as “the waters shall teem with fish.” Yaakov applied this to human beings also when he blessed Joseph’s children wishing וידגו לרב בקרב הארץ, “may they increase abundantly as fish,” in Genesis 48,16. We may therefore view both the number seven and the number ten as metaphors for large numbers of something.