Drawing on close readings of an understudied Hebrew-language archive – the journal Ma’arakhot – this article examines the emergence of a new political and technical vernacular for the ‘doing’ of national security. That vernacular was both practical and poetic/rhetorical. That is, it aimed to produce intuitive Hebrew-language equivalents for strategic, operational, and tactical concepts used in foreign – especially British, Soviet, and American – sources; and to foster a vibrant, expressive, Hebrew-language political vernacular in which they could appear. The paper then consider tensions that arose between these two aims, and the ways in which the journal’s editors and translators attempted – ultimately unsuccessfully – to deal with them. ‘Realist’ theory, I argue, could only work if rooted in a mythic framework for which it could not itself give an account. Unable to resolve these tensions, the journal reverted to a fulsome, faux-biblical prose style, producing what I call an ‘absent sublime.’ The paper describes the ‘absent sublime’ in some detail, along with the specific stylistic choices upon which it relied. It then considers the backlash against such usages, in light of the tensions they conceal.