“You have.”
“On June 28, 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was riding in a motorcade through the city of Sarajevo when he was assassinated by a Bosnian Serb nationalist. In response to the assassination, the Austro-Hungarian Empire began mobilizing for war against Serbia. Within a month the Russian Empire began mobilizing for war in support of Serbia. Germany in turn began mobilizing for war against Russia, as did the Austro-Hungarian Empire. France in turn entered into war on the side of Russia. In an attempt to defeat France, Germany invaded Belgium. Belgium in turn appealed to Britain. Britain in turn declared war against Germany. By August 1914 the First World War had begun.
“The Ottoman Empire was not openly allied with any of the European powers, though in August it had signed a secret treaty with Germany. But on October 29, 2014, Ottoman warships, acting under the orders of the newly appointed German admiral of the Ottoman navy, launched a surprise attack on Russian ports in the Black Sea. On November 2 Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire. On November 5, France did the same, as did Britain.
“So the two empires, the British and the Ottoman, were drawn into the conflict on opposite sides of the war. Each was destined to play a part in the fulfillment of prophecy. By the autumn of 1914 it was all in place.”
“And the Ottoman Empire,” I added, “was the possessor of the land. And if you remove any of those events . . . it doesn’t happen.”
“Yes.”
“So God was behind those events?”
“Man was behind those events. But God works all things together, the good and the evil, all the pieces of the puzzle, for the purpose of redemption. But there were other pieces in the mystery . . . smaller ones. One of them was born in the Russian Empire in 1874 to a Jewish family, the third of fifteen children. He had a passion for science and as a young man had moved to Germany to study chemistry. But he had a deeper passion, the dream that his people would one day return to their ancient homeland. And while still pursuing his studies, he attended the Second Zionist Congress convened by Theodor Herzl.”
“What was his name?”
“His name was Chaim Weizmann. In 1904 he moved to Britain and was employed by the Chemistry Department of the University of Manchester. Not long after taking up that post, Weizmann’s path happened to cross with that of a renowned British politician and member of Parliament who at that time happened to be representing the same district in which Weizmann lived. His name was Arthur Balfour. Balfour was a man of deep Christian faith. His encounter with Weizmann left a lasting impression and a growing conviction concerning the return of the Jewish people to the land.
“Then came the events that would lead to the First World War, which in turn would lead to Weizmann’s appointment to the British Admiralty laboratories and as an adviser to the newly established Ministry of Munitions, the head of which was David Lloyd George. Lloyd George’s knowledge of the Bible had predisposed him to the dream of a Jewish homeland in Israel. But it was Weizmann’s impact on Lloyd George that would be critical in the events that followed.
“At the time of Weizmann’s appointment, British and Allied forces found themselves in the midst of a crisis over the shortage of a chemical vital for the war effort, acetone. Weizmann came up with a process of producing the substance in mass quantities. It would prove a key factor in helping the Allies attain victory. But it was another chain of events that would lead to one of the most critical moments in two thousand years of Jewish history. In December 1916 the government of the British prime minister H. H. Asquith collapsed. The man who succeeded him was David Lloyd George. For his foreign secretary, Lloyd George appointed Arthur Balfour. So the two men who were in favor of a Jewish homeland were suddenly lifted to the heights of world power at that critical moment. If Asquith’s government had not collapsed just when it did, what was about to happen would never have taken place. You see, Asquith was against the idea of a Jewish homeland. And it was only in that small window of time that these things could have come about.”
“So his government had to crumble,” I replied.
“Yes,” said the Oracle, “and had to crumble just at that moment.”
“Why then?”
“Because it was the very end of 1916. 1917 was coming. And 1917 was the year of Jubilee. And it just happened to be the same year that the British Empire would be placed in the position of determining the future of the land of Israel. And as the Jubilee concerns the return of one’s ancestral land, so world history would now turn to the Middle East and to the land of the ancient inheritance.
“As the year of Jubilee began, members of the British government held a conference concerning Palestine. By the middle of the year Balfour called for a draft to be made for a public declaration concerning the land. By autumn the British Cabinet was in discussion over the form the declaration would take.
“But it was determined that the plan wouldn’t proceed unless it had the support of the American president. On October 16, 1917, the British government was informed that the president, Woodrow Wilson, was in favor of the declaration. On October 31 the declaration was approved by the British War Cabinet. Two days later, on November 2, it went forth in the form of a letter penned by the foreign secretary, which included a single sentence that would come to be known as the Balfour Declaration. It declared,
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object..."1
“It’s the Jubilee declaration,” I said, “the return of the land to the original owner.”
“Yes,” said the Oracle, “and it must return in the fiftieth year. So it had to happen in that year, 1917. And so it did, and just in time, as the year neared its end. And in the Jubilee the transference is a matter of law. It has to be recognized in some way by the reigning authorities. And so it was the British Empire, a reigning authority, that issued the recognition. That recognition would be both momentous and historic. It was the first such declaration of any major power since ancient times, the first since the Roman Empire drove the Jewish people out of their land two thousand years earlier.”
“My vision ended with a Roman soldier . . . ”
“Yes, and it began with a British officer riding with a document. The document was the Balfour Declaration.”
“And the other riders?” I asked.
“They represented the powers that had taken the land and occupied it in the two thousand years when the Jewish people were in exile . . . the Ottomans, the Mamluks, the Crusaders, the Byzantines, the Romans.”
“So it went back to the beginning, to the Roman soldier. And then he disappeared.”
“Yes, just as the Jubilee undoes the occupations of those to whom the land does not belong.”
“You said it was the first time that any major power had supported the return of the Jewish people to their land since ancient times, since the time of Rome. But Rome never supported the Jewish people coming back to the land.”
“No,” he said, “Rome scattered them.”
“Was there ever another power that did support their return?”
“One other,” he said, “only one . . . two and a half thousand years ago, when the Persian emperor Cyrus allowed the Jewish people to leave their exile and go back to their homeland.”
“Was there a declaration to that as well?”
“Yes, the Cyrus decree. From ancient times God has used the words of kings, world rulers, to confirm His purposes, to establish them, and to inaugurate what is yet to come. In both cases, the ancient and the modern, the declaration would lead to a massive change in the years that followed it.
“So the Jubilee of 1917 was the year of the gezerah, the decree. In the Jubilee the land must be returned to those to whom it belongs, and the return must be given legal authority. So it came about in the year of Jubilee, 1917, that the land of Israel was returned, by proclamation, to the Jew
ish people, those to whom it belonged, and the return came with the legal authority of the world’s preeminent empire.
“It was the fiftieth year from the Jubilee of seeds, and that which had been planted in that first Jubilee came to its fruition in the second. In 1867 the release of the land began. In 1917 the release came to its fulfillment. In the first Jubilee the land was measured. In the second it was transferred. And even the man who measured it, Charles Warren, would be a sign. He was a British soldier, a representative of the British Empire, the same power that would bring about the transference in the next year of Jubilee.
“The world was oblivious to what took place in the first Jubilee. But with the second Jubilee the whole earth would see it. The world would be shaken. And through war and the fall of kingdoms and empires, that which was ordained by the ancient mystery would come to pass.”
“So everything worked together to produce the declaration.”
“The declaration,” said the Oracle, “was only the beginning. Each Jubilee sets in motion a new cycle, opens up a new era, unleashes the appointed purposes.”
“And what did this Jubilee open up?”
“The Balfour Declaration gave the Jewish people the tangible hope of a homeland. With that hope they came from the ends of the earth back to their ancestral possession, and in greater and greater numbers . . . as it was decreed in the ancient ordinance, ‘Each shall return to his own possession.’”
“There was more to the mystery.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning there was another word appointed to converge at that exact moment in history. And that word would speak to world events in the voice of God . . . from an old man in a Middle Eastern tent to the rise and fall of empires.”
Chapter 19
THE PROMISE
I FOUND THE Oracle in the oasis, sitting on a rock at the edge of the pool. I joined him there.”
“The old man and the little boy on the battlefield . . . what did they signify?”
“In the year of Jubilee,” he said, “what is it that must be invoked and reaffirmed for each to return to his ancestral possession?”
“The original owner’s right to the land.”
“And what is your right to your ancestral possession based on?”
“On your ancestors’ ownership of that land.”
“And what does that go back to?” he asked.
“Your ancestors coming into possession of the land.”
“So in the Jubilee of 1917 what must be reaffirmed?”
“The ancestral right of the Jewish people to their land.”
“Which means it must go back to their ancestors coming into possession of that land. Who is the ancestor, the forefather of the Jewish people?”
I paused for a moment to think. “Abraham?”
“Yes. And in your vision he was the old man with the boy. The right of the Jewish people to return to the land goes back to Abraham, to the moment he received the promise of the land and the moment he entered it. Both of those things appear in the section of the Bible that begins with Genesis 12. It’s there that Abraham was called to leave the nations and come to the land that God would show him. It’s there that God’s first words concerning the land are recorded. And it’s there that Abraham receives the promise and enters the land. God would give the land to Abraham and to his children.”
“To the Jewish people.”
“Yes. The same portion of Scripture beginning with Genesis 12 contains the specific promise giving the land to his descendants, the Jewish people.”
“It guess it would be harder to find a stronger title deed than that.”
“I would say. So it’s here where it all begins and wherein lies the right of ownership and the right to return . . . to be manifested in the year of Jubilee.
“But for nearly two thousand years,” he said, “the world rejected that promise and that right. Empires, armies, and occupiers, one after the other, laid claim to it, while the land’s rightful heirs were treated as strangers. But in the Jubilee of 1917 it would all be undone.”
“But you said that in the Jubilee the right of ownership, the ancestral right, has to be invoked and recognized. Was it?”
“It was the last Sabbath before the week that would change Jewish history, the week the British War Cabinet approved the Balfour Declaration. Do you remember what I told you about the parashas?” he asked.
“The Scriptures that were appointed in past times to be read on specific days, on the Sabbaths.”
“So on that last Sabbath before the declaration that would usher in the return of the land to Abraham’s children, there was a Scripture appointed to be read.”
“And what was it?”
“It was Genesis 12.”
“The Scripture that establishes the ancestral right.”
“For in the year of Jubilee the right of the original owner must be invoked and affirmed. The word was this:
Now the LORD had said to Abram: “Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you. . . ” 1
“And the very first mention of the children of Israel:
I will make you a great nation . . . 2
“And the words by which God gave the land to the children of Israel:
Then the LORD appeared to Abram and said, “To your descendants I will give this land.” 3
“In that same word, appointed for the week in which the Balfour Declaration would give the land back to the Jewish people, the ancestral right was proclaimed again and again:
. . . for all the land which you see I give to you and your descendants forever. 4
Arise, walk in the land through its length and its width, for I give it to you. 5
I am the LORD, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to inherit it. 6
On the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying: “To your descendants I have given this land.” 7
Also I give to you and your descendants after you the land . . . as an everlasting possession. 8
“It was thus given to the Jewish people ‘ forever’ as an ‘everlasting possession.’”
“In the vision Abraham was reading from a scroll. Did that signify the Scriptures that were appointed for that moment?”
“Yes. And he read from it in the middle of a battlefield, as it all came to fulfillment in the midst of war. In the midst of the gunfire of the First World War the ancient prophecies were being chanted and proclaimed throughout the British Empire, the power that would bring them to pass . . . and throughout the Ottoman Empire, the power that would crumble so that the prophecies would be fulfilled, and in every land of the Great War, from Western Europe to America to Russia . . . throughout the entire world.”
“At the end of the vision the old man and the boy left the battlefield. They were returning home.”
“Once the ancestral right is affirmed, the heirs may return to their inheritance, the land to the people, and the people to the land.”
“Who was the boy?”
“The child of Abraham, the generation of Abraham’s descendants that would receive back the land, the Jewish people alive in the days of the declaration, those who would return. And even that could be seen foreshadowed in the words appointed to be recited at that time.”
“What words?”
“The very first prophecy ever to speak of the return of the Jewish people to the land. It was also recited on the last Sabbath before the declaration:
. . . they shall return here . . . ” 9
“But there was another piece to the puzzle, without which the ancient prophecies would never have been fulfilled.”
“And that was the Oracle’s next revelation?”
“Yes, after the next vision.”
“A vision of . . . ?”
“A place where water flows in the middle of the desert, a land of seven wells.”
Chapter 20
THE LAND OF SEVEN WELLS
I
FOUND THE Oracle sitting by the waterfall, right at the point where it poured into the pool of water. I joined him there.”
“The wells that I saw in the desert . . . what was that about?”
“Have you ever heard of a place called Beersheba?” he asked.
“It sounds familiar. But I don’t know anything about it.”
“When the Bible speaks of Israel’s borders, it uses the phrase ‘from Dan to Beersheba.’ Beersheba was Israel’s southernmost border, where the nation began . . . in space as well as time.”
“In time?”
“Beersheba was central to Israel’s beginning. The nation began when Abraham had a son, Isaac. Isaac grew up in Beersheba. And Abraham was instrumental in Beersheba’s founding. Abraham was the one responsible for its name.”
“How?” I asked.
“It was there that Abraham dug a well.”
“The wells of the vision. And the little girl called it ‘our father’s wells.’ Abraham was the father of the Jewish people.”
“In Genesis 21 it’s recorded that men of the Philistine king Abimelech took possession of Abraham’s well. Abraham approached the king to contend for its return. And Abimelech returned it. So the two made a covenant concerning the land. And the place was called the Well of the Oath. In Hebrew the word for well is beer, and the word for oath is sheva. So together it becomes Beersheva, or Beersheba. In your vision how many wells did you see?”
“I counted seven.”
“Do you know what the Hebrew word for seven is? Sheva, the same word that means oath. So Beersheba is also known as the Land of the Seven Wells.”
“So my vision was about Beersheba. Why?”
“The Jubilee,” he said. “Beersheba is about Abraham losing his property and then having it returned to him. The very name comes from its loss and return . . . the essence of the Jubilee. Beersheba is also the first place in the Promised Land to which Abraham laid claim, the first possession, the first loss, the first appeal for return, and the first restoration. After the giving of God’s promise, it was the well, the covenant, and the name Beersheba itself that constituted Israel’s first legal right and title in the Promised Land.”
The Oracle Page 8
