Mystical forces were unleashed as well. Millennia ago, when the specter of Jewish dispersal from the Holy Land was becoming a reality, the Hebrew prophets declaimed that one day God would call the Jews back to Jerusalem, that they would rebuild the temple and the Messiah would come, and that in the Holy War that followed evil would be vanquished. Over the centuries, the Christians added their own gloss to these prophecies, declaring that when the Jews arrived back in Israel they would convert to Christianity, and Christ, not the Messiah, would arrive and that this would trigger the Holy War of Armageddon and then one thousand years of peace and a final conflict that would end with the triumph of good and the arrival of the New Jerusalem.
The outcome of the Six Days’ War thrilled fundamentalist Christians around the world, the creation of the state of Israel was as wildly wonderful as it was wholly unexpected; suddenly it seemed possible that the Apocalypse scenario prophesied for Jerusalem could begin to unfold. And now the Israelis had liberated the sacred plateau in East Jerusalem! Fundamentalist Christian leaders all over the world leaped to their podiums, particularly in America. In the 1970 global bestseller The Late Great Planet Earth, preacher Hal Lindsey reminded his readers that the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 had been the first manifestation of that return of the Jews which, as predicted in scripture, would pave the way to the Last Days of the world. But the capture of the Temple Mount in 1967 had broken everything wide open and made possible the complete fulfillment of scripture: now the temple would be rebuilt, Christ would come a second time, and the final battle with the Antichrist would be engaged. The Middle East, Lindsey declared, was “the Fuse of Armageddon!”4
Of course it was true, he added, that the presence of the Islamic dome and the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Mount presented an obstacle, but that would be overcome, because prophecy demanded that the temple be raised again.
It has been half a century now since the Mount was liberated. The sleeping giant of the Apocalypse has been awakened, but his power of movement is severely impeded by the sectarian storms that rage around the Mount, and when he strains against these forces he only produces dreamlike micro-parodies of what was supposed to be. Clandestine cells of radicalized Jews, Christians, and Arabs plot how to storm the Mount, take the temple, and provoke the Apocalypse all by themselves. They roam the narrow streets of East Jerusalem like restless anarchists from a Dostoevsky novel, protesting, preaching, and harassing the authorities. Sometimes Christians and Jews cooperate (the Christians try to convert the Jews and the Jews want American money); other times they squabble. Rumor has it that they sneak into the caves beneath the dome at night to search for the Ark of the Covenant, which they will use as a shield against impiety on the day they storm the temple; or that they are raising rare red heifers whose blood, mixed with ashes, will protect them when they invade the sacred precincts of the Mount. Most alarming of all are the cells of radicalized fundamentalist Muslims, who—and again this is largely rumor—are plotting to capture the Temple Mount and, when their own messiah, the Mahdi, comes, use it as a base of operations from which to launch a jihad against all the Jews in the world. As 2017 dawned, the Temple Mount fought for its soul amid the storm clouds scudding across Middle Eastern skies.
Four hundred years ago in England, Isaac Newton heard the distant keening of the Temple Mount yearning for fulfillment. He heard it not directly but through the prophetic books of Daniel and Revelation and in the impassioned prophecies of Hebrew prophets like Ezekiel and Isaiah. The Apocalypse scenario of the great millenarian thinkers of the seventeenth century was not unlike (though far more learned!) than that of Hal Lindsey in The Late Great Planet Earth—with one extraordinary addition. Not only did Newton think the process couldn’t begin until God called the Jews back to Israel from the four corners of the Earth to which they had been scattered, which could happen only when the Jews had settled in every single country in the world. He also thought it wouldn’t happen until all the Jews, once back in Israel, or shortly before, had been converted to Christianity en masse. Then the liberation of the Temple Mount would strip away “the mystery of the restoration of all things that the Prophets had spoken about,” and he wrote of “the final return of the Jews [from] captivity & their conquering the nations of the four Monarchies & setting up a peaceable righteous & flourishing Kingdom at the day of judgment.”5
The notion that the Jews will convert en masse to Christianity seems quaint and old-fashioned to us today, and so it appeared to some of Newton’s contemporaries. In the poem To His Coy Mistress, which begins this chapter, Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) uses the phrase “the conversion of the Jews” to indicate an event that will take place very far in the future if it takes place at all—in other words, an extremely improbable event.
If the idea of the mass conversion of the Jews seems strange to us today, many find it even stranger that so many in Newton’s time ardently desired the end of the world even if that meant the end of themselves. Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch explains:
It is not surprising that so many have sought the Last Days. The writing and telling of history is bedeviled by two human neuroses: horror at the desperate shapelessness and seeming lack of pattern in events, and regret for a lost golden age, a moment of happiness when all was well. Put these together and you have an urge to create elaborate patterns to make sense of things and to create a situation where the golden age is just waiting to spring to life again.6
But the notion that the Jews would convert en masse to Christianity had somehow become woven into that pattern, and the religion scholars of Newton’s time not only wrung every last drop of meaning out of biblical prophecy, but they also resorted to every last strategy they could think of to find out when God would, or if he already had, summon the Jews back to Israel.
William Oughted, vicar of Albury (1574–1660) and the probable inventor of the slide rule, used a “calculation coincidence with the diluvian period” to come up with the prediction that an extraordinary event, which he thought was the conversion of the Jews, would take place in 1658.7 The eminent prelate-scholar Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638), notorious for the sheer weirdness of his learning, examined with a fine-tooth comb the personal hieroglyphs of Giordano Bruno and immersed himself in the musical triangles of Raymond Lull, and did a great deal more, until, adding it all together, he decided that 1694 was the date of the conversion of the Jews and the beginning of “the divinely ordained End Times.”8 In 1715, chronologist Arthur Bedford decided that the demise of Cromwell’s Republic and the restoration of church music (the Commonwealth having banned the latter along with Christmas, maypole dancing, and the theater) “had a providential purpose and would play a role in the conversion of the Jews to Christianity.”9
But the greatest angler in the murky waters of biblical prophecy about the Jews was Sir Isaac Newton—perhaps. Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), lord protector of the Commonwealth, came a close second. This wasn’t because Cromwell was a scholar of biblical prophecy and a seeker after End Times dates himself, though he was. It was because he had acted politically in a way that may actually have brought the time of the return of the Jews a little closer—or at least that’s how Cromwell’s contemporaries saw it.
Here’s what happened: In the summer of 1656, the mystically minded Rabbi Mahasseh ben Israel (1604–1657), an internationally acclaimed scholar of religion and since age eighteen a leader of the Jews in Amsterdam, paid a visit to Cromwell in London. There were no Jews in England at the time. They had been expelled en masse by Edward I in 1290. Mahasseh wanted to annul the expulsion, and for that reason he had asked for a series of meetings with the lord protector.
Cromwell agreed to the meeting because the Commonwealth needed money, and he knew how rich the Amsterdam Jews were and how good they were at making money for others. He was prepared to listen to Mahasseh.
The rabbi arrived. The meetings began. They discussed money. Then Mahasseh startled Cromwell by giving him another, wholly original, reason for lettin
g the Jews back into England. He quoted Deuteronomy 28:64 and Daniel 12:7. Both passages stated that Judgment Day would not come until the scattering of the Jews was complete “from one end of the earth even unto the other”; only then would God call the Jews back to the Holy Land to set in motion the events that would lead to the End Times. Mahasseh knew the gentiles desired this; but if there were no Jews in England then the Jews had not settled in every country in the world, and God could not call them back to Israel.10
Cromwell listened. This argument impressed him. What impressed him more was the wealth of the Jews and the financial problems of his government. (It’s likely the payment of a large sum of money to Cromwell from the Jewish bankers of Amsterdam had much to do with making these meetings possible.) Cromwell agreed to let the Jews back into England.
But Parliament wouldn’t agree. Then, after some investigations, it turned out that Edward I had never really passed a law banning the Jews from England. Cromwell decided to act as if Rabbi Mahasseh ben Israel’s request had actually been granted by his government. The Jews began, slowly and inconspicuously, to slip into England. A cemetery and a synagogue were established in London. A Naturalization Bill for Jews was passed in 1753. In 1868, Benjamin Disraeli, a Jew, was elected prime minister of England.
At no time during this period did the Jews suddenly begin to return to the Holy Land; for whatever reasons, God held back his call. But Newton and his colleagues never ceased to search for signs that the recall of the Jews was under way.
Newton held the Jews in the highest esteem. He believed they really were God’s chosen people, “unique among the nations of the world and the special recipients of God’s grace.”11 Newton’s library contained more than two hundred books related to Judaism, including, for starters, a Hebrew Torah, the Kabbalah, and multiple works by Maimonides. As has been mentioned earlier, the great ancient Semitic-languages scholar Abraham Yahuda, scouring Newton’s papers on theology, detected in Newton a distinctively Jewish cast of character. He saw the mathematician as a “Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides,”12 a man whose writings breathed forth the implicit belief that “Jehovah is the unique God.”13 Yahuda read Newton’s theological writings in 1936 when Hitler was stripping German Jews of their citizenship and forbidding them to marry non-Jews. He confessed to his wife that “in these times of crisis and ordeal he [Newton] exercises a calming and reassuring influence upon me.” Scholar Sarah Dry explains that Yahuda saw “the redemptive potential of Newton’s papers for the Jews, who could benefit from Newton’s sympathy with their faith at a particularly vulnerable moment. . . . [She says that, for Yahuda, the papers] contained truths that could survive ‘destructions and isolations’ of the sort hinted at by Daniel.”14
Newton believed Abraham’s covenant with God (Gen. 12:1–3) was a mark of the special favor the Creator had bestowed on the Jewish people. God had promised them that Canaan would be theirs forever (Gen. 13:14–17)—numerous biblical passages attested to this*24—and Newton believed a promise from God was the equivalent of divine law and therefore eternal and immutable.
Some objected that the Jews had already returned once, from the Babylonian Captivity, and that therefore God’s prophecy had been fulfilled; there could be no second return. Newton replied that God had promised the Jews they would return forever but that the return from Babylonia had not been forever; the Diaspora, the first signs of which could be seen at the time of the Babylonian Captivity, would expand into an immense Earth-spanning exodus once the Jews were defeated by the Romans in AD 70.
Newton pointed out that God had promised the Jews they would return to all of their lands, but that that, too, hadn’t happened when they returned from Babylon. “Israel possessed neither the land of the Edomites nor that of the other nations at the time of their return,” clarifies Steven Snobelen.15
If the Jews were God’s chosen people, unique among nations, then why had he allowed them to be scattered to the winds? Not because they bore any responsibility for the crucifixion and death of Christ, insisted Newton. The Jews had brought the Diaspora on themselves by failing to “understand prophecy”; they had refused to recognize that Jesus was the prophesied Messiah. They had instead put their faith in Daniel’s Prophecy of the Seventy Weeks, which they thought provided them with divine assurance that their Messiah would arrive at the right time. Tragically, this apparent assurance had emboldened them to go to war with the Romans.†3
Here’s how Newton puts the Jewish-Roman problem: “This Prophecy [of the Seventy Weeks] which had for some time put the Oriental nations in continual expectation of a temporal Potentate out of Judaea, and which the Jews understood of the Messiah with that confidence of temporal domination as to rebel against the Romans and begin that war which caused their ruin.”16
When the Jews failed to recognize that Jesus was their Messiah, “God began to reject them from being his people, & to call the Gentiles without obliging them to observe the law of Moses, & soon after caused the Jewish worship to cease & the Jews to be dispersed into all nations . . . as at this day so that at present they are no body politique or people but a scattered servile race of men without any government of their own.”17
This was not a patronizing statement. Newton had nothing but praise for how well the Jews, despite not having created an independent Jewish political entity anywhere in the world, had maintained their identity through 1,700 years of exile. He marveled at how they “in a wonderful manner continue numerous & distinct from all other nations: which cannot be said of any other captivated [captive] nation whatever, & therefore is the work of providence.”18
Newton regarded Judaism as the purest religion. The Jews had never tried to describe their God; they had never set up graven images of Him; they had never been idolatrous. It may be that Newton regarded the enclaves of Jews buried away in the far-flung metropolises of the world as shining beacons of monotheistic light, dispelling the blackness of Trinitarianism with the purity of their beams. In the context of his history of the corruption of the soul of man, they were steadfast flashes of light gleaming out of the gathering darkness of the Great Apostasy.
But the fact was that the Jews had erred grievously in failing to understand biblical prophecy that told them that Jesus was their Messiah, and they had suffered accordingly. And now we find ourselves in the presence of some of Newton’s most mysterious pronouncements. They are pronouncements that frighten us a little. The great mathematician put the greatest store by the proper interpretation of prophecy. He believed that, since the prophets always spoke the word of God, to interpret prophecy correctly was “no matter of indifferency but a duty of the greatest moment.”19 Moreover, if the Christians failed to interpret prophecy correctly, how much harsher must their punishment be if they as Christians, “who have had ample instruction in how properly to understand Scripture, are not able to recognize the signs of the Antichrist and the true apocalyptic future?”20
As Newton puts it:
For certainly it must be as dangerous and as easy an error for Christians to adhere to Antichrist as it was for the Jews to reject Christ. And therefore it is as much our duty to endeavor to be able to know him that we may avoid him, as it was theirs to know Christ that they might follow him. . . . Therefore beware that thou be not found wanting in this trial. For if thou beest, the authority of these scriptures will as little excuse thee as the obscurity of our Saviour’s Parables excused the Jews.21
Only the pure of heart can interpret prophecy correctly, declares Newton. And they will be mocked if they do, because, Newton says enigmatically, “It is the wisdom of God that his Church should appear despicable to the world.” Moreover, those who speak truth about prophecy will have to endure the “reproaches of the world,”22 and, the greater the truth, the greater the reproach. As we near the End Times, says Newton, we will experience a “quickening” of perception; this is a statement that could easily come from the lips of a twenty-first-century New Age aficionado. Newton concludes that we will und
erstand prophecy “still better at the return of the Jews from their long captivity predicted by Moses & the Prophets.”23
These are among Newton’s severest warnings to mankind. But what does he mean? What are these biblical prophecies that we must not fail to understand? Everything seems to be bound up with the time of the return of the Jews to the Holy Land. Newton scoured the Book of Daniel for answers to these questions, but he never really tells us what he discovered. Instead, he gives us a commencement date and a specific prophetic time span.
This brings us back to the question of the prophetic numbers. Where exactly did they come from? It was essential to make proper use of these mysterious numbers, and in chapter 8 we saw Mede and Newton working with the prophetic formula “a time, time-and-a-half, and two times” (equals 1,260 days equals 1,260 years). We’ll recall Newton’s assertion that “the ancient sages had more sorts of days weeks months & years than one. They had their vulgar years & their great years, vulgar months & great months, weeks of days & weeks of years, natural days & days mystical. And therefore where the things prophesied of are mystical it’s proper to understand their times in a mystical sense.”24
We will find new mystical time spans in Daniel: “1,290 days,” “1,335 days,” “2,300 days.” It was obvious to Newton that these days were years: “Tis altogether impossible that within the 1290 & 1335 days in Daniel 12, which extend from the setting up the abomination Daniel 11.31 to the end of the prophesy & to the resurrection of the dead, [that so many historic events could have been packed in] unless those days be mystical [i.e., years and not days].”25
The mystical formulae of “a time, time-and-a-half, and two times” and its variants seem to be as much constants of the world of biblical prophecy as Einstein’s relativity equation, E = mc2, or Wolfgang Pauli’s fine structure constant, 137, are constants of the physical world. But, again, where do these mystical numbers come from? For starters: How did the Hebrew prophets get in the habit of calling a prophesied year a day?
The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton Page 19
