in articles across America and beyond. He would bear witness to multitudes of his generation and thus fulfill the prophecy.”
“So he accomplished what he was appointed to do.”
“What he was born to do,” said the Oracle. “The stranger must come before the return of the Jewish people and when the land lies in desolation and utter hopelessness.”
“Why utter hopelessness?”
“It is hopelessness that sets the stage for the moving of God’s hand and the impossible that sets the stage for a miracle.”
“So the stranger would mark the ending of the land’s devastation and lead into the beginning of its redemption and the return of its exiles. So did he?”
“He did.”
“When did Mark Twain come to the Holy Land?”
“In the year 1867.”
“And was that significant?”
“We shall see,” said the Oracle. “But that would be another mystery.”
“He would reveal it in time. But there was another mystery to be opened.”
“From the vision?”
“Yes.”
“Which mystery?”
“The man with the measuring line.”
Chapter 10
THE MAN WITH THE
MEASURING LINE
I RETURNED TO the mountain and found the Oracle sitting on the same rock on which he sat when I first saw him. I sat down, as before, on the rock facing him.”
“The man in my vision with the white robe and the measuring line . . . what was that about?”
“The prophet Zechariah saw something very similar:
Then I raised my eyes and looked, and behold, a man with a measuring line in his hand. So I said, “Where are you going?”
And he said to me, “To measure Jerusalem, to see what is its width and what is its length.” 1
“The man with the measuring line,” said the Oracle, “was an angel.”
“What does it mean?”
“The man with the measuring line appeared to Zechariah in the days when the people of Israel had returned from their exile in Babylon to the land but hadn’t yet seen the fullness of God’s promised restoration.”
“But why a measuring line?”
“When,” he asked, “does a builder use a measuring line? When he’s about to build. So the man with the measuring line is a sign of God’s future purposes, in this case that He was about to rebuild Jerusalem.
“In the Jubilee the original owner returns to his land. What happens when you return to a land? What has to be produced in order to take possession of it? A title, a deed, a survey. The land must be defined or redefined, its length, its breadth, its borders, its parameters. And if there’s no existing survey, then a survey must be made. The land must be defined, mapped out . . . measured—and so the measuring line. So in the days of Zechariah, when the Jewish people were returning to the land, the man with the measuring line comes to the city in a vision. And his appearance is a sign of what is yet to take place. It happened in the ancient world. So too it would happen again in the modern. The ancient sign would again manifest in the world . . . in modern times. The man with the measuring line would again come to Jerusalem. And his appearance would be a sign of what was yet to come.
“The man you saw in your vision dressed in a red military uniform. His name was Charles Warren. He was a British officer, a member of the Royal Engineers. He was sent to the land of Israel on a mission to survey and map out Jerusalem, to measure the Holy City—as a man with the measuring line.
“But his mission was not just to survey Jerusalem as it was then but as it once was: to measure its ancient parameters, the boundaries of ancient Jerusalem, the biblical city, to locate its ancient walls and borders, to uncover its foundations. In order to do that, he had to dig through centuries of ruins and earth to get to the city’s biblical foundations. But the British weren’t in control of the land; the Ottoman Turks were. And they were suspicious of his activities. He was always being watched. So he had to tread lightly and often work in secret.
“Warren’s work would constitute the first extensive excavation of biblical Jerusalem, the first extensive measuring of the biblical foundations of the Temple Mount and of the city itself. It would usher in a new age of biblical archaeology. Remember what I told you about the Jubilee—the focus returns to what was lost and must be restored, the ancestral possession. Jerusalem is the ancestral possession of the Jewish people. So the focus must