and to the blessings that would await them there. So the man with the measuring line is the one who issues a prophetic call.”
“But Charles Warren was an engineer, not a prophet.”
“But he was also the man with the measuring line, and the man with the measuring line is the one who issues a prophetic call.”
“So did it happen?”
“After measuring Jerusalem and uncovering its ancient pathways, Warren returned to England. There he would be led to write down a vision concerning the land and its future. It was not only a vision but a specific plan on how the vision could come to fruition. It was called Land of Promise. Keep in mind the state of the land when Warren penned his words. It was the time of the stranger and the barren, grassless desolation. That makes what he wrote all the more prophetic and stunning.”
“What did he write?”
“He wrote that the debt incurred by the Ottoman Empire could be used to bring about the return of the Jewish people to the land. He envisioned the Jewish people again learning how to farm the land. He believed the land could be watered and that the planting of trees would change the land’s ecosystem. The deserts, he wrote, could be made to blossom.
“In his vision Warren foresaw the return of the Jewish people from exile and that their return would lead to the birth of a nation. He envisioned the nation of Israel resurrected from the dead, a Jewish state. He saw the great powers of Europe involved in its resurrection. He even believed that America would be the best guarantor of the Jewish nation’s rebirth—though he couldn’t see how that would come about.
“Where Twain could barely see how the land could support the most meager of populations, Warren wrote of a future where the land could accommodate millions of Jewish people. And yet even with such numbers, he believed that the new Jewish nation could attain a standard of living equal to that of the most advanced nations. 1 With the return of the Jewish people and the blessings of God, the land known to the world as Palestine could again become the ‘land flowing with milk and honey’ 2 as in the days of the Bible. Warren’s vision was amazingly prophetic and, in the year and decades that followed, would come to pass.”
“Did he know the biblical prophecies of Israel’s rebirth?”
“He did,” said the Oracle. “It was those prophecies that gave him the confidence to envision what seemed otherwise unimaginable. And by so doing, he would pen what is considered the first detailed vision and plan for the establishment of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. And it would be written over twenty years before a similar vision and plan would be penned by a Jewish hand.”
“You said that the Jubilee sets in motion the purposes of God. Did anything happen concerning the Jewish people in the years after 1867?”
“Yes,” he replied, “the Ottoman Land Code of 1867 would set in motion a series of events that would lead to Israel’s restoration. By the early twentieth century large tracts of the land had been purchased for the return of the Jewish people, the fruition of what was sown in 1867.”
“When were the changes first evident?” I asked.
“Soon after that year,” he answered. “When Twain and Warren came to Jerusalem in 1867, the Jewish people constituted a minority in that city. But within just a few years they had become the majority. Then just three years after Twain’s visit and one year after the publishing of his book came the founding of Mikveh Yisrael. Mikveh Yisrael was the first school established to teach Jewish people how to farm the land. It was the first time in nearly two thousand years that Jewish people were being taught how to sow and reap the Promised Land, the first sign of a redemption that would transform the country.
“That same decade would see the founding of the first Jewish agricultural settlements in the land since ancient times. And just after that a massive persecution of the Jewish people in the Russian Empire would begin and bring about the fulfillment of the ancient prophecies. It would cause many Jewish families and individuals to seek refuge in other lands and would begin the first massive waves of returning exiles that would continue into the twentieth century.”
“And nobody involved in the land’s restoration could have planned for it or known that it was coming.”
“The prophecies