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 Jewish 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