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