for ages. Then a young Jewish man from eastern Europe heard a voice saying, ‘the resurrection of Israel on its ancestral soil.’ 3 A resurrected nation would need a resurrected language. So he made his life’s mission the resurrection of the Hebrew language. The rest of his years would be spent creating a massive dictionary of a language that had been dead since ancient times. In the world languages give birth to dictionaries. But with Israel and with Hebrew it was the dictionary that gave birth to the language. And in the world it is the parents who teach the children the native language. But in Israel it was the children who taught the native language to the parents . . . everything in reverse . . . resurrection.
“Even the land itself was resurrected. Forests were planted and sprung up where ancient forests had once stood. Vineyards, olive groves, and fields of grain rose up where vineyards, olive groves, and fields of grain had once flourished but died. It had been ages since the land had seen Israeli farmers, sowers, and reapers. But a resurrected land needed to be tended. So there came another resurrection. After two thousand years resurrected Israeli farmers and vineyard keepers appeared in the land to farm and tend its resurrected fruits.
“The last Israeli soldiers died in battle against the Roman Empire, then vanished from the earth. So another resurrection began. After two thousand years the Israeli soldiers reappeared on the earth to protect the nation that had likewise died and reappeared on the earth.”
“Has anything like this ever happened before?”
“The total resurrection of a nation? Never has a nation been so completely destroyed and so come back to life . . . or vanished from world history for thousands of years, only to reappear in modern times. And never have any people been so driven from their homeland, then gathered back together from every corner of the earth.
“Nations exist,” he said, “and then are spoken of. But the Israel that was to rise from death was spoken of, prophesied of, and dreamed about for thousands of years before it existed. Such things have no precedent. Nor has any such thing ever been foretold thousands of years before it happened. But from ancient times it was prophesied, ‘I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it.’” 4
“When I next saw the Oracle, he would reveal the ancient mystery that lay behind an American president.”
“A modern American president?”
“A twentieth-century American president.”
“And it went back to ancient times?”
“It went back to an ancient king.”
Chapter 29
THE PERSIAN
TO FIND THE Oracle this time, I had to walk through several of the cave’s chambers. Without the light of the oil lamps it would have been impossible. I found him sitting in a chamber of stone artifacts, what you might imagine finding in the storage room of some archaeological museum. He lifted up a cylinder of hardened clay.”
“That was in the vision,” I said, “that exact object.”
“The cylinder is an edict of King Cyrus,” he said. “It’s a replica, but everything’s the same. Cyrus issued it soon after he conquered Babylon and assumed the throne of a world empire. He was the king you saw in your vision of the White House. It was Cyrus who allowed the Jews to return from their exile to rebuild their nation and their Holy City. There would only be two exiles in Jewish history and two returns, the first in ancient times, the second in modern times. Critical to the first return was the existence of an ancient world leader to support and sanction it, Cyrus. Likewise critical to the second return was the existence of a modern world leader to support and sanction it.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The president of the United States,” he replied, “Harry S. Truman. Thus the question: Could the two world leaders be linked, joined together in a mystery? Could the return of the Jewish people in modern times under Harry Truman have followed the pattern of the return in ancient times under Cyrus? And is it possible that behind a modern American president is the mystery of an ancient Persian king?”
“Is that what the vision was revealing? The man in the Oval Office was King Cyrus? And the man he became, the man in the light suit and hat, was President Truman?”
“The rise of Harry Truman to the most powerful position on earth was one of the many quirks of