word is made of four Hebrew letters.”
“But I didn’t recognize the keys as Hebrew letters.”
“The symbols you showed me,” he said, “were Hebrew, just a different kind of Hebrew, the most ancient of Hebrew scripts, Paleo-Hebrew. In your vision the wandering man represented the Jewish people in the wanderings of their exile. The man was continually trying to unlock the doors of his exile. So the Jewish people in their wanderings continually longed to return to their homeland.”
“But the man couldn’t open any of the doors.”
“And the Jewish people couldn’t open the doors of their return until the appointed time.”
“If the keys are letters,” I asked, “then are the letters also keys? Does the Hebrew word for you shall return itself contain the mystery concerning the return of the Jewish people to the land?”
“The four Hebrew letters of tashuvu are the letter tav, the letter shin, the letter beit, and the letter vav. And remember, each letter is also a number. Tav is the Hebrew number for 400. Shin is the Hebrew number 300. Beit is the Hebrew number 2. And vav is the Hebrew number 6. 400, 300, 2, and 6. What number does the word tashuvu come out to?”
“708,” I replied.
“708. That’s correct. Now tell me,” he said, “what year do those Hebrew letters and that word pinpoint on the Western calendar?”
“If the Hebrew letters for 660 stand for 1900,” I said, “then 708 is . . . 48 years later. So the Hebrew letters stand for . . . the year . . . 1948!”
“Yes,” said the Oracle, “the word tashuvu pinpoints the year 1948.”
“1948! The year Israel came back into the world.”
“The year of the return.”
“Amazing! And so the Hebrew word that means you shall return contains the secret of the time when the nation of Israel would return! The ancient Jubilean ordinance actually identifies the year of Israel’s return!”
“And in what command does that Hebrew word appear? The command to return to your possession, to your ancestral land. So the Jewish people returned to their ancestral possession in 1948.”
The Oracle paused for a moment, then spoke.
“And there’s more to the mystery. Further on in the Bible the word tashuvu is written differently, with a second vav; so too in modern Hebrew. But in Leviticus 25 it appears without the second vav. It’s all the more striking since it is this particular spelling that appears in the Jubilean ordinance at the mystery’s inception. But remember what I told you about Hebrew dates: one letter or numeral is kept either absent or separated from the others.”
“The letter that represents the millennium.”
“Yes, so in the case of tashuvu the missing or separated letter is already identified—the Hebrew letter vav.”
“So then could it stand for the millennium?” I asked.
“The full Hebrew year was 5708. And the number 5 would commonly be used to represent the millennium. But which millennium actually was it? In which millennium of the Hebrew calendar did Israel actually return?”
“It was in the sixth millennium.”
“So the missing or separated number, the number of the millennium, would be 6. And what Hebrew letter stands for the number 6?”
I was silent.
“The letter that stands for 6 is the vav. And the vav is the missing or separated letter of tashuvu. So the return of the nation would take place in the year 708 of the sixth millennium. Or, in other words, the 6 would indicate how many times the number 708 would recur in the Hebrew calendar. On its sixth recurrence they would return . . . which comes out to the year 1948.”
“At the end of my vision the man opened the fourth door and entered a room filled with people. It was the room in which the declaration of Israel’s birth was proclaimed, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. And at the very end of that declaration and document appears the Hebrew year, 1948, when Israel returned home.
“So it was all there in the ancient law of the Jubilee, in the command to return to your ancestral possession. It was all there from the very beginning of the mystery! It was all there from the beginning in the very words they were given in the desert: ‘You shall return.’”
“That was the final mystery the Oracle revealed to me in the cave. Now I would wait for the vision that would lead me to open the next door, the fourth door.”
“And what mysteries would it hold?”
“A Jubilee of lightning, a song of prophecy, the shaking of nations, the man with the