Hebrew Voices #176 – Palestine Prophecy: Part 1

Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

In this new episode of Hebrew Voices #176, Palestine Prophecy: Part 1, Nehemia and Lynell delve into Bible prophecy and its potential relevance to the war in Israel and the Tanakh view of the end times. They start off by laying the background of Zechariah 9:1-8, including the Four Fasts, the restoration of Jerusalem, and the different types of prophecy found in Scripture.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Transcript

Hebrew Voices #176 – Palestine Prophecy: Part 1

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: They wrote letters. It's called “satanic letters” that they wrote. It actually says that in Ezra; it calls it a letter of sitna. Sitna is an adversarial letter, a letter of enmity, of accusation, but literally it's the word, “satan”.

Nehemia: Shalom, I’m Dr. Nehemia Gordon.

Lynell: Shalom, I’m Lynell Gordon.

Nehemia: Welcome to…

Lynell: The Palestine Prophecy.

Nehemia: So, we do these Bible studies in the mornings, and we were going through the Book of Zechariah, the Book of Zechariah, and we got to chapter 9, verses 1 through 8.

Lynell: And I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is happening today! For real! Could that be?”

Nehemia: We had to stop and realized that we need to share this with people, because this is something that very well may be relevant to what's going on in the news today.

Lynell: It’s phenomenal.

Nehemia: As we're recording this.

Lynell: Nehemia and I just got back from Israel, and it has been a life-changing event for everyone in the world, not just us.

Nehemia: I lived in Israel for 20 years, and I've been through situations where there were air raid sirens and rockets flying. So, Lynell said to me, “Have you ever seen anything like this?” And I said, “Only on TV.” That's when we had these explosions literally over our heads, lots of them.

Lynell: It’s been quite an event for all of us. And when we read this in our Bible study one morning, I was like, “Nehemia, this is applicable today. We should study it!”

Nehemia: I feel like we were reading Zechariah chapter 9, the Book of Zechariah. I used to watch this show, Law and Order, and they would say, “Ripped from the headlines,” where they would take a story of something that actually happened in real life and then they would retell it, with a few changes, of course. And I’m like, “This could be referring to something happening today.” I don’t know if it is. We always want to leave the possibility that this could be something that happens a thousand years from now, for all we know.

So, let's get into it. We were discussing this yesterday with my nephew, Natan, and he asked a really powerful question. He said, “What's the context of this prophecy before we even start?” Which is beautiful, because the way we had read it is, we started in Zechariah chapter 1, then we jumped over to Ezra, which gave a little bit of the historical background, and went back to Zechariah, and we just read through.

Lynell: And then we ended up in Isaiah.

Nehemia: All over.

Lynell: Deuteronomy.

Nehemia: So, there's an immediate context. What does it say in that verse? What does it say in the verse before? And then there's what's called the broad context. The broad context in this case is, Zechariah’s giving you something that happened in a certain historical context, and so we’ve got to go to Ezra. Ezra is on the other side of the Bible in the Hebrew, but it's relevant to understanding what Zechariah is talking about.

Zechariah is one of the three main prophets of the post-exilic period. The Jews went into exile in the year 586 BCE, when the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and burned the Temple in 586 BCE. Then they were in exile for 70 years. And then they came back, and the people who came back are, in Hebrew, called Shivat Tzion, “the return of Zion”, the people who return to Zion.

And not everybody came back; some people stayed in Babylonia. In fact, probably most people stayed in Babylonia, and they were there from 586 BCE… some of them went a little bit earlier, a few decades before, and stayed there until 1956. You know what happened in 1956?

Lynell: Tell me.

Nehemia: Israel had a war with Egypt, and Iraq expelled all the remaining Jews that were in Iraq. So, there are Jews who had been there longer than the Arabs, longer than Islam existed, longer than… I mean, boy, longer than a whole lot of things in the world. They had been there for, at that point, 2,500 years.

Lynell: Yeah, that’s a long time.

Nehemia: More than 2,500 – 2,600 years, and they were expelled. Where did most of them go? Most of them went to Israel. So, here the Arabs who were thinking, “We're going to strike this blow to the Jews by kicking them out of our country,” and today over 50% of the population of Israel are Jews who came from Muslim countries, who came from Iraq, and Egypt, and Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Iran. They are Jews that… I just saw a video the other day of an Iraqi Jew. He's a guy on the Israeli news, Channel 13 News, his name is Zvi Yehezkeli. And I believe his parents came from Iraq, and he's a native Arabic speaker. And as we’re recording this, there’s a war going on between Israel and the Hamas terrorists in Gaza, and he addressed the people of Gaza directly in Arabic.

Lynell: Wow.

Nehemia: And it became this viral video in the Arabic speaking world, because here's this Orthodox Jew who wears a kippah, and he says, “Look, I am a Jew, but I'm also an Arab.”

Lynell: Wow.

Nehemia: What does it mean to be an Arab? Well, that's a complicated question that maybe we'll get to in one of the sections of this discussion. Anyway, you have Jews that were in Iraq, in Babylonia, as it was called at the time, and about 10% of them returned from Iraq, from Babylonia to Israel. That's the Shivat Tzion, “the returners of Zion”.

Now, when they arrive back, they’re under the leadership of Zerubbabel. I think in English you call it Zerubbubul? Is that right? Zerub-bubul?

Lynell: Zeru-babel?

Nehemia: So anyways, Zerubbabel is the leader there, and he's actually a descendant of the king. And then there's Yeshua, the son of Yehotzadak.

Lynell: Where are we at in the Bible?

Nehemia: We are in the book of Zechariah. We’re actually in Haggai, Zechariah, possibly Malachi, Ezra, Nehemiah, that’s where we are.

Lynell: Alright, that’s what I just wanted to make sure.

Nehemia: And then parts of Chronicles.

Lynell: Okay, go for it.

Nehemia: Not much of Chronicles, a little bit of it.

Lynell: My dad would call him Zerubbabel.

Nehemia: Zerububul!

Lynell: No! But that's…

Nehemia: Zeru-bu-bu-bul!

Lynell: Okay!

Nehemia: So, Zerubbabel comes back with the Jews who return, and they start to rebuild the Temple because they've been given permission by Cyrus to return to the Land of Israel and to build the Temple. Cyrus was the Persian emperor who overthrew the Babylonians. He conquered the Babylonian Empire. They start to build the Temple, and they set up an altar and lay the foundations of the Temple. And then the nations around them start to threaten them.

Lynell: Why?

Nehemia: Well, first they say, “You're building that Temple. We want a part in that.” And you have to understand in the Middle East, there’s an idea that existed back then, and it still sort of exists. There’s a different concept of ownership than we have in the United States. There are certain things that are owned publicly, and the way you express ownership over those things is by using them and repairing them. And just to give you an example, the most important church in the entire Christian world… and when I say Christian world, I mean, people who self-identify as Christians.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: So, that's the Catholics, and the Greek Orthodox, the Coptic Christians in Egypt, the Armenian Christians, and the Ethiopian church. Those are the five denominations that have been in the Land of Israel at least since the time of the Crusaders, for a thousand years. And those five denominations control this building called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which they believe is the place where Jesus was crucified, where his body was laid out. And then he was put in a tomb, and then he rose from that tomb, obviously. And I’ve got a newsflash for you.

Lynell: What’s that?

Nehemia: The tomb is empty!

Lynell: But you're talking about a church that’s in the Holy City, right?

Nehemia: It's in Jerusalem.

Lynell: It’s in Jerusalem. Is it the one with the ladder hanging on the outside?

Nehemia: The famous ladder! Let’s throw up a picture of the ladder here. So, this ladder is a picture of what I'm talking about.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: So, what happened, and still happens today is… Nobody, none of these five denominations, own any piece of that church, but they have rights.

Lynell: Who owns it?

Nehemia: Nobody owns it.

Lynell: Okay, but they have rights.

Nehemia: But they have rights that they express. So, if a doorknob breaks, and the Catholics, or the Greek Orthodox, or the Ethiopian Church tries to fix the doorknob, and one of the other churches says, “Hey, that's our doorknob,” there'll be fistfights, literally.

Lynell: Because they all want to fix it to make it better?

Nehemia: That's right. No! They don't want to fix it, they want to own it.

Lynell: If they fix it…

Nehemia: You know the expression we have, “If you break it, you bought it.” In the Middle East, if you fixed it, it's yours. You own it. So, there are literally fistfights that still take place. The Israeli police have to get involved.

Now, in the 1800’s, Israel was occupied by the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish Empire. They were this foreign imperialist power that ruled over Israel for 400 years, from 1517 to 1917. And they issued an edict; the Sultan of Turkey issued an edict in the 19th century, in the 1800’s, called “the status quo”. What does that mean? If there's a chair in a certain place, and that chair belongs to the Catholics, that chair cannot be moved. Or if there’s a certain priest who every day stands in a certain spot, that remains the situation and nobody else can stand in that spot without the permission of that church. And they'll never give that permission, because once you give it away to another church, you'll never get it back.

Lynell: So, is it similar, what you're talking about…

Nehemia: 100%. So, when they come to Zerubbabel and they say, “We want to help you build your temple.” What they mean is, “We want to own part of your temple.”

Lynell: So, is that like when David went to the threshing floor, and he said, “You can have it. I'll give it to you.” And he's like, “No, I want to buy it from you.” Or when Abraham went to buy the grave for Sarah…

Nehemia: So, those situations are very similar in that, if somebody gives you something for free in the Middle East, you don't own it.

Lynell: That’s what I wanted to hear.

Nehemia: If you pay for it, it's yours. Now here, it wasn't a matter of paying for it. They had permission from the Persian emperor, Cyrus, to rebuild the Temple. And these pagan idolaters come and say, “We want to participate in rebuilding the Temple.”

Lynell: Oh, okay.

Nehemia: And they say no. And why do they say no? Because if they let them participate in building the Temple, it’s no longer an Israelite temple, it's now a temple that's controlled by these other peoples that are in the area. The Ammonites, for example, like Tobiah the Ammonite, and different characters there. And there was Sanballat the Horonite, who is some sort of a Samaritan.

Lynell: Which my dad would call San-ballet!

Nehemia: San-ballet? Okay! Sandblasting, San-ballet! So, these guys want to control the Temple. They want a piece of it, just like today. Oh, so you talked about the ladder! So, what's the ladder? So, when this decree was issued in the 1800’s, there was a ladder in a certain spot where they were… presumably, we don't know for sure, but we think they were repairing something in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And so, nobody's allowed to remove that ladder.

Lynell: So, the ladder’s there for eternity.

Nehemia: It really is an interesting picture of how these churches become fossilized. This is a tradition; why do we do that? "Because that's what we do, it's the status quo. If we change it, other people will come, and they'll try to control it and they'll try to put their ladder there.” And there'll be fights; they'll be physical, actual altercations. And so, this is actually kind of a picture that gives us… So, why not let these Gentiles participate in building the Temple?

Lynell: Right, why not?

Nehemia: That sounds like a beautiful thing.

Lynell: “Come help us, we’ll all do it together.”

Nehemia: Yeah, we'll all worship the same God. The problem was that while they may have welcomed the Gentiles to come and participate in the Temple, they didn't want it to be a pagan temple.

Lynell: I understand.

Nehemia: And the pagans, if they had participated in building the Temple, now all of a sudden, “Wait a minute, we built that door. We want to put a symbol of Molech on that door because we're Ammonites.”

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: "And we're Edomites, so we want to paint a picture of Qos on that door.” So, they're like, “Okay, wait, we'll build the temple. Maybe you can be involved later, but this has to be our temple.”

Lynell: So, they said, “I don't want...”

Nehemia: “I don't want to do it.”

Lynell: “I don’t want to do it.”

Nehemia: So, that's the background. So, these nations came and intimidated them. And although they had the permission of Cyrus, the Persian emperor, there were these nations who were intimidating them and threatened to attack them. And so, they weren't able to finish building the Temple.

Lynell: Oh.

Nehemia: What they did was, they laid the foundations, and they had an altar that they could bring sacrifices in. But the Temple was not built in the original period of Zerubbabel. It was much later, where Zechariah has a prophecy and Haggai has a prophecy, and he says, “Okay, now, in this new period,” it was the time of Darius. They said, “You not only can, but you need to go build the temple.” And they were frightened by the nations at the time, as well, who threatened… there were the United Nations of the time. “How dare you? You have no rights to the Temple Mount!” I mean, boy, doesn’t history repeat itself?

Lynell: It's true.

Nehemia: “You have no rights to that place!” And so, they end up building the Temple, and then in Zechariah chapter 7… and I have a teaching on this on NehemiasWall.com. Zechariah chapter 7, the people come to Zechariah after the Temple has finally been rebuilt. They have been back in the land for decades. We don't know exactly how long, but it seems like it's decades. And how do we know? We had King Cyrus, and then King Artaxerxes, and then now we're in the time of King Darius. And maybe there were some other kings in the middle, it's not clear. But we're on the third Persian emperor and it's only then that they finish building the Temple. They come to Zechariah, and they say, “For these 70 years that we were in exile, we used to fast every year, four times a year.” And what were the fasts? So, those are referred to in the Book of the Zechariah as the Fast of the Fourth Month, the Fast of the Fifth Month. Wow, there’s a lot of “th”s in there!

Lynell: That’s a lot of fasting.

Nehemia: The Fast of the Seventh Month and the Fast of the Tenth Month. So, there were four fasts, and what are these fasts? Well, it doesn't explicitly tell us, but we can infer. And we don't really have to infer because I have news; some of these fasts are still observed today in Rabbinical Judaism.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: And even some Karaite Jews observe these fasts. So, the four fasts were different key events in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. So, the first in the cycle of these fasts is actually at the end of the year, on the tenth day of the tenth month, what they call today in Hebrew, Asarah b’Tevet, “the tenth of Tevet”, or “the tenth day of the tenth month”. How do we know that? Because we read in 2 Kings, and it describes for us how that's when the siege of Jerusalem began under the Babylonians in 586 BCE. And all this is the background to understanding what we're going to read in Zechariah chapter 9.

Lynell: You said something that I want to clarify about what you said before you go to finish...

Nehemia: Yeah.

Lynell: And I don't know if everyone knows because I didn’t know this. When you talked about having no rights, I wonder if everyone realizes that Jews today have no right, today, to pray at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The reason I think that's important is, I just think before we go into this prophecy that it’s an important back part.

Nehemia: Oh, yeah.

Lynell: Because I asked Nehemia right before we went to Israel last year, I said, “Nehemia, who owns the land where the Temple Mount is?” And he said, “Israel owns the land.” And I said, “No, no...”

Nehemia: Well, you didn't say who owns the land, or maybe you did. But there's two different questions. What country is the land part of?

Lynell: Right. What country is the land part of?

Nehemia: And who actually owns it?

Lynell: Right. I was asking, what country is it in?

Nehemia: Those are two separate questions. And I'll give you an example. The place where the Knesset, Israel's parliament, is built, is actually land that's owned by the Greek Orthodox Church.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: Why is that? Because when they built the Knesset, there was a field out in the middle of nowhere and they went to the Greek Orthodox Church, and they said, “We're going to lease this from you.” I think for 50 years or something, 49 years. And when that 49 years was about to come up, well, the people who control the Greek Orthodox Church in Israel are extremely anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. So, they said, “When that lease comes up, we're going to ask you to remove your building.”

Lynell: The Knesset?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Lynell: The government building of Israel?

Nehemia: Yeah, the parliament.

Lynell: Where they meet?

Nehemia: Israel said, “No, we can nationalize this land.” There's a concept called eminent domain…

Lynell: Oh, it's here too?

Nehemia: Well, yeah, you have eminent domain here. And I know a lot of people out there have been severely hurt, where they had a piece of property, and somebody came and said, “We're taking it away.”

Lynell: Our whole church was uprooted for that same reason. They put a highway right through it.

Nehemia: Where's that?

Lynell: In North Carolina. It was eminent domain.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, eminent domain is a concept that goes back thousands of years. When the king wanted to build a road, he would say, “You have a farmhouse, and the road is going to go through your farmhouse. Too bad. So sad.” You would sometimes be compensated, sometimes you weren't. Today you're usually compensated. Not what you want, because…

Lynell: Well, you’re never compensated…

Nehemia: You’re compensated in some way, or you’re not in some countries. They just take the land.

Lynell: Yeah. So, the Temple Mount…

Nehemia: So, Israel threatened to exercise eminent domain. And then there was a compromise where the Greek Orthodox Church got tens of millions of dollars.

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: Far more than what it would have been worth on the open market, but it was worth it to Israel. So, I gave the parallel of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but you're bringing up a really important point. I should have given the parallel of the Temple Mount.

Lynell: Yes.

Nehemia: So, the Temple Mount is part of the State of Israel. It was annexed in 1967, and it was bought by King David around 1006 BCE, give or take a few years.

Lynell: 1006 BCE?

Nehemia: That’s the date they give for David conquering Jerusalem.

Lynell: That’s a long time ago.

Nehemia: Yeah. And he actually bought it from Aravnah the Jebusite for money.

Lynell: Right, the threshing floor.

Nehemia: The threshing floor of Aravnah the Jebusite, or he’s called Ornan in a different place. It's one of four pieces of property in the Land of Israel that our ancestors actually purchased.

One of those, of course you mentioned, was the Ma’arat Ha’Machpelah, “the Cave of Machpelah,” in Hebron, where Abraham buried Sarah, and later Abraham, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob and Leah were buried. Not Rachel: she was buried elsewhere. There is the Tomb of Joseph in Sh’chem, Shechem, that was purchased by Jacob.

Lynell: And we can't go there, right?

Nehemia: No, we would be killed immediately, instantly, if we went there.

Lynell: So, we couldn't go there and look. We do have a video about the Cave of the Patriarchs...

Nehemia: The Cave of Machpelah we could go to. It's dangerous but we can go. The Tomb of Joseph, we can't go there because it's in land that's controlled by the Palestinian Authority.

Lynell: I just have to say something about that, Nehemia.

Nehemia: We can see it from far away.

Lynell: When he says, “We can go there but it’s dangerous,” what that means is “we're going there even though it’s dangerous.”

Nehemia: No, no… oh, you're talking about the Tomb of Machpelah?

Lynell: I’m talking about lots of things…

Nehemia: But in the case of the Tomb of Joseph, we actually can't go.

Lynell: No, no, no. I know.

Nehemia: If we went there, we'd be instantly killed. And it would be me violating the law. You know, they talk about Israel as an apartheid state. I’ve got news for you; there is an apartheid state within the borders of Israel, and that's called the Palestinian Authority.

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: In Israel, Arabs have full rights. They can vote, they are equal before the law. There is currently an Arab member in the Supreme Court. In the Palestinian Authority, it's illegal for Jews to own land, and if you sell land to a Jew, you will be executed. If the Jew buys the land, he'll be executed by the Palestinian Authority. If I, as an Israeli citizen, went in there, I'd be violating the law, and I would be instantly killed.

Lynell: Right. That’s a little bit racist there, is that a racism thing?

Nehemia: It’s extremely racist. Because if an Arab Israeli goes into the Palestinian Authority, they won't do anything to him. He’ll be fine, and they do it all the time. It's only when Jews come in that they’ll kill them.

Okay, so, there are four pieces of land. The third one is the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. That was purchased from Aravnah the Jebusite. And the fourth one is the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Israel, which isn't Jerusalem. When the kingdom was split between Judah and Israel, the capital of the kingdom of Israel was the city of Shomron, or Samaria. And that was a hill that was purchased by Omri from a Canaanite named Shemer.

Lynell: Where is that?

Nehemia: It's in northern Israel, between the Jezreel Valley and Jerusalem. So, it’s north of Jerusalem.

Lynell: So, we’ve driven by there.

Nehemia: We haven’t gone there. I've been there, but we haven’t been there together because it's kind of dangerous to go today. But maybe one day.

Alright. So, the analogy here of the Temple Mount, to help us understand… this is incredible. So, the Temple Mount; who owns it? Well, nobody really owns it; it's a national heritage, a national treasure. But the Muslims have daily prayers there, and you can see in the picture where they're bowing down towards Mecca, with their backs towards…

Lynell: The Temple Mount.

Nehemia: The actual place of the rock, where the Holy of Holies was, or somewhere around there was the Holy of Holies, where the Temple was, their backs are to it because they face Mecca in prayer. Jews face Jerusalem in prayer from all over the world.

Lynell: But we can't pray there.

Nehemia: You can go and find synagogues all over the world, going back 2,000 years, and they face Jerusalem.

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: And in Jerusalem, they face the Temple Mount. And if they're close enough to the Temple Mount, they face that center upper part, which is today where the Dome of the Rock is.

Lynell: But no matter what direction the Jewish people face, they can't pray on the Temple Mount. Nehemia, it's illegal, right?

Nehemia: It is not allowed by the Muslim authorities. And the Israeli authorities, in order to avoid riots and wars forbid Jews from praying there as well.

Lynell: And they follow you around, and they tell you where to go and where not to go. I know because we've been and that's what they've done.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Lynell: We thought maybe we would sit in a corner by ourselves and just chill… no.

Nehemia: So, here's an interesting analogy. The Muslims say, “Well, we worship the same God as the Jews and the Christians.” So why wouldn’t they let Jews come up and pray there?

Lynell: You tell me, I don't know.

Nehemia: Because they want to control it. And if the Jews ever come up there and pray there, and the Muslims allow it, they’re afraid that, just like that doorknob in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, now that belongs to the Greek Orthodox Church or the Catholics or whoever fixes it. They're afraid the Jews will say, “Well, now we have a right to pray here.”

Lynell: But they should have a right to pray there.

Nehemia: They absolutely should, but it's not about their religion, it's about political power. They want to exercise the political power to control that spot.

Now, if you go back to the situation in the Book of Zechariah and in Ezra, where the nations say, “We want to participate in building your temple.” Well, they don’t just want to build the Temple, they want to bring their idols in there as well. So, that's a problem.

There, in the modern situation of the Temple Mount, we don't want to bring anything into the Temple Mount that the Muslims should object to. In other words, in Islam it actually says that they believe that we have the same God.

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: And they called him Allah, and they said that Allah wrote the Torah and the Gospels. That's what they say. So, if we brought a Torah scroll up there, that shouldn't be something they object to. So, why do they object to it? That's about politics, not about religion. They are kind of intertwined in the Islamist way of thinking.

Lynell: So, as we go through and read this prophecy, I just want you guys to keep in mind the fact that even though the Temple Mount, the place where God put His name forever, even though He calls it His house, even though God gave it to the Israelite people, they can't walk up there and pray. They can go to the Wailing Wall, which is down below…

Nehemia: Which is outside.

Lynell: Yeah, it's outside.

Nehemia: And they’re crying, wailing, because they can't get to the Temple Mount. That's actually why it's the Wailing Wall.

Lynell: Guys, did you know that?

Nehemia: There's a story from the early Islamic period that one of the Muslim leaders who conquered Jerusalem comes to Jerusalem, meets with the head of the Christians in Jerusalem, and invites the Muslim. He says, “Oh, you guys worship the same God.” He invites him to come and pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which was around when the Muslims conquered Jerusalem. It goes back to the time of Constantine. And the Muslim leader says, “No. If I come and pray there, then Muslims in the future generations will lay a claim to this spot. I want to respect the rights of the Christians.” So, they wanted to respect the rights of the Christians, but not of the Jews. What they did is, they appropriated the site of the Jews, while in that case, at least, respecting the rights of the Christians. The Christians weren’t making a claim to the Temple Mount back then.

Lynell: So, I didn't know…

Nehemia: Tell people why you're crying, because they may not know.

Lynell: I didn't know that's why they call it the Wailing Wall, Nehemia. I thought they just went there to pray because it was the closest place they could go to pray. Which is true, but I didn't know that’s why it’s called the Wailing Wall.

Nehemia: Well, they’re wailing and crying over the destruction of the Temple and that they can't get to that spot.

Lynell: I can tell you that if you go to Jerusalem, the one place I wanted to go when we went to Israel, I said, “I want to go to the Temple Mount,” because I knew from reading the Bible how important that place was. There's a lot of important places in the Bible in Israel, let's just say that, but that one is very special. And when I found out that we couldn't go there and pray, and not only that, but if we went with a group of Jews, we had to be surrounded by the military…

Nehemia: Heavily armed guards protecting us.

Lynell: And we were still ordered around. And then when Nehemia and I went by ourselves, I was like, “Let's go surreptitiously.” What I wanted to do was sit there and pray. I wanted to write in my journal, actually, and sit there and pray, and we weren't allowed to do that. They wouldn't let us sit in any one place for any length of time. You could not.

Nehemia: In contrast, Muslims go up there, and you'll see this daily; they have picnics.

Lynell: They do.

Nehemia: There's a famous video of them having snowball fights up there when it snowed once.

Lynell: They play games.

Nehemia: They play soccer all the time up there with the kids.

Lynell: And we can’t even sit.

Nehemia: That's a desecration of the place where it says in the Tanakh that Yehovah placed His name forever. That's a sacred spot that they're not supposed to be doing those things in.

Lynell: So, when we get to the part of the prophecy that talks about the house of God, it talks about His house, we're talking about the Temple Mount. You guys keep that in mind the fact that as of today, Jews don't have the right to go up there and pray.

Nehemia: So, let's continue with the context here.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: So, they say to the Gentiles, “No, you can't participate in building the Temple.”

Lynell: The fasts, all these fasts.

Nehemia: Oh, the four fasts.

Lynell: Right, that’s where we were.

Nehemia: Oh, the four fasts. The four fasts began on the tenth day of the tenth month, which was the siege of Jerusalem in the year 586 BCE. It might've been 587, actually, technically, depending on when that fell during the year. Yeah, it would have been 587. So then, the siege continues from the tenth day of the tenth month into the next year, the ninth day of the fourth month. And we're told in the Tanakh that on the ninth day of the fourth month the famine overtook the city. They were under siege, and they ran out of food. They didn't run out of water. And the army of King Zedekiah, who was defending the city, collapsed and fled. They had a secret passage to leave the city. They fled, the Babylonians chased them, and there was no one defending the city.

And then, from the ninth day of the fourth month until the tenth day of the fifth month; so, for one month and one day the Babylonians went through the city, street by street, fighting and destroying it until the city was completely burned. And the Temple was fully burned on the tenth day of the fifth month. To this day, Jews will fast on the ninth of Av, the ninth day of the fifth month, even though in the Tanakh it says the tenth day.

Lynell: Bad things.

Nehemia: The rabbis have an excuse. They say, “Well, it burned for several days, and the worst part was the ninth day.” Which, maybe that's right. We don’t know.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: That's not what the Tanakh says, but it could be. It does seem to say it burned for several days, that part is correct. And the Second Temple was destroyed on the same day.

Lynell: So, the context here is that they're fasting.

Nehemia: They’re fasting. And then the final fast is when the Jews, who had survived the destruction of the Temple and the exile, two months later they assassinate the Babylonian governor, Gedaliah, and then they flee to Egypt.

So, there was this remnant of Jews that remained, and rather than submitting to the Babylonian authority, which Jeremiah had told them to do, they rebel against the Babylonians once again, kill the governor, and then realize, “Oh no, the Babylonians are going to come and kill us.” And they flee to Egypt, and they take Jeremiah with them as a prisoner.

Lynell: Oh, no!

Nehemia: And as far as we know, he died in Egypt, captive to these rebellious Jews. And then he has a whole prophecy like Jeremiah 44, which we've talked about, which is a curse upon those Jews in Egypt.

So, there were four days, four key events, that they fasted on. And during those four events, they’re mourning over the destruction of the Temple, and the destruction of Jerusalem, and the destruction of the Jewish presence in Israel, and the exile. And they come to Zechariah, in chapter 7, and they say, “We've been fasting for all these years, and the Temple's now rebuilt and we're back in the land. Shall we keep fasting?” And his answer is a prophecy from Yehovah. The answer is, “I never told you to fast. When you ate, you wanted to eat. When you drank it was because you wanted to drink. And when you fasted it’s because you wanted to fast. I never told you to fast in the first place. I never commanded you to fast in this situation. You have a fast on Yom Kippur.”

Now, if you think about the difference between the valid fast of the Torah, in the whole Tanakh, versus these fasts, all of the fasts that we see in the Torah and in ancient Israel that were deemed valid by the prophets are fasts about something that's going to happen in the future. So, why am I fasting on Yom Kippur? I'm asking God for mercy. I've sinned, and it’s an act of repentance, saying, “God, don't punish me. Atone for my sins, let my sins be atoned.” That's what the fasting is.

A great example is when David's son is dying, and he's fasting. And then his son dies, and he gets up to eat, and the people are dumbfounded. They're like, “What are you doing? When the boy was sick you fasted, and now he's dead, you're eating?” He said, “When the boy was sick, there was a chance that God would save him, would heal him, and I was fasting in that event. Now that he's dead, what's the point of fasting?” He says, “He's not coming to me. I'm going to him.”

Lynell: So, he was beseeching Yehovah.

Nehemia: Right. So, it's an act of prayer about something in the future. These four fasts they asked Zechariah about, over the destruction of the Temple, are about things that happened in the past. They're mourning over things that already happened. And God's response is, “I never told you to do that. I never told you to fast over these things that happened in the past. You have this custom of doing it, but that wasn’t something that I commanded you to do.”

And then at the end of the prophecy… it's a series of prophecies, and this series of prophecies in Zechariah 7 to 8, these are a series of prophecies, he says, “Here's what I told you to do.” And these were things before the exile, during the exile, that God is saying, “Here's what I told you to do. It wasn't fasting.” And then he ends in 8:19, he says, “Thus says Yehovah of hosts: the fast of the fourth month, and the fast of the fifth month, and the fast of the seventh month, and the fast of the tenth month,” boy, my withp ith weally coming out here, “shall be for the house of Judah…” Oh, it’s even worse in Hebrew, “le’sasson u’le’simchah”, that’s a lot of sibilance.

Lynell: Syllables?

Nehemia: No, sibilance.

Lynell: What’s a sibilance?

Nehemia: A sibilance is a sound that's a “s” or “sh” or “z”. It’s a certain type of linguistic sound. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter.

So, “it shall be le’sasson u’le’simchah”, “for celebration and rejoicing”, “u’le’mo’adim tovim”, “and for good appointed times.” And he says, “ve’ha’emet ve’ha’shalom ehavu”, “but love peace and truth”.

Lynell: Peace and truth.

Nehemia: So, you asked if you should fast? No. What you should do is love peace and truth.

Lynell: Love peace.

Nehemia: And truth.

Lynell: And love truth.

Nehemia: Love peace and truth.

Lynell: So, that is our context for…

Nehemia: And then in Zechariah 8:20, he then continues.

Lynell: Oh, I love this part.

Nehemia: Do you want to read it? 8:20?

Lynell: Yes, I love it.

Nehemia: Because remember, we’re trying to get to 9, but here’s the context.

Lynell: “Thus says Yehovah of Hosts: Peoples and the inhabitants of many cities shall yet come. The inhabitants of one shall go to the other and say, 'Let us go and entreat the favor of Yehovah, let us seek Yehovah of Hosts. I will go too.' The many peoples and the multitude of nations shall come to seek Yehovah of Hosts in Jerusalem and to entreat the favor of Yehovah.”

Nehemia: So, here’s an important point. “To entreat the favor of Yehovah”, it doesn't say that. It says, “to seek the face of Yehovah”.

Lynell: So, they're coming to Jerusalem…

Nehemia: They’re coming to the Temple. And how do I know that they're coming to the Temple? Because it describes that in the Torah as, “appearing before Yehovah.” Coming on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem is called “appearing before Yehovah”. And the context in Exodus 23, and Exodus 34, and Deuteronomy 16 is, “Don't appear before Yehovah empty handed, you come with a gift to the Temple.” So here they're coming to seek the face of Yehovah and to seek after Yehovah of Hosts. That means they're coming to the Temple, and it says Jerusalem here.

So, this is important, because the context we just saw, if we go to Ezra and the whole background of Zechariah, is that these nations… we spend a lot of time on this and people are like, “Why are you talking about what happened in Ezra? Why are you talking about what happened before this?” They're coming to the Jews and saying, “We want to help you build the Temple.” And the Jews say, “No. We're going to build this temple.” And now Zechariah is coming to them and saying, “Okay, that was right what you did, but those nations will have a part in this. They're not going to be able to claim ownership over it,” which is the Middle Eastern thing if you help build something, “but they are going to come, and this is going to be a good thing. Many of the nations will come to the Temple to seek Yehovah and to worship Him.” And then verse 23.

Lynell: “Thus says Yehovah of Hosts: In those days, ten men from nations of every tongue will take hold.” Are there going to be exactly…?

Nehemia: Let’s finish it.

Lynell: Okay. “They will take hold of every Jew by a corner of his cloak and say, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.’”

Nehemia: So, is that literally ten people and one Jew? Your translation had "every Jew". It says, “And they will grab hold of the corner of the garment of a Jewish man.” Now, this is what we call a collective singular, or at least that's how your translation interprets it, I think correctly. A collective singular is a linguistic form in Semitic languages, in Hebrew as well. The famous example I love to bring is that when God brought the plague of the frogs upon Egypt. It doesn't say “frogs”, it says, “He brought frog over Egypt.”

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: And then the rabbis have this ridiculous story that they must know is ridiculous, that there was a giant frog that gave birth to many millions of small frogs. No, no. “He brought frog over Egypt,” means the collective singular “frogs.” And every English translation will translate it that way because there is no collective singular English, at least not in that sense.

Lynell: Not in that way.

Nehemia: And so, here “the garment of the Jewish man” is a collective singular. And what's “ten” here? It's “tenfold”. So, for every Jew, there'll be tenfold non-Jews who come, grab hold of the Jew, and say, “Let us go with you for we have heard that God is with you.”

Now, that's different from what the nations were planning on doing once we understand it in the Middle Eastern context. They were coming to the Jews and saying, “Hey, we want to build this temple with you so that it's just as much ours as it is yours.” Rather than saying, “Okay, God has a covenant with the Jews,” grabbing hold of the Jew and saying, “We want to go with you because we hear God's with you.” That's different than saying, “We're going to be part of building the Temple and we're going to own it just as much as you own it.” That's a different concept there. And so, he is in a sense assuring the Jews, “Look, you're going to have to deal with these Gentiles.”

Lynell: “They’re going to eventually come, and this is what they’re going to do.”

Nehemia: “And this is a good thing, this is a wonderful thing. Those Gentiles who are surrounding you right now, and they're fuming.” They wrote letters. It's called “satanic letters” that they wrote. It actually says that in Ezra; it calls it a letter of sitna. Sitna is an adversarial letter, a letter of enmity, of accusation, but literally it's the word, “satan”. So, they're writing satanic letters against the Jews, making false accusations against the Jews. Somebody say BBC!

Lynell: BBC! WelI, they apologized now, they did.

Nehemia: Well, that one time they apologized. And by the way, when people watch this a month from now, they'll have no idea what you're talking about…

Lynell: So, we should tell them.

Nehemia: You don’t even have to! There are so many false accusations by the fake mainstream media against Israel that who can even keep track?

Lynell: And the Palestinian propaganda.

Nehemia: Oh, the Palestinians…

Lynell: The propaganda is… just today, while we’re recording this.

Nehemia: Can we talk about the picture of the little boy holding his hand up to heaven, standing over the dead body of his father?

Lynell: Oh! The one with six fingers!

Nehemia: Can we show the photo over here?

Lynell: Oh, six fingers!

Nehemia: It really is heartbreaking.

Lynell: It is a heartbreaking photo.

Nehemia: But it's fake.

Lynell: It's photoshopped.

Nehemia: Well, I'm sure it's AI. It’s much more sophisticated than Photoshop.

Lynell: It's whatever. But it’s fake. Yeah, you’re right. So, that is the context for where we're going…

Nehemia: Hold on. So, this is an important context, because the Israelites had had these Gentiles coming and saying, “We want to be involved in building the Temple.” And the Jews said, “No. We'll build the Temple.” But there is a place for those nations, and it's a very important function. It's a Messianic prophecy. It’s an end times fulfillment. This hasn't happened yet. You could say it’s maybe happened in little ways, but there haven't been ten times as many Gentiles as there are Jews come to Israel, and grab hold of a Jew and say…

Lynell: Is it to Israel? Or is it to Jerusalem?

Nehemia: It's to Jerusalem, right. Well, but it’s of the Jewish people. “The garment of the Jewish man” is what it says.

Lynell: We have a little dribble of that right now.

Nehemia: There are little bits of it beginning happening.

Lynell: There are people who come from… like from 90 nations came this past year into Jerusalem, and I'm like, “Why did they come to Jerusalem?” Well, let's see what God does here.

Nehemia: Well, it’s a different prophecy in Zechariah, actually of why they came.

Lynell: It is.

Nehemia: So, this is the context. The context here of chapter 9 is they've rebuilt the Temple. He says, “Stop mourning the destruction of the temple. I never told you to do that in the first place. I told you to repent.” And they're told that “in the end times, those nations that you rejected, they will have a part, coming to you, to worship God with you, rather than trying to control the Temple and bring in their idolatries with them.”

Lynell: So, let me ask you this, Nehemia. Is the Bible chronological?

Nehemia: No.

Lynell: Is it topical?

Nehemia: Not necessarily. The famous example is Numbers chapter 9. It gives a date of when it takes place and it's before Numbers chapter 1.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: It's a month before. So, there are things in the Tanakh that can be topical. They can be by the principle of association. So, you have a series of prophecies in, for example, Isaiah 40 and on, where these prophecies are linked together by some format. It's a doubling of a phrase or that kind of thing. You have commandments in Deuteronomy that are linked by the principle of association.

And what does that really mean? What it means is that there was a scroll, and another scroll, and they’re like, “Okay, how do we put all these scrolls together? Okay, this one is connected to this by this common theme, let’s sew here. And it makes it easier to remember.”

Lynell: Okay. So, the reason I asked that is I want to make sure that… The prophecy that we're going to talk about right now begins in…

Nehemia: Chapter 9 verse 1.

Lynell: And it ends in?

Nehemia: In verse 8.

Lynell: In verse 8.

Nehemia: And how do we know it ends in verse 8? Because in Hebrew manuscripts there’s a space between verses 8 and 9. That's what's called a parashah setumah, “a closed section”. We’ll throw it up on the screen here. And you see this space here, this is what’s called a closed section. And then here is what it looks like in the Leningrad Codex. We have a space here between the sections. So, 9:1 through 8 is a single prophetic unit.

Now, was 9:1 through 8 revealed for sure after chapter 8? Not necessarily, but it's been put there as part of the sequence of prophecies.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: So, look, this is a really important question that we always have to ask, and this is about prophecies in general. So, there are three possibilities about how we look at these prophecies.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: And this is in general. Is it a prophecy that took place in the past that was already something that was the reality in the time of the prophet? That's a possibility.

Lynell: For instance?

Nehemia: For instance, Jeremiah will say, “Surrender to the Babylonians. God’s given you over into their hands.”

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: So, he's telling you, “Now surrender over to the Babylonians. They've surrounded the city; you're not getting out.” I guess there's a little bit of a future thing there, but really, it's about something in that time. The second category is prophecies that are about the future for the prophet, but not for us. For us it’s in the past.

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: And then there are prophecies that are about the future, both for the prophet and for us, they haven't been fulfilled yet. So, an example of the second category, that is, for the future for the prophet, is there's a prophet in the Book of 1 Kings that comes and says, “One day there'll be a descendant of David named King Yoshiyahu, King Josiah, who will do certain things.” And then hundreds of years later, 300 years later, that comes to pass, and they say, “Oh, this was prophesied by this earlier prophet.”

Lynell: Okay.

Nehemia: There are other prophecies that are for the future for the prophet and for us as well. And an example of that would be Isaiah chapter 2, where it says they'll “beat their swords into plowshares”.

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: That evidently hasn't happened. How do I know? Because we're in the middle of a war as we're recording this.

Lynell: That’s right.

Nehemia: I have two nephews who are fighting in a war, and that wouldn't be the case if Isaiah 2 had come to pass. But there's a fourth possibility, which I don't believe, but somebody could bring it. Let's just say what all the possibilities are. The fourth possibility is that Isaiah wasn't a true prophet, and when Isaiah said that there'll be peace in the future, he was wrong. I don't accept that.

Lynell: Right.

Nehemia: I believe in the Book of Isaiah. I believe in the entire Tanakh, but I know there are people out there I would say, “Oh yeah, Isaiah thought that's what would happen.” I don't agree with that, but these are the possibilities, and that's an important possibility to think about. Because sometimes we look at these prophecies, and we're like, “What on earth is going on here? This can’t be what it's saying, it doesn't make sense.” And what's your alternative? That Zechariah was a false prophet? Go believe that if you want. I don't believe that.

Lynell: We've got some really cool things here, though.

Nehemia: I believe Zechariah was a true prophet, and so these things will happen if they haven't already happened. I don't think they’ve happened. Now, with any prophecy, we have to decide which of those three it is. Is it something that was past tense in the time of Zechariah? And by the way, most of Zechariah 7 through 8 was things that were in the past. “Should we keep fasting?” “No, I never told you to fast.”

The last verse is the future, both for them and for us, because those four fast days aren't holidays: not yet.

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VIDEO CHAPTERS

00:00 Intro
02:07 Status quo & ownership in the Middle East
13:14 The Four Fasts of Zachariah
15:15 Control & ownership of the Temple Mount
27:28 Back to the Four Fasts
33:54 Jerusalem being restored
40:57 Biblical organization & types of prophecy

VERSES MENTIONED
Zechariah 9:1-8
Zechariah 6:9-15; Haggai 1
Zechariah 7-82
Kings 25:1; Jeremiah 52:4
2 Samuel 24:18-25
Genesis 23; 25:9-10; 35:29
Joshua 24:32
Jeremiah 39:2; 52:6
2 Samuel 12:15-23
Ezra 4:6
Numbers 9:1; 1:1
Jeremiah 38:17-18
1 Kings 13:1-2
Isaiah 2:4

RELATED EPISODES
Support Team Study – The Four Fasts of Zechariah

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