Today there is no shortage of people who think that those who believe the Bible offers a reliable guide to coming events are lunatics.
In his 2000 book The End of Days, Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg called belief in biblical prophecies of the end times a “fantasy” and “dangerous.”80
Bill Moyers, the longtime PBS journalist, marveled in a 2004 speech that there are actually “people who believe the Bible is literally true,” and specifically called the end-times beliefs of Americans “bizarre.” Christians, said Moyers, believe that “once Israel has occupied the rest of its ‘biblical lands,’ legions of the Antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. . . . True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow. I’m not making this up. . . . I’ve read it in the literature.”81
In his best-selling 2006 book, American Theocracy, former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips echoed such sentiments. He warned that Americans who believe in biblical prophecy are “overimaginative” at best and “radical” at worst, asserting that “the rapture, end-times, and Armageddon hucksters in the United States rank with any Shiite ayatollahs.”82
What really stuns and infuriates such skeptics is the enormous number of Americans who believe that world events are unfolding just as the Bible foretold.
In February 2006, curious to see just how many there were, I commissioned a national survey of American adults to better understand contemporary attitudes toward Bible prophecy. The poll was conducted by the respected firm of McLaughlin & Associates, founded by John McLaughlin, who works with some of the world’s leading business and political leaders, including Steve Forbes, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.83
We asked people if they agreed with the following statement:
Events such as the rebirth of the State of Israel, wars and instability in the Middle East, recent earthquakes, and the tsunami in Asia are evidence that we are living in what the Bible calls the last days.
Remarkably, more than four out of ten Americans (42 percent) said they agreed. And common stereotypes notwithstanding, it was not just white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or rural, Bible Belt, southern men who said they agreed.
One in three Jews believe we are living in the last days.
One in three New Englanders believe we are living in the last days.
One in three Americans on the “Left Coast” believe we are living in the last days.
Four in ten Democrats believe we are in the last days.
Four in ten Catholics believe we are in the last days.
Half of all Republicans believe we are in the last days.
Half of all women believe we are in the last days.
Nearly half of all senior citizens believe we are in the last days.
Nearly six in ten young people age eighteen to twenty-five believe we are in the last days.
And a whopping 75 percent of African-Americans believe we are in the last days.
The numbers were even more surprising when we narrowed the question.
The rebirth of the State of Israel in 1948 and the return of millions of Jews to the Holy Land after centuries in exile represent the fulfillment of biblical prophecies.
This time, a remarkable 52 percent of all Americans said they agreed. Only 22 percent said they disagreed, while 26 percent either did not know or chose not to answer the question. And again, belief was not limited to the “usual suspects.”
Seven out of ten self-described evangelical Christians believe Israel is a prophecy that has come true before our very eyes, as would be expected. But so do half of all Catholics (52 percent) and nearly six in ten American Jews (57 percent).
Two out of three conservative Republicans believe modern Israel is the fulfillment of Bible prophecy, but so do nearly half of self-described liberal Democrats (44 percent).
Six in ten Southerners agree, but so do nearly half of all New Englanders (47 percent) and half of all Americans from the “Left Coast” (48 percent).
Half of white Americans agree, but so do nearly half of all Hispanics (46 percent) and fully six in ten African-Americans.
THE ROAD AHEAD
Just because tens of millions of Americans say they believe that Bible prophecy is coming true before their eyes or that they are living in the last days does not, of course, mean they are aware of the specific events the Bible says are right around the corner. In the chapters ahead, therefore, I will lay out ten future headlines we will read, the scriptural basis of such predictions, and the latest events and trends that suggest such headlines may be closer than previously thought.
CHAPTER FIVE: FUTURE HEADLINE
ISRAEL DISCOVERS MASSIVE RESERVES OF OIL, GAS
When I began writing the Last Jihad series, I based it in large part on prophecies in the book of Ezekiel that indicate two things that must occur before Israel’s last-days showdown with Russia and Iran. The first “prerequisite” is that there must be a period of calm and stability in Israel before the War of Gog and Magog. The second is that Israel must build up significant wealth.
In the next chapter, I will discuss the “peace prerequisite.” But first I want to take a look at the “prosperity prerequisite” from Ezekiel 38. In this passage, the ancient prophet is conveying a message from God to a future dictator of Russia:
After many days you [dictator of Russia] will be summoned; in the latter years you will come into the land that is restored from the sword, whose inhabitants have been gathered from many nations to the mountains of Israel which had been a continual waste; but its people were brought out from the nations, and they are living securely, all of them. . . . And you will say, “I will go up against the land of unwalled villages. I will go against those who are at rest, that live securely, all of them living without walls and having no bars or gates, to capture spoil and to seize plunder, to turn your hand against the waste places which are now inhabited, and against the people who are gathered from the nations, who have acquired cattle and goods, who live at the center of the world.” Sheba and Dedan [ancient names for modern-day Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states] and the merchants of Tarshish [historically southern Spain, though it could refer more generally to Europe or the Mediterranean states] with all its villages will say to you [the Russian dictator], “Have you come to capture spoil? Have you assembled your company to seize plunder, to carry away silver and gold, to take away cattle and goods, to capture great spoil?” (Ezekiel 38:8, 11-13, NASB)
It’s important to note that this passage comes after the rebirth of the modern State of Israel prophesied in chapter 36 yet before the Russian-Iranian attack. According to the passage, prior to the attack
the Jews have poured back into the land of Israel;
the Jews are settling and in the process rebuilding the ancient ruins and “formerly desolate cities” of Israel—that is, there is a building boom under way;
the Israelis have become wealthy enough to acquire silver, gold, livestock, and other material goods;
Israel is so wealthy that even the Saudis and those who live in the Gulf states can see that Russia and her allies covet Israel’s treasures.
Ezekiel 36:11 provides yet another clue: “I will increase not only the people [in the land of Israel], but also your animals. O mountains of Israel, I will bring people to live on you once again. I will make you even more prosperous than you were before. Then you will know that I am the LORD” (emphasis added). That would be quite a development, I thought when I first read this passage. After all, when Solomon was king of Israel, he was one of the wealthiest men in the world. Yet Ezekiel was saying that modern Israel would be wealthier still.
In The Coming Peace in the Middle East, Dr. LaHaye had considered a number of ways that Israel could become so peaceful and prosperous. Among them:
“Suppose that a pool of oil, greater than anything in Arabia . . . were discovered by the Jews. . . . This would change the course of history. Before long, Israel would be able independently to solve its economic woes, finance the resettlement of the Palestinians, and supply housing for Jews and Arabs in the West Bank, East Bank, or anywhere else they might choose to live. Even if something besides oil were discovered, it would have the same far-reaching effect if it were able to produce high revenues.”84
When I first read that, I nearly laughed. Oil in Israel? Wouldn’t that be nice? Israelis have long complained that if they are really the chosen people, why in the world didn’t God resettle them in Saudi Arabia? As the late prime minister Golda Meir once put it, “Moses dragged us for forty years through the desert to bring us to the one place in the Middle East where there was no oil!”85 But the more I thought about LaHaye’s theory, the more it seemed exactly like something God would do—unveil a dramatic plot twist near the end of the story.
Then in the fall of 2000, as I was working for Sharansky and Netanyahu, the New York Times published two headlines that captured my attention:
GAS DEPOSITS OFF ISRAEL AND GAZA OPENING VISIONS OF JOINT VENTURES
The New York Times, September 15, 2000
ARAFAT HAILS BIG GAS FIND OFF THE COAST OF GAZA STRIP
The New York Times, September 28, 2000
Wrote reporter William Orme: “Drilling deep below the seas off Israel and the Gaza Strip, foreign energy companies are discovering gas reserves that could lift the Palestinian economy and give Israel its first taste of energy independence. Industry experts, including those on this giant platform, say the Palestinians and Israelis will both profit if they can work together in a high-stakes partnership.”86
What’s more, experts had calculated that Israel had “some three to five trillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves,” and according to Yehezkel Druckman, Israel’s petroleum commissioner, “there may be more.” At current prices, Orme reported, “the value of the strike was estimated [at] $2 billion to $6 billion, depending on pressure, quantity, and other variables.”87
Israel? Proven reserves? Billions? When I read those words, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. True, the stories spoke only of natural gas, not a massive oil strike. But what if Commissioner Druckman was right? What if this was only the beginning? What if there was more where that came from?
By the time I sat down to write Jihad, I had decided to add a fictional oil strike—discovered by a fictional American investment company working with a fictional Israeli company called Medexco, run by a fictional Russian Jewish petroleum engineer named Dmitri Galishnikov. I did so not because I believed that the Bible specifically predicted it, but because it suddenly seemed plausible, and I wanted this thriller to seem as realistic as humanly possible.
Little did I know.
BLACK GOLD
Just days before Jihad was released in November 2002, a curious headline flashed across the newswires: “Israeli Geologist Drills for Oil Based on Biblical Guidance.” The article told the story of Tovia Luskin, an Orthodox Jew born and raised in Russia who became so convinced by studying the Bible that there was black gold buried under the sands of the Jewish state that he moved to Israel, conducted extensive research, launched a limited partnership called Givot Olam, and came to the conclusion that “there are 65 million barrels of oil” in central Israel alone.88
There was just one problem. Tovia Luskin was wrong. A year later, just before The Last Days was published, the news broke that Luskin and his colleagues had discovered oil reservoirs at their Meged-4 drilling site in central Israel holding not 65 million barrels but 100 million barrels.89 A few months later came even more stunning news: new testing had revealed that the Givot Olam site contained not 100 million barrels but upward of a billion barrels, leading the Associated Press to report, “An Israeli oil company has made the largest oil find in the history of the country” and driving Givot Olam shares on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange up 30 percent.90
People e-mailed me from all over the country to see if I had seen the stories and to ask me yet again if my novels were coming true. But the gusher of headlines about oil in Israel had only just begun to flow.
NATURAL GAS, OIL FOUND IN DEAD SEA
Jerusalem Post, April 1, 2004
ISRAEL STRIKES BLACK GOLD
Arutz Sheva, May 4, 2004
OIL BARON SEEKS GUSHER FROM GOD IN ISRAEL
Reuters, April 4, 2005
IN ISRAEL, OIL QUEST IS BASED ON FAITH
Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2005
HIS MISSION: SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND OIL
USA Today, May 19, 2005
A VISION OF OIL IN THE HOLY LAND
Newsweek, June 13, 2005
MOSES’ OILY BLESSING: WILL ISRAEL FIND OIL?
The Economist, June 18, 2005
SEARCHING FOR OIL IN ISRAEL
CBS News, September 20, 2005
IS ISRAEL SITTING ON AN ENORMOUS OIL RESERVE?
WorldNetDaily, September 21, 2005
The story in the respected London-based Economist magazine particularly caught my eye. It turned out that Tovia Luskin was not the only businessman who believed the Bible talked specifically about the existence of oil in Israel: “In the 1980s, John Brown, a Catholic Texan cutting-tools executive, and Tovia Luskin, a Russian Jewish geophysicist and career oilman, both had religious epiphanies. Mr. Brown became a born-again Christian, while Mr. Luskin joined the Orthodox Jewish Lubavitch movement. Soon after, each found inspiration in chapter 33 of the book of Deuteronomy, in which Moses, nearing death after guiding the tribes of Israel to the border of the Promised Land, leaves each tribe with a blessing.”91
The article went on to describe the blessing Moses gave to Ephraim and Manasseh, two tribes descended from Joseph: “Their land, says Moses, will yield the ‘precious fruits’ of ‘the deep lying beneath,’ of the ‘ancient mountains’ and of the ‘everlasting hills.’”
Luskin believed Moses was giving “a classic description of an oil trap.” The name of his company, Givot Olam, means “everlasting hills.” According to the article, John Brown came to a similar conclusion, founding his own company, Zion Oil, in the hope of discovering the treasures Moses had described.
Intrigued, I tracked down Luskin at his office in Jerusalem and chatted with him by phone about all the headlines he was generating.
Luskin, a graduate of Moscow State University with a degree in geology and a love for oil exploration, explained that he left Russia in 1976 and moved to Canada, where he worked for Shell Oil and other petroleum companies. Later he worked for oil companies in Indonesia and Australia before immigrating to Israel with his family in 1990.
“Initially,” he told me, “I came to the idea of looking for oil in Israel from reading the Chumash, the first five books of Moses. And then I came to Israel and started studying the geology here. . . . When I got the Israeli geological data it was striking in that it was very similar to the Syrian Basin, which seemed to me to extend down to Israel, which turned out to be exactly right. . . . Since 1993, we’ve drilled three wells and all three wells encountered oil. It’s a big oil field.”
“So, how close are you to commercial production?” I asked him.
“We are about to start a new well,” he said. “Hopefully this well will take us to production stage. Eventually, we will probably need to drill around forty wells.”92
OIL AT ARMAGEDDON?
In August 2005, while on the Ezekiel Option book tour, I had lunch in Dallas with Gene Soltero, the president and CEO of Zion Oil, the company founded by John Brown. I had never heard of the MIT-trained economist and petroleum engineer before, but I took a liking to him immediately. Balding, with short tufts of gray hair over each ear and small, wire-rimmed glasses, Soltero was a soft-spoken man in his sixties who looked more like a professor of management at some college in the American Midwest than a treasure hunter in the Mideast. But he had quite a story to tell, and a lot of question
s for me.
On a recent visit to Israel, an investor in his company had picked up a paperback copy of The Last Jihad in Ben Gurion International Airport. He’d read it on the plane home and gotten so excited about it that he had e-mailed Soltero and everyone else in the company, urging that they read it too. Why? Because to Soltero and his colleagues, the discovery of oil in the Holy Land described in the novel wasn’t fiction. It was their lives.
As Soltero explained it, all the top executives in the company quickly read Jihad and The Last Days. The more Soltero and his colleagues read, the more intrigued they got. How had I come up with such an oil-and-gas story line? Did I know about all the biblical prophecies that said Israel would, in fact, discover oil in the last days? More to the point, did I know just how close their company and others were to seeing these prophecies come to pass?
I had questions of my own.
What had gotten him involved in such a risky and speculative hunt for oil in the Holy Land? What exactly were these prophecies upon which he and Brown and Luskin were basing their companies? And what did he believe the future held?
As we shared our stories, Soltero, who had worked in the oil-and-gas business for more than four decades, explained that he joined Zion Oil not long after Brown had founded the company in 2000 because Brown had such a compelling way of looking at Israel. Soltero didn’t use this terminology, but what he meant was that Brown looked at Israel through the third lens.
In 1981 Brown had visited a church in Clawson, Michigan. There he heard a sermon by the Reverend James Spillman, who wrote a short book called The Great Treasure Hunt.
In his book Spillman argued:
Biblical prophecy describes an event in which the armies of the world, led by Gog and Magog, would invade Israel “to take a spoil.” What could Israel possibly possess in the last days that would make it such a prize for conquest that the world’s armies would meet there to fight for the spoils? . . . Countries don’t invade their neighbors for pomegranates and olive oil, but they do go to war over another kind of oil. Petroleum. . . . The problem, however, is that Israel is an oil poor country. Fifty years of oil exploration and production in Israel have produced about 20 million barrels total. That’s a little over two days of the oil production coming out of Saudi Arabia. Armies will go to war over oil, but not two days’ worth. But what if a significant amount of oil were discovered in Israel?93
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