“But on the Hebrew calendar, the biblical calendar, the day had a different name.”
“What day was it on the Hebrew calendar?”
“The ninth of Tammuz.”
“The ninth of Tammuz!”
“The day of the falling walls. The day of the breach. The day of the breaking down of the hedge . . . the ninth of Tammuz, the same day that the soldiers of Babylon penetrated the walls of the holy city, the day of victory and celebration for Babylon but of sorrow and mourning for the people of God, as it would remain for ages.”
“And the day, you said, that the nation’s defenses were abandoned.”
“Yes,” said the prophet, “when its princes and leaders, those entrusted with the protection of that civilization, ceased from protecting it.”
“And so with America . . . ”
“Yes,” said the prophet, “as it was for Israel, so too it was for the nation founded after its pattern. On the ninth of Tammuz, the wall that formed a protective hedge surrounding American civilization was broken.”
“And for ancient Israel,” I said, “the ninth of Tammuz was the beginning of the end. And with America?”
“The breaching of the wall by the Babylonians opened up a floodgate that would usher in the nation’s destruction. . . . So too with America.”
“The ninth of Tammuz,” I said, “was the day that the walls holding back judgment fell down. So that which takes place on the ninth of Tammuz unleashes events and forces that lead to destruction. What happens on that day constitutes the beginning of the end.”
“After which,” he replied, “it is only a matter of time.”
It was then that it hit me. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before. I pulled the seal out of my pocket and looked at the temple, at the irregular columns of its facade.
“Those are Roman numerals,” I said.
“Yes. The two columns at each end are framing the number.”
“And this is a V,” I said of the two columns that spread upward and outward, “the Roman numeral five. And this is an X,” I said of the intersecting columns, “the Roman numeral ten. And the rest of the columns represent the Roman numeral one.”
“Put it together, Nouriel.”
“The I and the V to its right would form the number four. And the I with the X to its right would form the number nine. . . . The fourth month, the ninth day . . . the ninth of Tammuz!”
“Yes.”
“A nation on the brink of judgment. Is this what could happen . . . or that which must happen . . . and will happen?”
“If the course is unchanged, Nouriel, then so too will be its end.”
He was silent after that. I didn’t know if he was waiting for me to say something or letting me take it in. But there was nothing I could say.
“Come,” he said, turning away from the building and toward the street. “Let’s leave this place.”
He began walking down the steps. I followed. When we reached the bottom, he turned around one last time, looking up at the building.
“This is not the supreme court,” he said. “There is one higher.”
And then it was as if he was no longer speaking of the court but to the court.
“If a nation,” he said, “should uphold the ways of the Almighty, then it shall be upheld. But if it should pass judgment upon the ways of the Almighty, then upon that nation shall the judgment of the Almighty be passed.”
He turned around and began walking away. But I just stood there. There was something about what he had just done that left me shaken.
He turned around once more.
“Are you coming?”
He waited until I caught up with him, then asked me for the seal. I gave it to him, and he handed me another.
“And what was the next mystery?” she asked.
“It concerned a word that determines the destiny of nations . . . the fate of America . . . a hidden word.”
“Hidden?”
“Hidden somewhere in New York City . . . a word I was to search for and find.”
Chapter 21
The Hidden
WHAT WAS THE image on the seal?”
“Letters,” replied Nouriel. “I took it to be a word inscribed in an ancient script. In back of the letters was a cloud. I recognized the script. I had seen it before. It was Paleo-Hebrew, the oldest form of written Hebrew. But of course, I had no idea what it meant.”
“And you had a dream?”
“Yes. I saw an ancient king sitting on a throne. The throne was metallic red. On the armrest to the king’s left was a red chisel. And on the armrest to his right was a red hammer. Taking one in each hand, he rose from his throne and walked into the distance ahead of him. He came to a massive structure of scaffolding, as at a construction site, maybe fifty feet high. He ascended a series of wooden steps within the scaffolding until he reached the platform that formed its top.
“In front of him was a cloud, hovering low to the earth, half of it below the king and half of it above him. He set the chisel toward the cloud, lifted up his hammer, and drove it into the chisel as if to sculpt or engrave it.”
“How do you engrave a cloud?” asked Ana.
“I don’t know, but the moment the chisel struck the cloud, there came flashes of red sparks. He struck the chisel again and again and again. He was engraving letters, glowing red letters, onto the white of the cloud. The letters were of the same script as on the seal, Paleo-Hebrew. When he finished engraving what I took to be a word, the cloud and the word moved to his left, and another cloud came from the right to take its place. Again, the king chiseled out a word in red letters, and again, the cloud moved to his left. This happened several times.
“The clouds, with their red letters, formed a ring. When the king finished his engraving, the ring began to rise slowly into the sky until it was hovering over the buildings of an ancient city. When it completed its ascent, it turned black. The letters, though, remained glowing red. The sky darkened. The clouds began to flash from within, as if they were filled with red lightning. The letters also began to flash. Then bolts of red lightning began shooting out of the clouds upward to the heavens and downward to the city. And the dream ended.”
“It matched what was on the seal,” she said, “the letters against the cloud. So what did you make of it?”
“A king engraving letters on a cloud . . . not much. The dream provided me with context, but it was the seal that contained the most definite clue—the actual ancient letters. I searched online for anything that could help me unlock the meaning of the word. I was able to match each symbol on the seal with a letter from the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, but I had no idea what it meant. I decided to go to the New York Public Library, to the reading room, to research it further and see if I could find anything that would unlock the meaning.”
“And what did you find?”
“Not what . . . but who. I was ascending the library’s front steps when I heard a voice.
“You won’t find the answer to this one here,” he said.
It was, of course, the prophet. He was standing near the top of the steps, near the library’s entrance and over to the left. He descended a few steps, then sat down in front of a base, on which stood two pillars, and motioned for me to join him there. So I sat down beside him.
“Then how will I find it?” I asked.
“Tell me your dream.”
So I did.
“The words,” he said, “were those of a king. That’s the critical fact.”
“Why?”
“Because a nation’s king or priest or leader represents the nation and is most critical in determining its course. The words of kings determine the fate of nations. The principle appears throughout the Scriptures. The words of Pharaoh determined the fate of Egypt. The words of the kings of Assyria and Babylon determined the fate of their empires. And in the case of Isaiah 9:10, the vow of defiance would only have consequence if spoken by the nation’s leaders. Only they could set the nation’s
course in defiance and, thus, seal their kingdom for judgment.”
“And so the mystery,” I said, “has to do with the word of a king that determines the fate of a nation.”
“Yes.”
“What king?”
“A king you know of.”
“What kind of word?”
“A hidden word,” he said.
“But if it’s the word of a king, why would it be hidden?”
“It was not hidden . . . but now it is.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It’s where the word is hidden.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s hidden in this city.”
“The word of a king hidden somewhere in New York City?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“That, Nouriel, is what you’ll have to find out.”
And with that, he rose to his feet and began descending the steps.
“It’s a big city!” I shouted after him. “Where do I even begin?”
“Not here,” he said without turning to look back or pausing his descent. “That should help.”
“So you had to find the word of a king hidden somewhere in New York City.”
“Yes, the needle of a mystery in the haystack of a metropolis.”
“So what did you do?”
“I thought, ‘Where would the word of a king be in New York City?’ I went to the Metropolitan Museum and searched through ancient artifacts, medieval artifacts, more recent artifacts . . . but nothing. Then I searched through the Jewish Museum. But again . . . nothing. It was then that I questioned my strategy. How could I find something hidden in a museum?
“I thought more about the dream and the seal. Both placed the word on a cloud. And since no one writes or engraves words on clouds, the cloud had to represent something else, something on which words could be written or engraved. I took the cloud to represent the heights, the highest place on which a word could be written. And the word was somewhere in New York City. What’s the highest place a word could be written in the city? A skyscraper. And the tallest skyscraper, the highest possible place, was precisely that which I had always avoided.”
“The tower at Ground Zero,” she said.
“The harbinger,” he replied, “of defiance.”
“You avoided it because . . . ”
“Because of everything it represented. I had never set foot inside. But there was a chance that it now held the mystery I was searching for. So I went down to Ground Zero. It was late afternoon when I got there. I couldn’t bring myself to go in or even to approach it. I just looked at it from a distance. So many things were running through my mind, so many things connected to it.
“And then I heard the voice.”
“Well done,” said the prophet. He was standing beside me.
“So the word of a king is hidden there.”
“Yes. Shall we go in?”
“We’d be going inside a harbinger.”
“That’s where the mystery is. Come.”
So we approached the tower and entered one of its ground-floor entrances. He led me to the elevator. He had already arranged for whatever tickets and reservations were needed. And of course, it was all based on the certainty that I would be there at that exact time, which, of course, I was. The elevator was crowded with tourists excited about the prospect of ascending the tower. But I was more apprehensive than anything else.
“We’re in an elevator inside a harbinger,” I said.
He didn’t answer. The ascent was rapid, taking less than a minute to reach the destination. We arrived at the tower’s observatory. We were surrounded by glass windows that allowed us to see for miles in every direction. He led me first to the window facing westward to the Hudson River and the New Jersey shoreline.
“Remember the connection,” he said, “between the tower and the word. The Tower of Babel was birthed with a word. So too in Isaiah 9:10, that which they rebuilt was begun with a word, the vow of defiance. So too this tower was begun with the utterance of a word. It was birthed the day after 9/11 . . . on Capitol Hill.”
“With the speech,” I said, “of the Senate majority leader to Congress and the nation.”
“With a word,” he replied. “‘The bricks have fallen, but we will rebuild’—not just a word but the ancient vow. So this tower was brought into being by the ancient vow. It’s a manifestation of that vow . . . and that scripture. This soaring American skyscraper was born of an ancient mystery.”
“So the tower,” I said, “is the manifestation of the word. And the word was given first by the leaders of ancient Israel. So is that the mystery?”
“It’s not this mystery,” he replied.
“Then what?”
“The mystery replays itself in the modern world. So it would be the word of a modern king.”
“A modern king?”
“If America is replaying the mystery of ancient Israel, then who would be the modern equivalent of the ancient king?”
“Its leader?”
“Yes.”
“So the word of the king is the word of the president.”
“Yes.”
“Hidden in this tower?”
“Yes.”
“The president of the United States hid a word in this tower.”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“He came to this place.”
“To the observatory?”
“No, the tower wasn’t finished when he came. But it was rising. It was nearing its completion. So he came to Ground Zero.”
“When?”
“Soon after you wrote your first book, the president came to the harbinger.”
“And what happened?”
“Before I tell you what happened, we must open up the vow.”
“What do you mean?”
“What is the vow?” he asked. “What is its essence?
The bricks have fallen down, but we will rebuild with hewn stones.1
“It contains, in essence, three declarations,” he said. “The first speaks of what has been, the remembrance of the destruction, the attack: ‘The bricks have fallen down.’ The second speaks of the nation’s undoing of what took place, the calamity, the destruction. It’s the nation’s defiance in the face of the attack: ‘But we will rebuild.’ And the third speaks not only of undoing the destruction and rebuilding what had fallen, but of rebuilding something stronger and greater, not with clay bricks but ‘with hewn stones.’ The nation is declaring that it will come back stronger than before.
“And the next line:
The sycamores are cut down, but we will replace them with cedars.2
“It’s known as Hebrew parallelism. The vow is repeated in a different form. But note, its essence stays the same. It is, again, made up of three declarations. The first speaks of what has been, the remembrance of the destruction: ‘The sycamores are cut down.’ The second speaks of the nation’s undoing of the destruction: ‘But we will replace them.’ And the third, the replacing of sycamores with cedars, speaks of coming back stronger than before.”
“I understand. But what does it have to do with . . . ”
We walked to the next window. We were now facing southward, toward the New York Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.
“When the president came to Ground Zero, it was for a ceremony. They presented him with a beam. It was a most important beam. It was to be placed on top of the World Trade Center, to seal and embody the tower’s completion. He had come to inscribe words on that beam.
“They gave him a pen with which to write the words, a red marker.”
“Red,” I said, “as in my dream, the king’s hammer and chisel were red. What color was the beam?”
“White.”
“As with the cloud.”
“So the ceremony,” he said, “centered on the word of the king. And the word would be inscribed on the beam, and the beam would complete the building of the tower. He could have written anythi
ng on that beam.”
“So what did he write?”
“How many declarations or aspects did the ancient vow have?”
“Three.”
“So the president inscribed three declarations on the beam. How did the ancient vow begin? What was its essence?”
“The first part speaks of the destruction . . . the remembrance of the calamity.”
“The first declaration of the president’s inscription was this:
We remember.3
“It was speaking of what had taken place, the destruction. And what was the second declaration of the ancient vow?”
“The nation would undo the destruction: we will rebuild.”
“The second declaration of the president’s inscription was this:
We rebuild.”4
“The same declaration—the same word.”
“And the third—what was it?”
“The nation would not only come back—it would come back stronger than before.”
“The third declaration of the president’s inscription on the beam was this:
We come back stronger!”5
“It’s the vow!” I said. “He wrote the vow on the tower.”
“Let’s put it together, the essence of the vow and the words on the beam. First is the remembrance of the destruction. And the first line on the beam was what?”
“We remember.”
“Second is the vow to rebuild. And the second line on the beam was what?”
“We rebuild.”
“Third is the vow to come back stronger. And the third line on the beam . . . ”
“We come back stronger.”
“The leaders of ancient Israel spoke the vow in the language of their land and day. The leader of America spoke it in the language of his land and day. But the vow remains the same. Listen to the words of a commentary written on Isaiah 9:10, speaking of the words Israel spoke in its last days as a nation:
They boasted that they would rebuild their devastated country and make it stronger and more glorious than ever before.”6
“It speaks of the ancient declaration. Yet it describes as well what the president inscribed on the last beam of the tower. We rebuild. We come back stronger.”
The Harbinger II Page 15