In New Theory of the Earth (1696), Newton acolyte William Whiston traces the day-equals-year formula back to the first days of our planet. Whiston is trying to reconcile the findings of astronomy with the Book of Genesis’s assertion that the world was created in seven days. He decides that when the world was created a day really did equal a year, because the earth hadn’t yet begun to rotate. Because, according to Whiston’s pre-Darwinian worldview, mankind was created in a state of perfection on on the sixth day, then we were aware that our planet did not rotate. This we remembered, and in some mysterious way it became, when our planet was spinning at full speed, the mystical formula of a day’s equaling a year. 26 This notion appears in various expressions in some of the writings of ancient poets and thinkers. Empedocles (ca. 490–430 BC), for one, wrote, “When Mankind Sprang originally from the Earth, the Length of the Day, by reason of the slowness of the Sun’s [perceived] Motion [the Earth’s motion], was equal to ten of our present Months.”27
Did Pythagorean number theory play any role in the formulation of these mystical numbers? We first encounter “time, time-and-a-half, and two times” in the visions of the prophet Ezekiel. For centuries the rumor ran through the Middle East that Ezekiel, using the pseudonym of “Nazaratus Assyrius,” was a teacher of Pythagoras. This rumor persisted until it was determined, not long ago, that Ezekiel lived in 622–570 BC and Pythagoras from 582–507 BC; the life spans of the two overlap by only twelve years. But finally no one has been able to establish a connection between formulae such as “time-and-a-half and two times” equals 1,260 years and revolutionary sixth-century BC Pythagorean theories that involve triangles, magic numbers, irrational numbers, vibrating strings, and the like.*25
So how did Newton use the mystical numbers in the Book of Daniel? What conclusions did they enable him to reach about the return of the Jews to the Holy Land?
Scholar David Castillejo tells that
the political events that he [Newton] will be interpreting sweep right over Newton’s own head and into our future; but he himself never mentions a date beyond his own life-time, citing the biblical warning against false interpretations. He merely devotes his attention to fixing the start of a prophesied period. Thus he will discuss in great detail when the reign of the Whore of Babylon began, but he will not mention its end. So the reader is left to perform the second half of the operation by [e.g.,] adding 1,260 years onto the opening date.28
Let’s see how Newton deals with Daniel’s prophecy (12:11): “And from the time that the continual burnt offering is taken away, and the abomination that makes desolate is set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days.” Most of Newton’s contemporaries thought “the abomination that makes desolate” took place in the year 168 BC, when the Hellenistic king of Syria and also ruler of Judaea Antiochus IV Epiphanes (215–164 BC) forced the Jews to sacrifice swine on the altar of the Temple of Jerusalem. Antiochus also tried to destroy all copies of the Torah and suppress the Jewish festivals, and he murdered the legitimate high priest, Onias III (2 Mac. 4:30–38; Dan. 9:26), selling the priesthood to Onias’s brother Jason (2 Mac. 4:8).
Newton, on the other hand, thought Daniel’s “abomination that makes desolate” was a reference to the year AD 609 when Pope Boniface IV signed a decree granting every church in Christendom the right to set and worship images of Christ.
This was idolatry of the highest order, and Newton despised it. So, unique among his colleagues, he advises the reader to add the prophetic time span of 1,290 days, or years, to AD 609. If we do so, he says, we will arrive at the year when “God shall have accomplished to scatter the power of his holy people”—that is, the year when the Jews will finally have been dispersed to every country in the world—“and He will then summon His Chosen People back to the Promised Land.”29
When we add 609 to 1,290 we get 1899. What could possibly have happened in that year that has any bearing on the return of the Jews to the Promised Land?
Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) was a handsome and debonair Hungarian Jew who up until 1896 had no interest in Judaism. He made his living writing sketches, criticism, and lightweight frothy plays and spent his nights hobnobbing with the wealthy gentiles of Budapest high society.
In 1896, Herzl suddenly became a new man. He was purposeful and powerful. He published a book, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), that was dedicated to “turning the messianic currents of longing for a return to Zion into a political force.”30 Zion is the Hebrew name for the Temple Mount; Herzl was advocating that a sustained political effort be made to create a “national home,” eventually a state, for the Jewish people in Palestine.
Herzl’s book was the talk of the town, but it was disliked by European Jewry who feared that the precarious position they now held in gentile society would be endangered if they rallied to the author’s call. But Herzl pushed on forcefully; he was charismatic to the highest degree, “cast,” writes one biographer, “in the heroic mold, with a prophetic face, an aristocratic poise, and a manner which enthralled his followers and impressed his intellectual opponents.”31 In the face of intense opposition, the fervent young crusader convened the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897.
The congress was well attended, but few practical proposals and less money were forthcoming. Still, this first Zionist Congress was the first step on an extremely rocky road, beset by every sort of pitfall, that would lead to the foundation of the state of Israel a half century later. Enthusiasts of biblical prophecy who take Isaac Newton’s formulations seriously believe that 1,290 years added to AD 609 and equaling 1899 refers to the First Zionist Congress; they brush off the fact that the congress took place in 1897, accounting for the discrepancy by citing a difference between solar years and lunar years.
Newton does better, though, when he tackles Daniel 9:25, which reads, “From the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks.” Once again he uses a commencement date different from that of most of his colleagues, who believed the prophetic time span of seven weeks (equals 49 days, which equals 49 years) eventuated in the year Christ was born. Newton, however, thought the culminating year was that of the Second Coming of Christ. He counsels us to add the 49 years to 1,290 years added to AD 609.
This takes us to the year 1948.
Nineteen forty-eight was hardly the year of the Second Coming of Christ, who hasn’t arrived yet. But it is the year when, on May 14, due to an extraordinary confluence of political events almost as rare as the alignment of five planets, the United Nations voted to establish the state of Israel in Palestine. The Jews, after wandering the world for two millennia, had found a home again.
And, if 1948 wasn’t the year when Christ came a second time, the foundation of the state of Israel was the one indispensable step toward making that happen. For Christ could only return when the temple was rebuilt, and that could only happen once Jerusalem truly belonged to the Jews again.
Newton added a second observation to his interpretation of Daniel 9:25, and this one, when we think about it, truly gives us pause. Newton writes: “Since the commandment to return and to build Jerusalem, precedes the Messiah the Prince 49 years, it may perhaps come forth not from the Jews themselves, but from some other kingdom friendly to them, and precede their return from captivity, and give occasion to it.”32 Newton doesn’t identify this “other kingdom friendly to them.” What country might it be?
Other Zionist congresses followed Herzl’s first congress. In between, the Hungarian leader spent nearly all his time personally lobbying the leaders of countries in Europe and the Middle East; he was looking for a tract of land on which the Zionists could settle. In 1903, Britain’s colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain offered Herzl a huge chunk of land in Uganda, British East Africa. “It is hot on the coast,” the colonial secretary enthused, “but as you travel inland, the climate improves and is splendid even for Europeans. You can raise sugar and coffee there.”33
/> Herzl was grateful but not enthused. He reluctantly put this offer before the Sixth Zionist Congress of 1903. It caused so much bitter dissension that it had to be quietly dropped.
On November 3, 1917, the British made a far more substantial offer. World War I was almost over; Britain knew it would soon control Palestine. The British Foreign Office sent a letter to the Zionists that began, “His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object.”34
This was the Balfour Declaration, on the basis of which 150,000 Jews were able to immigrate to Palestine between 1918 and 1936. The British reneged on the declaration in 1939 to mollify the Arabs, who wanted to bar them from access to their oil fields in the Middle East. But, by this time, a strong enough Jewish presence existed in Palestine that the Zionist dream was able to stay alive until 1948.
There’s no doubt Britain played an indispensable role in the establishment of Israel. Was it the “other kingdom friendly to them” of which Newton speaks?
Newton also gave much thought to Daniel 12:1: “Blessed is he who waits and comes to the thousand three hundred and thirty-five years.” He suggested that we add the prophetic time span of 1,335 days/years to the commencement date of AD 609.
When we do, we arrive at the year 1944.
Whatever did 1944 have to do with the return of the Jews to the Holy Land?
Newton scholar David Castillejo has an answer.35 He points out that June 6, 1944—D-Day—was Day One of the liberation of Europe. That was the day when 176,000 Allied troops, ferried across the English Channel in an armada of 6,000 landing craft, ships, and other vessels, stormed ashore at a dozen French coastal towns and launched a massive counteroffensive against Nazi Germany. Months of desperate fighting followed. The Allied armies ground through France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Finally, they plunged into Germany.
Here the Allies encountered Hitler’s concentration camps. This was the first the world learned of Hitler’s savage plan to annihilate world Jewry, a plan that had already seen the deaths of six million Jews. The Nazis were defeated in the summer of 1945. Revulsion at the Holocaust mounted. A feeling developed that the world must somehow compensate the Jews. The worldwide Zionist leadership, hesitant during the war, committed itself to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The refoundation of a state of Israel, inconceivable for two millennia, wouldn’t have happened if a colossal cross-Channel expedition, launched in 1944, hadn’t liberated the captive countries of Europe and exposed the full extent of Hitler’s crimes against the Jews.
Newton frequently changed his mind about when the return of the Jews might occur. Still using the Book of Daniel, he pointed out the path of some dates that lie very far in our future.
In Daniel 8:13, a saint asks, “How long shall be the vision concerning the daily sacrifice, and the transgression of desolation, to give both the sanctuary and the host to be trodden under foot? In Daniel 8:14, the saint answers, “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.”
Newton decided that this 2,300-day (or 2,300-year) prophetic time span was the time span of the Jewish Diaspora. But he had difficulty settling on a commencement date, because he had to decide among the year the Romans destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem (AD 70), the year when they built their own temple to Jupiter Olympus on the burned-out site of the Temple of Jerusalem (AD 132), and the year of the third Jewish-Roman War—the Bar Kochba revolt of AD 135–36—which ended in the bloody defeat of the Jews. Adding the prophetic time span of 2,300 years to these commencement years gives us dates for the “cleansing of the sanctuary,” said Newton—the time when the Jews return to Jerusalem and the End Times begin—AD 2,300; AD 2,430; and AD 2,433–34, respectively.36
That’s 354 to 420 years in the future, some twelve generations from now—far enough away to make even the most eager of biblical prophecy enthusiasts lose a little interest!
Newton sometimes seemed to feel that a period of prosperous governance in Palestine would take place between the time of the return of the Jews and the advent of the End Times—that the Jews, once returned, would make Palestine a wealthy state and a powerful military force for a period of time before the Apocalypse. Newton’s source was Ezekiel, chapters 38 and 39, where, Newton wrote:
He [Ezekiel] represents how the Jews after their return from captivity dwell safely and quietly upon the mountains of Israel in unwalled towns without either gates or bars to defend them until they are grown very rich in Cattle and gold and silver and goods and Gog of the land of Magog stirs up the nations round about, Persia and Arabia and Africa and the northern nations of Asia and Europe against them to take a spoil, and God destroys all that great army, that the nations may from thenceforth know that the Jews went formerly into captivity for their sins but now since their return are become invincible by their holiness.37
Some see in Ezekiel 38 and 39 a foretelling of the Israeli War of 1948 or the Six Days’ War of 1967. Newton himself made only one concrete prediction about a restored Jewish state—one that sounds curiously like a half quatrain from Nostradamus. The future nation of the Jews would not come about, predicted Newton, “Til Egypt Has a Greek king / And Turkey was no more”38
Newton was right about Turkey; the return of the Jews to Israel was out of the question until the British chased the Turks from Palestine in 1918. But the chances that Egypt will ever have a Greek king are so impossibly remote as to push the time of the return of the Jews very, very far indeed into the future.
It is amazing to think that Isaac Newton’s public reflections on the fate of the Jewish people as foretold in biblical prophecy actually helped the Jews return to Israel.
This was because those speculations strongly influenced his theological disciples like William Whiston. Newton’s strange and provocative interpretations of Daniel merged with a prophetic tradition that, writes Professor Stephen Snobelen, “helped create during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the religious and political climates that paved the way for the resettlement of Jews in Palestine.”39
So Newton’s intense meditation on the Jews ultimately transformed itself into a contribution to their well-being. Thus Newton becomes, along with so much else, virtually a Zionist and certainly an enabler and abettor of the state of Israel.
CHAPTER TEN
WITH NOAH ON THE MOUNTAINTOP
On July 1, 2004, the hybrid spacecraft Cassini-Huygens slipped into orbit around the planet Saturn. During its second orbit, the three-ton probe, launched by NASA in 1997, separated into its two component parts. Cassini continued on its way around Saturn while Huygens sped off toward Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Huygens landed on Titan on January 14, 2005, and radioed data back to Earth by way of Cassini for ninety minutes.
The hybrid craft scored a double first. Cassini was the first space vehicle to orbit Saturn, and Huygens was the first space probe to land on a celestial body beyond the orbit of Mars.
If the shade of Isaac Newton had been speeding through interplanetary space and chanced to come upon Saturn when these events were taking place, he would have had good reason to feel satisfied. He had been the first person to calculate the orbital velocities of Saturn and Titan and work out the interactions of their gravitational fields. He had invented the mathematics and physics that enabled NASA to fling Cassini-Huygens across two billion miles of space into orbit around Saturn. He had known personally the two scientists after which Cassini-Huygens was named: Jean-Dominique Cassini (1625–1712), the French Italian astronomer who discovered four of Saturn’s moons, and Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695), the Dutch mathematician who discovered Titan and first realized that the bulges on Saturn’s sides must be rings.
What would have held Newton’s attention most as he hovered watching the antics of Cassini and Huygens, was the huge ringed world that hung suspended in space before his eyes. This wasn’t because of Saturn’s g
reat beauty or its scientific potential. It’s because Newton would have seen in his mind’s eye, as if superimposed upon the yellow-orange disk of the ringed planet, the face of Noah, the patriarch of the ark, who had brought all the species of the world through the Flood and had saved mankind.
The planet Saturn was named for the god Saturn, and Newton was convinced that the god Saturn was derived from the memory of Noah, who with his family had been a sort of template of the gods. And Noah was a personage of consuming interest for Newton, for he had brought with him on the ark priceless knowledge of the antediluvian world. Moreover, Noah was one of those rare beings whom God produces only once every few thousand years: a great leader to lead a remnant of mankind from a dying world to a new.
Newton had given much thought to all this in his lifetime, as we are about to see, and a glimpse of the planet Saturn would have brought it all back.
On almost the same day, July 1, 2004, as Cassini-Huygens swept into orbit around Saturn, another expedition, completely different but perhaps equally visionary, was being called off back on Earth. A twelve-man team of American Turkish climbers had assembled at the foot of Mount Ararat to scale the sacred mountain and look for Noah’s ark. But Ararat lies in disputed Kurdish territory, and in 2004 tensions ran high between Turks and Kurds. Iran is ten miles away and Iraq, where a vicious civil war was raging, not much farther away than that. The Turkish government, fearing the area was swarming with spies, mercenaries, and terrorists, had called off the expedition at the last moment.
The binational team, sponsored by the Christian Shamrock/Trinity Corporation of Honolulu, Hawaii, must have been disappointed. The previous summer had been the hottest in two hundred years, and melting snows on the mountaintop had revealed a black rectangular shape. Aerial photos suggested this was the wreckage of a boat the size of an ocean liner. To the expedition’s Christian organizers, it sounded like Noah’s ark.
The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton Page 20