Bartholomew's Notes

Right Wing Watch has the latest from Jonathan Cahn:

During a recent appearance on “It’s Supernatural with Sid Roth,” Cahn told guest host Michael Brown that the elections of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump had all been foretold in the Bible, specifically, in a handful of chapters out of 1 & 2 Kings.

As Cahn explained, Bill and Hillary Clinton are the modern day versions of the ancient king and queen of Israel, Ahab and Jezebel.

…Cahn went on to claim that just as the Clintons are modern day version of Ahab and Jezebel, Donald Trump is a modern day version of Jehu, who was raised up by God to become king and to slay Jezebel.

Jezebel was a Phoenician princess who married into the Omride dynasty ruling over northern Israel in the ninth century BCE; in the Hebrew Bible (2 Kings 8-10) she is reviled for persuading her husband Ahab to adopt Pheonician religious practices and for persecuting Yahwist prophets. Jehu not only slew Jezebel (by ordering her eunuchs to defenestrate her) – he also massacred the prophets of Baal, although to the dismay of the author of Kings he also adhered to the golden calf images that were part of the Yahwist religion of the time. The Phoenician influence may explain child sacrifice in Israel in the centuries that followed, whether performed as a rite to Baal or as a part of Yahwist worship. (1)

Jezebel is now a synonym for feminine wickedness: in the Pentecostal/Charismatic Christian tradition, there is a horror of a “Jezebel spirit” that is supposedly responsible for dysfunctional behaviour and manipulative relationships, particularly between men and women; it has been suggested that Bill Clinton brought a “Jezebel curse” on America. Further, child sacrifice as condemned in the Hebrew Bible is seen by many Christians today as a relevant rebuke against the practice of abortion: in its strongest form, it is claimed that abortion providers are literal Satanists, performing occult sacrificial rituals under the guise of medical interventions.

Cahn brings these strands together in reference to Hillary Clinton:

Cahn said that just as Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, was “a champion of Baal worship,” so too was Hillary Clinton “an advocate of female power and advocate of abortion.”

Cahn’s belief that America is somehow reliving the history of ancient Israel was apparently inspired by an incident the day after 9/11, when Tom Daschle publicly quoted Isaiah 9:10 in the Senate:

“The bricks have fallen down, but we will rebuild with dressed stone; the fig trees have been felled, but we will replace them with cedars.”

Daschle thought that the verse referred to perseverance in the face of adversity, when the text is actually cited by Isaiah as an “arrogant” boast by the people of Ephraim and Syria, who have failed to understand that recent military disaster was a punishment from God. Senator Jonathan Edwards committed the same goof three years later.

For Cahn, this was not simply evidence that plucking Biblical verses out of context does violence to the wider meaning of the text – it showed that the USA was literally replaying Israelite history. This was the basis of his 2011 bestseller The Harbinger, and he followed up with a complementary theory that economic cycles are linked to the Jewish calendar. In both instances, God becomes a predictable impersonal force, and the evidence is compiled from extremely selective datasets of incidents from recent history that are interpreted as fitting the theory. Cahn’s new book, The Paradigm, claims that the Bible actually predicted “the exact date of 9/11”, although we will have to wait for the release day to see his reasoning.

It’s worth noting Michael Brown’s role as the guest host of Sid Roth’s programme; Brown is one of the less speculative writers to appear on Charisma News, yet here he is hosting a show that is one of the gateways for conspiracy thinking within Evangelicalism. In the past, It’s Supernatural with Sid Roth has featured Roth in conversation with Tom Horn and Chris Puttnam on the topic of “Aliens in the Vatican” , and with Chuck Missler on “UFOs and the Nephilim” (more on Horn and Missler here).

Footnote

1. On this last point I rely on two academic works, both viewable on Google Books: (1) Patrick D. Miller, The Religion of Ancient Israel (2000), pp. 59-60, and (2) Deeanne Westbrook, Speaking of Gods in Figure and Narrative (2011), p. 97.

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