Talking Out Of Turn

The teacher had, you may recall, been enjoined by God not to teach prophecy or eschatology for a while, so I didn’t hear much about it while he lived in St. Louis. After they moved to California, we started to hear a bit more about it, and then the events of September 11, 2001 came and went, and the world turned upside-down.

The teacher proclaimed this the vindication of everything he had taught, particularly about the Arab world. He equated prophecies about Esau and Edom with the Arab/Muslim world, and confidently taught that the Arabs were essentially Edomites. When challenged on the bloodline issue, he also defended it geographically, saying that because Mt. Seir is now in Saudi Arabia, prophecies relating to Seir or those who live near it must apply to Saudis, and by association to (in order from specific to general) Wahabists, Sunnis, Muslims, and sometimes Arabs in general.

Now we began to get a very full timeline of the end-times and were told that they were being fulfilled. People who had been connected with the ministry for decades were saying that the teacher had said these things way back, and this just proved that he was right. At this point we began to hear teaching that apparently hadn’t been covered in a long time, dark secrets about the tribe of Dan and their role in history.

A brief note for those who aren’t steeped in this sort of thing: all the late tribe lists of Israel leave Dan out. This includes lists in Revelation and 1 Chronicles. There are various reasons given for this, but it may make some of you wonder how you can have twelve tribes and still leave one out. It depends on what you are counting, really:

1. Lists of ancestral tribes will sometimes include Levi but put both Ephraim and Manasseh under their father Joseph for a total of twelve. Examples: 1 Chronicles 2:1,2; Ezekiel 48:30-34 (both of which include Dan).
2. Lists of landholding tribes, or tribes which contribute soldiers to the army, will leave Levi out because they did not inherit land, but will break Joseph out into Ephraim and Manasseh, retaining the number twelve. That’s how there were ten northern tribes and two southern tribes, and yet the Jewish people today (and in Jesus’ time) are mostly made up of Judah, Benjamin, and Levi. Examples: Num. 1,2; Josh. 14:4.
3. The list in Revelation is the tribes which make up the 144,000 (which I believe is a symbolic number, and the teacher thought so as well, by the way), and it includes both tribes coming from Joseph (listed as Joseph and Manasseh, with Ephraim’s descendants being counted as Joseph) and Levi, but leaves out Dan, to end up with twelve again. Example: Rev. 7:4-8. We also note that the detailed genealogies in 1 Chronicles leave Dan’s descendants out, leading some commentators to believe that Dan had already assimilated or perished and lost their tribal identity by the postexilic period.

The obvious question is, what happened to Dan? They are reported in 1 Chr. 12:35 to have attended David’s coronation, but that is the last we hear of them historically. I think that Occam’s Razor (link to Wikipedia, so do consider the source before buying everything you read there or anywhere) leads the Biblical historian to the opinion of the commentators I have already mentioned, thinking that there wasn’t anybody left who considered themselves a Danite by the time the Babylonian Exile of the Southern Kingdom was over. But there are some wild-eyed theories about Dan, including the idea, based on an attempt to read Jacob’s prophecy and Deborah’s song (Judges 5:17) as literal statements about Dan’s history and future, that Dan moved completely out of the land of Israel. Some Anglo-Israelite teachers (and we shall have much to say about that later), including our own, taught that there was linguistic evidence that Dan had moved into Europe, and they were the ancestors of the Franks and some of the Germanic tribes, as well as Thracians, Macedonians, and quite a few others. They were seen as being the ultimate traitors to Israel, the people who genetically hated God and wanted to destroy the Jews throughout history. Greek culture and Hellenism, we were told, came from the tribe of Dan. Roman soldiers were Thracian mercenaries, and we were even treated to mythology about the “Spear of Destiny,” the Thracian spear that pierced Christ’s side, and how whoever owned that spear could rule the world (and we were told that secret societies knew where that spear was, and wielded it)—that was the tribe of Dan. The French and everything we couldn’t stand about them—tribe of Dan. The Nazis and the Holocaust—tribe of Dan. Constantine and the antisemitism of Christianity—tribe of Dan. The Irish people who didn’t side with England—tribe of Dan. The Europeans anywhere who took the side of the Palestinians against the Jewish state of Israel—tribe of Dan.

The primary proof of this was any name in any European language that contained the consonants “d” and “n” with any vowel between them. Lon<em>don</em>? The Blue <em>Dan</em>ube? <em>Den</em>mark? What more proof do you need? That tribe of Dan is everywhere!

There is no prophecy after Deuteronomy about Dan, except for Ezekiel 48. (And before you go doing a word search and finding Dan in other prophecies, remember that anything saying “from Dan to Beersheba” is a reference to the geographic whole of the land of Israel, not a reference to the tribe. That will save some of you some time.) But that didn’t stop the teacher from reading them into the list of peoples in the war of Ezekiel 38-39. Dan moved into the geographic areas in which people like “Meshech” and “Tubal” and so forth lived, so therefore those are references to Danites.

I wish I were exaggerating. I wish I were making it sound ridiculous. But the fact is, this is rather toned down from the actual teaching we got.

Anyway, the teacher saw a cataclysmic war, with either Dan and Edom joining against Israel, or Edom attacking Israel and then Dan destroying Edom, or (in the final scenario I remember) Edom attacking Dan, Dan destroying Edom, and then Dan turning on Israel. To save you wear and tear on your Bible prophecy decoder rings, let me help you with that:

1. The Muslim world will attack Europe, perhaps mostly through terrorism (after skirmishes with the US and Britain, who are not considered part of the tribe of Dan, more on this later).
2. Europe will stop supporting the Arabs and savagely defend itself, in the process breaking the power of militant Islam.
3. Europe will then join together with their new allies, the defeated client nations of the Arabs, and attack Israel.
4. Israel will win. At some point in here the Church will be removed.
5. After some time of Israel in the ascendancy (not necessarily a great time for them, but they’ll be in better shape than they ever have been), the Second Coming will take place and Christ will establish the Millennial Kingdom on earth in Jerusalem.

This is the best I can do on details at the moment. You may notice that there is a lack of many of the usual pre-trib hallmarks: one world government, antiChrist world leader, and so forth. Give us time, we’ll get there.

All of the teaching series coming from California were eventually subsumed into a lengthy prophecy series. Every teaching was either a discussion of current events (with many references to the secret goings-on in smoke-filled rooms, behind closed doors, within the Bilderberg or Bohemian Grove confines, etc.) designed to prove to us that the teacher was the only person we knew with a true understanding of those current events (because of his biblical insight into prophecy, of course), or slicing through an eschatological Bible study aimed at either proving his point or showing how stupid and ignorant every other prophecy teacher in the world had been.

The big question on some people’s mind was, “why?” I mean, why do we need to know this? Is there any point to having a better grasp of current events and the unfolding of prophecy in the Bible than the next person? In my more cynical moments, I wondered, were there really no problems with sin and understanding God’s holiness and power and sanctification in the group in California, that we could spend all our time on this? These questions will be answered, in a way, soon.