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Numbers 19 (NIV)

1 The LORD said to Moses and Aaron:
2 "This is a requirement of the law that the LORD has commanded: Tell the Israelites to bring you a red heifer without defect or blemish and that has never been under a yoke.
3 Give it to Eleazar the priest; it is to be taken outside the camp and slaughtered in his presence.
4 Then Eleazar the priest is to take some of its blood on his finger and sprinkle it seven times toward the front of the Tent of Meeting.
5 While he watches, the heifer is to be burned--its hide, flesh, blood and offal.
6 The priest is to take some cedar wood, hyssop and scarlet wool and throw them onto the burning heifer.
7 After that, the priest must wash his clothes and bathe himself with water. He may then come into the camp, but he will be ceremonially unclean till evening.
8 The man who burns it must also wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he too will be unclean till evening.
9 "A man who is clean shall gather up the ashes of the heifer and put them in a ceremonially clean place outside the camp. They shall be kept by the Israelite community for use in the water of cleansing; it is for purification from sin.
10 The man who gathers up the ashes of the heifer must also wash his clothes, and he too will be unclean till evening. This will be a lasting ordinance both for the Israelites and for the aliens living among them.
11 "Whoever touches the dead body of anyone will be unclean for seven days.
12 He must purify himself with the water on the third day and on the seventh day; then he will be clean. But if he does not purify himself on the third and seventh days, he will not be clean.
13 Whoever touches the dead body of anyone and fails to purify himself defiles the LORD's tabernacle. That person must be cut off from Israel. Because the water of cleansing has not been sprinkled on him, he is unclean; his uncleanness remains on him.
14 "This is the law that applies when a person dies in a tent: Anyone who enters the tent and anyone who is in it will be unclean for seven days,
15 and every open container without a lid fastened on it will be unclean.
16 "Anyone out in the open who touches someone who has been killed with a sword or someone who has died a natural death, or anyone who touches a human bone or a grave, will be unclean for seven days.
17 "For the unclean person, put some ashes from the burned purification offering into a jar and pour fresh water over them.
18 Then a man who is ceremonially clean is to take some hyssop, dip it in the water and sprinkle the tent and all the furnishings and the people who were there. He must also sprinkle anyone who has touched a human bone or a grave or someone who has been killed or someone who has died a natural death.
19 The man who is clean is to sprinkle the unclean person on the third and seventh days, and on the seventh day he is to purify him. The person being cleansed must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and that evening he will be clean.
20 But if a person who is unclean does not purify himself, he must be cut off from the community, because he has defiled the sanctuary of the LORD. The water of cleansing has not been sprinkled on him, and he is unclean.
21 This is a lasting ordinance for them. "The man who sprinkles the water of cleansing must also wash his clothes, and anyone who touches the water of cleansing will be unclean till evening.
22 Anything that an unclean person touches becomes unclean, and anyone who touches it becomes unclean till evening."

It can now be revealed that less than one month ago, a red heifer was born in Israel.

It can now be revealed that over five years ago, a red heifer was born in Israel. From the Boston Globe over 5 years ago:

Rabbi Shmaria Shore examines a red heifer seen by some as a sign for Jews to rebuild the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. (Globe Photo/Heidi Levine)

KFAR HASIDIM, Israel - She stares out at the world through dewy eyes, stumbling on awkward legs, dipping into her trough with abandon, oblivious to the soaring hopes and apocalyptic fears that have spread with the news of her birth.

Watched over by an armed guard in a skullcap and visited by rabbis and other seekers of meaning, this rust-colored six-month-old heifer is hailed as a sign of the coming of the Messiah and decried as a walking atom bomb.

Of a variety believed extinct for centuries, the red heifer is seen by some as the missing link needed for religious Jews to rebuild their ancient Temple in Jerusalem. Sacrificing the animal in its third year and using its ashes in a purification rite would allow Jews to return 2000 years later to the Temple site, a spot holy to both Jews and Muslims.

With tensions already high over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's decision to build a Jewish neighborhood in the section of Jerusalem Palestinians consider theirs, many fear that the calf's arrival could create an explosive situation.

``That cow represents the risk of a massive religious war,'' said Avraham Poraz, a member of Parliament from the leftist Meretz Party. ``If the fanatics get a hold of it and try to take over the Temple Mount, God knows what will happen. It only takes a few crazies to endanger all our lives.''

In terms of historic gravity, some have drawn a loose analogy with Dolly, the cloned Scottish sheep. But if Dolly stands on the frontier of science, the calf of Kfar Hasidim harks back to the most ancient tribal ritual.

Born to a black-and-white mother and brown father on a northern Israeli farm run by a religious high school for troubled and orphaned students, the calf was brought to the attention of Rabbi Shmaria Shore shortly after its birth.

Shore, a native of Providence, said he had his doubts and, after checking with ancient texts, invited a number of rabbis from Jerusalem to come to give their views. They did so several weeks ago and quickly spread word that something truly miraculous seems to have occurred.

To understand the significance of the heifer requires a knowledge of long-abandoned practices in the extinct Temple as well as a grasp of the place the Temple holds in the collective unconscious of religious Jews.

For strictly Orthodox Jews, the Temple stands for the Jewish people's direct link to God, its place as His chosen people. Built by King Solomon around 950 BC and destroyed and rebuilt and expanded over the succeeding centuries until its final destruction by the Romans in AD 70, the Temple was the center of Jewish life where daily animal sacrifices were overseen by the priestly classes of Levites and Cohens.

The Temple's destruction meant that Jewish religious life had to be re-created. Prayer, Torah study and good works became substitutes for animal sacrifice as a means of seeking favor and forgiveness from God, a development that many modern Jewish thinkers have welcomed. But a yearning for the days of the Temple has never entirely died.

One byproduct of Israel's victory in the 1967 war that brought the Old City of Jerusalem under Israeli control is the revival of interest among a small number of Jews in rebuilding the Temple because of the link they believe it offers to God and the cosmic centrality it might signify for Jews everywhere.

This has caused concern not only because few Jews wish to return to animal sacrifices and priestly classes but because the site of the Temple has been occupied for the past 1,300 years by the third-holiest shrine in Islam, the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques.

Holy to Muslims and Jews

Those mosques were built when Islam spread through the region in the 7th century. Most scholars say the mount was chosen for their location precisely because of the belief that it was a holy place. The Prophet Mohammed is said to have ascended to heaven from there.

A few Jewish fanatics have been caught trying to blow up the mosques to make room for a new Temple that would anchor a renewed Jewish kingdom and trigger the arrival of the Messiah. Most everyone else believes such a move would launch a war with the world's 1 billion Muslims.

The fear of such an act is nonetheless keen. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat recently showed a meeting of the Islamic Conference Organization in Pakistan a photo montage sold by Temple advocates that depicts the mount with the ancient Temple in the place of the two mosques.

Arafat indicated that the current battle over a Jewish housing project in East Jerusalem is but the first step on a path leading to the new Temple. Last September, when Israel opened a new exit to an archeological tunnel near the mount, Muslims rioted, saying the Jews were seeking to bring down the mosques.

The vast majority of Jews fiercely reject dreams of returning to the mount, content to have the one remnant of the Temple, the Western Wall, as a symbolic link to a bygone era and leave it at that. And they have been generally unworried about the zeal of a handful of Temple faithful for two reasons.

First, to avoid friction with Muslims, the Israeli government forbids Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount. And second, the rabbis have ruled that religious Jews may not even walk on most of the mount for fear that, in their impure state, they will pollute the holiest of earthly places.

But that is where the new heifer comes in.

In the days of the Temple, all who entered it had to be made spiritually clean by being sprinkled with a substance whose main ingredient came from the ashes of a red heifer burned in its third year.

A rare breed

The sages described the heifer as a rare breed. Only nine were recorded in religious texts to have existed and the strain has long been assumed extinct, thus making it impossible to contemplate a return to Temple ritual.

Orthodox Jews still pray three times a day for the rebuilding of the Temple. But, Jewish scholars say, most have not taken the prayer literally.

``It has always been a kind of nostalgia,'' remarked Daniel Sperber, an Orthodox Jew and professor of Talmud at Bar Ilan University, outside Tel Aviv. ``Most people relate the rebuilding of the Temple with the coming of the Messiah. Until he turns up, we don't have to worry much about it.''

But most religious Jews consider the mount to be an exceptionally holy, if temporarily occupied, spot. They will not speculate on when the Temple will replace the mosques but many believe that, one day, it will.

The creation of Israel and the recapture of Jerusalem have reawakened a belief among the rapidly growing ultra-Orthodox community that something divinely inspired is unfolding here. The red heifer is simply the next sign.

A dozen rabbis have examined the calf and said she is the long-awaited ritual heifer, meeting, so far, all the criteria described by the ancients. If the calf lives unblemished for another 18 months, she can theoretically be put to use.

``It is written that it is the 10th heifer that the Messiah will discover and here we have the 10th heifer. This is a clear sign that the Messiah is near,'' said Rabbi Ido Weber Erlich of Jerusalem in an interview on Israel Radio.

For the workers at The Temple Institute, on a cobblestone alley inside the rebuilt Jewish quarter of Jerusalem's Old City, the arrival of the heifer is an inspiration.

The institute recreates the implements of the Temple, from the pale flaxen robes worn by the priests to the golden incense jars and lyres used at prayers. There is already a portrait of the new heifer on the institute wall.

``For us, the heifer is a milestone,'' said Rabbi Menachem Makover, deputy director of the institute. ``During the diaspora, everything was missing. No one knew about the crown worn by the high priest, for example. Now we see that everything that was gone is slowly coming back.

``We used to say, `We don't have this,' or `We don't have that,' but that is no longer an excuse. We still have political problems with the Arabs. But from above someone is leading us to these tools. We didn't ask for the red heifer. Suddenly it came.''

This is the kind of talk that makes Arabs and many Israelis nervous.

David Landau, a journalist with the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz, and himself an Orthodox Jew, wrote an opinion piece recently titled, ``The Red Heifer: It's No Joke.'' in which he called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his security services to take this problem in hand now.

Landau says that while a bullet to the head of the calf might be the ticket, less radical action might also be considered since any blemish or irregularity to the calf would ruin it for liturgical purposes.

Rabbi Shore, who presides over the religious school here, says the only execution carried out by Israel was that of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann 35 years ago and if the state were to do the same to the red heifer, ``I don't know whether I'd laugh or cry.''

Some rabbis are urging that the calf be used to breed a herd of red heifers so that such an attack not end what has begun.

Shore says the heifer's arrival poses other, still-unsolved problems, such as finding a ritually pure member of the priestly Cohen class to slaughter it. But many difficulties in the renewal of Jewish life in Israel have already been solved, he said, and this, too, might have a solution.

``Some people say, `Blow up the mosques,' but I don't see it that way,'' he said. ``The Temple is at the core of the spiritual life of the Jews, and it must come when the Jews are truly ready for it. Of course, rebuilding the Temple may come as something violent and hostile.

``The Temple Mount is the source of blessing for the entire world. It is not just a piece of real estate. So this opportunity we have must not be wasted.''

Bartenders in the Mideast are famous for their vibrant cocktails, mixing equal parts religious fervor, political ambition and ethnic hatred – along with a dash of gunpowder for that certain something. Best served flaming hot in a broken glass, quaffers and elbow-tippers should ready themselves for the drink's poison. In Palestine, the mickey is the drink.

Christians around the world closely watch the bloody revelry, convinced the brawl is of – hit the deck, incoming cliché – biblical proportions.

We can blame God for this. When He decided to tell His story, He sent the cast and crew to Israel and the surrounding environs. Very little was shot off-location. Hence the grand handle: The Holy Land. Christians look intently at this thin sliver of real estate as the lightning rod of biblical prophecy – the epicenter of God's future rumblings.

The Bible says the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob will play host to an encore by Jesus Christ. The creeds of Christendom affirm this fact as crucial to the faith. What's still undecided is the order and significance of the events preceding that coming.

Currently the chic view is that espoused by prophecy pundits like Tim LaHaye and my fellow WND columnist Hal Lindsey.

In their scheme, the events of Revelation and other prophetic books will soon erupt, literally, in Israel, reaching out and engulfing much of the world. Christ will come back only after the imminent unpleasantries are finished.

Hal Lindsey recently wrote that "The Middle East is about to explode into all-out war," which was "predicted thousands of years in advance."

Tim LaHaye's fictional "Left Behind" series, co-written with Jerry Jenkins, kicks off with such a conflagration. Taking their cue from Ezekiel 38-39, LaHaye and Jenkins explain that Russia, allied with various Arab nations, will attack Israel, which they say is their "binding, overriding, passionate, and common hatred."

The views of Lindsey and LaHaye are wildly popular – both have sold multimillions of books. But they do not represent the only approach to applying Scripture to the bloody scraps in the Middle East.

"End Times Fiction," by Gary DeMar, published late last year by Thomas Nelson, is billed as a "biblical consideration of the 'Left Behind' theology." In the book, DeMar takes various portions of "Left Behind" that detail LaHaye's last-days views and compares them with Scripture.

For instance, in the first "LB" novel, "Buck" reads Ezekiel and immediately recognizes it as predictive of the battle in Israel he had witnessed at the start of the story. But how? "The battle in Ezekiel 38-39 is clearly an ancient one," writes DeMar. "All the soldiers were riding horses (38:4, 15; 39:20). The horse soldiers were 'wielding swords' (38:4), carrying 'bows and arrows, war clubs and spears' (39:3, 9). The weapons were made of wood (39:10), and the abandoned weapons served as fuel for 'seven years' (39:9)."

LaHaye follows what he calls "The Golden Rule of Biblical Interpretation"; unless the context clearly militates against it, the reader must opt for the most literal interpretation. But how does this square with LaHaye's interpretation of those references to ancient weapons as "war planes," "intercontinental ballistic missiles" and "nuclear-equipped MiG fighter-bombers"?

"There is nothing in the context that would lead the reader to conclude that horses, war clubs, swords, bows and arrows, and spears mean anything other than horses, war clubs, swords, bows and arrows, and spears," writes DeMar. "And what is the Russian air force after? Gold, silver, cattle, and goods (38:13). In what modern war can anyone remember armies going after cattle?"

LaHaye and Jenkins invent a fictional motive for the attack, a growth-enhancing botanical compound, which is admittedly sexier than cows. But just like the plot device, the interpretation is also contrived.

The details of the battle, DeMar points out, mirror closely those of a battle described in Esther – so closely, in fact, that it appears much more probable that Ezekiel's prophecy has long been fulfilled, in biblical times no less. A better hermeneutic than "The Golden Rule of Biblical Interpretation" is "Scripture Interprets Scripture Better than do Newspapers."

What about the "wars and rumors of wars" mentioned by Christ in the Gospels? Surely even if Ezekiel is wrongly applied by LaHaye and others, this one applies to the Israeli situation, right? Wrong.

DeMar points out that Tacitus, chronicling the events at the time of Christ and after in the Roman Empire, "describes the era with phrases such as 'disturbances in Germany,' 'commotions in Africa,' 'commotions in Thrace,' 'insurrections in Gaul,' 'intrigues among the Parthians,' 'the war in Britain,' and 'the war in Armenia.' Wars were fought from one end of the empire to the other in the days of the apostles." In other words, been there, done that, bought the toga.

The impulse by Christians to look for prophetic clues to events foretold in the Bible by keeping one eye on CNN and the other on sensationalistic books by men like LaHaye and Lindsey reflects a prejudice – however innocent – that none of those events could possibly have happened already. DeMar's "End Times Fiction" makes a powerful case that many of them have.

Israel and end-times fiction HERE

From Personal Update

Holy Cow?
The Red Heifer

by Chuck Missler

Much excitement has been generated by the arrival of a "Red Heifer"¹ in Israel. The birth of a red heifer (cow) on a farm in the religious youth village of Kfar Hasidim (near Haifa) has excited sectors in the Israeli religious community.

A delegation of numerous experts have visited the farm and have concluded that it is, in fact, an acceptable red heifer according to Torah requirements.

However, the cow must be at least two years old before it can be used. Until then, the cow will be carefully watched to ensure that nothing occurs to invalidate its status.

Why All the Excitement?

A red heifer was to be the means for the congregation of Israel to purify themselves, as specified in Numbers 19. It is this Torah connection which drives some of the religious Jews of today to prepare for the coming priesthood and temple services.

The red heifer must meet certain physical criteria and must be sacrificed in a certain way. Once sacrificed, the ashes are to be mixed with "clean" water and it is this mixture which is sprinkled over the "unclean."

According to the Torah, the red heifer must be without blemish, must be without defect, and must never have worn a yoke.²

The sacrifice³ must be performed outside the camp; the blood must be sprinkled seven times in front of the tabernacle; the entire heifer must be burned before the priest; cedar wood, hyssop and scarlet are added to the fire. While the primary purpose was for ritual cleansing, some believe it may have had medical implications as well.

The cedar oil came from a kind of juniper tree that grew in both Israel and in the Sinai. This cedar oil would irritate the skin, encouraging the person to vigorously rub the solution into their hands.

The hyssop oil is actually a very effective antiseptic and antibacterial agent. Hyssop oil contains 50 percent carvacrol, which is an antifungal and antibacterial agent still used in medicine today.⁴

The Water of Purification⁵ is then prepared by a priest, who is clean, who gathers the ashes, adds water to the ashes⁶ and then stores it outside the camp in a clean place.

Prophetic Significance

The Talmud claims that the red heifer sacrifice was the only one of God's commands that King Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, claimed he did not understand.

The red heifer, as well as all the other specifications in the Torah, was an allusion which ultimately pointed to Jesus Christ, as Paul points out in Hebrews 9:13, 14:

For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the flesh: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?

Solomon apparently did not understand why Numbers 19 declared that the priest would be "unclean until evening." This unusual sacrifice symbolically pointed to Jesus Christ and His sacrifice because our Lord, who was perfectly sinless, judicially took upon Himself the sins of the world so that we who are sinful could become righteous before God.

Just as the red heifer was sacrificed "outside the camp," in contrast to all other sacrifices that took place in the Tabernacle or Temple, Jesus was sacrificed outside the city of Jerusalem, on the very spot, we believe, on which Abraham offered Isaac two thousand years earlier.⁷

(Also, it was the Water of Purification, resulting from the ashes of the red heifer and reserved for ritual cleansing, that was the water used by Jesus when He turned the water into wine at the wedding at Cana.⁸ One cannot fully appreciate the significance of this event unless one understands the background of Numbers 19, et al. He was, to His disciples only, declaring Himself the Lord of the Torah.)

The Coming Temple

It is this water, the Water of Purification, which is required by the Israelites today. It is needed to "purify" today's Levitical priesthood and to "purify" the temple mount in preparation for the building of the Third Temple.

We know that this temple will be built because Jesus, John, and Paul all make reference to it.⁹

Since Herod's Temple was destroyed by the Roman emperor Titus in 70 A.D., no flawless red heifer has been born within the Biblical land of Israel, according to Rabbinical sources. Since there has been no temple, nor sacrifices, since the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, the availability of the necessary purification agents would seem to pose a problem.

Furthermore, the Jewish people did not see the recreation of the State of Israel until 1948, nor the recapturing of Jerusalem until 1967.

There are, however, some well placed and respected experts who believe they know where the ashes of the last red heifer are presently hidden.

However, to discuss this further would put some people at risk. If this turns out to be in error, then perhaps the presently available candidate may prove very significant after all. Being only about 9 months old, it will not be eligible until its third year: 1999 or so.

The only real obstacle to the rebuilding is not the missing ashes, but political access to the Temple Mount. Everyone has their own conjectures as to how this will ultimately happen, but we'll just have to wait and see.

Just as Zechariah predicted,¹⁰ Jerusalem is indeed becoming "a cup of trembling" and a "burdensome stone" to all the nations of the earth. The rebuilding of the Temple will be another intensifying aspect in the present Middle East imbroglio.

We understand that the Vatican has offered to "internationalize" the Temple Mount: let the Muslims use it on Friday (their holy day); the Jews use it on Saturday (Shabbat), and the Christians on Sunday. This appears consistent with their ambition and agenda to lead the worldwide "ecumenical" movement.

If the southern conjecture (supported by some current researchers-see sketch on page 12 by Tuvia Sagiv) proves to be the correct location of the Temple, it seems it could be built without disturbing the present structures!

Southward, the bedrock drops enough to permit a sanctuary to be built below the present structures, disturbing neither the Dome of the Rock nor the Al Aksa Mosque.¹¹

This is only a provocative proposal and there is no clear reason to view it as acceptable to the religious Jews. Any proposal at all will, of course, be unacceptable to Islam.

However, the Coming World Leader, who ultimately is destined to desecrate this Temple himself, is first going to prove attractive to both the Jews and the Muslims,¹² while posing as a replacement for Christ.¹³ (Somehow his acceptability apparently may exploit Islamic eschatology as well!)

The very emergence of these topics into the mainstream news media is provocative. The rebuilding of the Temple would, of course, be an exciting milestone on the forthcoming prophetic scenario. We will just have to watch and see. Jesus said,

And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh. (Luke 21:28)

Exciting times, indeed. Are you really ready?

* * *

Notes:

A heifer is a young female bovine (cow) prior to the time that she has produced her first calf.
Numbers 19:2.
Numbers 19:3-7.
Cf. S.I. McMillen, MD., None of These Diseases, Fleming H. Revell Co., Old Tappan NJ, 1958.
Numbers 19:9.
Numbers 19:17.
The Akedah, Abraham's offering of Isaac, is explored in our briefing package, The Coming Temple: Update, and in our Expositional Commentary on Genesis, vol.. 3, p.15-18.
John 2:6.
Matthew 24:15; Revelation 11:1-2; 2 Thessalonians 2:4ff.
Zechariah 12:2, 3.
Personal UPDATE, 1/93, p.16-21; 5/93, p.9-15; 4/95, p.12-13.
2 Thessalonians 2:4.
The label "Antichrist" comes from the Greek avnti,cristoi,, which means "in the place of Christ," or "claiming to be Christ," as well as "against Christ."