The Harbinger II - The Return

By Jonathan Cahn

Before starting this review, I was curious what other readers had said about it. 

I checked out Amazon, and wasn't surprised that the greatest criticism was "repetitious." 

I can't disagree. Cahn's style, at least based on this book and the initial "harbinger" book, The Harbinger, the Ancient Mystery That Holds the Secret of America's Future, is repetitious. But, in an odd way, it suits the nature of the story. It isn't so much "repetitious" as "question and answer," or maybe "call and response." 

The two books both mainly consist of conversations between the narrator, Nouriel, and The Prophet. It seems The Prophet has chosen Nouriel to be his vehicle for sharing important prophesies about the

future of America, based on Biblical prophesies given to ancient Israel, as The Prophet promises these words were intended for both Israel, and America, as the two nations shared a promise from God, and a dedication to God. 

I read the first Harbinger in 2014, two years after it was written, and 11 years after the events about which it was written occurred. Looking back on that review, I find I had a similar comment to what I'll say again in this review, and what many other reviews, both pro and con, had to say. "I didn't like the style." 

Indeed, the Q&A gets tedious until you accept it and just roll with it. But I will correct myself in this regard: when you're dealing with material that is arcane, has specific references in a language you don't understand, and about which you probably know little, a bit of repetition might actually serve a purpose.

First, let me say about me: I was raised Catholic. Why that matters is simple: based at least this Catholic's religious education, we studied a Catechism, we did not read and discuss the Bible. The Church has a very specific dogma, drawn, of course, from the writings of the Bible but also from word of mouth and handed-down tradition. The Catholic Church prides itself on being a line drawn from St. Peter, the first "pope" of the Church, to today. That may be disputed by other Christian churches and traditions, but from the standpoint of the Catholic Church, the "priests" were interpreters of the scripture, and certainly at a time when most people were illiterate, were the only ones who could read the texts, let alone should. As a consequence, unlike probably many of Cahn's readers, I had never really sat down and read the Bible, either as literature, or as a religious text, cover to cover, and learned to correlate a prophesy and its outcome, or one book or writer or passage with another. So in one way, I was at a disadvantage, and at another, perhaps an advantage. 

I was both very limited in my Biblical scholarship going in, and, very limited in my opinions and conclusions about the Book qua book. I was open to Cahn's study, his interpretation, and his somewhat stunning insights.

Basically, in The Harbinger, the first book, Nouriel learns that the 9/11 attacks were promised long, long ago - both to Israel, and to any other nation that had dedicated itself to the God of the Bible, as he claims did the United States.

That contention of course is debated. The religious history of the United States has been written about almost ad nauseam, and lately with a lot more disagreement that I recall when I was first introduced to U.S. History many years ago. As I understood it, the colonies were first founded because many who populated them in their earliest days sought religious freedom. They were fleeing places, one in particular, that was constantly demanding they obey the state "church," and not follow their conscience or belief. At the same time, many of the earliest voyagers and investigatory visits were based on trade, and conversion. Many early Spanish visitors wanted trade and gold, to be sure, but others wanted souls to convert. The French wanted pelts to trade, but the missionaries were interested in baptisms as well. Almost all the earliest settlers wanted to find a place where they could practice their faith unmolested; later colonists had a variety of reasons for making the dangerous voyage west, but by the time of the revolution, the leaders and thinkers responsible for the foundational documents that created the country were men of the Enlightenment, a scholarly and philosophical movement that separated the religious from the scientific, but honored both - and more than one founder noted that a "moral people," and by that it was understood a people who honored the Ten Commandments, were required to maintain a free Republic. 

The United States never shrank from public prayer, and while there was no state sanctioned or selected church, the Judeo-Christian standards were understood to be the prevailing morality and underpinning of the state's ideas of "right and wrong."

For Cahn, this means, God was in the bargain. And while this God was never as specific as the Yahweh/Jehovah of Israel, the fact that most Americans were some form of Protestant/Christian, his assumption that "God" was that same God who promised much to Israel as his chosen people has some merit.

What Cahn's first book uncovers is the promise in the scriptures that Israel must not forsake or disobey God, on peril of his abandonment and punishment. Cahn says that this same fate awaited America if it didn't heed these same warnings - these "harbingers" - and remain faithful to God as his "chosen nation." When America turned its face away from God, a punishment was sent - per very specific promises - in the form of the 9/11 planes crashing into the Twin Towers, a field in Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon.

Now warned, and a decade later, America is sent another warning, the form of a plague. But of course that's only a piece of the story. 

Cahn offers very specific behaviors, promises, failures, and betrayals, literally chapter and verse, that explain what was prophesied in the Bible, what happened to Israel, how it parallels modern America and all that it suffered during the 9/11 horrors, and what is going on in the present. And, as noted, while I am no Biblical scholar and can't bring any deep learning to the table in terms of agreeing or disputing his conclusions, I can certainly find the passages in the Bible and attest that they are there, and that there is some reason to say, "He's got a point."