It was shortly after sunset in an Aboriginal settlement called Dodge City, just outside of Brewarrina, New South Wales. Chaim Rosenberg had accompanied Molly on an expedition to visit some of her relatives. Molly was off touring the neighbourhood, and Chaim sat casual y on the couch at Ben Black's place while half a dozen men of various ages passed a flagon of port around.
Ben himself was not there. The loungeroom was almost dark now, either because the electricity no longer worked, or because someone had failed to replace a bulb. In either event, the men were oblivious to the darkness as long as they could make out one another's silhouettes in the light that came through curtain-less windows from a nearby street light.
The house smelled of dirty nappies from the two babies that lived there, though it had little effect on any of the men in the room. Conversation was banal and tended toward arguments over the least detail. But none of this fazed Chaim, who remained silent, and simply passed the flagon on untouched whenever it came to him. No one seemed aware that he was not Aboriginal, that he was not joining in the conversation, nor that he was not drinking.
These were the kind of scenes Chaim had grown accustomed to over the past few months. He had come to love them, not because of the conditions just described, but because he had a growing conviction that, as a people, the Australian Aborigines were just waiting for something of immense importance to happen... something in which they would play a vital role. Ironically, the Aboriginal community itself was almost indifferent to all the fuss the rest of the world was making over the war in America.
"You mob clear out. We got business to 'tend to." It was big Ben Black standing in the doorway. (The door itself had been removed years ago.) He had a tall, thin white man in a cheap, dusty suit with him. The Aboriginal men in the the room rose to their feet, as Ben motioned Chaim to stay seated.
"Charlie, you can stay too," he said, and one of the older men in the room resumed his seat on the loungeroom floor.
When the others had left and there were just Chaim, Ben, Charlie, and the stranger, Ben began his introduction.
“This young fella is name of David… David Hartley. He got some fings to show us from the Bible... important fings for our people."
David was about 35 years old. Chaim later learned that he had been raised in the Seventh Day Adventist Church... a group that believed fanatically for decades that it was evil to worship on Sunday. The movement had, in recent years, become far more liberal, and far more tolerant of other Christian denominations.
David had left the church during one of many divisions that resulted from its shift toward mainstream Christianity. He had spent a couple of years on his own, travelling around the country. Like Chaim, he had a strange attraction toward Australia's Aboriginal people.
"I discovered this a few months ago," the young preacher began, opening a well-worn Bible to the 18th chapter of Isaiah, and squinting heavily as he struggled to read in the dim light. "It's a message to people from Kenya, who it says came to Australia many years ago. Least that's the way I read it."
The chapter started with, "Woe to the land… which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia, that sends ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of bulrushes, saying, 'Go, swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from their beginning hitherto, a nation meted out and trodden down, whose land the rivers have despised."
David looked up to see if he still had their attention before he continued: "Some translations say this new land they were talking about was vast and flat, with few rivers, and no way to travel 'cept by foot. Most big flat dry places in the world either have horses or camels, but not Australia. The first people here got 'round by walking. Doesn't it sound like the Aboriginal people of Australia?"
He went on, without waiting for an answer.
"There's theories that the first Aborigines came from Africa, maybe in papyrus boats, just like the verse says. Then there's the baobab tree. It only grows in Australia, India, and Africa. In all three countries there's a legend about God punishing the tree for its pride by pulling it out of the ground and planting it upside down."
"He thinks us Black people, here and in India, come from Africa," Ben put in.
Chaim's thoughts strayed at the first mention of India. He had, since attending the conference in Chennai, formed a deep friendship with Guru Vaishnu. The two had corresponded almost daily via email, and earlier that week, Chaim had received a disturbing letter from Vaishnu, about problems with the government there.
David's voice brought Chaim back to the passage of scripture and the darkened room: "It starts out warning the people in this country; then it says there'll be some pruning; and it finishes up saying they'll bring a gift to God at the time of the harvest, when a trumpet blows."
Chaim pulled out a little penlight and, looking over David's shoulder, he shone it on the open passage. One line stood out: "The churlish man will no longer be called liberal." A smile crossed his face as he thought of the recent decision by the Liberal Party, to change its name. For as long as he could remember, the party had been conservative to a fault (even 'churlish' he thought mischievously) in its foreign and domestic policies. It had always been a misnomer to call them 'Liberals'.
"In Bible prophecy," David continued, "the harvest is the end of the world.
There are seven trumpets that signal a time of great trouble, just before the end."
Chaim flinched. The end of the world? Bible prophecy? he thought.
These were not his favorite subjects, not as a Quaker, as a Jew, or as an academic. Yet it was no more preposterous than him sitting here in a dirty, smelly, darkened room in an Aboriginal housing estate. He may as well hear David out.
The others squatted on the floor, in front of Chaim and David, who were sitting on the worn-out couch. "It's not really the end of the world, like the destruction of the world," David explained. "It's more like a change... the end of one age… an age of spiritual darkness. And the dawn of a new age… an age of justice and righteousness."
Chaim noted that David's words were almost identical to the ones Hindus use to describe what they expect when their Kalki Avatar arrives.
David explained further: "Just before the end, there'll be another leader who will bring what seems like peace, prosperity, and religious unity. The problem is that he'll be a counterfeit. Only those who are tuned in to God will know the truth. This false peace will turn into the worst suffering in the history of the world."
"What happened in America?" Chaim asked. "Is that what you're talking about?" He knew what fundamentalist Christians believed about the coming world leader, but he was hoping that David might be pushing a toned down version.
"Way I see it, we're going to experience something even worse than that," David replied.
It was difficult to imagine anything worse than the destruction of America.
The official death toll was now nearing thirty mil ion and counting, with some 300 million people evacuated over the past year, and mil ions more unaccounted for, presumably dead, or living in Canada and Mexico by now. The entire country had been left uninhabited, and there was hardly a person on earth who had not been directly affected by it. Not even the Black Plague had taken so many lives.
On the other hand, what David was saying coincided with Chaim's own misgivings about something even worse coming in the future.
David continued. "This world leader, who starts out good, ends up as evil as the devil himself, a man called, 'The Antichrist'. He'll try to kill true believers, but the Bible says they'll be taken to someplace called 'the wilderness', where they'll be protected. Maybe this is where God will use the Aboriginal people.
They've lived for centuries in some of the harshest country in the world... the wilderness of Australia. They could train people all over the world in how to survive. I think the 'gift' these people bring to God may be the people they help to escape from the Antichrist."
The concept of an antichrist wasn't new to Chaim, but he had not personally met anyone who related any of it to the Aborigines.
"How long have you believed these things? Have you shared them with others? And if so, what has been their reaction?" he asked as politely as he could when David had finished his presentation.
"I've been talking about this for a few months now, travelling 'round the Outback. Truth is, no one so far has been interested in it." David hung his head slightly. "Least not till tonight."
"Most of our people are as lost as anyone else," Ben said through two missing front teeth. "But I fink it's true. I been finkin' 'bout Jesus for a long time, and I reckon he's got more aboriginality than most us Black fell as."
Talk turned to things that Jesus was reported to have said about money and about living by faith. This part of what David was saying appealed more to Chaim. He recognised Jesus as a great teacher; and he had already noted a link between what was happening in India and things Jesus had said. He himself had pretty much stopped working for money now. So it was intriguing to think of Australia's Aborigines becoming part of a similar movement, if that was what David was talking about.
The Aboriginal people, most of whom had no word for 'money' in their native languages, had for millennia escaped the curse of materialism. While the world saw them as misfits, who refused to become compliant workers in its economic quests, the Aboriginal people themselves had held out. But many thousands had drunk themselves to death, and many more had suffered a kind of collective insanity in the process.
Despite his reservations about the eschatalogical stuff that David was spouting, Chaim was starting to feel that they were getting closer to discovering the true destiny of the native people of Australia.
Missionaries had tried to scrub and clothe those to whom they ministered, but they had never seen the potential for the Aborigines themselves to become missionaries of a different sort... ambassadors of truth and goodwill to the rest of the world. With this concept of learning to survive without paid jobs in an alien world, the Aborigines might be the natural experts.
There were points here that could be quite exciting... if only Chaim could get over the stuff about Bible prophecy. He decided to ask more questions.
"I've read a bit about prophecy," he explained, without revealing his academic expertise in the area of religion. "It always seems like the prophetic bits could be read in several different ways. The interpretations aren't usually clear until after they've been fulfilled. Would that be a fair way to put it?"
"I don't see it quite like that," said David. "But is it really important that people understand it all in advance? Might even cause problems if they did know too much. As long as it really does fit with what happens, seeing it can still be inspiring even if you don't see it till after it happens." David paused for a moment and then went on.
"Of course some prophecies are easier to prove than others. I'll give you two examples...
"There's the Isaiah 53 prophecy about Jesus being wounded for our transgressions, and being led as a lamb to the slaughter, without answering back. That kinda stuff.
"It's a pretty good match for what he actually did; but the prophecy itself doesn't say enough for people to have been sure it was talking about the Messiah before Jesus came along. This is the kind of thing you're talking about, isn't it? It wasn't clear until after it all happened."
Chaim grunted agreement.
"There's lots of prophecies like this," David confessed.
"But there's another one that says right from the start that it's about the Jewish Messiah. In fact, it's the only prophecy in the Old Testament that uses the exact word 'messiah'. And it tells the exact year when Jesus would be crucified." He looked to see if Chaim was interested, and he was. This was something different.
David continued: "It was written by the Hebrew prophet, Daniel, more than 500 years before it happened."
David directed Chaim to Daniel 9:24 to 27. It said that "Messiah will be cut off, but not for himself" 483 years after the decree to rebuild Jerusalem. David was talking about a decree by Artaxerxes of Persia, in 446 B.C., to rebuild Jerusalem.
"Even if one is skeptical enough to believe that Daniel wrote the prophecy after the decree was issued by Artaxerxes," David explained, "no one believes it was written after Jesus was crucified, in 30 A.D. So Daniel definitely beat the odds by picking the exact year of Jesus' death so many centuries earlier."
Chaim wasn't so sure. Somehow, in his studies, he had never heard of this passage. Also, he had done some quick calculations while David was talking, and he came up with a discrepancy of seven years.
"From 446 B.C. to 30 A.D. is only 476 years... not 483," he argued. The prophecy is off by seven years."
"Only if you work on the modern calendar, which has 365 1/4 days to the year," David explained. The calendar used in Bible prophecies worked on a year of 360 days."*
"Over a period of 476 years, at a rate of 5 1/4 days per year, you would have accumulated a total of 2499 days, or roughly seven years!"
Chaim was impressed. Why hadn't he ever encountered this passage in his studies? As a Jew himself, any reference to the Messiah should have included reference to this passage, if it really was, as David said, the only passage in the Old Testament that specifically named the 'Messiah'.
(*See Revelation 11:2, 11:3, 12:6, 12:14, 13:5, and Daniel 7:25, and 12:7, where a period of three and a half years is also described as 42 months, or 1260 days [42 x 30 days, or 3.5 x 360 days] ).
The fact that it predicted the exact year of the crucifixion of Jesus (and, of course, the subsequent impact on history made by this one incredible man) was overwhelming evidence for Christian claims about Jesus being the Messiah.
But for Chaim himself, messiahs of any sort were not a major concern.
Nor were prophecies. He was not that kind of a Jew. What he was interested in were the implications of all this with regard to his dealings, both with the Aborigines of Australia, and with the Vaishnuvites of India.