The Harbinger by Jonathan Cahn Page B

cedar was exotic. Unlike the twisting sycamore, the cedar was straight, majestic, and towering. Its wood was smooth, durable, and perfectly suited for construction. The sycamore could reach a height of about fifty feet; but the cedar could grow to well over a hundred. That was the point. They would plant cedars in place of the fallen sycamores. And unlike the sycamore, the cedar would stand strong against any future attack…or so they hoped. One commentary puts it this way:
    “Instead of hearkening, heeding, and repenting, the nation determines to act in a spirit of defiance… it will exchange its feeble sycamores that are cut down for strong cedars which the wildest gales will spare . 1
    “The wildest gales would be what?” he asked.
    “The nation’s coming day of judgment,” I replied.
    “Yes. And on that day nothing would be spared—not the trees, not the stones, not the nation. And the kingdom would fall as quickly and violently as a cedar crashing down to the earth.”
    “So it’s the same thing they did with the quarried stone…the same act in a different form. They laid the quarried stone in the place of fallen bricks. Now they plant the cedar in the place of the sycamore.”
    “It’s the act of khalaf ,” he said.
    “ Khalaf ?”
    “It’s the Hebrew word used in the verse. It means to exchange, to replace, to plant one thing in the place of another .”
    “And what about the word cedar ?” I asked. “ Cedar is English. What’s the original word used in the prophecy? What was the tree called in Hebrew?”
    “ Erez . It was called the erez . ‘The sycamores have fallen, but we will plant erez trees in their place.’”
    “So erez means cedar ?” I asked.
    “Yes and no,” he replied. “ Cedar is the word most often used to translate erez , as in the cedars of Lebanon. But erez means much more than the English cedar . Come.” With that, he left the path and led me over to a tree. “How would you describe it, Nouriel?”
    “It’s an evergreen.”
    “And what else?”
    “It has cones, and its leaves are needlelike.”
    “It’s a coniferous tree, a conifer. The classic botanical word known as Hierobotanicon defines the Hebrew erez as a conifer or coniferous tree. The word erez also appears in several different ancient texts where it refers to an evergreen conifer.”
    “So an Erez Tree is a coniferous evergreen.”
    “Yes,” he replied, “but not every coniferous evergreen is necessarily an Erez Tree.”
    “So what exactly is it?” I asked.
    “Most specifically it’s a particular kind of cone-bearing evergreen. One commentator more narrowly pinpoints it:
    “The Hebrew erez rendered cedar in all English versions, is most likely a generic word for the pine family.” 2
    “And that means what…exactly?” “The Erez Tree would fall under the botanical classification of pinacea .”
    “ Pinacea . And what,” I asked, “does pinacea refer to specifically?”
    “The cedar, the spruce, the pine, and the fir.”
    “So the most accurate identification of the Hebrew word erez would be pinacea tree .”
    “Yes. The most botanically precise translation of the vow would be, ‘But we will plant pinacea trees in their place.’”
    “And the pinacea includes the cedar, but more than the cedar.”
    “Correct. So they plant the stronger tree in place of the weaker, as they vow a stronger nation to replace a weaker one. The Erez Tree becomes another symbol of the nation and its defiance—a living symbol of their confidence in their national resurgence, their tree of hope.”
    “A tree of hope, but not a good hope.”
    “No,” he replied, “a prideful, self-centered, and godless hope. What they saw as a tree of hope was, in reality, a harbinger of judgment.”
    He asked me for the seal. So, of course, I gave it to him, and, lifting it up in his right hand, as he had done with the others, he began to reveal its mystery.
    “The Seventh Harbinger: The warning of the fallen sycamore