#messianic kingdom | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

gingersnaptaff · 19 days ago

Text

Y Mab Darogan 1

(Stained glass window depicting Cadwaladr and his flag in Llandaff Cathedral, Charles Powell, 1919)

(King Arthur (top left), St Tewdrig, and St Cadwaladr, stained glass window in Llandaff Cathedral. Situated in the North Aisle, Charles Powell, 1919)

'The awen predicts they will make haste;

We shall have treasures, possessions, and peace

And broader leadership and lively leaders;

And after war, dwellings in every area;

Men fierce in fight-clamour, furious warriors,

Swift in attack, slow to leave defence-

Fighters that scatter foreigners as far as Caer Wair'

- the opening first lines of Armes Prydain

Something a bit different today but I thought I'd yell about ‘Y Mab Darogan’ or The Prophesied Son, who was seen as a messianic figure in Welsh literature and was appellated to four* (!) different lads (including King Arthur). This will be a long one so please have a snack and a drink at hand. You're gonna need ‘em.

Now, Y Mab Darogan as a concept first crops up in the 10th Century poem ‘Armes Prydain’ (The Prophecy of Britain) from the Book of Taliesin. Andrew Breeze postulated that the poem was written in about ‘940 AD.’ Taliesin’s status as ‘a seer’ write Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams in their introduction to The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain means that ‘it is not at all surprising’ to find a collection of Prophetic poems alongside the others within Llyfr Taliesin. ‘Its themes,’ Lewis and Williams further write, ‘are recycled in several later poems looking forward to a reunification of the British - usually Under the leadership of Gwynedd - and the advent of a heroic deliverer.’

It's a call for all Celtic nations (Welsh, Scots, Irish, Cornish, Britons, Manx) to come to arms against the Anglo-Saxon invaders - as can be seen in the lines 'long-haired champions, masters of war/ Will come from Ireland to drive out the Saxons.', 'Both loyal men will come from Alt Clud, / A resplendent army to drive them from Britain' 'A powerful host will come from Llydaw (Brittany),' 'Let the Cymry rise up, a war-like company' and 'On all sides shame will be the Saxons destiny' and, although it doesn't feature King Arthur proper it's writing kinda alludes to his death.

To zoom through some background, Hywel Dda (yes, he of Law fame) was seen as very much toeing the line to the Angles - who y'know were (and kinda still are) Wales’ traditional enemies. Now, for ol’ Hywel, this had meant that when Edward the Elder ruled over Wessex had had to cleave to him to ensure that Wales didn't get battered within an inch of its life as had all other Celtic nations in Britain (so the Gaels, the Picts, etc, etc). However, once he was out of the picture and his son, Athelstan, had taken over, an alliance of the kingdoms of the Strathclyde*, Dublin, and Scotland had all risen against him. In a break from tradition - y'know, the whole Men of the North business where it was acknowledged and expected that the Welsh would aid their compatriots - Hywel vehemently denied the three kingdoms’ aid leading to their defeat at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937.

Obviously, this pissed A LOT of Welsh lads off.

I mean, yeah, it'd piss me off too. if I expected a battle only to find out we weren't getting one cuz some lawmaker lad had to keep his neighbours happy I'd be LIVID. So this poem was written! No word if Hywel read it, but I imagine his Goodreads review would've been a firm one star.

In it, it refers to ‘Thus they'll avenge Garmon's* friends with force/ Four hundred and forty years on' and, according to the Annales Cambriae (my absolute beloved) in 537AD there was: ‘The Strife of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut perished; and there was plague in Britain and Ireland.’ which means ‘404 years’ after that is 941. Therefore, the poem is very much looking forward to the annihilation of the Saxons in 941 which kinda happened because Edmund had to accept a humiliating treaty at Leicester in 941, giving the north-east of England to the Viking leader Olaf Guthfrithson.

Also, the poem invokes two famous leaders - Conan of Brittany, and Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon of Gwynedd - in the line: 'Cynan and Cadwaladr, warlords in the armies' Cadwaladr is seen as hot shit - basically on par with Arthur as a ‘Great Deliver’ figure for the Welsh - and, somehow, the Welsh Dragon has become known as Cadwaladr's flag. Cadwaladr is also important because Henry VII (yeah, HIM) claimed descent from him. The hoped-for leader is seen as returning from exile - just as Cadwaladr is said to have done and Henry VII would later do once he'd hot-footed it to France to get aid - or arriving from over the sea - as Owain Lawgoch would later unsuccessfully attempt to do in the 1300’s - and ‘on their return they … overthrow corrupt or alien rulers within Wales, and rally other Welsh kingdoms to resistance and ultimate victory over the English.’

Now, as I previously alluded to, King Arthur is pretty much absent from the early corpus which makes up the ‘Mab Darogan’ legend. The ‘fierce resentment’ of the Armes Prydain makes no mention of him, and, therefore, we must look elsewhere.

We find it in the Gwyddelian composed Historia Brittonum. He's specifically indicated as fighting the Saxons (ons of the main tenets of the job, I think we'll all agree) and doing… okay. T. Charles Edwards states, ‘The victories of a Gwrthefyr, or an Arthur, might be glorious but they had no future,’ and, I think, it is this utter glory and utter ineffectualness that highlights the two main tenets of what makes you mab darogan, well, y mab darogan.

Arthur ‘echoes the achievements of Gwrthefyr’ in his chapter and so brings with it another key building block of y mab darogan. He is an echo of what has coms before and what will - hopefully, futilely - come again. A warrior will rise and lead through Britons - the Welsh, the natives of the land - to a brief taste of freedom before slipping away in a haze.

Furthermore, T. Charles Edwards states, ‘Perhaps the main concern of the author of Historia Brittonum is to encourage the Britons to come to terms with defeat of loss and territory.’ Arthur, like Macsen Wledig before him, is a rallying point for the Welsh. A flashpoint. Arthur is the ‘British Dux’ or warlord, the rebellious leader at will bring the Saxons to heel.

The legend of him being Y Mab Darogan amongst the Welsh is thought to have taken widespread hold after this. He's seen as a rallying cry for various rebellions and poets made use of his stature to advance various other disaffected Welshmen's causes. The Anglo-Norman text ‘The Description of England’ states that ‘openly they [the Welsh] go about saying,... / that in the end, they will have it all; / by means of Arthur, they will have it back... / They will call it Britain again’ So this would firmly put him in the bracket of The Welsh Lord and Saviour, kiss fuckin kiss. Furthermore, Daniel Helbert in his essay, ‘The Prophetic Hope in Twelfth Century Britain,’ states ‘at the close of the twelfth-century, the idea that King Arthur would return from the grave and lead his people to victory was not a new one,’ for the power and popularity of this legend both within Britain and on the continent as a whole (i.e. in Brittany where Arthur - and, later, Owain Lawgoch - is also seen as a somewhat Messianic figure in his own right) had an ‘allure’ to it. This suggests that, to me, the ‘Breton/Briton Hope’ was always a powerful sticking point in people's heads. Arthur had already left an indelible mark on culture, be it Welsh, Anglo-Norman, or otherwise, and people would use it in whatever ways suited them.

But I also must caution against believing this outright. *sigh* Arthur is Welsh*, yes. The building blocks of his myth are Welsh. I do not dispute that. However, O.J. Padel says that no contemporary Welsh source of a prophecy concerning Arthur's return to Britain has been found, and Charles T. Edwards further states: ‘Although the use of a Welsh battle-poem has been suspected, perhaps rightly no such source is likely … And if there was such a poem celebrating Arthur's battles, its date remains entirely uncertain.’ While there exists plenty of poetry on Arthur's ‘descendants’ as it were, Owain Lawgoch and Owain Glyndŵr, there is nothing particularly concrete for Artie and, furthermore, we must both rely on non-Welsh texts AND Henry VII's propaganda during the Wars of the Roses when he was challenging the Plantagenets for the English throne.

(Personally, Arthur just likes to be a tricksy bastard and I wish he'd CEASE AND DESIST. Bro, I went to ur fuckin Grotto in Corwen* when I was a kid. You OWE me.)

Conversely, Arthur has been used to legitimise the English’s rule over the native Britons. Edward I, after his conquest of Wales, used ‘Round Tables’ to celebrate and justify his conquest of Wales - one of many Big Kicks in the Teeth for us, ngl, other than letting the Prince of Wales be a baby because he only babbled*, and having the true last Princess of Wales, Gwenllian, be shut up in a monastery when she was a baby - and the consequent ‘reunification’ of Arthurian Britain. The Galfridian texts also were even used to justify Edward's claim over the Scottish throne - after the House of Dunkeld came to an untimely end with Margaret, the Maid of Norway's, death at sea when she was only 7 - as Arthur conquered Scotland. Geoffrey of Monmouth, I'm hitting your ghost over the head with a boot. One with iron toe caps. And smeared in dung. Arthur's use as a colonial tool by both the Normans’ and the Plantagenet dynasty cannot be overstated. To do so is a great disservice that doesn't do anybody - least of all the Celtic countries who had their great mythological king beaten into this oppressive tool to try and bring them to heel - any favours.

Aled Llion Jones writes in Darogan: Prophecy, Lament, and Absent Heroes in Medieval Literature that the imagined victory of y mab darogan represents a ‘return to a united, unified legendary state of organicism’ which was once conjured in a long-lost son called ‘Unbennaeth Prydain or ‘The Sovereignty of Britain. Furthermore, Brud and Brut (that's Prophecy and History for all you non-Welsh speakers out there) were near-homonyms in medieval Welsh and the Brut y Brenhinedd - ‘Chronicles of the King's,’ which are an adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae - was framed as being the story of how British lordship over Ynys Prydain had been gained, flourished, and lost to the Saxons. Prophecy, therefore, provided how it would ultimately be won back by those who would come after Arthur.

But, I mean, Wales would have to wait to find out who their next Mab Darogan would be. Next week: Owain Lawgoch's Hot Shit Tour of France: How he Became Y Mab Darogan, Fucked About in Guernsey and Got Assassinated When He Was Cutting His Hair.

Some notes!

*Garmon is St. Garmon the Gaulish Bishop who visited Britain in the first half of the fifth century

*You could make the case that Owain Gwynedd could be seen as Y Mab Darogan considering his various run-ins with the Normans. However, you could say that about The Lord Rhys also and, if we’re getting into the meat of it, neither of those two lads are even seen as having faulty alarm clocks. Or chillaxing beneath a mountain.

*Strathclyde wasn't incorporated into Scotland until the 11th Century when it was annexed into the Kingdom of Alba. It would still be known as Ystrad Clud at this time.)

*Technically, Brythonic which is the forerunner to the Britons but, like, the language of the texts he is primarily featured in is Old Welsh. I know he's seen as an English figure but that's wrapped up on years and years of colonialism.

*That baby was later known as King Edward II whose reign was less than impressive, but extremely gay. Nice to see him committing to the Remarkable cosplay ngl. (Idk if he ever did that. I just think it's fun to imagine he did. Bet he was Lance.)

*The Grotto was so fuckin fun. If I can dredge up a photo of the Red and White Dragon fighting then I'll fuckin slap it up because ooooh, baby, it was SO COOL. Also, they had an animatronic Arthur asleep under a mountain. ANYWAY.

*Myrddin/Merlin was also associated with prophecy in the early Welsh texts particularly those about the mab darogan.

Background Reading and Sources:

Land of My Father's by Gwynfor Evans

The History of Wales by J. Graham Jones

Wales: England's Colony? by Martin Johnes (A Banger.)

The Book of Taliesin by Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams

The Arthur of the Welsh by Rachel Bromwich (T. Charles Edwards is included in it. Strongly recommend it.)

The Earliest Welsh Poems by Joseph Clancy

Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature by O. J Padel

The Welsh Triads by Rachel Bromwich

Lastly a quick aside: this is my theory but it is entirely possible that Arthur disinterring Bendigeidfran's head in Branch 2 of the Mabinogi could be seen as him taking up the 'heroic deliverer' role from an earlier Celtic hero. Certainly, while his head remained buried at Gwynfryn (White Hill, speculated to be Tower Hill in London) 'no oppression would ever come from across the sea to this island while that head was in its hiding place.' Bendigeidfran, like Arthur, was seen as the High King of Britain, and there is certainly an echo of Arthur about him. Arthur, in a fit of hubris, disclosed the head of Bendigeidfran from its resting place because 'it did not seem right to him that this Island should be defended by the strength of anyone, but his own.' And this 'was known as one of the Three Unfortunate disclosures,' so the Mabinogion says.

I'm not an academic but it is perhaps something to think about.

76 notes · View notes

cyndaquilisbestboi · 2 years ago

Text

One thing I’ve yet to see talked about with Nimona, but that I really really liked, is how it tackles the mythology of war and valor. Specifically, when we first see Gloreth during the intro book sequence, she’s depicted as a full grown adult, this divine, messianic figure heroically battling threats to her nation and people. The city’s equivalent of “good god” is even “good Gloreth”. But then when we actually get to see when all this started through Nimona’s flashback by the well, Gloreth is *very much* a whole ass six year old, maybe eight or nine if we’re stretching it. The mythical hero driving back the “evil darkness” is a few inches shy of a toddler. We don’t know much about the intervening conflict between Nimona and the people of the city, other than that it probably lasted longer than that one mob burning down their own village, and Gloreth abandoning Nimona. But one thing we do see when we pick back up 1000 years later is that the “elite force of knights” who Gloreth (supposedly) put in place whose “descendants would protect the kingdom for generations to come” are being succeeded by a whole new batch of child soldiers. The footage of Ballister breaking into the training grounds as a child isn’t him running to meet adult heroes honing their skills, it’s of him as a seven or eight year old trying to go train with the other child soldiers. This whole movie is a commentary on how media likes to portray soldiers as mature adults who go to war for honor, glory, and patriotism instead of a pack of kids being pushed into the line of fire because it’s what the adults in power tell them is right. It’s certainly something that stood out to me as someone who’s grown up in the hyper nationalism of the US, has seen who society *claims* is sacrificing their lives in military service, and has also seen who *actually* is recruited (the fact that Ballister is a homeless street kid who tries to use the military to get a decent life is not an accident.) And I think that’s neat and important.

#nimona #ballister boldheart #nimona spoilers #gloreth #fuck the usa #fuck the military

731 notes · View notes

maybe-boys-do-love · 2 months ago

Text

What are some possibly significant queer associations with St. Bartholomew for Ticket to Heaven?

I'm glad you asked!

For those who don’t know, Bartholomew’s considered one of Jesus’s twelve disciples, but barely mentioned in the Bible. It's generally agreed that he is referred to also as Nathanael in the gospel of John, and as someone with the name Nathaniel, which means gift of God in Hebrew, I can tell you that’s a gay-ass name and will also def make me cry if I think too hard about Gem's character having that parallel during the show).

Bart’s often depicted holding his flayed skin (ew gross!) from when he got martyred, most famously in queer Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo’s "Last Judgment" painting in the Sistine chapel at the Vatican. The skin St. Bart’s holding there is actually a (skinned) self-portrait of the artist. Peek at Aof’s insta and you’ll see that he actually visited the work. It’s giving queer influence in (Catholic) Christianity and autobiographical reference, baby ✨

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Backaof Aof Noppharnach (@backaof)

instagram

Bartholomew and another disciple Philip, who was written to have introduced Bartie to the big JC party and to have traveled with him after JC’s post-post-mortem, are mentioned in a translation by Yale scholar John Boswell of a liturgy for an adelphopoeisis ceremony between two monks from the tenth century. Boswell argued that adelphopoeisis, or spiritual brotherhood unions in the pre-sodomy-law-era early church should be understood as same-sex unions. This, as most discussion of gay shit with the Church, has been controversial, although some of those controversies are issues with Boswell’s translation. There does seem to be some evidence that these spiritual brotherhoods were understood to have the potential to be sexual in nature. Either way, it seems likely Aof has come across Boswell’s ideas because it’s pretty prominent in discourse for anyone looking into gay Christian history.

THEN, although it might be unintentional, the Thai-ification of Bart is homophonic with Bath????!!!! If Bart can be short for Bartholomew, y'all are gonna have to let me stretch a little bit past Aof's official statement so Bath can be short for Bathsheba because...

Giving us another Biblical name reference but from the other gender who's THE example of coveting in the Bible/Torah is such a power move! King David sees Bathsheba bathing from his roof and has her over to sleep with him even though she's the wife of one of David's soldiers who's literally off fighting for his kingdom. Then he gets her pregnant. Then David has the poor guy over for dinner and doesn't admit to it, sends him back out and has him put in the front lines to get killed. He dies and Bathsheba mourns for a bit before becoming David's wife. It's heterosexual failure! It's the temptations of the flesh! It's one of the inspirations for Leonard Cohen's cold and broken Hallelujah! This connection reframes the queer temptations as something no less normal than heterosexual desire.

After all, David is the good guy. The celebrated little David who killed Goliath. It's essential to trace Jesus's lineage back to this most-celebrated king in the Bible for the messianic prophecies to be correct. So giving us a reference to this venerated and simultaneously deeply human figure really complicates the kind of Christianity that expects immaculate humans.

And, Bathsheba wasn't David's only paramour. Researching same-sex relationships in the Bible, David and Jonathan will be at the very top of the list. "The soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul...Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his girdle." That's coming from the book of Samuel in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, which was the first in 1946 to have any reference to word ‘homosexuality,’ using it to replace in the King James Version "abusers of themselves with mankind" and "effeminate” (which at that time did not have the common association with gay men the way it does today) on the list of sinners barred from heaven. Would David have been far enough on the Kinsey scale to qualify? Well, David had some other wives on top of Jonny and Bath, too. Whatever happened to family values!?

Of course, Bath also gives us images of washing and purifying alongside the sacrament of baptism!

The Bartholomew connection deserves more legit emphasis with Aof's statements and actual evidence for his visit to the Vatican, but how fun that the translation gave us another queer part of Christianity even if it wasn't intentional!

Complicating all of this discussion further is Catholicism's very late switch away from Latin and its more emphatic focus on tradition, hagiography, and liturgy rather than the text of the Bible. My ex-Christian fixation is on issues in Reformed Christianities (and I still love me some iconophobia, a topic with which Aof loves to engage), so I know more about the books and interpretations. I'm looking forward to the Catholic and ex-Catholic contributions here as the show gets underway. Like, y'all have been doing the most for production values of a Sabbath!

And to all my ex-Christians who can get sucked into spirals about this stuff, just remember that the concept of God is chill and all if it's just the comforting sense of connection between things in the universe, but any concepts of Christology, sin, or puppet-master deities are literally the most whack things if they're being thought of as anything more than a kind of out-there overly-simplified metaphor for trying to live a life where you can be yourself and get along with other people.

*This info and a great deep dive into the induction of the language and discourse of homosexuality in the Bible and its progressive! roots and aftermath is Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights.

#ticket to heaven #meta #ticket to heaven meta #aof noppharnach #gemini norawit #fourth nattawat #geminifourth #gemfourth #gmmtv #gmmtv 2025 #christianity tw

49 notes · View notes

kdmiller55 · 2 months ago

Text

I Will Dwell In Your Midst

6 Up! Up! Flee from the land of the north, declares the Lord. For I have spread you abroad as the four winds of the heavens, declares the Lord. 7 Up! Escape to Zion, you who dwell with the daughter of Babylon. 8 For thus said the Lord of hosts, after his glory sent me to the nations who plundered you, for he who touches you touches the apple of his eye: 9 “Behold, I will shake my hand over them,…

#Assyria #Babylon #covenant-keeper #Egypt #faithful #God #incarnation #Israel #Judah #Messiah #Messianic prophecy #millennial kingdom #Revelation #Second Coming #the promises of God #the return of Christ #Zechariah #Zechariah 2

0 notes

world-v-you-blog · 1 year ago

Text

Considering Psalms, 13 – Psalm 72, 1

Please read Psalm 72 in whichever reputable translation you prefer in preparation for this reflection. The translation I am using is the Complete Jewish Bible, translated by David Stern, 1998. Psalm 72 is accredited to Solomon (Shlomo in Hebrew). It is in the form of a prayer for God’s blessing to rest upon the anointed King of Israel, according to the covenant between Solomon’s father, King…

View On WordPress

#Book of Psalms #David #Fallen human nature #Human hubris #King David #Messianic Kingdom #Psalm 72 #Psalms #Solomon

0 notes

idylls-of-the-divine-romance · 5 months ago

Note

What’s your favorite(s) Jesus moment?

Okay so I was thinking about this and I was going to list several but I’ve actually got a single answer

The Sermon on the Mount. It’s incredible and so masterfully designed. Now, whether there actually was a big sermon on a mountain side that Jesus gave or if this is just a collection is for scholars to debate (tho, naturally, I do have my own opinion) but either way it’s amazing.

Especially, the beatitudes: the manifesto of the messianic kingdom. The citizens of (G)Arden are the poor in spirit, the grieving, the low trodden, those desirous for justice and righteousness, the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted.

How incredible is that??

#christianity #christian #bible #faith #faith in jesus #bible scripture #keep the faith #jesus christ #jesus

28 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 3 months ago

Text

Donald Trump’s fans and critics alike have compared him to some of history’s most famous rulers: Cyrus the Great, Adolf Hitler, King David and more.

But on the eve of the election, a celebrity pastor named Jonathan Cahn wants his evangelical followers to think of the Republican candidate as a present-day manifestation of a far more obscure leader: the biblical king Jehu, who vanquished the morally corrupt house of Ahab to become the 10th ruler of the Kingdom of Israel.

“President Trump, you were born into the world to be a trumpet of God, a vessel of the Lord in the hands of God. God called you to walk according to the template; He called you according to the template of Jehu, the warrior king,” Cahn told the hundreds of Christian leaders who gathered last week for the National Faith Summit outside Atlanta. He also shared a clip of his prophecy about Trump on his YouTube channel, which has more than a million followers.

What Cahn means — and why at least one scholar of the Christian right says he is worried — requires some background. Cahn, 65, is the son of a Holocaust refugee and grew up in a Jewish household in New Jersey. When he was 20, he says he had a personal revelation that led him to Jesus, and he eventually became the head of a Messianic congregation, blending Jewish rituals with Christian worship and a focus on doomsday prophecies.

Cahn helped popularize the interpretation of 9/11 as an apocalyptic biblical allegory. In his telling, the terrorist attacks were akin to God’s rebuke of the biblical nation of Israel, and they happened because God wanted the United States to revert to a time before legalized abortion and gay rights when religion held a more central place in society — or else. His book on the topic, “The Harbinger,” came out in 2012 and spent months on The New York Times bestseller list.

Cahn continued to release commercially successful books, and combined with his social media activity, he established a growing and enthusiastic audience for his prophetic warnings.

Then Trump came along. During Trump’s first term, many evangelical Christian supporters explained his lack of religiosity by comparing him to Cyrus, the pagan ruler of ancient Persia, who served as God’s agent by, according to the Bible, helping the Israelites return home from exile. In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, amid an effort to build stronger ties with the evangelical movement, praised Trump as a modern-day Cyrus.

But Cahn had spun a different prophetic narrative about the new American president. He released a book called “The Paradigm” a few months after the 2016 election, which cast Trump as Jehu, the biblical king who took control of and restored the Kingdom of Israel, whose territory largely overlapped with parts of present-day Israel and Lebanon. Just as Jehu killed the idol-worshippers who had taken over the kingdom, Trump would “drain the swamp” of Washington and “make America great again.” In this contemporary rendition, Hillary and Bill Clinton play the role of Ahab and Jezebel, the evil rulers who had led the kingdom astray. Jezebel is also seen as wicked in the Jewish tradition, but she is far more prominent as a symbol in evangelical discourse today, representing feminism, sexual promiscuity, and moral decay.

In the 2024 election, Biden’s replacement with Harris as the Democratic candidate challenging Trump allowed the template of Jehu-versus-Jezebel to get updated and become salient again.

Two weeks before Cahn spoke at the National Faith Summit, an ally of his named Ché Ahn evoked the comparison at another mass religious event. Ahn heads Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, California, as well as a network of thousands of ministries all over the world. He is a leader of a spiritual movement known as New Apostolic Reformation, which aims for Christians to dominate society and government. Major Republican figures like Mike Pompeo, Sarah Palin, and Josh Hawley have visited Ahn’s church, reflecting the growing influence of Christian nationalism on the Republican party.

On Oct. 12, Yom Kippur, Ahn appeared at the “Million Women March” event on the National Mall, speaking before a crowd of tens of thousands with many wearing prayer shawls or blowing shofars — traditionally Jewish symbols highlighting the movement’s overlap with Messianic Judaism.

“Jehu will cast down Jezebel,” Ahn said, and prophesized a victory by Trump over Harris.

The social media user who brought the recent Jehu comparisons to wider notice through posts on X is Matthew Taylor, a scholar of the Christian right at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies, a Baltimore-based Interfaith research and advocacy group, dedicated to “[dismantling] religious bias and bigotry.”

“Since Harris became the candidate this summer, we’ve seen the Jehu image really rise to the surface much more,” Taylor said in an interview. “This is the story [Cahn and Ahn] want running through their followers’ heads, their lens for interpreting the election and its aftermath.”

In the grim biblical story, recounted in the book of II Kings, as Jehu ascends the throne, he kills Jezebel by ordering her thrown out of a palace window, after which he stomps on her body, which is then eaten by dogs. The new warrior king then goes on a killing spree, slaying the families of Ahab and Jezebel and other Baal-worshiping pagans who had despoiled the kingdom.

“Jehu came to the capital city with an agenda to drain the swamp,” Cahn said in his speech, addressing Trump, who also spoke at the National Faith Summit. “Jehu formed an alliance with the religious conservatives of the land. So, it was your destiny to do the same. Jehu overturned the cult of Baal by which children were sacrificed. So, God chose you to overturn America’s cult of Baal, Roe vs. Wade.”

Cahn and Ahn did not respond to a request to their ministries from JTA to discuss the theology of their recent statements.

Neither pastor elaborated on the analogy they were drawing and neither made an explicit call for violence. But Trump has generated widespread concern by speaking of retribution, calling his political opponents “the enemy from within,” and talking about using the military against political enemies if he wins.

Given the riots that took place at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 after Trump challenged the election results, and his ongoing promotion of electron fraud narratives, independent experts and government agencies are warning of increased political violence. Many Jewish leaders are particularly concerned because Trump recently blamed Jews for his potential defeat.

Taylor says the pastors’ followers would be familiar with the biblical story of Jehu and he believes that they are priming their audience to accept violence during the election or afterward.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, that surfaced the Jehu prophecies, Taylor voiced his alarm.

“If Trump wins in this election, the Jehu ‘template’ tells Trump’s Christian supporters: some real-world violence may be needed to purge America of her demons,” Taylor wrote. “If Trump loses this election, particularly to Kamala Harris their ‘Jezebel,’ the Jehu template prescribes vengeance.”

16 notes · View notes