The Harbinger: The Ancient Mystery that Holds the Secret of America's Future

The final chapters of the book include a marked shift in tone for the prophet, as he shifts from revealing mysteries to recruiting Kaplan as his scribe, and a revelation of the metanarrative of the book. For the prophet, his focus becomes convincing Kaplan that Kaplan needs to accept God and avoid judgment; he offers the mysteries as a balm for The Need for Guidance in Troubling Situations. This shift begins in Chapter 20, as the prophet tells Kaplan that “God’s will is that none should perish” (218), despite having already confirmed God’s will behind several disasters. The prophet embellishes his misconception that Iraqi people are direct descendants of Assyrians, and plays on a reader’s ignorance of Middle Eastern history to create an “us vs. them” argument, stating that certain peoples in the Middle East are “merciless, arrogant, brutal,” and “cold-blooded” (219). Polarizing the United States and Iraq encourages xenophobia, but also gives the xenophobe a clear enemy to overcome. The prophet intensifies the discussion by telling Kaplan that he is living in the days of judgment, asking him what he would do. The solution, of course, is to turn to God, who’s love the prophet compares to a marriage, albeit a marriage in which the bride is distinctly not the equal of the bridegroom. This love is described as infinite, “the infinite presence of infinite love” (230), which, by its nature requires infinite time: eternity. As the prophet completes his shift to proselytizing, he elaborates on how Jesus’s name is Yeshua, meaning God’s love or salvation, which indicates a distinctly Christian or Jewish Christian ideology. The prophet, though he says that this is “not about religion,” and Kaplan points out that the prophet has not “mentioned the word religion even once” (231), has established that this is a matter of religion. The American people, according to the prophet, need to convert promptly to either Judaism or Christianity, if they maintain a specific love and acceptance for Jesus as a savior, or else God is going to bring judgment down on the nation.

This narrative is not uncommon in discourse centered on scripture, especially biblical discourse, and Cahn makes it clear in Kaplan’s final discussion with Goren that this is not a fictional work. Goren and Kaplan specifically plan out how Kaplan will write a book about the prophet and the prophecy, using “the form of a narrative” as “the Bible uses stories,” with Kaplan as the narrator and by making “everyone into characters” (247-48). In effect, Goren has described the process by which Cahn can be assumed to have written this work. In this case, Kaplan is Cahn, and Goren is Cahn’s publisher, implying that the prophet is a person that Cahn met with and uncovered the mysteries. Several factors can be taken as fiction, such as the movements of the prophet that defy reason, but the prophecy itself, then, is meant to be taken as the truth. Kaplan even worries that people “might not realize that the revelations are real” (247) if the book is framed as a narrative, effectively asking the reader to realize that the revelations are not fiction, though the work is a novel. Cahn does this to push the scale to faith in The Balance Between Faith and Reason.

The significance of this discussion is that it frames the metanarrative of the work. Already, the novel is a metanarrative that combines the stories of biblical prophets, ancient history, American history, the comments of scholars, speeches given by politicians, and the story of Kaplan and the prophet, all layered to communicate a broader meaning or pattern and to lay out the groundwork of a master narrative involving future calamity. The revelation that Kaplan is Cahn adds another layer onto this narrative which transcends fiction, reaching into the real world as so many elements of the narrative already do. The result is that the entire novel is meant to serve as a prophecy predicting calamity, urging readers to turn toward God and Jesus to be saved from the imminent judgment. The ending of the book can then be seen as Cahn’s discussion of himself as a scribe to a prophet, communicating the story that was revealed to him by that prophet. As a narrative, the novel serves to communicate the harbingers, and Cahn and Kaplan protect themselves from criticism by predicting it. In the end, both Kaplan, who is now a representation of Cahn, and the prophet agree that: “They’ll do everything they can to attack and discredit it” (250), rendering any criticism of the prophecy as fulfillment of the prophecy, and serving as another failsafe for the predictions of the novel and marrying Predetermination and Free Will in Prophecy.