Semi-Weekly Mississippian [Jackson, MS], June 22, 1860
To the student of the Bible and church history there are few current subjects of more absorbing interest or of deeper significance than the events, now almost daily transpiring, which point to the repossession by the Jews of their own land. The tide of progress, after a lapse of centuries may be said to have fairly turned in that direction, and the prayer long offered by that chosen but now scattered people, that Judah may be saved, and Israel dwell securely, and that the Redeemer may come to Zion.” the Philadelphia Press thinks is undoubtedly hastening to its fulfillment.
The Sultan of Turkey is encouraging Jewish emigration to Palestine, and is offering to sell them as much land as they choose to buy, and, it is said, has even expressed his willingness to dispose of the Mosque of Omar to them, which, it will be recollected, stands on the very site of the Jewish Temple of Mount Moriah. This mosque is one of the Mohammedan’s most celebrated shrines, being scarcely inferior in national importance to those of Mecca and Medina. Politicians and statesmen look upon these indications as a legitimate consequence of the liberalizing influence of Mohammedan in intercourse with Christians, and so they may be; but, to the reader of the yet unfulfilled pages of Revelation, they also point to what, as it respects the Jewish nation, “Prophets and kings” have long waited for, “but died without the sight.”—That the Mosque of Omar should be in a fair way of passing into the hands of the people to whose fathers the site on which it stands was once given as an everlasting covenant, is what no reader of secular history fifty years ago could even have dreamed would ever come to pass. Some of the hills around Jerusalem have already become Jewish property, and is by no means improbable that some of the present generation will see the entire city of Jerusalem again in the hands of its ancient owners. That might revolutions will follow in the wake of such an event is probably as certain as that the Jews will return at all; at all events, affairs in that immediate region of the East must ere long become an engrossing theme among the nations of the earth.