the Holy Land, the Messiah will come for the first time. So what?”95
Still, at least some Jewish observers are willing to comment on the strange bedfellowship of fundamentalist Christians and Jews. “This is a grim comedy of mutual condescension,” Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the
Apocalyptic activism, in fact, has reached the highest levels of American politics and policy-making. When the Senate debated whether Israel ought to withdraw the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, for example, Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, relied on the Bible to justify the continued occupation of Hebron: “It is at this place where God appeared to Abram and said, ‘I am giving you this land,’” he declared on the floor of the Senate, quoting the book of Genesis. “This is not a political battle at all. It is a contest over whether or not the word of God is true.”97
Very few politicians, diplomats, or generals who hold such beliefs are courageous (or foolish) enough to speak about them so openly. For that reason, it is all too easy to dismiss as a religious eccentric someone who advocates the use of the Bible as a document of American foreign policy. But, as Senator Inhofe reminds us, true belief and Bible literalism have never been confined to backwater churches where the congregants handle snakes and speak to each other in tongues. Every now and then, the apocalyptic idea explodes into the headlines and reminds the rest of us that it has been lurking in the shadows all along.
Back in the 1930s, a congregation of Seventh-day Adventists in Los Angeles found itself with an awkward problem after welcoming a new member named Victor Houteff, a Bulgarian-born washing-machine salesman. Houteff had come to believe that the Christian scriptures were composed in a secret code that only he had succeeded in solving, and he offered his own strange teachings in place of those sanctioned by the church. At last, in 1935, Houteff was barred from the congregation, and he led a dozen families to a self-imposed exile on a remote hilltop compound in Waco, Texas, where he fully expected to witness the end of the world in the company of the 144,000 followers that he hoped to gather there.
Nowadays, of course, Waco calls to mind an incident that proves how tenacious and how dangerous the apocalyptic idea can be. Back in the 1930s, however, Houteff and his followers were merely one more obscure and exceedingly odd religious community whose day-to-day lives in a remote Texas backwater were wholly invisible to the rest of America. Yet the seeds of the deadly standoff between the Branch Davidians and federal law- enforcement agents that took place in 1993 reach all the way back to the earliest stirrings of the apocalyptic tradition in the New World and, arguably, the worst excesses of Jan Bockelson, the messiah-king of medieval Munster.
Houteff adopted “Mount Carmel” as the name of his community in an allusion to the site where, according to the Bible, the prophet Elijah orders the seizure and slaughter of 450 priests of the pagan god Baal in an act of carnage that is meant to glorify the God of Israel.98 For Houteff and his followers, as for Elijah and the author of Revelation, the choice between the One True God and all other beliefs and practices is, quite literally, a matter of life or death: “It should be ever kept in mind that the very name ‘Mt. Carmel,’” wrote one observer who visited the compound in 1937, “indicates a place where we are being severely tested as to whether we will serve God or Baal.”99
Houteff, like other doomsayers, was convinced that the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland was a precondition to the Second Coming, and he called his followers “Davidians” in anticipation of the restoration of the throne of King David. To keep them in “a state of perpetual readiness for the End,” he ordered that a clock in the headquarters of the Davidians at Mount Carmel be fixed at eleven o’clock “as a reminder that time was nearing its conclusion.”100 Thus roused to an unremitting state of “psychological imminence,” Houteff and the rest of the Davidians waited for the world to end on time.
Houteff, of course, did not live to see any of the remarkable events that he was able to discern in the coded passages of the Bible. Upon his death in 1955, the community shattered into contending factions, and the one that ended up in possession of the Waco property called itself the Branch Davidians. On April 22, 1959, they gathered at Mount Carmel to witness the fulfillment of a new prophecy by Houteff’s widow, Florence: “the faithful would be slaughtered, resurrected and carried up to heaven.” A journalist who covered the spectacle reported on the “pitiful” display of disappointment by those who found themselves still alive and well at the end of the day. “Of the thousand there, more or less, only one person was relieved,” he wrote. “Me.”101
By the mid-1980s, Mount Carmel was very nearly moribund, but the Branch Davidians were reinvigorated by the arrival of a charismatic young man called Vernon Howell, a “semi-literate rock guitarist with fantastically detailed knowledge of the Bible and an overwhelming urge to uncover its secrets.”102 Howell was blessed with a glib tongue, a lively sense of humor, and “a gift for self-parody.”103 Indeed, he slyly called himself a “sinful messiah,” and he recruited a brood of “wives” out of a self-proclaimed duty to sire as many children as possible.104 As he rose to the leadership of the Branch Davidians, he acknowledged his new role by taking a new name—David Koresh.
The name that Vernon Howell chose for himself is dense with biblical meanings. The first name, of course, was meant to remind the Branch Davidians of the biblical king of Israel whose blood is said to have flowed in the veins of Jesus: “Lo, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David,” writes the author of Revelation, “has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”105 And “Koresh” is the Hebrew name of the Persian emperor, Cyrus, who permitted the exiled Jews to return to Judea and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, thereby earning for himself the biblical title of “Messiah.” Thus did Vernon Howell make a coded claim to his own messiahship.
Like Houteff, David Koresh was convinced that he alone was capable of retrieving the hidden secrets of the Bible, especially the meaning of the seven seals of Revelation. Like Jan Bockelson, he prescribed a strict code of sexual morality that applied to everyone but himself, and he openly snacked on forbidden foods like ice cream and candy while his followers were confined to a vegetarian diet “whose rules about food combination changed frequently.” Like Father Miller, he engaged in the dangerous practice of date setting. The Tribulation, Koresh predicted, would begin in 1995, exactly ten years after his “coronation” as leader of the Branch Davidians.106 And, like the author of Revelation, he insisted that he had been “taken up into the heavens by angelic beings,” which Koresh described as “a ‘spaceship’ that ‘travels by light, the refraction of light.’”107
Koresh was convinced that the world was witnessing the fulfillment of the prophecies that are expressed in Revelation as the breaking of the seven seals. He understood his own calling to the leadership of the Branch Davidians as the prophecy of the first seal: “And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.”108 By 1992, Koresh had come to believe that one of the spookiest and most unsettling prophecies in the book of Revelation, the opening of the fifth seal, was imminent:
And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar
the souls of them that were slain for the word of God,
and for the testimony which they held:
And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord,
holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood
on them that dwell on the earth?109
David Koresh might well have lived out his life in obscurity as a self-appointed “prophet” if he had not also embarked on a fateful plan to arm the Davidians with automatic weapons. He had already amassed an arsenal, and now he began to purchase the kits that would enable him to convert a cache of semiautomatic rifles into weapons with a far greater rate of fire. That’s why agents of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms began to take an active interest in what was happening inside the compound at Mount Carmel. On February 23, 1993, federal agents launched an abortive raid, the beginning of a siege that lasted fifty-one days and ended only with a final conflagration that burned Mount Carmel to the ground and cost the lives of more than eighty Branch Davidians,
