The Rising Might of Germany

The Trumpet’s editor in chief made an electrifying statement in our May-June 2009 edition. “This is the biggest news event in the world right now,” he explained. “But it is almost totally overlooked by the world’s news media.” A year later, most of the world’s media are still overlooking this blockbuster story.

What is that story?

“European nations fear economic collapse,” that article said. “Now they are looking to Germany as their financial savior. But they are going to get a lot more than a financial savior!” (emphasis mine throughout).

Then came the statement that we would do well to remember: “You need to watch the September 27 election this year in Germany,” Gerald Flurry wrote. “It could very well produce the political leader of the Holy Roman Empire.”

Mr. Flurry reiterated this remarkable prediction in our October issue: “As I write this article, Germany is just weeks from electing a new chancellor. That election and events to unfold from it are going to bring devastating consequences to this world.”

What a whirlwind of activity we have witnessed since those words were penned!

After that election and the subsequent ratification of the Lisbon Treaty by all 27 EU member states, Mr. Flurry referred back to the statement he’d published six months before, writing in our February edition, “I believe we may have witnessed a fulfillment of that prediction.”

A close look at just what has happened in Germany and the European Union since that election powerfully validates that impression!

Political Crisis

If one word could describe the state of German politics since last September’s elections, it is crisis.

Almost immediately, reports emerged indicating a widening split in the ruling coalition between Chancellor Merkel’s cdu/csu bloc and Vice Chancellor Guido Westerwelle’s Federal Democrats. “Only two months after being sworn in, partners in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government are finding it increasingly difficult to paint over differences on issues ranging from tax cuts to anti-terror measures,” Deutsche Welle reported on January 3. The discord continues to be fueled by the very different political profiles of Germany’s chancellor, vice chancellor and defense minister.

Though she is still able to command headlines when she appears on a public platform, Angela Merkel has given the impression of being often absent from the scene when trouble boils over between the various conflicting personalities in her coalition. Some have viewed the chancellor as becoming weary of the fray. Whereas it seemed by pure chance she had the golden political touch during much of her first stint as Germany’s leader, things have seemed to be quite the reverse since this latest election. Though she still rates high with the public, polls consistently indicate that her defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, rates higher by far as Germany’s most popular politician. Meanwhile, Vice Chancellor Westerwelle’s popularity rating plunged to single digits in February.

Deep divisions in both economic and defense policy separate Westerwelle and Guttenberg, divisions Merkel has been unable to resolve. Mrs. Merkel’s efforts at political progress are weak at a time when Germany needs strong leadership; recession is biting and the people are getting restless. In fact, Germany’s coalition government could founder on either of two issues: economic and taxation reform, or defense-related matters.

Germany is ripening for political change.

All this as the whole of Europe is looking to Germany—creator of the idea of European union, its main driving force and Europe’s most powerful economy by far—for solutions to the accelerating fiscal crisis, the collapsing economies in Eastern and southern Europe, and the rising tide of social unrest this is causing. Yet Germany dithers. The state that leads the Union appears reluctant to take that lead.

The impression of general dither amid crisis is being emphasized by the fact that two nobodies were given the two top posts in the European Union hierarchy created under the Lisbon Treaty—President Herman Van Rompuy and Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton. The result has been mass confusion within the EU hierarchy.

To put it simply, both Germany and the European Union are suffering from a great leadership vacuum.

History indicates it is in times of crisis that Germany requires the closest scrutiny—for that is when it is most dangerous!

Model of Democracy?

Many German nationals will tell you they are a model democratic nation. They abhor war and just want to live peacefully, enjoying the good life that the strongest and richest economy in Europe has given them. Germans today generally appear to think they are the very model of peaceful democracy. Yet is that impression really correct?

The best analyses of the German character come from Germans themselves.

Gerhard Marx, who worked for many years as a supporter of Herbert Armstrong, said of his own people, “Even though Germany is presently based on a democratic government, it is wrong to look upon it as a real democracy …. [W]hat Germany has today is more of a bureaucratic democracy. And, of course, as long as the average German finds sufficient food on the table, has a reasonably secure job, is able to save some money for his annual vacation; as long as things are going well, he is in no hurry to throw off this form of democracy.

“But come a time of crisis—and in German history there have been many—will democracy withstand the acid test?” (A Two-Thousand-Year Analysis of the German Character).

Many authors have analyzed the German national character. Some have described it like Proteus, the creature of mythology that could change shape at a moment’s notice. Twenty-five years ago, when it was clear that West Germany had long become the engine of a uniting Europe, journalist Luigi Barzini wrote, “It is therefore once again essential for everybody … to keep an eye across the Rhine and the Alps and the Elbe in order to figure out, as our fathers, grandfathers, the ancient Romans, and remote ancestors had to do, who the Germans are, who they think they are, what they are doing, and where they will go next, wittingly or unwittingly” (The Europeans).

Within seven years of Barzini writing those words, the political face of Germany had changed. It was no longer divided at the Berlin Wall. East Germany had come in from the cold. Within a short time, the debris of Communist rule was being cleared away in Potsdamer Platz in a newly united city of Berlin, which emerged as the busiest construction site in Europe. Structures reflecting a renewed German pride—the pride of a united German nation—began to rise out of the ground. Then, a decade after the wall came down, statues of Germany’s warrior heroes, having gathered dust in storage since Germany’s defeat in World War ii, began to be preened, polished and placed on pedestals in public places. German national pride was undergoing a revival.

Last November, Germany partied as it celebrated 20 years of national unity.

Is it not high time that we ask, once again, as Germany reflects renewed pride in its nationality standing head and shoulders above its compatriots in Europe, just who the Germans are today, who they think they are, what they are doing, and where they will go next?

Just What Is Germany Up To?

As Mr. Flurry mentioned in that May 2009 article, Germany has returned to a status where all Europe is now looking to it as its financial savior. Surely then, given that nation’s history when it wields such influence—and combined with the volatile nature of that nation in time of crisis such as the present—we ought to be asking just what the Germans are doing today.

The answer is, quite a lot.

The Germans are busy shoring up their capability as the greatest export nation in the world, despite China’s recent claim to have taken over that role.

They are busy bidding for the world’s top banking job, that of European Central Bank president.

They have worked within the shadows of the EU to establish a regulatory body to control the global economy, the Financial Stability Board.

They are calling the tune on just how the EU will deal with indebted EU member nations such as Greece, nations that are losing pace against the winds of accelerating economic crisis.

The Germans are also, quietly, without a lot of fuss, expanding and strengthening the deployment of their military forces around the world. And the Germans are becoming busy retooling their heavy industry to produce greater amounts of armaments, military machines, ships, submarines and aircraft to prepare for building up a combined European military force. They are steadily exhibiting a greater will to use that force than their appeasing Anglo-Saxon counterparts.

Most Anglo-Saxons are oblivious to all this. In fact, most are totally blind to the reality that what Germany is up to today poses the greatest of risks to international security.

Meanwhile, much publicity is given to the misguided pronouncements on Europe by “experts” across the Atlantic. The Obama administration actually says Europe’s leaders endanger peace with their pacifism. “In a withering attack on what Washington sees as European complacency in the face of new security threats,” the Guardian reported, “Robert Gates, the U.S. defense secretary, demanded root-and-branch reform of the transatlantic alliance, voiced exasperation with nato bureaucracy and said it was becoming increasingly difficult for the U.S. and Europe ‘to operate and fight together’” (February 24).

Just how real is this vision of a “pacifist Europe”? Dig below the surface of the journalese of the day and we find another story emerging.

Germany’s Power Within the EU

The Germans have a history of embracing authoritarian rule. As the German philosopher Hegel said, “The state says … you must obey …. The state has rights against the individual; its members have obligations, among them that of obeying without protest” (Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany).

Look at how this tendency has manifested itself within today’s Europe. The Lisbon Treaty—which in reality is the constitution for a revived European empire—defines those powers that the EU state holds over its members. Greece is but an early example of a country being brought to book by the EU centralized state. It will not be the last. (Even so, Greece has exposed deep divisions within the EU camp as its members have considered how to deal with it. Germany itself has been split over how to treat the issue. This again reflects the inherent weakness of current EU and German leadership.)

The member nations of the German-created EU imperial state have handed over their individual national sovereignty to the EU institutions. Constitutionally, the EU now wields tremendous power over its member states—with one singular exception: Germany. On the eve of the full ratification by all member states of the EU constitution, the German Constitutional Court rushed through a judgment that recognizes German law as trumping EU law. Thus Germany stands alone as not only the most dominant member of the European Union, but also as the only one that retains the power of its own sovereignty. While ensuring the loss of the very definition of the nationality of all other EU members, reducing them to vassal states of the European empire, the German elites have been careful to protect their own nationhood.

Now Germany possesses a legal, political and economic power within Europe of an extent it never gained through past military aggression.

Meanwhile, those icons of past German heritage—the statues and memorials of pre-world war imperial glory brought back to the public gaze some years ago—remind the average German of an imperial national heritage. The nation possesses a latent national spirit that history proves only lacks at this moment the spark to light the fires of a revived nationalism.

Four Things That Stir German Nationalism

Kurt P. Tauber, in his analysis of the German national character called Beyond Eagle and Swastika, analyzed and recorded the potency of the energy suddenly released from within Germany by the appeal of National Socialism in the 1920s and ’30s. He also noted the latent nationalism bubbling under the surface in postwar Germany. In his conclusion, he mused, “We have analyzed the myriad difficulties and disappointments of postwar nationalism, but we strongly doubt that we have written its epitaph.”

What have been the main stimulants to the rise of German nationalism in the past? Four things: an ideology that appeals to the innate desires of German imperialism, the power of a charismatic personality, utilizing a compliant cabal of industrialists, and a powerful cadre of military officers to propel the nation to dominance in Europe.

In the 1930s, these stimulants were manifest through the ideology of National Socialism (Nazism), the personality of an Austrian by the name of Adolf Schicklegruber, the dynasties of German industrialists that produced his military machinery, and the powerful Prussian aristocratic military High Command that supported their führer’s imperial vision.

Today, Nazism and Hitler are the whipping boys of German politicians and commentators who squarely blame the horrors of German extremism in World War ii on both of them. This is a convenient way of absolving the German nation per se of any collective guilt.

Only two of those aforementioned stimulants to German nationalism are obviously extant today: those same dynasties of German industrialists (article, page 13), and a cadre of military officers modeled on the old German military High Command revived under the name Joint Operations Command.

That leaves us to wonder whether there exists a personality and a latent ideology that would have mass appeal to the German population such that it could unleash the dormant fires of German nationalism in a time of crisis as has been the habit of the German nation in the past.

We believe the answer to that is a clear and resounding YES!

Let us consider personality first.

Two Bavarians to Watch

The Trumpet has noted two Bavarians who have the potential to powerfully influence Germany in times of crisis such as it has now entered.

Edmund Stoiber, mentored by the powerful postwar Bavarian politician Franz Josef Strauss, was the political leader who appeared likeliest to replace Gerhard Schröder as chancellor in Germany’s 2002 federal election. But on the eve of the election, Schröder managed to swing the vote in his favor. Stoiber was narrowly defeated.

Then in 2005, it seemed Stoiber would gain the coveted foreign minister’s job and hence the vice chancellorship in Chancellor Merkel’s cabinet. But Merkel offered Stoiber the poisoned chalice of the economics portfolio. He declined and withdrew from the coalition—then became an eminent EU technocrat charged with slicing through the wasteful billions of euros of red tape in the EU bureaucracy.

Edmund Stoiber remains a powerful, if presently latent figure in German politics. He first garnered political strength from the years he spent as personal aide to Franz Josef Strauss. Then, as prime minister of Bavaria, he became renowned for running the most economically successful state in Germany. He is now in an interesting situation. Having presented his conclusions to the EU on methods to cut billions of euros of wastage out of the cumbersome and deeply corrupted EU bureaucracy, he is in a prime position to be invited to consider a senior advisory post in the German government.

Stoiber has proven himself in the field of economics at the state level in Germany. But the plum job he sought in Germany’s coalition government was the foreign policy portfolio. That is a ministerial post under great pressure for change as Vice Chancellor Westerwelle flounders. Stoiber, with his statesmanlike bearing, vast political experience and papal favor, would seem to be an ideal candidate for the foreign policy portfolio, if not a position as a chief adviser in this area.

Yet there is another Bavarian—mentored by Stoiber, even as Stoiber was previously by Strauss—who previously, though briefly, successfully filled the economics post in the Merkel government. He now heads up the defense portfolio in the Merkel coalition: Baron Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg.

This man’s meteoric rise within German politics came about as a direct result of last September’s elections. And the subsequent instability in the nation’s ruling coalition has only bolstered his political profile all the more! Thus we track his progress with growing interest in light of Mr. Flurry’s prediction regarding that election.

There is something almost dynastic about the Strauss-Stoiber-Guttenberg connection. Strauss penned the vision that all three hold of the future of Germany leading a united Europe in his visionary book The Grand Design.

In the conclusion to that book, Strauss admitted that Germany used the cloak of a postwar uniting Europe to hide behind while undergoing its revival as a national power. He wrote, “[I]t was going to be much easier for Germany to make a comeback as a member of an international family, as a member of a European Federation, than as a German Reich, a single national state. Therefore we should not insist too much on what good Europeans we are; we must understand that our European attitude was the only escape hatch we had, the only approach that made a comeback possible.”

Well, now Germany can play it both ways. It is a member—in fact the leading member—of a “European federation,” the EU, having cleverly also retained its status as “a single nation state,” the only nation to have done so within the entire 27-member union!

If we accept that Germany has two powerfully charismatic personalities that it can call upon in time of crisis to rally the nation, there is only one of the four previously mentioned elements that is lacking in the formula that has historically sparked the German people’s innate nationalistic fervor: an overarching ideology preached by a revered icon.

Enter yet a third Bavarian.

The Vatican Connection

Franz Josef Strauss, Edmund Stoiber and Baron zu Guttenberg all exhibit one thing in common: dedication to Roman Catholicism. Bavaria is the heartland of Rome’s religion in Germany. Coincidentally or otherwise, Bavaria’s capital, Munich, was also the birthplace of the National Socialist movement in German politics back in the 1920s and ’30s. It was in Munich that Hitler and Ludendorf initiated the famous Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.

Of all German states, Bavaria was the least denazified. It is said that from the mid-1940s through to the 1970s, Bavaria’s government agencies and professions retained many of the same personalities in office as during the Nazi era. As they reached retirement age by the 1970s, they handed over to a generation they had taught and trained. Thus the National Socialist spirit remained alive, though cleverly masked under the veil of “democracy.”

Amid that process there arose a third Bavarian who had lived through both those generations, a man now greatly revered in Germany: Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict xvi.

Bavarian by birth, Benedict xvi’s first visit back to his beloved Fatherland after he was elected pope was to the University of Regensburg in Bavaria where he had taught as a young priest. On that occasion, in a now infamous speech, he laid down the gauntlet to both the anti-church secularists and the entire Muslim community.

Over the five years of his papacy, Pope Benedict has proven himself the most articulate of modern popes, publishing a vast array of homilies, treatises and books. He is the archetypal conservative, right-wing and German to the core. He is backed by a strong rightist curia, the legacy of both his and his predecessor John Paul ii’s efforts to swing the church hierarchy away from its 20th-century liberal bent toward a more traditional “Holy Roman” orientation.

Benedict has a dogged determination to see his religion returned to its previous status as the force that binds the whole culture of Europe together. His vision is to see Europe, newly federalized under the Lisbon Treaty, return en masse to the religion that has bound imperial Europe together as the Holy Roman Empire in six previous resurrections since Justinian’s restoration. Benedict knows that his home nation is the only power on Earth that can bring that about. He is, after all, an avid student of history.

James Bryce, in his work titled The Holy Roman Empire, notes that it is recorded in the Speculum Saxonicum, the great North German law book written in a.d. 1240, that “The Empire is held [by] God alone …. Emperor and pope are supreme each in what has been entrusted to him: the pope in what concerns the soul; the emperor in all that belongs to the body and the knighthood.” This was at the time of Frederick ii, imperial ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.

The German Eike von Repgow, contemporary of Frederick ii, stated in his treatise The Saxon Mirror that “God has successfully created four empires and the present one is the continuation of the old Roman Empire. Caesar had conquered Germany, and the [German] Franks had then inherited the empire from the Romans” (Frederick Hertz, The Development of the German Public Mind). The statement “God has successfully created four empires” is a reference to the four empires prophesied in Daniel 2:36-40, with the fourth kingdom being the iron kingdom that was to crush all others.

Of the later Habsburg dynasty, historian A.J.P. Taylor noted that the Holy Roman Empire of the time was “In the eyes of its rulers … a supranational organization, ordained by God, and ruled over by God’s nominee” (The Habsburg Monarchy).

Otto von Habsburg, of that same dynasty, referred to the symbol that Europe possesses which “belongs to all nations equally. This is the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, which embodies the tradition of Charlemagne …. [T]he crown represents not merely the sovereignty of the monarch, but also the ties between authority and the people” (The Social Order of Tomorrow). That crown represents the only power that has succeeded in binding Europe together in unity throughout history as a union of church and state: the Church of Rome and the German sovereign state! The crown of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation!

The EU has its ideology, even more potent than the now discredited National Socialism. It is a religion that has, over many centuries in the past, enlivened the whole nation with a religious zeal to crusade for the dominance of the Holy Reich over the whole world. It’s a religion that inspired German soldiers with a crusading zeal in battle with the words “Gott mit uns”—God with us—embedded in their belt buckles as they fought in the trenches and in the desert in World War i.

Gearing for Battle

The Balkans provided the test case for public acceptance of the German military deploying in combat outside of the nation’s borders when the Luftwaffe was drafted over Kosovo in 1999. Ten years later, the Bundeswehr operates in over a dozen countries around the world.

Even the Greens in Germany endorsed the Luftwaffe mission in the Balkans. Now, Afghanistan is providing the pressure point for German elites to begin conditioning the public’s mind to accept an even wider and a stronger role for Germany in theaters of active or potential combat.

Since taking office last October after that pivotal election, Defense Minister Guttenberg has overseen certain changes in the government’s stand on Germany’s military force. He is spearheading changes to the Bundeswehr’s rules of engagement in Afghanistan. Even months before that, Guttenberg had made it known that the public must be enticed to change its collective negative view of German troop deployment in Afghanistan so as to demonstrate public support of the nation’s troops involved in active combat roles.

Guttenberg is determined to change the Bundeswehr’s image into that of a legitimate combat force with broad public acceptance. At the February Munich Security Conference, he laid his cards on the table. He “spoke about the need to take action. What was important, the minister pointed out, was that progress be made regarding the long-overdue reforms of the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato). ‘We talk too much and act too little,’” he said (Munich Security Conference, February 6).

This was an effort to apply pressure to nato to revamp its charter by the end of the year, implicitly integrating German imperial goals with nato objectives. Guttenberg is particularly interested in eliminating overlap between the developing imperial European military force and nato. Ultimately, German military elites will be eyeing either a merger with, or takeover of, the nuclear-armed nato. This vision is helped by the fact that the majority of nato members are overwhelmingly EU member nations. The EU is empowered under the Lisbon Treaty to develop a continental military force. That this force will have nuclear potential is quietly taken as a given by certain German military and political elites.

Germany has come a long way since the Luftwaffe was the first Bundeswehr force to return to active combat outside of the nation’s borders in the skies over Kosovo in 1999. Each step—from bombing runs over Kosovo to combat on the ground in Afghanistan; from arresting pirates in the Gulf to deployment in Sudan, Libya and Gabon, or securing the Mediterranean Sea and engaging in naval exercises off the coast of South Africa; from tank training in Canada and Luftwaffe training in the U.S.—is helping to fine-tune the Bundeswehr and make the public comfortable with its expeditionary roles.

It is important now to watch for the new nato charter, which should be tabled by the end of this year. An appeasing Washington is being juggled out of the European sphere of influence. Europe’s future security won’t depend on an alliance with the U.S. Rather, it will be a forthcoming alliance between a German-led European Union and—believe it or not—America’s nemesis, Russia.

Where Is It All Leading?

The outcome of Germany’s return to global power status is bound to amaze many in the near future. Mr. Flurry’s prediction of “devastating consequences” to emerge from the last election and events unfolding from it was based on sure biblical prophecies describing Germany’s role in events just ahead of us. We have since witnessed an unmistakable ripening of the conditions—in several specific areas—that will lead directly to the fulfillment of those prophecies.

Amid the present crisis and confusion, watch Germany closely. The German mind delights in creating order out of confusion. The trouble is that in the past it has often been guilty of creating the chaos out of which it then finds opportunity to impose its own solution. The Balkan wars of the 1990s were triggered by Germany unilaterally—speedily supported by the Vatican—recognizing Croatia and Slovenia as separate nation-states to the Yugoslav federation. The intent was to solve the resulting crisis by imposing German-led rule over the Balkan Peninsula. This plan is now well advanced.

The classic crisis of all that German and Vatican elites would dearly love to grab on to and then impose their own solution on is the Middle East peace process. That is what Bible prophecy forecasts will actually happen. The result will be the surrounding of Jerusalem by an international “peacekeeping” force, which will prepare the way for the pope to move his headquarters to the city that Rome has lusted to possess ever since the failure of its last crusade.

But the good news is, it doesn’t end there.

The surrounding of Jerusalem by armies is the most potent sign of the imminence of intervention by a military power of incredible force to impose the greatest era of peace on this Earth that can ever be imagined (Luke 21:20).

Eike von Repgow understood that the biblically prophesied fourth kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar’s great vision was the Teutonic iron empire, which later became known the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. But did he foresee the fifth kingdom? In Daniel 2:44 we read: “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms and it shall stand forever.”

Leaders of the German people have sought throughout history, in association with the Vatican, to set up a thousand-year Reich. It has always failed, despite six determined efforts to resurrect it. The seventh and final effort to resurrect that old Holy Roman Empire—the Fourth Reich—became an operating entity, despite its apparent sputtering start, on Jan. 1, 2010. Though it is destined to rain terrible destruction on old Persia and the Anglo-Saxon nations in particular, it will be the shortest-lived resurrection of that old empire in history.

Believe it or not, an actual thousand-year rule of a great imperial government is about to consume all the nations on Earth and take them under its wing. This government will teach all nations how to finally live in peace and harmony with each other. That is the very same kingdom that a small and loyal group was set up by its King to publicize way back in a.d. 31. This they did for 40 years until forced to disperse and flee persecution and martyrdom under the old iron rule of Rome.

Just over 80 years ago, a man named Herbert Armstrong was ordained by God to begin publicizing that same message. During the latter half of the 20th century, he fulfilled Christ’s prophecy of Matthew 24:14, reaching all nations on Earth. Mr. Armstrong even took that message personally to many world leaders at the time.

Then, just as prophesied in your Bible, powerful forces destroyed that organized work.

But God had prophesied that the group He set up to publicize the message of His coming Kingdom would never die out.

And it never did. It exists today, still small, yet powerful in its potential to prophesy that same message of the coming of the Kingdom of God one final time around this globe. You hold that message in your hands: a message prophesying the great clash of civilizations that is the forerunner to the return of the Savior of mankind to enforce global peace under His government over the whole Earth! That is a message no man can shut down.

It is that reign—that kingdom—which needs our attention today, even as we see Germany rising one more time to global prominence to lead that final resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire for its brief yet powerful moment in history immediately before the establishment of the fifth kingdom of Daniel’s prophecy!

To find out more about the final resurrection of that fourth kingdom, request our free booklets Germany and the Holy Roman Empire and The Rising Beast.

To really understand the prophesied all-powerful fifth kingdom and what to do about preparing for its coming, request our booklet The Wonderful World Tomorrow—What It Will Be Like. It explains in detail the same message of hope that the ruler of that coming kingdom personally broadcast when He trod this Earth 2,000 years ago. It’s a message that prophesies of two nations that have been the traditional enemies of Israel from ancient times actually reconciling and living in harmony as an example to all peoples. That kind of peace on Earth is only possible under the direct rule of the Creator of humankind Himself!

“In that day shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians. In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land: Whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying, blessed be Egypt, my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance” (Isaiah 20:23-25).