Hi Coccus Ilicus,
It's been 5 years since you started this topic. I did respond early after you posted this article. It's taken this long for me to gather some information and to give due consideration to your proposal regarding the "three measures of flour" being the three branches of the Abrahamic faith.
Just yesterday, I came across the article that I'll include the link for. I have copied and pasted the major relevant section into a document which I'll include in this post. The material in this post will not be to everyones liking, but I believe it should be considered.
http://www.biblesearchers.com/hebrewchu ... el10.shtml
Three Messiahs, Three Religions from the Loins of the Patriarch Abraham the Prophet
The strangest of all the mysteries as we arrive at the time of the end are the conflicting messiahs between the Christians, the Muslims, and the Jews, where to each, theirs is the only Messiah. In reality, when we study each of their historical traditions, they could really be a portrayal of the same divine manifestations of the same “Person” in different events at the time of the end, seen through the prisms of three different religious traditions.
The Christians believe in one Messiah who will come with two appearances on this earth; the first in the 1st century CE when he came as the Prince of David Yahshua ben Yosef (Jesus the son of Joseph) and the second coming will be the returning King Messiah Yahshua as the Prince of David, the (Messiah son of David) who will return as the “King of kings and the Lord of lords.”
The Jewish traditions of the Maschiach (Messiah) are also that He will make two appearances, but both of these will be at the time of the end. They are expecting the Maschiach ben Yosef (Messiah son of Joseph) who will come to lead the Jewish faithful during the days of great upheaval before the final days of the apocalypse. The Jewish traditions are nonspecific as to the timing of the Messiah’s arrival, or the length of time between the revelation of His arrival and His death. The Messiah son of Joseph will die in battle, but whose apocalyptic demise will herald the arrival of the Maschiach ben David (Messiah son of David).
The coming of the Jewish Messiah son of David is specifically timed by the Jewish prophet Zechariah to occur during the “Great Day of the Lord” in which all nations will gather to battle against Jerusalem.
Zechariah 14:1-4 – “Behold the day of the Lord is coming and your spoil will be divided in your midst. For I will gather all the nations to battle against Jerusalem. The city shall be taken, the houses rifled, and the women ravished. Half of the city shall go into captivity, but the remnant of the people shall not be cut off from the city.
Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations, as He fights in the day of battle. And in that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem on the east. And the Mount of Olives shall be split in two, from the east to west, making a very large valley; half of the mountain shall move toward the north and half of it toward the south.”
The Islamic traditions of the Messiah are also that He will make two appearances. Also both of these appearances will be at the time of the end. They are expecting the arrival of the “Guided One” who is called “The Mahdi”. He also will lead the Islamic faithful through days of great tribulations and apocalyptic wars and will die in battle for His people. The death of the Mahdi will herald the arrival of the Islamic Messiah, Isi ben Miriam (Jesus son of Mary).
Analyzing the Islamic traditions depict some very interesting blendings of these three religious traditions. It gives confirmation to those “with eyes that can see” and surprises for those who want to adhere to their own religious traditions.
All three traditions have one thing in common. They all speak of the God, who
is the God of the universe, and the God of all beings on this planet earth. They all
speak of “Dark Forces” that will come to deceive and lead their followers into the paths of destruction, so that they will consume internally to destruction.
As far as the interrelationship between the Jews and the Muslims in comparison of the Jews with the Christians, history does confirm that since the era of Constantine the Great and the ascendance of apostate Roman Christian history and the Holy Roman Empire, that it was not the Muslims that tortured, abused, disgraced with pogroms, genocide and persecutions but the Christian European nations under the spiritual rule and guidance of the Roman Christian Church.
While Holy Roman Imperial Europe was in the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment brought out more intense persecutions against the Jews, the era of the Islamic Caliphates was experiencing her Golden Age and shared an era of respective peace where the Jews achieved great advancement in Torah enlightenment under the Baghdad and Spanish Caliphates.
For 1260 years, between the years of 567 and 1917 CE, the Jewish people lived in the prophetic “wilderness”, while those Jews that lived in Europe suffered great persecutions by the Roman Christians and also by their apostate Jewish brethren the Sabbatian Jews. This documentation came by the BibleSearchers researchers in the articles titled, “Part Two - The Influence of the Persian Ram upon the Modern Islamic Shi’tie Nation of Iran”, where that Jews prospered in Moorish Islamic Spain but were expelled, like Christopher Columbus, by the Spanish Christian royal throne of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella began the Roman Christian Inquisition. The Jews were treated with dignity in the Visigothic Kingdom of Aquitaine and Hispania yet were expelled when the Roman Christians came to power.”
In the historical research of BibleSearchers Reflections, it was documented that the Jews prospered during the Golden Era of the Islamic Caliphates.
BibleSearchers Reflections - Until the year of 614 CE, the city of Jerusalem was a Christian city under the dominion of the Romans. After that it was ruled by the Shi’a Persians until the Byzantine Christians re-conquered it and ruled over Jerusalem until 637 CE. On that date, the Sunni Muslims ruled over Jerusalem until 1099 CE when the Christian Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred the entire population, Arabs and Jews alike.
Throughout the greater part of Jewish exile from Jerusalem, the Jews were a numerous and sizable population in the Arabic life and culture in the Middle East. During this age, the rabbinic schools at Sura and Pumbeditha became great Jewish institutions of higher learning. These schools became the nurturing grounds for the preservation of the Torah and the education for the majority of the Jewish rabbis and scholars.
It was the fourth Caliph of the Sunnis who was also the first Caliph or Imam of the Shi’ites, ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib, the son-in-law to the Prophet Muhammad when he married the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima Zahra, that gave the Islamic ruling in 657/658 CE to free the Jewish academies of any political control within the Islamic world. This ruling came from the only Caliph or Imam that was accepted by both the Sunnis and the Shi’as. What it did was to remove the Jewish people from obtaining any political power that would become a rivalry to the Muslims. As such the Jewish people were no longer a political threat to the Islamic people...
“This was a time of peace and security when the unique Jewish religious,
cultural and historical heritage was not threatened by Anti-Semitism nor
the threat of annihilation. The Western Roman world was in a marked decline. While Roman Christian persecution and Inquisition was raging across the continent of Europe while the Jews were prospering in the Arabic Muslim dominated regions of the Middle East and Africa. Unlike the Holy Roman Empire whose emperor was led by the spiritual pontiff of the Pope who had now usurped the temporal powers that was once placed only in the hands of the emperor, the Jewish Gaons were given spiritual but no political power and authority. They were in essence placed as a “neutral” party.
Roman Catholic Europe was in a precipitous moral, religious and cultural freefall yet the Jewish people were “safe” in the hands of their Islamic benefactors. Here began a time of safety when the Jewish people were isolated and preserved from the chaos of the rest of the world. Here the vital intellectual reservoir, the spiritual independent of the Jewish people was preserved. Here the God of Israel chose to preserve in “hiding” in the “wilderness” the continuous faithfulness of His people, the preservation of the Jewish religious, economic and cultural life. As such the Holy Scriptures and the calendar of the Lord were preserved for the Time of the End. Here was an era of 1260 years that began in 657/8 CE and lasted until 1917 CE when the God of Israel cast his protective “net” over the Jews from the Tigris and the Euphrates River to the coastline of the eastern Mediterranean Ocean. The time was soon to come for them to be “called” out of these Islamic lands and return to the Promise Land that the God of Israel gave to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
Since the day when the Lost Tribe of Ephraim, as the Ephraimite Imperialist Nation of Great Britain decided to accept responsibility for the fate of her Jewish cousins from the House of Judah, the Arab Islamic states turned against the people they had politically protected for 1260 years (657 to 1917)
The Mystery of the Arrival of the Islamic Messiah, the Mahdi
The least understood of all the “messiahs” is the Islamic messiah, called
the “Mahdi”. He is the first of the two Islamic messiahs. The Messiah of God
was foremost a Jewish tradition written by the Jewish and Israeli prophets.
Christianity was Islam were children of Jewish Nazarene Messianism. Even the second messiah of Islam refers back to Jesus the Prophet, whom they call “Isi ben Miriam”.
Strange as it may seem, we have to consider that with two major Islamic tribes, in
Afghanistan and Kashmir whose ancestral traditions resonate from the Hebrew traditions of the messiah, that we must consider them closely. Here we can
perceive the origin of Islamic Messianism; the Pashtun Tribes of Bani-Israel.
This makes it important for Christian and Jewish scholars of prophecy to understand how Islam views the traditions of the Islamic Mahdi, and the impending apocalyptic events at the time of the end. For us to read of their testimony, we must also go to the literature of the Islamic faith and analyze the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad that are called “Hadiths”. Only here can we penetrate the Islamic prophetic viewpoint about the time of the end.
Why is this important? Do we not recognize that they are one of the prime participants in the final apocalyptic events? As they materialize the words of the
Prophet and create a literal reality in their lives, only then will the clashes between the Nations of this Earth fully erupt. As we will see, in the Islamic mind, they will be the prime military defenders of the “faith” against the anti-Messiah. Let us begin our search for clues to the identity of the Islamic Mahdi.
The first identity factor is that the ancestral genealogy concerning the Mahdi will come from the family of the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, Fatima. Let us read:
Hadrath (Honorific title meaning “The Great Presence”) Umm Salama, the wife of the Prophet – “The Prophet (PBUH or “Peace Be Upon Him who reads the words of the Prophet) said: “The Mahdi will be on my family, of the descendants of Fatimah.”
This statement does not preclude that the Mahdi, as the 12th Shi’ite Imam
will not also have genetic roots as a Prince of King David. During the days of the
Prophet, the relationship between the Jews and the Muslims was quite close. We recognize this fact, when we realize that one of the most famous of the Jewish Exilarchs of Baghdad was Bostonai (Bustanai), who was a Davidic prince of the 2nd dynasty of exilarchs. He was appointed by the Arabic Caliph in 642 CE to be the new exilarch and hereby began the new 3rd Dynasty called the Bostonaite Lineage. It was the daughter of the Jewish Baghdadi Exilarch Bostanai that became the 9th wife of the Prophet Muhammad.
Let us consider this one fact, a daughter that may have come from the
relationship between Muhammad the Isalmic Prophet and a Jewish wife, would still be recognized as Jewish. If this young daughter married back to a halachic genetic pure Prince of David of the House of Judah, and their sons in descent were carried down the descandant’s tree through a male to male lineage all the way down to the future accepted Mahdi, this accepted Islamic messiah could be both a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad would also be a Prince of David.
What if that descendant remained as a Jewish Davidian “hidden” within the Pashtun Tribes of Afghanistan. This Davidian descendant would in turn fulfill another “hadith” of the Prophet Muhammad, in which we will soon read.
The First Imam or “Rightful Caliph” recognized by the Shi’a Muslims was ‘Alī (Ali) ibn Abī Ṭālib (599-661 CE). He reigned as the Fourth and Last of the Four Righteous Caliphs from 657 to 661 CE. He was the cousin to the Prophet Muhammad
and married the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima Zahra and so became also the Prophet’s son-in-law. If an Islamic daughter out of this marriage married back to a Jewish Exilarch
of one of the legitimate descendants of the Bostonaite Lineage, and if the male to male descendants remained pure, even though they are now of the Islamic faith and married into the Pashtun tribes of Afghanistan or Pakistan (Ancient Khurasan) it could result in a Shi’ite accepted Imam that would also be a Jewish Prince of David.
Now we read in the Hadiths (sayings of the Prophet) that claim that the
Islamic warriors following the Mahdi will come from the region of Khurasan. As strange as it may seem, but as we have documented above, the region of Khurasan was the main tribal region of the Pashtun Tribes of Bani Israel that lived in a wide swath across Afghanistan, Pakistan, and into Kashmir.
This strongly suggests that the “battle axe” of God, the Lost Tribes of Israel who were implanted as the Pashtuns of Afghanistan, will become the predominate counter insurgents against the global forces of the West and the Vatican that are seeking world domination. Let us read this interesting and tantalizing fact:
Hadhrat (“Great Presence”) Buraidah (R.A.) narrated by Rasulullah (Sallallahu
Alayhi Wasallam) said: "There will be many armies after me. You must
join that army which will come from Khurasaan." (Ibn Adi)
The mystery gets deeper as we begin to realize that the Islamic messiah called “The Mahdi” will be hidden, like Osama ben Laden today, in the midst of the Afghani tribal forces of the Pashtun tribes. As we will later read, one of most important objectives of the Mahdi’s Army will be to head towards Jerusalem. This army, according to this
following Hadith will be that the first Islamic army to attack from the Muslim world will be from the Bani Ishaq [Sons of Isaac or the Children of Israel (Bani-Israel)].
It appears that the first attack will be on the city of Istanbul (Constantinople). This military attack against the former capital of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire will cause the fall of that great city. Istanbul will be spared looting and
desecration for suddenly the news will arrive that the Dajjal (False or Anti-Messiah) will have arrived in the region. Suddenly the Mahdi’s forces will “leave everything there and would turn to him”, and head back to Damascus to find the False Messiah.
Abu Huraira reported Allah's Apostle (may peace he upon him) saying: “You have heard about a city the one side of which is in the land and the other is in the sea (Constantinople). They said: Allah's Messenger, yes. Thereupon he said: “The Last Hour would not come (time of the end) unless seventy thousand persons (warriors) from Bani lshaq (Sons of Isaac) would attack it. When they would land there, they will neither fight with weapons nor would they shower arrows but would only say:" There is no god but Allah and Allah is the Greatest," that one side of it would fall.
Thaur (one of the narrators) said: “I think that he said: ‘The part by the side of the ocean. Then they would say for the second time: "There is no god
but Allah and Allah is the Greatest" that the second side would also fall, and they would say: "There is no god but Allah and Allah is the Greatest," that the gates would be opened for them and they would enter therein and, they would be
collecting spoils of war and distributing them amongst themselves that a noise would be heard and It would be said: Verily, Dajjal (False or Anti-Messiah) has come. And thus they would leave everything there and would turn to him. (Saheh Muslim)
How will the Islamic Mahdi be identified? The clues about the identity of “The Mahdi” will be several. His age will be forty years old, his face will shine like a “son of the Divine”, in a manner like the medieval artists surrounded the head and face of Jesus Christ. There will be a “mark of identity”, for he will have a black mole
or birthmark on his right cheek. More important, he will be wearing not one, but
two “Qutwaani” Pashtun cloaks with fringes in conformity with the command of the
Torah to wear a tallis, or the fringe of a cloak called the “tzit-tzit”.
Rasulullah (Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam) was asked who would be the Imam of the Muslims at that time. Rasulullah (Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam) said - ”That person would be from my family, his age would be 40 years, his face would be bright as a star and a black spot would be on his right cheek. He would
be wearing two Qutwani Cloaks. He will appear exactly as a person
from Bani Israel. He will rule for 20 years and will conquer the cities of the Mushrikeen (Idolaters) (Kanz-ul-Aamal, pg 268, Hadith No 3868)
According to an article titled, “Imam Madhi, the Descendant of Muhammad PBUH (Peace be unto Him)” by Mufti A.H. Elias and Mohammad Ali ibn Zubair Ali, we also learn about other features of the first Islamic Messiah called “The Mahdi”;
1. He will be tall.
2. He will be fair complexioned.
3. His facial features will be similar to those of Rasulullah (Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam).
4. His Father’s name will be Abdullah.
5. His Mother’s name will be Aamina.
6. He will speak with a slight stutter and occasionally this stutter will frustrate him causing him to hit his hand upon his thigh.
7. His age at the time of his emergence will be forty years.
8. He will receive Knowledge from Allah.
From the sayings of the Prophet, we learn that a Nation of Liberated Slaves will come to the rescue and aid of the Arabs. It suggests that the war in Afghanistan will become so severe and intense with extreme destruction of the Pashtun tribal lands and massacres of the Pashtuns Israelites that they will go on the offensive, not with white flags of surrender but black flags of offense. In this region of Khurasan, we find the Bani Ishak which means the same as Bani Israel, are also identified as the same people called the Nation of Liberated Slaves that were freed from slavery from the Pharaoh of Egypt during the days of the Prophet Musa (Moses).
Hadrat Abdullah bin Masud narrates…”an army of Liberated Slaves will come to help the Arabs (against Edom, the Romans) and say, ”O Arabs leave prejudice or no one will support you and there will be a war with the Idolater… (Jamia Kabeer by Imam Suyuti, also mentioned in Eihtesaab-e Qadiyaniat, Vol. 14 by Muahdith e kabir MaulanaSyed Badar Alam Merhti)
While the Lost Tribes of Bani-Israel will be followers in the impending war of the Al-Mahdi, a separate Hadith describes that also from the East and also from the land of the Khurasans will arise the Dajjal or the feared anti-Messiah, known to Christians as the anti-Christ. The first followers of the anti-Messiah’s forces will be the Turks of Khurassan. Who then are these people?
Al-Tirmidhi Hadith 5487 Narrated by AbuBakr as-SiddiqAmr ibn Hurayth quoted AbuBakr as-Siddiq as saying that; “Allah's Messenger (peace be upon him) told them the Dajjal would come forth from a land in the East called Khurasan, followed by people whose faces resembled shields covered with skin.” (Tirmidhi transmitted it)
Tajik, Uzbek and Hazarah Shi'iah groups
Bukhari narrated Abu Huraira: The Prophet said, "The Hour will not be established till you fight a nation wearing hairy shoes, and till you fight the Turks, who will have small eyes, red faces and flat noses; and their faces will be like flat shields. And you will find that the best people are those who hate responsibility of ruling most of all till they are chosen to be the rulers. And the people are of different natures: The best in the pre-lslamic period are the best in Islam. A time will come when any of you will love to see me rather than to have his family and property doubled." (Bukhari Volume No: 4; Book No: 56; No: 787)
This is a fascinating discovery as we learn that both the Islamic Messiah called the Mahdi and the Islamic anti-Messiah called the Dajjal will both come from the same province of Khurassan whose chief tribes are the Lost Tribes of the Bani-Israel called the Pashtun Afghanistan, Pakistani or Kashmiri tribes but include also many ancient Jewish tribes.
