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263 These prophecies, as did Jeremiah’s, also contained the promise that Mankind will be offered a new beginning, new hope; that a Messianic Time will come when “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb.” And, the Prophet said, “it shall come to pass at the End of Days that the Mount of Yahweh’s Temple shall be established as foremost of all mountains, exalted above all hills; and all the nations shall throng unto it”; it will be then that the nations “shall beat their swords into plough- shares and their spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift up sword against nation, and they shall no longer teach war” (Isaiah 2: 1-4). The assertion that after troubles and tribulations, after people and nations shall be judged for their sins and trans- gressions, a time of peace and justice shall come was also made by the early Prophets even as they predicted the Day of the Lord as judgment day. Among them were Hosea, who foresaw the return of the kingdom of God through the House of David at the End of Days, and Micha, who—using words identical to those of Isaiah—declared that “at the End of Days it shall come to pass.” Significantly, Micha too consid- ered the restoration of God’s Temple in Jerusalem and Yahweh’s universal reign through a descendant of David as a prerequisite, a “must” destined from the very beginning, “emanating from ancient times, from everlasting days.” There was thus a combination of two basic elements in those End of Days predictions: one, that the Day of the Lord, a day of judgment upon Earth and the nations, will be fol- lowed by Restoration, Renewal, and a benevolent era cen- tered on Jerusalem. The other is, that it has all been preordained, that the End was already planned by God at the Beginning. Indeed, the concept of an End of Epoch, a time when the course of events shall come to a halt—a precursor, one may say, of the current idea of the “End of History”’— and a new epoch (one is almost tempted to say, a New Age), a new (and predicted!) cycle shall begin, can already be found in the earliest biblical chapters. The Hebrew term Acharit Hayamim (sometimes trans- lated “last days,” “latter days,” but more accurately “end of The End of Days