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292 the name of “a place in the Hebrew tongue”—Har-Megiddo, Mount Megiddo, in Israel)—a war involving the Holy Land. If that future Babylon is indeed today’s Iraq, the prophetic verses are again chilling, for as they foretell current events leading to the fall of Babylon after a brief but awesome war, they predict the breakup of Babylon/Iraq into three parts! (16: 19). Like the Book of Daniel, which predicted phases of trib- ulations and trying stages in the messianic process, so has Revelation tried to explain the enigmatic Old Testament prophecies by describing (Chapter 20) a First Messianic Age with “a First Resurrection” lasting a thousand years, fol- lowed by a Satanic reign of a thousand years (when “Gog and Magog” will engage in an immense war), and then a second messianic time and another resurrection (and thus the “Sec- ond Coming”). Unavoidably, these prophecies triggered a frenzy of specu- lation as the year A.D. 2000 approached: speculation regard- ing the Millennium as a point in time, in the history of Mankind and the Earth, when prophecies would come true. Besieged with millennium questions as the year 2000 neared, I told my audiences that nothing will happen in 2000, and not only because the true millennium point count- ing from the birth of Jesus had already passed, Jesus having been born, by all scholarly calculations, in 6 or 7 B.c.E. The main reason for my opinion was that the prophecies ap- peared to envision not a linear timeline—year one, year two, year nine hundred, and so on—but a cyclical repetition of events, the fundamental belief that “The First Things shall be the Last Things”—something that can happen only when history and historical time move in a circle, where the start point is the end point, and vice versa. Inherent in this cyclical plan of history is the concept of God as an everlasting divine entity who had been present at the Beginning when Heaven and Earth were created and who will be there at the End of Days, when His kingdom shall be renewed upon His holy mount. It is expressed in repeated statements from the earliest biblical assertions through the THE END OF DAYS