Did God have a spindly flying toy for children become key in saving Jerusalem?

      In 1878 A.D. a father brings home a little, wooden, rubber band powered flying toy, he tosses it up in front of his sons, and voila!, Jerusalem is rescued partially because of it.  It follows a complicated path to Israel becoming a nation on May 14, 1948, ending 1,878 years of homeless wandering for the Jews since the 70 A.D. destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans.  Notice the 1878's?  Odd, right?

     Now, here's a condensed overview:  Turkey...the Ottoman Empire...ruled over Jerusalem and a great deal of the surrounding area for 400 years.  People say it was for '400 years', but 402 is a more perfect number.  During World War I the Turks were aligned with Germany and others against Britain and other allies.  The British fought their way to Jerusalem.  They took up a position out in the town away from Jerusalem's walls in a stone structure that was known as Samuel's Tomb, referring to Samuel the great and very obedient priest of the Old Testament, a highly favored servant of God. This notable historic structure was pulverized before the fighting was ended, which the British realized was a shame.  Even the Germans agreed on that point.  In fact, the Turks had sent out a message to a German commander to please send them some additional troops that they felt they badly needed, and it is a matter of record that he withheld the troops because he did not want to be responsible for even greater destruction is such a religiously significant city as Jerusalem.  On both sides there was a level of acknowledgement that this was God's holy city that they would be firing the artillery rounds in.  The most holy city in the world, in fact.  There were some Turkish troops also outside Jerusalem's walls set up to fight the British from amidst the buildings and structures where they were located.  Inside the city of Jerusalem many thousands of Jews and some others were starved, beaten, desperate, many already dead, hopelessly praying for relief from the occupying Turks.  It is reported that literally thousands of orphans lived there doing whatever they could to stay alive. Many of the fathers and fighting age males had been conscripted and taken away to distant battlefields earlier by the Turks.  The British hoped to save them.  A man named Allenby was the British commander.  

     The British military forces came close, and were willing to fight the Turkish forces outside Jerusalem's walls, but some of the British commanders were extremely reluctant to fire away with their large artillery weapons at the walls of Jerusalem and into the city within the walls, causing the sort of massive destruction to people and structures that such weapons do.  This was Jerusalem!  This was God's holy chosen city.  Mount Zion, the place God claimed as His holy mountain, was here. For a believing Christian this was a horrible conundrum.  The British wished to liberate the city from nearly 400 years of Ottoman rule, but they felt dread at the thought of harming the city.  But there were some fighting forces outside and inside Jerusalem's walls that must be dealt with somehow. 

     However, the British didn't have to fight very much as it turned out.  The appearance of an airplane in the sky...an unfamiliar sight to many of the Ottoman forces...was one of the elements that caused the Ottomans to decide to depart and/or surrender.  Orville and Wilbur Wright, brothers from the USA, had taken that first credited flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903 on the flats at Kill Devil Hills.  It flew three times that day, but never another day, as a strong wind picked it up and flipped it while it was sitting on the ground, doing so much damage that they counted it as destroyed.  (Of course, it is said that pieces of this first flying aircraft, the Wright Flyer, some fabric and a bit of wood, were taken by Neil Armstrong to the surface of the moon in 1969, in his pocket.  So its first flight wasn't its longest!  And technically speaking, its first day of flying wasn't also its last.  It might even be a nice touch if a few pieces of the Wright Flyer were on the first manned mission to Mars, should we achieve that goal.)  And so, in 1917 A.D. the airplane, now emerging as a useful tool of war, had born the strange fruit of helping to liberate the geography of ancient Israel and Jerusalem from the Ottoman Turks merely by being an unfamiliar and frightening sight in the sky to the eyes of Turkish troops.  They probably knew it was a machine, but what were its war capabilities?  They had to have wondered, and perhaps found it demoralizing to speculate.  And so the Turkish forces surrendered, gave up, and the day that the victorious British entered the city was on Hanukkah no less, a holy day associated, among other things, with throwing off the yoke of your oppressors and getting back to Jewish business as normal.  Ironic, yet appropriate, that the occupying foreigners would be driven out of Jerusalem on Hanukkah, bringing to mind the days of the Maccabees, the 2nd century B.C., when the holiday was first begun, when they had kicked out the Seleucid forces who earlier on had forced them to quit worshiping in their holy temple. 

   Once the Turks surrendered or fled the city of Jerusalem and Israel fell into the hands of the British, it became part of what would come to be called the British Palestine Mandate, and stayed in that condition for 31 years until Israel declared itself a sovereign nation on May 14, 1948 A.D.  The British Mandate had included a lot more land than present day Israel occupies.  Land east of the Jordan River was included in the mandate...land that is today's nation of Jordan.  At that time, when it was all part of the British Mandate, the land on the east side of the Jordan River was referred to as the trans-Jordan portion of the British Mandate. 

     Wilbur and Orville Wright had a hand in it.  So did their dad!  Wright means 'craftsman', and the Wright brothers surely qualified as that.  Wilbur means 'brilliant' and Orville is a name which means 'golden city'.  They had, with that first 1903 flight, contributed to the liberation of Jerusalem, a city which has sometimes literally been called 'the golden city' in some historical writings.  And by the way, can you guess which Jewish holiday was being celebrated on December 17, 1903, when the first successful 120 foot Wright brothers flight occurred there at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina?  Did you guess Hanukkah?  You guessed correctly!  The brothers had known that it might be a historic day the day they went out to Kill Devil Hills to test their airplane design called the Wright Flyer, so they flipped a coin to see which brother would attempt the first test flight.  Wilbur won the coin toss and got first try.  But that attempt didn't produce a lift off.  Orville got the second try, and that's when it happened...a manned flight of about 120 feet, counted as the first ever, though some contest that the Wrights were first.  God had known every smallest thing about aerodynamics since the Creation was formed, having designed birds and bats and gliding mammals and reptiles and tree seeds designed to glide, etc.  But in 1903 A.D. mankind was just learning the smallest bit for the first time since perhaps the days before the Great Flood.  Perhaps back then there was flight, since some rebellious angels with their angel knowledge had came to live among men in those days.     

     And what had originally caused Orville and Wilbur to develop their curiosity about flight, this vision that machines could one day fly?  Here is an excerpt said to have derived originally from an interview where they were asked that question.  I excerpted it, for educational purposes only, from a website article discussing some interesting facts about the Wright Brothers.  It can be found at this site:   https://visitnaha.com/10thingsyoudidntknowwrightbrothers/#:~:text=The%20tight%2Dknit%20brothers%2C%20born,printed%20a%20daily%20newspaper%20together 

     "A toy launched their flying obsession. When the brothers were youngsters in 1878, their father returned home one evening with a gift that he tossed into the air. “Instead of falling to the floor, as we expected,” the brothers recalled in a 1908 magazine article, “it flew across the room till it struck the ceiling, where it fluttered awhile, and finally sank to the floor.” The model helicopter made of cork, bamboo and paper and powered by a rubber band mesmerized the boys and sparked their passion for aviation."  End of excerpt.

     I do not know if this is the same design of wooden, rubber band powered flying toy as their father released that day inside the house in front of the Wright children.  Isn't it amazing to imagine that a little spindly thing like this, a tiny little toy, might help lead to the liberation of Jerusalem?  But in a way it did.  And this can be a lesson to fathers and mothers...little things you do in front of your children that may seem small to you might be huge in the minds of your children.  Their little eyes watch, their little minds absorb.  And they dream bigger and bigger dreams as they develop into adults, feeding upon what they have learned, much of it coming from their parents, to generate exciting visions of what they might accomplish.     

     Sometimes Protestant pastors speak about 'the 400 silent years' not spoken of in the Bible.  But there are issues of subjective inaccuracy with them saying that.  For one thing, they say '400' like it's an exact number when it possibly isn't.  And it's true that 400 is sometimes used in an ever so slightly general sense.  400 years is a number that is important in the Bible, though, don't get me wrong.  It's often associated with escaping slavery or oppression, or getting back what you lost or what was taken from you not via your own power, but through God's power.  It's a number associated with getting a nearly free and often miraculously achieved victory or restoration from God.  There is the 400 years of slavery that Israel suffered through in Egypt, after which God brought them across the Red Sea.  Was it 400 years exactly?  Maybe.  Not sure.  God did it for them.  There's the 400 shekels Abraham paid to Ephron the Hittite to procure a burial place, a cave, for his family among a foreign people, but Ephron publicly spoke words about just letting Abraham have it for free.  You could say that God procured the land for free for Abraham's use.  Abraham paid though...400 shekels.  He didn't want any future misunderstandings about who the land belonged to.  Another example:  Cyrus the Persian gave the Jews leave to return to Jerusalem for free, even helping them with the costs and greasing the skids with the local petty rulers, and when they went back to Jerusalem and rebuilt their temple in a much humbler design than the previous they rededicated it with the sacrifice of 400 male lambs among other animals.  God, using the heart of Cyrus, had given Jerusalem back to the Israelites without them having to fight for it.  And there's the 400 years that the Ottoman Empire controlled the area of Israel and Jerusalem (really 402, but they call it 400) until about 1918, but then the people of God got Jerusalem back into their own hands (partly) through the efforts of the British, but really through God, right?  The yoke of the Ottoman Empire was thrown off by the arrangements that God made to have it be so!  Elijah called out the 450 priests of Baal and the 400 false prophets of Jezebel to have a showdown to see whose God was the real God.  The 450 priests of Baal showed up for the duel, but the 400 false prophets of Jezebel apparently did not...Elijah got the victory over them without having to face them that day, you might say.  He killed the 450 Priests of Baal.  

     The pastors who refer to the 400 silent years should perhaps pick up a Catholic Bible though.  The 400 so called 'silent years' they refer to are the 400 years before Christ's birth.  In most Protestant Bibles there aren't any of the 66 canonical Bible books that speak of those years.  But in the Catholic Bible those years are spoken of in the Books of the Maccabees for instance, in quite a lot of detail.  (I personally feel like a Protestant, but was raised Catholic, and I think these churches both worship Jesus as their Lord and as the Son of God made into flesh to walk among us and teach, and then to die for us.  I think there was much that needed fixing when the Protestants broke away from the Catholic Church.  But Jesus has done many great miracles through the Catholic Church through the centuries also, which I believe shows that it also is or at the very least once was His church.)  The Maccabees refers to a family of Jews nicknamed that...derived from a word for 'hammer' some scholars say...who fought against the oppressive, Greek-originated Seleucid Empire that ruled over Jerusalem in those years and had done so since fairly shortly after the Greek defeat of the Persians and the Medes by Alexander the Great.  In fact, a Seleucid overlord/ruler named Antiochus IV Epiphanes came into Jerusalem with soldiers and butchered a foul unclean pig (from the Jewish perspective) in God's holy temple just to insult the Jewish God and to desecrate their Jewish temple of worship, and he made the Jews quit rendering to God their required regular offerings, the ones that were mandatory for observing their Jewish faith, offerings specified as necessary in their Torah.  And Antiochus added insult to injury when he put up a bronze plaque, right there at their Jewish temple on top of the alter of burnt offerings, honoring the false god Zeus.  The family of Maccabees brothers led a rebellion and fired up their people to wage brave war against these 'Greeks', they performed amazing exploits and eventually they drove the Seleucid forces out of Jerusalem's vicinity, allowing the Holy Temple to be literally and ceremonially cleaned out and spiritually sanitized, and it was rededicated for offering sacrifices to God in 164 B.C.  This re-dedication of God's temple, this kicking out of the occupying and desecrating Gentiles, has been celebrated as a holiday each year every since by the Jews, it is the annual celebration called Hanukkah.  Or Chanukkah.  Hanukkah commemorates clearing out the gentile oppressors and rededicating God's Temple.    

     The Jews in Israel at that time really never enjoyed too much independence for very long though.  The Romans soon took over Israel, in 63 B.C.  They would go on from there to place local kings over Israel, men such as Herod the Great, the Idumean.  His family, he and his successors, ruled Israel long past then, even past when Jesus was born and lived His earthly life.  As we know, the Jews largely rejected Jesus and even crucified Him, God's actual Son.  Some think that the crucifixion was around 30 A.D.  Some say more like 33 A.D.  About 40 years later (40, the classic time of trial and testing in the Bible) the Romans grew sick of the constantly rebelling Jews and laid siege to Israel and Jerusalem, finally breaking into Jerusalem after a roughly 4 year siege in 70 A.D.  And then the surviving Jews were mostly all enslaved.  They also lost their nation for many, many centuries.  They wandered through various gentile nations, going from place to place and seemingly were never welcome for very long in any of the places where they tried to settle and regroup, and then against all odds they were somehow miraculously and officially restored as a nation, in the geographical bounds of ancient Israel no less, on May 14, 1948.  That occurred about 1,878 years after 70 A.D., the year they were first driven from God's Golden City Jerusalem (again, it's called that in Jewish and other literature sometimes) and from God's holy mountain, Mount Zion.  And various gentile nations had ruled over Israel for most of that intervening time.

     Back to 1917.  A British military commander named General Edmund Allenby had been tasked with driving the Turks out of Jerusalem, and being a Christian man he was concerned about how to do it with little loss of life and holy relics inside of Jerusalem's walls.  But he was encouraged when he came across some prophecy.  Here is an excerpt about that from a One For Israel article:

He {Allenby} came across the work of Bible scholar, Dr H. Aldersmith, who had been studying the prophecies regarding Israel. Aldersmith explained in his book from 1898, The Fullness of the Nations, that he believed Jerusalem would be delivered by Great Britain in 1917 [2]. He had become convinced from Isaiah 31:4-5 that the UK would have a part to play in the restoration of Jerusalem, and that it would be accomplished by some kind of flying machine [3]. Aldersmith had arrived at this idea even before the Wright brothers took their first flight in 1903 – air planes had not even been invented, but of course that is precisely what ended up happening. Fourteen years later in 1917 airplanes were used but not commonly, and most people had never seen one. This man’s conviction about Isaiah 31 was Allenby’s inspiration. He would fly planes over Jerusalem, and drop notes written in Arabic saying, “Surrender the city! Allenby”.

End Quote

     Here is Isaiah 31:4,5

⁴ This is what the Lord says to me: