Donald Trump said something on live television this week that stopped one of the world’s leading experts on biblical prophecy in his tracks. The president suggested that Iran, by attacking its Arab neighbors, had unintentionally pushed the Sunni Arab world into friendship with Israel. To most viewers, it was a passing comment on regional politics. To Rabbi Tovia Singer, founder and director of Outreach Judaism and a longtime teacher of the Hebrew Bible’s prophetic books, it was confirmation of a script written by the prophets Ezekiel and Zechariah two and a half millennia ago.
Singer made the case in a video interview posted Monday, arguing that the war with Iran, the October 7 massacre, and the sudden realignment of Arab states toward Israel are not meredly political headlines. More significantly, they represent discrete stages of a single, ordered process the Bible describes as geula, or redemption.
Singer’s understanding is based on Ezekiel 38 and 39, two chapters describing a coalition led by Gog, from the land of Magog, that is prophesied to invade Israel in the last days. Singer identified that invading force as Persia, the ancient name for Iran, and read from Ezekiel 39:21: “I will set My glory among the nations, and all the nations shall see My judgment that I have executed, and My hand that I have laid upon them” (Ezekiel 39:21). The verse describes a war so visible that the entire world watches it happen. “The whole world will watch it in real time,” Singer said, and argued that description alone should unsettle a modern reader. When Ezekiel wrote it, Persia under Cyrus the Great was the empire that had freed the Jews from Babylonian exile and funded the rebuilding of the Temple. “It would have been irrational on the prophetic level” to name Persia as Israel’s future enemy, Singer said, since the prophecy was written when Persia was the Jewish people’s greatest ally.
Singer pressed the point further. The Talmud assigns the reading of Ezekiel 38 and 39 as the haftarah, the prophetic portion read in synagogue, on the Sabbath that falls during Sukkot, the festival of Tabernacles. The October 7, 2023 attack fell on the last day of that same holiday. Singer connected the date directly to the liturgy: “The attack on October 7th was the last day of Sukkot.”
Singer connected several other events to specific verses. He read Zechariah 12:3 as describing Jerusalem returned to Jewish hands and besieged by a coalition of nations before the Messiah’s arrival: “In that day I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all peoples; all who lift it will injure themselves, and all the nations of the earth will gather against it” (Zechariah 12:3). “I beg you, the viewer, take out a moment and just read Zechariah 12,” Singer said, calling the chapter’s language plain rather than coded: “There’s no hidden, there’s no gematria, there’s no remez. All very straightforward.”
Singer read Jeremiah 30:7, a passage the Sages call the time of Jacob’s trouble, as describing a catastrophe from which the nation emerges intact, a promise he connected to the devastation of the Holocaust and the birth of the State of Israel three years later. He pointed to Zechariah 12:10-11, which describes the nation mourning “each family apart,” men and women separately, as the only source in the entire Hebrew Bible for the mechitza, the partition between men and women in Orthodox synagogue prayer. “This is the only reference in which it is to men and women praying separately,” Singer said, noting that Tel Aviv’s plan for a mechitza at its public Yom Kippur services reached Israel’s Supreme Court, which ruled against it, just days before October 7.
On the war’s toll, Singer put the figures at 1,189 Israelis murdered and 251 taken hostage on October 7. The hostage figure matches current reporting; the death toll is close to, though slightly below, the approximately 1,200 most recent tallies cite, after Israel’s Foreign Ministry revised its initial estimate downward in the weeks following the attack. Singer went on to describe what happened fourteen months later by an unprecedented direct assault, 300 ballistic missiles and drones launched from Iran at Israel on the night of April 13 and 14, 2024. Not one person was killed. One Bedouin girl was injured by shrapnel. Singer tied the outcome to Ezekiel 16:6, a verse recited every year at the Passover seder and at every brit milah (circumcision): “In your blood, live” (Ezekiel 16:6). “We are living in a time of miracles that are happening for our eyes,” he said.
Singer also addressed why exile followed the destruction of the Second Temple. Both Christianity and Islam, he said, emerged only after that destruction, and both hold that Jewish suffering and dispersion prove the Jews were rejected for not accepting Jesus or Muhammad. Singer cited Maimonides’ twelfth-century answer: God permitted both religions to spread specifically because they carry the God of Israel’s name and the authority of the Hebrew Bible to nearly five billion people, laying groundwork that will collapse in the Jews’ favor the moment the true Messiah is revealed and the Temple is rebuilt. His proof text was Ezekiel 37:28, the final verse of the dry bones vision: “Then the nations will know that I am the LORD who sanctifies Israel, when My sanctuary is among them forever” (Ezekiel 37:28). “Jerusalem is everything,” Singer said of why Jewish sovereignty over the city and the Temple Mount would flip global opinion.
Singer was direct about which parts of the Christian world he believes stand opposed to this reading and which do not. He said the Roman Catholic Church’s theology, going back to Augustine and Cyril of Jerusalem, held that a Jerusalem emptied of Jewish sovereignty proved Christianity’s truth, and that the Eastern Orthodox Church, having never undergone a reform comparable to the Second Vatican Council, remains more resistant to Jewish return to Jerusalem than Rome. He was equally direct that many individual Catholics, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and many evangelical Christians, do not hold to that older theology and instead actively support Israel. On Iran specifically, Singer added a sharper aside about the country’s own identity: “If you want to make an Iranian upset, just call them an Arab. They don’t like it, because they’re not.”
Singer closed on the war’s economic and diplomatic aftershocks. “The streets of Jerusalem are filled with young children, as is prophesied in Zechariah chapter 8,” he said, describing a city he called safer for families than most American downtowns despite sitting in what he called “the worst neighborhood of the world, surrounded by enemies on all sides.” Of Trump’s comment on Iran pushing Arab states toward Israel, Singer said only, “I wish him well. I didn’t ask him any question. I just saw it in the headlines.” Hamas, he said, calculated a swift and devastating war against the Jewish state, only to slow its own advance through the atrocities its terrorists committed on October 7, giving the Israel Defense Forces time to fight back and later, alongside the United States, to strike Iran’s nuclear program directly. Iran being cast as Israel’s enemy of last days, he added, makes the country “the motherload of bad ideas.”
Whether Iran’s missiles or Trump’s off-the-cuff remark on Arab realignment will be remembered as prophecy fulfilled or as one rabbi’s reading of current events, Singer’s underlying claim is not new. It is the claim the Hebrew Bible’s prophets made about their own era: that the God of Israel works in a fixed and visible order, and that the order does not require guesswork to recognize once it starts.
