The Harbinger, by Jonathan Cahn, a Messianic Jewish rabbi and author, is Cahn’s debut novel. The Harbinger is described as a Christian novel; it uses and relies on themes, concepts, and scripture that are prevalent in the Old Testament. It was initially published in September 2011 by FrontLine, an imprint of Charisma House, which is a religious publishing group dedicated to spreading religious messages. FrontLine is the imprint of Charisma House used for discussing cultural and political issues with a focus on the Bible and prophecy. The Harbinger is a prophetic novel, meaning that it contains the author’s view on a predictive pattern of events. The novel follows a journalist, Baruch Nouriel Kaplan, on his journey with “the prophet,” a man who claims to have uncovered an ancient secret that explains all modern America’s problems. The novel is also considered apocalyptic literature, because it uses themes of judgment and destruction, as well as concepts like revelation, salvation, and religious dogma to discuss modern and past events through a lens focused on the destruction of a people, a nation, or the world. The Harbinger is a New York Times fiction bestseller, was on Amazon’s top 100 bestselling books list for over six months, and remained on USA Today’s top 150 bestseller list for over 79 weeks. The novel has also received multiple awards and commendations from various religious organizations. A sequel to The Harbinger, titled The Harbinger II, was published in 2020, and a film adaptation was released in 2022 titled The Harbingers of Things to Come. The novel covers themes of religious history, including omens as a means of understanding the world, redemption as a path to safety in both the life and the afterlife, and the mysterious methods through which history and spirituality unfold.

This guide references the 2011 FrontLine Kindle edition of The Harbinger.

Content Warning: This guide includes discussions of discriminatory language, including racist, anti-gay, and anti-Muslim rhetoric that is discussed in the source text.

Plot Summary

The novel opens by establishing a frame in which Baruch Nouriel Kaplan, a journalist, meets with Ana Goren, a book publisher, to discuss publishing a story that Kaplan has uncovered. Goren is initially resistant to Kaplan’s ideas, as he claims to have found a mystery that explains the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, in New York City and Washington, DC, as well as multiple disasters and events after that attack. Kaplan then proceeds to tell Goren the story of how he came to find this information, with Goren periodically commenting on Kaplan’s story.

Kaplan receives a seal, a small object meant to mark documents to show authenticity, in the mail, and he becomes interested in its meaning. He meets a man in the park one day who has a similar seal, and this man tells Kaplan that there is an ancient mystery to be uncovered with the seals. He gives Kaplan a new seal, and Kaplan begins referring to this man as “the prophet.” Over time, the prophet reveals nine harbingers to Kaplan through nine representational seals. The first harbinger is the attack on 9/11, which destroyed the World Trade Center and set off a series of events related to terrorism and economics. The prophet links 9/11 to the Assyrian invasion of Israel in 732 BCE, and this link forms the base of all the mysteries presented in the novel. The second harbinger is Osama bin Laden, who is acknowledged as responsible for 9/11. The prophet characterizes the Assyrian Empire as the founders of terrorism, and this serves as the basis for his rhetoric linking them to all future terrorists. He identifies contemporary Iraqi people as descendants of the ancient Assyrians and emphasizes the physical location of Iraq in the same place as ancient Assyria as his foundation for this link.

The third harbinger is the bricks of the World Trade Center, the buildings destroyed on 9/11, which the prophet links to ancient Israel through Isaiah 9:10, a verse in the Old Testament. The fourth harbinger is the Freedom Tower, which was built on the site of the World Trade Center after the attack, and which the prophet sees as a symbol of America’s defiance of God. The fifth harbinger is the gazit stone, a block taken from a mountain to serve as the base of the Freedom tower. The significance of the stone is linked to the “hewn stone” in Isaiah 9:10, which the prophet asserts is a component of ancient Israelite and modern American arrogance. The sixth harbinger is the sycamore, a tree significant in both ancient Israel and in the prophet’s telling of modern American events through Isaiah 9:10. The seventh harbinger is the erez, or cedar tree, likewise significant in Isaiah 9:10. The eighth and ninth harbingers are the utterance, a speech given by John Edwards, then the vice-presidential candidate for the Democratic party, in 2004, and the prophecy, a speech given by Tom Daschle, the Senate Majority Leader, on 9/11 just after the attacks. Both speeches quote Isaiah 9:10, which the prophet claims connects the prophecy directly to modern America.

After revealing the nine harbingers, the prophet asserts that America needs to turn back to God to avoid judgment in the form of destruction, but he indicates that another warning will occur if America does not accomplish this task. Years later, Kaplan and the prophet meet again, and the prophet now has four mysteries to reveal to him through the same seals used to reveal the harbingers. The first mystery is the Isaiah 9:10 Effect, which the prophet proposes is the process through which a nation assures its own destruction in the methods it uses to avoid that same destruction. For America, this process is the series of decisions made economically and through foreign policy in the years after 9/11. The second mystery is the “uprooted,” which refers to the collapse of Wall Street. This reference relies on the original name of the New York Stock Exchange, the Buttonwood Association, in which “buttonwood” is another name for a sycamore tree. The third mystery is the shemitah, which is a Jewish practice of letting fields rest for one year out of each seven, and which includes the practice of forgiving all debts at the end of a seven-year period. The prophet notes that the initial stock market collapse after 9/11 and the housing market crash in 2007-08 both occurred on the day appointed for the forgiving of debts in shemitah. The fourth mystery is the third witness, who is Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. In Obama’s inaugural address, he uses phrasing the prophet claims is congruent with the message of Isaiah 9:10, which he says reestablishes America’s vow of defiance to God.

Following the revelation of the prophet’s message, he takes Kaplan to St. Paul’s Chapel in New York City, and he explains that George Washington dedicated America to God in exchange for God’s blessings. Now that America has turned away from God, the prophet claims that it is losing those blessings through calamities like 9/11 and the housing market crash of 2007-08. Unless America turns back to God, according to the prophet, an even greater destruction will come, which he calls judgment. He appoints Kaplan as his scribe, following the biblical tradition of Jeremiah, who also communicated through a scribe named Baruch. Kaplan ends his story by telling Goren that he plans to publish a book on the prophecy, and Goren suggests that Kaplan frame it as a narrative in which he is recounting the prophet’s message to his publisher.