The Gaza War and the Red Cows of Prophecy

Hamas plotted the Al-Aqsa Flood operation in great secrecy. Although Israeli military intelligence caught wind of extensive and mysterious training in Gaza months earlier, the final preparations for the Oct. 7 attacks were known only among Hamas’ top leadership. A rare window into the decision-making process, however, was opened during a bizarre interview on Oct. 26 on the Egyptian satellite TV channel Sada El Balad. 

Mustapha Bakri, an Egyptian member of Parliament and prominent media personality, interviewed the former head of Hamas in Gaza and now senior leader of its Qatar-based exile group, Khaled Mashal, about the surprise attack on Israel three weeks prior. As reported later that day by the Egyptian newspaper Shorouk News, Mashal told Bakri that the operation was necessary to disrupt Israel’s scheme “to import five red cows from the United States of America to implement the Zionist plan to destroy the Al-Aqsa [mosque] in the shortest possible period.” 

“Shame would stain the nation’s forehead,” Mashal continued. “And so, the Al-Aqsa Flood operation was necessary.” 

Five red cows? Imported from the United States? The destruction of the Al-Aqsa mosque? What on earth was he talking about? 

Mashal was referring to an aspect of the Arab-Israeli conflict that is so weird, even most Israelis write it off as an obsession of the lunatic fringe. It involves a magical potion of Biblical origin that some ultra-Orthodox believe is required to rebuild the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount on land currently occupied by the Al-Aqsa mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam. The potion involves a mixture of spring water and the ashes of a ritually sacrificed two-year-old cow, or heifer, that must be covered by red hairs only. At the moment, five candidates for the sacrifice are quietly grazing on an undisclosed kibbutz somewhere in Israel.

The origins of the red-cow recipe date to legendary events described in the Torah, supposed to have taken place some 3,000 years ago. In Chapter 19 of the Book of Numbers, God dictates the red heifer ritual to Moses and his brother Aaron. The blood of the dying beast must be sprinkled around seven times once its throat is cut, God explains, before delivering elaborate instructions for the cremation of the cow’s carcass: 

Her flesh, and her blood, with her dung, shall be burnt. And the priest shall take cedar-wood, and hyssop, and scarlet, and cast it into the midst of the burning of the heifer…. [A] man that is clean shall gather up the ashes of the heifer, and lay them up without the camp in a clean place, and it shall be kept for the congregation of the children of Israel for a water of sprinkling; it is a purification from sin.

The red cow ritual is meant to cleanse people of the contamination associated with contact with death. The rules of the ritual were later fleshed out further by learned rabbis in Talmudic law. In the twelve chapters of the Mishnah Parah, God’s instructions multiply into a cascade of increasingly complex details regarding the making of the mixture. In Chapter 5, for example, we learn that, “All are eligible to prepare the mixture, except a deaf mute, an imbecile and a minor. Rabbi Judah says a minor is eligible, but disqualifies a woman and a hermaphrodite.”

According to an 11^th-century midrash on the Book of Numbers, King Solomon, famously wise, is said to have been baffled by all of this. But the key points are easy enough to grasp. The heifer must be pure red without one hair of another color. It must be between two and three years of age. 

This obscure obsession made its way to the United States by way of a Massachusetts rabbi named Chaim Richman. After Richman moved to Israel in 1982, he became deeply involved in the plan to rebuild the Temple. In 1989, he was named international director of the Temple Institute, an organization founded in 1984 by Rabbi Israel Ariel, a right-wing zealot. Richman quickly positioned the Temple Institute as the chief mover in achieving the goal of bringing unalloyed red cows to the Holy Land. He is also the author of a book on the subject, “The Mystery of the Red Heifer: Divine Promise of Purity.”

Richman and the other activists are slippery about what, exactly, is going to happen to the Al-Aqsa mosque once the Biblical potion is ready. But barring divine intervention, demolition looks likely. According to Jewish tradition, somewhere in the Temple Mount site is the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant, and it would be disastrous if any unclean Jew were to tread on it. The Rabbinate of Israel declared it out of bounds to Orthodox Jews for this reason in 1921. This is why Richman, the Temple Institute and their allies have concentrated on the magic potion plan. A sprinkle of the good stuff would make the priests pure enough to risk contact with the holy site and reconstruction of the ancient Temple could then proceed.

There was just one problem: The ideal red cow needed for the sacrifice, always rare, appeared to be extinct in the Middle East. Rabbi Richman announced several times that they had found one, and each time, before it reached the legal age for the sacrifice, it grew hairs of the wrong color. When he became international director of the Institute in 1989, Richman started exploring the idea of importing American cattle. He realized that this could be aided by forming alliances with evangelical churches in the American South that, he soon discovered, were just as excited about rebuilding the Temple as he was, though for different reasons.

By the 1990s, ambitious plans were hatched to create an entire herd of American Red Angus cattle in Israel. The Temple Institute is financed by New York hedge fund billionaire Henry Swieca, so money has never been an issue. But once again, fate was against them, and the red cows could not be found. In 2018, they tried importing embryos from Nebraska. Another exciting announcement, another disappointment. Within months, the dreadful black and white hairs sprouted again. Having drawn blanks in Mississippi and Nebraska, the Temple Institute tried again, this time focused on Texas, which is full of cattle. In 2022, they approached a trucking company boss and Israel-obsessed evangelical End Times enthusiast named Byron Stinson. Eager to help, Byron placed calls to his Christian rancher friends. He was soon claiming to have found, not one, but 21 pure red calves.

The Dallas Theological Seminary is at the heart of Dispensationalism, an eschatological form of evangelical Christianity that believes in the Rapture. Texas Evangelicals are unusually obsessed with Israel because they believe the country will play host and trigger to the Big Event. For this reason, megachurches routinely organize End Times package holidays to the Holy Land, where visitors can take selfies at the site of Armageddon as their guides cheerfully narrate the coming nuclear holocaust.

Rapture-bound churchgoers are generally clean-cut, positive types, and have come to see the Second Coming as a kind of party, with all the death and destruction happening to other people, as they are lifted out of their clothes to watch it all from heavenly front row seats. While they see the whole deal as a foregone conclusion, preachers differ on the details.

Sometime in 2022, the Temple Institute sent a team of rabbis to Texas to make sure the red heifers were up to Biblical standards. They were deemed eligible, and before long, the Texas-Israel axis had come up with a plan to get around inconvenient U.S. laws against exporting livestock. The key was a loophole for pets. In the age of emotional support animals, airlines are required to take pets — up to five on one flight. In September of 2022, American Airlines obliged and the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture gave a green light. The red cows are now in Israel; all are apparently still pure red in color.

Twelve years ago, Rabbi Yitshak Mamo bought a plot of land on the Mount of Olives in a place deemed appropriate for the ritual sacrifice, now planned for 2024. In March of 2023, he explained to the Christian Broadcasting Network that he is aiming for Passover, during the last week in April.

Although this story has been widely reported in Israel and in the Muslim world, mainstream English-language outlets have mostly ignored it. If you want to read about it, you’ll need a subscription to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram rather than The New York Times. Hamas, for its part, has a simple reason to take all this seriously, aside from the pending destruction of the al-Aqsa mosque. As Muslim fundamentalists, they believe in the second chapter (or sura) of the Quran, which is also the longest chapter. It is called “The Cow,” and includes a version of the Jewish cow sacrifice story from their perspective. In the Quran version, the heifer is not red, but yellow. Moses is a Muslim prophet, and when he orders them to make the sacrifice, it is therefore the word of Allah. It is thus not surprising that Hamas should take the idea of the ritual sacrifice so seriously, as Muslims are told to believe in the magic, even if it’s not entirely clear what it will do. It is also not surprising that this story should spread so easily through the Muslim world, where memorizing the Quran is the basis of education. In a religious landscape populated with djinns, talking trees and flying horses, a magic cow fits right in, even one seen as benefiting the Jews. 

Meanwhile, the key figure in this story, Byron Stinson the Evangelical trucker, appears blithely unaware of what he has unleashed. On the one hand, he is proud to help Israel rebuild the Temple, which he incredibly describes as the house of peace for all faiths (an idea he seems to have taken from his new friends at the Temple Institute). But he gets more serious when he talks about the important stuff, namely the End Times and the Tribulation. 

“The question we need to ask is, ‘Do we want the Messiah to come?’” he said in an interview with a Dallas televangelist network associated with Zola Levitt Ministries in December of 2022. Stinson estimates that two-thirds of humanity will be exterminated, but remains fatalistic about his role in the catastrophe. “Whether we go through it three years from now, 30 years from now, or 300 years from now, there’s a group of people who have to go through it, and I for one would just as soon go ahead. I’m from Texas, you know. So, let’s get it on!”