One thing I most looked forward to after seminary was the freedom to read what I wanted. That freedom has proven elusive, as circumstances have been such that I had to solidify my eschatology, or the study of end times. One book I read to that end on a recent cruise vacation in the Caribbean is The End of America: The Role of Islam in the End Times and Biblical Warnings to Flee America by John Price. In it, Price concludes 1) America is the prophetic “daughter of Babylon” (sometimes also referred to as “Babylon the Great”) in Scripture, 2) Israel will soon come to peace with its neighbors, 3) Israel will then be invaded by Russia and a coalition of Islamic forces, 4) as the “daughter of Babylon” the United States will fail to come to Israel’s defense, 5) God will destroy or allow to be destroyed the United States by Islamic nuclear attack, and 6) that Christians and Jews living within the United States should make preparations to obey God’s call to flee the “daughter of Babylon” and emigrate to a foreign nation to be chosen based on moral factors such as the legality of abortion and same-sex marriage. While Price’s conclusions are admittedly intriguing and presented in a very convincing fashion, due to his arguments’ foundation of questionable exegesis, source materials without citation, failure to address other possibilities, speculation, oversimplifications and logical contradiction, I can only give this book two out of five stars.
Summary
Price begins by addressing why he did not raise these concerns in his first book, America at the Crossroads, in short holding that the world has changed drastically since the 1970s when he published that work and that such changes reveal a high likelihood that America is the daughter of Babylon. He then briefly reviews Islamic history and Koranic verses, arguing that Islam is not a religion of peace, but a religion of violent jihad determined to rule the world. He then draws parallels between biblical end-times prophecies and Muslim end-times prophecies and practices.
Price next attempts to demonstrate how clues as to the identity of the daughter of Babylon describe the United States. He then uses contemporary morals in the United States to further his argument that the United States is Babylon the Great. He continues by discussing the persecution that Christians will face in America, and are facing today to a certain extent. He discusses several passages regarding the daughter of Babylon as to how God views this nation. All of these chapters are designed to illustrate how the United States is the prophetic daughter of Babylon and describe what is going to happen to the United States.
Price then returns to the topic of Islam, noting that Muslims have the desire and patience to destroy the United States. He argues that the fall of the United States at Muslim hands will come by nuclear attack on the governmental, financial, cultural, and energy headquarters of the United States – Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and Houston – plus several other cities. He describes his belief as to what the world will look like after the United States has been completely destroyed.
He then proceeds to argue that God will demand an accounting from America for the deaths of billions of unborn children across the world as a result of not only the legalization of abortion in America, but America’s influence overseas toward a global legalization of abortion. He then goes into further detail of what the world will be like politically and financially as a result of America’s fall. As a result of these changes, Price argues that it will be necessary for Christians and Jews to flee America to safer locales mainly in Central and South America.
Price proceeds to outline several natural disasters that have occurred on or around days in which the United States has taken an official position to force Israel to give up land for peace with Palestine and why God is upset and punishing America for that position. He outlines several more pragmatic reasons to emigrate separate from the prophecies upon which his arguments are based and concludes with a brief analysis of when Christians and Jews should leave the United States.
Critique
Price’s conclusions are unreliable for several reasons that crumble the foundation of his polemic. One fatal problem with his position is its foundation on poor exegesis of Scripture. For example, one passage he claims discusses the United States is Jeremiah 50 and 51. The first rule of Bible interpretation is to place the passage in its literary and historical-cultural context. The historical-cultural context of Jeremiah 50 and 51 (a prophecy against Babylon) is leading up to the Babylonian captivity. The literary context while prophetic is the concluding prophecy against several specific peoples: the Egyptians (specifically Pharaoh in Jeremiah 46), the Philistines (chapter 47), the Moabites (chapter 48), the Ammonites (chapter 49), Edomites (chapter 49), Asyrians (chapter 49), Kedar and Hazor (chapter 49), and the Elamites (chapter 49). Each of these nations and peoples had a specific geographic location and role in ancient Jewish history. If the prophecy against Babylon in chapters 50 and 51 are actually allegorical in that they speak of the United States and not Babylon, then the prophecies against these peoples must also be allegorical. Who do they represent in end times prophecies? Price does not address this question.
Price also fails to adequately explain why Jeremiah 50 must apply to the United States when the passage begins with, “The word which the LORD spoke concerning Babylon, the land of the Chaldeans, through Jeremiah the prophet.” (Jer. 50:1). The land of the Chaldeans was located near modern day Kuwait and Iraq just south of where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers converge and run into the Persian Gulf. Abram hailed from Chaldea where Ur was located. With such specific geographic information, it is hard to believe that this passage refers to the United States.
In his efforts to convince the reader that Jeremiah 50 describes the United States, he argues – almost deceptively – that Jeremiah 50:12 refers to Babylon the Great as a young nation in end times by arguing that the Hebrew word akharit should be translated as hindermost although the NASB and several other translations translate the word as least. He makes this claim as a trained lawyer, not a Hebrew scholar. In fact, this is a very difficult verse to interpret because it lacks a verb in the second half of the verse. A very literal translation of the verse reads, “Your mother will have been greatly ashamed, she who gave you birth will have been humiliated, behold, the least of the nations, a wilderness, a parched land and desert.” The parsing of previous verbs in the sentence (qal, perfect, 3rd person, feminine, singular) indicates that the action is complete, at least in the mind of Jeremiah. As such, the proper translation is probably 1) “she was the least of nations”, 2) “she has been the least of nations”, 3) “she had been the least of nations”, or 4) “she will have been the least of nations”. Remembering the prophetic genre of this passage, the fourth seems the best translation. Hebrew scholars working towards the English Standard Version and New Revised Standard Version have translated the word as “last” while scholars working toward the New American Standard Bible and New Living Translation have translated it as “least.” In the context of the verse itself – “Behold, she will be the least of the nations, a wilderness, a parched land and a desert” (NASB), either seems to fit with the sense being that when this destruction befalls Babylon, it will be in the future the least or last of all nations. In any case, the argument that this passage refers to the United States is untenable as this is but one of many examples of poor exegesis.
From poor exegesis, Price draws several assumptions to support his conclusions. For example, with no real exegetical reason to do so, Price concludes that God destroyed Sodom with forces similar to a nuclear attack. From this exegetical conclusion, he assumes that there were radiation effects from the force used to destroy Sodom to draw a parallel with the effects of nuclear weapons observed after Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a point of comparison of what will happen when the United States falls by nuclear attack. Thus, his conclusion that Americans will have blackened skin as a result of an Islamic nuclear attack rests on a pillar of assumption that rises from a foundation of poor exegesis. The frailty of these conclusions thus becomes even more evident.
Adding to the frailty of Price’s conclusions are the natural contradictions that begin to arise on such thinly supported arguments. Continuing his argument for an Islamic nuclear attack on the United States, he cites Genesis 19:27-28, which indicates that Abraham returned to the area of Sodom and Gomorrah and saw the destruction. If God used nuclear forces to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah similar to what the world observed in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Chernobyl, the area would have still been of sufficient radioactivity to cause Abraham serious problems. Several similar contradictions arise in Price’s book.
When Price lacked information on a particular topic, he began to speculate. For example, in an effort to show that God punished America every time it took a position to induce Israel to trade land for peace with the Palestinians, he admits that he has no idea what Secretary of State Warren Christopher said to Israeli officials in private talks. So Price speculates that Christopher told them to give up land for peace, which led to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 as punishment for America’s position.
There are several external criticisms that can be levied against the book as well. Price seems intent on playing off people’s fears to motivate them to leave the United States instead of motivating the country towards righteousness and repentance, or Christians to evangelism and grace. Furthermore, he addresses several issues of key eschatological interest without addressing what is arguably the most important eschatological verse in all of Scripture, Matthew 24:14, which says, “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.” Price asks Christians to base their preparations for the return of Christ on political events between Israel and Palestine. Scripture clearly tells Christians to base their preparations for the return of Christ on the spread of the gospel of Christ to all the world. This oversight or omission cannot be ignored.
Several other stylistic problems raise concerns as well. There are typographical and grammatical errors throughout the book. At times, he states a statistic or seemingly outrageous fact without any citation to source material. Such things detract from the credibility of any book, removing it from the category of a research-based book and placing it solely in the opinion category.
Conclusion
I do not recommend any reader of The End of America to take action based on the book. Test his ideas, conclusions, and arguments against Scripture and any merit they appear to have quickly dissolves. While we must prepare and be ready for the end of time and the return of Christ (1 Thess. 5:1-10), moving out of America to avoid judgment is at least less biblical than being sober and alert by being a servant of all, pursuing righteousness, and sharing the gospel with this admittedly lost and dying world.