Framed within Eschatological Tradition — For Reflection and Study
The Oracle of Damascus
The most frequently cited prophetic text in this context is Isaiah 17:1 — “See, Damascus will no longer be a city but will become a heap of ruins.” For centuries, this oracle has occupied a peculiar status among eschatologists because Damascus holds the distinction of being one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth — it has never, in recorded history, been utterly destroyed. That fact alone has led many in the premillennialist tradition to regard its prophesied desolation as necessarily future.
The American withdrawal from Syria is significant within this interpretive framework not because it fulfils the prophecy, but because it is read as clearing the stage for it. The presence of roughly 1,000 U.S. troops in northeastern Syria, supporting the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, constituted one of the principal restraining vectors against unchecked regional escalation. With that presence dissolving over the coming two months, the prophetic imagination discerns the removal of what Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians (2:7) calls the katechon — that which “holds back” — allowing latent conflicts to move toward their appointed culmination.
Specifically, several scenarios now become more conceivable in geopolitical terms, each resonant with prophetic expectation: Iranian consolidation of a land corridor through Syria toward Lebanon, a renewed and potentially existential confrontation between Israel and the Iran-Hezbollah axis operating from Syrian territory, and Turkish military expansion against Kurdish forces the U.S. previously protected. Any of these trajectories, in the prophetic reading, brings Damascus closer to the catastrophic fate described in Isaiah and elaborated in Zechariah 9, where the cities of Syria fall in sequence preceding a larger judgment.
Some interpreters also link this withdrawal to the Gog-Magog coalition described in Ezekiel 38–39, wherein a northern confederacy — historically mapped onto Russia and Iran, with Turkey (Togarmah) as a participant — descends upon Israel. The departure of American military presence removes an obstacle to precisely such an alignment consolidating on Israel’s northern frontier.
The Singapore Dimension
Singapore does not appear by name in any canonical prophetic text, and intellectual honesty requires acknowledging this plainly. However, within the broader eschatological framework, Singapore’s significance is read through several interpretive lenses.
As a node of global commerce. Revelation 18 describes the fall of “Babylon the Great” in terms that are conspicuously mercantile — a city whose merchants were “the great ones of the earth,” through which passed “cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones…fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet…every kind of citrus wood…ivory…cinnamon and spice, incense, myrrh and frankincense, wine and olive oil, fine flour and wheat; cattle and sheep; horses and carriages; and human beings sold as slaves.” The Port of Singapore handles approximately one-fifth of global container shipping. In the typological reading, Singapore represents the apotheosis of the late-modern commercial order whose sudden cessation Revelation 18 mourns. A major Middle East conflagration disrupting the Strait of Hormuz and global energy markets would reverberate through Singapore’s entrepôt economy with devastating speed.
As a geopolitical bellwether. Singapore’s strategic doctrine has long rested on the presence of great-power equilibrium — specifically, American forward deployment as a counterbalance to Chinese regional hegemony. An America withdrawing from Syria is an America recalibrating its appetite for distant military commitments more broadly. Singapore’s leadership has historically been among the most candid global voices warning that U.S. retrenchment destabilises the open international order upon which small, trade-dependent city-states depend. Within the prophetic schema, the progressive withdrawal of Pax Americana from the world’s strategic peripheries is read as the dismantling of the katechon at a civilisational scale — not merely in Syria but across the Indo-Pacific.
As a site of spiritual discernment. In the Charismatic and Pentecostal traditions prominent across Southeast Asia, Singapore occupies a specific intercessory role. Figures such as Derek Prince and, more recently, networks associated with the New Apostolic Reformation have positioned Singapore as a “gateway nation” — a place from which spiritual authority flows into the broader Asian region. Within this framework, geopolitical disruptions in the Levant are interpreted as signals calling the church in Singapore and the wider region to heightened intercession and eschatological readiness. The Last Frequency
The call came at 4:17 in the morning, which was how Miriam knew it was real.
Hoaxes came at reasonable hours. Genuine emergencies — the kind that rearranged the architecture of your life — came in the blue-black nothing before dawn, when the mind was too slow to protect itself.
She sat up. The phone glowed on the nightstand like a coal.
“I need you to come,” her brother said. No greeting. Natan had never once in forty-three years said hello.
“Where are you?”
“The office. Don’t take a cab. Walk.”
The line went dead.
Miriam dressed without turning on the light, a habit from the years when she’d shared a room with their mother during the bad period, the years she didn’t name anymore. She was out of the apartment on Cantonment Road and into the wet Singapore air before she’d fully decided to go. That was the thing about Natan. He didn’t persuade you. He simply assumed, and somehow the assumption was load-bearing.
The streets at this hour belonged to a different city. Delivery drivers on electric bikes. A cluster of Bengali workers waiting at a bus stop with the particular stillness of men who had learned to wait without wasting energy on impatience. Somewhere behind the towers on Cecil Street, the harbour was moving in the dark, containers shifting between ships, the vast mechanical metabolism of a city that never fully slept.
She had lived here for eleven years and still felt, at moments like this, that she was observing Singapore from the outside. She suspected this was not a problem she would solve.
Natan’s office occupied the fourteenth floor of a building near Raffles Place that had been, in sequence, a rubber trading house, a colonial administrative annex, and now the regional headquarters of a consultancy that did work Miriam had never entirely understood. Strategic communications, Natan said when she asked. She had stopped asking.
He was standing at the window when she came in, his back to her, looking out at the harbour lights. He was still wearing yesterday’s shirt. A half-eaten bowl of congee sat on the desk beside three laptops, each open to a different feed.
“They’re pulling out,” he said without turning. “All of them. By April.”
She set down her bag. “Syria.”
“Syria.” He turned now, and she saw that he hadn’t slept. Not a short night — several nights. The skin under his eyes had the texture of old paper. “You know what this means.”
“It means a lot of things.”
“It means the corridor opens.” He moved to the desk, pointing at one of the screens. A map. She recognised the shape of the Levant, the coloured overlays she associated with the kind of analysis that lived behind paywalls and security clearances. “Iran to Lebanon. Unimpeded. And when that corridor opens—”
“Natan.”
“—everything we’ve been tracking moves from theoretical to operational in weeks. Not months. Weeks.”
She sat down. The city hummed below them, indifferent.
“Who sent you the information?”
He hesitated. That hesitation was new. In all the years she’d known him to work in the grey margins of things she wasn’t supposed to ask about, Natan had never hesitated before answering her. He’d simply answered, or not answered, with the clean economy of someone who had decided in advance what could be said.
“It doesn’t matter who sent it,” he said. “What matters is that it’s confirmed.”
“It matters to me.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Behind him, the harbour lights blurred in the pre-dawn haze, and for a moment she saw the city as it might look from a great distance — this small bright point on the map, surrounded by the dark weight of oceans and geopolitics and everything the island’s founders had spent fifty years trying to hold at bay through sheer institutional will.
“You remember what Abba used to say,” he said. “About Damascus.”
She felt something cold move through her. “Don’t.”
“He said it every year at the Seder. Every year, without fail. He’d pour Elijah’s cup and he’d say—”
“I know what he said.”
“He said the oldest city in the world had never fallen. That when it finally did, we would know the hour.”
“He was not a prophet, Natan. He was a retired engineer from Netanya who read too much Haaretz.”
“He was right about ’73.”
“He was right about ’73 because he understood Egyptian military logistics, not because God spoke to him over the gefilte fish.”
Natan almost smiled. That was something. She reached across the desk and turned one of the laptops toward her. The feed was a financial wire — commodity futures, oil, shipping indices. She understood these. This was her territory, the language in which the world’s anxieties expressed themselves most honestly.
The numbers were moving in ways that suggested someone, somewhere, was repositioning very large sums with some urgency.
“How long have you known?” she asked.
“Forty-eight hours.”
“And you’re telling me now because—”
“Because I need you to move the foundation’s assets.” He said it simply, the way he said everything. “Before the markets open in London. I need it done quietly and I need it done this morning.”
She looked up from the screen. “The foundation is a humanitarian endowment, Natan. It funds schools. You cannot ask me to—”
“I’m not speculating. I’m protecting.” His voice had gone flat in the way that meant he believed himself absolutely. “If I’m wrong, we move everything back in a week and no one is any worse off. If I’m right—”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.
Outside, almost imperceptibly, the sky had begun to separate from the sea. The first taxonomy of dawn, distinguishing water from air, the horizon asserting itself against the dark. Miriam had read somewhere — in what context she couldn’t remember — that ancient sailors considered this the most dangerous moment of any crossing. Not the storm. Not the reef. The moment you could finally see where you were.
She pulled the laptop closer.
“Tell me exactly what you need,” she said.
Three hours later, when the calls began coming in from London and the first headlines started moving across the wires, Miriam was standing at the window where her brother had stood. He was asleep on the office sofa behind her, finally, one arm over his face.
She watched the sun come fully up over the Strait.
She thought about her father, who had stood at a different window in a different city, also watching the light come. Who had believed, with the uncomplicated certainty of a man who had survived things that should have revised his certainties, that history was not random. That it moved. That it was going somewhere.
She had spent thirty years not believing this.
She was less sure of that now than she had been at 4:17 this morning.
On the screen behind her, Damascus was trending.