The Shaking of Shushan

On the first day of Ramadan 2026, February 18th, just four days ago, a magnitude 5.5 earthquake struck Khuzestan province in southwestern Iran. The German Research Centre for Geosciences registered it precisely, with a secondary tremor of 5.3 magnitude centered squarely in the same region. The epicenter sat atop one of the most prophetically charged pieces of real estate on earth: ancient Shushan,  known today as Shush or Susa,  the city of Esther, the city of Mordecai, the city where a decree for the annihilation of every Jewish man, woman, and child was sealed with the king's own ring.

Purim was ten days away.

For those with eyes to see,  for those trained in the prophetic tradition of Israel,  this conjunction of events demands attention. It is not enough to log an earthquake in an Iranian province and move on. When the ground beneath Shushan trembles on the eve of Purim while Iran openly funds the terrorization of the Jewish state, the thoughtful believer is obligated to ask: What is the Author of history saying through the language of the earth itself?

Shushan is the City That Remembers

Shushan's history stretches back approximately 7,000 years, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements on earth. But for the Jewish people, the city is defined by a single generation: the generation of Esther and Mordecai, when the Persian Empire under King Ahasuerus became the instrument through which the enemies of Israel very nearly succeeded in genocide.

Haman the Agagite, an Amalekite by lineage, an implacable enemy of the Jewish people by vocation,  cast lots to determine the optimal date for the extermination of every Jew in the empire. The word for those lots, פּוּרִים (Purim), gives the holiday its name. The irony embedded in the name is itself theological: the very act of randomness through which Haman sought to destroy the Jews became the memorial of their salvation.

The name of God does not appear once in the Book of Esther, מְגִלַּת אֶסְתֵּר (Megillat Esther). This is not an oversight or a scribal accident. The Sages taught for millennia that concealment itself is the message. God works through הֶסְתֵּר פָּנִים (hester panim),  the hiding of the face,  through what appears to the uninitiated eye as coincidence, as natural events, as the ordinary turning of the world. Look closer. Nothing in Esther is accidental. Timing is the medium through which Providence speaks.

And so, when an earthquake strikes the ruins of Shushan on the first day of Ramadan,  ten days before the world's Jews will read aloud the story of Haman's destruction,  we are reading Megillat Esther playing out in real time.

V'nahafoch Hu: The Great Reversal

The theological spine of Purim is encoded in three Hebrew words from Esther 9:1: וְנַהֲפוֹךְ הוּא (v'nahafoch hu),  "it was turned upside down." The ESV renders it: "the Jews gained mastery over those who hated them." But the underlying Hebrew communicates something more cosmically precise: the decree aimed at the Jews reversed direction and struck those who aimed it.

The verb נָהַפַךְ (nahafoch) carries the force of a complete inversion,  not merely a defeat, but a turning inside-out. What was aimed at Israel turned back on its senders. This is not merely a historical observation. It is a pattern woven into the fabric of Providence, a recurring signature of the God who "makes foolish the wisdom of this world" (1 Corinthians 1:20). Iran is, in the present hour, building nuclear weapons. Iran funds Hamas,  the organization that murdered, raped, and burned its way through southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Iran funds Hezbollah. Iran has funded the Houthis who launched missiles at Israeli cities. In every strategic and moral sense, Iran has been playing the role of Haman.

The question embedded in the shaking earth of Shushan is this: Does Iran understand how the story of Haman ends?

Ezekiel 39:11–15,  The Valley of Hamon-Gog

To understand the prophetic weight of what just happened in Khuzestan, we must descend into the text of Ezekiel 39:11–15. Here, in some of the most vivid and specific prophetic language in the Hebrew Bible, Ezekiel describes the aftermath of God's victory over the coalition of Gog,  a burial ground so vast it will take seven months to cleanse the land:

"On that day I will give to Gog a place for burial in Israel, the Valley of the Travelers, east of the sea. It will block the travelers, for there Gog and all his multitude will be buried. It will be called the Valley of Hamon-gog. For seven months the house of Israel will be burying them, in order to cleanse the land. All the people of the land will bury them, and it will bring them renown on the day that I show my glory, declares the Lord GOD. They will set apart men to travel through the land regularly and bury those travelers remaining on the face of the land, so as to cleanse it. At the end of seven months they will make their search. And when these travel through the land and anyone sees a human bone, then he shall set up a sign by it, till the buriers have buried it in the Valley of Hamon-gog." (Ezekiel 39:11–15, ESV)

Let us exegete the key terms from the Hebrew text.

הֲמוֹן גּוֹג (Hamon-Gog): The Multitude of Gog

The word הָמוֹן (hamon) means "multitude," "tumult," or "crowd." It is the same root used in Genesis 17:4–5, where God changes Abram's name to Abraham,  אַבְרָהָם (Avraham),  because he would become the "father of a multitude of nations" (אַב הֲמוֹן גּוֹיִם, av hamon goyim). There is a profound irony in Ezekiel's choice of this word: the same linguistic root that describes the promised proliferation of the covenant people through Abraham is now applied to the mass burial of those who came to destroy that covenant people.

גּוֹג (Gog) is the name of the northern king who leads the coalition against Israel. In Ezekiel 38:2, he is described as the "prince of Rosh",  נְשִׂיא רֹאשׁ (nesi Rosh),  a title whose geographical interpretation has occupied commentators for centuries. What is unambiguous is that Gog represents the archetype of the human ruler who opposes God's purposes for Israel in the latter days. The valley named after Gog's buried multitude,  עֵמֶק הֲמוֹן גּוֹג (Emek Hamon-Gog),  becomes the monument to his failure.

לְטַהֵר אֶת הָאָרֶץ (L'taher et ha-aretz): To Cleanse the Land

The verb טָהֵר (taher) is the standard Hebrew term for ritual purification,  the same root used throughout the Levitical code for cleansing from impurity. The ESV renders it "to cleanse" in verse 12. The use of this specifically cultic, priestly term signals that the burial of Gog's forces is not merely a sanitation project; it is a sacred act, an act of cosmic restoration.

The land of Israel,  הָאָרֶץ (ha-aretz),  had been defiled by the invasion of those who marched against it. In Levitical theology, the land itself can become טָמֵא (tamei, impure) through the shedding of innocent blood or through the presence of the dead (Numbers 35:33–34). The cleansing of Gog's armies requires the full seven months of burial, a period that echoes the seven-day periods of purification in Leviticus and hints at the completion of a full sacred cycle.

Seven months. In Jewish reckoning, seven is the number of שַׁלֵּמוּת (shalemut),  completeness, wholeness. God rested on the seventh day. The Sabbath year comes every seventh year. The cleansing of the land after Gog will take seven months,  suggesting that this is the final, complete purification of the land from the forces that sought its destruction.

עֶצֶם אָדָם (Etzem Adam): A Human Bone

Verse 15 contains a remarkable detail: "when these travel through the land and anyone sees a human bone,  עֶצֶם אָדָם (etzem adam),  then he shall set up a sign by it." The word עֶצֶם (etzem) means both "bone" and, in its adjectival form, "essence" or "very self." When God says "on this very day",  בְּעֶצֶם הַיּוֹם הַזֶּה (b'etzem ha-yom ha-zeh),  in covenant contexts (Genesis 17:23, Leviticus 23:28), the same root carries the force of ultimate reality.

The sight of a single human bone triggers a communal response: a marker is placed, and the professionals of burial come to inter what remains. This painstaking, bone-by-bone process reflects the Torah's profound respect for the human body: every person is made בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים (b'tzelem Elohim), in the image of God (Genesis 1:27); even the bodies of enemies must receive proper burial. And yet the sheer scale of the operation,  seven months of work,  speaks to the immensity of the army God will destroy.

 פָּרַס (Paras): Persia in the Coalition of Gog

In Ezekiel 38:5, the prophet explicitly names פָּרַס (Paras),  Persia,  among the nations that will join Gog's coalition against Israel. The ESV renders it simply: "Persia, Cush, and Put are with them." Modern-day Iran is ancient Persia. There is no historical ambiguity here: the nation that currently funds terrorism against Israel, that has publicly declared its intention to eliminate the Jewish state, that detonated its theocratic revolution on anti-Israel ideology,  that nation is named in Ezekiel's prophecy.

The nominal list in Ezekiel 38:2–6 situates these nations within a theological framework, not merely a geographical one. Each name represents not just a country but a spirit of opposition to the covenant purposes of God. פָּרַס in this list is not simply a Persian Empire acting in geopolitical self-interest,  it is Persia acting in the role it has occupied since the days of Haman: the archetype of the nation that rises against the Jewish people and is ultimately overturned by the God who does not sleep.

Consider the theological continuity: Haman the Agagite, in the court of the Persian king, casts lots to destroy every Jew on earth. He fails,  not because of Jewish military strength, but because the hidden God of Israel orchestrated events through a queen, a sleepless king, and the ironic mechanism of Haman's own gallows. Two and a half millennia later, modern Persia,  Iran,  is again plotting the destruction of the Jewish people. And Ezekiel tells us, with prophetic precision, that this coalition will march against Israel and be destroyed by God Himself, not by human armies.

 אֱלֹהִים and the Forces of Nature

Ezekiel's description of God's intervention in the Gog war is theologically specific about which divine Name is acting. The passage consistently uses אֱלֹהִים (Elohim) in conjunction with natural catastrophe. This is not accidental. The Hebrew tradition distinguishes between two primary Names of God: יְהוָה (YHWH),  the Name of covenant love, mercy, and personal relationship,  and אֱלֹהִים (Elohim),  the Name of creative power, universal sovereignty, and דִּין (din, judgment).

Jeremiah 10:10 captures the interplay: "But YHWH is the true God; He is the living God and the everlasting King. At His wrath the earth trembles, and the nations cannot endure His indignation." (ESV) The God who makes the earth tremble is the God of all creation,  Elohim,  acting in His role as universal Judge.

Ezekiel 38:22 describes God's weapons against Gog in startling specificity: "With pestilence and bloodshed I will enter into judgment with him, and I will rain upon him and his hordes and the many peoples who are with him torrential rains and hailstones, fire and sulfur." (ESV) Note the arsenal: not missiles, not soldiers, not political coalitions,  but rain, hail, fire, and sulfur. These are the weapons of Elohim, the God whose creative power formed the natural world and who can bend that world to His purposes in a moment.

Ezekiel 38:19–20 is the earthquake passage: "For in my jealousy and in my blazing wrath I declare, On that day there shall be a great earthquake in the land of Israel. The fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field and all creeping things that creep on the ground, and all the people who are on the face of the earth, shall quake at my presence. And the mountains shall be thrown down, and the cliffs shall fall, and every wall shall tumble to the ground." (ESV)

The key phrase is בְּקִנְאָתִי וּבְאֵשׁ עֶבְרָתִי (b'kin'ati uv'esh evrati),  "in my jealousy and in the fire of my wrath." The word קִנְאָה (kin'ah) refers to the divine jealousy that is inseparable from covenant love. God is not a disinterested observer of history. His covenant commitment to Israel generates a corresponding intensity of response when that covenant and its people are threatened. The earthquake that strikes in Gog's day is not random geological activity,  it is the footstep of the jealous God of Israel moving to defend His people.

The Zohar, Earthquakes, and the Divine Gaze

The rabbinic tradition does not treat earthquakes as theologically neutral events. The Zohar Chadash (Ruth 59) offers a striking teaching: earthquakes occur when the Holy One, blessed be He, gazes down upon that specific portion of the earth with the full intensity of divine attention. The earth cannot bear the weight of that gaze unaltered. It shakes.

Some rabbinical authorities apply this framework to the pre-Messianic period, understanding the earthquakes described in Ezekiel 38 as the trembling of creation before the approaching footstep of the God of Israel, who is about to enter history with finality. The earth does not just tremble during the Gog war; it begins to tremble before it, as the forces that will participate in that war begin to move into position.

The prophets understood earthquakes as cosmically communicative: they are not merely geological events but divine speech delivered through creation itself. Psalm 104:32 says of God: "who looks on the earth and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke." The God of Israel communicates through the language of the earth He made.

Whether or not the Khuzestan earthquake of February 2026 is a direct fulfillment of any specific prophecy, it is the kind of event the prophetic tradition has always recognized as הַשְׁגָּחָה פְּרָטִית (hashgacha pratit),  particular divine providence,  working through natural events to send a message that those with ears to hear will understand.

 עֶשֶׂר בָּנִים (Ten Sons) and Ten Days

The Sages are not casual with numbers. In the Purim narrative, Haman had ten sons, עֲשֶׂרֶת בְּנֵי הָמָן (aseret b'nei Haman), who were hanged alongside him when the reversal occurred. Their names are listed in Esther 9:7–9, and in the traditional reading of the Megillah, these names are chanted in a single breath,  because tradition teaches that they died together as one unit of judgment.

The earthquake struck ten days before Purim 5785. The Muslim world was beginning its holy month. The Jewish world was approaching the annual re-enactment of the most dramatic divine reversal in the Hebrew Bible. Ten sons. Ten days. The Sages teach that these numerical resonances are not coincidences; they are the grammar through which Providence communicates across centuries.

The Book of Esther is unique in the Hebrew canon precisely because of its refusal to name God. But what the Sages saw,  and what we are invited to see,  is that the absence of the divine Name makes His presence more vivid, not less. When everything "just happens" to align,  the queen positioned at the right moment, the king unable to sleep on the night the decree could be reversed, Haman arriving in the palace courtyard at the precise moment he could be humiliated,  the probability calculus of coincidence collapses. What remains is Providence.

The End-Times Significance of This Moment

We are living in a moment of extraordinary prophetic convergence. Israel is a reconstituted nation,  עַם שָׁב לְאַרְצוֹ (am shav l'artzo), a people returned to their land,  for the first time in two millennia, precisely as Ezekiel prophesied in chapters 36 and 37. The nations explicitly named in the Gog coalition are, in the present hour, in various stages of hostility toward Israel. Iran,  ancient Persia,  is the most active and vocal in its genocidal intent.

Ezekiel 38:8 describes the condition of Israel when Gog attacks: the people are "gathered from many peoples on the mountains of Israel, which had been a continual waste",  brought back to a land that had been desolate and restored it to prosperity. That description fits the modern State of Israel with uncanny precision. A land that was a malarial swamp and barren desert a century ago is now a technological and agricultural powerhouse, a refuge for Jews gathered from every corner of the earth.

Ezekiel 38:11 records Gog's reasoning: he looks at Israel and sees "a land of unwalled villages",  a peaceful people, dwelling safely, without walls or bars or gates. Some interpreters see in this phrase a description of Israel's confidence in its military deterrence, so secure in its defensive capabilities that it does not need traditional fortifications. Others read it as a description of the spiritual complacency of the age. Either way, the contrast with what follows,  an invading army that "comes like a cloud to cover the land",  is stark.

What is certain is that God's response to the invasion will not be a human military victory. It will be a divine act on the scale of the Exodus,  a demonstration so overwhelming that "the nations shall know that I am the LORD" (Ezekiel 38:23, ESV). The Gog war is not merely a geopolitical event. It is a theophany,  a divine self-revelation through the medium of history,  that will force the entire world to reckon with the God of Israel.

Reading the Signs Without Overreading Them

A word of caution is necessary here, and it comes from within the tradition itself. The prophetic calling is not to pin specific dates to specific events with the confidence of a newspaper editor. The Sages distinguished between the genuine prophetic insight that recognizes patterns of divine activity and the false prophetic certainty that claims to know precisely when and how the End will unfold.

The earthquake in Khuzestan province may or may not be a direct precursor to the Gog war. It may be a warning shot. It may be a sign of the season, not the specific hour. The Jewish tradition maintains that the exact timing of the End remains known only to God,  אֵין אָדָם יוֹדֵעַ (ein adam yodea), no human knows,  and that the role of the wise person is not to calculate the date but to recognize the direction.

What we can say with confidence is this: the alignment of the earthquake in ancient Shushan with the eve of Purim, during Ramadan, at a moment when the modern heir of ancient Persia is prosecuting a war of attrition against the Jewish state,  this alignment is the kind of hashgacha that the prophetic tradition is equipped to recognize and to proclaim.

Ezekiel saw it. The Megillah encodes it. The earth, it seems, is rehearsing it.

What Iran Should Understand

There is a message embedded in the shaking of Shushan that is directed, with prophetic precision, at those who now govern the land beneath which the ruins of Haman's empire lie buried.

The God of Israel does not forget. He does not miscalculate. And He has made a habit,  documented across millennia of recorded history,  of reversing the decrees aimed at His covenant people. Shushan itself is the proof. The city where Haman sealed the death warrant of the Jewish people is now the city where the earthquake struck on the eve of the festival that commemorates Haman's destruction. The earth beneath Shushan knows what happened there, and perhaps it is shaking with the memory.

Ezekiel 39:11 speaks of a valley,  גַּיְא,  that will be given to Gog for burial. The word גַּיְא (gai) means a deep ravine or valley, a place of descent. Those who descend upon Israel in arrogance are given a valley,  not a throne, not a monument of conquest, but a burial ground. The greatest army the world has seen,  הֲמוֹן גּוֹג, the multitude of Gog,  will need seven months of burial, so many are the dead.

Iran would do well to contemplate which role it is playing in the unfolding drama of Ezekiel's vision. History suggests the role of Gog does not end well. And the Book of Esther suggests that the role of Haman does not end well. The ground beneath ancient Shushan is vibrating with that reminder.

The God Who Hides and Reveals

The earthquake in Khuzestan province on the first day of Ramadan 2026 will be filed by seismologists as a routine tectonic event,  magnitude 5.5, depth 10 kilometers, no significant casualties reported. The world will move on to the next news cycle.

But the tradition of Israel has always known how to read events that the world dismisses as routine. The Megillah taught us that. The God who does not appear in the Book of Esther is nonetheless on every page of it, hidden in the folds of the timing, present in the turning of events, active in the inversion of decrees.

Ezekiel promised that God would make Himself unmistakably known through the Gog war,  "so that the nations may know me, when through you, O Gog, I vindicate my holiness before their eyes" (Ezekiel 38:16, ESV). The Hebrew word translated "vindicate my holiness" is וְנִקְדַּשְׁתִּי בָם (v'nikdashti vam),  I will be sanctified, made holy, revealed as קָדוֹשׁ (kadosh), utterly set apart, through them. The defeat of Gog will not be a military victory that gives Israel bragging rights. It will be a theophany,  a revelation of the Holy One of Israel,  that changes how the world understands God.

We are not yet there. We do not know the day or the hour. But we are living in a season whose features,  the regathering of Israel to its land, the rise of a Persian-led coalition hostile to the Jewish state, the escalating instability in the Middle East,  match the prophetic descriptions of the approach of that day with striking fidelity.

And on the first day of Ramadan 2026, ten days before Purim, the ground beneath ancient Shushan shook.

The God who hides His face is still writing the story. He is writing it in the language of earthquakes and holidays, in the convergence of ancient prophecy and contemporary geopolitics, in the shaking of land that remembers what was done there,  and what was undone there,  twenty-five centuries ago.Pay attention. The earth is speaking. And the God who made it has not finished writing.