Oil In Prophecy

On May 20, 2001 in Lancaster, California, Kim Clement prophesied the following.

"The Spirit of the Lord says as your prayers are coming forth from your spirit, I will take them and I'm going to turn them around and I'm going to answer you tonight," says the Lord.  "If my people who are called by my name would humble themselves and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and I will heal their land.  I'm going to heal your land," says the Lord. 

"There's going to be a miracle that's going to happen between America and China.  There's going to be a miracle that's going to happen in the Middle East.  As you begin to pray tonight, I'm going to begin to shake the Middle East with my power and with my glory," says the Lord.  " Israel, Israel, Israel, Israel, there's oil coming out of your land.  Israel, there's oil coming out of your soil.  There's oil going to come forth," says the Spirit [of the] Lord.  "And you shall laugh at your enemies, you shall laugh at your enemies.  Because I will raise up within you a sound of victory," says the Spirit of the Lord.   "As my people pray tonight, I will heal this land and I will cause the political powers to begin to fall on their knees and begin to pray.  I began with the President and they are mocking him," says the Lord, "but because he is praying I am going to do something so fresh in this land and it shall come to pass that 18 months from now, I will cause every church in this nation to be filled with my fire and filled with my power and filled with my anointing," says the Lord.  Everybody pray.  Everybody pray.

In an excellent article entitled "BULLS FROM THE SEA: Ancient Oil Industries"as published by Aramco World (http://users.erols.com/gmqm/ancient1.html) Dr. Zayn Bilkadi informs us that ".the ancient Arabian people known as the Nabataeans, also referred to as the 'Oilmen of the Dead Sea,' ...founded one of the greatest kingdoms of the ancient Middle East.  Nabataeans were a wealthy nation - so wealthy in fact, that they are the only people in history known to have imposed a punitive tax on whomever among them grew poorer instead of richer .

"In 88 and 87 BC, the Greek Seleucid king Antiochus XII launched two separate campaigns against the Nabataean king 'Ubaydah I, in a determined effort to capture the Nabataeans' oil industry .  In 31 BC, the Arabs triumphed over the Judean king Herod at the battle of Qanawat, in present-day Syria, and the politics of oil in the ancient Middle East sealed the fate of Antony and Cleopatra VII.

 "Finally, in the year AD106, the Nabataeans were incorporated by the emperor Trajan into the newly formed province of Roman Arabia, with its capital at Bostra in southern Syria.

Pre-historic hunters used bitumen [oil] to attach flint spearpoints to shafts, and prehistoric farmers harvested with sickles whose stone edges were held in place with the same substance, which also served as a liniment and a laxative.  Seven thousand years ago, the Ubaid people caulked their boats with bitumen, and used it as well as making works of art inlaid with mother-of-pearl and lapis lazuli.

"All this was in Mesopotamia [Iran], where petroleum was naturally available from bitumen seeps, oil springs and oil-bearing rock.  Recent evidence suggests that bitumen was traded down the western shores of the Arabian Gulf before the end of the fifth century BC.  And elsewhere in the Middle East, escaping natural gas, lit by lightning, produced 'eternal flames' that were objects of superstitious awe.

"It served in the construction of irrigation systems, as a caulk for ships, and as both an additive to strengthen fired clay bricks and a mortar to hold them together.  These large-scale civilizations used bricks by the millions and bitumen by the ton - used them, in fact on a scale we would have to describe as industrial.

"For the ancient Arabian people known as the Nabataeans, history arrived in 312 BC, when an army of Greek mercenaries crossed the Syrian desert into present-day Jordan and headed toward the southern tip of the Dead Sea .   When they reached their destination, their commander-a general named Hieronymus of Cardia-couldn't believe his eyes:  Scores of Arabic-speaking tribesmen were camped on the shore, with pack-camels couched and reed rafts beached, waiting for what they called the thawr-the  word was Arabic for "bull"-to appear in the middle of the sulfur-smelling waters .   The 'bulls,' Hieronymus discovered, were great iceberg-like mounds of jellied crude oil - bitumen - that floated up from the depths of the murky water and drifted aimlessly with the wind.  Every time a new 'bull' rose into sight, a swarm of axe-wielding seamen leapt onto their reed-bundle rafts and began a frantic race toward the catch .  The Arabs prized the oily exudate immensely; as the Greeks put it they carried the stuff off 'like plunder of war.'"  Nowhere is this scene more vividly depicted than in Hieronymus's own journal:  'They make ready large bundles of reeds and cast them into the sea. 

On these not more than three men take their places, two of whom row with oars, which are lashed on, but one carries a bow and repels any who sail against them from the other shore, or who venture to interfere with them.  When they come near the floating bitumen they jump upon it with axes and, just as if it were soft stone, they cut pieces and load them onto the raft, after which they sail back .'

"On the shore, crews of women and children sprinkled the hunks of tarry oil with sand, stuffed them into leather bags and loaded them onto camels for the long journey across the Sinai.  Their final destination:  Alexandria, Egypt.

"Until that eventful day when the Greeks made their unwelcome appearance in their midst, almost nothing was known about these oilmen of the Dead Sea.

"The Nabataeans knew that in the oil of the Dead Sea they had their hands on a fortune of immense proportions.  Then as now, oil and international trade proved to be inseparable.

Editor's Note :  I had to skip more of the article here.

"Demetrius finally agreed to withdraw, on condition that he be given hostages and gifts.  Instead of retreating toward Syria; however, Demetrius, to the Arabs' dismay, marched  on to the Dead Sea and declared himself ' lord of all the oil fisheries .'  Leaving behind his army he then hastened back to his father to report the news.

"Antigonus, apparently impressed by what his son had found, immediately sent another battalion to the Dead Sea, headed this time by Hieronymus, with specific orders to "prepare boats, collect all the bitumen, and bring it together in a certain place.  However when Hieronymus attempted to harvest the oil with his boats, his forces were attacked by no less than 6000 Arabs - some of them on rafts - and were annihilated in a shower of arrows.

"We know from the Roman historian Josephus that in 88 and 87 BC, the Greek Seleucid king Antiochus XII launched two separate campaigns against the Nabataean king 'Ubaydah I, in a determined effort to capture the Nabataeans' oil industry .

"The Nabataeans continued their petroleum exports to Egypt well into the first century BC, and their wealth, already considerable, continued to grow.  The bitumen was carried along the Wadi Arabs to Petra or Avdat by camel caravans, and then north to the coastal city of Gaza. From Gaza, it was either loaded aboard ships bound for Alexandria, or taken along the Mediterranean coastline in fresh caravans into Egypt.  "Antony fell in love with that extraordinary Greek-Egyptian queen, Cleopatra VII, who persuaded him to give her the Nabataean oil fisheries as a gift.  To maximize her income from the operation while still ensuring that the oil would continue to flow into her kingdom, the canny queen contrived the first recorded lease-back scheme:  For a hefty 200 talents, or roughly $400,000 a year, she leased the Dead Sea oil works back to the Nabataean king Malik I in 36 BC.