The Artist 
Happy Doomsday
Another Waco—or simply wacko? That’s the lingering question about Abilene’s House of Yahweh, the latest Texas cult with a charismatic leader of questionable integrity who has visions of the end of the world.
rose says: Hi, my daughter was on the index cover of your magazine, holding a cat, with another girl. My daughter is the one with the brown hair. We have been out of the house of hawkins for over 3 years now. Alot of news has happened at that place, which I do believe you would be interested to know about. Please go to skipstanley.com for more information. You should consider doing a follow-up story to this one you did in 1996. More than just the people in Texas are interested in what is going on in that place. It has reached as far as Africa, where people prepared in bunkers a couple of years ago, to prepare for the "end of the world", because of Hawkins false predictions. Thank you! (December 23rd, 2008 at 12:25am)
(Page 3 of 4)
Today Yisrayl Hawkins says, “Ever since 1951 we [he and Jacob] talked about us being the two witnesses. We weren’t sure about this until the early eighties.” If this is true, then his decision to change his first name could be viewed as a brazen ploy to fulfill the Scriptures, and his display of emotion to Kay could only be fakery. But those who knew Jacob, both in his congregation and in the Hawkins family, said that the older brother never believed himself to be a witness. In 1986 Jacob—long since dismayed by Yisrayl’s deceptions—assured a friend in a letter, “No one at this time knows who the two witnesses are. They will be two men from the House of Yahweh, but Yahweh has not revealed who they are, and you can be assured that they will not be teaching what is taught in Abilene.”
But in 1982 Kay was convinced that her husband was Chosen. Together they wrote a pamphlet titled “The Two Witnesses,” a 36-page attempt to prove that Jacob and Yisrayl were the two in question—as opposed to other oft-cited potential candidates, including Cyrus and Alexander, Moses and Elijah. The pamphlet is the first of many the House of Yahweh would publish that would rely upon methods of “retranslation” so calculatedly arbitrary that the authors would likely be laughed out of any language school on the planet. Take, for example, their tortured analysis of the crucial Isa. 44:5 phrase … and another shall subscribe with his hand unto the Lord, and surname himself by the name of Israel. To prove that the passage means that a man such as Buffalo Bill Hawkins would legally change his name to Yisrayl, the authors first isolated the Hebrew word for “subscribe,” kathab—which can mean “write,” “describe,” “inscribe,” “prescribe,” “record,” or “subscribe.” The authors chose two of these six definitions to bolster their case. The first is “prescribe,” which as a verb has three definitions. The authors selected the third: “to assert a right or title to something on the grounds of prescription.” The second definition of kathab they chose is “record,” and from several listed definitions they picked, “an official written report of public proceedings, as in a legislature or court of law, preserved for future reference.” This definition is meant to apply to a noun, and the word in question—kathab—is a verb. Still, after this series of ill-advised leaps, “The Two Witnesses” concludes, “Not only will one of the two witnesses be ‘surnamed’ Yisrayl, he will take this name legally—in a court of law—just as the prophecy has proclaimed!”
Yisrayl Hawkins had discovered a con of biblical proportions. Rooting through the Scriptures for golden acorns of prophecy was an age-old pastime, as was foretelling the Second Coming. But Hawkins’ quasi-scholarly methodology was enticing bait to wayward Christians. Without knowing a lick of Hebrew, he could prey on doubt by offering fact. “He proved everything,” member after member would say. Or, “It all made sense.” The House of Yahweh would be packaged as a superscience, indisputable—above all, the evidence that its overseer was the witness Yisrayl, Yahweh’s unassailable spokesman.
It helped that Hawkins had a bit of luck on his side. His brother Jacob would occasionally confide, “Bill is not only deceiving the people—he’s deliberately deceiving the people.” But Jacob could have brought the whole deception down by publicly challenging the notion that the Hawkins brothers were the two witnesses. For reasons of his own, he never did this. None of Hawkins’ other family members or ex-wives resided near enough to Abilene to expose him as a scoundrel. Kay “bought the whole thing,” she now admits—a crucial alliance, since her poorly educated husband relied heavily upon her to research and script the propaganda that the House of Yahweh would pass off as proof.
The most staggering coincidence in Hawkins’ favor was that the word “Abilene” actually appears in the Bible, in Luke 3:1, cited in passing as a Gentile province. Predictably, Hawkins made major hay with the reference. In his pamphlet “The House of Yahweh Established,” he devoted 42 pages to proving that “Abilene” was pregnant with prophetic meaning. After studying these Hebrew-intensive pages at my request, New Testament professor John Alsup of the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary listed all of Hawkins’ typical tricks without knowing anything about him: selective use of definitions, habitual decontextualizing, and with respect to Hawkins’ analysis of the -ene suffix in “Abilene,” a basic ignorance of Hebrew. “It’s a mess,” Alsup told me.
For the linguistically challenged, Hawkins had another way to prove Abilene’s significance. Noting that the Scriptures suggested that Yahweh’s new temple would be located due west of Jerusalem, Hawkins wrote: “Now look on any world globe, find the city of Yerusalem, Israyl, then go directly west on the exact latitude, and you will move directly to the city of Abilene, Texas!” Jacob Hawkins had claimed the same thing about Odessa as a geographically prophesied location for the House of Yahweh. When I mentioned this to Yisrayl Hawkins, he shook his head and said, “No, not quite. If you look it up, Odessa is not quite due west.” I looked it up. Jerusalem’s latitude is 31 degrees 47'. Odessa’s is 31 degrees 50'. Abilene’s is 32 degrees 27'.
AND YET THE BELIEVERS MULTIPLIED. The House of Yahweh drew them from California, New York, Tennessee, and Georgia, from Africa and continental Europe. Prison inmates sent off for the literature. Saturday churchgoers on mailing lists received letters. Parents brought in children, and vice versa. Catholics. Jews. Atheists. Some were thieves and transients, but others were eminently respectable, like Naval intelligence officer Paul Schneider and computer whiz Michyl Sheets, both of them future elders, and a talented musician named Michael Sharrow, who would become the House’s music director. To them, Yahweh’s rules were strict but unambiguous and ultimately peace loving. The laws made far more sense than did the Christianity espoused by the political right or Sunday school classes. And the House’s obsession with the coming apocalypse offered a peculiar allure to adrift souls. One could be chosen and not have to wait forever for the glorious payoff. In the meantime, as Sharrow says today, “The pressure is off when you know the world’s coming to an end. You don’t have to get a job.”
In 1990 the House of Yahweh acquired 44 acres ten miles east of Abilene in Callahan County, just outside tiny Eula. A group of House members from Wisconsin trucked in loads of construction materials gratis, and within months the church had a vast new sanctuary. The three annual feasts brought in dozens, then hundreds, then upward of a thousand. Neighbors who had bought adjoining property years before Hawkins showed his face became alarmed by the din, the mess the congregation had made of their only road, and above all, the ominous weirdness of the House. They complained to county officials that the group’s waste-disposal methods were poisoning the water table. They told the sheriff that they had heard gunfire (and were reminded that guns were legal in Texas). Several attempted to sell their property, but no one wanted to buy into the area—except, of course, more House of Yahweh members.
Hawkins for the most part turned a deaf ear to his neighbors. But in 1991 his power base received a serious jolt when Jacob fell ill with cancer. The Odessa preacher’s scorn for the Abilene church had been a thorn in Yisrayl’s side. “That whole thing up there has been a deception from the very beginning,” Jacob wrote one mutual friend. Congregation members who didn’t know how Jacob felt about the Abilene House would regularly ask Yisrayl, “When will the other witness come to our feasts?” Still, Jacob’s existence, coupled with his silence, was crucial to the younger Hawkins’ prophetic status. Jacob’s death that year made a sham of Yisrayl’s two-witness scenario. It must have been doubly devastating when, at the Odessa funeral home, Yisrayl fell upon Jacob’s corpse and tried in vain to resurrect him.
News of the witness’s demise was kept from the Abilene congregation for a time while Hawkins consulted with his elders. They emerged with a remarkable pronouncement. The Hebrew Scriptures had been examined and found to be incorrectly rendered. A new translation of Isaiah 43 was supplied, to be pasted into each member’s Book of Yahweh. In this version Jacob had been destined to die all along, while Yisrayl would survive as the lone witness. With only a handful of exceptions, the congregation went along. The House stood.
But Yisrayl Hawkins wasn’t going to take the new prophecy on faith—not as far as his own life was concerned. His attacks from the pulpit on pagan Christianity had infuriated a few outsiders, as did the House’s tendency to attract new members who left their families behind to join the church, where they would often meet new mates and remarry with Yahweh’s blessings. The occasional threats unnerved him. In 1991 a system of shamarin (Hebrew for “guards”) was instituted. Several men were recruited and trained in fighting techniques such as martial arts and pressure-point maneuvers. Security cameras were installed in and around the sanctuary. Hawkins’ movements were top secret. Once a ubiquitous presence, the overseer now made himself available to the congregation only from the pulpit and in his office—by appointment. The members were made to understand. “Guard the House of Yahweh” read one of the 613 laws.
My Library
