Sea of Revelation: Prophetic Pasts and Theocratic Futures in Solomon Islands

On Malaita in Solomon Islands, an evangelical Israelite-inspired movement centers on a distinctive time-consciousness that reads the historical past and present as prophetic signs of an imminent future. This book examines how these ’prophetic histories’ interweave biblical narrative, theological reflection, local accounts, kastom practice, spiritual journeys and Old-Testament political theory. Michael Maeliau, the movement’s foremost leader, casts the resulting stories as divine messages. His theological reasoning transcends time, space, hierarchy and surface identity, to uncover the true essence of Malaita and establish a theocracy on the island. At the movement’s core lies a prophetic order that integrates events, scripture and kastom while foregrounding the agency of God and divine revelations.

Jaap Timmer is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney and a former Senior Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. He has published numerous articles on religion, history and sovereignty in Indonesian Papua and the Solomon Islands. His recent research explores historicity, heritage and the notion of a ’cosmic polity’ among the Asmat of Papua.