“And the evening and the morning were the first day.” (Genesis 1:5)
When we left off in our last post, we concluded that while the Little Horn of Daniel 8 and the Little Horn of Daniel 7 share much in common, the Scriptures nonetheless differentiate between the two. Although they are both similarly hostile to God’s holy people (Daniel 8:24, 7:25), they are nevertheless distinguished one from the other, separated in time by the succession of empires. The Little Horn of Daniel 8 is Greek in identity and the Little Horn of Daniel 7 is Roman. Among the significant differences between the two, one of the most prominent is the period of persecution by the Little Horn of Daniel 8. The duration of his persecution is described in terms of literal days: “Unto two thousand and three hundred evenings and mornings” (Daniel 8:14). As with the days of creation (Genesis 1), “the evening and the morning” is one literal day, and 2,300 such evenings and mornings is 2,300 literal days. Those 2,300 literal days all occur within the One Week of Daniel 9:27; the 1,290 days of Daniel 12:11 all occur within those 2,300 literal days; and the 1,290 literal days, plus an additional 45 literal days, comprise the 1,335 literal days of Daniel 12:12. Our objective this week is to identify those three periods of literal days— all the evenings and mornings. Continue reading All the Evenings and Mornings…→
Intercalation is only necessary when literal days are in view.
Of the many things Daniel shows us in his visions, one of the most prominent is that of imperial succession. Son follows father in the succession of kings, and empire follows empire in the succession of kingdoms. Daniel 2 speaks explicitly of four empires—Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome—and Daniel 7 speaks explicitly of the same four. When those two visions are harmonized, what emerges is a Fifth Empire, the Empire of Roman Catholicism that arose after the thirteen-way fragmentation of Rome. We explored the emergence of Roman Catholicism as the successor to those Four Empires in our series, The Fifth Empire, and in our article The Fourteenth Diocese. Like a river flowing relentlessly and continuously onward, the prophetic timeline depicted in Daniel 2 and Daniel 7 flowed from Babylon to the rise of Antichrist without gaps or discontinuities—Babylon, then Medo-Persia, then Greece, then Rome. Then Papal Roman Catholicism, the arrogant Little Horn of Daniel 7, the persecutor of God’s holy people.
Jesus did not say the Seventieth Week of Daniel was yet future. He said the Statue of Jupiter would return as a herald of the demise of Judæa.
In the last two weeks, we have laid the foundation for an analysis of the Seventieth Week of Daniel. In The Leviticus 26 Protocol, we showed that the Seventy Weeks of Daniel 9 are inextricably related to the Seventy Year chastisement described in Jeremiah 25 and 29. The latter chastisement (Seventy Weeks of Years) is a seven-fold prolongation of the former chastisement (Seventy Years) and thus, the Weeks and Years must in some way share a common point of beginning. In our follow up article, Rightly Dividing the Weeks, we showed that Gabriel, in explaining the vision to Daniel, divided the Seventy Weeks into three subsets—the Sixty-two, the Seven and the One. The Seven Weeks (587 – 538 B.C.) ran concurrently with the Sixty-two (605 – 171 B.C.), which was only possible if Gabriel had first “divided” the Weeks, which is precisely what he did when he announced them to Daniel. That is why the “anointed” is described as being “cut off” after the Sixty-two Weeks (Daniel 9:26), rather than after the often alleged, but Scripturally untenable, “Sixty-nine.”
What follows upon the description of the Sixty-two Weeks is the most detailed description of any Week in the ninth chapter of Daniel. What we will demonstrate is that the Seventieth Week of Daniel was fulfilled between 171 and 164 B.C., in the period of Greek rule over Israel. As we shall also demonstrate, Jesus acknowledged the past fulfillment of Daniel’s Seventieth Week when He instructed His audience in Matthew 24:15 and Mark 13:14 to watch carefully for the soon return of the Abomination of Desolation to the Holy Land. Continue reading The Seventieth Week of Daniel 9→
There is a reason that Gabriel only describes the Seventy Weeks in terms of Sixty-two, Seven and One.
When we left off last week with The Leviticus 26 Protocol, we mentioned that Gabriel had multiplied the Seventy Year Babylonian Exile in accordance with Leviticus 26 to arrive at Seventy Weeks of Years in Daniel 9:24. As specified in the Law of Moses, Israel had been punished for disobedience, and when Israel still would not hearken unto the Lord, her punishment was multiplied seven-fold. But Gabriel had done more than that. He had multiplied the Seventy Years, but then he divided the Seventy Weeks. Although Gabriel announced the “Seventy Weeks” in Daniel 9:24, he never mentions them in those words again, and instead describes the prophecy in three subsets of Weeks. He speaks of the Seven Weeks (Daniel 9:25), the Sixty-two Weeks (Daniel 9:25,26) and the One Week (Daniel 9:27), but never again of the Seventy. That division is reflected clearly in the text, but many translations and interpretations have long since obscured the meaning by trying to put the Seventy Weeks back together again. Continue reading Rightly Dividing the Weeks→
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