Daniel and the Boys in the Band by Brian E. R. Limmer - HTML preview

Chapter 2: Defining Time

I blame the Babylonians! They were brilliant mathematicians and star gazers, but when it came to times and seasons, they based half their calculations on the Solar cycle, and half on the Lunar cycle. As these two cycles rarely coincide, this has caused confusion even down to today. They sought to apply the mathematical principle by finding the lowest common denominator which gave them a circle divided with 360 divisions.

Daniel’s ‘weeks’ comes from his phraseology of ‘sixty-nine-sevens. It is mysterious to us, but in his day it was common talk. Daniel, used a 360 day year, totally unaware that later, a year would be re-defined more accurately as 365 ¼ Days. Trying to combine Lunar and Solar calendar systems was a headache. By the time the New Testament book Revelation was written, the Babylonians, Greeks and Romans had each rearranged the calender. So John, in his literature, uses three labels for the year interchanging the Greek and Hebrew methods. He refers to ‘a time-two-times-and-a-half-time’, when he means 31/2 years under the old standard of a 360 day year. He qualifies it as 1260 days or 42 months.

Daniel’s prophecy is written mainly in Hebrew⁵³. Literally, his phrase reads as ‘seven-sevens’. The ‘sevens’ can be anything. In English it might be translated as: score, decades, seasons or new moons for all we know. It is defined and understood by the context. English translators thought they were being helpful to the English speaking world by calling it seven-weeks. But it is really defined by a Babylonian time scale, in which Lunar and Solar time-scale gradually get out of sync. They got over this by resetting them every fiftieth-year. This year became known as Jubilee year. In Jubilee year, Israeli people reset everything. All contracts end, tenancies return to the owners, debts are written off, and slaves are set free.

The first seven-sevens mentioned by Daniel equals 49 years, or one Jubilee cycle. This was the time prophesied, to mark the first stage point, when the city of Jerusalem would be rebuilt.

The next sixty-two weeks (434 years), included, what has become known as ‘four-hundred years of silence’; it was named this because no prophet spoke to the nation until Messiah’s arrival. This second time marker, predicting the time by which Messiah had come, Messiah had entered into Jerusalem (on an ass), Messiah had been cut off from the land of the living, (the cross). A short time after that, the Jews would become refugees again and the great temple would be destroyed. That marked the end of this part of the prophecy.

The end of this ‘69th week’ would stop the clock. A period of unknown length would follow, (which we now call ‘the time of the Gentiles’). Because Daniel’s prophecy is directed at the Children-of-Israel in particular, time is paused, while the time-of-gentiles is completed. Then the time will start the 70th week. The trigger to restart the clock will be signalled when, a world leader of future time, will establish a seven-year contract, or covenant for peace among the middle-east nations, only to renege on it half way through.

All that seems quaint until, in a moment, we will expound and explain other events in scripture which give credibility and reason to the prophecy. We stay here for the moment though, with a closer look at time.

Month

The Jewish Calender was defined by the Lunar cycle. Every 28 days the Sanhedrin would call together a group of witnesses and ask if they had seen the first crescent moon. If they had, the previous month would be declared finished on the previous day, and that day would be declared the first of the new month. If they had not seen a new moon, that day would be declared the last day of the month, the following day would be declared the first of the new month. As a complete cycle of the moon is twenty-nine and a quarter days, the month would sometimes have 29 days and sometimes 30 days.

Year

The solar year, on the other hand, is 365¼ Years. So the difference between a lunar year, and a solar year had a remainder of 11 days. This caused a problem because the Torah declares that Passover, (the first of Jewish feasts marking the beginning of year cycle), must be in the spring. If it was not to creep into another season these two markers had to be reconciled. To overcome this, The Sanhedrin inserted an occasional extra month into one year in four. This became a leap year, or ‘pregnant year’. This system was disrupted when Rome overruled the Jews in the forth centuryAD. Rabi Helal anticipated this by setting up a fixed Jewish calender (shown above). Jews today use this calender all over the world to ensure they celebrate Passover on the same day each year. That calender is also the basis for biblical interpretation and we can go wildly wrong when we inadvertently read scripture within our modern time and calender scale.

Day

‘Yom’ is the Hebrew word for day in Scripture. It is not a set period of time, it simply marks the progression of a process from its declaration to its finish. Early Hebrew time, (like a computer process timer bar), anticipates how long a process will take, adjusting up or down while processing. It can be paused at anytime, but always displays zero when it is complete. To define a day (yom) in Genesis, for example, is to declare its commencement (Evening), to declare its progression (morning) and its ending (the first day).

To get into the Hebrew understanding, we can use the creation of the sun in Genesis one as an example:

God described what was in his mind, to create light. He declared this intention to create it in verse three. Creation, in early Hebrew thought, is closer to our word invent, which contains three stages. It begins:

                (1) as a concept or idea, moves through

                (2) expression by word or drawings, onto

                (3) to the manufacture or making.

Verse three declares the project. Verses four-to-seven describes the progression or process.

There is a gap until verse fourteen, when God completed and established the sun and moon. (We will deal with the gap in time in a moment). But the process from concept to completion is said to be a day (yom).

Hour

The flexibility built into the measure of Day, is carried into the hour. The hour was built on the watch, (as in guard-watch). The day and night guard were based on four battalion watches, of roughly three hourly shifts. These were not precise. If the battalion overslept, the hour was delayed. The terms ‘watch’ and ‘hour’ are interchanged in scripture. The sum total of: first, second, third, and forth hour of the day and the same throughout the night added up to one day.

Week

A week in Hebrew is seven days starting in the first day of the week which is our Sunday and ending with the Sabaoth. Ancient Sabaoth began at sundown but modern Sabbath begins at 6:00 pm on Friday. A week was also called a numerical seven. What is often translated as seven-weeks in our English Bible is written as ‘seven-sevens’ in the Hebrew. Seven sevens can be days, weeks or years as discerned from the context of the phrase.

Jubilee Year

Daniel’s prophecy follows a pattern of ten 49-year Jubilee cycles: To Hebrew minds this mirrors the story of Genesis when God rested on the 7th day. The first ‘week’ (49 years, or one Jubilee cycle), was allotted as the time-up for the rebuilding the city of Jerusalem. Then followed by sixty-two ‘weeks’ (434 years), would mark the end of the period before the promised Messiah’s arrival. Incidentally this contained what Christians call ‘four-hundred years of silence’, between when the boys in the band stopped prophesying and John-the-Baptist started again. In between, no other prophet spoke.

The 69th year began when the angels announced the birth of Messiah to Mary, continued through the time He carried out His ministry and was cut off from the living, ending, right on time, in AD 70 when the temple is destroyed. This happened in a jubilee year, or reset year. The land is to be rested, debts cancelled, property and land returned to the rightful owner.

Rest Day / Gap Year

It is common in Scripture to have pauses in sequence event in scripture. Most of these are implied, some are pronounced, but many are passed over as part and parcel of the same event. Peter, as an example of a very impatient person, was not interested in the detail or mundane. When Peter dictated his record of events for Mark, we see his impatience in the frequent use of the word immediately. For Peter’s ‘Immediately’, we can read, ‘the next interesting event after this...'.

Already we have mentioned several gaps in Genesis chapter-one, recognised by Hebrew readers as pauses between the announcement of intention (God Said) and the establishment announcement (God saw it was good), the positioning and commissioning of that creation (e.g. ‘Separated light from darkness’ and ‘to rule by day’). Every time we read the phase ‘And the evening and morning were…’, we have a time pause before the next event.

From Daniel 9: 26:

And after the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing.⁵⁴ Then the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. This will come like a flood, and to the end there shall be war.

Isaiah also prophesies the same event, running two halves of a Prophecy together in Isaiah 9:6-7:

Unto us a child is born unto us a son is given, [gap] and the government shall be upon his shoulders.

We do the same today when we talk of a football match where the break is understood as part of the match. The match is not over until the two teams break to change sides halfway through. The break is understood. It is essential to the fairness of the game, those that had the wind and other elements against them in the first half have it behind them in the second.

A clearer example of a time gap understood by Jesus, can be seen when he went into the synagogue of Nazareth to preach. Jesus announced that ‘half-time break’, by talking about the first half of his ministry, stopping at a comma, and leaving out the second part which is yet to come:

He was given the book of Isaiah the prophet. He opened it and read,  “The Lord’s Spirit has come to me, because he has chosen me to tell the good news to the poor. The Lord has sent me to announce freedom for prisoners, to give sight to the blind, to free everyone who suffers, and to say, ‘This is the year the Lord has chosen’.” Jesus closed the book, then handed it back to the man in charge and sat down. Everyone in the meeting place looked straight at Jesus. Then Jesus said to them, “What you have just heard me read has come true today.” ⁵⁵

What Jesus left out, ‘and the day of Vengeance of Our Lord’, belonged to the second half. Before the final judgement can be made, the Gospel must first go out to all nations. To those that heard him preach that day, they thought it would be another sermon about Jubilee year, but Jesus applied the passage to himself, He was announcing his mission within the context of Daniel’s prophetic vision, was about to begin.

Much misguided theology around these deliberate pauses has grown up into dubious doctrine. Some may say various verses of scripture refer to God’s chosen people Israel, some saying they mean the church; some might say they are symbolic, some might say they are literal. Pauses in scripture are there for a purpose. Misread pauses divide the church on doctrine. If we see nothing else in this chapter on time, one thing stands out. There are two time-bases woven through scripture, ours and heaven’s. These are as different as Lunar and Solar time bases, they coincide perfectly in God’s mathematics and are not always visible from earth. That is why it is important to look for the pauses in scripture.

Taken overall, there is no definitive way to splice time as Daniel understood and expressed it, but Daniel’s prophecies are certainly accurate within any margin of error caused by history’s changing method of keeping time. More, it is worthwhile to recognise different ways of reconciling time, especially as seen by Heavenly and Earthly kingdoms.