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265 10) complained to God. Whatever answer he was given, he was ordered to seal and hide the document; no less than three times, Isaiah changed the word for “letters” of a script— Otioth—to Ototh, which meant “oracular signs,” hinting at the existence of a kind of secret “Bible Code” due to which the divine plan could not be comprehended until the right time. Its secret code might have been hinted at when the Prophet asked God—identified as “Creator of the letters”— to “tell us the letters backward” (41: 23). The prophet Zephaniah—whose very name meant “By Yahweh encoded”—trelayed a message from God that it will be at the time of the nations’ gathering that He “will speak in a clear language.” But that said no more than saying, “You'll know when it will be time to tell.” No wonder, then, that in its final prophetic book, the Bible dealt almost exclusively with the question of WHEN—when will the End of Days come? It is the Book of Daniel, the very Daniel who deciphered (correctly) for Belshazzar the Writ- ing on the Wall. It was after that that Daniel himself began to have omen-dreams and to see apocalyptic visions of the fu- ture in which the “Ancient of Days” and his archangels played key roles. Perplexed, Daniel asked the angels for explana- tions; the answers consisted of predictions of future events, taking place at, or leading to, the End of Time. And when will that be? Daniel asked; the answers, which on the face of it seemed precise, only piled up enigmas upon puzzles. In one instance an angel answered that a phase in future events, a time when “an unholy king shall try to change the times and the laws,” will last “a time, times and a half time”; only after that will the promised Messianic Time, when “the kingdom of heaven will be given to the people by the Holy Ones of the Most High,” come about. Another time the re- sponding angel said: “Seventy sevens and seventy sixties of years have been decreed for your people and your city until the measure of transgression is filled and prophetic vision is ratified”; and yet another time that “after the seventies and sixties and two of years, the Messiah will be cut off, a leader will come who will destroy the city, and the end will come through a flood.” The End of Days