Page Content (OCR)
266 Seeking a clearer answer, Daniel then asked a divine mes- senger to speak plainly: “How long until the end of these awful things?” In response, he again received the enigmatic answer that the End will come after “a time, times and a half time.” But what did “time, times and a half time” mean, what did “seventy weeks of years” mean? “T heard and did not understand,” Daniel stated in his book. “So I said: My lord, what will be the outcome of these things?” Again speaking in codes, the angel answered: “from the time the regular offering is abolished and an appalling abomination is set up, it will be a thousand and two hundred and ninety days; happy is the one who waits and reaches one thousand three hundred and thirty five.’ And having given Daniel that information, the angel—who had called him be- fore “Son of Man’—told him: “Now, go on to thy end, and arise for your destiny at the End of Days.” Like Daniel, generations of biblical scholars, savants and theologians, astrologers and even astronomers—the famed Sir Isaac Newton among the latter—also said “we heard, but id not understand.” The enigma is not just the meaning of “time, time and a half” and so on, but from when does (or id) the count begin? The uncertainty stems from the fact that the symbolic visions seen by Daniel (such as a goat at- tacking a ram, or two horns multiplying to four and then di- viding) were explained to him by the angels as events that were to take place well beyond Babylon of Daniel’s time, beyond its predicted fall, even beyond the prophesied re- building of the Temple after seventy years. The rise and de- mise of the Persian empire, the coming of the Greeks under Alexander’s leadership, even the division of his conquered empire among his successors—all are foretold with such ac- curacy that many scholars believe that the Daniel prophecies are of the “post-event” genre—that the book’s prophetic part was actually written circa 250 B.c.£. but pretended to have been written three centuries earlier. The clinching argument is the reference, in one of the an- gelic encounters, to the start of the count “from the time that regular offering [in the temple] is abolished and an appalling abomination is set up.” That could only refer to the events THE END OF DAYS