Question: On pages 75 and 178 of your book, In Defense of the Faith, there are some sensational ...

September 1, 2001

TBC Staff

Question [condensation of 8 pages]: On pages 75 and 178 of your book, In Defense of the Faith, there are some sensational claims...that call into question your legitimacy as a serious and knowledgeable author....One...is that the book of Daniel “foretold the very day (April 6, A.D. 32) that Jesus would ride into Jerusalem...and be hailed as the Messiah”...and that “Daniel foretold the splitting of the Roman Empire into two parts (East and West) centuries before it occurred....” To make a sensational claim without giving the basis for that claim is, of course, characteristic of tabloid writing.... [N]owhere in the book of Daniel did I find any basis for the claim...that Daniel gave details about the Roman Empire and Jesus. ...The real concern of the book of Daniel [is] the plight of the Jews in Palestine at the time of the cruel oppression...of Antiochus Epiphanes....Thus the logical reason for the book of Daniel [is] to offer encouragement to the Jews of Palestine during this terrible period of persecution....

It would take an absolute lack of knowledge of the historical facts...not to understand which four great kingdoms Daniel is concerned with....They are the Babylonian...Median...Persian...and the Grecian....You appear to be making historical claims without a knowledge of pertinent historical reality. I would like to hear what you have to say to justify your claims.

Response[condensation]: While perhaps I should be flattered that you studied my book In Defense of the Faith so carefully, and happy that you studied Daniel also, I have the impression (I hope I’m wrong) that you investigated with the purpose in mind of disproving rather than discovering, eager to show that I lack the scholarship you admire.

Unfortunately, your dating of Daniel during the days of Antiochus Epiphanes is speculation....Where is the scholarly proof for this idea, proof which you say I lack in my writing? The book purports to have been written by Daniel, not centuries later by someone who pretended to be Daniel and dared to write in the first person the words of a man he didn’t know and to tell details of a life he had not lived as though he had lived it. What “comfort” would it have given the Jews for a book suddenly to appear in their time which claimed authorship centuries earlier and thus on its very face was an obvious fraud? Nor is there even a hint that Daniel was written to encourage the Jews.

Clearly, the major thrust of the book is not encouragement, but prophecy. That stage is set by the dream God gave Nebuchadnezzar specifically to make known “what shall be in the latter days” (2:28) and it carries all through the book (8:17, 19; 9:24; 10:14; 11:35, 40; 12:4, 9, 13); as well as the revelation of God’s eternal kingdom which shall replace earth’s succeeding kingdoms (2:44; 7:14, 27, etc.); and the time of the coming of the Messiah (9:25) who will rule God’s kingdom. Failing to recognize the prophetic purpose of Daniel, you attempt to fit it all into history, though much of it is yet future and concerns what the Bible calls the latter time or last days. Your purely historic approach leads you to a number of false conclusions.

Focusing upon “kings,” you attempt to correlate everything Daniel says with historically identifiable rulers. Hence your claim that I fail to understand history. On the contrary, while you do verify that Daniel foretells with amazing accuracy events that actually occurred during the reign of the Seleucid kings, you eliminate from your thinking the possibility that Daniel was at the same time foretelling events far beyond that time period—in fact those that will occur in the “last days” prior to Christ’s Second Coming.

Though there is some reference to kings, and details that history verifies, the main thrust of Daniel concerns kingdoms. It is clearly stated that the prophecies depicted in the image and the four beasts refer to four kingdoms (2:39-40; 7:23) which would exist in sequence, the first, Babylonia, being conquered by the second, that by the third and that by the fourth. You say that none of the kingdoms following Babylonia are named (yet you name them). In fact the first two are named: Med-Persia and Grecia, in that order, with some details given of the kings within Medo-Persia and of its conquest by Grecia (8:20-21; 10:20; 11:1-4).

Faulting me for allegedly failing to understand history, you erroneously imply that the Babylonian Empire was succeeded by the Median Empire and that by a Persian Empire, making these the second and third empires of Daniel, and Grecia the fourth. There is no possibility of Media being the second kingdom. The Median empire was scarcely worthy of the name. Will Durant writes (vol. I, p. 351) of the kingdom which Cyaxares (greatest of the Median kings) established (it took in Assyria, Media and Persia): “Its tenure [little more than a generation] was too brief to permit of any substantial contribution to civilization, except...as it prepared for the culture of Persia. To Persia the Medes gave ‘the law of the Medes and Persians’.” The Medes were a group of tribes taken over by the Pars (Persians) in a rebellion led by Cyrus in 550 B.C. (some say 553 B.C.) and only then did the Medo-Persian army begin its conquest, capturing Babylon in 539 B.C., then Egypt. Clearly, the Median Empire, which you say succeeded Babylon, had ceased to exist and had become a Medo-Persian Empire before the fall of Babylon. You yourself acknowledge that “Cyrus conquered the kingdom of the Medes in 550 B.C. and then the Babylonian kingdom in 539 B.C.” Thus Babylonia was succeeded by Medo-Persia, the second empire, to be succeeded by Grecia as the third.

There is no question that the Grecian Empire was succeeded by the Roman Empire, so the latter must be Daniel’s fourth and unnamed kingdom. Surely it is reason- able to consider that its two legs depict its division into two parts. That division occurred politically in A.D. 330 when Constantine moved his capital to Constantinople, and religiously in A.D. 1054, when Pope Leo IX excommunicated Michael Cerularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, leaving Roman Catholicism in the West and creating Eastern Orthodoxy in the East, a division which remains to this day.

And now to the prophecy concerning Jesus. Obviously He is not named by Daniel, but His fulfilling this and numerous other prophecies proves He is the Messiah. Daniel’s reference “unto the Messiah the Prince” must therefore predict the coming of Jesus. That it is not His birth or the beginning of His ministry but His entry into Jerusalem to which Daniel refers can be deduced inasmuch as that was the first (and only) time that He was openly declared to be the Messiah by a large group of followers and that declaration was publicly accepted by Jesus.

The angel Gabriel told Daniel that this coming of Messiah would occur “69 weeks” (483 years) after “the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem.” You say, “I have encountered no explanation of the reason for calling the ‘weeks’ in Chapter 9 a period of seven years.” Let me give you some. First of all, what is prophesied is for the last days and surely Gabriel did not intend to indicate that the long-prophesied “last days” with the many preceding and attendant events would have arrived and all prophecies for Jerusalem and Israel, including the Messiah dying for sin and reigning on the throne of David, would be concluded within 70 weeks (fewer than 18 months) from the command to rebuild Jerusalem! That is foolish on its very face. It would take longer than that just to rebuild Jerusalem.

Secondly, the word translated “weeks” is shabuwa and literally means “sevened,” so it could legitimately mean seven years as well as seven days. But verse 9:2 clinches it. Daniel tells us that from reading “books” (no doubt Exodus:21:2; Leviticus:25:1-7; 26:34-43; Deuteronomy:15:1-2; and 2 Chronicles:36:21) he has just understood the reason Jeremiah foretold that God’s judgment would cause 70 years’ desolation of Jerusalem (Jer:25:11-12). The above (and other) scriptures inform us that when God brought His people Israel into the promised land He told them that there would be a sabbath not only of days but also of years. Every seventh year they were to release all fellow Hebrew slaves, forgive all debts owed by fellow Hebrews and let the land lie fallow for a one-year sabbath. For 490 years they disobeyed that command: therefore, in judgment God made them slaves, took everything away from them and removed them from the land so that it would lie fallow for 70 years to catch up on the sabbaths it had missed.

Having just come to this realization, Daniel is prepared to understand when Gabriel tells him there is another period of 490 years (70 sevens) ahead for Israel and Jerusalem, and at the end of that time every prophecy pertaining to her would be fulfilled as foretold. Christ did come at the end of 483 years and was “cut off.”

The 70 weeks are very clearly said to be measured “from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem...” (Dn 9:25). Having searched the Book of Ezra, you declare that “nowhere is anything said in Artaxerxes’ decree about rebuilding the city of Jerusalem.” Your error is elementary: you apparently ignored the Book of Nehemiah. There we are told (2:1) that “in the month Nisan, in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes [Longimanus]...,” Nehemiah begged the king, “send me unto Judah, unto the city of my fathers’ sepulchres [i.e., Jerusalem], that I may build it...let letters be given me to the governors beyond the river. And the king granted me.... Then I came to the governors beyond the river, and gave them the king’s letters” (2:4-9). This surely is the “commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem” referred to in Daniel:9:25.

As you know, Artaxerxes Longimanus ruled from 465 to 425 B.C. So the date Nehemiah provides is Nisan 1, 445 B.C. Calculate it yourself, not forgetting leap years and the fact that the Jewish year was 360 days, and you come to April 6, A.D. 32, the very day Christ rode into Jerusalem. If your dates for Longimanus and your calculations vary from the above, it can’t be by more than a year or two—certainly far from the date of 55 B.C. which you allege, and certainly well within the period of Christ’s life upon earth, which is well established. As for the suspension of the seventieth year, I have dealt with that in detail elsewhere.

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