Bible Question: Most conservative protestant churchs use parts of Daniel 9:24-27 to support their belief that at some unknown time the saints will be raptured and then a seven year period will set in and the anitchrist will arise. As these text are prophecies about the first coming of Christ, what rule of Bible interpertation allows them to be used to identify the antichrist? And please don't say it is a "dual" prophecy. Because if that is the case then all 350 prophecies in the Bible that reference Christ would there also reference the antichrist, and we know no one wants to go there. |
Bible Answer: Before interpreting this passage, one should be aware of the original text, shibah and shabuwa. Shibah is the unusual masculine gender, almost a slang for the sixty-nine total spans of time, and shabuwa is the concise feminine gender, for the literal seventieth span of time. -- Please note that both Youngs and Strongs are problematic in their citations, but John Walvoords "Daniel, The Key to Prophetic Revelation", p.217, or any interlinear should confirm the two texts. I would propose that if the author has intended to present all periods of time as sevens, he certainly would have used shabuwa. Thus one might consider that the sixty nine shibah are years, as provided in 9:2, and only the seventieth is the shabuwa week. Fortunately 9:2 also suggests that we can find confirmation to this premise in one of the OT books. In 1985, a book titled "Hidden Prophecies In the Psalms", by J.R. Church, proposed that Psalms is the 19th book of the bible, and is prophetic for the 1900s, with each chapter representing a respective year. I.e., book 19, chapter 44, would describe the holocaust; Chapter 45, the liberating U.S. military with a Hiroshima and Nagasaki inference, and so forth. According to this concept, if one were to presume that Psalms 23 is a foundational chapter, and Psalms 24 were the "going forth of the word to establish and rebuild Jerusalem", then history should account for a messiah (small "m") in 1931. I believe that David Ben-Gurion arose to significant leadership at that time. - Please note that Newton observed that it does "violence" to add the seven and sixty-two, and that the RSV and some other translations, including the Jewish Publication Society, portend a messiah (small "m") at the seven periods-of-time, and a second messiah (small "m") after the sixty-two. History accounts that in 1993 a peace accord was signed, an Israeli leader was assassinated after 1993 (i.e., 1995), and of course the peace accord lasted seven years. The "anti-christ" is yet to come. As such, per your question, it might be a mistake to infer any tribulation or rapture event to this passage. |