not always ex

sense.

symbolical import. But allowing that they have such import as the Symbolical does foregoing examples indicate, we must not suppose that clude literal they thereby necessarily lose their literal and proper meaning. The number ten, as shown above, and some few instances of the number seven (Psa. xii, 6; lxxix, 12; Prov. xxvi, 16; Isa. iv, 4; Dan. iv, 16), authorize us to say that they are used sometimes indefinitely in the sense of many. But when, for example, it is written that seven priests, with seven trumpets, compassed Jericho on the seventh day seven times (Josh. vi, 13–15), we understand the statements in their literal sense. These things were done just so many times, but the symbolism of the sevens suggests that in this signal overthrow of Jericho God was confirming his covenant and promises to give into the hand of his chosen people their enemies and the land they occupied (comp. Exod. xxiii, 31; Josh. ii, 9, 24; vi, 2). And so the sounding of the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse completed the mystery of God as declared to his prophets (Rev. x, 7), so that when the seventh angel sounded great voices in heaven said: "The kingdom of the world is become that of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever" (Rev. xii, 15).

The "time and times and dividing (or half) of a time" (Dan. vii, Time, times, 25; xii, 7; Rev. xii, 13) is commonly and with reason and half a time. believed to stand for three years and a half, a time denoting a year. A comparison of verses 6 and 12 of Rev. xii shows this period to be the same as twelve hundred and sixty days, or exactly three and a half years, reckoning three hundred and sixty days to a year. But as this number is in every case used to denote a period of woe and disaster to the Church or people of God (Rev. xi, 2), we may regard it as symbolical. It is a divided seven (comp. Dan. ix, 27) as if suggesting the thought of a broken covenant, an interrupted sacrifice, a triumph of the enemy of God.

The twelve hundred and sixty days are also equivalent to fortyForty-two two months (Rev. xi, 2, 3; xiii, 5), reckoning thirty months. days to a month, and, thus used, it is probably to be regarded, not as an exact designation of just so many days, but as a round number readily reckoned and remembered, and approximating the exact length of the period denoted with sufficient nearness. In Dan. viii, 14 we have the peculiar expression "two thousand and three hundred evening mornings," which some explain as meaning so many days, in allusion to Gen. i, 5, where evening and morning constitute one day. Others, however, understand so many morning and evening sacrifices, which would require half the number of days (eleven hundred and fifty). This latter is the more

preferable view, and the number 1150 should be compared with the 1290 and 1335 of Dan. xii, 11, 12. All these numbers approximate the period of three and a half years, and may possibly have had relation to facts no longer known to us. But the noticeable enigmatical differences in these related numbers may have been designed, in apocalyptic symbolism, to suggest that the "time, times, and dividing of a time" were not to be understood with mathematical precision.

Forty.

The number forty designates in so many places the duration of a penal judgment, either forty days or forty years, that it may be regarded as symbolic of a period of judgment. The forty days of the flood (Gen. vii, 4, 12, 17), the forty years of Israel's wandering in the wilderness (Num. xiv, 34), the forty stripes with which a convicted criminal was to be beaten (Deut. xxv, 3), the forty years of Egypt's desolation (Ezek. xxix, 11, 12), and the forty days and nights during which Moses, Elijah, and Jesus fasted (Exod. xxiv, 28; 1 Kings xix, 8; Matt. iv, 2), all favour this idea. But there is no reason to suppose that in all these cases the number forty is not also used in its proper and literal sense. The symbolism, if any, arises from the association of the number with a period of punishment or trial.

Seventy.

The number seventy is also noticeable as being that of the totality of Jacob's sons (Gen. xlvi, 27; Exod. i, 5; Deut. x, 22) and of the elders of Israel (Exod. xxiv, 1, 9; Num. xi, 24); the Jews were doomed to seventy years of Babylonian exile (Jer. xxv, 11, 12; Dan. ix, 2); seventy weeks distinguish one of Daniel's most important prophecies (Dan. ix, 24), and our Lord appointed seventy other disciples besides the twelve (Luke X, 1). Auberlen observes: "The number seventy is ten multiplied. by seven; the human is here moulded and fixed by the divine. For this reason the seventy years of exile are a symbolical sign of the time during which the power of the world would, according to God's will, triumph over Israel, during which it would execute the divine judgments on God's people.”

1

time.

of

We have already seen (p. 278), in discussing the symbolical actions of Ezekiel, that the four hundred and thirty days Prophetic desof his prostration formed a symbolical period in allu- ignations sion to the four hundred and thirty (390+40) years of the Egyptian bondage (Exod. xii, 40). Like the number forty, as shown above, it was associated with a period of discipline and sorrow. Each day of the prophet's prostration represented a year of Israel's humiliation and judgment (Ezek. iv, 6), as the forty days The Prophecies of Daniel and the Revelation, Eng. Trans., p. 134. Edinb., 1856.

during which the spies searched the land of Canaan were typical of the years of Israel's wandering and wasting in the wilderness (Num. xiv, 33, 34).

theory.

Here it is in place to examine the so-called "year-day theory' The year-day of prophetic interpretation, so prevalent among modern expositors. Upon the statement of the two passages just cited from Numbers and Ezekiel, and also upon supposed necessities of apocalyptic interpretation, a large number of modern writers on prophecy have advanced the theory that the word day, or days, is to be understood in prophetic designations of time as denoting years. This theory has been applied especially to the "time, times, and dividing of a time" in Dan. vii, 25, xii, 7, and Rev. xii, 14; the twelve hundred and sixty days of Rev. xi, 3; xii, 6; and also by many to the two thousand three hundred days of Dan. viii, 14, and the twelve hundred and ninety and thirteen hundred and thirty-five days of Dan. xii, 11, 12. The forty and two months of Rev. xi, 2, and xiii, 5, are, according to this theory, to be multiplied by thirty (42×30=1260), and then the result in days is to be understood as so many years. After the like manner, the time, times, and a half, are first understood as three years and a half, and then the years are multiplied by three hundred and sixty, a round number for the days of a year, and the result (1260) is understood as designating, not so many days, but so many years.

A theory so far

should have

port.

If this is a correct theory of interpreting the designations of prophetic time, it is obvious that it is a most important reaching and one. It is necessarily so farreaching in its practical fundamental results as fundamentally to affect one's whole plan and most valid sup- process of exposition. Such a theory, surely, ought to be supported by the most convincing and incontrovertible reasons. And yet, upon the most careful examination, we do not find that it has any sufficient warrant in the Scripture, and the expositions of its advocates are not of a character likely to commend it to the critical mind. Against it we urge the five following considerations:

1. This theory derives no valid support from the passages in Numbers and Ezekiel already referred to. In Num. in Num. xiv and xiv, 33, 34, Jehovah's word to Israel simply states that they must suffer for their iniquities forty years, "in the

Has no support

Ezek. iv.

1 See on this subject Stuart's article on the Designation of Time in the Apocalypse in the American Biblical Repository for Jan., 1835. Also a reply to the same by Dr. Allen in the same periodical for July, 1840. Compare also Cowles' Dissertation on the subject at the end of his Commentary on Daniel. Elliott's laboured argument on this subject (Horæ Apocalypticæ, vol. iii, pp. 260-298) is mainly a series of presumptions.

number of the days which ye searched the land, forty days, a day for the year, a day for the year." There is no possibility of misunderstanding this. The spies were absent forty days searching the land of Canaan (Num. xiii, 25), and when they returned they brought back a bad report of the country, and spread disaffection, murmuring, and rebellion through the whole congregation of Israel (xiv, 2-4). Thereupon the divine sentence of judgment was pronounced upon that generation, and they were condemned to "graze (D, pasture, feed) in the wilderness forty years" (xiv, 33). Here then is certainly no ground on which to base the universal proposition that, in prophetic designations of time, a day means a year. The passage is exceptional and explicit, and the words are used in a strictly literal sense; the days evidently mean days, and the years mean years. The same is true in every particular of the days and years mentioned in Ezek. iv, 5, 6. The days of his prostration were literal days, and they were typical of years, as is explicitly stated. But to derive from this symbolico-typical action of Ezekiel a hermeneutical principle or law of universal application, namely, that days in prophecy mean years, would be a most unwarrantable procedure.

Analogy.

2. If the two passages now noticed were expressive of a universal law, we certainly would expect to find it sustained and Not sustained capable of illustration by examples of fulfilled prophecy. by Prophetic But examples bearing on this point are overwhelmingly against the theory in question. God's word to Noah was: "Yet seven days, I will cause it to rain upon the land forty days and forty nights" (Gen. vii, 4). Did any one ever imagine these days were symbolical of years? Or will it be pretended that the mention of nights along with days removes the prophecy from the category of those scriptures which have a mystical import? God's word to Abraham was that his seed should be afflicted in a foreign land four hundred years (Gen. xv, 13). Must we multiply these years by three hundred and sixty to know the real time intended? Isaiah prophesied that Ephraim should be broken within threescore and five years (Isa. vii, 8); but who ever dreamed that this must be resolved into days in order to find the period of Ephraim's fall? Was it ever sagely believed that the three years of Moab's glory, referred to in Isa. xvi, 14, must be multiplied by three hundred and sixty in order to find the import of what Jehovah had spoken concerning it? Was it by such mathematical calculation as this that Daniel "understood in the books the number of the years, which was a word of Jehovah to Jeremiah (comp. Jer. xxv, 12) the prophet, to complete as to the desolations of Jerusalem seventy

years" (Dan. ix, 2)? Or is it supposable that the seventy years of Jeremiah's prophecy were ever intended to be manipulated by such calculations? In short, this theory breaks down utterly when an appeal is taken to the analogy of prophetic scriptures. If the time, times, and a half of Dan. vii, 25 means three and a half years multiplied by three hundred and sixty, that is, twelve hundred and sixty years, then the seven times of Dan. iv, 16, 32, should mean seven times three hundred and sixty, or two thousand five hundred and twenty years. Or if in one prophecy of the future, twelve hundred and sixty days must, without any accompanying qualification, or any statement to that effect in the context, be understood as denoting so many years, then the advocates of such a theory must show pertinent and valid reason why the forty days of Jonah's prophecy against Nineveh (Jon. iii, 4) are not to be also understood as denoting forty years.

enty weeks not

parallel.

3. The year-day theory is thought to have support in Daniel's Daniel's proph- prophecy of the seventy weeks (Dan. ix, 24-27). But ecy of the sev- that prophecy says not a word about days or years, but seventy heptads, or sevens (yay). The position and gender of the word indicate its peculiar significance. It nowhere else occurs in the masculine except in Dan. x, 2, 3, where it is expressly defined as denoting heptads of days (DDD). Unaccompanied by any such limiting word, and standing in such an emphatic position at the beginning of ver. 24, we have reason to infer at once that it involves some mystical import. When, now, we observe that it is a Messianic oracle, granted to Daniel when his mind was full of meditations upon Jeremiah's prophecy of the seventy years of Jewish exile (ver. 2), and in answer to his ardent supplications, we most naturally understand the seventy heptads as heptads of years. But this admission furnishes slender support to such a sweeping theory as would logically bring all prophetic designations of time to the principle that days mean years.

Days nowhere

Years.

4. It has been argued that in such passages as Judg. xvii, 10; 1 Sam. ii, 19; 2 Chron. xxi, 19, and Isa. xxxii, 10, the properly mean word days is used to denote years, and "if this word be sometimes thus used in Scripture in places not prophetic, why should it not be thus employed in prophetic passages?"1 But a critical examination of those passages will show that the word for days is not really used in the sense of years. In Judg. xvii, 10, Micah says to the Levite: "Dwell with me, and be to me for a father and a priest, and I will give thee ten (pieces) of silver for 1 See Allen's article "On the Designations of Time in Daniel and John,” in The American Biblical Repository, for July, 1840, p. 39.