Nelson Walters has another great post asking if the Jews 2000 years ago had predicted or calculated the arrival of the Messiah and might have been expecting Him in a given year.
Did the Jews Calculate Daniel’s 70 Weeks?
Excerpts below:
“Did First Century Jews try to calculate Daniel’s 70 Weeks? If so what was the result?
As we announced in the last blog article about the identity of Darius the Mede (SEE LINK HERE), in the next month we will publish my fourth and MOST IMPORTANT BOOK, 70 Times 7.
The book will be one of the most radical and controversial eschatology books in the last ten years. It seems to refute many facets of our current understanding of Daniel’s prophecy. If that prophecy is the foundation of nearly all our interpretations of end time prophecy (and it is), disputing that understanding shakes up nearly every aspect of our insight of what is to come. This means that it refutes some of what I have previously taught and some of what nearly all other prophetic teachers have espoused. Needless to say, I’d like you to read and consider what this book has to say. You can learn more about this upcoming book at this link (READ HERE).
The following article is another sample of some of the new biblical interpretations available in the book.
The Mystery of Daniel’s 70 Weeks
The 70 Weeks Prophecy is rather unique. Given its importance, you would imagine that the Old Testament prophets and the writers of the Epistles would have each made reference to it, especially because it is the only prophecy that foretells the timing of the First Coming of Jesus. We can almost imagine the Apostle Paul alluding to it:
“But when the first 69 weeks were accomplished, God sent forth his son . . .” (fabricated quote of Paul)
But that is not what the Apostle said. He wrote, “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son” (Gal. 4:4 ESV). In fact, Paul, Peter, John, and James never allude to these “weeks” mentioned by the prophet Daniel. The New Testament Epistles are completely silent on the “weeks.” Not only are the Epistles silent on this prophecy, but the other Old Testament prophets never refer to these mysterious 70 Weeks either.
You and I must ask why that is. If the 70 Weeks Prophecy is the most important prophecy in the Bible, what could have been God’s purpose for excluding it from being fully explained and referred to in the Old Testament and the Epistles? I mean, if I were living at the time of Peter and Paul, it would have been my “go to” prophecy to prove that Jesus was the Messiah. In fact, after the death and resurrection of Jesus, the ancient rabbis pronounced a curse on all those who attempted to calculate the timing of the coming of Messiah based on the 70 Weeks Prophecy:
A Sage said: “May the curse of heaven fall upon those who calculate the date of the advent of the Messiah, and thus create political and social unrest among the people.”
— Sanhedrin, 97b
Some of our Rabbis, in a further attempt to keep us from Daniel, even state that Daniel was wrong. — Alfred Edersheim
Obviously, the rabbis feared that the 69 “weeks” of the prophecy had already past and that the 70 Weeks Prophecy was a direct link to and proof of the messiah-ship of Jesus. It was likely for this reason that they forbid calculating the first coming….”
Check out Nelson’s blog or his upcoming book for more insights…
I don’t know what timing Nelson came up with yet, but I’m sure his analysis is worth looking into. In a previous book of mine (End Times and 2019) I concluded that no later than 444 B.C. (the twentieth year into the reign of the Persian King Artaxerxes) astronomers/magi had all the clues needed to know that the Messiah of Jewish prophecy would be killed around Passover of what we now refer to as 33 A.D. Along with the reunification of Jerusalem under Jewish rule in 1967 (Even Adam Clarke calculated it would be in 1966 over a century ahead of time, but his math failed to account for the lack of a year zero between BC and AD) we can calculate quite a bit of prophetic fulfillment from Daniel…
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