I was recently told that an excellent example of prophecy fulfillment in the Bible is the prophecy that the nation of Israel would be restored, as recorded in Ezekiel 4. If true, that would be a huge boost to the Bible’s credibility, so let’s dig in and see how it fares.
In Ezek 4:4-6, God tells Ezekiel to do the following:
4 “Lie also on your left side, and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel upon it. According to the number of the days that you lie on it, you shall bear their iniquity. 5 For I have laid on you the years of their iniquity, according to the number of the days, three hundred and ninety days; so you shall bear the iniquity of the house of Israel. 6 And when you have completed them, lie again on your right side; then you shall bear the iniquity of the house of Judah forty days. I have laid on you a day for each year.”
A little context is probably in order. Ezekiel lived during the time that the nation of Judah was taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Much of his writings talk about the captivity that the Jews are under, and in this passage, he prophesies about when they’ll return from captivity. As the end of verse 6 says, each of these days represents one year.
The Case For This Being a True Prophecy
The person who pointed me to this prophecy gave this link as a good explanation of how this prophecy works, so I’ll be referring to its points throughout this post.
First, we take these two periods and add them together: 390 years for Israel + 40 years for Judah = 430 years.
Next, Babylon took Judah captive in 606 BCE for exactly 70 years leaving 360 years left to go. But how do we explain this leftover 360 years?
Well, it turns out that Leviticus 26 lays out all these conditions on the Israelites. There, God tells them that as long as they serve him faithfully, he’ll bless them. But if they don’t serve him faithfully, then he’ll punish them “7 fold” or “7 times” for their sins (Lev 26:18-33). So if we take those remaining 360 years and multiply them by 7, we get 2,520 years.
But we’re not done yet. We must remember that the Jews used a calendar based on both lunar and solar years. They had 12 30-day months and would occasionally add in leap-months as needed to keep the seasons lining up correctly. So to understand what Ezekiel meant by “year,” we need to convert these 2,520 years into days, which comes out to 2,520 x 360 = 907,200 days.
Now to find out how many actual years this represents, we need to convert back to the standard 365.25 day/year calendar that we use today. This comes out to 907,200 / 365.25 = 2,483.78 years.
We can finally connect all the dots:
606 BCE – 70 years = 536 BCE
-536 (since it’s BCE) + 2,483 + 1 (since there’s no year 0) = 1948 CE
And 1948 is the year that Israel was again made a nation! Furthermore, Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BCE, 19 years after he took Judah. And Jerusalem was restored to Israel in 1967 CE — exactly 19 years after they reclaimed the nation of Israel! So the numbers work out for Jerusalem as well!
So that’s the case for the prophecy being legit. But are there reasons to be skeptical?
The Case Against This Being a True Prophecy
There are actually a number of problems with what I laid out above, and those familiar with the Old Testament may have already seen them.
First of all, why should the years in Ezekiel’s prophecy be added together at all? Ezekiel says there will be 390 years for Israel and 40 years for Judah — it’s no accident that he separated them. According to Jewish tradition, all 12 tribes of Israel were united when they took the land of Canaan. They remained united through all 15 judges and through kings Saul, David, and Solomon. But after Solomon died, the nation split into two kingdoms: the nation of Israel, consisting of the northern 10 tribes, and the nation of Judah, consisting of the southern 2 tribes. So far, the archaeological evidence leans away from this story. It appears that Israel and Judah were never united into one large kingdom, but that’s outside the scope of this article, so we’ll leave it at that for now.
Israel was taken into captivity by the Assyrian Empire in 722 BCE. Many passages in later parts of the OT predict those lost tribes being restored, and it seems that this is what Ezekiel is referring to in this passage. That’s why they’re given a different period of time than Judah is — they were taken captive almost 150 years before Judah was. So it does not make sense to add these years together as though they refer to one specific thing. Israel and Judah were being dealt with separately here.
Secondly, the starting date of 606 BCE for Judah’s captivity isn’t accurate. In 606 BCE, Judah was its own kingdom, though it was a vassal state to Egypt and had been for 2 or 3 years. Egypt and Babylon were butting heads in the region during this time. Nebuchadnezzar came to the throne in 605 BCE, and he defeated Egypt at Carchemish that same year. That’s when Judah changed allegiance from Egypt to Babylon, as it was suddenly clear that they were now the most powerful force in the region. But it wouldn’t be appropriate to say they were under captivity at that time. They were still a separate kingdom that paid homage to Babylon. If we were to make the case that such a scenario equaled captivity, then Judah’s captivity would actually have begun in 609 or 608 BCE under Egypt.
In 601 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar tried to invade Egypt, but his forces were driven back, which caused several of the kingdoms in the Levant to rebel against him. Judah was one of them. In 599 BCE, Babylon besieged Jerusalem, and the city fell in 597 BCE. But at this point, Judah still retained its status as a vassal kingdom, and Nebuchadnezzar appointed Zedekiah as king. But several years later, Zedekiah revolted, aligning the kingdom with Egypt once again. This time, when Nebuchadnezzar took the city, he practically leveled it, and much of the population was taken off into captivity. This was in 587 BCE.
Considering this information, the most likely candidate to mark the beginning of Judah’s captivity is 587 BCE. Even if you try to push it back further, it’s hard to make a case for any time before 597 BCE, and this causes problems for the math that was laid out above.
One of the problems has to do with the 70 years of Babylonian captivity that was talked about above. When you were reading the above arguments, it may have struck you as odd that 70 years got subtracted for Judah’s captivity to Babylon, when Ezekiel said 40 years. The reason 70 was brought up is because of Jeremiah 29:10, where Jeremiah prophesies that Judah would be in captivity for 70 years. But that’s not what happened.
When the Persian Empire overthrew Babylon in 539 BCE, they allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem that same year (Ezra 1:1). The numbers differ depending on when you count Judah’s captivity as beginning, but this makes Judah’s captivity as few as 48 years (the more likely figure) or as many as 66 years. This again causes problems for all the equations that were used above.
There’s also the issue of multiplying the years by 7. There’s some discussion about whether the passage in Leviticus means that punishments would be multiplied by 7 years, or whether it would mean 7 separate punishments (like 7 additional plagues, etc). There’s also the issue that this kind of language is often taken to be more symbolic than literal. Furthermore, if this is how God was going to mete out the punishment, perhaps that’s already been calculated into the numbers he gives Ezekiel. Again, the passage has God say “a day for each year,” and there’s no indication that it should mean anything else. But I view those as side points.
The main problem I have is why does the multiplication of 7 only apply to 360 of the years? Why wouldn’t it have applied to all of them? So if we add the years together, and multiply by 7, we would have 3,010 years, not 2,520. Even if we continue to use 360-day years, that calculation comes out to 2,966.74 years, which puts us around the year 2431 CE. Of course, that isn’t helpful to those who want this prophecy to be true.
There’s another issue that should be mentioned as well. It turns out that the Septuagint doesn’t use the same figures as the Masoretic text. The Septuagint records Ezekiel 4:4-6 like this:
And thou shalt lie upon thy left side, and lay the iniquities of the house of Israel upon it, according to the number of the hundred and fifty days during which thou shalt lie upon it: and thou shalt bear their iniquities. 5 For I have appointed thee their iniquities for a number of days, for a hundred and ninety days: so thou shalt bear the iniquities of the house of Israel. 6 And thou shalt accomplish this, and then shalt lie on thy right side, and shalt bear the iniquities of the house of Juda forty days: I have appointed thee a day for a year.
It’s hard to say if 390 is the correct number, or if 150 is. Some people think that 150 is original, but that later scribes changed it once that amount of time had passed. But who knows? Unfortunately, there’s not a way to know which number is original to the text, which makes it very hard to base predictions upon.
Finally, the last piece of this that should be questioned is using a 360-day calendar. The Hebrew calendar was based on both the cycle of the moon as well as the solar year. Therefore, it is said that their calendar consisted of 12 30-day months, and every couple of years they would add a 13th month to keep the years aligned correctly with the seasons. But this isn’t exactly right. A lunar month follows the phases of the moon, which does not work out to 30 days exactly. Instead, it will alternate between 29 and 30-day months, meaning that the Hebrew calendar year came out to 354-355 days (or 385 days on leap years). This calls into question using a 360-day calendar to recalibrate the years in Ezekiel’s prophecy.
Furthermore, the Jews still understood that a year consists of 4 seasons (which is why they used intercalary years), so it seems bizarre to redefine “year” every time it’s used in prophecies. And it’s easy to see how big a 5.25 day variance can be. In the example at the beginning of this post, it took us from 2,520 years to 2,483.78 years. Daniel 12 and the Book of Revelation are the only places in the Bible I’m aware of that use a 360-day average in reference to a year. But I think it’s hard to argue that those references mean every time “year” is used in a prophecy it should be recalculated using 360-day years. Most calendars in the ancient world did not operate that way, and 360 days per year was a good generic estimate when referring to how many days are in a year at that time. Just as today we refer to a year as 365 days, when we realize that an extra day is needed every 4 years. That doesn’t mean when someone says something will happen in 20 years we have to recompute it to 19.98 years — we know they mean 20, regardless of how the leap years fall. I’m sure there are some Christians who would argue vociferously over the need to use 360-day “prophetic” years, but they have to. Without them, too much fails.
Conclusion
This was a really long post, and we’ve covered a lot of ground. I certainly can’t speak for everyone, but I personally do not find this prophecy to be a good example of a real prophecy. When taken at face value, Ezekiel talks about 390 years for Israel and 40 years for Judah. Neither of those figures work out correctly. Since they don’t, many different explanations have been sought after to make this prophecy point to something significant. The beginning of this post laid out one of those arguments, and on the surface, it seems pretty impressive. It gets us to the years 1948 and 1967 which are definitely important to the nation of Israel. But to get there, we’re making several sacrifices, like what year Judah went into captivity, adding the years together, multiplying some of them by 7, and converting the years to a 360-day format that almost certainly wasn’t the intent. And there’s still the issue of whether or not that translation is even accurate.
To me, this prophecy is simply too vague to be of any use. And the method used to create a connection to modern-day Israel is too problematic to be anything but evidence against prophecy-fulfillment, in my opinion.
Resources used in this article:
http://www.alphanewsdaily.com/mathprophecy2.html
http://www.theskepticalreview.com/JFTProphecyEzekiel4.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezekiel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Judah
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_%28587_BC%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebuchadnezzar_II_of_Babylon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_calendar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_calendar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunisolar_calendar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_month
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophetic_Year
Finding Truth 
No worries Bluntbelief – misunderstandings are very common, and no reason for anyone to feel at fault or apologize.
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@ Howie,
Of course then there’s the stuff like the characters of Bill Gates’ name adding up to 666…
I found an interesting article the other day in some of my research. You may already be aware of this, but here’s an excerpt linked to the entire article:
“Irenaeus devotes an entire chapter to a discussion of the variant in Rev 13:18 (AH 5.30). He does not speak of the original text, however, but does address the earliest copies that he had seen. He compares the two readings, 616 and 666, and gives the palm to 666. However, since he also gives it a spiritual interpretation, one has to wonder whether his motives clouded his judgment and whether the church, under his spell, began to copy out 666 here instead of 616. Until just a few years ago, the only known manuscript to have 616 in Rev 13:18 was Ephraemi Rescriptus (codex C), a fifth century codex and the second most important manuscript of the Apocalypse. Then, with the discovery of sixteen or seventeen NT papyri at the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford University just a few years ago, confirmation of this reading appeared. The earliest manuscript on Rev 13, now P115 from the third or perhaps fourth century, also has the reading 616. I looked at the papyrus in 2003 while visiting Oxford, examining it under a microscope. Clearly, it had the reading 616 in the original hand—no erasures, no alterations.”
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“And especially for those who have never taken a stats course. All you have to do is ask: how did you derive the statistical probability of your claim……”
laughable nonsense. You apparently never took a stats course yourself then. When you have the selection of a number out of a range of numbers (in this case dates) theres nothing hard about it. This is actually elementary stats. As a baseline and for ease you could pick even a range 50 years beyond 1967 at 1 in 3.000. The odds would only go up from there based on the chance of Israel ever returning as a nation or reclaiming a city with every century that passes since historically the longer a people are separated from their land the less likely they are to reclaim it or even survive as a distinct group. Since Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70 you have a nearly 2,000 year absence from the land – unprecedented.
Then to that you add the fact that the land a mostly arid region historically must then make a radical change after their return so they become a major agricultural state filling the earth with fruit (Israel is Major supplier of produce to Europe) without any technology to do so at the time of the prophecy and in the presence of enemies all around (also prophecied which should have precluded them from being able to retake the land to begin with)
Nates favorite research resource
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_Israel
then we can adjust the statistics upward for the fact that even the setup of the 1967 war is foreshadowed in the Bible
Zechariah 12:2-3 (KJV)
2 Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem.
3 And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it.
Interesting since the six day war started with nations around them surrounding the new state and at the time of the writing no one seiged a city that had no bars and gates. (walls stopped being used completely in world war 1 as a defense system and Ezek prophesies thy would not be used throughout the whole land)
and we’d just be getting started 🙂 because I don’t do just one prophecy when I discuss prophecy evidence. NEVER
Again Nate LIED when he said he had been told that an excellent example of prophecy was this calculation. He asked for evidence and i began to present a wide range of evidences because I do not present as his hack piece alleges one example any time I debate the evidence from prophecy. Instead of presenting one tree I present a forrest.
its pretty obvious what happened with Nate here. He saw that Till attempted to deal with the 1948 portion of this biblical calculation, had no intention whatsoever of listening to the answer to the question HE HAD ASKED of me and ran to write a piece that doesn’t even cover the whole thing. He leaves out the 1967 part because Till ducked from it or was unaware of it and he tries to slice out the calculation in isolation of our discussion that was to be about all the prophetic evidence to write his typical Till and Wiki only researched hack job article.
What can I say? 🙂 its true. I have zero respect for such antics or anyone who acts like that.
“We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it leads”
really? because to me that line above and this kind of dishonest approach to a discussion doesn’t show a whole lot more progress than concocting a lie to a church and delivering it to them with a straight face.
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@ Howie,
I thought I was linking to the article. I must have done something wrong with my syntax so here’s the link:
https://bible.org/article/did-original-new-testament-manuscripts-still-exist-second-century
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Ruth, that just ruins a whole bunch of movies! 😉 Interesting article.
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Sorry to be a spoiler, Howie.
As I read the article I thought of all the people who have been in the news because they either quit or lost their jobs rather than take an employee number of 666(or as part of it). And the number of times, as an accountant, I’ve seen people alter numbers to 667 or 665 if they were truly 666. All for what? Fear of some imaginary number?
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And, Howie, how many of them would be completely freaked out that they have unwittingly been perfectly willing to use the number 616? 😕
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Ruth, reminds a little of recently having to explain to our kids why the hotels we stayed at didn’t have a 13th floor – they both thought it was pretty silly.
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“Again Nate LIED when he said he had been told that an excellent example of prophecy was this calculation. He asked for evidence and i began to present a wide range of evidences because I do not present as his hack piece alleges one example any time I debate the evidence from prophecy. Instead of presenting one tree I present a forrest.” – mike
so, you posted this formula as supporting evidence for the passage you claim is grand evidence of a clearly fulfilled prophecy, but now you’re saying he “lied” because it turns out to be stupid?
He may have misinterpreted your use of it, but why give poor evidence for something you’ve been saying is so clear, and such a great example, if you didn’t think it was an “excellent example?”
So nate “lied”… what should he have said? That you thought it was a “good enough example” or a “dumb, but all i have example?”
I don’t think it’s so much that nate lied as it is a case of you being an idiot – a position you find yourself in often.
Really, I dont have the stomach to hang with this for extended periods anymore… I’ll go away again until until my nausea passes.
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“so, you posted this formula as supporting evidence for the passage you claim is grand evidence of a clearly fulfilled prophecy, but now you’re saying he “lied” because it turns out to be stupid?”
Alas something is not stupid merely because you too daft to do simple maths otherwise well …..everything would be stupid. 🙂
Further You are just as much a liar as he is. I never claimed one piece of clearly fulfilled prophecy is grand evidence.
go ahead thou liar – give me the quote you are quoting me from saying “grand evidence”. Heres your shining moment. present the quote. Your reply will either be a fudge or crickets
Truth is you can twist yourselves out of any singular prophecy. I’m well aware of that. This isn’t my first rodeo with atheists and thats particularly why i don’t deal with just one as a “grand evidence” as you just lied to back up Nate’s insinuation.
I ALWAYS draw a cumulative picture when I present prophecy and I announced very clearly that to Nate and told him upfront I would call him on it if he did what he did. If the Bible considered one prophecy to be grand evidence then it would have just one or two.
Furthermore HE DID NOT EVEN DEAL WITH ALL of the calculation either. Only the part that TIll covered for him. So he presented HALF the case which no matter your claims is a FLAT OUT DISHONEST way to deal with ANY issue. You show again you can’t grasp basic things so you should go sit in the corner when the adults are talking.
“Really, I dont have the stomach to hang with this for extended periods anymore… I’ll go away again until until my nausea passes.
Good alas when the Nausea passes the same lack of common sense is still there with you so it makes no difference.
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This is what you said, Mike:
If you don’t think this is a good example, why is it the first one you provided? Then, a couple of comments later, you posted this:
I haven’t created a new post for these, but I did answer you later in that thread. At the beginning of this post I said “I was recently told that an excellent example of prophecy fulfillment…” While I added the word “excellent,” it was based on my assumption that you wouldn’t provide a prophecy as evidence unless you thought it was really good and clear evidence — “excellent” evidence, in other words. Apparently, you don’t think that. And after examining the prophecy, I can see why.
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“Further You are just as much a liar as he is. I never claimed one piece of clearly fulfilled prophecy is grand evidence.” – mike
I didnt read past this… I’m feeling sick again
Mike, you had said there were evidences, we asked for those evidences and you provided a few prophecies – this one being one of them. Now, if you didnt think they were good examples of evidences, then why provide these when evidences is what we were asking for?
This is stupid. there’s just no nice way to put it. And here you are again, defending the formula as if you think there’s merit to it. So, for clarity’s sake, is the passage a good example of evince for the bible, and is the formula that you provided and good explanation for interpreting this passage?
if either of these answers is a “no” then it was stupid to provide them and only confused the issue. If either of these is a “yes” then you were a liar or an idiot to say that nate had lied.
i seriously had once thought that this was an act of yours, but now I’m not sure, and leaning toward very real and serious mental limitations on your end. I feel like i’m trying to explain walking to fish whenever i engage with you…
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“Why not put up everything like an honest person eh Nate? Like what I was responding to
“How about providing some of the evidence you were talking to William about? Like fulfilled prophecies, etc” -Nate
“If you promise to not merely handwave. Game on. Up to this point I have mostly discussed and rebutted your contradiction points but its perhaps time for me to move beyond that.” Mike
and what I said in the same post you left out
“Then we can discuss a series of prophecies related to the return of Israel all of which clearly happened after the Bible was written”
Nice try but the contexts indicates in your own words you were asking about prophecies plural and i stated i would be presenting a series of prophecies not harping on one.
if that were not enough I told you in the same thread before you did your hack piece
“Just caught this wording Nate and let me tell you up front. If you put that claim up in a post I will call you out as straight forward up and up lying. that “think Mike said” was all your fabrication. When I present fulfilled prophecies I never put one up as the “biggest example” I show the wide rang of prophecies. When you present a case you offer the whole case not one piece. It makes it harder for the defense or in this case skeptics such as yourself to deal with the whole forest over one tree.”
EZ Peazy but you went ahead anyway so I’m making good on my calling you out on it – Thats dishonest
“If you don’t think this is a good example, why is it the first one you provided?.”
Yawn…. your rhetoric after being caught in your characteristic dishonesty matters little to me Nate. I don’t think anything is bad or weak in it. Of course I would provide multiple good prophecies if I said a series of prophecies and I also despite your spin have no problem with this one. its pretty good especially tied in with Daniel 9 – Sorry rhetoric rebutted. No Your obvious dishonesty comes down to two things and two things only
A) You lied pretending as if I had presented one singular prophecy as an example when you even now admit I hadn’t specified one but was presening a range of them as you yoursef had requested. Your posts hides that from readeers. Its how your piece reads and you know it. Trying to fudge one out of them because Till wrote about it IS dishonest but thats par for the course with you.
B) You didn’t examine the whole prophecy. YOu are lyng again. Your source material links PROVE it. Your only source outside of WIki doesn’t cover 1967. You flubbed half of it and I can see why because the second part you left out doesn’t rely on any disputed date so you and till left 1967 out almost entirely.
When confronted with this FACT you claimed that my case got weaker when in fact probably your only half decent objection is rendered irrelevant by the restoration of Jerusalem to Jewish rule because it doesn’t rely on 606 bc. You made sure to leave that out entirely. tsk tsk
So not only did I not point to merely one prophecy as a great example but you took the one calculation and subtracted what you and til wanted from it.
and thats why you are a dishonest soul.
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William you are a bonafide nit. i have proven it on too many occasion which is why I read less of you than anyone else. I certainly didn’t read though your last post so keeping on talking to the wind.
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“I haven’t created a new post for these, but I did answer you later in that thread. ”
Yes you linked to a wiki article to claim that what your own source says is 90% fence is actually a city wall and you suggested that if every prophecy is not fulfilled then none of it is.
Stellar 🙂
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Mike, I never said that you only listed one prophecy. But I can only deal with one of them at a time. This was the first one you posted, so it’s the first one I dealt with. And considering its complexity, I didn’t want to do it in a comment.
Of course, these aren’t real objections anyway. This is your typical tactic of driving attention away from the real discussion, since the evidence doesn’t favor your position. I’m sorry you’re so continually left in that situation — maybe you should consider finding a new point of view?
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I’ve said before that I wasn’t avoiding the 1967 part of the “fulfillment.” But since it relies on the same math formulas, I didn’t see the need to restate all the same points about the problems in that view.
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Curious, Mike… if, as you claim, this prophecy is so amazingly clear, why didn’t a single soul before the 1940’s arrive at the dates you have? More than 80 generations have passed since the penning of this “prophecy” (66 generations since the advent of the Julian Calendar, and nearly 9 since the adoption of the Gregorian calendar), yet it seems absolutely no one “worked it out” until after the event….
Care to explain….
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“Nice try but the contexts indicates in your own words you were asking about prophecies plural and i stated i would be presenting a series of prophecies not harping on one.” – mike
Youre a moron. “Nice try?” No one is trying to mislead anyone here but you. nate said he’d reply to one of them in this post.
and what difference does it make? If your prophecies are such grandiose examples of biblical inerrantcy, then why get upset and act if they all hinge off one another? You’re making noise and making yourself look silly. it’s pathetic. stop it.
so fine, this prophecy isn’t your “biggest example” but you did put it us an example – and it’s a poor one.
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@ JZ,
Curious, Mike… if, as you claim, this prophecy is so amazingly clear, why didn’t a single soul before the 1940′s arrive at the dates you have? More than 80 generations have passed since the penning of this “prophecy” (66 generations since the advent of the Julian Calendar, and nearly 9 since the adoption of the Gregorian calendar), yet it seems absolutely no one “worked it out” until after the event….
Care to explain….
Thank you for answering my question. I left it here a couple of days ago asking if anyone between the advent of A.D. and 1947 had predicted the 1948 date. I don’t think the date would matter because one could always work their way back into the prophecy and claim it’s fulfillment.
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Ah, sorry Ruth, hand’t seen your comment.
Let’s hope Magic Magic has an answer….
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No worries, JZ. I think he might be too busy arguing with William, Nate, Howie, and you to notice my tiny question. 😉
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“Of course, these aren’t real objections anyway. This is your typical tactic of driving attention away from the real discussion, since the evidence doesn’t favor your position.”
Yawn… your usual empty rhetoric. I’ve made it abundantly clear on this blog that as far as I am concerned logic will be the arbiter of what the evidence is said to favor not you and yours From that point it favors me fine.
You are right there is no objection but that would be on your part. Observe.
the 360 day year IS in the Bible and is a calendar used in Babylon where the captivity took place – FACT – No logical objection
The date of 606 bc is indicated in the text and even your own skeptic sites states the third year of Jehoikim is that year – your claim Daniel was wrong based on the text of the bible was a flop. Your claim that Neb was not king yet is a flop as well because he was operating military campaigns LONG before he took the throne officially.
and the date of Jerusalem destruction is not reliant on the 606 bc date – so no logical objection to that part you left out
theres no doubt in Leviticus the Hebrew translates as seven time or seven – no logical objection
Finally theres the seventy years subtraction and Daniel indicates that 70 year is to be cut off of time. – A passage that is ENTIRELY about the captivity and the multiplication of that time – no logical objection
So again what do you have left except the hand waving claim that ooooh its just too complicated and ad hoc – when in fact these things are not a matter of convenience but Jewish law that states by covenant it MUST be multiplied by seven.
Try again nate or at least show a spackling of honesty and write a full piece. Your excuses for leaving out half of what this is about are sad.
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“I’ve said before that I wasn’t avoiding the 1967 part of the “fulfillment.” But since it relies on the same math formulas, I didn’t see the need to restate all the same points about the problems in that ”
You are full of nonsense. It is a completely different calculation that corroborates the first one and it is based on entirely different date and your objection to the 606 bc is left up as if it applies to both which we both know is garbage.
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“Curious, Mike… if, as you claim, this prophecy is so amazingly clear, why didn’t a single soul before the 1940′s arrive at the dates you have? More than 80 generations have passed since the penning of this “prophecy” (66 generations since the advent of the Julian Calendar, and nearly 9 since the adoption of the Gregorian calendar), yet it seems absolutely no one “worked it out” until after the event….”
neither you nor I know that so you are fudging to say they didn’t and i would be fudging to say they did. to be honest I don’t know who first i figured that out. Way before my time. I’d be surprised if no jew did but I have never done exhaustive research to see who got it first..
That said if I wrote you a note about what was going to happen to one of your children and you didn’t read it closely and even forgot it then opened it up and realized it had nailed everything that had happened to your children how would not reading before have made a difference to the fact it states what it does? if it involved legit calculations in its predictions and the calculations worked out based on your childs age at different juncture it still would be significant.
Even in science we have found significant patterns after the fact (the periodic table) so whether anyone realized it or not if the numbers are legit and the multiplications and techniques are called for then the significance remains. In the church we’ve had people for centuries forget the teaching of saved by Grace through faith and it couldn’t be more clearly in there. So again I presently don’t have that info
So I don’t kow that your claim is true. I’ve never had time to do much research in Jewish books but they have some fascinating stuff
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