The prophecies of Daniel - part 1

Then Jesus entered a house and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, "He is out of his mind." Mark 3: 20-21

Later in the same chapter of the book of Mark, Mary and Jesus' brothers come to put a stop to His ministry. The strangest thing about this scene is that this is Mary we are talking about. The same woman who wrote a song (Luke 1: 47-55) when an angel told her she was going to give miraculous birth to the messiah. Now she thinks he's gone mad. What happened?

Apparently, the same thing that happened to John the Baptist. John baptised Jesus and witnessed the miraculous infilling of Jesus by the Holy Spirit. Later, when he was imprisoned by the Roman authorities, John sent a messenger to Jesus who essentially asked, 'are you really who you say you are?' (who I thought you were?).

Here, now, I want to reiterate my point about misconceptions and make it specific to our examination of Daniel: just like Mary and John and the Baptist, if you have a preconceived notion of how God's revelation should look -- and I'm talking literally about His 'revealings' here, not just the book of Revelation -- then it is likely that you will disbelieve the events when they actually occur.

Case in point -- In Daniel chapter 12 Daniel is told when the world will end. He answers the way that modern theologians still answer to this day, "I heard, but I did not understand," (Daniel 12: 8). There is a good reason why Daniel could not puzzle it out; today's theologians have a much flimsier excuse.

Before I explain further, how about a little backstory on our boy Daniel.

And some of your descendants, your own flesh and blood, that will be born to you, will be taken away, and they will become eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon. -- 2 Kings 20:18.

Daniel was one of the young men of Judah who fulfilled this prophecy when Jerusalem fell to Babylon in 586 BC. Castration of certain public servants was common in societies where the Rulers possessed harems. It wasn't just a matter of vanity. Sleeping with the harem girls was one of the basic symbols of a King's office, which is why Absalom takes time out of his takeover of Israel to sleep with King David's concubines in 2 Samuel 16:21-22. For this reason, operations like this were often performed on foreign servants... and I do mean foreign.

You see, there was no such thing as a 'minor' surgery in ancient times. This and some of the other not-so-pleasant aspects of Palace servitude meant that these positions were ideal for foreigners... people not yours... who could not easily rebel or incite rebellion....

Now, a point that needs to be made here is that eunuchs were not typically known as humanitarians. Unmarried men are often harsher by nature than family men anyways, marriage and parenthood having a softening effect of sorts. Eunuchs did not only lack families, they lacked much of anything that would inspire compassion and thoughts of a peaceful future for one's legacy. The stereotypical eunuch of the ancient near east was a stone-faced servant, lurking off to the King's left, always ready with the advice of who should be killed and how.


Then there was Daniel.

he seems to have had no bitterness toward his masters, the men who mutilated him. Not only that, but the prophecies of the Israelites overwhelmed him at times, as if he has adopted every one of them as an enormous extended family over which he felt a deeply protective love. This is the man God chose to give the first of the clearly apocalyptic visions: a man of limited temptations, a man of sympathetic character who never grew hardened in spite of living his entire adult life under the specter of possible death from a capricious ruler and jealous rivals.

And in chapter 12, verse 7 he asks when the world will end and is told-- The man clothed in linen, who was above the waters of the river, lifted his right hand and his left hand toward heaven, and I heard him swear by Him who lives forever, saying, "It will be for a time, times, and half a time. When the power of the Holy people has finally been broken, all these things will be completed."

The typical translation of this phrase 'time, times, and half a time', is a year, two years, and half a year. It's not taken totally out of the blue either, since in verse eleven we are given two time periods (1,290 days/ 1,335 days) that roughly equal 3 1/2 years. But if we take this as a veiled reference to 3 1/2 years we have two problems: 1) why didn't the angel just say "3 1/2 years? and 2) the angel didn't actually answer his question since, without any contextual clues for when to begin the 3 1/2 years he hasn't actually told him anything. 3 1/2 years from when? Starting when?

But that's not what it means. We are given all the context we need for interpretation when the angel says, "when the power of the Holy people has finally been broken."

In the next post, a brief history of the church, and three times in history that it came close to collapsing.