The Prophetic Designations of Time

We have already seen (p. 370), in discussing the symbolical actions of Ezekiel, that the four hundred and thirty days of his prostration formed a symbolical period in allusion to the four hundred and thirty (390+40) years of the Egyptian bondage (Exod. 12:40). 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. 4:6), as the forty days 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)

The Year-Day Theory

Here it is in place to examine the so-called "year-day theory" 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. 7:25, 12:7 and Rev. 12:14; the twelve hundred and sixty days of Rev. 11:3; 12:6; and also by many to the two thousand three hundred days of Dan. 8:14, and the twelve hundred and ninety and thirteen hundred and thirty-five days of Dan. 12:11,12. The forty and two months of Rev. 11:2 and 8:5, are, according to this theory, to be multiplied by thirty (42x30=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 Reaching and Fundamental Should Have Most Valid Support

If this is a correct theory of interpreting the designations of prophetic time, it is obvious that it is a most important one. It is necessarily so farreaching in its practical results as fundamentally to affect one's whole plan and 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.HAS NO SUPPORT IN NUM. 14 AND EZEK. 4. This theory derives no valid support from the passages in Numbers and Ezekiel already referred to. In Num. 14:33,34, Jehovah's word to Israel simply states that they must suffer for their iniquities forty years, "in the 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. 13:25), 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 (14:2-4). Thereupon the divine sentence of judgment was pronounced upon that generation, and they were condemned to "graze (pasture, feed) in the wilderness forty years" (14:33).

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. 4:5,6. 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.

2.NOT SUSTAINED BY PROPHETIC ANALOGY. If the two passages now noticed were expressive of a universal law, we certainly would expect to find it sustained and capable of illustration by examples of fulfilled prophecy. 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. 7:4). 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. 15:13). 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. 7:8); but who ever dreamed that this must be resolved into days in order to find the period of Ephriam's fall? Was it ever sagely believed that the three years of Moab's glory, referred to in Isa. 16:14, 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. 25:12) the prophet, to complete as to the desolations of Jerusalem seventy years" (Dan. 9:2)? 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. 7:25 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. 4:16,32, 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. 3:4) are not to be also understood as denoting forty years.

3.DANIEL'S PROPHECY OF THE SEVENTY WEEKS NOT PARALLEL. The year-day theory is thought to have support in Daniel's prophecy of the 'seventy weeks' (Dan. 9:24-27). But that prophecy says not a word about days or years, but seventy 'heptads,' or 'sevens.' The position and gender of the word indicate its peculiar significance. It nowhere else occurs in the masculine except in Dan. 10:2,3, where it is expressly defined as denoting 'heptads of days.' 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 means years.

4.DAYS NOWHERE PROPERLY MEAN YEARS. It has been argued that in such passages as Judges 17:10; 1 Sam. 2:19; 2 Chron. 21:19, and Isa. 32:10, the 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?" But a critical examination of those passages will show that the word for 'days' is not really used in the sense of years. In Judges 17:10, 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 the days," that is, for the days that he should dwell with him as a priest. In 1 Sam. 2:19, it is said that Samuel's mother made him a little robe, and brought it up to him from days to days in her going up along with her husband to offer the sacrifice of the days." Here the reference is to the particular days of going up to the tabernacle to worship and sacrifice, and the exact sense is not brought out by the common version, "year by year" or "yearly." They may have gone up several times during the year at the days of the great national feasts.

And this appears from a comparison of 1 Sam. 1:3 and 7, where, in the first place, it is said that Elkanah went up from days to days, and in ver. 7, "so he did year by year." That is, he went up three times a year according to the law (Exod. 23:14-17) "from days to days," as the well-known national feastdays came round; and his wife generally accompanied him. 2 Chron. 21:19 is literally: "And it came to pass at days from days (i.e., after several days), and about the time of the going out (expiration) of the end, at two days, his bowels went out," etc. Similarly, Isa. 32:10: "Days above a year shall ye be troubled," etc. That is, more than a year shall ye be troubled. The most that can be said of such a use of the word days, is, that it is used indefinitely in a proverbial and idiomatic way; but such a usage by no means justifies the broad proposition that a day means a year.

5.DISPROVED BY REPEATED FAILURES IN INTERPRETATION. The advocates of the year-day theory rest their strongest argument, however, upon the necessity of such a theory for what they regard the true explanation of certain prophecies. They affirm that the three times and a half of Dan. 7:25, and the twelve hundred and sixty days of Rev. 12:6, and their parallels, are incapable of a literal interpretation. And so, carrying the predictions both of Daniel and John down into the history of modern Europe for explanation, most of these writers understand the twelve hundred and sixty year-days as designating the period of the Roman Papacy.

Mr. William Miller, famous in the last generation for the sensation he produced, and the large following he had, adopted a scheme of interpreting not only the twelve hundred and sixty days, but also the twelve hundred and ninety, and the thirteen hundred and thirty-five (of Dan. 12:11,12), so that he ascertained and published with great assurance that the coming of Christ would take place in October, 1843. We have lived to see his theories thoroughly exploded, and yet there have not been wanting others who have adopted his hermeneutical principles, and named A.D. 1866 and A.D. 1870 as "the time of the end."

A theory which is so destitute of scriptural analogy and support as we have seen above, and presumes to rest on such a slender showing of divine authority, is on those grounds alone to be suspected; but when it has again and again proved to be false and misleading in its application, we may safely reject it, as furnishing no valid principle or rule in a true science of hermeneutics. Those who have supposed it to be necessary for the exposition of apocalyptic prophecies, should begin to feel that their systems of interpretation are in error.

(From Milton Terry's "Biblical Hermeneutics - A Treatise on the Interpretation of the Old and New Testaments" (1898).)