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Calculations Confirm Sabbath Year

Hi Everyone. This is Daniel Gregg speaking. I have a video for you today on Daniel 9:26 to continue the series on Daniel 9.

I had made a longer version of this video but decided not to publish it because the video was overexposed with the background. I also thought through the teaching methodology and realized I was making things too complicated. So in this remake, I hope to improve matters.

My main goal is to simplify things as greatly as possible for the audience.

Here is the overall Hebrew text in interlinear form for Daniel 9:26.

   

Here is a paraphrase. "And after sixty-two Sabbatical years, the Messiah will be put to death. And no one will be for him. And the people following a coming political leader will corrupt the city and the holy place. But his end will be with an overflowing of divine wrath. And until the end, war has been declared with great desolation."

We will consider several questions. When are the sixty-two Sabbath years? When was Messiah put to death? The last half of the verse I will introduce, but I will save most of its explanation for when we get to vs. 27.

Let's begin with the first clause of the text.

   

And after sixty-two Sabbatical years.

The equation between sevens and Sabbatical years was established in the first video in this series. The starting point was explained in the second video at the year 445/444 BC, and that after seven sevens, the first anointed came, which is Ezra, and after sixty-two additional seventh years, the second anointed one came, which is Messiah Yeshua.

Ezra left Babylon in the 7th year of Artaxerxes II and finished up his work in 397 BC, after seven Sabbatical years were finished and before the sixty-two Sabbatical years began. Messiah Yeshua finished his ministry after an additional sixty-two Sabbatical years in the year AD 34, after the 62nd Sabbatical year but before the 70th.

Let's check this calculation. Since we are dealing with BC years, it will be necessary to convert them to the astronomers' scale. The historical year system BC/AD has no zero year. The lack of a zero year causes a one-year error when performing integer math by adding or subtracting years across the BC/AD boundary. The astronomers scale overcomes this problem by assigning the year 1 BC to the zero year, 2 BC to the minus 1 (-1) year, and so on.

The first sabbatical year is 445/444 BC in terms of historical years. The sabbatical year spans two Julian historical years, 445/444 BC. The slash notation separates the two years. The year before the slash is when the Sabbatical year begins. The year after the slash is the Julian year when the Sabbatical year ends. The Sabbatical year begins in the autumn of 445 BC and ends in the autumn of 444 BC, or more technically, from the first day of Tishri in 445 BC to the last day of Elul in 444 BC.  Converting the 445/444 notation to terms of the astronomers  is -444/-443 BC.

Here is the calculation of the first two Sabbatical years, which are also called "release" years, or in Hebrew, shemittah years.

-444/-443  = 1st Shemittah in 445/444 BC
  +7/  +7
-437/-436  = 2nd Shemittah in 438/437 BC

So now add 5 more Shemittot or 5 x 7 year. By adding a multiple of 7 years we can be sure of calculating the next Sabbatical years.

-437/-436 = 2nd Shemittah in 438/437 BC
 +35/+35
-402/-401 = 7th Shemittah in 403/402 BC

Then Ezra comes to govern Judea after this 7th seven.

So now add 62 more Shemittot or 62 x 7 years. 62 x 7 = 434:

-402/-401 = 7th Shemittah in 403/402 BC
+434/+434
  32/33   = 62nd Shemittah in 32/33 AD.
  

The 62nd Sabbatical year ended on the last day of Elul in AD 33, or more precisely, September 14th, AD 33.

Messiah's ministry was only a half year past this until the spring of AD 34, in which he died on Nisan 14 and rose again on the Sabbath. That year, Nisan 14 was on Wednesday, March 24. But I am anticipating the next clause of Daniel 9:26.

I'd like to make a few remarks on the exactness of this prophecy. Firstly, there are no compatible dates in the years AD 35 or 36 for Messiah to be cut off on Nisan 14. Those years are astronomically speaking, impossible. Also, any date before AD 34 is also impossible, because it would not be after the sixty-two Sabbatical years.

Would it be possible to shift the Sabbath year backward one year to make Messiah's ministry end in AD 33? No. Why? Because when Ezra was a young priest under Nehemiah's administration, he conducted the Torah reading during the fall feasts, which was required at the beginning of the Sabbatical year in the feast of Tabernacles. This is explained in Deuternony 31:10. Also, Nehemiah caused a release of debts, with Tishri 1 beginning the seventh year being the deadline to remit debts. If the Sabbath year were pushed earlier in history than I have stated, then the two duties to read the Torah and to release the debts would have occurred in 446 BC.

But Nehemiah came in the 20th year of Artaxerxes I, and in his reign, which is astronomically fixed, this year is 445 BC and not 446 BC. So accordingly, it is impossible to put this back one year.  And therefore, it is impossible to end the 62 sevens in time to make AD 33 a possible year. This leaves only AD 34 for an exact fulfillment of the prophecy.

What does Jewish tradition say about the timing of the Sabbath year? Jewish tradition assigns the year AD 69 to the destruction of the second temple and says that it was the first year after a Sabbath year. The tradition says that AD 67/68 was the Sabbath year.

We may verify that the traditional Sabbath year AD 67/68 agrees with what I have just calculated for you. AD 32/33 was the 62nd Sabbath year in the prophecy. We may calculate forward from this an exact multiple of 7 years to show that the traditional Sabbath year is correct:

 32/ 33 =  Shemttiah year
+35/+35 
 67/ 68  = Shemittah year
 

When the Orthodox Jew Bennedict Zuckermann wrote his research treatise on the Sabbatical year, he put forth two alternatives for the Sabbatical. Year. This was one of the two. The other view came about when some Jewish scholars realized that the second temple was destroyed in AD 70. But they did not want to give up, believing that it was destroyed in the first year after the Sabbatical year. So they changed the dates that tradition had given for the sabbatical year to one year later.

But we realize that dating the destruction of the 2nd temple in AD 69, just after the Sabbath year, was done for Jewish polemical reasons to reinterpret Daniel 9, and that when they were forced to conceed it was in AD 70, they changed the sabbatical year to one year later to preserve their polemical narrative on Daniel 9.

Therefore, by misdating the destruction of the Temple to AD 69, the earlier tradition confirms that AD 67/68 was the seventh year, and this agrees exactly with the fulfillment of the prophecy by Messiah Yeshua. So the Jewish mistake may be reverse engineered to confirm the truth.

There is a lot more to be said about the search for the Sabbath year in my chronology books. Let us go to the next phrase.

The Messiah will be put to death. And no one will be for him.

   

As explained, Messiah was crucified in AD 34. The Hebrew idiom is to be "cut off." The next phrase, "and none be for him," refers to the fact that his disciples deserted him at the last hour. Also, the nation rejected him. The leaders rejected him. This may also be translated, "and nothing be for him." This way, it means that he did not receive the kingdom then or re-establish it. It may also be rendered "and not for himself." The High Priest Caiaphas wanted Yeshua to die for political reasons, not because he had committed any sin but because he wanted to prevent the Romans from taking their nation away. So we may complete the idea, "not for himself (his own sin), but for us (the nation). Now truly, Messiah was lifted up for the nation, so that we might see what our collective sin cost the Most High in the flesh, and thus repent. And by the same argument, draw all nations to himself. Just as the serpent was raised in the wilderness, so Messiah was raised so that we might see what our sin has resulted in.

The next clause of the text is: "And the people following a coming political leader will corrupt the city and the holy place."

   

This passage refers to the future beyond the end of the 62 Sabbatical years. For nothing from this part of vs. 26 to the end of vs. 27 happened in the years through the next seventh year in AD 39/40.

This observation introduces a gap in time before the seventieth-year period takes place, which I proved in the video on vs. 24 has not happened yet. This gap is part of a normal prophetic pattern in Scripture. 480 years in 1 Kings 6:1 were not one continuous segment. The 70 Sabbath years that Israel broke are separated into groups with gaps between them. The 390 years of the sin of Israel are separated into time segments with gaps between, and so are the 40 years of the sin of Judah. The 70-year period for the rule of Babylon was also cut short at 66 1/2 years, with 3 1/2 years remaining for the end. This prophetic method serves to conceal the final outcome. Daniel was told that matters were sealed up until the time of the end.

So clearly, there is one of these gaps after the 62 sevens, just as has occurred before in Scripture. And the question now is if the latter half of verse 26 occurs in the gap like Messiah's death does, or does it wait for the last seven years of the prophecy to begin? If we look ahead to vs. 27, we see that it continues with the same subject, either a "he" referring to the coming political leader, or an "it" referring to his people, his followers, namely "he will have made strong a covenant with many for one Sabbatical period. So the conclusion should be that the last part of vs. 26 refers to what comes in the 70th seven-year period and not to the gap time.

So, since vs. 27 refers to the last seven, and the last seven has not happened yet according to vs. 24, and the actor in vs. 27 appears to be the same actor as in vs. 26 that corrupts the city and holy place, it follows that "the coming leader" NAGID HABA should be the future antichrist.

There are many interpreters with contrary systems of interpretation. The key to understanding why they are wrong requires identifying the key false doctrine that corrupted their system, and the language norms of Scripture that they are required to violate to establish their systems. The key false doctrine corrupting almost every Christian interpretation of Daniel 9 is a false theological view of the meaning of Messiah's death which places it at loggerheads with a false view of the meaning of the temple offerings.

The false theological views corrupt the systems and cause the inventors of the systems to reject the norms of the biblical languages and further to design their systems with dichotomistic explanations that fail to result in a unified explanation of the relevant texts. I cannot do more than generalize the problem here, because to dive into the details of these systems at the same time as giving this view that agrees with the language norms, unifies the teaching of Scripture on the subject, and agrees with the language norms, would be to corrupt the message with overcomplication.

The unified Scripture teaching on the Antichrist is this. The king of Dan. 7:24–25 is the same as the little horn in Daniel 8:9–14, and is the same as this NAGID HABA in Dan. 9:26–27, and is the same as the man of sin or lawlessness in 2 Thess. 2:3–10, and is the same one who responsible for the abomination of desolation in Matthew 24:15, and is the same one as in Revelation 11:7 and Revelation 13:1.

We do not have to fully understand these matters. Because they are sealed up until the end, even if I have shed some light on them. But by all means, we must not take a view that opposes the covenant, the sanctuary in the Torah, and its future in the Prophets. Because if we do, we will misunderstand the testimony of Messiah and may fail the test coming on the whole world, or we may end up misleading others out of the faith by false teaching before then.