Are the 1,290 Days Complete?

This Wednesday, May 16, is the 28th day of Iyar on the Jewish calendar. It was on this date in 1967 (June 6 on the 365.24-day calendar that most of us use), that Israel liberated the Old City of Jerusalem, during the Six Day War. Those of you familiar with the Bible know that God often works in forty-day or forty-year steps. Jesus, for example, fasted for forty days right after His baptism, and the life of Moses can be divided into three forty-year segments: he spent forty years in Egypt, forty years in Midian, and forty years wandering in the wilderness with the Israelites. Well, now that the 40-year anniversary of Jerusalem’s liberation is coming up, what does God have planned for this year?

Along that line, the Book of Daniel has a prophecy that may be relevant to our time. I’m quoting from the Blue Letter Bible, in case you’d like to check out the verses for yourself:

Daniel 12:11 = “And from the time [that] the daily [sacrifice] shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, [there shall be] a thousand two hundred and ninety days.”

Daniel 12:12 = “Blessed [is] he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days.”

A lot of people think the 1,290 days mentioned in 12:11 is the Great Tribulation, the terrible time right before the Lord comes. But in other verses of Daniel and Revelation, 1,260 days are assigned to the Great Tribulation, not 1,290. My church in Florida chose a different interpretation: the 1,290 “days” refer to years, like the “seventy weeks” in Daniel 9, and the “Abomination that maketh desolate” refers to the time when Jews cannot pray or make offerings on the Temple Mount, due to the Moslem shrines up there. They went on to suggest that “1,290 days” means the years from 677 to 1967. The Dome of the Rock was built near the beginning of that period, most likely in 691, so what could have happened there in 677? Perhaps that was when the other major site on the Temple Mount, the Al Aqsa Mosque, was converted into a Moslem holy place; previously it had been a church.

Now assuming all this is right, what about the “1,335 days” mentioned in the 12th verse? If we follow the same logic, then the 45th year after the end of the “1,290 days” is important. That would be the year 2012 (1967+45=2012). Will this be the year when the Jews finally work up enough courage to take back the Temple Mount, something Gershon Salomon and the Temple Mount Faithful Movement have been calling for since Moshe Dayan gave it back to the Arabs in 1967? Or will this be the year when Israel finally achieves a just and lasting peace? I don’t think it will happen the way today’s politicians want it, through negotiations alone. In the past, true peace only came through victory, when one side beat the other so badly that the loser said, to quote Chief Joseph, “I will fight no more, forever.” Especially in the Middle East, where “cease-fire” means the same thing in both Hebrew and Arabic: “RELOAD!” Will 2012 be the date of the last war in the Arab-Israeli conflict, perhaps even the Armageddon many expect to see on the eve of the Messiah’s arrival?

I’m not going to declare that 2012 will be the year when the Messiah comes, because Jesus said in the Gospels that He is coming at a time when nobody will expect it. But some folks are already looking ahead to that year, due to the prediction that because 2012 marks the end of a cycle in the Mayan calendar, it will be the end of an age in the world’s history. Recently our local newspaper ran a story about an author, Lawrence Joseph, who claimed that if the world ends in 2012, Berea, KY, a town about 30 miles south of here, will be the best place to flee to, because it is one of the most environmentally-friendly communities anywhere. I guess that depends on how he defines the world “ending”; if we get another ice age, for instance, Berea will have a fighting chance at survival. Whatever the case, it looks like something special is scheduled to happen in five years. Stay tuned!