I. Jews and Christians have commonly agreed on some major predictions, like a future resurrection (see eg. the Talmud's discussion on Isaiah 26), and the coming of a Davidic Messiah who would bring in a blessed apocalyptic Messianic era and nonetheless die (see eg. Maimonides on Isaiah 42 in his Introduction to Perek Helek, https://www.mhcny.org/qt/1005.pdf , p. 15).
Maimonides and others saw Daniel 9 in particular to be an apocalyptic End Times prophecy because of the extreme blessings in the angel's prediction and its sense of finality. The 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation says:
Quote:Seventy weeks are decreed upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sin, and to forgive iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal vision and prophet, and to anoint the most holy place.
The next part of the prophecy is rather unclear for me:
וְתֵדַע וְתַשְׂכֵּל מִן-מֹצָא דָבָר, לְהָשִׁיב וְלִבְנוֹת יְרוּשָׁלִַם עַד-מָשִׁיחַ נָגִיד--שָׁבֻעִים, שִׁבְעָה; וְשָׁבֻעִים שִׁשִּׁים וּשְׁנַיִם, תָּשׁוּב וְנִבְנְתָה רְחוֹב וְחָרוּץ, וּבְצוֹק, הָעִתִּים.
The prophecy starts those 70 weeks at a "word" (or edict) to restore and rebuild Jerusalem, which was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC. It adds that the city's walls would be rebuilt during the 70 weeks. The Jews returned from Babylonian captivity in 539 BC. soon after Daniel received the prophecy, and King Cyrus gave an order to rebuild the Temple. In 457 BC, Artaxerxes gave Ezra an edict to restore Temple services and appoint judges, and Ezra commented that the Lord "extended mercy unto us in the sight of the kings of Persia, to give us a reviving, to set up the house of our God, and to repair the ruins thereof, and to give us a fence in Judah and in Jerusalem." (Ezra 9:9, 1917 JPS translation). Later, Artaxerxes himself gave an edict to Nehemiah in c. 444 B.C.E. about building the city's walls (Nehemiah 2:1-8). So the 70 weeks would have to start somewhere in 539 to 444 BC. Based on the math, the end of those 70 weeks would be somewhere in 49 BC to 46 AD.
Next, it says that after 483 years into those 70 weeks, an anointed one or Messiah would be cut off and "be not", which points to somewhere in 42 BC to 39 AD:
וְאַחֲרֵי הַשָּׁבֻעִים שִׁשִּׁים וּשְׁנַיִם, יִכָּרֵת מָשִׁיחַ וְאֵין לוֹ; וְהָעִיר וְהַקֹּדֶשׁ יַשְׁחִית עַם נָגִיד הַבָּא, וְקִצּוֹ בַשֶּׁטֶף, וְעַד קֵץ מִלְחָמָה, נֶחֱרֶצֶת שֹׁמֵמוֹת.
The Hebrew expression here for "be not" might be "waen lo" (וְאֵין לוֹ). May I please ask what the "lo" means?
The only place I found in the Tanakh where a specific person "was not" was when Enoch "was not" because the Lord took him away (Gen 5:24):
וַיִּתְהַלֵּ֥ךְ חֲנֹ֖וךְ אֶת־הָֽאֱלֹהִ֑ים וְאֵינֶ֕נּוּ כִּֽי־לָקַ֥ח אֹתֹ֖ו אֱלֹהִֽים׃ פ
II. Let's turn now to rabbinical commentaries to better understand this major prophecy.
Rashi sees this as a prophecy about expiation of sin and about anointing for the Messiah's work. He writes that the 70 weeks "to terminate the transgression and to end sin" are
Quote:so that Israel should receive their complete retribution in the exile of Titus and his subjugation, in order that their transgressions should terminate, their sins should end, and their iniquities should be expiated, in order to bring upon them eternal righteousness and to anoint upon them (sic) the Holy of Holies: the Ark, the altars, and the holy vessels, which they will bring to them through the king Messiah
Rashi considers the anointed one / Messiah in the chapter to be King Herod Agrippa of Judea and "cut off" to refer to his being killed.
Quote:And after:
those weeks.
the anointed one will be cut off:
Agrippa, the king of Judea, who was ruling at the time of the destruction, will be slain.
and he will be no more:
Heb. וְאֵין לוֹ, and he will not have.
The meaning is that he will not be.
SOURCE: Rashi's commentary, http://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/...rashi=true
The Artscroll Tanakh translation of the Tanakh has footnotes on Daniel 9 and they summarize Rashi's views as well.
Maimonides wrote in his Letter to Yemen that Daniel had discovered the date of the Redemption:
Quote:In your letter you have adverted to the computations of the date of the Redemption and R. Saadia's opinion on the subject. First of all, it devolves upon you to know that no human being will ever be able to determine it precisely as Daniel has already intimated, "For the words are shut up and sealed." (Daniel 12:9). Indeed many hypotheses were advanced by scholars, who fancied that they have discovered the date, as was anticipated in Scripture, "Many will run to and fro, and opinions shall be increased." (Daniel 12:9). That is, there shall be numerous views concerning it.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Epistle_t...Complete#3
Maimonides explains that Daniel made a calculation of Messiah's arrival, and he disagrees with the rabbis' ban (mentioned in the Talmud) on calculating the Messiah's coming, calling them a "stumbling block to the people" and saying that circumstances can make the calculation permissible:
Quote:Inasmuch as Daniel has proclaimed the matter a deep secret, our sages have interdicted the calculation of the time of the future redemption, or the reckoning of the period of the advent of the Messiah, because the masses might be mystified and bewildered should the Messiah fail to appear as forecast. The rabbis invoked God to frustrate and destroy those who seek to determine precisely the advent of the Messiah, because the masses might be mystified and bewildered should the Messiah fail to appear as forecast. The rabbis invoked God to frustrate and destroy those who seek to determine precisely the advent of the Messianic era, because they are a stumbling block to the people, and that is why they uttered the imprecation "May the calculators of the final redemption come to grief" (Sanhedrin 97b).
As for R. Saadia's Messianic calculations, there are extenuating circumstances for them though he knew they were disallowed. For the Jews of his time were perplexed and misguided. The Divine religion might well nigh have disappeared had he not encouraged the pusillanimous, and diffused, disseminated and propagated by word of mouth and pen a knowledge of its underlying principles. He believed, in all earnestness, that by means of the Messianic calculations, he would inspire the masses with hope for the truth. Verily all his deeds were for the sake of heaven.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Epistle_t...Complete#3
As for the rabbis' ban on calculating the redemption, the reason in the Gemara for the ban was that people might think that Messiah didn't arrive at the appointed time. Based on Sanhedrin 97 in the Talmud, it looks like the rabbis did have an idea of the time to which the dates pointed, as they noted:
Quote:(Rav):
All the Ketzim [dates] have passed. Now, Mashi'ach depends on Teshuvah and Mitzvos.
(Shmuel):
The mourner need not mourn longer than the proscribed period. (Hash-m will not wait forever, even if Yisrael are not worthy. Alternatively, Yisrael has suffered enough in Galus, so they will be redeemed even without Teshuvah.)
http://dafyomi.co.il/sanhedrin/points/sn-ps-097.htm
J.Whitehead writes in his Judaism Now website about the importance of Daniel 9's prophecy:
Quote:Daniel 9:24 spells out six things that the seventy weeks are to accomplish (1) to terminate transgression (2) to end sins (3) to wipe away iniquity (4) to bring everlasting righteousness (5) to confirm the visions and prophets (6) to anoint the Holy of Holies.
...
The prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel prophesied of this great time... and [describe] in their prophesies :
to end sins -
"I will save them out of all their dwelling places, wherein they have sinned, and will cleanse them: so shall they be my people, and I will be their God." - Ezekiel 37:23
...
to bring everlasting righteousness -
"And they shall dwell in the land that I have given unto Jacob my servant, wherein your fathers have dwelt; and they shall dwell therein, even they, and their children, and their children's children for ever: and my servant David shall be their prince for ever. Moreover I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them: and I will place them, and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in the midst of them for evermore." - Ezekiel 37:25, 26
to confirm the visions and prophets -
"Thus will I magnify myself, and sanctify myself; and I will be known in the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am the LORD. - Ezekiel 38:23
https://judaism-now.blogspot.co.il/2008/...-from.html
The cleansing of sins, making the Lord's Servant David their prince forever, fulfilling the prophets' predictions, and the nations of the world looking to the Lord are apocalyptic, redeeming prophecies associated with Messiah.
The 1st c. AD Jewish writer Josephus noted how there were major Messianic expectations in his century due to a prophecy in the sacred writings:
Quote:But what lifted them up especially toward the war [of 70 AD] was an ambiguous oracle likewise found in their sacred writings, as at that time someone from their country should rule the inhabited earth. This they took as belonging to their own house
Josephus, Wars 6.5.4 §312-313:
The Talmud says that the date of the Messiah's coming is in the Ketuvim/Hagiographa, the section of the Tanakh that includes Daniel.
Quote: "And the (voice from heaven) came forth and exclaimed, who is he that has revealed my secrets to mankind?.. He further sought to reveal by a Targum the inner meaning of the Hagiographa, but a voice from heaven went forth and said, enough! What was the reason?--because the date of the Messiah was foretold in it!"
Targum of the prophets, in Tractate Megillah 3a, which was composed by Rabbi Jonathan ben Uzziel
Of course, I understand that the rabbis and Christian theologians have diverging interpretations over Daniel 9, whether it applies to Jesus, and whether Jesus is the Messiah. I am not debating this in this thread, but rather looking to the general points of agreement in order to ask what is for me a more basic question. That is, Jews and Christians commonly agree in a Davidic Messiah, they apparently see Daniel 9 as a key prediction of the Messiah's arrival, they agree that the Messiah would die, they foresee a general resurrection, and they associate the latter with the Messiah too.
III. And so a fundamental, ultimate issue with these prophecies is that regardless of which interpretation is correct, why would one objectively conclude that they must actually be fulfilled in reality? How could the prophesying function successfully?
One possible explanation is that the Lord inspired the prophets, who believed in Him, followed His commands, and were righteous, so they received an ability to prophesy. I agree with that description of the prophets- I can see in Daniel's perseverence his love of the Lord, his faith and righteousness. But I am not sure that it automatically objectively follows that whatever a righteous believer predicts must be fulfilled. I can see God inspiring and working in civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., writers full of compassion for the poor like Charles Dickens, or moral idealists like utopian communists of the 19th c. But I don't know that I would accept whatever predictions they made as guaranteed for fulfillment. They might have expected a democratic socialist utopia to be achieved in the 19th or 20th c., but it doesn't mean it happened, unfortunately.
Of course, the prophets of the Tanakh can be even greater in the virtues, and their words have moral and allegorical truths that I accept. But even there I am skeptical that this guarantees that they describe scientific facts. My reading of Genesis 1 is that it describes the heavens as a firm layer into which the stars are set, and that the plants of the earth were made before the "Great Light", the sun.
Another explanation could be that an objective ability to predict the future exists. It seems that the Tanakh takes this ability and other paranormal skills as scientific fact. In the Torah, both Moses and the Egyptian magicians turn their staffs into snakes.
The website My Jewish Learning has an article explaining the concept of Divination and how it relates to prophecy:
Quote:"Who is wise? He who foresees the results of his deeds (Tamid 32a)."
Across human cultures, it has been widely believed that the gods and spirits close to them (the dead, for example) have privileged knowledge of what will unfold in the mortal realms. The ability to gain such supernatural insight has been prized by humans since (and probably before) the dawn of written history. All divination can be divided into the quest for one of two kinds of knowledge: knowledge of the future (manticism) and knowledge of present, but hidden, events (clairvoyance).
Jews are no exception in their desire for this knowledge, and throughout history many Jews have accepted the reality of divinatory events and experiences. Moreover, Jews have been practitioners of many different diviner’s arts across time and geography.
...
The generic biblical words for divination are kesem and nahash. Among the accepted means of divination are prophets and seers of God (Deuteronomy 18:14-22; I Samuel 9:6; II Kings 3:11), one iromancy (dream interpretation; Genesis 37:5-9; Daniel), Urimand Thumim, the casting of lots (I Samuel 23:10-12), mic (II Kings 3:15), lecanomancy or hydromancy (reading patterns in liquid; Genesis 44:5), and word omens (I Samuel 14:9-10).
...
At times, the biblical witnesses are not always in agreement about what constitutes legitimate mantic practice. Thus, for example, despite the cases of exemplary practitioners like Joseph and Daniel, the prophet Zechariah condemns one iromancy along with other forms of divination (10:2).
Under the general category of oracular prophets, there is the navi (prophet), the roeh (seer),and the ish elohim (man of God).
Though condemned by the Talmud, the use of divining rods was also tolerated by the late Middle Ages. Most specifically, Jewish divination practices have all but vanished from modern communities, though some pietistic groups ... employ bibliomancy.
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/divination/
The TaNaKh distinguishes permitted prophecying by the Lord's prophets from forbidden divination, as when it says:
Quote:Leviticus 19:26-31
'You shall not eat anything with the blood, nor practice divination or soothsaying.
Deuteronomy 18:9-14
"When you enter the land which the LORD your God gives you, you shall not learn to imitate the detestable things of those nations. "There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens
2 Kings 17:17
Then they made their sons and their daughters pass through the fire, and practiced divination and enchantments, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the LORD, provoking Him.
Further, it rejects that all divination turns out to be factually true or legitimate:
Quote:Jeremiah 14:14
Then the LORD said to me, "The prophets are prophesying falsehood in My name I have neither sent them nor commanded them nor spoken to them; they are prophesying to you a false vision, divination, futility and the deception of their own minds.
Jeremiah 27:9
"But as for you, do not listen to your prophets, your diviners, your dreamers, your soothsayers or your sorcerers who speak to you, saying, 'You will not serve the king of Babylon.'
Jeremiah 29:8-9
"For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, 'Do not let your prophets who are in your midst and your diviners deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams which they dream. 'For they prophesy falsely to you in My name; I have not sent them,' declares the LORD.
Ezekiel 12:24
"For there will no longer be any false vision or flattering divination within the house of Israel.
Ezekiel 13:6-7
"They see falsehood and lying divination who are saying, 'The LORD declares,' when the LORD has not sent them; yet they hope for the fulfillment of their word. "Did you not see a false vision and speak a lying divination when you said, 'The LORD declares,' but it is not I who have spoken?"'"
Ezekiel 21:21-23
"For the king of Babylon stands at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination; he shakes the arrows, he consults the household idols, he looks at the liver. "Into his right hand came the divination, 'Jerusalem,' to set battering rams, to open the mouth for slaughter, to lift up the voice with a battle cry, to set battering rams against the gates, to cast up ramps, to build a siege wall. "And it will be to them like a false divination in their eyes; they have sworn solemn oaths But he brings iniquity to remembrance, that they may be seized.
Ezekiel 22:28
"Her prophets have smeared whitewash for them, seeing false visions and divining lies for them, saying, 'Thus says the Lord GOD,' when the LORD has not spoken.
Especially notable in this regard is how Daniel contrasts his own ability to decipher the Babylonian king's dreams with the Babylonians' own inability to do so, proving that interpreters of dreams can fail at their attempts. See in Daniel 2, eg.:
Quote:Then the king gave orders to call in the magicians, the conjurers, the sorcerers and the Chaldeans to tell the king his dreams. So they came in and stood before the king.
...
The Chaldeans answered the king and said, "There is not a man on earth who could declare the matter [of the king's dreams] for the king, inasmuch as no great king or ruler has ever asked anything like this of any magician, conjurer or Chaldean.
Wikipedia discusses scientific experiments that cast doubt on the reliability of precognition(knowing the future beforehand), and in particular the accuracy of dreams for predicting the future:
Quote:Some psychologists have explained the apparent prevalence of precognitive dreams in terms of memory biases, namely a selective memory for accurate predictions and distorted memory so that dreams are retrospectively fitted onto subsequent events.[11] In one experiment, subjects were asked to write down their dreams in a diary. This prevented the selective memory effect, and the dreams no longer seemed accurate about the future.[44] Another experiment gave subjects a fake diary of a student with apparently precognitive dreams. This diary described events from the person's life, as well as some predictive dreams and some non-predictive dreams. When subjects were asked to recall the dreams they had read, they remembered more of the successful predictions than unsuccessful ones.
David Ryback, a psychologist in Atlanta, used a questionnaire survey approach to investigate precognitive dreaming in college students. His survey of over 433 participants showed that 290 or 66.9 percent reported some form of paranormal dream. He rejected many of these reports, but claimed that 8.8 percent of the population was having actual precognitive dreams.[52]
Dreams which appear to be precognitive may in fact be the result of the Law of large numbers.[53] The psychologist Stuart Sutherland has written:
Suppose that you can remember ten incidents from a night's dreaming, at least when prompted by a similar incident occurring a day. Now consider how many incidents occur during a day, including those you read about in the paper, watch on television or hear from your friends. There are a vast number and it is highly probable that from time to time one of them will, at least to some extent, resemble one of those from your dreams. When one or more of these coincidences occur, people are likely to conclude that dreams foretell the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precognition
The magazine Popular Science has an article "Study Shows Some Evidence Of Human Precognitive Powers":
Quote:
Paul the Predicting Octopus: Perhaps Paul was simply very in tune with his cognitive abilities.
It's long been regarded as pseudo-science or simple lore, but precognition – that is, the ability to not just predict but to actually perceive the future – is getting a fair shake in some scientific circles lately. A research paper titled Feeling the Future from Cornell Professor Daryl Bem shows some statistically significant results coming from a series of experiments empirically testing the human mind powers of premonition and precognition.
The science is sound enough that Bem's paper found a home in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which will publish the piece shortly. It also received a fairly lengthy write-up in Psychology Today.
[D.Bern] conducted nine experiments on more than 1,000 Cornell students.
...his methodology is consistent throughout: Take an established psychological response to a certain stimuli, then flip it around so the stimulus comes after the response and see if the response is still the same. The results weren't overwhelming, but they were statistically significant.
in one experiment Bem gathered 100 subjects, half male and half female. Using a computerized system, they then played a game in which two curtains were displayed on the screen and the subjects had to choose which one had a picture hiding behind it. Some of these pictures were neutral in content. Others were chosen at random by the computer from a database of semi-erotic and erotic photos (hey, looks like science isn't boring after all).
The result: In cases where an erotic photo was lurking behind the curtain the subjects were able to accurately identify which curtain it was behind with 53.4 percent accuracy – not a huge statistical spike but significantly better than the 50 percent accuracy rate that could be expected by chance. The accuracy rates were not as high for non-stimulating images, which fell more or less in line with raw statistical chance.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/20...ive-future
The photo above is of Paul the octupus that appeared to guess the winner of international soccer games.
(SEE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus)
A skeptical researcher has an article in the Guardian criticizing Bern's study at length:
Quote:As can be seen from our published report in PLoS ONE, none of us produced results that supported the effect reported by Bem (neither did Eric Robinson in a paper published in July 2011 in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research). Our failure to replicate Bem's results will, no doubt, not come as a surprise to many readers as they will have assumed from the outset that the alleged paranormal effect was not real. Indeed, many commentators strongly criticised the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology for publishing Bem's paper in the first place, though it had been put through the same peer review process as other submissions.
I do not share their view. Once we think we know in advance which effects are real and which are illusory, true scientific objectivity flies out of the window. Having said that, my personal opinion is that retroactive facilitation of recall is not a real effect.
I also have my doubts about the other effects reported by Bem. As would be expected given the controversial nature of Bem's claims, a number of critics have gone through the original paper with a fine-toothed comb and highlighted evidence of flawed methodology and inappropriate statistical analyses.
Even so, I find myself in agreement with Tal Yarkoni's comment on his excellent blog: "It's important to note that none of these concerns is really terrible individually. Sure, it's bad to peek at your data but data peeking alone probably isn't going to produce nine different false positives. Nor is using one-tailed tests, or constructing measures on the fly, etc. But when you combine data-peeking, liberal thresholds, study recombination, flexible hypotheses, and selective measures, you have a perfect recipe for spurious results."
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012...plications
So in conclusion, it looks to me like the Bible recognizes prophecy as the same kind of phenomenon, but considers the faithful prophets to have a real gift whereas the unfaithful ones are false and unreliability. Meanwhile, it looks like modern science has mixed opinions about precognition, but considers it typically unreliable pseudoscience. This leaves me in turn with uncertainty about the reliability of Biblical prophecy as well, since the tool itself of precognition doesn't seem clear in its ability to be reliable. It seems to rely on paranormal mechanisms that themselves don't seem clear in their reliability.
A third explanation for Biblical prophecy could be that the prophets were ancient sages and therefore relied on their wisdom and powers of reason with God's help and guidance to make their predictions. It would seem then that one could consider and evaluate the predictions and their merits, based on the explanations that the prophets made as to how they arrived at their conclusions.
Daniel's story says that he received the prophecy via explicit message from an angel that descended from heaven and gave it to him as a reward for his prophecy. That sounds quite outside our modern experience of the universe, which adds some doubt for me, although on the other hand we aren't prophets like Daniel, it's true.
I read that rabbis put Daniel in the "Scriptures"(Ketuvim) section of the Tanakh rather than the "prophets" section out of skepticism about the book. Sophie in an "Ask the Rabbi" thread says about Daniel 9:
Quote:First, realize that the Book of Daniel is not prophecy. It is in Writings not Prophets.
http://messiahtruth.yuku.com/topic/1192/...IEkmn2Al2B
Quote:Daniel is never called a "prophet" (Hebrew, navi), nor are his visions called "prophecy" [Babylonian Talmud: Megillah 3a; Bava Batra 14b]... BT Sanhedrin 93b–94a argues that Daniel was greater than prophets such as Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi because he "saw the vision" of a heavenly priest, which they did not [Dan 10:7]... The rabbis rejected Daniel as a prophet because he is not... explicitly called a prophet. But this criterion for his exclusion was not universally applied, for many of the prophets in the "Prophets" portion are never called navi either by themselves or by God himself.
...
There are nine prophets not named a navi in the Bible:
Hosea
Joel
Obadiah
Jonah
Micah
Nahum
Zephaniah
Malachi
Amos
http://www.hebrew-streams.org/works/misc...aniel.html
I read that one rabbi expressed major skepticism in the Talmud that Daniel's story about the angel flying down to tell him the prophecy was not literally and physically true, because angels did not do that kind of thing. The implication by the rabbi was that instead this was a literary device by the book of Daniel's author.
Another skeptical claim I read by some scholars is that Daniel was not really written by the 6th c. BC prophet Daniel, but rather was written by an anonymous writer of the 3rd-2nd c. AD. In this alternative explanation, the writer really was narrating the events of his own time like the Seleucid Greeks' persecution of the Jews and their desecration of the Temple. I don't know enough about this to have a strong opinion about this.
A third difficulty with the reliability of Daniel 9 is that while Christians say it was fulfilled in the 1st c. with Jesus' death and Rashi said it was fulfilled with the death of King Herod Agrippa, the rabbis in the Talmud seem to think that the scriptures' dates expecting the Messiah passed without him coming. If that's a legitimate viewpoint, then it raises the question of whether the same could turn out to be true for other major blessed prophecies. That is, just as according to their logic the Messiah didn't arrive at the appointed time for some reason (like the people's sins?), perhaps other predictions could turn out to be skipped or not fulfilled as they were actually specified either?
Let me please add a final note: I am not debating the Jewish or Christian view of Daniel 9, but rather looking to the elementary commonality in their messianic expectations. Nor am I promoting psychic paranormal abilities or denying that the prophets had legitimate divine predictions. In fact, my personal preference is for their predictions to turn out to be factually true. So instead I am basically asking for reasons to believe that their predictions, whatever the correct interpretation may be, are basically reliable.
Thank you.