Many people are familiar with the massive changes to divine law that took place when Christianity was born, even if many of those changes were interpretations added onto the New Testament centuries after it was written, which are less well known. This is a topic of a following chapter. What very few moderns know is that what Christianity did to divine law was a process that was well underway by the time of Christ. In this chapter, we’ll flesh out origins of some of those changes. But to follow this trail, we will again go all the way back to the Torah.[1] Unfortunately, the full explanation of how this world-changing story is connected throughout Israel’s history will have to wait till a later book in this series.
How Long O Lord?
A Promised Rest and Blessing, Invisible Kings, and the God Made Me Do It
One of the pesky details that almost never gets mentioned in Bible classes is that all of the major predictions and promises of even the Torah never saw earthly fulfillment. This may seem like the comment of an unbeliever, but it’s also right there in Hebrews 4. They did not in fact enter into the rest that God had promised for them in Canaan. The first generation did not enter in at all, but God strew their cadavers through the wilderness. The book of Judges covers that first four centuries in the land, when Israel is almost continually oppressed, with only brief respites when they turn to God and repent, and he sends saviors.
And this fact is all the more incredible because the Exodus is one of the most powerful stories of the entire Bible. It is the birth of Israel herself, and the origin point for the Abrahamic promise’s hope of fulfillment, for the billions of Christians, Jews, and Muslims that fill the world these some three millennia or more later. It is one of the few Bible stories that is still well-known among moderns, the first generations in millennia who have little to no Bible knowledge. And yet the Exodus’ ultimate promise of rest in a land flowing with milk and honey was never permanently fulfilled. How can this be?
Of course the Biblical writers often chastise Israel for not realizing these promises. After all, it’s their own fault for rebelling against God. But there are exceptions to this. Psalm 44 denies any wrongdoing for God’s punishment. And surely this was the case for, say, the group of Israelites born in Babylonian captivity, who were not alive to sin before the Temple was destroyed. And few Sunday (and maybe Sabbath) schools mention that there is absolutely no reason given in the Bible for Israel’s enslavement by the Egyptians, which began before the birth of Moses. If they were God’s chosen people, and they had not yet sinned like they later would, why did God let them end up in that situation, where the Pharaoh was killing their babies? No wonder they doubted Moses’ promises as he led them into a wilderness with no food or water. And again, I am not taking sides here, merely considering Israel’s perspective in this world-changing story.
The situation was even stranger for the ancient mind, for whom God was responsible for everything. A few exemplary passages should prove this point. I once heard a preacher complain that people at funerals would often say that God “took” the deceased; his complaint was that he believed that God did not simply take people; maybe so, but the ancients certainly saw it that way, including the biblical authors. Moderns also struggle with how God could allow evil things to happen; but the ancients spoke in terms of all things, even catastrophes, being caused by God. Amos 3:6 asks the question: does disaster come upon a city, and has YHVH not caused it? For the ancients, this was rhetorical, for they knew that God caused all events. For Jacob, it was God who had withheld children from Rachel, not chance. For both the author of Job and Job himself, it was God, not the Accuser, who was the causal agent behind his suffering.[2] In later books we’ll see how the Bible actually contains polemics against pagan concepts of the gods in its stories, showing that God is not only almighty, but also upholds all things by the word of his power.
Had not heaven the fall of Troy designed,
Or had not men been fated to be blind,
Enough was said and done to inspire a better mind
Then had our lances pierced the treacherous wood
And Ilian towers, and Priam’s empire stood.
—The Aeneid, regarding the entrance of the Trojan Horse
So, looking through the lens of the ancients where God causes all things, their savior from Egyptian bondage would have been the very one who put them there! God led them down into Egypt knowing that they would be enslaved.[3] The prophets were quite explicit with the parallel occurrence of Babylonian captivity. Of course God did it. Every evil thing that happened to them was a fiery trial authored by God, intended to bring them closer to him; and this was true even when they had done nothing to deserve it, which appears to be rare. To bolster this point, consider the tenth plague: God was going to kill every firstborn in Egypt, even those of Israel. God’s responsibility for this plague cannot be questioned, for the narrator sets it as a given. Only the blood of the lamb on the doorpost prevented it. And this concept, in a way, is continued throughout Israel’s history of Torah observance, for it explicitly said that the firstborn was his, but they were to offer a substitute.[4] Imagine you’re an Israelite who has been faithful to YHVH, and Moses tells you that God’s destroyer is coming tonight: ask yourself, why would he do that to your child? This is the God of the ancients, whose attributes are seldom seen by moderns.
Token Fulfillment
And yet, despite the Bible’s own narrative showing how they never could quite obtain God’s greatest promises, the Bible often speaks of them being fulfilled. David’s throne was established, even when the last writers of that narrative were living in time when it had ended. How could they see God’s prophetic word as inviolable and immutable? In what way were any of God’s promises fulfilled, as the Bible seemed to think happened, even when its own narrative says that they didn’t?
In one sense, prophetic fulfillment was pushed into the future, as we’ll see below. In another sense, it was given what I’ll call a token fulfillment. We’re told that they had rest on every side as God had sworn to their fathers, after Joshua is said to have fulfilled all the commands of taking the land.[5] From the perspective of the whole historical narrative, this peace would have only been a blip in the history of mostly bondage, oppression, poverty, plague, famine, and war that befell Israel, just as with other ancient peoples of Canaan and Mesopotamia. Even worse, the details of the book of Joshua show that they did not take all the land, and were still surrounded by people who would oppress them, which the book of Judges would make all the more evident.[6] To take a modern, “rationalist” view that Hebrews 4 contradicts this assertion of God’s faithfulness in Joshua is to miss a much more subtle and complex God whom the ancients understood much better. Israel brought the massive innovation of monolatry to the world, but by depicting this all-powerful God, they also needed to grapple with how evil could exist if God was all good; we dare not dismiss their writings on the topic, as they still greatly affect the worldview of the bulk of the world’s population even to this day, whether for good or ill, and whether interpreted correctly or not.[7]
Before we move on to the Davidic and later grand, prophetic promises, I’d like to reiterate the importance of token earthly fulfillment. By token I do not mean of little significance, because for Israel these were not unimportant; on the contrary, these past, almost symbolic[8] fulfillments were paramount, even as they looked to future fulfillments of them. For instance, when the ancient prophets said that kings would come to bow before the Davidic Messiah, and would bring gifts and pay tribute, the New Testament writers, and their readers, did not consider it a weak story to say that a small group of kings came and gave gifts to Jesus in only one incident.[9] On the contrary, they would have seen it as a part of a very legitimate prophetic tradition that began with Solomon receiving tribute from the nations, despite the fact that the rest of the narrative of the kings of Judah would see an utter loss of this fulfillment! In fact, there were cracks showing in it even in the details of Solomon’s own kingship.[10] And how in the world could a man in the first century, who from an earthly perspective merely got himself killed as a Jewish insurgent, be considered supreme king of a reign that overwhelms and conquers all other kingdoms?[11] We must continue on through the Scripture’s unfulfilled promises to even begin to grasp how anyone could believe this, much less for a sizeable portion of the world to build an entire worldview on it.[12] The Bible may not be the best explanation for the paradoxical evidence of the human experience (e.g., the existence of both love and suffering), but it certainly is the most successful one; and I find modern, naturalist arguments to be the weakest, at least to the human mind and heart: if the physical is the only existence that matters, then nothing matters, because everything we humans value has no physical existence, only physical manifestations, whether it’s love, morals, or even just a corporation that produces goods.[13]
“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
—Carl Jung
Multiple Fulfillment
The consequence of viewing prophecies as having a token fulfillment in the past, while still awaiting a “complete” fulfillment in the future, is that Israel developed a dual-fulfillment[14] view of these promises from YHVH. This may sound odd to the modern reader, but bear with me. I once mentioned this to one of my preacher friends who was well versed in the Bible, and he was taken aback by it, for he had never considered it. It is perhaps a modern view that a prophecy has one fulfillment, and that’s that.
We need only cite a few examples to prove this point, and then many others will easily become apparent. An offspring was prophesied to come from David who would finally bring a permanent peace to Israel.[15] The “multi-nature” of prophecy should already be apparent at this point, since this peace in the land was said to have been realized under Joshua already, even when Judges made it more apparent than the book of Joshua (which also mentions it’s failure) that they did not in fact get much peace, unless it was merely a “token” few years. But let’s continue with the Davidic promise. This offspring was also to build God a house. In the context of the immediate narrative, the obvious fulfillment occurred under David’s son Solomon, who is said to have not only built God a house, but to have ended war and brought peace and incredible prosperity. Not only that, but he would be the quintessential “Prince of Peace” of later prophets;[16] his name even meant “peace” in Hebrew.[17]
But the perspective of the compilers of Samuel/Kings/Chronicles is clearly from a later period, after the exile. The promise of an eternal kingdom for David’s offspring had already been lost! At least from an earthly perspective. God’s house was destroyed, and when it was built back, it probably was nowhere near to the glory of Solomon’s original Temple. There was no earthly king on the throne, much less a Davidic one. We see Zerubbabel mentioned in the post-exilic period as a sort of governor and Davidic offspring, but that must not have lasted; he disappears after the first half of the book of Ezra, and the first quarter or so of Zechariah; after that, it is Joshua the priest who is prominent, and even crowned by the prophet, as if the high priest were the ruler on the throne of Israel now, not the sons of David. In fact, Zechariah 6 sounds like other Davidic prophecies, regarding the Branch who would rebuild the house of God and sit on the throne, but there is no mention of David’s offspring here, only the crowning of a Levite, which is totally contrary to the Davidic promise of who the legitimate king of Israel was to be. A Christian might argue that this is a sort of “prefiguring” of the argument of Hebrews 7 that the law was being changed, but we will avoid such considerations for the moment, and try to see things from the perspective of readers of the text for the half a millennium before Hebrews was written. Perhaps the most significant detail that should be noted is that mentions of the actual Davidic offspring disappear from the prophets after Zerubbabel, since they are no longer in power, and the only other mentions are of some future Messiah. It is the priests who will ensure the continuation of the law for the prophets in this period, and who will even rule. This also matches what actually happens in history, for from the time that Joshua the priest seems to rule at the beginning of the 5th century BCE to the time of New Testament, when Israel wasn’t being ruled by foreigners, we only read of priestly rulers, the most significant of which was the famous Hasmoneans who secured a brief and the very last independence for Israel, and the last to wear the title of king as well.
But let’s return to Solomon, the apparent fulfillment of the Davidic covenant, at least according to the story that they had, if not their subsequent history. In the post-exilic period, where were they to find meaning in such divine revelation, when the “eternal” Davidic kingdom could not even endure more than a few days after the inauguration of Solomon’s son, Rehoboam? They could not overwrite that history, so instead they interpreted subsequent history to build to a climax to a second quintessential son of David, Josiah by name. For an excellent and detailed analysis of how this is evinced in the language of the biblical author(s), see Who Wrote the Bible, by Richard Friedman. He shows very well how Josiah was portrayed as the ultimate Davidic king using the exact Deuteronomistic language of what the ideal king of Israel was to be, who would again save the people like Moses. And quite significantly, it was Josiah who was the first to actually establish centralized Temple worship, and the first to ban worship on the high places, as we’ve already seen. This, then, is also a quintessential example of dual fulfillment of prophecy. Never mind that neither Josiah nor his dynasty would much longer endure; for some reason, it was his evil predecessor, Manasseh, whose sins would be blamed for the perfectly faithful Josiah’s loss of life and rule.[18] Of course, this explanation is only found in the book of Kings; Chronicles has a different take on the matter: for example, it does not mention that Josiah’s reforms were not enough to offset Manasseh’s earlier sin; rather it portrays Pharaoh as telling Josiah that he is essentially opposing God, for which he ostensibly falls.
It should be noted that when I say the biblical authors added to the story that came before, I am in no way taking sides on whether they were divinely inspired. I am merely pointing out that this is in fact the way the biblical authors built the Bible, whether told by man alone, or with the addition of divine direction. I do not discount this phenomenon as mere stories, either. This is part of the most incredible story ever told, in both terms of influence and numbers of printed copies, and to which I intend to dedicate many more books.
One more example should be raised, I believe, of dual interpretation of prophecy, to help us see how not understanding this principle adversely affects the understanding of both believing and secular students of the Bible. The New Testament authors are often accused of force-fitting wording in the Hebrew Bible to be prophetic for their own time. One of the best examples of this is Isaiah 7’s prophecy that a young woman would bear a child, with only the Septuagint translating the word for a young woman as a virgin. I will not weigh in on either side of this argument here, except to say that, yes, there is an obvious fulfillment right there in the next chapter, where the prophetess bears a child; yet for the New Testament writers to apply it to their own time—to Jesus—was at the very least not a new practice of interpreting prophecy as having more than one fulfillment. Yet moderns are so far divorced from this concept, seeing prophecy now as only fulfilled once in most cases, that the plain interpretation given by Isaiah himself is often glossed over in Bible classes. So too, secular teachers also ignore this ancient view of prophecy, and see Christian interpretations of the Hebrew Bible like that of Isaiah and similar passages as merely silly and dishonest.
For any fundamentalist who is struggling with this idea of dual or multi-fulfillment of prophecy, there is perhaps a simple and acceptable way to illustrate it. Just note how many times certain stories of God’s promises are told and retold. The most obvious one is perhaps the promise that God would free them. We see this in the story of the Exodus, then the judges, and the recasting of the Exodus when they are freed from Babylonian rule. Over and over this incredible story gets remade. And in this sense, this is multi-fulfillment of this one prophetic message: God’s promise to liberate his people, at least when they turn from their sin to him. Or in his good time.
Future Fulfillment
But multiple fulfillments of prophecies did not just occur as the biblical writers looked back. They also projected secondary and even tertiary fulfillments into the future. The Davidic covenant which we’ve already noted is a prime example. Not only were Solomon and Josiah unique fulfillments of this promise in their own way, but the entire nation still awaited that ultimate Messiah who would, perhaps literally this time, establish a kingship in Jerusalem which would rule the entire earth.
In fact, from the first time that the Davidic covenant was first given, the prophets had added to it, with promises that were ever grander. At first it was simply a promise of a kingship that would finally bring peace to God’s people in Israel, in a kingdom without end, and he would build a house for God. Then the prophets added that he would also judge and even rule the nations, who would come to pay tribute to him, and would even worship in Jerusalem. Then finally, Daniel 2 says that his kingdom will not only rule the nations, but will actually replace them all. And these were not merely written promises that sat in dusty scrolls, as Bibles tend to rest on bookshelves today: it was the hope of an entire people when Jesus showed up in the first century. It was much of the impetus behind the rebellions that would ultimately get the Temple destroyed for the last time. [19]
It is my experience that many of those promises that were tacked onto the Davidic covenant were so grand that they are often glossed over in Bible classes. For instance, I’ve often heard it taught that the ten tribes of the North were lost forever, and that Judah (which also included Benjamin) was the only remnant to be restored; however, there are prophetic promises that those 10 tribes would in fact also be restored.[20] Ezekiel 37 and its vision of the dry bones has such incredible imagery that it still inspires songs to this day, such as “Rattle!” by Elevation Worship and “Come Alive” by Lauren Daigle, and is certainly read in Bible classes; yet it too contains the promise that the Northern kingdom of Israel/Ephraim would be restored with Judah. The only believers I’m aware of that take these passages literally, at least among Christians, subscribe to the concept of Zionism, and are probably a minority. Ironically, the New Testament writers set (at least one token) fulfillment of at least part of this prophecy at the death of Jesus, that of rising from the dead. This detail is only found in Matthew. [21]
Daniel 9, set around some time in the second half of the sixth century, is one of the most interesting examples of pushing prophecy out into the future.[22] Daniel mentions Jeremiah’s prophecy that the captivity would be 70 years. Ezra 1 at least recognized the return of the captives under Cyrus and the later rebuilding of the Temple as a fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy, even if it didn’t happen in exactly 70 years.[23] But scholars have long recognized that Daniel reflects the longing of a people who had not yet seen the kingdom restored, whose Temple may very well have been a pitiful copy of Solomon’s. I remember in my youth being taught that Daniel 9 was confirming Jeremiah’s 70-year prophecy, since he is said to have served until the first year of Cyrus. But if you read the chapter carefully, you see that the angel actually re-interprets the passage for him, by pushing it out into the future! Jeremiah didn’t (just?) mean 70 years; he meant seven times 70. And now we see one of the many reasons that Judah was a powder keg to the Romans approximately five centuries after the setting of Daniel’s narrative, when Jesus and many other Messiah’s came along.[24] But so far we’ve covered what secular scholars have noticed; let’s look one more time at Daniel 9: Gabriel tells him that the count of this period of 70 sevens begins its count with a single 7, then 62 sevens, then another seven, then half a seven. That very first seven in the sequence that totals to about 70 counts from the time that word went out to build Jerusalem. That would be about 539 BCE, not the beginning of the captivity. In other words, yes Daniel is leaning on Jeremiah’s prophecy of 70 years, but this is a secondary prophecy/interpretation, not a replacement of it! This is therefore an excellent example of multi-fulfillment, which most scholars totally miss.[25]
The abomination that makes desolate[26] in Daniel was a fairly clear reference to what the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV, Epiphanes, did in 167 BCE, entering and desecrating the Temple, possibly by sacrificing a pig. Secular scholars and a sizeable portion of believing scholars and theologians are in agreement on this point, even if you can find all manner of interpretations among believers that still push this one out into the future. This was surely an event familiar to Jesus’ disciples, who lived fewer than two centuries later, and who celebrated the Feast of Lights or Dedication[27] to commemorate when Temple worship was restored under the leadership of the Hasmoneans in 164. However, the gospels would have Jesus apply it to the future.[28] Of course, Jesus could have simply been saying that there would be a repeat of a desecration of the Temple, an event which the gospels clearly reference, and which happened in 70 CE when the Temple was destroyed for the last time, at least so far…. Regardless, this interpretation appears to be a dual-fulfillment of Daniel, and I would argue that the New Testament authors interpreted Jesus’ meaning this way as well, as they naturally drew heavily on the Hebrew Bible’s understandings of the nature of prophecy. (If you find the double application of the abomination of desolation prophecy hard to swallow, then check out Matthew 2’s interpretation of Rachel weeping, originally found in Jeremiah 31, and obviously applied by Matthew to a second event, although he probably also would have acknowledged the first.)
And if you’ve ever doubted the power of the Biblical story, consider that billions of Christians and millions of Jews are still awaiting the advent of the Davidic Messiah that was first promised, at least in the Bible’s timeline, three millennia ago. The New Testament, which was supposed to be Christ’s arrival, still has language in it referring to the future arrival of the Messiah.[29] Regardless of the “proper” interpretation of this, this language is perhaps necessary because it is quite obvious that there is no David Messiah ruling in Jerusalem to whom the nations pay homage and tribute. Nor is there a physical Temple there. Nor is Jerusalem the capital of some end-time One World Order that rules all nations.
This brings us to the next logical step in understanding biblical prophecy: so far we’ve seen the biblical writers speak of token fulfillments in the past, and possible multiple fulfillments over time, some of which are still pushed out into the future. But perhaps the ultimate view of prophetic fulfillment is when the Bible speaks of spiritual fulfillment.
Spiritual Fulfillment
Where are the fulfillments of all these incredible prophecies, of a Davidic Messiah who will rule the earth in an eternal kingdom based in Jerusalem, into which the nations will flow? The New Testament is full of answers, and many of them are quite spiritualized. For example, Acts 2 gives one tiny detail that shows that the nations did in fact flow into Christ’s kingdom; it’s a list of people groups in verses 9 through 11. This could be viewed as token fulfillment; yet its view of the nature of the kingdom is spiritual as well. We’re told that Jesus himself clearly said that his kingdom was not of this world.[30] And we’re clearly told that the kingdom did in fact fill the earth, even if their view of the earth was somewhat more limited than ours.[31] What about the eternal priesthood, sons of Aaron, who were supposed to serve in Jerusalem for all time? Well, there was to be a new Jerusalem, in heaven itself, and Christians are all now a nation of priests, with Christ being the sacrifice that replaces all earthly ones.[32] And what about Christ’s kingdom taking over all the Earth? That would be a great topic for a later book. Christianity took centuries to fill the Earth, but boy did it. Mostly.
“The Christians won…the world. The Christians won everything, a long time ago. If you don’t believe me, let me ask you a question: what year is it…according to the entire human race? We’re counting to [the next year] in unison as a species, for thousands of years…. What is this number? We’re counting the day since what? Since there was ever people? Not at all. Since CHRIST!!! Which makes sense if you’re Christian. But what…are the rest of us doing? Everybody, scientists, historians, ‘Jesus plus 2! Jesus plus 3!’ Jesus plus 2017 years, 4 months, and 3 days, is when your license expires!”
—Louis C.K.
But this spiritualization of prophecy was not new in the first century. For multiple centuries before Christ in fact, Jewish prophets had been leaving behind an earthly hope of God’s word being fulfilled for a far more glorious, spiritual vision of what God’s kingdom and rule were to be. The New Testament authors leaned heavily on these earlier teachings, especially their concept of a New Heaven and a New Earth, found in Isaiah 65:17, and added that we’ll have a new body, new Temple, and even a new source of all light.[33] This is not to say that the post-exilic prophets, or even the New Testament ones, totally left behind the idea that God’s prophecies have earthly fulfillments. Such a view is still alive and well even to this day, such as with the millennialist or new-Heaven-new-Earth views that Jesus will physically reign on Earth, whether this one or a new one; these may not be majority views of Christians, but there are many earthly views of prophetic fulfillment which are in fact mainstream; for example, probably most Christians believe in a physical resurrection of the body, which is undeniably an earthly view of the fulfillment of prophecy. But there is no denying that many of the Bible’s greatest and most ancient promises were spiritualized. To explore how the Bible recapitulates a four hundred years cycle of its story of redemption and captivity from Abraham to at least the time of the Romans, check out my book here.
[1] I say “all the way back to the Torah” to mean that we’re going back to the beginnings of the story of the Bible, not necessarily to the earliest writings of the Bible. As we’ve seen with Deuteronomy and Leviticus, for example, the Torah can itself contain much later perspectives.
[2] Genesis 30:2; Job 2:3
[3] Genesis 15:23, 14; cf. 46:3; Isaiah 45:7
[4] Exodus 13; 22:29; 34:19, 20
[5] Joshua 21:44; 22:4
[6] In fact, the details within Joshua itself about which cities were or weren’t taken contradict each other.
[7] Other ancient religions saw evil as the cause of another primordial creature, who in some tales is vanquished by another great god, and sometimes caused by evil spirits, demons. The Hebrew Bible mostly dispenses with these and usually depicts God as all powerful, but also all good. This left a gaping logical hole: how then could you explain evil in the world? Ironically, the demons come back in the New Testament, and now there is a nemesis to God again, Satan.
[8] I do not call them symbolic, because they are presented as literal and historical events.
[9] E.g., Isaiah 45:14; 60:3, 5-6, 9, 11; Matthew 2:11.
[10] E.g., 1 Kings 11:23-25; 9:10, 11.
[11] E.g., cf. Daniel 2
[12] Of course it could be argued that modern Christianity largely ignores these promises, with their faith taking a vastly different focus, or by pushing these promises into the future, but that is a topic for later.
[13] See chapter two of Sapiens, by Yuval Harari, in the section “The Legend of Peugeot.” Or try to think of one thing that you greatly value which has a purely physical existence. Even for those who greatly value physical things, it is actually intangible benefits that they get from such things.
[14] An author and philosopher friend of mine, Daniel Rogers, raised a point recently that I had not thought of. He objects to the expression “dual fulfillment” because he views such prophetic fulfillment as typological. I agree with him that many if not all of the repeated prophetic fulfillments were viewed as typological, and should not merely be seen as dual or multi-fulfillment; but I would also like to reiterate that Israel saw these fulfillments as actual historical events, and therefore multi-fulfillment is an appropriate term, even if modern preachers which he and I both know often fail to see the perhaps more important meaning of the typology behind them.
[15] 2 Samuel 7
[16] E.g., Isaiah 9:6
[17] Many of the narratives of the Bible have people named to reflect something in the narrative. For instance, we’re told at the beginning of Ruth that there was famine in the land, so Elimelech moved his family to Moab, where he and his two sons died; what most moderns probably miss is that the names of the two sons mean “sickness” and “wasting” in Hebrew.
[18] 2 Kings 23:26; 24:3
[19] 2 Samuel 7; 22:44-45; Isaiah 2:2-4
[20] Isaiah 11:11-16; Jeremiah 31; Ezekiel 37. Another reason these might be glossed over is because the religious culture in which I have experience denies Zionism.
[21] Matthew 27:52; cf. Daniel 7:18, 22
[22] Most secular scholars view Daniel as written in the 2nd century. Darius the Mede is also considered by most scholars to be a fictional character in Daniel; however, Steven Anderson makes a fascinating argument for the historical reliability of Xenophon over Herodotus, and contends that Darius the Mede is Cyaxares II (Darius the Mede: A Reappraisal); although, his argument is rejected by most scholars.
[23] It’s not quite clear when you would begin and end the count, anyway. Jerusalem first fell to the Babylonians in 597, but was not destroyed until their rebellions brought on destruction in 587/6. The first wave of exiles that returned under Cyrus would have been around 538, less than 50 years after the last captives were carried off. I guess if you wanted to find a literal 70 years, the Temple was completed around 516, seven decades after its destruction. But Jeremiah 25 also speaks of punishing the king of Babylon at the end of that seventy years, which actually fell in 539. Seven decades before 539 actually puts you pretty close to where the Babylonians began to exact tribute of Judah’s kings, but more than a decade away from when the first successful conquest of the city occurred.
[24] Josephus in Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities mentions at least a dozen, including Ezekias, defeated by Herod in 47 BCE, and Judas son of Ezekias, Simon of Perea, Judas the Galilean, and Theudas. Some of these are even mentioned in the New Testament itself, as in Acts 5:33-38 and 21:38. Even the Samaritans got their own Messiah in the mid first century, named Dositheos, recorded by Origen. (Contra Celsum). The last major Jewish Messiah, Simon bar Kokhba, brought the final revolt that was brutally quashed by the Romans in 135 CE.
[25] I also think this is true despite the fact that Daniel’s numbers do not exactly align with the historical events that they seem to be referencing. The first Seven sevens (in theory, 539-490 BCE) ends with the anointing of the prince, a key figure we’ve already seen in Ezekiel, which probably refers to Zerubbabel (See the Jewish Study Bible); the 62 sevens (490-56) takes us to what was probably Antiochus IV’s killing of the priest Onias III, and the destruction of the sanctuary, which actually happened in 167, so Daniel’s numbers are already overshooting by more than a century. After this we cannot keep adding the sevens. The covenant Antiochus IV made for one week, could have only fallen within his rule from 175 to 164, and the decree to end sacrifice, which actually matches the time of the period of 3.5 sevens, was from 167-164. Daniel again shows knowledge of Antiochus IV’s reign in 12:21-39; however, his details derail from actual history from 11:40 onward, which is scholars’ reasoning for dating the last half of the book to the period between the ending of Temple worship and its restoration, 167-164.
[26] Daniel 9:27; 11:31; 12:11
[27] John 10:22
[28] Matthew 24:15; Mark 13:14
[29] E.g., 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17; Revelation 22:12-13; Philippians 3:20. Interestingly, there is a minority view in Christendom which views many if not all of the prophecies regarding Christ’s return as having already occurred; this view is known as Preterism. The reason for such a view quickly becomes apparent when reading many of the passages of Christ second coming as being “at hand” or happening during the lifetime of those who were living then. E.g., 1 Peter 4:7; Matthew 24:3-34, Revelation 1:3-7; 21:1-22:7, 20. Of course other passages seem to recognize that it was delayed, e.g., 2 Peter 3:1-13.
[30] John 18:36
[31] Colossians 1:6-20; cf. Acts 1:8
[32] Galatians 4:24-26; Hebrews 12:22; Revelation 1:6; 3:12
[33] Revelation 21:23; 22:5.