You don’t accept Antiochus IV because it breaks your and the Adventist understanding of Daniel 8. That’s simply not a good reason. The little horn arises from the four kings, not the four winds,a tortured linguistic interpretation. Antiochus arose immediately from the four successors to Alexander, and was that power who desecrated the temple, not the papacy.
Additionally, the time period of chapter 9 is not cut off from that of chapter 8 as Adventist expositors like to posit. That is simply a misreading of the Hebrew term for cut off, or determined. Kate went down this road on a previous thread.
George, I know all the Adventist arguments. I taught them. I no longer buy them. If you do, that’s fine. I accept those that do are still Christians in good faith. Please extend that acceptance to others. We can differ on these issues, and still believe in Jesus together.
Steve…Akhenaten’s reign as Pharaoh of Egypt and his controversial shift, forcing the population to monotheism and worshiping only the god, Aten, is not a folk tale. You can look him up on Wikipedia or other more reliable sources if you choose. He ruled for 17 years, in what was the 18th dynasty, dying around 1336 B.C.
My only point was, for the lesson authors to give any credence to Egypt as a bastion of atheism and secularism as a fulfillment of the King of the South prophecy is patently ridiculous on its face. Akhenaten was the lone exception to their polytheism. The fact of being polytheistic makes it impossible to be an atheist. And their religious practices were anything but secular.
Frank,
You make a case that the four winds in Daniel is from a “tortured linguistic interpretation” but you completely ignore proof I presented to you on a separate post concerning the linguistic meaning of the word “Chathak” as meaning “cut-off” not just from biblical but from linguistic expert sources such as the MIshnah Ancient rabbinic literature, Hebrew-English Dictionary, and others? Is this a consistent position?
The four kings that succeeded Alexander were: Cassander, Ptolemy, Rabbinic Antigonus, and Seleucus and you don’t find that the 8th down-line from Seleucus is a stretch as qualifying for the 4th king?
Please see above, not only Kate provided you with a lot of information but I did as well and you never admitted that maybe there is something in this you have not considered before.
I am still waiting fr your reply on whether you believe if the 70-week prophecy points to Jesus’s ministry and death or not, and if you do, how do you account for your inconsistent approach to the Historicist method.
I have heard you say this many times. You see Frank, for me (someone who spent 25 years outside of the SDAC) is not about proving their position, right or wrong, much less believing in their interpretations by default. For me s about believing truth.
Kate is a scholar in this area, and presented that the posited meaning of chatak as cut off from a larger period of time is totally alien to the language and culture of that time. She has said that if one used the word to mean this, they would have been looked at as if they had three heads. She is not alone in that observation. Maybe you conveniently forgot this in your defensive zeal of Adventist interpretation. It is not only you who are concerned with truth, George. The fact that you would insinuate that my motives are different is just flat insulting.