The temple saying & traditions before Mark.

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spin
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Re: The temple saying & traditions before Mark.

Post by spin »

Bernard Muller wrote:to spin,
spin wrote:
I've already pointed out (at the end of the post above) that in Ezek. 4:5 the number of years of punishment assigned to Israel was the number of days Ezekiel was to lie on his side, ie 390 days. A similar indication of years for days is found in Num 14:34 "According to the number of the days in which you spied out the land, forty days, for every day a year, you shall bear your iniquity, forty years, and you shall know my displeasure." Years for days is nothing new in Hebrew culture.
The ones who spied the land (which will become Israel) for 40 days lied in their report about what they saw, discouraging the Israelites of Moses to invade it. So God says they will be punished by having them in the wilderness for 40 years, until they all die.
Once again it is well explained and that does not say one day is equal to one year. Or that one appointed time is the same than one year. Or a week is 7 years.
All this denial to try to make your stupid theory work. 40 days yield 40 years, 390 days yield 390 years. Six days plus the sabbath paralleling six years plus a sabbath year. A sabbath of years. Jubilees' weeks of years. It would be hard for a listener not to make the connection in Daniel 9 between weeks and weeks of years, a connection that you are desperate to deny.

1. There is no reason to contemplate the theory that the noun שבעים means anything other than "weeks" in Dan 9 and what those weeks signify can only be weeks of days or weeks of years—it is left unspecified which, though starting with Jeremiah's 70 years weighs in favor of "years"—, but 10:2 uses "weeks of days" in contrast to 9:25-7.

2. Seven is an adjective, which with a plural ending means "seventy". The notion of "sevens" is unjustified and counter-intuitive. (Using the ellipsis in 1 Sam 2:5 to try to justify "seven" as a noun is just silly. Just ask "seven what?" to see. Ellipsis.) This use of "sevens" is a modern concept and retrojecting it 2200 years ignores the history of numbers. (You might enjoy George Ifrah's From One to Zero.)

3. The spreadsheet approach used to arrive at seventy "sevens" is another modern conception that won't find any equivalents 2200 years ago. All the conjecture about how the people of the period could have arrived at the theory's conclusion are modern retrojections. Numbers weren't available. Words render the process outlandish. And notations in sand require an undemonstrated abstraction. Conjecture is all you have, conjecture based on modern ideas. It would be interesting to know how you conceive of the writers arriving at your conclusion 2200 years ago.

4. Your efforts to justify the christian amalgamation of the seven weeks and the sixty-two weeks are as baseless as the christian inspiration to make the two anointed figures become one, which is also part of your theory. So in order to preserve that christian inspired amalgam, you have to negate all the signs to the contrary. A) Because one rabbi wanted to ignore the atnach, you hopefully can. B) despite the waw syntactic marker of the start of a clause, you want to ignore it and claim the clause following the 62 weeks doesn't need a waw. C) There is no reason to divide the seven from the sixty-two if they were meant to be read as sixty-nine, hence the ridiculous recourse to seven being special and 62 being the age of Darius the Mede! Adding these unlikelihoods together should show you that your theory is worthless, but you choose to demonstrate the fact that it is fringe lunacy by picking those gross improbabilities to preserve the theory.

Though you seem happy to talk about anything other than your theory, if you really want to keep waltzing around the fact that you are pushing nonsense on stilts, I guess I can oblige you by continuing to point out the nonsense.
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Bernard Muller
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Re: The temple saying & traditions before Mark.

Post by Bernard Muller »

to spin,
All this denial to try to make your stupid theory work. 40 days yield 40 years, 390 days yield 390 years.
Six days plus the sabbath paralleling six years plus a sabbath year. A sabbath of years. Jubilees' weeks of years. It would be hard for a listener not to make the connection in Daniel 9 between weeks and weeks of years, a connection that you are desperate to deny.
Not true, 40 days do not equate 40 years, 390 days do not equate 390 years. Day is not year in any of your quoted verses. I wrote earlier: It is like a judge saying: I send you in jail for five weeks, equal to the number of months you broke your parole. That does not mean one week is equal to one month. What is equal in the number of weeks (5) and the number of months (5).
Your parallelism is very far-fetched. And then, we are talking about days, not "weeks".
Leviticus & Jubilees (written after 'Daniel') needed to be explicit and both mentioned "of years" which is not the case in Daniel 9. There was no precedent for "weeks" on its own (without "of year") to mean 7 years.

Listener? most being Illiterate ones, making the connection in Daniel 9 between weeks and weeks of years? I rather think they would be puzzled about these "weeks". And because of the last "week" events did not happened with a timeline that would justify "weeks" as week of years (see next note), and of course the "weeks" in Dan 9:24-26 could not be periods of seven consecutive days, they would be asking for explanation.
Note: Antiochus IV very obvious strengthening of the Greek covenant and the cessation of the Jewish sacrifices happened within a short time in Jerusalem (in 167 BCE) (1 Macc. 1), not with a time interval of 3.5 years (& not 7 years before the reconsecration and/or Antiochus' death).
And the "he" in Dan 9:27 is Antiochus, not Menelaus.
1. There is no reason to contemplate the theory that the noun שבעים means anything other than "weeks" in Dan 9 and what those weeks signify can only be weeks of days or weeks of years—it is left unspecified which, though starting with Jeremiah's 70 years weighs in favor of "years"—, but 10:2 uses "weeks of days" in contrast to 9:25-7.
I already stated there are plenty of reasons for שבעים not to mean 7 years. And in Dan 10 שבעים does not mean 7 years but rather "three sevens days" or "three weeks of days". So why would "Daniel" specify "days" in Dan 10, but not "years" in Dan 9? Why would "Daniel", if he emulated Lev 25:8 & Jeremiah's "seventy years", not write "seventy weeks of years"?
As for "seven(s)" being used as a noun, let's say "Daniel" was innovative and made OT firsts, as I shown on an earlier posting. And you are the one who proposed a translation in Dan 9:25 where "wide" & "sharp", normally adjectives, become nouns:
The wide and the sharp will be built for 62 weeks
.
2. Seven is an adjective, which with a plural ending means "seventy". The notion of "sevens" is unjustified and counter-intuitive. ...
The notion of "sevens" works superbly, but not your weeks of 7 years with the consequent 490 years. And don't tell me the Jews then did not have a faintest idea when Cyrus reigned over Babylon, when he allowed ancestors of some 160's Jews to come back to Jerusalem and (allegedly) permitted the temple to be rebuilt (Isaiah 44:28).
That info could be obtained in different ways, including from astronomers in Babylon and Alexandria.
The Seder Olam was more motivated by religious consideration than for historical correctness, as I explained on earlier postings.
3. The spreadsheet approach used to arrive at seventy "sevens" is another modern conception that won't find any equivalents 2200 years ago. All the conjecture about how the people of the period could have arrived at the theory's conclusion are modern retrojections. Numbers weren't available. Words render the process outlandish. And notations in sand require an undemonstrated abstraction. Conjecture is all you have, conjecture based on modern ideas. It would be interesting to know how you conceive of the writers arriving at your conclusion 2200 years ago.
I put that spreadsheet so my reader can check me out. I did not say that spreadsheet had to be used by Jews in 167 BCE. Simply counting the years (starting at 1) from Cyrus' decree up to all occurrences of שבע ("seven") in the numbers add up to 70 will do fine. Some Jews then knew how to add up, don't you think so?
4. Your efforts to justify the christian amalgamation of the seven weeks and the sixty-two weeks are as baseless as the christian inspiration to make the two anointed figures become one, which is also part of your theory. So in order to preserve that christian inspired amalgam, you have to negate all the signs to the contrary. A) Because one rabbi wanted to ignore the atnach, you hopefully can. B) despite the waw syntactic marker of the start of a clause, you want to ignore it and claim the clause following the 62 weeks doesn't need a waw. C) There is no reason to divide the seven from the sixty-two if they were meant to be read as sixty-nine, hence the ridiculous recourse to seven being special and 62 being the age of Darius the Mede! Adding these unlikelihoods together should show you that your theory is worthless, but you choose to demonstrate the fact that it is fringe lunacy by picking those gross improbabilities to preserve the theory.
If the new clause stated by "And for sixty-two weeks" does not make sense with "remained built" in the perfect tense, because by your 171 year BCE (when your last "week" of 7 years would start) the city or/and temple was still "remained built". In that case, the imperfect should have been used.
It make even less sense with simply "built", implying it took centuries to rebuild the city (note: Isaiah 44:28 predicted (after the fact!) that Jerusalem was rebuilt during Cyrus' reign).
And the LXX (written many centuries before the masoretic text) did not allow that nonsense.

As for the 7th to 10th century atnach, who knows what went into the head of the masorete who put it here. Certainly, they could no have asked "Daniel" for advice.
Some of these atnachs have been demonstrated to be just pause placed within a verse, at best "translated" as a comma. For example the first verse of Genesis has an atnach placed under "God": "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.". That certainly does not indicate the beginning of a new clause. See also Dan 9:2 where the atnach is placed below "scrolls/books" instead of right before the embedded clause about Jeremiah.

I did some research with references from http://lc.bfbs.org.uk/e107_files/downlo ... oretes.pdf and
http://biblehub.com/wlc/daniel/9.htm
My conclusions:
a) The masorete did delimit what we know as verse by a silluq under the last word of the verse.
That's done for every verse in Daniel 9.
b) The masorete always put an atnach (and only one) in each verse, regardless if the verse is short or have only one clause (Dan 10:2) or long with multiple clauses.

The meaning of the atnach in Dan 9:25 might be ambiguous, but the masorete did not indicate a sentence (verse) started at "and (for) sixty-two "weeks"". If he did, he would have used a silluq under the preceding word.

By splitting the 69 "weeks" into two groups of 7 and 62 (each one somewhat justified in 'Daniel'), the author avoided to write "sixty-nine", which does not have any godly justification whatsoever in 'Daniel' or the OT.
Though you seem happy to talk about anything other than your theory, if you really want to keep waltzing around the fact that you are pushing nonsense on stilts, I guess I can oblige you by continuing to point out the nonsense.
Though you seem happy to talk about anything other than your theory, if you really want to keep waltzing around the fact that you are pushing nonsense on stilts, I guess I can oblige you by continuing to point out the nonsense.

Cordially, Bernard
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spin
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Re: The temple saying & traditions before Mark.

Post by spin »

Bernard Muller wrote:to spin,
All this denial to try to make your stupid theory work. 40 days yield 40 years, 390 days yield 390 years.
Six days plus the sabbath paralleling six years plus a sabbath year. A sabbath of years. Jubilees' weeks of years. It would be hard for a listener not to make the connection in Daniel 9 between weeks and weeks of years, a connection that you are desperate to deny.
Not true, 40 days do not equate 40 years, 390 days do not equate 390 years.Day is not year in any of your quoted verses. I wrote earlier: It is like a judge saying: I send you in jail for five weeks, equal to the number of months you broke your parole. That does not mean one week is equal to one month. What is equal in the number of weeks (5) and the number of months (5).
You should stop these straw men. There is no argument because you are being irrelevant. No-one equated anything, except you.
Bernard Muller wrote:Your parallelism is very far-fetched. And then, we are talking about days, not "weeks".
The only reason you can say this is because here you ignore my comments on weeks of years being paralleled to weeks of days. (Your far-fetched comment is an empty assertion.)
Bernard Muller wrote:Leviticus & Jubilees (written after 'Daniel') needed to be explicit and both mentioned "of years" which is not the case in Daniel 9. There was no precedent for "weeks" on its own (without "of year") to mean 7 years.
Again a misrepresentation of what was said to you.

Leviticus is stating the cultural issue: it is only obvious it would be explicit. Jubilees uses "weeks of years" structurally, so its explicitness is obvious. Nevertheless we have a clear idiomatic use of weeks with years and despite your need to deny that, there is little chance it would be ignored in Dan 9.
Bernard Muller wrote:Listener? most being Illiterate ones, making the connection in Daniel 9 between weeks and weeks of years?
Well, if they didn't know about sabbath years and hence weeks of years, you could be right, but it is ridiculous to think that they did not know the agricultural calendar and its implications. Land was by law left in the sabbath year. You want these illiterate peasants not to know about their livelihood. You joke.
Bernard Muller wrote:I rather think they would be puzzled about these "weeks". And because of the last "week" events did not happened with a timeline that would justify "weeks" as week of years (see next note), and of course the "weeks" in Dan 9:24-26 could not be periods of seven consecutive days, they would be asking for explanation.
Note: Antiochus IV very obvious strengthening of the Greek covenant and the cessation of the Jewish sacrifices happened within a short time in Jerusalem (in 167 BCE) (1 Macc. 1), not with a time interval of 3.5 years (& not 7 years before the reconsecration and/or Antiochus' death).
Another non-reflection on anything I have said.
Bernard Muller wrote:And the "he" in Dan 9:27 is Antiochus, not Menelaus.
Yet another strawman. This so far has been one crock of nonsense.
Bernard Muller wrote:
1. There is no reason to contemplate the theory that the noun שבעים means anything other than "weeks" in Dan 9 and what those weeks signify can only be weeks of days or weeks of years—it is left unspecified which, though starting with Jeremiah's 70 years weighs in favor of "years"—, but 10:2 uses "weeks of days" in contrast to 9:25-7.
I already stated there are plenty of reasons for שבעים not to mean 7 years.
Strawman, once again. Get this into your head: שבעים the noun, means "weeks". It does not mean seven years. Your understanding of language is pissing me off in its limits. When you ignore context you tend not to understand the message. Words take on collocations given appropriate contexts for those collocations. The word does not mean the collocation. You derive the collocation from the word in its context. The word "man" does not mean "provider", but in the context of a housewife talking about "the man of the house" the collocation of the man as the provider is clear. The word "week" is a concept of seven time units, normally days, though Jubilees' "weeks of years" shows further use of the term, probably originally through metaphor, but weeks of years is institutional, given Lev 25.

Now, you have babbled about the form of the word שבעים without knowing anything about defective spellings, so claiming שבעים doesn't mean weeks because it is not spelled weeks is just nonsense. The word seven שבע is an adjective, whose "plural" form means "seventy", which is also an adjective. Dan 9's שבעים שבעים is an adjective noun combination, ie "seventy weeks".
Bernard Muller wrote:And in Dan 10 שבעים does not mean 7 years but rather "three sevens days" or "three weeks of days". So why would "Daniel" specify "days" in Dan 10, but not "years" in Dan 9? Why would "Daniel", if he emulated Lev 25:8 & Jeremiah's "seventy years", not write "seventy weeks of years"?
Umm, it's a vision: language is used cryptically. That does not mean there is no logic, but that the logic is arcane.
Bernard Muller wrote:As for "seven(s)" being used as a noun, let's say "Daniel" was innovative and made OT firsts, as I shown on an earlier posting.
Let's just say you are overtly bullshitting at this point. You have no precedent for the thought you insinuate into Daniel. Being in a vision doesn't mean "no logic".
Bernard Muller wrote:And you are the one who proposed a translation in Dan 9:25 where "wide" & "sharp", normally adjectives, become nouns:
The wide and the sharp will be built for 62 weeks
.
The word for "wide" is actually a noun in Hebrew and the word for "sharp" can be both.
Bernard Muller wrote:
2. Seven is an adjective, which with a plural ending means "seventy". The notion of "sevens" is unjustified and counter-intuitive. ...
The notion of "sevens" works superbly,...
"Superbly"!
:whistling:

You might have liked to try to justify the nonsense about sevens instead of this amusing assertion.
Bernard Muller wrote:...but not your weeks of 7 years with the consequent 490 years. And don't tell me the Jews then did not have a faintest idea when Cyrus reigned over Babylon, when he allowed ancestors of some 160's Jews to come back to Jerusalem and (allegedly) permitted the temple to be rebuilt (Isaiah 44:28).
The existence in Daniel of "Darius the Mede" should show you just how confused the writers were about Persian and Median chronology.

As you keep trying to peddle Hebrew ultra-accuracy, tell me, when was the temple rebuilt? Ezra 6:14 talks of commands to finish the temple from Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes. So under which Darius was the completion date (6:15)? Why according to 2 Macc 1:18ff is it Nehemiah who is first to rekindle the temple's fire and in fact is attributed with building the temple?
Bernard Muller wrote:That info could be obtained in different ways, including from astronomers in Babylon and Alexandria.
The Seder Olam was more motivated by religious consideration than for historical correctness, as I explained on earlier postings.
While Daniel instead was motivated by ultra-accuracy! I guess you cannot see the incoherence of your approach.
Bernard Muller wrote:
3. The spreadsheet approach used to arrive at seventy "sevens" is another modern conception that won't find any equivalents 2200 years ago. All the conjecture about how the people of the period could have arrived at the theory's conclusion are modern retrojections. Numbers weren't available. Words render the process outlandish. And notations in sand require an undemonstrated abstraction. Conjecture is all you have, conjecture based on modern ideas. It would be interesting to know how you conceive of the writers arriving at your conclusion 2200 years ago.
I put that spreadsheet so my reader can check me out. I did not say that spreadsheet had to be used by Jews in 167 BCE. Simply counting the years (starting at 1) from Cyrus' decree up to all occurrences of שבע ("seven") in the numbers add up to 70 will do fine. Some Jews then knew how to add up, don't you think so?
Who said the spreadsheet was used by Jews in 167 BCE? Oh, I get it, another strawman. I understand that you don't see how outlandish your proposal is, how unreflective of anything of the time we are dealing with, how modern the conception is.
Bernard Muller wrote:
4. Your efforts to justify the christian amalgamation of the seven weeks and the sixty-two weeks are as baseless as the christian inspiration to make the two anointed figures become one, which is also part of your theory. So in order to preserve that christian inspired amalgam, you have to negate all the signs to the contrary. A) Because one rabbi wanted to ignore the atnach, you hopefully can. B) despite the waw syntactic marker of the start of a clause, you want to ignore it and claim the clause following the 62 weeks doesn't need a waw. C) There is no reason to divide the seven from the sixty-two if they were meant to be read as sixty-nine, hence the ridiculous recourse to seven being special and 62 being the age of Darius the Mede! Adding these unlikelihoods together should show you that your theory is worthless, but you choose to demonstrate the fact that it is fringe lunacy by picking those gross improbabilities to preserve the theory.
If the new clause stated by "And for sixty-two weeks" does not make sense with "remained built" in the perfect tense, because by your 171 year BCE (when your last "week" of 7 years would start) the city or/and temple was still "remained built". In that case, the imperfect should have been used.
I've already shown this sad attempt is piffle. I pointed you to a court case in which the question was repeatedly asked "How long has the house been built?" You ignored it.
Bernard Muller wrote:It make even less sense with simply "built",...
It would seem that you are merely showing me the limits of your English usage...
Bernard Muller wrote:...implying it took centuries to rebuild the city
...further demonstration... though I think you are just trying to be difficult.
Bernard Muller wrote:(note: Isaiah 44:28 predicted (after the fact!) that Jerusalem was rebuilt during Cyrus' reign).
Built under Cyrus... built under Darius... built by Nehemiah....
Bernard Muller wrote:And the LXX (written many centuries before the masoretic text) did not allow that nonsense.

As for the 7th to 10th century atnach, who knows what went into the head of the masorete who put it here. Certainly, they could no have asked "Daniel" for advice.
So you'd prefer your unlearned desires to the understanding of native speakers of the language.
Bernard Muller wrote:Some of these atnachs have been demonstrated to be just pause placed within a verse, at best "translated" as a comma. For example the first verse of Genesis has an atnach placed under "God": "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.".
It is not a multi-clause verse.
Bernard Muller wrote:That certainly does not indicate the beginning of a new clause. See also Dan 9:2 where the atnach is placed below "scrolls/books" instead of right before the embedded clause about Jeremiah.
What follows the atnach is an embedded noun clause.
Bernard Muller wrote:I did some research with references from http://lc.bfbs.org.uk/e107_files/downlo ... oretes.pdf and
http://biblehub.com/wlc/daniel/9.htm
My conclusions:
a) The masorete did delimit what we know as verse by a silluq under the last word of the verse.
That's done for every verse in Daniel 9.
b) The masorete always put an atnach (and only one) in each verse, regardless if the verse is short or have only one clause (Dan 10:2) or long with multiple clauses.

The meaning of the atnach in Dan 9:25 might be ambiguous, but the masorete did not indicate a sentence (verse) started at "and (for) sixty-two "weeks"". If he did, he would have used a silluq under the preceding word.
Why are you confusing atnach and silluq here? You've already related the silluq to the end of a verse. The atnach by its nature does not mark the end of a verse. It was introduced to facilitate reciting. That cashed out to separating the first sense group from what followed. It may not have been perfect, but in a multi-clause verse it separated the first clause. You might find rare exceptions regarding accuracy, but the practice is quite plain. Your argument is essentially once again, you know better than the masoretes in this case.

However, in real life we start off with the Masoretes as the default position and to go against it you need to provide evidence to say why you disagree.
Bernard Muller wrote:By splitting the 69 "weeks" into two groups of 7 and 62 (each one somewhat justified in 'Daniel'), the author avoided to write "sixty-nine", which does not have any godly justification whatsoever in 'Daniel' or the OT.
This is pure unjustied assertion. The verse states that the prince the anointed came seven weeks after the word to rebuild and for the next sixty-two weeks the city stayed built. So when exactly in this scheme was the city finished? To me it is obviously after seven weeks.
Bernard Muller wrote:
Though you seem happy to talk about anything other than your theory, if you really want to keep waltzing around the fact that you are pushing nonsense on stilts, I guess I can oblige you by continuing to point out the nonsense.
Though you seem happy to talk about anything other than your theory, if you really want to keep waltzing around the fact that you are pushing nonsense on stilts, I guess I can oblige you by continuing to point out the nonsense.
This certainly seems to be a reflection of your whole sad silly discourse: you have so little substance that I can write your lines for you.

There is absolutely no substantive evidence whatsoever to support your conjecture and you have continued to demonstrate the fact.
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Bernard Muller
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Re: The temple saying & traditions before Mark.

Post by Bernard Muller »

to spin,
You should stop these straw men. There is no argument because you are being irrelevant. No-one equated anything, except you.
So what did you bring that parallel use of days and years? what would be the relevance with the issues in Daniel 9?
Very remote and far-fetched in my view.
The only reason you can say this is because here you ignore my comments on weeks of years being paralleled to weeks of days. (Your far-fetched comment is an empty assertion.)
We may have weeks of days in Daniel 10, but we don't have "weeks of years" in Dan 9, just "weeks".
Again a misrepresentation of what was said to you.
I was not even trying to comment on your ideas. I was giving my viewpoint on that matter.
Leviticus is stating the cultural issue: it is only obvious it would be explicit. Jubilees uses "weeks of years" structurally, so its explicitness is obvious. Nevertheless we have a clear idiomatic use of weeks with years and despite your need to deny that, there is little chance it would be ignored in Dan 9.
but weeks of years is institutional, given Lev 25.
There are 32 times "seven years" in the OT (including 15 in Genesis starting at 29:18) which could have been easily rendered as "week of year". But none of them did.
One verse only does not make it a cultural issue or institutional. Jubilees came later than Daniel and just adapted "sabbaths of years" to "Jubilees of years". Lev 25 never made "sabbath(s)" on its own equivalent to period(s) of seven years. And there is no "of years" in Daniel 9 following "weeks".
Also, I notice that Lev 25:8 has "seven times seven years", but Daniel 9:25 has "weeks/sevens seven" and not "seven times weeks/sevens". It is a clear distinction from Lev 25:8. And it also looks "Daniel" tried to avoid his audience to think about multiplication. With some added punctuation his "weeks/sevens seven would be "weeks/sevens: seven"
Well, if they didn't know about sabbath years and hence weeks of years, you could be right, but it is ridiculous to think that they did not know the agricultural calendar and its implications. Land was by law left in the sabbath year. You want these illiterate peasants not to know about their livelihood. You joke.
I don't see any connection between sabbath years (one year every 7 years) and weeks of years (duration of 7 years). More so when "of years" is not specified in Daniel. As for knowing when the Sabbath year will come, they only had to keep tab of the elapsed years from the last Sabbath year.
Another non-reflection on anything I have said
Why should I always reflect on what you said? I can be saying what I think, regardless of what you said. That's my right.
Yet another strawman. This so far has been one crock of nonsense.
If the "he" is not Menelaus in Dan 9:27 (but rather Antiochus in 167 BCE, which is absolutely certain), that means your 7 years starting with Menelaus (allegedly making the Greek covenant strong in 171 BCE) is wrong. And with your last week meaning 7 years proven to be wrong, and your "weeks" meaning the same (7 years), your theory dies right here.
שבעים the noun, means "weeks". It does not mean seven years.
That's what I have been saying all along.
The word "week" is a concept of seven time units, normally days
"time units" normally days"? Not normally, always "days". Where does "week(s)" is not period(s) of 7 days in the OT? Nowhere, not even in Leviticus 25 ("sabbaths" is not "weeks"), except for Dan 9:24,25 & 26.
Now, you have babbled about the form of the word שבעים without knowing anything about defective spellings, so claiming שבעים doesn't mean weeks because it is not spelled weeks is just nonsense. The word seven שבע is an adjective, whose "plural" form means "seventy", which is also an adjective. Dan 9's שבעים שבעים is an adjective noun combination, ie "seventy weeks".
All I have been saying if "Daniel" used שבעים for "weeks", he would have used שבע for "week" in Daniel 9:27, just as in Genesis, instead of שבוע. That plene form for "week" does not appear anywhere else in the OT.
It is obvious that "Daniel" wanted to make a distinction between "weeks" and week in Dan 9.
Number can be used as noun, such as "the fantastic four" or "the twelve". OK, that's not found in the OT, except in 'Daniel', as I see it. BUT you wrote:
Umm, it's a vision: language is used cryptically. That does not mean there is no logic, but that the logic is arcane.
I agree with that. But that goes both ways, not only for you. As you say: language in a vision is cryptic (& "Daniel" had multiple first in them).
The existence in Daniel of "Darius the Mede" should show you just how confused the writers were about Persian and Median chronology.
As you keep trying to peddle Hebrew ultra-accuracy, tell me, when was the temple rebuilt? Ezra 6:14 talks of commands to finish the temple from Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes. So under which Darius was the completion date (6:15)? Why according to 2 Macc 1:18ff is it Nehemiah who is first to rekindle the temple's fire and in fact is attributed with building the temple?
The only things that the educated Jews had to know is when was the first year of Cyrus relative to their times. Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes & Nehemiah relative times did not matter in the scheme of the seventy sevens.
Built under Cyrus... built under Darius... built by Nehemiah....
Isaiah 44:28 (written soon after the facts) has Jerusalem rebuilt but only the temple foundation laid during the reign of Cyrus.
The temple was rebuilt under Darius' reign.
Nehemiah had the city wall completed and its gates repaired, which encouraged Jews to build houses inside the safety of the walls.
While Daniel instead was motivated by ultra-accuracy! I guess you cannot see the incoherence of your approach.
Why not: "Daniel" was not the Seder Olam. Different thinking, different authors, different times but same goal: the chronology pointing to their (different) targeted year.
About 'Ezra': I am very certain that Ez 4:6-23 (about the city and the wall, not the temple) was relocated from the front of Nehemiah 1 (Ezra & Nehemiah were originally one book) (also Ez 4:24 was added then). But that's something to discuss on Jewish Texts and History, not here.
Who said the spreadsheet was used by Jews in 167 BCE? Oh, I get it, another strawman. I understand that you don't see how outlandish your proposal is, how unreflective of anything of the time we are dealing with, how modern the conception is.
But you accused me that the Jews had to use a spreadsheet like mine to figure out the targeted year was 167 BCE.
I've already shown this sad attempt is piffle. I pointed you to a court case in which the question was repeatedly asked "How long has the house been built?" You ignored it
You are the one who ignored one of my post (viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2405&start=160#p68269):
That is not an answer to the question asked of you: How long has your house been built? You indicate when your house was built. Can you answer my question, please?
50 years if you mean "remained built" for "built". The question is rather strangely stated and subject to confusion.
But did I tell you my house was demolished 2 years ago and I live now in a rented flat? in that case, the Hebrew perfect would be used. But if my house is still standing, so the Hebrew imperfect would apply.
If we look at "Then for sixty-two "weeks" (434 years for you) it shall be put back (imperfect) and remained built (perfect) with squares and moat, but in a troubled time." then that would mean "Daniel" thought the city or/and temple was still put back, and, at the same time, the "remained built" completed (that is "destroyed") in 171 BCE (that's where the last 7 years start for you). "Destroyed", yes according to Dan 9:26, but later (in 167 BCE).
That syntax does not make sense to me.
It is not a multi-clause verse.
That shows the atnach can be put anywhere, not only in front of a clause.
What follows the atnach is an embedded noun clause.
Not immediately: there are two words in between: מספר השנים
Why are you confusing atnach and silluq here? You've already related the silluq to the end of a verse. The atnach by its nature does not mark the end of a verse. It was introduced to facilitate reciting. That cashed out to separating the first sense group from what followed. It may not have been perfect, but in a multi-clause verse it separated the first clause. You might find rare exceptions regarding accuracy, but the practice is quite plain. Your argument is essentially once again, you know better than the masoretes in this case.

However, in real life we start off with the Masoretes as the default position and to go against it you need to provide evidence to say why you disagree.
"atnach by its nature does not mark the end of a verse. It was introduced to facilitate reciting.": I agree with that.
But if the Masoretes wanted to indicate the start of new independent clause, they would have used a silluq instead of an etnach. That shows the Masoretes were hesitant about declaring the start of a new independent clause (from the 1st one), so they put an etnach rather than a silluq.

"Your argument is essentially once again, you know better than the Masoretes in this case": Your argument is you know better than the LXX translator (many centuries before the Masoretes) who, without any ambiguity, linked the seven "weeks" with the sixty-two "weeks".
This is pure unjustified assertion. The verse states that the prince the anointed came seven weeks after the word to rebuild and for the next sixty-two weeks the city stayed built. So when exactly in this scheme was the city finished? To me it is obviously after seven weeks.
That's what you say. But Jeshua the high priest did not come after 49 years (not even close), and the perfect in your "stayed built" would mean the city had been destroyed in 171 BCE (while still staying restored!).
The "stayed built" in combination with "for 62 years" does not make sense.
Furthermore "but in troubled time" indicates a limited time, because there is not indication that during the last Persian kings and the Hellenist ones up to Antiochus IV, time were troubled for the Jews in Jerusalem.

Cordially, Bernard
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Re: The temple saying & traditions before Mark.

Post by spin »

Here is the crux of your piffle, Bernard:
Bernard Muller wrote:The only things that the educated Jews had to know is when was the first year of Cyrus relative to their times. Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes & Nehemiah relative times did not matter in the scheme of the seventy sevens.
Shown that Jewish historiography is incoherent, the example being several conflicting indications (which you didn't check) as to when the temple was finished, you cling to your belief in Jewish ultra-accuracy. It is the one arrow in your quiver: Yeshua cannot be what is talked about in Dan 9:25 because your derived dating would be so inaccurate; the writers cannot mean 490 years because that would be so inaccurate; the one week in 9:27 cannot be the same sort of thing as the weeks in 9:25-26 because that leads to inaccuracies according to your reconstruction of reality.

Jewish historiography is demonstrably not ultra-accurate, but your desire for it to be so drove you to try to make sense of the seventy weeks, leading to your spreadsheet discovery, not knowing that there were no numerals in Hebrew culture at the time. You refuse to see that the thought you employed to get to your theory is based on a cultural notion of presenting information that is completely and utterly unprecedented, but you discount your cultural bias because you are committed to your theory and the questioning of it only makes you cling to it more. You will waltz around taking the least likely positions whenever necessary because of your commitment. Reality, facts and likelihoods are irrelevant to your position, but it is yours so you will keep it against the world.
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Re: The temple saying & traditions before Mark.

Post by Bernard Muller »

to spin,
Can you prove that some Jews in the time of "Daniel" did not know how many years elapsed from Cyrus' first year to their time?
Note: Cyrus permitted the slaves of Babylon (some being ancestors of these Jews) to return home and allegedly, issued a decree to allow the 2nd temple to be built.

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Re: The temple saying & traditions before Mark.

Post by spin »

Bernard Muller wrote:to spin,
Can you prove that some Jews in the time of "Daniel" did not know how many years elapsed from Cyrus' first year to their time?
An amusing attempt at shifting the burden. Your single defense for your theory is an appeal to the ultra-accuracy of Hebrew historiography, yet you never, ever justify it, even in the fact of evidence that you are wrong about accuracy. The Seder Olam is clearly inaccurate and your defense is that the Seder has reasons to be inaccurate, omitting the fact that accuracy is not expected there without saying why it should be accepted in Daniel. The extremely significant event of the completion of the temple is diversely located in Hebrew chronology, demonstrating that accuracy is not to be expected, yet you return again and again arguing from ultra-accuracy. The accuracy of Jewish historiography is your presupposition, so the burden of proof for that accuracy rests squarely on your shoulders and you have failed to supply any proof, none whatsoever, yet here you are trying to put the burden onto me with the outlandish appeal to prove some Jews in the time of "Daniel" did not know how many years elapsed from Cyrus' first year to their time. Ultra-accuracy is your burden, not mine.
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Re: The temple saying & traditions before Mark.

Post by rakovsky »

I'm really late to this party, but it would be nice to have a list of the pro and contra arguments on how to associate the 7 and 62 weeks in Daniel 9:25:
ותדע ותשכל מן־מצא דבר להשיב ולבנות ירושלם עד־משיח נגיד שבעים שבעה ושבעים ששים ושנים תשוב ונבנתה רחוב וחרוץ ובצוק העתים׃

Therefore know and understand
From the going forth of the command to restore and to build Jerusalem until anointed-one prince weeks seven and weeks sixty and two again and shall be built the street and the wall and even in troublesome times
I found arguments that sound reasonable on both sides, but I don't speak Hebrew. To separate the 7 weeks from the 62 weeks, and to say "And 62 weeks again and shall be built the street..." sounds super clunky in English grammar. One would need to say in English "And during 62 weeks the street shall be rebuilt...." But English is not Hebrew, so for all I know, this sounds perfectly fine in Hebrew.
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Re: The temple saying & traditions before Mark.

Post by neilgodfrey »

rakovsky wrote: Tue May 17, 2022 1:16 pm I'm really late to this party, but it would be nice to have a list of the pro and contra arguments on how to associate the 7 and 62 weeks in Daniel 9:25:
ותדע ותשכל מן־מצא דבר להשיב ולבנות ירושלם עד־משיח נגיד שבעים שבעה ושבעים ששים ושנים תשוב ונבנתה רחוב וחרוץ ובצוק העתים׃

Therefore know and understand
From the going forth of the command to restore and to build Jerusalem until anointed-one prince weeks seven and weeks sixty and two again and shall be built the street and the wall and even in troublesome times
I found arguments that sound reasonable on both sides, but I don't speak Hebrew. To separate the 7 weeks from the 62 weeks, and to say "And 62 weeks again and shall be built the street..." sounds super clunky in English grammar. One would need to say in English "And during 62 weeks the street shall be rebuilt...." But English is not Hebrew, so for all I know, this sounds perfectly fine in Hebrew.
I think the explanation is to be found in events that are supposed to be prophesied at the end of each period or weeks.

After 62 weeks the "anointed one is to be cut off or killed. That leaves seven more weeks until the final week, completing the seventy. Yeh, it's clunky, but it is directing readers to think in terms of "when the anointed one is killed" and after that.... -- the maths is meant to remind readers to think of events that happened (according to "divine prophecy") at the end of the period of 62 weeks but prior to the.....
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Re: The temple saying & traditions before Mark.

Post by rakovsky »

Thanks for writing back, Neil.
ותדע ותשכל מן־מצא דבר להשיב ולבנות ירושלם עד־משיח נגיד שבעים שבעה ושבעים ששים ושנים תשוב ונבנתה רחוב וחרוץ ובצוק העתים׃

Therefore know and understand
From the going forth of the command to restore and to build Jerusalem until anointed-one prince
weeks seven
and weeks sixty and two
again and shall be built the street and the wall
and even in troublesome times
A) "From the going forth... until anointed one prince" can't be a stand-alone sentence, so the 7 weeks or the 7 + 62 weeks needs to be added to that clause.
B) "From the going forth... until anointed one prince weeks seven and weeks sixty and two" sounds a little clunky it seems to me, but not awful.
C) "Again and shall be built the street and the wall and even in troublesome times" sounds fine.
D) "Weeks sixty and two again and shall be built the street and the wall and even in troublesome times" sounds fine, I heard from a Hebrew reader.

Hypothesis #1: Option (A) above with the "7 weeks" alone and Option (D). They seems like the most natural sounding combination (like in the JPT and RSV translation).

Hypothesis #2: Options B and C.
They seem OK too (like in Theodotion's, modern KJV's, and Aquila's translations).

Since (B) seems a little clunky, it would be more feasible if there were other places in the Bible that use this kind of double-style expression about time periods. A bit of something like this comes up in Daniel 7:25:
He shall speak pompous words against the Most High, Shall persecute the saints of the Most High, And shall intend to change times and law. Then the saints shall be given into his hand For a time and times and half a time.
Why wouldn't the author in Dan. 7:25 just say 2 and a half years, or 2 and a half days? It seems that Daniel's author might have an unusual way of breaking up times when he talks about durations.

This kind of phrase comes up in Dan 12:7:
And I heard the man clothed in linen, which was upon the waters of the river, when he held up his right hand and his left hand unto heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever that it shall be for a time, times, and an half; and when he shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, all these things shall be finished.
Incidentally, Daniel 9:25-27 narrates a time (7 weeks), a time (62 weeks), and half a time (In the middle of the final "week", a prince stops sacrifices in verse 27).

Furthermore, verse 27 gives a duration (1 week) and then narrates a duration that begins partway through that duration (the stopping of sacrifices halfway through that 1 week). If one were to use verse 27 to assist in interpreting verse 25, it would suggest that verse 25 might also give a duration (from the order to rebuild Jerusalem until the anointed-one prince) and then express another duration that begins partway through that longer duration (the 62 weeks that makes up part of the time from the rebuilding order until the anointed one).

A third hypothesis is that the author of Daniel deliberately wanted to make an open ended prophecy so that the "anointed-one prince" concept could apply to both a person at the end of 7 weeks (like a Persian ruler) and to a person at the end of "7+62" weeks (like a Maccabean ruler or the Davidic Messiah). Tanakh gives those kinds of dual-interpretation Messianic prophecies with David, and perhaps Solomon. I recall hearing that "Cyrus" is a figure of the Messiah in the Book of Isaiah.

The larger picture seems to be that Daniel as a Book contains Messianic prophecies as Rambam asserted, and verse 9:25 says to "Know and understand" the predictions in Daniel 9:25-27, but the book also seems to have deliberate obscurity:
"Go, Daniel, for the matters are obscured and sealed until the time of the End." " -- Dan 12:25
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