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In the Old Testament prophetic book of Jeremiah, we encounter our second ground rule. The prophet Jeremiah lived just before the Babylonian captivity. He looked that catastrophe straight in the eye and stated that, though oral ball in the suffering is caused, it would have an end. He predicted that the time of captivity for the Jewish nation would be 70 years: "And thus says the Lord: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place" (Jer. 29:10).
The prophet Daniel lived through this captivity. When it started, he was a young lad in Jerusalem. He was taken captive to Babylon and rose in the ranks of royal advisers. Later in his life, he came across this prophecy of Jeremiah and realize that the seventy years was close to being completed (Dan. 9). Jeremiah's prophecy was about to be fulfilled -- but not with the precision that a modern Western reader might expect.
This prophecy of the seventy years is one of the only instances in which we can compare the prophetic time of the Bible with our modern concept of historical time. Both the prediction and the fulfillment are recorded in the Bible. As a result, scholars and historians have struggled to make the historical events of the captivity fit the seventy that Jeremiah predicted. It simply never works out exactly; rather, the events fit into either sixty-seven years or seventy-one years. Even a staunch literalist such as Walvoord admits this in "Daniel, The Key to Prophetic Revelation."
If you assume that God is omniscient and omnipotent, the natural question is, "Why would God revealed to Jeremiah a nice round numbers such as seventy when the actual time. We turn out to be a little less or a smidgen more?" The answer turns out to be quite simple. As Catholic and Protestant scholars alike have long recognized, in Old Testament times, numbers had a symbolic meaning.
Often, the symbolic meaning bears more importance than the literal numerical value. The number three was to the number of God. The number four was the number symbolizing Earth. Seven (three plus four) and twelve (three times four) signified God working in the world. Ten was the number of completion. Even multiples of these numbers were important to the ancient Jews. In the Jewish calendar, the seventh month was the most sacred, being the mom of the Feast of Trumpets, Yom Kippur, and the Feast of Tabernacles. Numbers that relate to dates and times were particularly significant.
The Bible even uses two Greek words for two types of time. Chronological time is kronos (the root of the words chronometer and chronology), whereas symbol-laden, salvific time is kairos. This kind of time is described in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8; "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under Heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted...."
So what might be the symbolism of the seventy years in Jeremiah? Seventy is a result of multiplying ten and seven. These numbers signify the completion of God's working in the world. In that case, that work involved the punishment of Israel. The captivity of Daniel and his fellow Jews was not seventy years, but the judgment of God was complete.
This does not match our modern concept of chronological time, but it speaks to something more important -- namely, symbol-laden, salvific time. The sixty - seven (or seventy-one) years of the Babylonian captivity was close enough to switch to seventy years for an observer to notice the correspondence, yet the significant number seventy was preserved. Numbers in prophecy denote a symbolic meaning that trumps any empirical value.
We must remind ourselves of this ground rule every time we read a number in the Bible. What is its symbolic meaning, if any? For example, the importance of the number one thousand is an immense. Jewish tradition teaches that this was the length of the Davidic kingdom. But when the Bible states that God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, it is inappropriate to start identifying which hills are being included. One thousand is the product of ten times ten times ten; thus it is a complete and perfect number. The number represents something more than 999 plus one. God's wealth is totally complete.
We see the ancient significance of numbers at work even outside of prophecy. In Matthew 1:17, the author organizes Christ's genealogy around the number fourteen. There are fourteen generations from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the Babylonian captivity, and fourteen from the Babylonian captivity to Jesus. This split the genealogy into "from promise given to promise fulfilled," "from promise fulfilled to promise lost," and finally "from promise lost to promise fulfilled eternally." In addition, some scholars notes that the number fourteen was the number of Cain David, which would remind a reader again and again that Jesus was the son of David. All of this is easily lost on the modern reader who does not study the ancient attitude towards numbers and their meaning.