The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

24 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
From the Awake! magazine of October 8, 1973, page 18.
The calculation of the “times of the Gentiles” as a period
of 2,520 years, beginning in 607 B.C.E. and ending in
1914 C.E., is the chronological basis of the apocalyptic
message preached worldwide by the Watch Tower
Society.
a year, “just as on a map one inch may stand for one hundred
miles.” 1 In the Bible there are two passages where prophetic
periods are explicitly counted that way: Numbers 14:34 and Ezekiel
4:6.
In the first text, as punishment for their errors, the Israelites
were to wander in the desert for forty years, measured out by the
number of days the spies had spied out the land, forty days, “a day
for a year.”
In the second text Ezekiel was told to lie on his left side for 390
days and on his right side for 40 days, prophetically carrying the
errors of Israel and Judah committed during just as many years, “a
day for a year.”
It should be noted, however, that these specific interpretations
are given to us by the Bible itself. “A day for a year” is nowhere stated
to be a general principle of interpretation that applies also to other
prophetic periods.
The development of the concept that the year-day principle can
indeed apply to any time-related biblical prophecy has a long
history. The shifting nature of its application during that history
surely reveals something as to its reliability.
Its use by Jewish scholars
1 LeRoy Edwin Froom, The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers (Washington, D.C.: Review
and Herald Publishing Association, 1948), Vol. II, p. 124.
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