The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

460 THE GENTILE TIMES RECONSIDERED
may be seen in Dr. Alfred Edersheim’s History of the Jewish Nation from the late
19th century, in which he cites dates for the destruction of Jerusalem from
several learned works, the earliest one of which is Dr.G.B.Winer’s Biblisches
Realwörterbuch from 1847-48 (published four years before Russell was born!),
which gives the year as 588 BC, while a scholar named Clinton has 587, exactly
like modern scholars nowadays! So why did not Mr Russell look to the
competent scholars of his day for the correct date? That would have saved him
from many a mistake and his followers from the long series of disappointments
which they have suffered over the years down till this very day!
The 70 years, the desolation of the land and Daniel 9:2
Well, back to pages 76, 77 of RF’s book where we find another slanted subtitle,
after which he goes on to Daniel 9:2, making an analysis of the Hebrew text,
giving a literal rendering of it and quoting the New World Translation for good
measure (in this he cuts a corner by writing ‘70’ instead of ‘seventy’). The
Hebrew is transliterated, but his system does not seem to conform to any of the
well-known standard systems: it employs the letter [æ], which is only used in
Danish and Norwegian, never in English texts; also, he does not transliterate
the divine name as Jehovah orYahweh as is usual in English-language publications,
but uses the Jewish substitute ‘adônay (‘‘my lord’), which is not really a
transliteration. There are other irregularities in his system, but let this suffice for
the moment.
Strangely enough, in his grammatical analysis he does not deal with the Hebrew
text but with the secondary English rendering, except for the tiny preposition le,
which he somehow maltreats together with the verb with which it is connected.
Also, it is incomplete, as he omits the initial time adverbial (bishenat ‘achat
lemâlekho, ‘in year one of his reign’) and the rest is defective - e.g., the subject in
the first part of the sentence is not just ‘Daniel’, but in Hebrew‘ani Dâniêl,
rendered in NW ‘I myself Daniel’, the inclusion of the personal pronoun ‘ani
(‘I’) showing that the subject is emphatic - Daniel had checked matters for
himself in ‘the Scriptures’. He also omits the quite important adverbial
bassepârim (‘in the Scriptures’) which shows that the aging Daniel did not waste his
time but checked the inspired Scriptures at once when the time was up. The
definition of the direct object (DO) is somewhat incorrect, too: first come the
core words mishpar hashânim (‘number of years’), followed by an embedded
relative clause,‘asher hâyâh debhar-YHWH ‘el-Yirmiyâh-hanâbhî (‘which gave word
of Yahweh to Jeremiah the prophet’). Finally, the last part of the DO is the
clause lemall’ôt lechorebhôt Yerûshalâyim shibhim shanâh, in which lemall’ôt is the
infinitive, le being the infinitive marker and the verb mal’e (‘to fill, fulfill,
complete’) is in the timeless and intensive piel conjugation (‘in order to fully
complete’), while lechorebhôt Yerûshâlayim is a prepositional phrase functioning as
an adverbial (‘in regard to/for Jerusalem’s desolations’), and lastly, shibhim
shanâh, (‘seventy years’) is the direct object. RF’s analysis of the word lemall’ôt,
i.e., that ‘the preposition plus infinitive serves as a temporal accusative whose
adjunct is 70 years’, for which he refers to Ronald J. Williams’ Hebrew Syntax An
Outline (2nd ed. Toronto U.P. 1976, p. 48, § 268) for proof, is in error; indeed, if
he had studied the paragraph referred to and the references from it in detail he