The Messiah in Jewish Thought [3] – The Cosmic Week

We have been dealing with passages in the Talmud, mainly from the tractate Sanhedrin, that deal with the messianic concept the rabbis held anywhere between the first century BCE and the fifth century CE. This is the period in which Talmudic thought was collected, edited, and compiled. We are now in Sanhedrin p. 97a, dealing with a very interesting passage that lays out the background for what Christians call millennial doctrine. In the New Testament there is only one chapter — Revelation chapter 20 — that deals with this concept of the millennium. And this is how it reads, with John speaking:

This is all we know of the doctrine of the millennium in the New Testament — where a thousand years is explicitly written of in the Bible. Now the question that comes to mind is: where does this teaching come from, and how does it fit into the general scheme of biblical thinking? There is not much in the New Testament itself, or in other early Christian literature, that is early enough to have a bearing on its interpretation. But we do have this teaching in the Jewish literature, which we are going to read today and try to understand in light of its background — and that will shed some light on how we should treat the passage we just read from Revelation 20. We are reading from Sanhedrin, Babylonian Talmud, p. 97a.

History as a Week

Two days here means two thousand years, according to Psalm 90 verse 4, which is quoted below.

A "day" is again explained, in the same Psalm at verse 4, as a thousand years. So Psalm 90, is interpreted by Abaye and by the Talmud itself as pointing to a thousand-year reign.

The thing to notice here is that the whole scheme of this thousand-year reign is taken from the creation story. The world was created in six days, and on the seventh day God rested; so the whole of history is seen on the scheme of a week — six days, and a seventh day of rest. If you take the creation story of six days and interpret it by Psalm 90, where a day is a thousand years, you have history in the perspective of six thousand years, and a kind of "para-history" in the seventh thousand-year period, which is a day when the Lord alone will be exalted. In Jewish literature and in the Jewish prayer book there is mention of a day that will be wholly Sabbath — that is, like the Sabbath. There will be no toil, no work, no anger, no disease. It will be a day of divine, heavenly rest for humanity, because the Lord rested on the seventh day. So the seventh thousand years, after a period of six thousand, will, according to this scheme, be a thousand years of rest. I am going to come back to this passage in a moment, but first let me continue the Talmudic text, and then return to Revelation to try to understand how the two relate.

This is the quotation from Psalm 92 and 90 again, justifying the view that a day is a thousand years.

The Tanna debe Eliyahu and the Three Eras

The Talmud brings in another passage, an earlier one, attributed to the Tanna debe Eliyahu, which is a Talmudic source with a great deal of Midrashic material. And this is what the Tanna debe Eliyahu says:

Let me unpack this. The desolation here is Tohu vaVohu, meaning like what the world was before the six days of creation — topsy-turvy — and so, for the first two thousand years, the world was desolate. The rabbis interpret this desolation as "no Torah." It is a tradition that Abraham was fifty-two years old when he began to convert men to worship the one true God, and that from Adam until then two thousand years elapsed. So the first two thousand years were before the government of the Law, before the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai, before man knew that there is one true God, Creator of heaven and earth.

The second two thousand years are the period in which the Torah flourishes — the period of the Mosaic Law, from Abraham's fifty-second year until 172 years after the destruction of the Second Temple. This does not mean, according to the Talmud, that the Torah would cease thereafter; it means merely to distinguish this from the next era. And the next two thousand years, according to the Talmud, are the Messianic era: the Messiah will come within that period and set up his kingdom and reign. But, the Talmud adds, "through our many iniquities all these years have been lost." In other words, the Messiah should have come at the end of the four thousand years from creation, but because we were so sinful, the Talmud says, he did not come — and all these years, according to the Tanna debe Eliyahu, were lost to us and never really fulfilled. That is a very interesting attitude that we need to examine more closely.

The Scheme of Sevens

Let's talk a little more about this concept of world history on the scheme of a week, the scheme of the Sabbath. Creation is not seen by the Jewish rabbis as only an act of nature. It is seen as a cosmic event: that the Creator of the whole universe — not only of the earth, but of the sun, the moon, and all the stars — has a plan, a scheme, in which, for whatever reason, he chose to create our world. And the world was created in six days, and on the seventh day he stopped creating and rested.

The same is true of all history — there is the micro and the macro. In the micro, it was the Garden of Eden; in the macro, we are talking about the whole world. In the way God commanded the children of Israel to rest on the seventh day, there is the scheme of seven, the scheme of the number seven. Every seven years the land should lie fallow — that is the Sabbatical year. Seven times seven, the fiftieth year, is the year of jubilee, in which there is the freeing of prisoners, the freeing of debts, and the freeing of land that was sold. It is a year of favor to the Lord, to free all of God's people and return everything to its former state — this is the jubilee. That is the way the rabbis looked at all of creation, at all of history: it goes by the scheme of seven. And if it goes by the scheme of seven, and if one takes Psalm 90 to mean that a thousand years is one day in the eyes of the Lord, then if it says seven days, it means the world will exist for seven thousand years.

But then, what happens on this day that is a Sabbath day — the last day in these seven thousand years? Is there a change in the system by which the world functions, like the change on the Sabbath day when you stop working, or in the Sabbatical year when you stop working and leave the land desolate, not laboring in it? In that year God provides for you, as he did when he fed the children of Israel with manna in the wilderness. Six days they collected manna, and if they collected double, say on a Wednesday, the manna rotted and got worms in it and became inedible; but if they collected the same double portion on Friday, on Saturday they did not collect, and the manna remained good, and no worms attacked it on the seventh day. So there is something supernatural in the scheme that the rabbis are looking into, to understand the relationship between creation and history. And out of that scheme they devised their different arguments — like the dispute between Rabbi Kattina and Abaye, whether it is one thousand years or two thousand years, each bringing a different passage from the prophets to justify his view.

The Sabbath Rest in Hebrews

So, after the argument of R. Kattina and Abaye, they bring in another opinion of R. Kattina — that the seventh thousand-year period is a Sabbath day — and they derive it from Psalm 92, "A Psalm, a song for the Sabbath day." And in Psalm 90 they find the reason why this Sabbath day is not just a regular one-day Sabbath at the end of every week, but a thousand years: because that Psalm says, "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past." A thousand years is like one day, like yesterday. And so, connecting these two things from Psalm 90 and Psalm 92, the rabbis could reason that the seventh thousand-year period will be a period of release, a period of desolation — in the sense that nothing new will be created and there will be no new laws, but God will rest, and the saints will have that rest.

We find this rest in the book of Hebrews chapters 3 and 4. Here we have a midrash on Psalm 95, and in the context of this midrash the writer also uses the word "day" as the eternal Sabbath day. Hebrews chapter 4:

Notice that the promise is that we would enter into his rest. Verse 2:

In other words, the works that God had prepared in the creation of the world were already finished before creation, in the foundation of the world. This plan — that the world would exist, and that at the end of the world there would be a period of rest that the saints would enter — was always God's plan, according to verse 3 of Hebrews 4. And Hebrews chapter 4 verse 4:

It is a scheme that the writer of the book of Hebrews draws from Psalm 95 and the creation story. Basically it says: if Psalm 95, written by David long after creation, still promises another rest, then this is not the rest promised by the Law of Moses in the Torah; it is another rest, spoken of in the act of creation. It is an eschatological, an end-time rest, that we are still waiting for. They did not enter it in the time of Joshua, when they entered the Land; they did not enter into that ultimate rest that God had promised. Because if they had entered it, there would be no need for David to promise it — they would already possess it. But since David, many years after Joshua, still promises a rest, they must be waiting for it — the future rest that is to come. It is the same scheme we see with the Talmudic rabbis: there is the act of creation, and the seventh day of creation on which God rested, which is the commandment of the Law of Moses; but there is another rest, an end-time rest. The rest we are dealing with is a day that is completely rest — as the Talmud says, a thousand years of that rest.

Where the Calendar Stands

Now, it is important to see the scheme, because I think it is a quasi-historical scheme, taken from the act of creation. And now we return to the passage of the Tanna debe Eliyahu.

The Tanna debe Eliyahu says the world will exist six thousand years. For the first two thousand there will be desolation — Tohu vaVohu, topsy-turvy, however the book of Genesis is rendered; in verse two it says, "Ve'eretz haita Tohu vaVohu" ["and the earth was without form and void," or in chaos]. And so the first two thousand years there will be chaos. Why chaos? No Torah, before the giving of the Law. And of course it was the generation of the flood that destroyed all life — Tohu vaVohu. It was the generation of the tower of Babel, before Abraham — Tohu vaVohu, when man was confused by God through the giving of different languages, different tongues. In the next two thousand years the Torah reigns, the Mosaic Law flourishes, and men live under the Torah — no Tohu vaVohu, because the Torah brings order into creation. And the third era, the Tanna debe Eliyahu says, is the Messianic era.

Now it is interesting to note today's date. The Jewish date today is 5786. According to the Jewish calendar — and this is admitted by the scholars, the rabbis, and everyone — there are about two hundred years lost in the Jewish calendar, between the period of Ezra and Nehemiah and the first Jewish tradition and literature that reappears during the Hellenistic period. These two hundred years are lost; nobody knows much about them, about what happened to the Jews in the Land; there is no record of it, and no rabbinical tradition about it. And so these two hundred years — a kind of dark age in Jewish history — are generally added to the calendar, which would mean that today we are really in the year 5986, close to the end of the six thousand. And if you subtract 1986 years, it brings you back to the first century — to almost precisely the time that Yeshua lived and walked in this Land, was crucified in Jerusalem by the Romans, on the third day rose from the dead, and forty days later ascended to be with his Father in heaven.

So this scheme of the Tanna debe Eliyahu is extremely interesting. It says that the last two thousand years are the Messianic era. Now, we are in the year 2026 by the Western calendar, which means that, according to the Tanna debe Eliyahu, we are living in the Messianic era right now. But the Talmud, written by rabbis who lived in Babylon during the Byzantine reign, says: that's true, the Tanna debe Eliyahu does say the last two thousand years are the Messianic era — but through our many iniquities all these years have been lost. In other words, it was not fulfilled, because we were so sinful; the years were lost, as far as we are concerned, because of our sin. But for us, who know the Messiah — that he is Yeshua, the Son of David, whom in English we call Jesus of Nazareth — we know the years were not lost. God kept his promise, and the last two thousand years have been the Messianic era. Israel was in the diaspora and did not enjoy the presence and guidance of the Messiah; but for those of us who know him, we know that they are the Messianic era.

Reading Revelation in This Light

Now let's go back to the book of Revelation and see if we can better discern what its writer is trying to tell us. If we take this seven-thousand-years idea, with the last thousand years being the Sabbath, then we see that the writer of Revelation is using this thousand-year idea. Satan will be bound — of course he will be bound, because it is a day of rest, a year of rest, a thousand years of rest, of Sabbath. So Satan, the serpent, the dragon, the Devil (all the names are found in chapter 20 verse 2), will be bound during this thousand years, cast into a pit and chained there, so that he can no longer deceive the nations, until the thousand years are fulfilled; and then he will be loosed for a season, but there will be a final end for him after that brief season. This thousand-year era is equivalent to the Sabbath day. Creation was six thousand years — six periods of a thousand years, as you can see in the creation story — and in the seventh thousand-year era Satan is bound; he will not deceive the nations.

When the thousand years, the Sabbath, are over — motzei Shabbat, the going-out of the Sabbath — he will deceive the nations again for a season; he will be loosed for a little season, but immediately after that comes the judgment. Verse 4 of Revelation 20:

Who is he talking about? He is talking about the apostles, alluding again to Psalm 122, where it speaks of thrones set in Jerusalem, the thrones of the house of David, to judge. Here are the apostles — the twelve apostles, like the twelve tribes — sitting on the thrones of David and proclaiming judgment. And the first judgment they proclaim is for the martyrs, those who were beheaded and suffered as witnesses of Yeshua and for the word of God, and had not worshipped the beast.

Now, after the Sabbath comes the judgment. There is a Sabbath day, and then the judgment; and of course, in order for the judgment to take place, the Sabbath is also a day of resurrection — a day on which the soul is revived, and life is revived. And so the writer takes it in the context of the Sabbath and says the Sabbath is a day of revival, a day of coming back to life — but only for the saints. The saints come back to life; the others are waiting for the judgment day, the second resurrection, the resurrection of everybody else, in order to stand in the judgment. And verse 7:

The writer of Revelation puts it again in the context of an eschatological war called Gog and Magog, taken from the prophet Ezekiel. John refers to Gog and Magog from Ezekiel as an eschatological war that will take place after Satan is loosed, after the Sabbath day, when he will try to devour the saints and the earth — but he will fail in that war, he will lose it, and it will be the end of the beast and the false prophet.

Verse 10 of chapter 20 says:

In other words, it is like Pharaoh and his armies when they came out of Egypt and drowned in the Red Sea. The writer of Revelation takes that scheme and joins it with what happened at the end of the slavery in Egypt: Satan and all the evil of the world will be cast into the sea of fire, like Pharaoh and his army, and they will suffer in that sea of fire for ever and ever — which is taken, of course, from Daniel chapter 12, where it tells what will happen after the resurrection of the dead.

Put together these schemes from the Bible — the creation of the world, the Sabbath day (which includes the Sabbatical year and the year of jubilee), the whole cycle of sevens, together with the story of the Exodus from Egypt — and draw the picture in light of the concept that the world will exist for seven thousand years, with the seventh thousand years an era wholly Sabbatic.

Conclusion

All of these things, taken from the Jewish context of our faith, and from the book of Revelation, reaffirm and reassure that context. The question is whether we take it as a literal historical scheme, or as a way of interpreting the program that God has for history. Either way, we cannot deny what the text says, nor can we deny the Jewish background from which it comes. Revelation itself doesn't hand us the idea that the thousand years is that Sabbatical year drawn from the pattern of creation — but putting them together, I think the picture becomes so much clearer, showing how the ideas of Revelation relate to their Jewish background, and how we should read them in light of the Sabbath and the creation story.