The prophetic visions God gave to Daniel and John include specific periods of time that we are expected to understand. The two primary time periods in Daniel and Revelation are the 2,300 days of Daniel 8:14 and the 1,260 days of Daniel 7:25 and Revelation 11:3 and 12:6. Are these references to literal days or symbolic days? We use principles of interpretation to understand the meaning of the symbols in Bible prophecy, and we should also learn the principles of interpretation that apply to the prophetic time periods. The way to understand what God showed Daniel and John in vision is not to guess at the meaning, but to let the statements from other places in the Bible interpret what we read.
There are two primary texts that link days and years in a prophetic sense. The first is Numbers 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.” God used the forty “days” from Israel’s immediate past to prophetically mark out an equivalent number of years for wilderness wandering. This day-for-a-year time prophecy of future judgment was experienced and confirmed in their generation. Israel’s time of wilderness wandering was 40 years, a day-for-a-year that God promised through Moses and Aaron.
The second prophetic text linking days and years is Ezekiel 4:4-6, “Lie also on your left side, and lay the iniquity of the house of Israel upon it. According to the number of the days that you lie on it, you shall bear their iniquity. For I have laid on you the years of their iniquity, according to the number of the days, three hundred and ninety days; so you shall bear the iniquity of the house of Israel. And when you have completed them, lie again on your right side; then you shall bear the iniquity of the house of Judah forty days. I have laid on you a day for each year.” In this prophecy given through Ezekiel, God applies the day-for-a-year principle in an obviously prophetic scenario. One literal day in the symbolic scenario Ezekiel is acting out represents one full year in the predicted burden Israel and Judah would bear.
Since the texts in Ezekiel and Numbers aren’t presenting an apocalyptic vision of end-time events, God clearly explained the day-for-a-year principle by saying, “for every day a year” and “a day for each year.” By contrast, in the apocalyptic prophecies of Daniel and Revelation, the day-for-a-year principle was not spelled out. Instead, it was simply understood by the original audience for several reasons.
The original audience understood the day-for-a-year principle applied to the prophetic books of Daniel and Revelation because visions were full of symbolism. The messages God gave in vision contained elements that must be understood symbolically if they are to make any sense. In Daniel 2, Daniel himself interprets the symbols of the metal image, the stone, and the mountain. The interpreter in Daniel 7 confirms that the beasts are symbolic by giving the interpretation for each symbol in the vision. In this case, the interpretation is given by an angel from Heaven who was part of the Judgment scene Daniel witnessed (Daniel 7:10, 16). Revelation 1:1 introduces the visionary images as symbolic when John writes, “And He sent and signified it by His angel to His servant John.” The messages are “signified,” that is, they are given through signs or symbolic images that require interpretation. In the visions of Daniel and Revelation, the symbolic descriptions and actions of the beasts are interwoven with timeframes that are equally symbolic.
Another indication that the prophetic time frames are symbolic rather than literal is that they are not expressed in the typical vocabulary to represent the normal passage of time. The literal Hebrew language of Daniel 8:14 says, two thousand, three hundred “evenings and mornings,” rather than the typical 2,300 days. An evening and morning is one full day, as we read in Genesis 1:5, “So the evening and the morning were the first day.” The Hebrew language of Daniel 9:24 says, “Seventy sevens,” (or weeks) rather than 490 days. Finally, instead of saying “three and a half years” or “three years and six months,” Daniel 7:25 uses “for a time and times and half a time” to represent 1,260 days or 42 months. These unusual linguistic constructions indicate that we should not interpret their passage of time in the normal fashion.
Further confirmation that the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation use symbolic timeframes comes in Daniel 10:2, where we find another peculiar construction of time-words found nowhere else in the Bible. Daniel describes that he was mourning for “three full weeks.” The Hebrew phrase Daniel used is literally translated “three weeks of days.” This unusual statement directly contrasts the seventy prophetic weeks from the previous chapter where each week represented seven years instead of seven literal days. This obvious emphasis on three weeks made up of days lets us know that Daniel is now transitioning from weeks OF SYMBOLIC DAYS in Daniel 9 to weeks OF LITERAL DAYS in Daniel 10. The symbolic days from Daniel 9 and the previous two chapters of symbolic visions represent a longer time period than a literal 24 hours.
We also know that long timeframes are built into the prophecies of Daniel 7 and 8. Because of these long timeframes, a day-for-day interpretation could not fit their fulfillment in a way that would make sense. The symbolic beasts in these visions are interpreted to be kingdoms that lasted hundreds of years, much longer than a literal day-for-day interpretation of the prophetic time frames would allow. Daniel 8 is interpreted as being about “the time of the end” (8:17), and “in the latter time” (8:19). Daniel is told to “seal up the vision, for it refers to many days in the future” (8:26). Since the prophecies are about the time of the end, both the actions and time periods predicted in that chapter continue to that far-distant time in the future. Because of this, the prophesied time must encompass a long period that extends beyond a literal day-for-a-day interpretation.
Today we are looking back through the lens of completed history through which we can confirm that the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation were not fulfilled in literal days but in prophetic years. Their fulfillment is plain to us because we can now mark the events at the beginning and end of the prophetic time periods.
Final evidence comes from the way that Hebrew thinking connected the words “days” and “years” in the writings of the Old Testament. Even before the prophetic book of Daniel was written, a foundation was laid in the Bible for linking these two descriptions of the day and year. Many Old Testament stories demonstrate an interchangeable relationship where days and years describe the same passage of time. In some cases, when the Hebrew word for days obviously refers to years, it is translated as “year,” “years,” or “yearly.” Here are a few examples:
- Genesis 5, which tells the ages of the first eight generations after Adam repeats this phrase, “and all the days of ___ were ___ years, and he died.”
- Genesis 6:3, the first time-prophecy in the Bible, links days and years: “My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years”.
- Exodus 13:10 – Passover, a yearly feast, was to be kept “from year to year.” The literal Hebrew words are “from days to days.”
- 1 Samuel 2:19 – Hannah took new clothes to Samuel each year (literally “from days to days”). She did this when Elkanah went to Shiloh for the yearly sacrifice (literally “sacrifice of the days,” 1:21)
- 1 Samuel 20:6 – A yearly sacrifice is described in Hebrew as the “sacrifice of the days”.
- 1 Samuel 27:7 – David’s men lived among the Philistines for “days and four months” according to the Hebrew words; the KJV translates the obvious meaning “a full year and four months.”
- 1 Kings 1:1 – “King David was old and advanced in years” (literally “in the days”)
- Leviticus 25:1-7 – Every seventh year was to be a sabbatical year when fields were to be unworked, and whatever grew could be used by the poor and needy. Verse 2 says, “When you come into the land which I give you, the land shall keep a sabbath to the Lord”. This “sabbath” was not the weekly seventh-day Sabbath, but a seventh-year sabbath. The parallel relationship between Sabbath days and Sabbath years is emphasized by verse 4 which says, “shall be a sabbath of solemn rest for the land” and verse 5 which says “shall be a year of solemn rest for the land.” These phrases are parallel in both grammar and vocabulary. The same terminology is applied to both the Sabbath day and the Sabbath year; the “day” Sabbath is a pattern for the “year” Sabbath.
Old Testament poetry also places “days” and “years” in parallel relationship in which they are understood to be the same thing.
- Job 10:5 – “Are Your days like the days of a mortal man? Are Your years like the days of a mighty man….”
- Job 15:20 – “The wicked man writhes in pain all his days, through all the years that are laid up for the ruthless.”
- Job 32:7 (KJV) – “I said, ‘Let days speak, and many years teach wisdom.’”
- Job 36:11 – “If they obey and serve Him, they shall spend their days in prosperity, and their years in pleasures.”
- Deuteronomy 32:7 – “Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you; your elders, and they will tell you.”
- Psalm 77:5 – “I consider the days of old, I remember the years long ago.”
- Psalm 90:9 – “For all our days have passed away in Your wrath; we finish our years like a sigh.”
These examples from Old Testament stories and poetry do not prove the day-for-a-year principle, but they show that they are closely related in the Hebrew way of thinking and writing. This sets the stage for Hebrew readers of prophecy to connect days and years in prophetic visions. It would not be a foreign concept for the biblical mind to apply the day-for-a-year principle in Bible prophecy where symbolic time is what is intended by the Jewish authors.
Together with the other evidence from Scripture, we have adequate reason to interpret the prophetic time frames of Daniel and Revelation using the day-for-a-year principle that is revealed in the Bible.