Justified True Belief

(P1) Judah's Scepter: Jacob's blessing holds Judah's rule in place until one particular person arrives, and the peoples will obey him. + Jacob is dying in Egypt, and the blessing he gives Judah from his bedside runs longer than any of the other eleven. It is also the oldest of these four texts and the only one with no date anywhere in it. (1) The line names an endpoint rather than a date. - "The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him; and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples." (Genesis 49:10) - A scepter is a ruler's rod of office, and the staff between the feet is the same picture from another angle, planted where a seated ruler would keep it. Both stand for the right to rule. - The whole sentence turns on one word: "until." Judah's authority holds, somebody arrives, and it stops holding. Think of a night watchman told to stay at his post until his relief comes. The order tells him nothing about the hour and everything about the fact that a man is coming. - So the verse hands over an endpoint with no calendar. The dates come from the other three texts (P2 through P4). (2) The one uncertain word is not the word the promise runs on. - That word is Shiloh, and nobody is sure what it means. The proposals divide roughly three ways: a place name, a squeezed-down form of "he to whom it belongs," or "tribute to him." • In this sense it appears exactly once in the whole Hebrew Bible, which makes it a hapax legomenon, Greek for "said once." Imagine a word in a grandparent's letters that turns up nowhere else in the family papers: you can guess at it from the sentence around it, and you can never check the guess. That is where every translator of this verse stands, and it is why the English Bibles differ. - What carries the promise is the second half of the line, and that half is not in doubt. English Bibles give the obedience or the homage of the peoples; the ancient Greek version makes him the expectation of the nations. The renderings differ. The single figure at the center of them does not. - Substitute each proposal in turn and watch what refuses to move: until Shiloh comes, until the one it belongs to comes, until tribute comes to him. In all three a person arrives, and in all three the nations turn toward him. - You might think a blessing on a tribe is only a note about succession, the next chief after the last one. This one ends with the nations of the world owing their obedience to a single man, which is well past succession whichever proposal turns out to be right. (3) Ancient Jewish readers took the line as a promise of the Messiah. - Targum Onkelos, the standard Aramaic version of Genesis used in the synagogue, renders the crucial clause as a promise that rule stays with Judah until the Messiah comes, whose the kingdom is. The other Targums run the same way. • A Targum is an Aramaic rendering of the Hebrew Scriptures, part translation and part running explanation, read out after the Hebrew because most Jews after the exile spoke Aramaic rather than Hebrew. • Messiah is simply the Hebrew word for "anointed one," someone put into office by having oil poured over his head, which is how Israel's kings and high priests were installed. By the first century the word had narrowed to one particular deliverer God had promised to send. - A commentary on Genesis from the caves at Qumran, copied out before Christianity began, takes the passage to be about David's royal line and ties it to the coming king the prophets call the Branch of David. - Neither of those is a Christian source. One was sealed in a cave before there was a Christian alive to influence it. The other reached its standard form while Jews and Christians were arguing over this very verse, and it kept the messianic reading anyway. Therefore, the oldest of the four texts fixes the subject rather than the calendar: a person is coming, the peoples will owe him their obedience, and Judah's standing holds until he arrives.

(P2) Daniel's Sequence: an anointed one is cut off, and only after that are the city and the sanctuary destroyed. + Daniel 9 carries the most argued-over timetable in the Bible. Almost none of that argument is needed here, because what carries the point is the order of the events rather than the count of the years. (1) The order of events does the work, before any arithmetic at all. - "Know therefore and understand that from the going out of the word to restore and build Jerusalem to the coming of an anointed one, a prince, there shall be seven weeks. Then for sixty-two weeks it shall be built again with squares and moat, but in a troubled time. And after the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing. And the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary." (Daniel 9:25-26) - Strike out every number in that passage and the sequence still stands on its own. An anointed one is cut off. Then a city and a sanctuary are destroyed. • "Cut off" in this kind of Hebrew ordinarily describes a life ended rather than an office vacated, and "the sanctuary" is the temple, the one holy building at the center of the city. - Translators divide over where the main pause falls in verse 25, which is why some Bibles read two anointed figures there and others read one. Verse 26 comes out the same either way: the cutting off first, the destruction after. - You do not need to know what time the train left to know that it left before the station burned down. The order is the evidence, and the order puts the anointed one first. (2) The arithmetic supports the sequence rather than carrying it. - The "weeks" are sevens, and the traditional reading takes them as sevens of years. Seven of them plus sixty-two of them makes sixty-nine sevens, which comes to 483 years. - Run that from either decree of Artaxerxes and it lands in the first century without landing on a date. He authorized Ezra in 458 BC, and 483 years later is AD 26. He authorized Nehemiah in 445 BC, and 483 years later is AD 39. - So the number is a fit inside a range of decades rather than a proof to the day. Take it for that much and no more. (3) A second-century date for the book costs the sequence nothing. - Mainstream critical scholarship dates Daniel to about 165 BC. Grant it in full. A book finished then, speaking of an anointed one cut off before a sanctuary is destroyed, still puts those two in that order nearly two centuries before the events at issue. • "Critical" here means academic rather than hostile. It describes dating a book by the evidence inside it, and on that method Daniel belongs to the persecution of the 160s BC rather than to the Babylonian exile. - What the passage needs is not an early Daniel but the right ruin. Which ruin it describes is a question about what the words mean, and no century of composition settles that either way. (4) One destruction since the book was written has taken the city and the sanctuary together. - Jerusalem and its temple were destroyed by Roman armies in AD 70, and nobody disputes it (P5). • The building that burned is what historians call the second temple, the replacement the returning exiles put up on the site of Solomon's, which Babylon had burned in 586 BC. - A first-century Jew already read Daniel of Rome. Josephus says the prophet wrote about the Roman power and about his own country being made desolate by it (Antiquities 10.276). - The rival candidate belongs on the table, and it is a serious one. Antiochus IV profaned the sanctuary in 167 BC and stopped its offerings, and the standard critical commentary takes the verse to be about him. What he did not do is destroy it. The building was still standing, and it was back in service three years later. Therefore, on the passage's own ordering an anointed one is cut off before the sanctuary comes down, and only one destruction since has taken the city and the sanctuary together.

(P3) Haggai's House: the second temple was promised a glory greater than Solomon's. + Haggai is the easiest of the four to date, because the book dates itself. Better still, the promise is nailed to a building rather than to a period. (1) The promise is attached to one particular structure. - "The latter glory of this house will be greater than the former," says the LORD of armies, "and in this place I will give peace." (Haggai 2:9) • "The LORD of armies" translates an old Hebrew title for God as commander of the armies of heaven. Older English Bibles render the same phrase "the LORD of hosts." - The year is 520 BC and the audience is a work crew. They are putting up a temple on the site of Solomon's, and the thing is a disappointment: Ezra reports that the old men who had seen the first house wept out loud when the foundations of the second were laid (Ezra 3:12). - "This house" is the building those men were standing in front of, in the mud and the rubble, and that is what makes the promise testable. A promise about an age can always be given more time. A promise about a house runs out when the house does. - The wider oracle fills the promise out. God will shake the heavens and the earth, the nations will come with their wealth, and He will fill this house with glory (Haggai 2:6-8). What the greater glory amounted to is argued over hard. That it was promised to this house is not. (2) That building had a start date and an end date. - It was finished and dedicated in 516 BC (Ezra 6:15). Roman soldiers burned it in AD 70. - Five hundred and eighty-five years, something like twenty generations, and then nothing. Whatever the greater glory was, it either arrived inside that window or the promise failed. (3) Nobody disputes when Haggai was written. - The book dates its own oracles to the second year of Darius, king of Persia, which is 520 BC, and critical scholarship accepts the setting. How the book was edited into its final shape gets discussed, as it does with every prophetic book, but nobody moves the oracles themselves out of the Persian period. • An oracle is a message delivered as the word of God through a prophet. Haggai's come stamped with the month and the day they were given, like entries in a logbook. - Two of these four texts need no dating argument at all, which is worth noticing in a subject where the dating usually eats the whole conversation. (4) No third temple has been built. - The phrase is "this house," and the house in question has been rubble since the first century. A promise about a particular building cannot be collected from a building that was never put up. - Herod's vast reconstruction, begun around 20 BC, does not break the identification. The service went on right through the work and the same house went on standing, which is why every historian dates the second temple period from 516 BC to AD 70 with Herod's masonry inside it. - Whether a temple raised on that platform in some future century could inherit the promise is a further question, and it does not touch the fact on the ground. From Haggai's day to this one, the only house that has ever answered to "this house" stood for 585 years and then burned. Therefore, a promise of surpassing glory was made to a specific building that stood for just under six hundred years and has not stood since.

(P4) Malachi's Messenger: the Lord would come to that same temple, with a herald sent ahead to clear the way. + Malachi reaches the same deadline from a different direction, and he hangs a second checkable claim on it. (1) The oracle names the same building Haggai named. - "Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple." (Malachi 3:1) - "His temple" in Persian-period Judea means the standing second temple. There was only one, Haggai's crew had finished it, and nobody had replaced it. (2) A forerunner is written into the promise. - The messenger is not the Lord who comes. He goes first and clears the road, which makes this a two-part promise rather than a one-part promise. • A forerunner is somebody sent ahead to announce that another is on the way, the way a herald went out before a king so the road would be clear by the time he reached it. - Malachi's own closing lines name the herald: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD." (Malachi 4:5) The expectation that Elijah would come back was in place in Jewish writing well before Christianity, and the Jewish wisdom book Ben Sira already takes it for granted around 180 BC. - Two moving parts are easier to catch out than one. "Someone will come" can be stretched to fit almost anybody. "A herald goes first, and then the Lord arrives at this building" has two ways of failing, and only one of them has to happen. (3) Malachi's date is not seriously in dispute either. - The book belongs to the Persian period, with estimates running from about 500 to about 430 BC. The argument between those figures turns on the Hebrew style and on the state of the temple service, and no one places the book anywhere near the events in question. - Roughly five centuries separate the writing of the promise from the burning of the building it names. (4) The coming has an address, not just an era. - "Will suddenly come to His temple" gives a manner and an address in six words. - Compare a prediction that a great leader will one day arise in the East. Nothing about that can ever come due, because it names no time, no place, and no way of telling whether it happened. Malachi names a doorway. Therefore, a second prophet, working generations after the first, attaches his promise to the same building and to the same deadline.

(C1) Therefore, the promised arrival had to fall inside the lifetime of the second temple. + A jury does not convict on one thing. It convicts on a fingerprint, a receipt, a witness who saw the car and a motive, none of them enough alone, all of them pointing one way. The usual picture for that kind of reasoning is a rope rather than a chain: cut one link and a chain is finished, but cut one strand of a rope and the rest still carry the load. Strands only compound when they can fail for different reasons, though. Four witnesses who all heard the story from the same man are really one witness, and these four texts have to be held up against each other before they can be added together. (1) No two of them come from the same author. - Genesis 49 is a deathbed blessing on a tribe, set inside a family story (P1). - Daniel 9 is a timetable inside a book of visions about the end of an age (P2). - Haggai and Malachi are short prophetic messages to the community that came home from Babylon and rebuilt the temple, and decades separate the two of them (P3, P4). - There is no shared source behind them, and no way for one of them to be quietly generating the others. (2) Genesis 49:10 names an endpoint without a date. - Judah's standing holds until the man arrives, and nothing in the verse says when that standing runs out. Historians argue over when Judah stopped being a self-governing people, and the answers spread across nine hundred years. None of them has to be settled. - So this strand fixes the subject rather than the calendar: one individual, obeyed by the nations, rather than an age or a movement. It is the strand that tells the other three what kind of thing they are timing. (3) Three texts arriving at one deadline is convergence, not duplication. - Daniel's sanctuary, Haggai's house and Malachi's temple are all the same building, and that is the convergence rather than a leak. They would be duplicates if they were three reports of one fact, and they are not. One dates a death against a destruction, one promises a glory, one promises an arrival. - Where the dependence is real is between Haggai and Malachi. Both attach a promise to that building, so a doubt about whether the second temple was owed anything lands on the pair of them at once. - Fold that pair together and the strict count is three strands rather than four. Two of the three carry a date. (4) The weakest strand is Genesis 49:10. - It has two weaknesses rather than one: the untranslatable word Shiloh, and the missing calendar. - A reader who sets the whole strand aside still has Daniel and the two temple oracles closing the same window. Being able to lose a strand and keep the conclusion is the entire reason for arguing from a rope. (5) The convergence delivers a constraint, not a name. - Any figure answering to these texts arrives before the second temple falls. That is what they say together, and it is all they say. - Whether anyone answers to them, and whether that person is Jesus of Nazareth, are separate questions resting on separate evidence. Counted at its strictest, then, three separate lines written centuries apart converge on one arrival. Two of them fix when it had to happen, and the third fixes what kind of person it had to be.

(P5) The Window Closed: the second temple fell in AD 70, and its sacrifices have never resumed. + A deadline only matters if it actually expires. This one did, and not in a way that turns on anybody's interpretation. (1) Nothing about the fall of the temple in AD 70 is disputed. - Josephus described the siege and the burning at length, and he was in a position to know. He had commanded rebel forces in Galilee, was captured in 67, and spent the rest of the war inside the Roman camp as an interpreter for Titus. - The Arch of Titus still stands in Rome with the temple furnishings carved into it, the great lampstand among them, being carried through the streets on the shoulders of soldiers. - The ash layer and the collapsed street stones are on view in the excavations along the western wall, lying where they fell. (2) The sacrifices have never restarted. - The Day of Atonement, the one day a year when the whole nation's sin was dealt with, requires a sanctuary, an altar and a serving high priest (Leviticus 16). None of the three has existed since the first century. - Nineteen centuries is the number to hold on to. The rite has now been impossible for more than three times as long as the second temple stood: about 1,950 years against 585. - Judaism has its own answer to that, and it is a serious one. Rabbinic tradition remembers Rabbi Joshua standing at the ruins and crying out that the house where atonement was made for Israel lay in pieces. Yohanan ben Zakkai answered him that there is another means of atonement just as good, the practice of lovingkindness, on the strength of Hosea's line that God desires mercy and not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6). - Christians answer from the Torah's own reason for the altar, that the life of the flesh is in the blood and it is the blood that makes atonement (Leviticus 17:11). Which text governs the other is an old argument between Jews and Christians, and no calendar is going to settle it. - What the calendar does settle is the closure. The building is gone, the rite has not been performed since, and anyone can check both. (3) Rabbinic tradition preserves its own memory of something changing around AD 30. - The Talmud reports that for the forty years before the temple's destruction the lot for God stopped coming up in the high priest's right hand on the Day of Atonement, the strip of crimson wool stopped turning white, and the westernmost lamp stopped burning. (Yoma 39b) • The Talmud is the great collection of rabbinic law and debate, compiled between roughly AD 200 and AD 600, and Yoma is the tractate, or volume, that covers the Day of Atonement. • All three were signs the priests watched for. The lot drawn from a box decided which of two goats died for the LORD, the crimson wool turning white was a token of forgiveness, and the westernmost lamp was meant to burn all night. - Forty years before AD 70 is around AD 30, which is why the passage gets quoted so often. - It is tradition rather than Scripture, written down centuries after the events it reports, by rabbis who drew no connection whatever to Jesus. Call it a curiosity in the record, then, and not a strand anything leans on. (4) The one text that predicts the fall is only as good as its date. - "And Jesus said to him, Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon" (Mark 13:2) - How much that is worth depends entirely on when Mark was written. Most scholars date the Gospel around AD 70, which would drain the point of most of its force. A minority case, argued in print by a scholar with no Christian commitment, puts it in the 40s at the latest. - So the prediction is suggestive rather than decisive, and the four texts do not depend on it. Therefore, the deadline those four texts point at is not a deadline anyone can reopen.

(C2) Therefore, if the Messiah promised in these texts has come at all, he came before AD 70. + Four texts, written centuries apart by men with no way of coordinating, describe one arrival. Three of them attach it to a building that stopped existing in the first century. - Judah's rule holds until a particular person arrives, and the peoples obey him (P1). - An anointed one is cut off before a city and a sanctuary are destroyed (P2). - A specific building is promised a glory greater than Solomon's (P3). - The Lord comes suddenly to that same building, with a forerunner ahead of him (P4). - Then the building burned, and the window closed (P5). What that delivers is a constraint and not an identification, and the difference is worth being exact about. Nothing here shows that Jesus of Nazareth is the person these texts describe. What it shows is that the search has a closing date and that the date has passed. Any candidate at all must have lived and died before the Roman armies finished their work in the summer of AD 70. The whole case runs only if these texts are promises of a coming deliverer in the first place, and a reader is entitled to deny that they are. Denying it is a position of its own, though, rather than a neutral standing back from the argument. The messianic reading of these texts is Jewish before it is Christian. It sits in the Aramaic synagogue versions of Genesis 49, in a commentary on that verse sealed in a cave at Qumran before there was a Christian alive, in a first-century Jew reading Daniel of Rome, and in the expectation of a returning Elijah that Jewish writers were already taking for granted around 180 BC. So a reader is left with three positions rather than the usual two. Someone answering to these texts came inside the window. Or the texts were never promises about a coming person at all, and whatever they did promise was collected long ago in the ordinary course of Persian and Greek and Roman history. Or the promises were made and not kept. All three are held by serious people, and the second and third deserve naming as the real options they are. What is not available is a fourth position in which these particular promises are still entirely ahead of us, because the house they were made to has been gone since the first century. See also: • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Were the Messianic Prophecies Written Before Jesus? • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Who Is the Servant of Isaiah 53?