organization and forever divorced from union with God. This was the cutting down of the lofty tree. To give hope to righteous mankind how glad we are to notice that God in the vision left a stump of this tree. Clearly this pictures the suspension of the office of righteous heavenly rulership through which God will exercise his sovereignty again over the earth. It would be kept in abeyance until He should come who would prove his right thereto. The dream shows that the Most High will give this kingdom right to the “lowest of mankind” or a son of man.—Dan. 4:17, Mo.

17, 18. (a) When do the “seven times” begin to apply as to the “tree stump”? (b) When does the period of “madness” become particularly manifest, and what changes are there in Gentile domination over Jerusalem?

¹⁷ Not before “seven times” had passed over the symbolic tree stump could God, according to his own decree, establish the kingdom over men in the hands of a righteous invisible ruler. The prophetic dream does not indicate that the “seven times” began at Eden immediately with the rebellion of Satan and his loss of the right and authority of righteous rulership. The facts in fulfillment show they did not begin then but in the days of the dreamer who had the dream fulfilled on him in miniature, namely, at the time the pictorial rulership was taken away from the last anointed king of Judah, Zedekiah. The dream merely announces that in the tree stump’s experience there would pass over it a period of “seven times” and that this would immediately precede the unbanding of the stump and its free growth again.

¹⁸ This makes it apparent that the “seven times” began with Nebuchadnezzar’s overturning of Jehovah’s typical theocracy at Jerusalem, in 607 B.C. As long as the typical administration of God at Jerusalem operated at all, even imperfectly, in his name, that long there was some measure of national sanity and a partial exhibition of right rule among nations on this earth. But with the overthrow of the typical theocracy there was then no restraint at all to the unreason and bestiality of human governors and humankind. The Gentile powers or governments were now exclusive in the field. God’s covenant people no longer held any national sovereignty in the midst of this world, independently of the Gentile nations. In 539 B.C. the Medo-Persian world power exercised domination over the Promised Land. In 332 B.C. it passed into the hands of Alexander, the Greek conqueror. In 63 B.C. Roman rule was established over Palestine. From A.D. 637 to 1917 various Mohammedan rulers generally controlled Jerusalem. In 1917 Viscount Allenby of Great Britain took Jerusalem from the Mohammedan Turks, who had controlled it since 1517.

MATHEMATICAL CALCULATION

19, 20. How long are the “seven times” of the nations? Give the proofs for establishing 1914 as a marked date.

¹⁹ How long are “seven times”, the times of the nations? The mathematics are supplied for us in another prophecy unrelated to this one which uses the term “times” or “periods of time”. In Revelation 12:6 (NW) there is mentioned 1,260 days and then in the 14th Re 12 verse 14 this very same period is referred to as 3 ¹/₂ “times”. So if 3 ¹/₂ “times” is 1,260 days, then 7 “times” (twice 3 ¹/₂ “times”) must be twice 1,260, or 2,520 days. Early in their wilderness trek the Israelites repudiated the sovereign wisdom of their God by wanting to return to Egypt on having believed the faith-lacking reports of the ten unfaithful spies. (Num. 14:1-4) For this lack of faith by the people in God’s sovereign leadership, Jehovah sentenced the nation to forty years of wandering in the wilderness with no sovereign control of land. “For every day spent in spying out the land, you shall spend a year being punished for your evil-doing, forty years for forty days; that will teach you what it is to have me against you.”—Num. 14:34, Mo.

²⁰ So according to this rule established in the wilderness the Jewish nation, who time and again showed they did not appreciate Jehovah’s sovereign control, would have to bear God’s adverse judgment at the hands of their Gentile overlords for a period of seven “times”, or 2,520 year-days. These 2,520 years ran from the desolating of Jerusalem and the land in the summer and fall of 607 B.C. up to the summer and fall of 1914, when they expired. From 607 B.C. to 1 B.C. is 606 years. From 1 B.C. to A.D. 1 is only one year, because the ancients had not discovered the zero which according to modern mathematics would have made it two years. The use of the zero is only of comparatively recent mathematical origin. From A.D. 1 to A.D. 1914 is 1,913 years. Therefore adding 606 years plus 1 year plus 1,913 years we get a total of 2,520 years.

21-23. (a) Give one correction of a slight error made by the brothers many years ago as to determining 1914. (b) Explain a second correction.

²¹ At this point some will inquire why Charles T. Russell in 1877 used the date 606 B.C. for the fall of Jerusalem whereas The Watchtower of late years has been using 607 B.C. This is because, in the light of modern scholarship, two slight errors were discovered to have been made which cancel each other out and make for the same result, namely, 1914. Concerning the first error, Russell and others considered 1 B.C. to A.D. 1 as being two years whereas in fact this is only one year because, as has been said above, there is no “zero” year in the B.C.-A.D. system for counting years. “The Christian era began, not with no year, but with a 1st year.”—The Westminster Dictionary of the Bible, p. 102.

²² The second error had to do with not beginning the count of the 2,520 years at the right point in view of historic facts and circumstances. Almost all early Bible chronology ties in with secular history at the year 539 B.C., in which year the fall of Babylon to Darius and Cyrus of the Medes and the Persians occurred. In late years several cuneiform tablets have been discovered pertaining to the fall of Babylon which peg both Biblical and secular historic dates. The one tablet known as the “Nabunaid Chronicle” gives the date for the fall of Babylon which specialists have ascertained as being October 12-13, 539 B.C., Julian Calendar, or October 6-7, 539 B.C., according to our present Gregorian Calendar.b This tablet also says that Cyrus made his triumphant entry into Babylon 16 days after its fall to his army. Thus his accession year commenced in October, 539 B.C. However, in another cuneiform tablet called “Strassmaier, Cyrus No. 11” Cyrus’ first regnal year is mentioned and was determined to have begun March 17-18, 538 B.C., and to have concluded March 4-5, 537 B.C.c It was in this first regnal year of Cyrus that he issued his decree to permit the Jews to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple. (Ezra 1:1) The decree may have been made in late 538 B.C. or before March 4-5, 537 B.C.

²³ In either case this would have given sufficient time for the large party of 49,897 Jews to organize their expedition and to make their long four-month journey from Babylon to Jerusalem to get there by September 29-30, 537 B.C., the first of the seventh Jewish month, to build their altar to Jehovah as recorded at Ezra 3:1-3. Inasmuch as September 29-30, 537 B.C., officially ends the seventy years of desolation as recorded at 2 Chronicles 36:20, 21, so the beginning of the desolation of the land must have officially begun to be counted after September 21-22, 607 B.C., the first of the seventh Jewish month in 607 B.C., which is the beginning point for the counting of the 2,520 years.

Evidences of the Year’s Correctness

1, 2. Describe the “family of nations” that arose after 1648.

WHAT physical evidences are there, then, that indicate 1914 was a marked year as to the ending of the “appointed times” of the nations? First a little background information is necessary. With the disintegration of the old Roman Empire and the breaking up of the Holy Roman Empire wedded to the Catholic Church there appeared after the Peace Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 a “family of nations”. This Gentile house of nations was a loose arrangement where big and small nations tried to get along in concert like big and small brothers with an occasional quarrel (war) between individual members. There was no big mother or father to boss them. Neither the Catholic Church nor the remnants of the old Roman Empire were any longer strong enough to keep these nations tied to their apron strings and thus keep these offshoot nations in line as they formerly did by being the superior dictators. Nevertheless the “family of nations” did maintain a measure of international order during their periods of world expansion, and they abode by a code of international law. However, this “family” had no political expression or super-organization. That was left for them to try later under the League of Nations in 1919 to patch up things.

² Following is an authoritative description of this “family of nations”. “The world empire of Rome showed a common political sovereignty by which the acts of remote territories might be regulated; the world religion of the Church of the middle period added the idea of a common bond of humanity. . . . The family was at first a ‘European Christian family of nations,’ and its law was European. The United States of America was the earliest addition outside of Europe. . . . In 1856 the five great powers admitted the Turkish Empire to ‘the participation in the advantages of European public law and concert.’ The entrance of Japan into the ‘family of nations’ in 1899 added another non-European state to the international family, which had ceased to be ‘European’ and ‘Christian’.”a

3, 4. (a) What are the physical facts that mark the end of the “seven times” of the nations? (b) What is remarkable as to the dates involved?

³ What happened to this loose house of Gentile nations in 1914 is common knowledge and history now. The delicate balance of Gentile powers which enabled them to generate themselves into vast war machines in the prewar period totally collapsed in 1914. Their whole house blew up and the nations went mad. Does not the collapse of this house of the Gentiles and their national sovereign independence being now put in jeopardy remind one of the destruction of the temple and the king’s palace in Jerusalem between July 30-31 and August 2-3, 607 B.C.? All this exactly 2,520