Recent Expositions of Daniel. By Prof. W. H. Green, D. D. [pp. 397-424]

lRecent Epositions of Daniel.
number of days first upon one side and then upon the other, to
bear the iniquity of the two houses of Israel, in which a day
was appointed for a year. l Here an action performed by the
prophet in view of the people, represented in miniature the
p)enalty to be inflicted on the entire body. But the penalty
itself is expressly stated at the time, not in days, but in years.
While, however, this passage does not serve the purpose for
which the advocates of the year-for-a-day system of interpretation commonly adduce it, it affords an admirable illustration
of what may be called the typical employment of numbers in
prophecy. The rigor with which the prophet was bound so
that he could not turn fromi side to side, represents the hardships to which the people would be subjected in the threatened exile. But the 390 years allotted to Israel and the forty
to Judah do not correspond with the actual periods that their
respective captivities were to last. The numbers in both instances belong to periods in the past, and represent the future
as a reproduction of what had already taken place. The 390
years is the period which had elapsed since the schism of Jeroboamn; this is taken as the measure of their guilt, and the penalty is graduated accordingly. They must continue to bear
it until all these years of transgression are expiated. The
forty years of Judah are in like manner borrowed from the
forty years' wandering in the wilderness. The exile was not
to last forty, but seventy years, as Jeremiah explicitly predicted. But it was to be to them what the abode in the desert
hlad been to their fathers, a period of purgation and trial, to
issue when the ends of discipline were answered, in their being
brought again to Canaan. The employment of the familiar
number recalls the event of the past with which it was associ ated. The very same parallel here suggested by the number
forty is by the same prophet, Ezek. xx. 35-38, unambiguously
expressed. The usage of the prophets to set forth the future
as the iteration of a typical event in the past, and to describe
what is hereafter to take place not so much in its own actual
forms as in forms or under emblems borrowed firom what had
previously occurred, is too frequent and well known to require
extended exemplification. Comp. Isa. xi. 15; Hos. viii. 13;
vli. v. 5; Zech. xiv. 16.
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