by Knowsnothing 4 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Just curious on what you guys think? I still think the statue and beast prophecy describes quite well Rome(iron) and the current fragmented political system around the world(clay mixed with iron).
Certainly, the particulars about the North and the South I don't care for because they are really open to interpretation. But, I think the above mentioned is spot on.
Also, what are atheists' takes on these prophecies? They seem pretty straightforward to me.
I view this about like I view Nostradamus - It is so vague that you can pretty much take it any way you want to and still try to claim your viewpoint is the true one.
If you go to the search feature and type in "King of the North", you'll get ten pages of topics on this website over the last ten years. Personally, I think the prophecy ended in the 2nd Century BC with Antiochus IV Epiphanes. It's also pretty evident that the book of Daniel was written long after the exile, by someone other than "Daniel".
Somewhere in those threads Leolaia has posted her usual scholarly analysis of this subject, and I believe it concurs with Antiochus. To "Daniel" and the Jews, their temple and their city of Jerusalem was, for all intents and purposes, the whole world, and it's reflected in these Hebrew works.
On the other hand, when "prophecies" get into human consciousness, we have a tendency to make them happen. It's like planting a seed.
I just skimmed the entry in my Zondervan's. Daniel is regarded as very controversial and open to interpretation. There is a large body of scholarly work that maintains that it was written during the Maccabean period and that it is about issues at that time and the coming of the Messiah. Of course the literalists disagree with this. I'm not sure what kind of spin they put on the whole thing.
My take is that the prophecy was not meant for our day and is therefore meaningless to us. If it was for our day, God would have designed a way for each one of us to know what the prophecy referred to. Otherwise, if the ordinary person has to rely on what a purported scholar has to offer in way of interpretation, and there could be a thousand and one such scholars each coming with their interpretation of a prophecy and most of whose works any one ordinary person would not even have come across, how would one be sure that what they are reading as the purported interpretation is correct? Most of us on this board once believed the WTS interpretation of the 7 times prophecy just to come to conclude that the WTS interpretation could not have been correct. So how can one ever know that the interpretation they have come across based on a scholar's writings is the correct one? If this be the case, then prophecy purported to be for our times is meaningless and could therefore not have been meant for our time.
