Daniel12chapter 12

there stood other two: Daniel sees two others standing at the river's opposite banks, and one asks the man clothed in linen how long it shall be to the end of these wonders. The answer comes as an oath, sworn by him that liveth for ever, that it shall be for a time, times, and an half, until the power of the holy people is fully scattered. The same phrase, a time, times and half a time, returns at Revelation 12:14 for the woman fled into the wilderness, and the commentators read Daniel's chapters and John's as speaking one language of an appointed limit even where neither names a shared date.

I heard, but I understood not: Daniel hears the oath and does not understand it, and asks what shall be the end of these things, only to be told the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end. His confessed incomprehension stands deliberately beside Revelation 22:10's opposite instruction to John, seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book, for the time is at hand, a contrast the commentators note as marking two different moments in the same unfolding purpose. Daniel's not understanding here answers back to his own words at 8:27, I was astonished at the vision, but none understood it, tying the book's visions together under one honest human limit.

purified, and made white, and tried: Many shall be purified, and made white, and tried, while the wicked continue in wickedness and understand nothing of what is unfolding, and only the wise are given to understand. The verse gives coming suffering a refining purpose rather than a merely punishing one, the same purging the chapter eleven corridor named at verse 35, to try them, and to purge, and to make them white. Wesley and the older writers read the line as the book's own answer to the trouble named at verse 1, affliction sent to sift rather than only to destroy.

abomination that maketh desolate set up: From the time the daily sacrifice is taken away and the abomination that maketh desolate is set up, twelve hundred and ninety days are numbered, the same abomination named at 9:27 and 11:31, the thread the Lord takes up at Matthew 24:15 as spoken of by Daniel the prophet. The commentators hold a near fulfillment in Antiochus's profaning of the temple alongside a fulfillment beyond him that the Lord's own citation keeps open, the positions named without either erasing the other. The number of days is left in the text to specify an appointed length rather than a reader supplying an occasion for it.

Blessed is he that waiteth: , and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days, a second count forty five days beyond the first, and the gap between the two numbers has been read by the commentators as marking a further stage of blessing reached only by waiting past the first appointed term. Some of the bench take both counts as literal calendar days from the abomination's setting up, while others read them as marking stages within one unfolding rather than fixed durations, positions named and neither pressed into a date. The blessing pronounced on whoever waits that far is the verse's own center regardless of which reading of the numbers is held.

thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot: But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days, the last personal word given to any prophet in Scripture, spoken to Daniel himself rather than about the nations he had just watched cross a continent in vision. Rest answers the trouble of verse 1, and standing in his lot at the end of the days sets Daniel's own resurrection, promised in general at verse 2, into his own particular future. The commentators close the book here on the note the whole chapter has kept, appointed suffering, appointed knowledge, and an appointed waking, all held in the hand of the God who names the days.