Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner, paid a hefty 1.8 billion in 2007 for a skyscraper in the address 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The symbolic value of 666 and Jared Kushner’s obvious resemblance with Sam Neill’s Damien in Omen III have not remained unnoticed from keen-eyed conspiracy people. There is, for instance, a quite amusing Youtube video showing Kushner as Damien.
After viewing the Youtube video, I had to watch again all three parts of Omen, but sadly, the film had a rather shaky understanding of Biblical prophecies. So I thought that maybe instead of watching some rubbish, I should write something (also rubbish): just a short post of how to make these end-of-the-time calculations and get the date for the arrival of the Anti-Christ. It is not such a futile exercise considering that in several instances of the history these Biblical prophecies were fulfilled on purpose by certain people who used them in their own plans. That is, they were the reason for two world wars and the creation of Israel.
Jewish calculation of the end-of-the-times is very simple, elementary, you may say. The basic cycle is seven thousand years: there is two thousand years before the law, two thousand years of the law, two thousand years of the messianic era, and the last is one thousand years when only the God is strong.
I know, the world and the universe is said to be much older than seven thousand years, and I do not disagree, so you may think that this theory is completely incorrect. But do not be so pedantic: as with many things, the theory is incorrect when incorrectly understood, and reasonably correct when understood correctly. The theory of cycles comes from astrological observations, originally the movement of the celestial north pole and circumpolar stars. It should be evaluated in that context. It does not actually claim that the earth and the space disappear after some thousands of years, or did not exist before some thousands of years. It is just a way of expressing it in this theory. It only means that there is a cycle in astrology: the Platonic year and there are catastrophic changes on the earth, like changes of the weather, that also have some periodicity, and early astrologers looked for a correlation of these cycles. The Jewish system of a seven thousand year cycle is just one of these theories, and not the most accurate one.
But here we follow the Jewish system. In order to calculate the end of the times we need to know when the cycle started. In Talmudic Judaism this starting event is called the creation of the world and according to Talmudic Judaism the world was created in the year 3761 BC.
From this 3761 BC you must first take away two 2000 year periods: the time before the law and the time of the law. The messianic era cannot start before these previous eras have passed. Adding a number of years 2*2000 to a year 3761 BC and getting an after Christ year X you calculate as X=2*2000-3761+1. This is because there is no year zero in our calender. Addition gives 2*2000-3761+1= 240 AD. This was the earliest date when the Jewish Messiah could come, but there is no reason to expect that the Messiah would come at the beginning of the era. We have a range of times from 240 AD to 2240 AD.
The Babylonian Talmud was written just a couple of years before 500 AD. We may expect that a section in the Talmud predicts which predicts the time the Messiah comes was written shortly before the predicted time. That is just the human nature: we always predict things to happen in a reasonably near future, and tend not to predict things in the past when we know they did not happen.
The section Abodah Zarah 9b in the Babylonian Talmud gives the time of the end and the arrival of the Messiah as 471 AD. We can deduce that the section Ab. Zarah was written shortly before this year. Ab. Zarah 9b gives two calculations. The first one is to add 400 years to the destruction of the second temple in 70 AD, the second one is to add 4231 years to the creation of the world. The first calculation gives 70+400=470 AD, while the second calculation gives 4231-3761+1=471 AD. Ab. Zarah 9b notices this problem but strangely concludes that the difference is not one year but instead it is 3 years. That probably is an effort to get a difference of 3.5 years to explain 3.5 years in Daniel’s book. The figure 400 years obviously comes from Israelites having been in Egypt for 400 years.
Another section in the Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 97b, gives a slightly different number. It states that the Messiah cannot come before 85 jubilees have passed. As a jubilee is 50 years, this means 4250 years from the creation of the world, i.e., 4250-3761+1=490 AD. Obviously Sanhedrin 9b was written after Ab. Zarah 9b and the rabbis knew that the Messiah did not come in 471 AD. Sanhedrin 97b also gives another calculations: the Messiah comes 4291 years after the creation. This is 4291-3761+1=531 AD. This is a bit after the Talmud was written, so it is a real prediction, albeit a wrong one. The Messiah did not come. It is difficult to invent what exact logic lead the rabbis to the number 4291.
The year for the creation of the world given in the Talmud was not the traditional year of the creation of the world during the second temple period Judaism. Had it been so, Jews would not have been waiting for the Messiah already before Jesus time, and they would not have considered any of the leaders of the three Jewish insurrections (66 AD-73 AD,115 AD – 117 AD, 132 AD -135 AD) as Messiahs, but they did. At least Jesus and Bar Kochba must be considered as a Jewish Messiah claimants before 240 AD.
The reasons is very simple: Talmudic Jews moved the time of the creation of the world by changing the time of the birth of a son in the Biblical lists of patriarchs. The version of the Bible currently used by Protestants, that is, the Masoretic text, is tampered text. The original years for the patriarchs are in the Greek Septiagint, still used by the Orthodox Church. We know that because the the years of the patriarchs in the Dead Sea Scrolls are as in the Septuagint. There is such propaganda that the Dear Sea Scrolls are more similar to the Masoretic texts than to the Septuagint. In some details this is true, but the years of the patriarchs was the important data in the Bible as it gave the date for the arrival of the Messiah, and there the Masoretic text is incorrect. Simply, Talmudic Jews did not want to accept Jesus as the Messiah, so they changed the times.
The calculation in the time of Jesus is shown by Josephus Flavius. He calculates, if I remember correctly it is in Against Apius, that the temple of Solomon was built in the year 968 BC. Let us notice that 1000 years from this time gives 1000-968+1=33 AD, which is the traditional time of Jesus’ crucifixtion. Today many scholars prefer the time 30 AD for the crucifixion, but the traditional date is 33 AD. It is the calculated one, one from the cycle theory.
Based on these two dates we can reconstruct the whole cycle as it was seen in Jesus’ times. The time before the law must be the time before Noah’s Deluge. What else, people did not have any law before Noah, but Noah was given a law. The traditional date for the Deluge range from 3000 BC to 3200 BC, but we know that some 1000 years ended 968 BC and 33 AD. From this we can conclude that Noah’s covenant with God must have been 2968 BC, just after the Deluge. Consequently, the time of the law was from 2968 BC to 968 BC. The law was the law God gave to Noah. God made a new covenant with Abraham around 1968 AD and added circumcision to the law: it was a specil law for the Jews. It follows that the time before the law was from 4968 BC to 2968 BC, which implies that 4968 BC was not the time of the creation of the world: before the first era there was an era from the creation of Adam to the start of the time without the law. From the Genesis we can read that people started to call God’s name in the time of Enos. The 2000 years before the law started from Enos, 6th from Adam. The years between Enos and Enoch are 1000 years in the Septuagint. Thus, in the middle of the 2000 years before the law there was Enoch, who did not die but was taken up to God, a prophet or messiah. Biblical scholars calculated from Septiagint the date of the creation as about 5500 BC. This gives some 530 years from creation to the time Enos called the name of the Lord. According to this calculation the messianic era started from the building of the temple of Solomon and the Messiah came exactly in the half of this era. The messianic era would have ended in the year 1033 AD and currently we are in the last one thousand year era, when only God is strong, that is, the intermediate period between two cycles. The new cycle should start in 2033 AD. So, this could be the time for a Damien of Omen, but I will show it is not: the time of the Anti-Christ was already.
Was this end-of-the-world calculation in Jesus’ time the original one from the time the Old Testament was written, around 500 BC? In the Old Testament Jeremiah calls the Persian kind Cyrus Messiah, but later Cyrus is not seen as the real Messiah. Ezra and Nehemiah do not make messianic claims, neither did any of the Hasmonean kings of Israel up to and including Antigonus II Mattathias. This was so even though Antiochus IV Epiphanes does resemble the Anti-Christ figure.
Yet it seems to me that Herod Agrippa (11 BC- 44 AD) intended to declare himself as the Messiah. The events of his death, told both by Josephus and Acts, point to that direction. Herod Agrippa was born soon after the star appeared in the sky, the Halley coment. He was from Beetlehem, as Beetlehem of Mica’s prophecy was not the city of Beetlehem but a small and insignificant family of Israel (the Hasmoneans), and the murder of the boys of Beetlehem seems to refer to Herod the Great killing Hasmonean princes. The second geneaology of Jesus (the one with Jannai and many Mattatiases) does look like the geneaology of Herod Agrippa.
The facts that only Herod Agrippa of the kings has messianic aspirations, that there were many Messiah claimants around the time of Jesus, and Jesus himself appeared at that time all point out to the direction that the time of Jesus was the original predicted time for the Messiah. That was the time when the astrological age changed. That was the time when all people in the Middle East waited for a new era to start and a king to appear.
Some Talmudic Jews did accept Bar Kochba as the Messiah, but after he lost the date of creation was moved some 1740 years forward. If 240 AD is the starting time of the messianic era, then the start of the time of the law becomes 1761 BC. That would have to be the time of Abraham. Then the Noah’s covenant after the Deluge had to be 2761 BC, because it must be at some boundary. This does not agree as well with archeology as the earlier version: the river flood of Shurappak (the original Deluge) is dated to about 2900 BC, not to 2700 BC, but the error is not large. Yet, there is a problem: in this version the Deluge is in the middle of the era without the law, so one may wonder what the commands Noah was required to follow were, if they were not a law. Obviously the Talmudic shifting of the date of the creation has some problems. You cannot mess with the years of the patriarchs. Some naive people think that the years of the patriarchs are either true years or mythical years. They are neither: they are years set there for an astrological calculation. The same is almost certainly true with the years in the Sumerian king lists (the origin of the patriarch lists). They are nor real years and they are not mythical years. They most probably contain some astrological calculation of the cycle theory, only we have lost the key to read this calculation.
There was no Jewish Messiah close to 240 AD, but Mani lived exactly at this time. Mani claimed to be the helper Jesus promises to send. Jews did not accept Mani. Around 440 AD -470 AD there was Moses of Crete. His time is quite close to the Talmudic date 471 AD, but Moses failed in his mission. From 500 AD to 620 AD some Babylonian Exilarchs tried to establish a Jewish kingdom. Exilarch Nehemiah ben Husiel, though not otherwise known in history, and Benjamin of Tiberias ruled Jerusalem for a while around 614 BC, but lost.
I would like to add Muhammad. Muhammad was born in 570 AD and died 632 AD. If we make a biblical calculation of 70 year weeks (490 years) from the time when Bar Kochba rebuilt the temple (132 AD), this calculation gives 622 AD. This year is the start of the Islamic calender: the time when Muhammad and his followers migrated from Mecca to Medina. Islam was influenced by a version of Christianity. Like Mani, Muhammad also saw himself as the helper whom Jesus promised he will send. Jews, naturally, rejected Muhammad as a Messiah, while Islam accepts Jesus as the Messiah.
After the Talmudic dates had passed, Jewish Messiah claimants had to be a bit more inventive in calculating the end of the times. David Alroy appeared around 1160 AD, Abraham be Abulafia (probably) declared himself as the Messiah in 1290 AD, and there were several other Jewish Messiah claimants around the same time. All these times are close to the Talmudic midpoint of the messianic era (1240 AD). In the cycle theory the Messiah should come in the mid point of the messianic era, like Jesus did, and like Enoch did.
We should expect some Messiah claimant to have appeared 1000 years after the Talmudic dates from 471 AD to 531 AD. There indeed were some claimants. A few were a but later, like Isaac Luria, who though of himself as Messiah ben Joseph, the prophet Messiah and expected the Messiah to appear in 1575 AD.
Talmudic dates for the Messiah should stop around here and appear again only close to the end of the messianic ear, 2240 AD. And so it was. The later Jewish Messiah claimants were not inspired by Talmud.
They had a different inspiration: Cabbalah and Christianity. The first of them was Sabbatai Zevi and the later ones, like Jacob Frank, claimed to be Sabbatai’s reincarnations. Sabbatai Zevi was influenced by British millennarianism, which included the ideas that Jews must return to Palestine before Jesus could come, the year Jews will be restored to Palestine is the notorious year 1666, and the Jews will be taken to Palestine by the Jewish Messiah. Obviously, the Jewish Messiah was not the Second Coming of Jesus, but some other character in the Christian Bible. The year 1000+666 gives a good hint to the identity of this other character: the Jewish Messiah in this Christian thinking had to be the Christian Anti-Christ. There was also another relevant date, a very important one: Sabbatai interpreted Zohar as saying that the year 1648 is the year of redemption for the Jews. This date resonates with the date 1948 too well to be a concidence, and it is not: the last reincarnations of Sabbatai Zevi were Jacob Frank and Eve Frank. Frankists joined Freemasonry, which was the driving force in pre-Zionism. And they created Israel, B’nai B’rith and other similar forces.
This, then, is the short story of Jewish Messianism. The Babylonian Talmud changed the years in the patriarch lists in the Genesis and moved the time of the Messiah forward. However, no Jewish Messiah appeared in these changed times. Finally messianism moved from Talmudic predictions to esoteric ones. The Anti-Christ was Sabbatai Zevi and he was “reborn” several times, and he completed the mission. There is no need for Jared Kushner as the Damien of Omen. But of course, the history is not finished yet. Wait for the continuation part of Omen.