The End Of Days
According to Abarbanel, at least
Don Isaac Abarbanel sat in his study in Naples, thinking deeply about the Book of Daniel and the codes he was certain lay hidden within it.
Born in Lisbon in 1437 Abarbanel became treasurer to Alfonso V of Portugal, before fleeing to Castile in Spain in 1483 and entering the service of Queen Isabella. Having tried valiantly to prevent the expulsion of the Jewish community in 1492, Abarbanel travelled to Naples and began to advise the King.
Four years later, he was now focused on a key phrase of the Book of Daniel in which the eponymous hero has a terrible dream about four beasts – a lion with eagles wings; a bear, a leopard, and a fourth ‘exceedingly terrible’ beast with many horns and ‘teeth of iron and nails of brass’.
Daniel learns, when a certain time comes עִדָּן וְעִדָּנִין וּפְלַג עִדָּן, idan v'idanin uflag idan, “a time and times and half a time” this Kingdom will disappear, and redemption will begin.
This is the code that Abarbanel was trying to break.
In his book Maayanei Yeshua Abarbanel carries out calculations that lead him to conclude that the Messiah will arrive in 1503 CE or that major events anticipating his arrival will occur no later than 1531.
Abarbanel also drew on astrology, specifically the alignment of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces which took place in 1464, years prior. “Since the effect of the great conjunction is to transfer the nation or subject that receives its influence from one extreme to the other its influence will affect a nation that is at the extreme of degradation, the extreme of abasement, and enslaved in a foreign land. The result is that the conjunction is then able to carry them to the [opposite] extreme of high stature.”
There is scholarly disagreement over the extent to which Abarbanel sets the tone for future Jewish messianic thought. But what’s strange is that Abarbanel’s main life was as textual commentator and advisor to statesmen. He was very grounded in the ‘here and now.’ He knows that most commentators shied away from calculating the end of days. And the date he suggested was only seven years on from when he wrote the book.
In Maayanei Yeshua Abarbanel writes that he sought to "strengthen feeble hands and weak knees, to try to bring comfort to those who stumble from the exile and those who remain of the multitude, to seek out in the book of the Lord His good word as imparted to His servants, the prophets, to inquire 'how long it shall be until the end of the wonders' (Daniel, 12:6).
While he knew predicting the end was frowned on, Abarbanel’s primary aim was to try to give comfort to his people.
Perhaps, Abarbanel genuinely couldn’t imagine how so much oppression could NOT in some way be part of a divine plan. Or that visionary alternatives to the bitter reality of exile would raise even greater theological questions than a mistaken calculation regarding the end of days.
Calev Ben-Dor lives in Jerusalem and writes and teaches about Israel and Judaism.