Modern Persia and Historical Contexts

SPEAKER 01 : 0:00

Greetings to the brightest audience in the country, and welcome to Bob and Yart Live. Today, we’re getting into a study of the Book of Daniel done by my father and predecessor, Bob and Yart. And if you want, you do not want to miss this. If you want to get all of Bob and Yart’s Bible studies for just $10, you can get that at nyart.shop that has all of these Daniel studies. You do not want to miss those. But today, we’re getting into this study of Daniel, So exciting. Hey, if you can’t afford that $10, email us, service at kgov.com, and we will find a way to get you those Bible studies. Hey, this is Daniel, Bob Enyart’s study of Daniel. So exciting. I’ll see you on the other end.

SPEAKER 02 : 0:42

Today, we’ve arrived at Daniel chapter 10, which is really just an introduction. It’s setting up the account of his next vision of Persia and Greece. Now, Greece we are especially familiar with because of its extensive influence on Western civilization, on our culture and language. Persia, well, we’re more familiar with Persia if we remember its modern name, which is Iran. Now, just as Iraq is modern-day Babylon, with the kingdom of Assyria and its capital city of Nineveh up in northern Iraq, anciently, and in the southern part of the country was the location of the Tower of Babel and the city and kingdom of Babylon, that’s Iraq. Well, to the east of Iraq is Iran, which similarly was Persia. When there are difficulties in foreign affairs between America and Iran, Iranians who live here, if you ask them, what country are you from, they say Persia, because they know we’ve all gone to public school and we have no idea where Persia is, or that Persia is Iran. So they say Persia when things are not good, which has been the case for decades now. In Iran, they do not speak Arabic. They’re not Arabs. They are Persians, and they speak Persian, although it comes in variance. But like the Arabs, the Persians share the common Muslim hatred of Daniel’s people, the Jews, and of his homeland, national Israel. Now, if we could take a moment before we even get started, I’d like to talk about modern Persia, specifically Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We’ve heard of him, the president of modern-day Persia, Iran. He makes the news often with his denial of the Holocaust. He claims that Germany never murdered millions of Jewish men, women, and children. And he makes these continued announcements as recently as this past week that he wants to wipe Israel off the map, push the Jews into the sea. And this is the man who is making every effort to get nuclear weapons. And so that’s why people who are reasonable want to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, because it is a lawless nation bent on the destruction of another nation. Now, Cheryl and I have been reading a book not about Iran, but a book called Son of Hamas by Mossab Hassan Yosef. And I highly recommended his father, Sheikh Hassan Yusuf, is the founder of Hamas. And Mossab himself was arrested several times by Shin Bet, which is Israel’s intelligence service. And he was imprisoned for his involvement in Hamas, which is a terrorist group. But over time, he began to question not only the terrorist attacks, but Islam itself. He was an extraordinarily courageous man, and he started giving intelligence to on planned terrorist attacks to the IDF, to the Israeli Defense Force. And because of that, they were able to prevent jihadists from committing specific terrorist attacks, arresting many. Some would end up blowing up themselves and none of their targets. Mossab was born in Ramallah in the West Bank the year after I graduated high school. 1978 he was born. And he has now become a born-again Christian. He’s been very influential in the horrendous difficulties. I shouldn’t say it that way. Thank God for the difficulties that Hamas has gone through because of him. And I highly recommend his book, which is filled with surprises, including for us conservative Christians. It’s called Son of Hamas. Now, I mention Mossad because the history of the Old Testament, beginning with the curse of Canaan. The most amazing story, if you wonder about it, and you weren’t here when we covered this, why is it that Ham committed a sin and Noah cursed his grandson Canaan? Why is that? That doesn’t seem to make sense until you look at the Hebrew figure of speech to uncover a man’s nakedness, which is throughout the Old Testament, which means nakedness to commit a crime of sexual immorality with his wife. And so Ham violated his own mother, Noah’s wife, and Canaan was born. So Noah was not the father of Canaan, but Ham was the father of Canaan, as the short little story says two or three times to clarify who the father was, and that’s why the grandson was cursed. And if you have any questions about that, you could just Google, why was Canaan cursed? Or go to our website, kgov.com slash Canaan, and you’ll see quite a Bible study with overwhelming biblical evidence that that is the actual meaning of that figure of speech. So Ham committed a terrible crime with his own mother. And that introduced to world history the arch enemies of the Israelites for centuries, the Canaanites. And so the history of the world is a very short history. And you go through in the Old Testament, beginning with the curse of Canaan, and you extend through the struggle between Abraham’s descendants and the nations around the Middle East. And you find out that history is still in the making. And those who wish for the Bible days, those who wish they had lived in the Bible days, all they need to do is realize that we are living in the Bible days. And if Mosab Yosef had lived back in the time of, say, Absalom or Solomon, and if he had lived the life he’s lived, the short life back then, he would probably have been in the Bible. probably. And we have the same opportunity. Abraham did not have a better opportunity, nor did Moses or David or John or Paul. They didn’t have a better opportunity to love God and get to know God than we have today. So we live the Bible days if only we want to. So for now, let’s begin Daniel 10 in verse 1. And after we read this verse, we’re going to refresh ourselves on something about Cyrus, and then Belteshazzar, and then the fact that the prophecy that was given would be a long time in coming. In the third year of Cyrus, king of Persia, a message was revealed to Daniel whose name was called Belteshazzar. The message was true, but the appointed time was long and he understood the message and had understanding of the vision. So we’ve already talked about Cyrus. Remember that the Jews, because of their sin, rebellion against God, they had lost the hand of protection that comes from knowing and trusting God. And so the Jews had been carried away captive to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar. And their Babylonian captivity lasted for 70 years until the Persian king Cyrus conquered Babylon and at last gave the Jews permission to begin to rebuild Jerusalem. Now, the timing of their return to Israel, to Judea, southern Israel, that was a fulfillment of the 70-year prophecy of Jeremiah, which we’ve already looked at, which Daniel has pointed out. He said, now, this is going to fulfill Jeremiah’s prophecy, and it did. And also remember that Christ’s crucifixion fulfilled the 490-year prophecy that we just studied in the previous chapter. So God is intervening in the affairs of men, and he’s doing it in a methodical way, and he’s prophesying in advance what will happen to give the people then, and people in our day, reason to believe that the Scriptures are not just the product of men, but they are the Word of God. Also, we are reminded that Daniel’s name is Belteshazzar. So a little bit, just a refresher, Belteshazzar, Daniel has a beautiful Hebrew name that means God will judge. And remember, the Babylonians changed the names of these Jews who they wanted to train to function in the king’s royal court. And so they changed Daniel’s name to Belteshazzar, and that name means Bel’s wife will protect the king. And that is a great perversion because Bel, B-E-L, I don’t know why that sounds familiar, but no relation. Bel was a term used for Babylon’s pagan idols, especially for Marduk. And Marduk, when you go this far back in history, there are historical records, but we always wish we knew more. But it seems that Marduk was associated with water and judgment. So very likely, there was an ancient effort to appease the gods to avoid another watery judgment like the global flood. So they invented a god, Marduk, of water and judgment, and they would sacrifice to him, and they called him Bel, and they called other gods the same term. And remember, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah also had their names changed to pagan Babylonian names. They had such beautiful Hebrew names, and each time the name change was some kind of an insult to God or to these Jewish men. So then in verse 1, we read that the appointed time was long. In other words, Daniel was receiving yet another vision, a prophecy, but it would be a long time in coming before it would be fulfilled. Well, God was not and God is not in a hurry. God is patient. Love is patient. And that is the meaning of the phrase, with God, a thousand years are like a day. With God, a thousand years are like a day. And also, he’s wonderfully capable. And that is the meaning of a day is like a thousand years. God can patiently wait for the fullness of time. Or like we read in Romans chapter 11, Paul teaches that he’s currently waiting for the fullness of Gentiles, for the fullness of the Gentiles to come in until he returns with working directly with national Israel. So God is patient. He can wait. And when that day comes that he’s been waiting for, then he is so capable that in one day he He can accomplish what people think might take a thousand years or a billion years, like the building of a city, New Jerusalem, or creating the heavens and the earth. God could do it in a day. So verse 2, “…in those days I, Daniel, was mourning three full weeks.” Now, three full weeks. The Hebrew for this phrase, three full weeks, is a bit surprising. Because what it actually says is three weeks of days. And we discussed this briefly in our last study when we saw in chapter 9, just three verses before this verse, There’s a prophecy of 70 weeks, but it’s not weeks of days, it’s weeks of years. So there’s a prophecy of 70 weeks, and here Daniel is mourning for three weeks. So you might think either the last chapter was 70 weeks of days or 490 days, or you might think that this verse is speaking of three weeks of years or 21 years. So is Daniel mourning here for 21 years? No, that’s not the meaning of this. That’s why he’s explicit in the Hebrew. We have the normal Hebrew word for three, which the King James translates as three, 388 times. Then we have the standard Hebrew word for week or Shabuwa, which it just means seven. And then we have the Hebrew word for day, which is yom. Yom. So we have three weeks of days. And that tells us Daniel is referring to what we consider three normal weeks. And this is typical in all languages and in Hebrew. Words have multiple uses. They have a sphere of meaning. So remember when Jacob… wanted to marry Rachel, and her uncle Laban said, well, you want to marry her? You got to put in your time. You got to work for me for seven years. And he worked for seven years, and then Laban tricked him, and he married Leah instead. And so then… Laban said, well, if you want to marry Rachel, fulfill her week also, and you could marry her. Fulfill her week. And so Jacob worked another seven years to marry Rachel. Now, he didn’t wait seven years before he could marry her. We find that out when we look at the sons that were born to Rachel and Leah and their two concubines, their female servants. Jacob had 12 sons and a daughter. And we realize that Jacob worked for seven years, then he married Leah, Then he was tricked by marrying her, and then he agreed to work another seven years, but he married Rachel right away. He didn’t have to wait seven years. By then, she would have been 14 years older than when he first said, I want to marry you. And that’s perfectly fine, but he wasn’t going to put up with that. So, fulfill her week, that shows us that the Hebrew word for seven is used in different ways, seven days or seven years. Now, by the way, Daniel is mourning for three sevens, and in Modern Jewish culture, when someone dies, a family member, a friend, they shavua, shavua, they seven. What does it mean they seven? They mourn for seven days. And so something you might do for seven days, the way language works, you could just say, I’m sevening, I’m sevening, I’m mourning. The same thing is true with the word for forty days. For example, 40 is used for something like a punishment, like it rains for 40 days and 40 nights. There are many uses of 40 for judgment or punishment in the Bible. And when we were in Turkey, our tour guide said to us that in the spring when they cleaned their homes, their moms would say, I’m 40-ing the house. So I’m giving it a good spring cleaning. I’m 40-ing the house. Well, when we were in Israel in November 1995, we’ve had the honor of leading three tours, three busloads of Christians to Israel. And it was just about a week after their prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, had been assassinated. And so the nation was mourning. They were mourning. And by the way, we produced a DVD called A Bible Tour of Israel. We just got a call from a friend who’s not a Christian back east in New Jersey. She was waiting for the hurricane Irene to hit, and she popped in A Bible Tour of Israel and said she really learned a lot. And so she’s inviting a Christian friend to come over so they could watch it together. So let’s hope all goes well with the Bible tour of Israel. So Daniel was mourning not the loss of a loved one, but like Nehemiah, his sorrow was for his nation, which had lost the blessing of God. because of their pride and rebellion against him. So verse 3, while Daniel was mourning, he writes, I ate no pleasant food, no meat or wine came into my mouth, nor did I anoint myself at all till three whole weeks were fulfilled. But Daniel, when the book begins in chapter 1, Daniel started out as a vegetarian. Remember that? Well, he didn’t really start out as a vegetarian. He started out as a carnivore. Not an herbivore, but an omnivore. He’d eat anything. Well, anything as long as it was consistent with the Mosaic dietary law. So when he ends up in Babylon… The concern is that the Babylonians are pagans. They don’t care anything about the ordinances that God gave to Israel for their diet. So they would take meat, sacrifice the animals to idols, and then feed the meat to whoever wanted to buy it. And so Daniel and his associates, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, they said, we just want vegetables. We don’t want to eat any meat because we don’t want to disobey our God. And so Daniel, he took some risk. Even if it was difficult, he wanted to obey God, and he did. And so what we see is that eventually Daniel started to eat meat again. So he was not a lifelong vegetarian from that day. As soon as he could ascertain that the food that they would procure for themselves was not unclean, As soon as he could assure, because remember, he rose up in authority and prominence and power within Babylon over a succession of kings. As soon as he realized that he could get the kind of meat he wanted, he began eating meat again, and good for him. Of course, we all love animals. They’re delicious. And if God didn’t want us to eat animals, he wouldn’t have made them out of meat. So Daniel did not eat meat during this time when he was mourning. Verse 4. Now on the 24th day of the first month, as I was by the side of the great river, that is the Tigris, Now, Daniel is most likely thinking of the first month based on the Hebrew calendar in the spring, which is the month of Abib. The Babylonians began their new year in the fall. But God had told Moses in the book of Exodus, I want you to begin your new year in the spring with the month of Abib. And that is the month of the Passover. Well, what is startling is on another trip, we were in Israel and it was the month of Abib and it was the first of the month and it was the year 2000. So it was basically the first day of the first month of the first year of the new millennium and the entire nation was completely oblivious that it was the first of the year by the biblical calendar. Because ever since they went to Babylon, when they came back, they changed the names of the months so that Abib is no longer Abib, it’s Nisan. That’s a Babylonian name for the pagan Babylonian calendar. And they observe Rosh Hashanah, their new year, in the fall, which is when the Babylonians observe New Year. Now, if you recall, God begins each day at sunset. So the Sabbath would begin, the rabbis would wait for the sun to set, and they would ring a bell or blow a trumpet and let everybody know at different times throughout history, this is the beginning of the Sabbath, so you have to have your work done, you have to be at home, and then you begin to enjoy the Sabbath. So at sunset. So because of that, many theologians have thought that God very possibly created the earth for Israel in the northern hemisphere in the fall, not in the spring. Because just as he says the day begins day one in Genesis 1, evening and morning, the first day. Evening and morning the second day. So the day began in the evening, so the year very possibly began in the fall. And so that’s why the Babylonians had their year begin in the fall because that’s the way it had always been since Noah, since Adam. The year began in the fall, and it was a 360-day year. And that’s why our circles are divided by ancient mathematicians into 360 degrees. And it was after the flood, and because of the consequences of the flood, that we ended up with a 365-day year. But why do we start our day now at midnight in our year in the dead of winter? We don’t do it the original way. We don’t do it the biblical way. We do it the Roman way. Because the Romans began their day at midnight and their year at January 1st in the dead of winter. So that is what we have inherited. I don’t think that God gets angry at anyone based on the words they use for the days of the week or the months of the year. I don’t think that he does. He wanted ancient Israel to keep their feast, the seven Levitical feasts from Leviticus 23. But God is a God of mercy. But I imagine when he returns to Israel and establishes their kingdom in the earth, that he is going to have them return to the biblical calendar. I imagine that he is and that he’s pleased when we remember that. the calendar that he established so this is the 24th day of the first month as I was by the side of the great river that is the Tigris you guys know about the Tigris in the Euphrates Rivers these two rivers in Iraq are where we get the term Mesopotamia from the Mesopotamian Valley Medzo means between, and like the Potomac River, that root means rivers. So between the rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates is the Mesopotamian Valley, the fertile crescent from where civilization sprung after the global flood. In Eden, there were actually outside of Eden. In the center of Eden, there was an enormous amount of water that came up from under the earth and it flowed out of Eden into And it’s separated into four rivers, which watered the earth, we read in Genesis 2. And Moses gives us the names of those four rivers from before the flood. Now, those rivers are gone. They were wiped out when the surface of the earth was carved from the catastrophe of the global flood.

SPEAKER 01 : 28:09

Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, we are out of time here on KLTT Radio. If you want the entire thing, you can find it in two different ways. One, you can go to kgov.com, click on the store, and purchase the Daniel Bible Study, which is a little bit expensive. I’ll be honest. It’s a little bit expensive. Or for way cheaper, you can go to enyart.shop and get all of Bob Enyart’s Bible Studies for just $10. You do not want to miss that. $10. What a steal. If that’s too expensive for you, reach out service at kgov.com and we will find a way to get that to you. No charge. We want to be a blessing to you. Again, nyart.shop. That’s E-N-Y-A-R-T dot S-H-O-P. Hey, may God bless you guys.