Thursday, November 7, 2019

Jesus' Fulfillment of Daniel 9:24-27 and the Cessation of the Efficacy of Temple Sacrifices in the Talmud When Jesus Died


Commenting on the Messianic prophecy in Dan 9:24-27, Roy Shoeman, a Jewish convert to Roman Catholicism, wrote the following:

When the Messiah would come

In a class by itself is the prophecy found in Daniel 9, which appears to predict that the Messiah will appear about A.D. 26, precisely the date that many scholars give for Jesus’ baptism by John and hence the beginning of His public ministry. The prophecy then states that He will be killed between three and four years later—also precisely fulfilled, since Jesus was crucified three and one-third years after His baptism by John. The prophecy concludes with the prediction that a short time later the Temple would be destroyed—again fulfilled by the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in .D. 70. The passage however, takes a bit of effort to understand (Daniel 9:24-27) . . .A few keys are necessary to decipher this passage. The Hebrew for “week” is the same word as for “seven”, and a day represents one year; hence “seven weeks” is 49 years, “sixty-two weeks” is 434 years, and “seventy weeks” is 490 years. The “going forth of the word to restore and build Jerusalem recorded in Ezra 7:11-26, which was given in 458 B.C.  It took exactly “seven weeks”, or 49 years, to complete the building of the walls of Jerusalem, indicated by the fact that 49 years after Artaxerxes’ decree, or in 409 B.C., Nehemiah ended his appointment as governor of Judah. Adding another sixty-two weeks, or 434 years, brings us to A.D. 26, which is the year which many, including the ancient Church historian Bishop Eusebius, give as the date of Jesus’ baptism in thee Jordan and the beginning of His public ministry. Then, in the “half of the week”—that is, three and a half years later—the “the victim and the sacrifice shall fail”. And it was about three years and four months after Jesus’ baptism that He was crucified, at which time the Temple veil was rent in two as a sign that the Temple sacrifices would henceforth fail . . . Then within a generation, the Romans came and destroyed the Temple and the entire city of Jerusalem and sent the Jews into exile, fulfilling the verse “a people with their leader that shall come, shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be waste, and after the end of the war the appointed desolation”. (Roy H. Schoeman, Salvation is From the Jews: The Role of Judaism in Salvation History from Abraham to the Second Coming [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003], 81-83)

Elsewhere, in a discussion of the Messiah in the Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 31b) wrote:

Both the Talmud and the Zohar contain accounts of how, in the days of the Temple, the High Priest would once a year—on Yom Kippur, or the “Day of Atonement”—enter the Holy of Holies and offer sacrifice for the atonement of the sins of all Israel. Both mention the “miracle of the scarlet thread”, in which a scarlet thread would miraculously turn white as the sign that God had accepted the sacrifice. From the account in the Zohar (Vayikra, Section 3, condensed):

All the sins are [taken] away . . . on this day, the defilement of the soul and of the body . . . All that day . . . God makes atonement for Israel and purifies them from all their sins and they are not accused before Him . . . On this day the priest . . . makes atonement for himself and his house and the priests and the sanctuary and all Israel . . . They used to know by a certain thread of scarlet if the priest had been successful . . . [I]t was known by the thread changing in color to white, when there was rejoicing above and below. If it did not, however, all were distressed, knowing that their prayer had not been accepted.

The scarlet thread turning white would be the sign that God had accepted the sacrifice and forgiven the Jewish people their sins (“though your sins be like scarlet, they may become white as snow; through they be crimson red, they may become white as wool”—Isaiah 1:18). Yet the Talmud itself reports that forty years before the Temple was destroyed,, this great miracle, which gave divine confirmation that the High Priest’s sacrifice had been accepted taking away the sins of the Jewish people, ceased to occur. The passage from the Talmud reads (Rosh Hashanah 31b):

Originally they used to fasten the thread of scarlet on the door of the [Temple] court on the outside. If I turned white the people used to rejoice, and if it did not turn white they were sad . . . for forty years before the destruction of the Temple the thread of scarlet never turned white but it remained red.

The Temple was destroyed about A.D. 70; hence the miracle ceased to occur about A.D. 30, which is precisely when the crucifixion took place—the crucifixion that replaced the sacrifice of the Old Covenant with that of Jesus on the Cross. According to the New Testament at the very moment that Jesus died on the Cross the curtain of the Temple that separated off the Holy of Holies was rent in two, symbolizing the end of the efficacy of the sacrifices of the Old Covenant (cf. Matthew 27:51; Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45). It is the Talmud itself that unwittingly confirms this when it recounts that from that time on—forty years before the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70—the scarlet thread never again turned white. (Ibid., 130-32)

In Yoma 39b, also in the Talmud, the miracle of the scarlet thread, and the fact that it ceased to occur about A.D. 30, is also recounted:

 . . . Without the presence of Shimon HaTzaddik among them, the Jewish people were no longer worthy of the many miracles that had occurred during his lifetime. For this reason, following his death, his brethren, the priests, refrained from blessing the Jewish people with the explicit name of God in the priestly blessing. The Sages taught: During the tenure of Shimon HaTzaddik, the lot for God always arose in the High Priest’s right hand; after his death, it occurred only occasionally; but during the forty years prior to the destruction of the Second Temple, the lot for God did not arise in the High Priest’s right hand at all. So too, the strip of crimson wool that was tied to the head of the goat that was sent to Azazel did not turn white, and the westernmost lamp of the candelabrum did not burn continually . . .

In both the Old Testament and Talmudic literature, the Messiah would come before A.D. 70 and the destruction of the Second Temple. Furthermore, in light of Yoma 39b and Rosh Hashanah 31b, the efficacy of the repetitive sacrifices of the Temple ceased around the time of Jesus’ death. This fits perfectly, not just the chronology, but the theology of the New Testament. As we read in Hebrews:

Since the law has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered year after year, make perfect those who approach. Otherwise, would they not have ceased being offered, since the worshipers, cleansed once for all, would no longer have any consciousness of sin? But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sin year after year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins. Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, "Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, 'See, God, I have come to do your will, O God' (in the scroll of the book it is written of me)." When he said above, "You have neither desired nor taken pleasure in sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings" (these are offered according to the law), then he added, "See, I have come to do your will." He abolishes the first in order to establish the second. And it is by God's will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. And every priest stands day after day at his service, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, "he sat down at the right hand of God," and since then has been waiting "until his enemies would be made a footstool for his feet." For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. (Heb 10:1-14 NRSV)

Ιησούς χριστός!