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Echoes of Revelation
Revelation never quotes the Old Testament outright, yet no New Testament book refers to it more. See both texts side by side, why they don’t match, and what John does with them.
Revelation 11:2-3, forty-two months and 1,260 days
Forty-two months and 1,260 days are three and a half years, Daniel's span for the season when God's people are under attack.
Revelation 11:2-3, in every translation this tool compares.
Half a week on a work schedule means the job is cut short, not finished. Daniel speaks of three and a half times, three and a half years, when God's holy ones are handed over. John uses that span three ways. The city is trampled for forty-two months. The witnesses prophesy for 1,260 days. Later he uses Daniel's own phrase. All three point back to Daniel.
The span of three and a half years. Daniel 7:25 in Greek gives the holy ones into the horn's hand for a set span (heos kairou kai kairon kai hemisy kairou). Daniel 12:7 has the same span. John's forty-two months and 1,260 days equal that, and 12:14 uses Daniel's wording.
John never uses Daniel's phrase in chapter 11. He counts the span in months and in days instead. Daniel's span is a time of oppression under a king; John uses it both for trampling (11:2) and for the witnesses' prophesying (11:3). Beale says the reason for the count in days is not clear.
Beale reads the number as a figure for the whole church age, from Christ's ascension to his return. For him it is a time of persecution under God's care. Forty-two may also recall Elijah's drought and Israel's forty-two camps in the desert, he says. Heiser says the numbers send readers back to Daniel and must be read with chapter 12.
Not a new number. The span is Daniel's three and a half times, counted here in months and in days.
Beale calls the forty-two months figurative for the time of tribulation Daniel prophesied (7:25; 9:27; 12:7, 11-12), and links forty-two to Elijah's drought (Luke 4:25; James 5:17) and to the forty-two stations of Numbers 33:5-49. Aune, as Heiser reads him, calls the period a symbolic number for a limited time of trial, derived from Daniel 7:25 and 12:7, and notes John's three ways of naming it. Keener says Daniel used all three figures and that a 360-day year makes them equal. The ESV Study Bible calls the span half a sabbatical cycle, and the NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible and the CSB Study Bible cite Daniel 7:25 and 12:7. Walton notes that the word times in Daniel 7:25 need not mean two. The vault's Greek Daniel 7:25 reads heos kairou kai kairon kai hemisy kairou. The grade is drawn here: the span is uniquely Daniel's, though the wording is John's.
Heiser reads Aune: the forty-two months, the 1,260 days and the time, times and half a time are three ways to name one period, from Daniel 7:25 and 12:7, so Revelation 11 must be read with Revelation 12. He then goes deep into Second Temple calendars, following Boccaccini, to show how Daniel's numbers fit a 360-day reckoning. His lesson is humility: prophecy is ambiguous at points by design, and every such alignment, he says, is speculation. His blunt advice: prophecy books that claim to know how it all plays out, without working through Daniel's calendar, should be thrown away.
The CSB Study Bible says the 1,260 days of 11:3 must come before the beast's forty-two months, so the two periods differ; Beale holds they are the same period. Futurists, as the NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible reports, read the literal last part of a future tribulation; Beale reads the whole church age. MacArthur reads the forty-two months as the second half of a future tribulation, the span of the Antichrist's open career, while God shelters the Jews in the wilderness (12:6, 14). He counts the 1,260 days of 11:3 as the same three and a half years.
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- G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation (New International Greek Testament Commentary), The Metaphors in 11:1-2, The Forty-Two Months
- Craig S. Keener, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, on Revelation 11:3
- ESV Study Bible, note on Revelation 11:1-2
- NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible, note on Revelation 11:2
- CSB Study Bible, note on Revelation 11:3-4 and cross-references on Revelation 11:2
- John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews and Mark W. Chavalas, The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament, on Daniel 7:25
- Septuagint, Daniel 7:25 and 12:7, Interlinear Greek-English Septuagint
- SBL Greek New Testament (MorphGNT), Revelation 11:2-3
- Michael S. Heiser, Revelation 11: The Two Witnesses and the Seventh Trumpet, video lecture (Naked Bible Revelation series)
- John MacArthur, The MacArthur Study Bible (ESV), notes on Revelation 11:2 and 11:3
