Using Seal Dates

Revelation 7 reveals the process of finding each lost tribe of Israel. The number of days between document signings in each modern tribe is given as 12,000 days. This article explores.

Background

The Book of Revelation is broken into a series of scenes as recorded by John when he was given a vision on the isle of Patmos. The scene we are interested in here deals with the tribes of Israel. It begins at chapter 7 verse 1 and runs through verse 8. The first 4 verses of this scene set the stage for the latter half of the scene. The details of these first four verses is so important we take them verse by verse.

Identifying ancient Israel as the Target

The "four winds" or the four compass directions are symbolic language used across the Bible for the various tribes of Israel. Recall that Abraham was told that his descendants would inhabit the north, south, east and west.

By the time the nation had developed and was wandering around the Sinai as a large company they were organized around these same four compass points. Three sets of tribes were situated north, three south, three east and three west. The Levites remained in the center around the tabernacle.

Earlier passages in Revelation have taken John to this same layout, there were 24 Levite elders, for example, who are the 24 around the throne in chapter 4. (Rev 4:4)

The community of ancient Israel is what this entire scene is about.

Using Seals on this community

This next verse introduces the use of a seal. Seals are another Biblical object that was first used in the Book of Genesis by Tamar to identify Judah.

Judah had committed prostitution with Tamar and left his seal and staff in pledge until he could deliver to Tamar a small goat. Judah had not realized Tamar was his daughter-in-law and when she was found to be pregnant he wanted her stoned.

Tamar produced Judah's own seal and staff and identified him as the other party in the act of prostitution. If she had been stoned, so would he. Further still, the surviving males in a family that looses a brother are responsible for continuing the lost offspring's line. Judah could have done that for his dead son, but would have endangered his other son's estates. Her apparent act of prostitution wasn't, as she was causing him to fulfill the family duty. If she had not done so, Judah would have been struck dead by God himself.

The angel is producing a seal, and it will be used for the same purpose, it will be used to identify Judah again, this time his offspring, not because they have lost a seal to Tamar, but because they use their own national seal on a document on an indicated date. All of Judah's brothers, as well as Joseph's two oldest sons will be identified the very same way. Each will sign a document on a specific prophetic date and identify themselves as a tribe of ancient Israel.

The first references to Time

Every time God speaks a count of anything, even when simply written in his word, he speaks an interval of time. We explore the sources of this important principle in the Bible Time website. In this case God is speaking through the writing of Revelation 7 and the interval he is indicating is 144,000, without units of any kind.

Counts this large can only be days. We are around 13,000 years from Adam and the count of 144,000, if it meant years, would be totally off the scales. The indicated count is of days.

The Bible Time website includes a series of Calendar Converters and the Day-by-number tool can be used to discover that this many days is just shy of 396 Biblical years. The period when the angel is unable to harm has something to do with this size of interval. Just what will be seen shortly.

First uses of seals

From this point out to the end of the scene the tribes themselves are listed in a special order:

There are several important features must be noticed:

• Dan is omitted. Yet the angel earlier said every tribe would be sealed.(Rev 7:3)

• Ephraim is omitted. Instead the joint tribal name Joseph is used. Joseph includes Ephraim and Manasseh. Joseph was not an extant tribe having been split into two tribes by Jacob on his death bed.

• Manasseh listed twice. If Joseph includes Ephraim, then it includes Manasseh too. Manasseh is also listed alone.

• The order is unusual. The order of the tribes listed here is special to this list.

Each of these issues will reflect into our final solution. Manasseh will indeed be sealed twice, Dan will be sealed too, and the order matters.

First Pass at Seal Dates

This half chapter from Revelation says something important. It says that we are to look at the tribes of Israel. At some point in their history, every 12,000 days, they will be "Sealed," or identified, because they have done something with a document at the national level. This passage does not say when to start looking.

Since we know the recorded history of the tribes of Israel and since that record does not record a day-accurate history when this might have happened, and since this is in Revelation, a book about the end of the age, we assume that it must happen after the end of the period of punishment that the tribes underwent beginning at the Civil War. As we've already shown that period of punishment ended in 1579. The following report takes the Passover Date that ended that punishment period and adds on 144,000 days. This is the last date in this list and the target for the final seal.

This is an auditable report. Pay attention to the expression 144,000th and the way the day numbers are actually 143,999 days apart. If they were exactly 144,000 days apart the final digits of the day numbers using either AA Numbers or JD Numbers, would be the same. They are not. This is consistent with 1 based math, another issue we address in Time Theory section of the Bible Time website.

This particular date is just after the Yom Kippur War that begun October 6, 1973. This date is very close to that fighting. As a matter of historical fact the Disengagement Agreement that ended the fighting in this war was signed exactly 70 days later, January 18, 1974.

That January '74 agreement also reopened the Suez Canal closed since the 6 day war in 1967. The agreement also caused the Israelis to withdraw back across the Suez. They were very close to the outskirts of Cairo when fighting had stopped. This was the last major peace agreement type document until peace between Israel and Egypt later in the decade.

Notice what we are looking for here is some sort of nationally signed document by some nation that must be identifiable as a tribe of Israel. Modern Israel fits the bill as a tribe of ancient Israel, and the document in January '74 works as the type of document we're looking for. Now, to trim the math a little tighter.

Tolerance at the start of Punishment

The start of the 2550 year period of punishment was only actually given in the historical account to the year. We arbitrarily selected the standard Passover date, the 14th day of the 1st month, because that is the national holiday that fell closest to the year break. There was no Bible text that supported such an assumption.

The window that these seal dates could fall in is actually a year wide. We selected the start date at the start of that year. We can choose any date in that year, for any reason we want, as the actual point where we should start. The next period of national assembly in the ancient story would have been the 1st day of the 7th month, so we could argue for a narrower, 6 month window, but that window would still start in the same place.

Perhaps we should shift forward 70 days and hit the January '74 date exactly?

Doing this suggests the start of Punishment at 10020/3/24 AA, a day of the month when Moses, 520 years before, went up on the mountain for the first time in order to receive the law. This is a reasonable day of the year for God to choose to consider the covenant broken, since this is the day of the year when it was given. Moses returned with the tablets, and broke them, 40 days later.

Seal Dates

The Seal Dates spring from the text given in Revelation 7. The following is the passage the chronicles this period and provides the order for each tribe.

This punishment period sets the start point for each of the 12,000 day long periods that sets the "Seal Dates" that we're going to use to identify each tribe of Israel. Those dates are shown in the following report:

For the rest of our analysis, we will use a seal date pattern that places the start date of 7 times punishment at 10020/3/24 AA and the last day of that punishment at 12570/3/23 AA. Seal dates will count out 12,000 days from there. This makes the last sealed document the Disengagement Agreement between Israel and Egypt signed January 18, 1974.

Notes

• From a logical perspective we've used a modern headline to "fit" the best interpretation out of a possible range of interpretations. If such is fit is right we should see the other documents landing 12,000 days apart from here. We will.

• Another strategy would have been to simply slap a tolerance on the analysis, the 1 year (or 6 months) implied by the starting story. Use of tolerance may be more appealing to engineers, but since we'll see other headlines at 12,000 day windows from here we prefer to use the 70 day shift. My original discovery process through this material used such a tolerance window. The precision in the answer mitigates against using that process here.

• The day of the year lining up with Moses' actions at mount Sinai also indicates that there could be related actions in the 70 days before (the first Passover was 70 days earlier) and there could be actions at 40 and/or 80 days later. Moses returned from Mount Sinai 40 days later, broke the tablets, then 80 days later after a second try. Each seal at each seal date could be so surrounded by other dates. Throughout this study we will look at dates 70 days before and 40 and 80 days after every date.

• Astute readers should notice that the last seal in the seal date list of Revelation chapter 7 is the tribe of Benjamin. Modern Israel the nation that signed the Disengagement of Forces agreement on that January day in the Egyptian desert outside Cairo. Since Cairo is not a likely candidate for a tribe of Israel, Egypt probably being Egypt, we can deduce that the modern nation of Israel is the ancient tribe of Benjamin, alone. We'll return to this accurate identification in a later article.