The 5500-Year Prophecy

Known as either the 5500-Year Prophecy or the Great Prophecy of 5 1/2 Days, this prophecy was believed to be one of the greatest prophetic words ever given, and yet most Christians today know nothing about it. That was not the case in the earliest centuries of Christianity. It was a prophecy that the Jews and Christians knew well. It was one of the reasons so many Jews became followers of Jesus as their long-awaited Jewish Messiah!

 

I find it particularly ironic that so many Charismatic Evangelicals (of which I am one) who are extremely interested in (if not obsessed with) prophetic words, have never heard of the 5500-Year Prophecy! A prophecy believed to have been given to Adam himself after he fell at the time that he and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden.

 

I began learning more in depth about this prophecy myself through several sources.

 

One source is the work of S. Douglas Woodward who wrote Rebooting the Bible - Part 1 and 2, A Chronology of the Christian Bible and The Septuagint and the Defense of the Christian Bible: How the Ancient Greek Bible Emends the Biblical Text and Best Presents the Case That Jesus Was the Christ.

 

Another source is W. Kent Smith's monumental work entitled Tales of Forever: The Unfolding Drama of God's Hidden Hand in History. (Note: Kent is currently working on another book about the 5500-Year Prophecy that will soon be published.)

 

There are several reasons that this prophecy isn't more well-known and believed to be authentic.

 

One reason is that 2nd-century Judaism, who had rejected Jesus as their Messiah, were trying to stop Jews from following Jesus. One of the ways they tried to do this was to make changes in the Hebrew Old Testament (the Tanakh) when they 'canonized' it nearly 100 years after the start of Christianity. 

 

Between AD90-AD110, the Rabbis, the descendants of the Pharisees, removed from their Hebrew Scriptures nearly 1550 years of chronology from Genesis chapters 5 and 11 (1386 years) and Daniel (165 years). As to the reason why they would do that, we will get to that below.

 

The resulting Hebrew Old Testament textual tradition, known as the Masoretic Text (MT), to this day reflects the chronological corruption that the Rabbis introduced into their Scriptures. The Church Father Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate (LV), used the Hebrew MT for his Old Testament which ended up affecting later English translations like the King James Version (KJV).

 

Thankfully, our Old Testaments do not have to rely solely upon the MT. In addition to the MT, any good study Bible will also incorporate the Septuagint (LXX) Old Testament text, the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) and other manuscript traditions such as the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) to get us as close to the original Hebrew text (and Aramaic) as possible.

There were other passages that the Rabbis tampered with to obscure clear Messianic prophecies that pointed to Jesus as Messiah. If you've ever wondered why the Old Testament quotations in your New Testament differ from the text in your Old Testament, it is because they were quoting from the Septuagint (LXX) 80-90% of the time. 

 

Christians and Jews debated these passages for centuries until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) in the 20th-century proved that the original Hebrew was reflected in the Greek Septuagint (LXX) over and against the Jewish Masoretic Text (MT). 

 

The greatest Jewish textual critic of the Hebrew Scriptures, Emanuel Tov said, 

"often the Greek [the Septuagint/LXX] is MORE AUTHORITATIVE and earlier, antecedent, to the Hebrew Bible [based on the Masoretic Text/MT] than what we currently have". 

 

In other words, for us to establish the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament, one must reference and incorporate the Septuagint. Tov would also add the Dead Sea Scrolls. 

 

So, WHY did 2nd century Jews remove nearly 1550 years out of their Hebrew Bibles?

 

It was because of the 5500-Year Prophecy!

 

Upon Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden, a prophecy was given to him that after 5 1/2 days (meaning 5500 years), God would send the Messiah to redeem him from death, from Hades and restore him to Eden. From the fall of the first Adam, humanity would have to wait 5500 years until the coming of the last Adam, Jesus Christ to rescue us from fallen state.

 

And according to the original chronology of the Old Testament, that is  found in the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch, Jesus Christ appeared precisely 5500 years after Adam.

 

Several early Church writers (i.e. Hippolytus and Julius Africanus who both lived in the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries) affirm this ancient chronology stating that Christ appeared on earth 5500 years after Adam which aligns perfectly with the prophecy.

 

A well-known early Church Father, Ephraim the Syrian (c. AD306-373), makes reference to the actual prophecy and the Jewish tampering with their Scriptures when he wrote, “The Jews have subtracted 600 years [in Genesis 5] from the generations of Adam, Seth, etc., in order that their own books might not convict them concerning the coming of CHRIST: He having been predicted to appear for the deliverance of mankind after 5500 years.”

 

Ephraim recognizes the specified prophecy when he speaks of the timing of Christ's appearance as "having been predicted"! It must have been to Adam as that was the time he lived according to the Hebrew Bible's original chronology! 

 

If the Messiah was to appear after 5500 years according to the Jewish Scriptures, then the Rabbis had to do something as Jesus fulfilled this exact timing. This prophecy had convinced many Jews in the 1st-century and the early 2nd-century to follow Jesus as the Jewish Messiah.

 

Their solution? Change their Hebrew Bibles to make the creation of the world and Adam's appearance at roughly 4000BC and Jesus ends up being disqualified as being the Messianic fulfillment of the prophecy. 

 

One can easily see why we have never heard anything about this. Most Christians are extremely uncomfortable with the idea that the Jews sought to change their Hebrew Scriptures after the advent of Christ. Some today will even consider the thought to be anti-Semitic to suggest such a thing. 

 

But to add insult to injury, rather than follow their own Old Testament, the Septuagint which matches the quotations we have in our New Testaments, Christians from Jerome (late 4th-century), adopted the corrupted Masoretic Text with its altered chronology for their Old Testament. 

I'm not a fan of St. Augustine, but he was strongly opposed to Jerome using the existing Jewish Old Testament of his day as the basis for the Vulgate's Old Testament text. Augustine knew it had been changed. Jerome was unpersuaded, and the primacy of the Masoretic Text as the basis for most of our English translations of the Old Testament remains with us to this day.

 

A good study Bible, as I mentioned, will highlight the differences, but one of the reasons I use the NET and/or the ESV for my English Old Testament, is because the scholars who translated them have allowed the Septuagint and/or the Dead Sea Scrolls to "correct" many of the changes the Rabbis made to their Hebrew Bible in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries.

 

Another reason the 5500-Year Prophecy is not well known is because beyond the references from the aforementioned early church writers, other sources that make mention of it are non-canonical writings, considered pseudepigraphal which are Jewish works whose claimed author is not the true author. 

 

I personally believe that as further discoveries are made, be that the appearance of Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts that were never published and/or newly discovered manuscripts that I am convinced will be found through the Copper Scroll Project, we will learn that some of these very works are in fact authentic, written by the claimed authors. 

 

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