Eighteen Times

You would expect the expression to stand everywhere.

A theme that carries the whole of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, the hinge of history — you would expect "the day of the LORD" to run in large letters across every page. Turn the machine loose, then, on the Hebrew text. The word for "day," yom, occurs twenty-three hundred times — one of the commonest words of the Old Testament. Isolate from it the exact phrase, yom YHWH, the day of the LORD itself. The answer is sobering, and it is the first thing this chapter has to say.

Eighteen times.

Eighteen. In all of the Old Testament. Not a thousand, not a hundred — eighteen places where the two words stand in fixed conjunction.1 It is no everyday expression but a cut term, a crystal, that the prophets set with care. And that is precisely what a technical term ought to be: rare, and for that very reason weighty. Whoever says "the day of the LORD" does not merely say something about a day; he calls up a whole judgment with three syllables.

But rare is not the same as marginal. For those eighteen are the tip of an iceberg. Around the core phrase lies a whole field — a family of expressions that illuminate the same day from other sides. There is a day of wrath, and a day of vengeance. A day of visitation, when God draws up the account. A day of distress, of devastation, of darkness. A day of the trumpet and the battle-cry. A day of the slaughter. Count not only the phrase but the whole field — every time yom stands joined with such a judgment-word — and the number leaps to nearly four hundred.2 The day of the LORD is no word. It is a vocabulary.

And there is one place where that whole vocabulary explodes at once.

Open Zephaniah, the first chapter, verses fifteen and sixteen. In two breaths the prophet piles the complete field upon itself, like a man laying one stone after another on a wall until the wall crushes you: a day of wrath is that day, a day of distress and anguish, a day of devastation and desolation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet blast and battle-alarm.3 Six times "a day of," without a breath's pause, each word darker than the last. Whoever wants to see the lexical field of the day of the LORD in one window need not search far. It stands here, in Zephaniah 1, compressed into a cascade. No wonder this book will later prove to be the template: whoever dissects these six verses holds the whole palette of motifs in his hands.

And then the question of where the field truly dwells. For that too the machine turns out to know, and the answer is as sharp as the number eighteen. The core phrase is not evenly scattered across Scripture. Of the eighteen, thirteen stand in the Twelve — the minor prophets, that handful of short scrolls at the back of the Old Testament that many a reader skips. Joel bears five, spread over his whole book; Zephaniah three; Amos three; and further Obadiah, Malachi. Only three stand in Isaiah, two in Ezekiel. And in the Torah, in the Psalms, in Daniel — in all those giants — the fixed phrase as such does not occur. The day of the LORD is, in the strictest sense, an affair of the Twelve. That is no side-matter for the construction of this book; it determines where the backbone lies. Whoever wants to learn to know the day of the LORD begins not with the great names, but with the small ones.

Yet here you must be careful, for the field has a pitfall, and it is honest to name it at once. Alongside the core phrase runs a second, far more common expression: bayyom hahu, "on that day." It occurs two hundred seventy-six times — fifteen times as often as the phrase itself. And the great majority of it is perfectly ordinary: "on that day David struck the Philistines," "on that day the covenant was made." No eschatology, only a date in a story. You cannot, therefore, count your way to the day of the LORD; you must distinguish it.4 In the narrative books "that day" is nothing but a time-marker. But in the prophets it can suddenly catch fire — in Isaiah, and most sharply in Zechariah twelve to fourteen, where "in that day" recurs sixteen times in three chapters until it has become one and the same great Day. The machine counts; the reader weighs. That distinction — counting and weighing — runs through the whole of this book.

Now cross the border into the New Testament, and something beautiful happens. The Hebrew yom YHWH becomes the Greek hēmera kyriou, the day of the Lord — the translation is straight, the thread runs on. Paul warns that it comes "as a thief in the night," exactly as the prophets. But alongside that familiar name a new one surfaces, and with the new name the face tilts. There is now also a day of Christ — and it carries no terror but comfort: in Philippians it is the day of the harvest, of the reward, "the day of Jesus Christ" toward which the believer looks. And there is a day of God, at Peter's hand, where the heavens burn and the new creation dawns. And a day of the wrath, at Paul's hand in the letter to the Romans. Four names for one day, each with its own face. And three words circle around it like moons around a planet: parousia, the coming; apokalypsis, the unveiling; epiphaneia, the appearing. The day coincides with the moment Christ becomes visible — not beside it, but within it.5

And note, finally, where in the New Testament the day dwells. Here too not evenly. As the Twelve carried the term in the Old Testament, so in the New one man carries it above all: Paul. Of the fourteen places where the Greek uses the technical Day-phrase, nine stand with him. The center of gravity has shifted — from the minor prophets to the apostle — but it is the same weight. The day traveled along from the old covenant to the new, and changed its name on the way without changing its nature.

All that the machine counts, and it counts it re-calculably. But a machine is a blunt instrument, and this book does not pretend otherwise. It also misses. It finds "the day of the LORD" where in reality stands ha-yom, "today," happening to fall next to the divine name; it finds it in Ezek 48:35, where no day at all is meant but the name of the new city — YHWH-shamma, "the LORD is there." Such phantom hits are removed by hand and separately named, so that of the nineteen raw hits eighteen genuine ones remain.6 That is no carelessness being hidden, but the method letting itself be checked: every count in this book stands in the apparatus, with the script alongside, so that whoever wishes may count everything over on the same ground.

So the day of the LORD proves to be no word but a world of words — eighteen cut cornerstones, and around them an extended field of wrath and vengeance, of darkness and trumpet, of distress and visitation. To learn to know it means: to walk through that whole field, from the Twelve to Paul, from the cascade of Zephaniah to the thief of the night. And it means: to distinguish where "that day" is nothing but a date, and where it catches fire into the Day.

The map is now in place. The next chapter sets down the thesis this map carries: that all those words, however dark, together describe one day — with two faces.