The Second Wilderness: Two Jubilees, and Then Thirty-Eight

Let me tell you a story that almost no one remembers anymore, and that will break your heart the moment you set it beside the first.

It is about a hundred years after the cross. The temple has lain in ruins for two generations already. And the people — who do not know the meaning of surrender, who have not bred it out of their blood, that wandering Aramean with his stubborn faith — rise up one more time. A leader arises, a warrior, Simon bar Kosiba, and he is everything a desperate people wants to see in a deliverer: strong, resolute, a man who retook Jerusalem and for three years hammered a free Jewish state out of the ground, with its own coins, its own government, its own dream. And the greatest rabbi of that century, Akiva, looks at him and does something that seals it all. He takes an old prophecy — "a Star shall come out of Jacob" (Numbers 24:17) — and hangs it about the shoulders of this man. No longer Bar Kosiba. Bar Kochba — Son of the Star. The Messiah.

Do you feel the pattern cracking beneath your feet? There stands the people once again at the border. And once again it chooses — not the Star that had truly risen and that it had sent away, but a star of its own, a star of its own making. They took the prophecy that had pointed to the real one, and tried to make it land on another. And it ended the way it ended the first time at the border: in disaster. The revolt was crushed. Emperor Hadrian called his finest general back from the far end of the empire, Julius Severus, and he sought no open battle any longer but something colder: he cut the resistance into pieces, fortress after fortress, village after village, and let hunger finish the work. The Roman historian Cassius Dio records it coldly — fifty fortresses razed, nine hundred and eighty-five villages destroyed, five hundred and eighty thousand fallen in battle, and the rest by hunger and fire and disease; numbers to make the head spin, even though the historians dispute them. And it ended where such things end: in one last fortress. Betar, a hill town to the southwest of Jerusalem, where Bar Kochba had withdrawn with his last men. The Romans surrounded it, and it fell — and it fell, the sources say, on the ninth of the month of Av. On Tisha B'Av. The same day on which the first temple had been burned, and the second. As though the calendar itself were sweeping all the grief together onto one page. Afterward Jerusalem became a pagan colony, Aelia Capitolina, with a temple to Jupiter on the holy mountain. The land was given a new name, chosen deliberately to wound — no longer Judea, but Palestine, named after the ancient archenemy, the Philistine. And the Jews, on pain of death, were no longer allowed to set foot there. The rabbis who had first acclaimed him later called him, with one letter changed, Bar Koziba — Son of the Lie. Akiva himself was flayed with iron combs, and died, they say, with the Shema on his lips. A holy man, a brave man — and he had pointed to the wrong star.

And now you must count — but count the way you read an image, not the way you close a sum; I will say honestly, in a moment, what this counting can and cannot carry. The window of grace closed around the year 34, when Stephen fell and the gospel rolled out into the nations. Lay two jubilees beside it — twice fifty, a hundred years — and you stand in the year 134; and in the year that follows, 135, Betar falls and Bar Kochba dies. Two jubilees to the border. To the false star. To the second, final refusal. And there, from that point on, the long road begins.

How much longer? Lay the measure alongside once more, and recognize the number as an old acquaintance. From that border, another thirty-eight jubilees — thirty-eight times fifty, nineteen hundred years — until the autumn of 2034. Two jubilees to the border, and then thirty-eight into the wilderness. That is what this book calls that span. That is how it is named. And let it be said at once, for otherwise it creeps in unnoticed: the dial is named this way; it is not carried by it.

In Depth — The Jubilee as Measure

The counting that reckons here in jubilees borrows its unit from Leviticus 25 — one of the most socially radical texts of the Torah. The people are to count seven sabbatical years, "seven times seven years," and to hallow the fiftieth year: "it shall be a Jubilee for you; and each of you shall return to his possession, and each of you shall return to his family" (Leviticus 25:8–10). In the jubilee, debts were forgiven, slaves set free, and sold land returned to the original family. It is a fifty-year heartbeat of release and restoration — not a punishment but a crown, the year in which everything returns to where it belongs. The day was opened with the blast of the shofar on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 25:9). (Well documented that the jubilee is the fiftieth year and means release and return to one's possession.)

Upon this unit the author lays a second image of the six thousand years, alongside that of the seven days of creation. Note the word, for it is chosen deliberately. A route is a way along which something is demonstrated; an image only points at what already stands. This is the second. It rests on Genesis 6:3 — "his days shall be one hundred and twenty years" — which in this reading does double duty: locally the countdown to the flood, structurally the lifespan of the human age, measured not in ordinary years but in jubilees. Then it reads: 120 jubilees × 50 years = 6000 years. It is a beautiful image. It is no more than an image. The six thousand years stand already without this sum, and they would stand just as firmly had no one ever written it down. (The author's image; it carries nothing — see the next frame.)

In Depth — What the Jubilee Does Not Carry

This book reckons in jubilees because the image speaks so well. That being so, it is more honest to say aloud what the count is not than to let it silently bear a weight it does not have. Arithmetically it carries nothing. That is no formula of modesty; it has been checked.

The first objection is statistical. The whole Jubilee space — both cycle lengths, every phase, every anchor — has been computed against ten thousand shuffled datasets, and the result is p = 0.54: randomly chosen years perform just as well. Whatever the Jubilee count "confirms," it confirms for very nearly any year put before it. A measure that fits everywhere measures nothing.

The second is historical. The only Jubilee cycle that can actually be anchored is the forty-nine-year cycle, and the rabbinic testimony yields it twice. B. Megillah 14b places the sixteenth Jubilee in Josiah's eighteenth year, Tishri 623 BC; b. Arakhin 12a places the seventeenth at Ezekiel 40:1, Tishri 574 BC. The interval is forty-nine, exactly. The fifty-year cycle on which 120 × 50 depends is, as a cycle, attested nowhere. And the two numbers may never stand in one sum: whoever lets 490 = 10 × 49 hold and also writes down 6000 = 120 × 50 is reckoning with two different units and calling both of them "jubilee." That is not a subtlety; it is an error.

Hence the rule that runs through the whole series: the dial is named this way; it is not carried by it. The Jubilee may give the two thousand years a name — release, return, the year of the Goel, two to the border and thirty-eight into the wilderness — but it does not count them, and it does not prove them. The autumn of 2034 hangs on the epoch and on nothing else. The reader who wants the full computation is referred to the Jubilee closing dossier. (Computed: the Jubilee count carries no pattern. Image, not proof.)

Two, and then thirty-eight.

Where have you heard that before? At the first wilderness. For two years Israel traveled from Egypt to Kadesh-Barnea, to the border of the promised land, and there it refused to believe — the giants were too great, the God too small — and received its sentence: thirty-eight extra years of wandering, one year for each day that the spies had walked the land (Numbers 14:34). Two years to the border, thirty-eight years into the wilderness. Forty in all, and not a foot in the land before that.

And the second time, exactly the same arrangement, only measured out in jubilees instead of years: roughly two jubilees (of 49 or 50 years) to the border — to Bar Kochba, the false star, the second refusal — and thirty-eight jubilees into the wilderness of the nations. Forty jubilees in all. Two thousand years. The same border, the same giants of doubt, the same reason, the same God who lets the clock tick with tears in His eyes — only now stretched out fifty times as long. The first time they rejected a map. The second time they rejected their Lord.

And see now how the two ends of that long road rhyme with each other — for it rhymes not in one place, but in three at once. That was already clear on the far side of the bridge: the seven-year window around the cross, from 27 to 34, mirrors itself two thousand years later in a seven-year window at the end, from 2027 to 2034. The Messiah appeared, and on the far side the counterfeit appears (27 over against 2027). The Prince of Peace was rejected with "crucify Him," and on the far side the lawless one seizes power and sets himself upon the throne (31 over against 2031). The window of grace closed with the stoning of Stephen and the gospel went out into the nations, and on the far side the window of the tribulation closes with a people that at last, at last looks up to Him whom it has pierced (34 over against 2034). The bridge has the same three pillars on both shores, at the same distance. You can walk across it.

In Depth — Daniel's Seventy Weeks

The seven-year window on both shores of the bridge comes from Daniel 9:24–27, the sharpest prophetic time-text of the Old Testament. Gabriel measures out "seventy weeks" — seventy shavu'im, "sevens," weeks-of-years, 70 × 7 = 490 years — over Israel and the holy city, "to finish the transgression, to make an end of sins, to make reconciliation for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to anoint the Most Holy" (9:24). They fall in three parts: seven weeks (49 years) of restoration, sixty-two weeks (434 years) until "Messiah the Prince," together sixty-nine — and then, set apart, the seventieth. (Well documented that seventy weeks are 490 years, in 7 + 62 + 1.)

The hinge falls in verse 26: "After the sixty-two weeks Messiah shall be cut off, but not for Himself." The verb yikkareth is the word for the cutting away, the violent death; "not for Himself" fits a chapter that speaks of reconciliation through the substitutionary death — the cross. And the cutting off falls after the sixty-nine weeks, in the space before the seventieth. The same text says that "the people of the prince who is to come" destroy the city and the sanctuary (the year 70), and that "till the end" there is war — a horizon that does not fit within a single week.

The current readings part ways here, and both deserve to be named honestly. The continuous reading (classic-historical, amillennial) keeps the seventy weeks contiguous, places the cross "in the middle" of the seventieth week, and sees therein the ceasing of the sacrifice in that Christ Himself is the last sacrifice; it has before it the simplicity of an unbroken count. The deferred reading (dispensational) reads a break between the sixty-ninth and the seventieth week — the Church age — and holds the last week to be future, with a covenant that opens it and an abomination that marks its midst, both by "the prince who is to come," not by the Messiah; it accounts for the year 70 within the text, but bears the burden of a long interval. The author chooses the deferred reading, with arguments, and lets the continuous one stand in its strength. (Disputed: whether an interval lies before the seventieth week belongs to the most sharply disputed questions of interpretation. Daniel supplies the structure, not the date. Framework, not calendar.)

Thirty-eight jubilees. Nineteen hundred years of ghetto and pogrom and expulsion and ash, and always, always that same indestructible sentence on the lips at the end of every Passover: next year in Jerusalem. And hear how the violin says that sentence: a glissando, a finger sliding up the string toward a note that always stays just out of reach — pushed up two thousand times, and the hand never got there. A people that heard its own prophet call its own God "Not-My-People" (Hosea 1:9) — and that went on singing it anyway, in tongues it picked up along the way, to melodies that weep and laugh in the same measure. Let the bow sink one more time to the dark G string, for this is the deepest note of the whole book, the note that comes closest to a real sob: a people that for two thousand years walked through the wilderness of the nations because of one missed recognition — and that at the end of those thirty-eight jubilees is not thrown away like a failed first attempt, but is brought home. For so is He. He hardens, and He heals. He scatters, and He gathers. He even counts the years of the punishment, not to stretch them, but because they have an end that He has already written down.

But that end, that third day, is for later in this book. First still the night. And in that long night of thirty-eight jubilees there burns a light that not Israel but we must carry — we, the wild branches, the church from the nations, grafted into the tree while the natural branches lay on the ground beside it. For two days the lamp is entrusted to us. And the question that opens the next part is the question that the mirror already put to us at the end of Part I, and that can no longer be waved away: did we carry that light better than Israel carried its day? Seven lamps we were given. Seven churches. Take up the violin and come along, for the next part laughs — and the laughter hurts, for it is about us.

In Depth — Two Plus Thirty-Eight: the Wilderness That Repeats Itself

The pattern "two to the border, thirty-eight into the wilderness" is, in the first wilderness, firmly given by the text. Israel came in the second year after the exodus to Kadesh-Barnea (compare Numbers 10:11 with 13:1–25); there the unbelief fell after the report of the spies; and the sentence read "forty years, one year for each day" (Numbers 14:34), of which by then nearly two had already passed — thus thirty-eight remaining. Deuteronomy 2:14 names that number in so many words: "thirty-eight years" from Kadesh to the crossing of the brook Zered. (Well documented.)

The application to the second wilderness is the author's framework, and it rests on two pillars: a fixed one and an elastic one. Fixed is the history. The window of grace that turns toward the Gentiles around the year 34 (Acts 8 through 13). And the Bar Kochba revolt, which broke out in 132 (a single reconstruction places the beginning already in 131) and whose decisive end came with the fall of the fortress Betar in 135 — on the ninth of Av, the same day of mourning as both temple destructions — while the last pockets of resistance only died out in the winter toward 136, with Rabbi Akiva applying Numbers 24:17 ("a Star out of Jacob") to Simon bar Kosiba and greeting him as Messiah — though not all the sages followed him in this; Rabbi Yochanan ben Torta is said to have remarked that grass would sooner grow out of Akiva's jaws than that the Messiah would come. It became a second, self-chosen messiah, and a second catastrophe, followed by the founding of pagan Aelia Capitolina, the renaming of the province Judea to "Syria Palaestina," and the ban on Jews entering Jerusalem — a name chosen after the Philistines, to erase the Jewish bond with the land. All of this is simply history. (Well documented; the margin lies only in the precise beginning and ending date: 132 to 135, with an extension to 136.) Not load-bearing is the jubilee-counting that lays a timeline over it: 34 plus 2 jubilees is 134, and in 135 Betar falls; plus 38 jubilees is 2034. It comes out exactly at the end year of the Master Clock, and it mirrors the "two plus thirty-eight" of Kadesh with a beauty you cannot force. But coming out exactly is not the same as carrying. The Jubilee space has been computed and yields p = 0.54 (see the frame "What the Jubilee Does Not Carry"), and the autumn of 2034 hangs on the epoch, not on this sum. Take the count away and no year falls; take the epoch away and everything falls. (Weighed reading: the structure is strikingly coherent and internally consistent, and it names the span strikingly well — but it does not carry it. The dial is named this way; it is not carried by it.)

And note the one thing that no margin takes away. Whether you count nineteen hundred years or are off by a century: history itself has already drawn the pattern, apart from any sum. A people that at the first border chose its own way and had to go into the wilderness. And that same people that at the second border chose its own star and went into a far longer wilderness. You do not have to believe the dates to hear the echo. You only have to listen.