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Back Cover Text The apostle Paul wrote that Jesus Christ "was raised on the third day according to the scriptures." What scriptures? The Third Day Bible Code examines a third day motif that occurs in some of the most important events in the history of Israel recorded in the Bible. Nearly all of these episodes involved a great crisis in which God rescued a righteous person or Israel itself on the third day. Here are a few: "On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance" (Gen 22.4). Moses: "Prepare for the third day because on the third day the LORD will come down on Mt. Sinai" (Ex 19.11). Joshua: "Prepare your provisions; for in three days you are to cross over the Jordan" (Josh 1.11). On the third day Esther put on her royal robes and stood in the inner court of the king's palace" (Est 5.1). "After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him" (Hos 6.2). Zarley claims that the third day motifs in these and other events are types that point to Jesus, some to the timing of his resurrection. By applying to them and Jesus' resurrection the principle "that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day" (2 Pt 3.8), Zarley asserts that Jesus will return in the early part of the third millennium after his departure, between the years 2070 and 2250. Whether one agrees with the author's sensational thesis about the timing of Christ's return, this book will serve as a strong apologetic for Jesus' resurrection as well as strengthen Christians in their faith. "Kermit Zarley has studied the Bible prophetically more than any person I've met, and I include academics and pastors. He offers us a reasonable suggestion, that the Bible's repeated third day motif just might contain a clue on how to understand God's plan of history."
"Although I personally do not use the Bible to forecast the future, I nonetheless find Zarley's ability to link sacred text with sacred text fascinating. The sheer creativity, born of a love of the text, is impressive and hearkens back to ancient ways of reading Scripture."
Kermit Zarley is known mostly for his career as a tournament-winning professional golfer on the PGA TOUR and its Champions Tour. A longtime student and teacher of the Bible, he has also established himself as a Christian author with books on the life of Jesus, eschatology, and now typology.
Abbreviations
Chapter One: Introduction
Chapter Two: “Raised the Third Day”
Chapter Three: “According to the Scriptures”
Chapter Four: Biblical Typology
Chapter Five: Interpreting the Signs of the
Times
Chapter Six: The Thousand-Year Day Principle
Chapter Seven: Raised “Early” the Third Day
Chapter Eight: The Sign of Jonah the Prophet
Chapter Nine: “Christ Our Passover” and “First
Fruits”
Chapter Ten: Decay on the Third Day
Chapter Eleven: Hosea and the Third Day Motif
Chapter Twelve: Abraham’s Offering of Isaac on
the Third Day
Chapter Thirteen: Joseph Imprisons His
Brothers for Three Days
Chapter Fourteen: Meeting God at Mount Sinai
on the Third Day
Chapter Fifteen: Preparing to Take the
Promised Land on the Third Day
Chapter Sixteen: Elijah and a Three-Year Motif
Chapter Seventeen: King Hezekiah Healed on the
Third Day
Chapter Eighteen: Queen Esther Saves the Jews
on the Third Day
Chapter Nineteen: Finishing the Church’s
Mission on the Third Day
Chapter Twenty: Finding the Boy Jesus on the
Third Day
Epilogue
(notes not included) The Bible is by far the world’s top bestseller of all time. It is a fascinating and sometimes mysterious book. People have spent far more time reading it, meditating upon it, memorizing it, and trying to comprehend it than any other book of literature. How to interpret the Bible is most critical to understanding it. In deciding on literary methods to use in interpreting the Bible, some practitioners of both Judaism and Christianity have thought that there must be some hidden code in the Bible that would unlock some of its mysteries. Jews generally have thought this about their scriptures, especially the Pentateuch—the first five books of the Bible, also called the Torah. They have especially believed that the oral Torah is contained cryptically, thus hidden, in the written Torah. Jews have therefore believe that the written Torah contains esoteric teachings and, moreover, that the Pentateuch itself is a code that needs to be unlocked in order to fathom its endless treasures of the knowledge and wisdom of God. Sir Isaac Newton believed likewise. He was the brilliant, famed seventeenth-century English scientist who discovered gravity. Newton was also a learned man and a devout Christian. He hadsuch a profound interest in biblical prophecies that he testified that his realization of the fulfillment of Bible prophecies is what convinced him to be a Christian. Sir Isaac was obsessed with thinking that there is a secret code in the Bible that would unlock its mysteries, especially those contained in its prophecies about the endtimes. He thought this mostly because of the extended prophecy the angel gave Daniel, recorded in the book of Daniel, especially the angel’s closing remark—“the words are to remain secret and sealed until the time of the end” (Dan 12.9; cf. v. 4). Newton devoted much of his life to trying to discover such a code that would unlock the meaning of biblical prophecies, especially those concerning the endtimes, but to no avail. The title of this book will no doubt remind some readers of The Bible Code (1994), written by The Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Drosnin, and perhaps The Da Vinci Code (2002), written by novelist Dan Brown. About the only thing these two best-selling books have in common with this one is that they assert that encrypted messages must be decoded in order to understand the Bible more clearly. Both of these authors, however, regard the Bible as historically unreliable. In contrast, The Third Day Bible Code is written from the perspective that the Bible is inspired by God, it being God’s written revelation about himself to the world, and thus is quite historically reliable. Drosnin’s The Bible Code is based on applying the concept of “equidistant letter sequence” (ELS) to the Hebrew Bible, especially the Pentateuch. This supposed code means that a consistent “skip” sequence of letters in the text are arranged together, resulting in the names of many future persons, objects and events, remotely like Bible prophecy. This notion of a code being mathematically embedded in the arrangement of letters in the Bible dates back to Jewish Kabbalah, an esoteric wisdom tradition that originated in the Middle Ages. Some Bible believers tout this cryptographic evidence of ELS as proof of the divine inspiration of the Bible. Drosnin, however, does not even believe in the God of the Bible; he merely insists that this Bible code indicates an alien super-intelligence. And he dismisses the Bible itself as of little importance, alleging that it serves little more than as a repository for these encrypted messages. Drosnin’s book is based on the late twentieth-century work of three Israeli scientists: mathematician Eliyahu Rips, physicist Doran Witztum and computer scientist Yoav Rosenberg. All three assert the unique concept of the Bible code. By taking the Hebrew Bible—without spaces between words, as in ancient Hebrew script—and feeding it into a powerful computer, they claim to have discovered numerous and unusual connections of words, a phenomenon that would not occur in any other literature. Many experts in various disciplines debunk this supposed Bible code. For one thing, they argue that these Bible decoders have no particular sacrosanct number of letters that they skip. That is, should every two letters be skipped, so that every third letter in the Bible is joined together to form words resulting in some supposedly enlightening message? Or should it be every fifth, tenth, or fiftieth letter that is conjoined? But the most devastating argument against this supposed Bible code is that it is fundamentally flawed because it is based on the erroneous presumption that we possess a Bible text that perfectly reflects the original autographs. All authorities explain that, whatever text is used (and there are several), the Hebrew Bible merely represents a compilation based on ancient hand-copied manuscripts that contain many variants, though most do not affect the meaning of the text and fewer exist in the Pentateuch. Deciding between these variants is the work of textual critics. They insist that their very educated guesswork cannot be expected to always be correct. Presuming a perfectly correct Hebrew Bible based on the LeningradCodex (AD 1008) of the Masoretic Text (MT) is extremely naïve and complicated by the fact that the Septuagint (LXX)—the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible produced over a thousand years prior to the MT—sometimes contains variants compared to the MT that textual critics believe preserve the original. The bottom line is that if only one letter in the Hebrew Bible does not represent the original autograph, this whole Bible code is thrown out of whack, making it totally meaningless. Moreover, all modern texts of the Hebrew Bible have vowels whereas Hebrew script did not until after the Exile. In sum, applying ELS to the Bible merely results in a mass of random statistical anomalies having no significance whatsoever. Not so with The Third Day Bible Code. It presents a true Bible code that has nothing to do with the presumption of a word-perfect Bible text and mathematically manipulating its letters. Rather, it is based on some of the most significant events in the history of Israel that are recorded in the Bible. During these episodes, something occurred on the third day that serves as a type that prefigures the future. Thus, this book is about biblical typology, a subject peculiar to the Bible. The preeminent book on typology is Northrup Frye’s The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982). In it, he shows that Christians have viewed typology as a code for understanding the Bible and that this is amply witnessed in their literature and art. Likewise, The Third Day Bible Code addresses a particular aspect of biblical typology that serves as a hidden code that unlocks God’s timetable for salvation history. I discovered this code in mid-2002. For many years, I hadwondered what the apostle Paul meant in 1 Cor 15.4b, that Jesus “was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.” My question was, What scriptures are indicated by this statement? I knew that many biblical scholars thought Paul did not mean that there are specific Old Testament passages indicating that the Messiah would be raised from the deadprecisely on the third day but that much of scripture generally declares that God will deliver a righteous person, or the nation of Israel, from crisis within a short period of time. Although I believed that the scriptures do indeed frequently make this declaration, I could not accept this principle as an interpretation of 1 Cor 15.4b because it went against my entire hermeneutical approach to Bible prophecy. Rather, I thought Paul must have meant literally and precisely “the third day” and that he hadin mind one or more scriptures that contain this motif. Like a few scholars, I wondered if Paul alluded to Hos 6.2. But I thought its context is exclusively about the repeated Old Testament theme of the penitent Jewish remnant of the endtimes and therefore not about the promised Messiah of Israel. So I launched into some very deep research, investigating my question about 1 Cor 15.4b. I first learned that certain Old Testament passages narrate that something significant happened on the third day in some of the most important events in the history of Israel. Yet any Bible concordance shows that there is hardly anything mentioned in the Bible about a second day, fourth day, fifth day, or sixth day in Israel’s narrative history, let alone that something significant happened on these days. Mathematically, I thought, such a phenomenon could not be mere coincidence. I concluded that in each of these important events in Israel’s history, what happened on the third day indicated God’s sovereign intervention into human affairs, and this third day motif served as a type that pointed futuristically to Jesus, much like Bible prophecy does. This conclusion set me off on a quest for all the ancient sources and scholarly commentary I could find on this subject. I believe this exciting research confirms that Paul’s statement in 1 Cor 15.4b refers to certain Old Testament scriptures that forecast Jesus’ resurrection on the third day. I was especially interested to learn that Jewish rabbis long ago recognized the prominence of this third day motif in their scriptures, and they diligently sought to understand its significance. I thought that Christians hadall the more reason to recognize it, but they largely hadnot. My research revealed that only a bare few Christian scholars wrote about it in the twentieth century in journal articles or brief sections in books, but no one ever wrote a book on the subject. Yet this phenomenon concerned such an important element in Christian tradition—Jesus’ resurrection on the third day. I also thought that this Old Testament third day motif serves as a strong apologetic that buttresses faith in Jesus’ resurrection, besides forecasting it would occur on the third day. The most unique feature of this book is the application of what I call the Thousand-Year Day Principle to this third day motif in scripture. I decided on it because of my perplexity concerning Hos 6.2. As mentioned above, this passage depicts the penitent Jewish remnant of the endtimes, in which some of its members will confidently declare that God will redeem Israel “after two days,” it being “on the third day.” The context of this remark is God’s abandonment of Israel, due to its sins, until it repents. I hadalways thought that the greatest sin of Israel was its culpability in the death of Jesus. And I still believed that this misdeed brought about the destruction of Jerusalem’s temple, in AD 70, and the eventual dissolution of the nation—both telltale signs of God’s abandonment of Israel. Since we are now approaching the twothousand- year anniversary of Jesus’ death and resurrection, which will occur perhaps in the year 2030, the two days in Hos 6.2 reminded me of 2 Pt 3.8, a citation of Ps 90.4, which states “that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.” Accordingly, the resurrection of the righteous dead, Jesus’ return and the Redemption of Israel will all occur simultaneously during the early part of the third millennia following Jesus’ death and resurrection. When I examined the other “third day” passages, they, too, seemed to fit this hypothesis. So, applying the Thousand-Year Day Principle to these biblical texts containing a third day motif is what I now call The Third Day Bible Code. I am very thankful and indebted to my dear friend, Professor Scot McKnight, for critiquing this book manuscript. I incorporated nearly all of his suggestions. Two of them were substantial. I originally hadanother thesis in it. Scot advised keeping the book solely to its main theme—the third day motif in scripture. So I removed all of the material about this second thesis, which consisted of three chapters. (I am developing it into another book.) Scot later suggested beginning the book with a brief introduction that sets forth the question the book attempts to answer concerning 1 Cor 15.4b. I did this, too. In fairness to Scot, however, I should add that, although he encouraged me in this endeavor, he was not convinced of my application of the Thousand-Year Day Principle to this third day motif in scripture. I was not surprised. I have acknowledged all along that I think it is a radical interpretation. I thus put it forth with some trepidation. As far as I know, it has hardly ever been applied to the third day motif in scripture, and never to Jesus’ resurrection, thereby forecasting his second coming during the early part of the third millennium following his death and resurrection. I also would like to thank Professor Dale Allison for critiquing this manuscript. He made some minor suggestions that I incorporated as well. I was surprised that both McKnight and Allison, after reading the manuscript, told me independently of each other that what I was doing in this work reminded them of how Jewish rabbis characteristically exegete scripture. Each time they said this to me, it put a smile on my face. I afterwards thought, “OK. Just call me rabbi Zarley, but without the skullcap and beard.”
Christian Origins In about AD 50, the apostle Paul became the first to preach the message about Jesus Christ in the city of Corinth in Greece. Scholars generally think that Paul wrote his New Testament letter entitled “First Corinthians” in about AD 55. That would be twenty-five years after Jesus’ death, since most scholars think he died in AD 30. According to this epistle, some people in the church at Corinth were denying that there would ever be a resurrection of the dead, regardless of whether Jesus himself hadbeen resurrected. Paul counters this error by providing a brief treatise, in which he defends the concept of the resurrection of the righteous deadand bases it on the resurrection of Jesus. He states, “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve” (1 Cor 15.3–5 NIV). And Paul goes on to assert that belief in the resurrection of Jesus is fundamental to the Christian faith. He argues, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (v. 17). And Paul attaches to this essential doctrine about God raising Jesus Christ from the deadthat it occurred on the third day.
The Gospel What did Paul and the other early Christians mean when they said that Jesus Christ was raised from the deadon the third day according to the scriptures? This question has baffled many devout Christians and not a few of their scholars. More particularly, what did they mean by “according to the Scriptures”? Notice that Paul mentions this prepositional phrase twice in 1 Cor 15.3–4. Did he mean specific passages or merely the scriptures in general? Concerning the first clause containing this prepositional phrase—“that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures”—Joachim Jeremias argues rather convincingly that Paul “must be referring to Isaiah 53.” And Jeremias provides various reasons to support his assertion. Paul and the early Christians may have hadin mind other scriptures as well. But what did Paul mean by his other clause containing this prepositional phrase in 1 Cor 15.4b, “that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures”? If Jeremias is correct about the first clause, the same would seem to be true of this second clause as well. That is, Paul and the early Christians would have hadin mind one or more specific texts in the Old Testament that indicate that Jesus would be raised from the deadon the third day following his death.
No Specific Texts or Literal Third Day? In 1957, Bruce M. Metzger proposed a novel way of dismissing altogether the issue of whether “the third day” in 1 Cor 15.4b is to be understood literally. He suggested that the two prepositional phrases, “on the third day” and “according to the Scriptures,” are co-ordinate and thus separately qualify the verb “raised.” He explains, “In this case Paul would be saying two things about Christ’s resurrection; first, that it occurred on the third day, and, second, that it was in accordance with the scriptures. Thus, it would be only his resurrection and not his resurrection-on-the-third-day which was regarded by Paul as foretold in the Old Testament.” But Metzger cannot even cite a single instance from scripture to support such an unusual grammatical construction. Metzger’s suggestion has not carried the day among New Testament scholars. Greek expert Murray Harris cites Metzger’s suggested grammatical construction in 1 Cor 15.4b and concludes, “Some have proposed that in verse 4b the phrase ‘according to the scriptures’ qualifies only the verb ‘he was raised’ (cf. Ps. 16.10; Isa. 53.10b–11) and not the whole expression ‘he was raised on the third day.’ But in the light of the similar triadic structure in verse 3b (‘Christ died/for our sins/according to the Scriptures’) and the parallel in Lk 24.26, it is more likely that the phrase ‘according to the scriptures’ alludes to various Old Testament passages which refer to divinely wrought deliverance or divine manifestation as occurring ‘on the third day.’”
Specific Third Day Texts Some scholars think Paul refers in 1 Cor 15.4b to a single specific text, Hos 6.2. But both times Paul says “Scriptures” in 1 Cor 15.3–4, which suggests a multiplicity of texts. And when we later analyze each of the above texts, it will become apparent that “Scriptures” in 1 Cor 15.4b probably refers to all of these texts, whether Paul or those Christians who passed this tradition to him understood so or not. To this author’s knowledge, there has never been a book published in English that has been entirely about this third day motif in the Bible and how it connects to Jesus’ resurrection, let alone also his return. But in 1969, German scholar Karl Lehmann wrote extensively and insightfully on Paul’s meaning in 1 Cor 15.4b—“raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.” Lehmann interprets Paul to mean specific Old Testament texts containing a “third day” motif. Lehmann lists all of the above texts, and these only, as those indicated by Paul in 1 Cor 15.4b. And Lehmann selects four passages in this list as having been preeminent in Paul’s mind: Gen 22.4; Ex 19.16; Hos 6.2; Jon 2.1. Another New Testament scholar who has followed Lehmann’s reasoning has been W.L. Craig. He points out, “there are nearly 30 passages in the LXX that use the phrase te hemera te trite” (“on the third day”), the same exact language as in Paul’s Greek text of 1 Cor 15.4b. The LXX was the third century BC Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. It, more specifically an Aramaic paraphrase, was the Bible of Jesus and the early Jewish Christians. This suggests all the more that Paul hadin mind various specific texts. Metzger hadalleged that Paul did not mean a literal “third day” in 1 Cor 15.4b because neither his epistles nor the remainder of the New Testament provide even a single “proof-text of Christ’s resurrection on the third day.” On the contrary, in Chapter Two we will see that Ps 16.10 is offered as such a proof text in the New Testament. In addition, Lehmann explains that for a long time “third day” hadbeen a Jewish idiom indicating “the day of salvation” or “the day of resurrection” and, therefore, the final day at the end of the age, when God would redeem and restore Israel. He shows that this eschatological hope of Judaism is indicated in its Targumim and midrashim regarding some of the relevant third day texts in its scriptures. Although this Jewish literature originated after the time of Paul, in the second and third centuries, most scholars would agree that it usually reflects common belief dating back to at least the early first century and thus the beginning of the Christian era, when Paul’s formula originated. Thus, Paul’s language in 1 Cor 15.4b—“third day according to the Scriptures”—should be understood as referring to the scriptural source of this idiom. In 1970, Jesuit Edward Lynn Bode’s doctoral dissertation was published as a book. He has an excellent chapter in it entitled “Resurrection on the Third Day and the Empty Tomb.” In this chapter Bode focuses on whether this New Testament tradition—that Jesus’ resurrection occurred on the third day in accordance with the scriptures—relies on any specific Old Testament texts. Bode surveys the scholarly literature produced on this subject in modern times up to 1970 (though he does not mention Lehmann’s book that was published the previous year), and he briefly considers most of the relevant “third day” (or “three days”) scriptural texts listed above. Like Lehmann and, later, Craig, Bode observes that Jewish “midrashic and targumic thought illustrates well the theme that God’s great acts of deliverance and manifestation are said to occur on the third day.” Indeed, for a very long time rabbinical authorities from the second or third centuries adand thereafter have well recognized the significance of this third day motif in several of their scriptures. And they have pointed out that nearly all of these texts regard important salvific events in Israel’s history. Jews have applied this interpretation—that God will deliver on the third day—both individually and corporately. That is, they have believed that God would not leave a righteous man in distress any longer than three days without delivering him on the third day, and some Jews have believed the same thing about God’s care of corporate Israel. Jewish scholar Pinchas Lapide applies this Jewish tradition about the third day motif, in all of the above-cited texts in the Old Testament, to Jesus’ resurrection. Bode concludes concerning 1 Cor 15.4b, “the source of the resurrection on the third day according to the scriptures is to be explained through the general Old Testament motif, which is enforced by midrash and targum, that the third day is the day of divine salvation, deliverance and manifestation.” However, whether this midrashic and targumic literature reflects pre-Christian oral tradition is debatable. If it does, then the early Jewish Christians surely drew upon this tradition of theirs when they connected Jesus’ resurrection on the third day with “the scriptures.” W.L. Craig cites the late dates of this Jewish literature and the absence of any such explanation about the third day motif in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha—Jewish literature that was contemporaneous with the New Testament. He concludes, “It appears that this interpretation is a peculiarity of later rabbinical exegesis of the Talmudic period,” thus being restricted to post-first century AD. Nevertheless, the main issue is whether any specific Old Testament texts having a third day motif support 1 Cor 15.4b. When we search the Old Testament, we do not find any passages that expressly and unequivocally state that the Messiah, or Isaiah’s suffering Servant (Isa 53), or Daniel’s Son of Man (Dan 7.13–14) will rise from the deadon the third day after his death. Moreover, when we examine the major texts that contain a third day motif, we are surprised to learn that none of them are prophecies about the Messiah. Rather, they merely are narrated events that occurred in the lives of the patriarchs or the subsequent Israelites. It can therefore be rather perplexing to grapple with these passages in an effort to understand how they possibly can have anything to do with Paul’s statement in 1 Cor 15.4b about Jesus being “raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.” Ronald J. Sider analyzes these third day texts in the Old Testament as possible references for Paul’s phrase in 1 Cor 15.4—“according to the Scriptures.” He concludes, “none of the scriptural texts or motifs appear sufficiently obvious to account by themselves for this phrase. If, however, the discovery of the empty tomb occurred on the third day, then it is entirely plausible that the early church could have seen less obvious scriptural texts as prophecies of the resurrection on the third day,” in which “the church then would have seen certain O.T. passages in a new way.” Sider is on to something. Gordon Fee enters this discussion. He agrees with Sider and explains, “the OT as a whole bears witness to the [Jesus’] resurrection on the third day.” He adds that it “was probably seen” by the early church “in terms of the variety of OT texts in which salvation or vindication took place on the third day.” But how?
Typology In conclusion, it is surprising that this third day motif in the Old Testament has been so neglected by Christians throughout nearly the entire history of Christianity. In contrast, we have seen that the Jews have not neglected this subject; Jewish rabbis have well recognized it and labored to understand its meaning. They have determined that this third day motif means that God will deliver his people from crisis, and perhaps imminent tragedy, on the third day. Christians have all the more reason to know and understand this third day motif in the Bible because they believe that Jesus was raised from the deadon the third day in fulfillment of the meaning Jews have attributed to this third day motif. In the next two chapters we will consider more deeply Paul’s assertion, that Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.” Then we will learn from the New Testament how “the third day” became such a fixed element of Christian tradition. Throughout the remainder of this book we will learn how these Old Testament texts containing a third day motif served as types that pointed to this fixed element in Christian tradition. All of this scriptural data serves as a code that provides us with a more complete understanding of the Bible, more particularly, the Jewish religion and the Christian faith, moreover, the timetable of God’s plan for human beings and planet earth. To learn more about this Third Day Bible Code, readon.
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