And he said unto me, Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed. The Massoretic reading is here clearly corrupt. "Unto me" ought to be "unto him," as proved by the versions and necessitated by sense.
The LXX. is somewhat violent in construction, but means, "And he said to him, Until evenings and mornings are two thousand three hundred days, and the sanctuary shall be purified." Theodotion agrees closely with the LXX; only he has "five hundred" instead of "three hundred."
The Peshitta agrees with the Massoretic, save as above mentioned—"him" instead of "me," and the last clause, which ought naturally to rendered "and the sacrifice be purified." The Hebrew phrase for this clause is an unnatural one—it might be rendered, "And holiness (or, 'holy thing,' 'offering') shall be justified."
The want of the article is not an objection, as the manner of the author is to use the article sparingly. The word translated "cleansed" really means "justified;" it is the only example of this part of the verb.
All the versions translate as if the word had been some derivative of טָהַר (tahar). The period referred to is that between the desolation inflicted on the temple by Antiochus Epiphanes and its cleansing by Judas Maccabaeus.
It is somewhat difficult to fix the exact space of time intended by these two thousand three hundred evening-mornings. Does it mean two thousand three hundred days? For this may be urged that this succession.
"evening and morning," not "morning and evening," resembles Genesis 1:1-31. If this resemblance is intentional, then "evening-morning" means a space of twenty-four hours. If the days are literal days, then the space of time would amount to nearly six years and a half, if' we take the year here as three hundred and sixty days.
Another view is that day and night are separated and each reckoned; hence the number of days involved would be eleven hundred and fifty—fifty-five days more than three average years, and seventy days more than three years of three hundred and sixty days each.
If, however, the year be the lunar year of three hundred and fifty-four days, it closely approximates to three years and a quarter. The period that one would naturally think of is that between the setting up of the abomination of desolation (1 Macc.
1:54), on the fifteenth day of Casleu, in the hundred and forty-fifth year of the Seleucid era to the rededication of the temple on the twenty-fifth of Casleu, in the hundred and forty-eighth year, but that is only three years and ten days.
If the first and last of these years were respectively the fifth and seventh of a metonic cycle, in each of which there were intercalary months, then there is only a difference of eighteen days between the interval given above and the actual historical interval.
If, however, we are to believe Maerobius ('Satur.,' Genesis 1:13, § 9), and hold that the intercalations were supplied by adding the three months in one year, if one of the years in question was the year in the cycle in which this took place, then the interval would be twelve days too much.
In either case the difference is very small. The attempt to take the interval as two thousand three hundred days leads to very arbitrary results. Behrmann takes the victory of Adasa, which Judas gained over Nicanor, as the termination of the period—a purely arbitrary date, and reckons back to the displacement of Onias, another date that, so far as can be seen, was not regarded as of importance by the Jews, however important it has become in the eye of critics.