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Japanese The abomination of desolation is an idolatrous thing set up in God’s temple, a sacrilege that leaves the holy place desolate. Daniel foretold it, 1 Maccabees records King Antiochus IV setting up “the abominable idol of desolation” on the altar in 167 BC, and Jesus named it as the sign for his followers to flee Judea (Matthew 24:15).
Where Matthew records Jesus’ words about it, the Gospel pauses in the middle of a sentence to speak to us, its readers: “whoso readeth, let him understand.” It is a striking thing to say about a prophecy that baffled the man who received it. “I heard, but I understood not,” Daniel confesses after his last vision (Daniel 12:8). Christians have been reading slowly ever since. Some find the fulfilment in the past, some in the future, and some in both.
What does “abomination of desolation” mean?
The phrase joins two Hebrew words from Daniel, shiqquts and shamem. Shiqquts is the Bible’s word for something detestable to God, and most often for an idol; the Blue Letter Bible’s outline of its uses reads “detestable thing or idol, abominable thing, abomination.” Shamem means to be laid waste, and also to be appalled, the stunned horror of someone looking at ruins. So the “abomination of desolation” is an idol, or idolatrous object, whose presence empties the temple of its worship and leaves it waste. The New International Version calls it “the abomination that causes desolation,” and the New Revised Standard Version “the desolating sacrilege.”
The Greek of Matthew and Mark, bdelygma tes eremoseos, is the Septuagint’s word-for-word rendering of Daniel’s Hebrew. The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907, in an article by the scholar Francis Gigot (a scholar’s view, not Church teaching), admits that the expression “is confessedly obscure,” and reports one scholarly suggestion that it is a contemptuous play on Baal Shamayim, “Baal of heaven,” a Semitic title for Zeus. Whatever the exact sense, it adds, Christian scholars “are practically at one” about its general meaning: “some idolatrous emblem, the setting up of which would entail the ultimate desolation of the Temple of Jerusalem.”
Where does Daniel speak of it?
Three times, each in a vision about the sanctuary and its daily sacrifice:
- “In the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate” (Daniel 9:27).
- “They shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate” (Daniel 11:31).
- “From the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days” (Daniel 12:11).
In an earlier vision one saint asks another the same anxious question in other words: “How long shall be the vision concerning the daily sacrifice, and the transgression of desolation” (Daniel 8:13). In every passage the pattern is the same. The worship of God stops, something foreign takes its place in the holy place, and the sanctuary stands empty.
How did Antiochus IV defile the temple?
The writers of 1 Maccabees and Josephus saw these words come true under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Greek king of Syria. In 167 BC, Britannica’s account says, he took Jerusalem, forbade Jewish worship “on pain of death,” and had an altar to Zeus Olympios set up in the temple. 1 Maccabees tells it in the language of Daniel: “On the fifteenth day of the month Casleu, in the hundred and forty-fifth year, king Antiochus set up the abominable idol of desolation upon the altar of God” (1 Maccabees 1:54; 1:57 in the Douay-Rheims). Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century, adds that the king “slew swine upon it,” and the Second Book of Maccabees says the temple was renamed for Jupiter Olympius (2 Maccabees 6:2).
Three years later Judas Maccabeus retook the temple, tore down the altar of Zeus and built a new altar. On the twenty-fifth day of the month Casleu, “According to the time, and according to the day wherein the heathens had defiled it, in the same was it dedicated anew with canticles, and harps, and lutes, and cymbals” (1 Maccabees 4:54). Josephus says the Jews made it a law to keep the festival for eight days, “and call it Lights.” It is the feast Jews still keep as Hanukkah, and John’s Gospel places Jesus in the temple at “the feast of the dedication” (John 10:22), walking in Solomon’s porch. The story is told more fully in Did Jesus celebrate Hanukkah?
Josephus believed Antiochus had fulfilled Daniel. “Our nation suffered these things under Antiochus Epiphanes, according to Daniel’s vision,” he writes, and then he adds a second sentence that matters for what Jesus would say: “In the very same manner Daniel also wrote concerning the Roman government, and that our country should be made desolate by them.”
Why did Jesus tell his followers to flee?
Jesus spoke of the abomination two centuries after Antiochus, which tells us he did not think Daniel’s words were used up. His disciples had been admiring the temple buildings, and he answered, “There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Matthew 24:2). They asked when. Part of his answer was this:
When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso readeth, let him understand:) Then let them which be in Judaea flee into the mountains: Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house.
Matthew 24:15–17
Mark has it “standing where it ought not” (Mark 13:14). Luke gives the same warning without Daniel’s phrase: “when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. Then let them which are in Judaea flee to the mountains” (Luke 21:20–21).
Notice what kind of sign it is. It is a warning given in love, so that those who heed it can get out. Eusebius, the church historian of the fourth century, records that the believers of Jerusalem did just that: before the war they were warned “to leave the city and to dwell in a certain town of Perea called Pella.”
Has the abomination of desolation already happened?
Many Christians say yes, and place it in the first century. Its fullest form is the preterist reading, from the Latin for “past,” which holds that Jesus’ words were fulfilled when Rome destroyed the temple in AD 70. Jesus had said, “This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled” (Matthew 24:34), and within a generation Jerusalem fell and the temple burned.
The Reformed teacher R.C. Sproul held this view. In a sermon on Mark 13, published by Ligonier Ministries, he says that Josephus saw Daniel fulfilled in Titus’ entry into the holy place, and then: “it may be that Jesus was predicting something with a short-term fulfillment and a long-term fulfillment, and I do not know. But we do not have to look beyond AD 70 to find a perfect fulfillment of what He was talking about in this text.”
The view has a difficulty, and the Catholic Encyclopedia names it. Josephus records that the Romans “brought their ensigns to the temple and set them over against its eastern gate; and there did they offer sacrifices to them,” but they did so only after the temple had burned, “too late to serve as a warning for the Christians of Judea,” as the encyclopedia puts it. Sproul answers from Luke, where the sign is the army itself: “when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh” (Luke 21:20). Jesus “told His people to flee to the mountains,” Sproul says, and the Christians were not among those slaughtered in the siege. John Chrysostom, the fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople whom Orthodox and Catholic Christians honour as a Father of the Church, read the verse in the same first-century light. By the abomination, he preached, Jesus “means the statue of him who then took the city,” and in his next sermon, of the same abomination standing in the holy place, “he seems to me to be speaking of the armies.”
Readers who place it in the first century still differ on the exact event. The Catholic Encyclopedia lists three candidates: the Roman standards, the Zealots who turned the temple into a fortress, and the Emperor Caligula’s order of about AD 40 to set up his own statue in the temple, which was never carried out. It leans to the last, while admitting that it “is not without its own difficulties.”
Is the abomination of desolation still to come?
Many other Christians read Matthew 24:15 as still ahead, a sacrilege by the Antichrist just before Christ returns. This is the futurist reading, and it is very old. Irenaeus of Lyons, a bishop of the second century, joined Daniel and Matthew to Paul’s words about “that man of sin,” who “as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God” (2 Thessalonians 2:3–4). In the temple at Jerusalem, Irenaeus wrote, “the enemy shall sit, endeavouring to show himself as Christ.”
The expectation of a last deceiver is wider than any one school. Chrysostom himself, a few verses later, hears Jesus “speaking of Antichrist” (Matthew 24:24). The Catholic Catechism teaches that before Christ’s return the Church “must pass through a final trial,” and that “the supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist” (675), though it does not tie that trial to this sign. The most detailed futurist reading today belongs to dispensationalists. Dallas Theological Seminary’s doctrinal statement places Daniel 9:27 and Matthew 24:15–21 in a seven-year period still to come, whose second half Jesus “called the great tribulation.” Thomas Ice of the Pre-Trib Research Center expects a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem, because the abomination of desolation “will occur in the middle of the tribulation” and a temple must stand there to be defiled. The verses futurists draw on are gathered in 20 Bible verses about the Antichrist, and the debate over when believers are caught up to the Lord, before or after this midpoint, is set out in what the Bible says about the rapture. Between the two readings stands the possibility Sproul himself left open, a near fulfilment in AD 70 and a final one at the end.
Both readings take Jesus at his word. The preterist sees a warning that saved lives in the first century; the futurist sees a warning still waiting for its hour. Both hear in it what he gave it to be, a call to watch, and to move when God’s people are told to move.
Daniel never got his answer. When he asked how it would all end, the angel told him only to go his way: “Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.” The last verse of his book is a promise to him and, through him, to everyone who has read these chapters with a puzzled heart: “But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days” (Daniel 12:9, 12:13).
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