So many have already made premature declarations that the final seven years have started or is immediately upon us.
I am not discounting possibilities, but I’d be a lot more expectant if Jolani had come into his position in Syria “peaceably”, according to Dan 11:21, but he did NOT. I’m aware that some translations translate Dan 11:21, “at a time of tranquillity” but that too fails to fit the circumstance of his rise to power.
So could we be wrong that Dan 11:21 is not the introduction of the AC? Though several able commentators over the years have offered a compelling defense of the position we take (I have a few in my library), we remain in the comparatively rare minority.
The exegesis is too involved to go into all the the points, but for just one example, how can Dan 11:31 be accepted as a second century B.C. event but Daniel 12:11 be understood as future, 3 1/2 years before the end? The language describing this event in both places is almost exactly the same, with both references belonging to the same continous prophetic narrative covering 2 1/2 chapters, beginning in Dan 10:14. Are we to believe they are completely different events?