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These days are either,
1. Natural days, and properly so called, and so the times of Antiochus are hereby noted. Or,
2. Prophetical days, a day for a year, Eze_4:6; and thus one thousand two hundred and ninety days is forty-two months, which if we multiply at thirty days the month make the sum one thousand two hundred and ninety. Here many learned expositors fall in together to that opinion of calculating these years by days, beginning the one thousand two hundred and ninety days from the profaning of the temple to the letter of king Antiochus to the Jews, /APC 2Ma_11:27, and so make them to end exactly then: and concerning the abomination of desolation, whereof see what is said Dan_7:25 8:14 9:25, being the epoch from Apollonius’s coming, who was called the prince of abominations, or from the worship of God forbidden by Antiochus, and at last restored by Judas Maccabeus, and confirmed by Antiochus, from thence to the death of Antiochus are fortyfive days, which added to one thousand two hundred and ninety make one thousand three hundred and thirty-five; but this is a false account, and contrary to the scope of this place, and to history and chronology, which the learned Joseph Mede hath proved at large, Lib. Oper. III. p. 882. The Jews make these days, i.e. years, to end at the coming of Christ, but uncertainly when to begin their reckoning, but have been often and grossly deceived. Sound Christians refer it to the second coming of Christ. Mr. Mede makes the chief revelation of antichrist to be in 1123. The latter number of one thousand three hundred and thirty-five ends in anno Christi 1168; and so the type of antichrist, which is Antiochus Epiphanes, leads us by the hand to the revelation of antichrist, which fell out anno 1106 to anno 1120; between which time the papal power was highly mounted, the church greatly persecuted, after that great numbers of them had separated from the abominations of Rome, openly declaring it to be antichristian. Therefore the angel saith, the saints by their trials
shall be purified and made white, that is, by those cruel persecutions which befell them, from their ignorant and enraged enemies, who went on to do wickedly and did not understand. How this is further cleared, and why the angel makes use of the Roman supputation in this case, namely, by indictions, and how it answers and resolves the case, see in the forecited author.