The mass expulsion of the children of Israel from Canaan, first by Assyrian kings and then by Babylonian ones, left Canaan essentially bereft of Israelites. The theocracy was gone; the monarchy was not around; the people were slaves to Gentile peoples. All this came as a consequence of the people's habitual rejection of God's law. Was this punishment of indefinite duration? Did God turn away from physical Israel and begin to work with spiritual Israel, the church (Galatians 6:16), instead?

That is what some teach, but they are wrong. God is still working with physical Israel. God established a specific time to terminate Israel's punishment. That point in time becomes a vital search criterion for identifying modern-day Israel.

Leviticus 26 records a number of conditional promises that God made to the children of Israel. This chapter relates what He will do for them "if you walk in My statutes and keep My commandments, and perform them" (verse 3)—and what He will do to them "if you do not obey Me" (verse 14). In the context of punishment, related in Leviticus 26:14-39, God uses the phrase "seven times more" four times (verses 18, 21, 24, and 28): "If you do not obey Me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins."

The phrase "seven times more" can refer to intensity. It is used this way in Daniel 3:19, where Nebuchadnezzar ordered a furnace to be heated seven times hotter than usual.

However, in Leviticus 26, God uses the phrase to refer to duration, notintensity of punishment. God says that He will punish Israel for a length of "seven times." Understanding this, we can easily calculate when God completed His punishment of Israel, when He stopped withholding His fulfillment of the promises. A prophetic "time" is one year of 360 days. Seven "times" is obviously seven prophetic years. Using this logic, the Kingdom of Israel's period of captivity, national humiliation, and deprivation must have ended seven years after her fall. Since she fell to the Assyrians in 718 BC, God must have ended her punishment seven years later, in 711 BC.

But history will not support that simplistic conclusion! Indeed, the northern Kingdom of Israel was not restored in 711 BC; the people did not then inherit the land as an eternal possession, where they now live as a wealthy, powerful, populous company of nations. Emphatically, nothing like that happened in 711 BC.

The phrase "seven times more"as used in Leviticus 26 cannot, then, refer to a period of seven literal years. We need to dig deeper to understand the meaning of this phrase.

Numbers 14 relates an incident that occurred as the children of Israel approached the Promised Land. Moses sent twelve men to "see what the land is like" (Numbers 13:18). All but two of the spies brought back a "bad report" (verse 32). So discouraged were the people, so afraid that their "wives and children [would] become victims" (Numbers 14:3), they determined to "select a leader and return to Egypt" (verse 4). Moses, intervening on behalf of the people, dissuaded an angry God from destroying them outright.

However, God did punish Israel for its faithlessness: "According to the number of the days in which you spied out the land, forty days, for each day you shall bear your guilt one year, namely forty years" (Numbers 14:34). In punishing Israel, God used the year-for-a-day principle: Each day counts as one year.

God reversed the year-for-a-day principle in Ezekiel 4:4-8. God told Ezekiel that Israel had sinned for 390 years—from the time that it had demanded that Samuel provide it with a king until its fall to Assyria. In verses 4-5, He commands Ezekiel:

Lie . . . on your left side. . . . According to the number of the days that you lie on it, you shall bear their iniquity. For I have laid on you the years of their iniquity, according to the number of the days, three hundred and ninety days; so you shall bear the iniquity of the house of Israel.

Ezekiel could not, of course, lie on his side one year for each day in the 390-year interval. That would be 360 x 390, or 140,400 prophetic years—the equivalent of just under 2,006 seventy-year lifetimes! So, God reversed the formula to a day-for-a-year. Ezekiel was to lie on his side for 390 days, one day for each year. This was to be a sign to the house of Israel (Numbers 4:3) that it was to be punished.

Hosea also makes a veiled reference to the year-for-a-day principle. Offering hope that God will "heal" Israel after allowing it to be wounded (Hosea 6:1), the prophet alludes to three days. These are probably years, part of the three-and-a half-year Tribulation period. Verse 2 foretells, "After two days He will revive us; on the third day He will raise us up, that we may live in His sight." Hosea might be saying that God will progressively show mercy to Israel in its afflictions, providing some relief after two years, more during the third.

All these scriptures have this in common: When speaking about the time-period of Israel's punishment, God uses the year-for-a-day principle or its inverse. We now have a solid formula to define the length of "seven times more" as used in Leviticus 26. Each "time" is one 360-day prophetic year. Seven "times" is 2,520 days (7 x 360 = 2,520).

Each day represents one year. Therefore, the actual time span in "seven times" is 2,520 years. From 718 BC to AD 1802 is 2,520 years. Remember, there is no year zero, but there is a 1 BC and an AD 1.

Leviticus 26:18, 21, 24, 28 all prophesy the same thing: If Israel refuses to obey God, He will withhold fulfilling His conditional promises to it for 2,520 years. Those 2,520 years began with the fall of Israel in 718 BC. They ended in the year AD 1802. Here is an amazingly specific search criterion to identify modern-day Israel. We will see later on, too, that history fully supports it.