The Book of Enoch "Dream of Beasts" prophecy (chapters 89-90 in the RH Charles version) of angelic shepherds ruling Israel, possibly for fixed terms of office, starting in Assyrian Conqest times (740-720 BC), leads to considerations which are quite new and it is wonderful to be given these insights now by God so we are kind of on sacred ground here with immense priviledge to get close to the mind of God. I think God shows how He in sovereignty keeps to the plans. The plan is to give each angel a proper term. There is the plan to give seventy angels each a term. There is evidently the agreement that these terms be fixed to 40 years each. God gave Saul and David and Solomon each a forty year term. These three witnesses show God's workings. So I guess the last term will be forty years too. I suspect there are plans written in heaven to say this. Clearly God usually keeps to script but He sometimes (rarely) goes off script like when He gave Ninevah forty days (see 40 again) before destruction and then gave a reprieve because they repented properly. The term now is probably still the sixty-ninth. Can we detect in history when the term ends and a switch of angel happens? Maybe. The State of Israel may have formed at the time of a term change. I am not sure. We do not know (sorry, I do not know - some might know) exactly when the first of these seventy terms started. It is not clear in the Book of Enoch. This prophecy was a dream after all. You cannot ask questions during a dream - well you can but usually don't. It looks like it was as Assyria took over in Israel. That was a fluid process like the change from autumn to winter. I think it was 730 plus or minus ten years. To get 2069 AD for end of term I used the most trusted year of seige of Samaria 722 BC from a quick Wikipedia check. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe an earlier date although vague and imprecise would be more accurate. So a date more than eleven or twelve years earlier would mean we are already in the last term and a switch-over to the last angel has just happened. That seems unlikely though from what the dream prophecy says. It is most likely we are in the sixty-ninth term. If the start of the terms was in the height of the Assyrian conquests of Israel around 730 BC we might be at the end of the sixty-ninth term and a switchover is about to happen right now in the coming years. More likely we have anything up to ten years before that happens. This last switch-over is certainly less than twenty years away and may be imminent. We do not know what this last shepherd will be like; only that every shepherd will kill more than the quota God has given them (and the quota might be secret from them). So surely they know they will perish for it. This coming tenure is the last of seventy. The last before the coming of Christ.
