What Is the Abomination of Desolation?
The abomination of desolation is a phrase Jesus borrowed from the book of Daniel, and it names a specific kind of event: something detestable set up in a holy place, with the result that the place is abandoned. The underlying Hebrew is shiqquts shomem. Shiqquts means a detestable thing, almost always an idol or a pagan object, from a root meaning to loathe. Shomem means desolate, laid waste, deserted. Put together it describes a defilement so complete that worship stops and the sanctuary empties out.
There is one historical event that readers of every school agree Daniel 11:31 describes: the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes desecrating the Jerusalem temple in 167 BC. That part is not in dispute. What is in dispute is why Jesus, nearly two centuries after Antiochus, told his disciples to watch for it as though it were still ahead of them.
The three verses in Daniel
And arms shall stand on his part, and 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
Two other verses use the same expression. Daniel 12:11 attaches a number to it: "And 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." And Daniel 9:27, the closing verse of the seventy weeks prophecy, has "for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate".
Those three verses are the whole Old Testament source. Everything after them, in Matthew, in Mark, in eighteen centuries of Christian commentary, is working on them. The chronology argument that runs through 9:27 is a separate problem, handled in the seventy weeks of Daniel.
One detail is worth knowing. A number of scholars have suggested that shiqquts shomem is a deliberate insult, a distortion of Baal Shamem, "lord of heaven", the Syrian title corresponding to Zeus. On that reading the Hebrew is a bitter pun: the lord of heaven becomes the detestable thing that empties the house. The suggestion is widely reported and not universally accepted.
The event nobody disputes
Antiochus IV ruled the Seleucid empire from 175 to 164 BC and took the title Epiphanes, "God manifest". In 167 BC, in the course of forcing Greek religion on Judaea, he had an altar to Zeus Olympios erected on the altar of burnt offering in the temple and an unclean animal, a pig, sacrificed on it. The daily sacrifice stopped. 1 Maccabees 1:54 calls the object set up there a desolating sacrilege, using the Greek phrase that stands behind the English words. Josephus describes the same events.
What followed was the Maccabean revolt, and its outcome, the cleansing and rededication of the temple, is what Hanukkah commemorates.
So when Jesus said "spoken of by Daniel the prophet", his hearers had a template in mind. They knew what one of these looked like, because their ancestors had lived through one.
What Jesus actually said
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. Matthew 24:15-16
Two features stand out before any interpretation begins.
The first is that this is an instruction, not a prediction offered for admiration. What follows it is an evacuation order so specific it is almost domestic. The man on the housetop is not to go down for his belongings. The man in the field is not to go back for his coat. They are to pray the flight does not fall in winter or on a sabbath.
The second is the aside in brackets.
Whoso readeth, let him understand
That parenthesis is unusual, and Mark has it too, at Mark 13:14, as "let him that readeth understand". Nobody is certain whose voice it is.
If it is Jesus speaking, it is a nudge toward the prophet: go and read Daniel, and you will recognise the thing when it stands there. If it is the Gospel writer addressing his own readers, it is closer to an editorial footnote, telling a particular congregation that this warning is meant for them and they should be ready to act on it.
The question is small and it shapes everything downstream, because each reading takes the aside differently.
- Preterists hear urgency addressed to a living generation: understand this, because you are going to need it.
- Futurists hear a signal that the passage is deliberately veiled and will become clear to the generation that sees it.
- Historicists hear an invitation to compare Daniel's numbers against the historical record.
- Idealists hear a call to spiritual discernment rather than to event matching.
Luke's wording, and why it carries so much weight
Matthew and Mark both keep Daniel's phrase. Luke, recording the same discourse in the same position, does not.
And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know that the desolation thereof is nigh. Luke 21:20
Same place in the sequence, same instruction to flee immediately afterwards, but the Hebrew idiom is gone and a plain military description stands in its place.
Preterists treat this as the strongest piece of internal evidence they have. Luke wrote for a largely Gentile readership who would not catch a Maccabean allusion, so he rendered it plainly: the abomination of desolation is the Roman army arriving. If that is right, the New Testament has interpreted itself and the matter is settled.
Futurists answer that Luke is reporting the nearer event, the siege of AD 70, while Matthew records a further one, and that Luke's own phrasing, "the desolation thereof is nigh", concerns the city rather than something standing in the sanctuary. On that account the two passages overlap without being identical.
Neither side treats the other as careless here. It is a genuine crux.
The four readings side by side
| Reading | What it points to | When |
|---|---|---|
| Preterist | Roman armies, then the temple's fall | AD 66 to 70 |
| Futurist | A coming man of sin in a rebuilt temple | Still ahead |
| Historicist | A corrupting power inside church history | Across centuries |
| Idealist | Any power desecrating God's dwelling | Recurring |
Preterist
Fulfilled in the first century. Roman armies under Cestius Gallus encircled Jerusalem in AD 66 and then unexpectedly withdrew; they returned under Titus, and the temple burned in AD 70. Eusebius records that the Christians of Jerusalem left the city for Pella before the siege closed, which reads like obedience to verse 16, although historians still argue about that tradition. R. C. Sproul set out this case in The Last Days According to Jesus, and Kenneth Gentry argues it at length. The whole reading leans on the time statement in Matthew 24:34, taken up in this generation shall not pass.
Futurist
Still ahead. The anchor text is not in the Gospels at all.
Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. 2 Thessalonians 2:4
Paul, writing while AD 70 was still future, describes a person, in a temple, claiming deity. Futurists read Matthew 24:15 and 2 Thessalonians 2:4 as the same event, which on a literal reading requires a temple to be standing. Dispensational writers such as John Walvoord and Thomas Ice place it at the midpoint of Daniel's seventieth week. Whether Paul means a physical building or the church is itself contested, including among futurists.
Historicist
Spread across church history. Protestant historicists, among them E. B. Elliott, whose Horae Apocalypticae appeared in the 1840s, read Daniel's day counts as years and matched the removal of the daily sacrifice to the rise of a corrupted worship in the medieval church, commonly dated 538 to 1798. Seventh-day Adventist teaching developed its own version of this. It was the mainstream Protestant reading for centuries and has few academic defenders today.
Idealist
Not one event at all. The idealist takes the phrase as a pattern: whenever a power installs itself where God alone belongs, this is the shape it takes, and Antiochus and Rome are instances of it rather than the whole of it. William Hendriksen argued in this direction, and G. K. Beale holds a modified version. The strength of the reading is that it explains why Jesus reached for language already fulfilled once. The weakness, its critics say, is that you cannot flee from a pattern, and Jesus told people to run.
What the disagreement really turns on
Almost all of this comes down to one prior question: whether Matthew 24 answers the disciples' question about the temple, or their question about the end of the age, or both at once in layers.
Settle that and the abomination sorts itself out. Leave it open and the four readings will keep circling, all of them quoting Daniel, all of them quoting the same verse in Luke.
Which is why the phrase is best read where Jesus put it, second of three, after the birth pangs and before the signs in the sky, inside a discourse that moves in order. Taken alone it is a puzzle with four answers. Taken in sequence, each answer at least becomes coherent, and you can see plainly what each one costs.