of Daniel 8:26, 12:4,9 but confirm the meaning of the words of Daniel 9:24.

Satham means 'to stop up' as one would a well or source of water supply.

Sennacherib attempted to stop the waters that supplied Jerusalem, and

Hezekiah stopped up the watercourse of Gihon (2 Chron. 32:3,30).  We can

therefore translate Daniel 9:24 freely yet nevertheless truthfully 'To

Imprison the transgression, to Seal Up, as a book or as a well, sins'.

We have seen that the 'deep' of Genesis 1:2 finds an echo in the

'abyss' of Revelation 20.  We have seen the possibility of a 'little season'

when Satan, 'that old Serpent', was loosed from the abyss of Genesis 1:2 and

immediately set about his campaign of deceit in Genesis that echoes the

'little season' and the 'deceit' of Revelation 20.  There is, however,

another parallel that bears upon the subject of 'Restraint' that we have

before us, but for the key to this we must turn to Psalm 8.  When it says

'that Thou mightest Still the enemy' (Psa. 8:2), the word translated 'still'

is the Hebrew shabath, and is used in Genesis 2:3 in the words, 'He had

Rested from all His work'.  It means a sabbath keeping.  God rested on the

seventh day of Creation week; Satan will unwillingly keep sabbath in prison,

for the sabbath that remains for the children of God is the 1,000 -year reign

of Christ.  He will indeed be 'stilled', but who, without access to the

original, would have dreamt of such a correspondence or such a teaching.

Here is 'restraint' indeed covering the whole period.

The remaining terms of Daniel 9: reconciliation, righteousness and the

anointing of the Most Holy, belong to a separate inquiry.  We are concerned

at the moment with 'the bottomless pit', the chain, the restraint of the

Devil and his works that introduce the Millennium into the pages of

Scripture, namely at Revelation 20:1 -3.  Sin is by no means 'finished' or

'made an end of' in the evangelical sense of the words, and the Authorized

Version margin reveals that the translators were not quite happy in thus

translating the Hebrew words used.  This element of restraint is reflected in

the 'feigned obedience' that will characterize some of the nations in the

Millennium, and after the reader has surveyed the evidence given for this

marginal translation of Psalm 18:44; 66:3 and 81:15, he may realize that

there is no need to attempt to justify the marginal rendering, the problem

will be rather to understand why the translators should have departed from

their own rendering in so many other places.  Had they been consistent, the

problem would never have arisen.  That there could not have been 'a finish'

or 'an end' to transgression or sin, Revelation 20:8,9 will demonstrate to

all who have no theory to justify, for the terms 'Gog and Magog', 'gather to

battle', 'sand of the sea', 'went up on the breadth of the earth', 'compassed

the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city' together with the

judgment of fire which 'devoured' them with which the Millennium ends, are

all so far removed from any conception of peace and sinlessness as to make a

long disquisition unnecessary.  We can only ask, if these are symptoms of

'perfect peace', are words of any use as vehicles of truth?

Some of our readers may be interested in a few sidelights on this

question of the abyss, and its relation to the Serpent.

Job 41:32 (in the LXX 41:23) reads:

'He reckons ... the tartaros of the abyss his captive'.

Peter uses the verb 'tartaroo' (cast down to hell) in 2 Peter 2:4.  The

title, 'old Nick' in folk lore is derived from the Anglo -Saxon Nicor, a