Sir; Do you know if Mrs. White ever used the term, "The Great Week of Time"? Our Wed night prayer meeting is studying from the book "Ready or Not" and in last nights study we ran accross the phrase. We sort of got the impression that the phrase was used by Mrs. White. But, I've looked though her works and nothing pops up. I would would be most greatful for you help . Your Servant ___________

Dear Brother ___________,

Thank you for contacting the Ellen G. White Estate. The CD-ROM of Mrs. White's published writings reveals no "hits" for "great week" or for "week of time." However, J. N. Andrews used this expression in a series of articles in the Review in July and August of 1883. Several years ago, in 1999, someone wrote to the White Estate asking for copies of those articles. I was not willing to submit our aging and somewhat brittle bound volumes to the photocopy process, but I wrote the following in partial reply:

I looked up the articles to see how many pages there would be (about 10 or 11), and I glanced at the titles and some of the contents. In the first article Andrews lays out his "week of time" thesis, which is based on drawing an analogy between creation week and the whole span of earth's days. In the subsequent articles he examines what happened in each of these "days" of earth's "week," doubling up on a couple of them so that this part of the treatment ends up taking only five articles instead of seven. What really surprised me, though, as I was scanning over one of the later articles, was to see that Andrews did not coordinate his thousand-year "days" with the millennia that we measure by our numbering of the years. His fifth millennium starts 161 years before Christ, for instance! And his sixth millennium closes at some indefinite time late in the 19th century! So Andrews did not even expect that there would be a 20th century here on earth--by then the saints were to be in heaven with Jesus. I was astonished to see that. Not having read the articles (I still have done no more than scan a few of them), it had never occurred to me that Andrews marked the millennia off differently from how we are doing it now.

Clearly, then, Andrews was wrong, at least about some things. Even if we discount his calculation of the dates for the millennia, and we go instead with Ussher's chronology, we are already into the seventh millennium, since Ussher dated creation at 4004 B.C., and the birth of Christ at 4 B.C. By that measure, the seventh millennium started in 1996.

My own opinion is that Andrews was fundamentally wrong on this matter. By that I mean that his analogy of creation week as representing the entire time-span of the planet is without Bible support. Nowhere does the Bible make this point. Without such a solid Bible basis, we are off into speculations of our own. I recall that in the 1840s Joseph Bates constructed some similar analogies--something about seven drops of blood on the mercy seat representing seven years from 1844 until Jesus would come in 1851. To him the analogy was compelling. But it had no Bible basis, and it failed.

Below my signature I will attach some material from "Last Day Events," a compilation from Mrs. White's writings, which to my way of thinking undermines any attempt to tie the coming of Jesus to a particular time now, such as the start of a new millennium. She specifically says that no time period of prophecy reaches beyond 1844. [I copied pp. 32-36 there; I won't include them here.]

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I hope this answers your question and perhaps gives you some additional information to work with. Let me know if I can be of further service. Thank you for writing, and God bless!

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William Fagal, Director
Ellen G. White Estate Branch Office
Andrews University
Berrien Springs, MI 49104-1400 USA
Phone: 269 471-3209
FAX: 269 471-2646
Website: www.WhiteEstate.org or www.egwestate.andrews.edu
E-mail: egw@aubranch.egwestate.andrews.edu