Glossary of Prophetic and Eschatological Terms

The study of prophecy comes with a specialized vocabulary. This glossary defines the terms used throughout this resource in plain language and from a neutral, descriptive standpoint. Where a term has a fuller treatment elsewhere on the site, a link is provided.

Interpretive schools

Historicism: The interpretive school that reads Daniel and Revelation as a continuous prophecy of history from the prophet's day to the Second Coming. See What Is Historicism?
Futurism: The view that most prophecy awaits fulfillment in a still-future end-time period. See Historicism vs. Futurism.
Preterism: The view that most prophecy was fulfilled in the past, chiefly in the first century. Partial preterism keeps a future Second Coming; full preterism does not. See Historicism vs. Preterism.
Idealism: The view that prophecy portrays timeless spiritual truths rather than a datable sequence of events.
Eschatology: The branch of theology concerned with “last things” — death, judgment, the end of the age, and the world to come.

Interpretive tools

Year-day principle: The rule that a prophetic “day” represents a calendar year. The foundation of historicist chronology. See the year-day principle.
Synchronism: Joseph Mede's method of aligning parallel visions of Revelation in time, so that different series can be correlated.
Recapitulation: The idea that some prophetic series retell the same period from different angles rather than running consecutively — a reading historicism generally resists in favor of continuous sequence.

Key time-periods and figures of prophecy

The 1,260 days: A period named in Revelation (also as 42 months, and as “time, times, and half a time”), read by historicists as 1,260 years. See the Book of Revelation.
The 2,300 days: The period of Daniel 8:14, read under the year-day principle as 2,300 years; central to nineteenth-century interpretation.
The seventy weeks: The prophecy of Daniel 9:24–27, understood as seventy weeks of years (490 years). See the Book of Daniel.
Little horn: The horn arising among ten in Daniel 7, a focus of historicist interpretation.
Antichrist / man of sin: Terms (from 1–2 John and 2 Thessalonians) for prophecy's great opposing power. Reformation historicists gave these a specific institutional identification — discussed, with the necessary qualifications, under Reformation and Prophecy.
Millennium: The thousand-year period of Revelation 20. Interpreters divide into pre-, post-, and a-millennial positions according to how they relate it to the Second Coming.
Babylon the great: The symbolic city of Revelation 17–18, variously identified across the schools.

Millennial positions and related terms

Premillennialism: The view that Christ returns before the millennium, which follows his coming.
Postmillennialism: The view that Christ returns after a long golden age brought about through the spread of the gospel. Many classic historicists were postmillennial.
Amillennialism: The view that the “thousand years” is symbolic of the present church age rather than a distinct future period; associated with Augustine.
Apocalyptic: A genre of highly symbolic prophetic literature (Daniel and Revelation are the biblical examples) marked by visions, cosmic imagery, and the unveiling of hidden things.
Rapture: In dispensational futurism, the catching-up of believers before a future tribulation. It has no counterpart in historicism, which does not read a future seven-year tribulation into the text.
Antiochus IV Epiphanes: The second-century-B.C. Seleucid king whose persecution of the Jews many modern scholars see as the primary background of Daniel's later visions — a reading that competes with the historicist one.

For sources that treat these terms at length, see the Recommended Reading page.