Before You Begin
Thesis. Long before Daniel's 2300 days, Moses wrote the first and longest of the prophetic periods into the covenant itself. To a people warned that obedience brings blessing and rebellion brings the curse, the LORD four times pronounced one sentence: "I will punish you SEVEN TIMES for your sins" (Lev. 26:18, 21, 24, 28) — and the sentence was a scattering: "I will scatter you among the heathen... and your land shall be desolate" (Lev. 26:33). A prophetic "time" is 360 years; "seven times" is 2520 years (Litch). Nebuchadnezzar's literal seven years of madness (Dan. 4) is the Bible's own type of it — a proud kingdom hewn down "till seven times pass over." The 2520 is the era Christ named "the times of the Gentiles," when "Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles" (Luke 21:24) — the long treading of God's people, pagan Babylon then papal Rome, the two desolating powers of Daniel 8:13. Measured from the carrying-away of Manasseh (B.C. 677), the seven times reach to A.D. 1844, ending where the 2300 ended; measured from the fall of Samaria and Judah's earlier shocks, the parallel reckoning reaches A.D. 1798, when the papal dominion was broken. The curse ran its full course — and on the cross Christ was "made a curse for us" (Gal. 3:13), that the scattering might end in a gathering.
Method. After Haskell's Bible Handbook: ref → gloss, scannable; every figure defined first from Scripture (Miller's Rule — the Bible defines its own figures: a time = 360 [Rev. 12:6, 14], a day = a year [Num. 14:34; Eze. 4:6]). The doctrine is built from the covenant text (Lev. 26; Deut. 28), the type (Dan. 4), and Christ's own word (Luke 21:24); the Millerite pioneers — William Miller, Josiah Litch, Apollos Hale, Samuel Snow, and the 1843-44 periodicals (Signs of the Times / Midnight Cry / Advent Herald) — corroborate ONLY, after Scripture. BE SCRUPULOUS: this is a contested pioneer period. Uriah Smith and the later mainstream did NOT hold the 2520 — Smith (DAR) is cited only for the daily/treading powers, NEVER for the period. Every refcode is quoted verbatim and verified; none invented, and no chronology is asserted that the pioneers did not actually compute.