Premillennialists interpret Revelation 20 to be a literal thousand-year earthly reign of Christ before he defeats Satan in one ultimate battle and inaugurates the new heavens and new earth. Is there any precedent for this view of an intermediate, earthly, messianic kingdom in ancient Jewish texts?

Craig Keener, in [amazon_textlink asin=’0830824782′ text=’The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament‘ template=’ProductLink’ store=’toughquest_plugin-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’bc5fc2b6-a238-11e7-80de-a5e1c29f53f3′], writes:

Many Jewish texts include an intermediate period between the present and future ages; in some, it is an age of messianic peace, but in others it is the final tribulation, which came to be called the ‘messianic travail.’ The length of the final intermediate period varies in those ancient Jewish texts that include it, producing such diverse figures as forty years, three generations, four hundred years and nearly as many other calculations as there are opinions recorded, sometimes counted by ‘weeks’ or jubilees of years. A few early Jewish traditions divided history into seven one-thousand-year periods, of which the final period would be an age of peace. (Plato’s figure of one thousand years between death and reincarnation as the intermediate state of the Greek afterlife might have influenced this Jewish figure [cf. also the phoenix of Greek mythology, discussed by rabbis], but this is unlikely; the apocalyptic penchant for dividing history into ages, plus the natural appeal of a round number like one thousand [cf. one hundred in Is 65:20], and especially the Jewish application of Ps 90:4 to the seven days of Gen 1, are sufficient to explain the length of the period on purely Jewish terms.)

Grant Osborne, in [amazon_textlink asin=’0801022991′ text=’Revelation, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament‘ template=’ProductLink’ store=’toughquest_plugin-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’da1691fd-a238-11e7-8a27-057e777696bd’], adds:

The OT had little explicit commentary on the ‘millennium,’ but the view of the coming kingdom of God as an earthly reign (e.g., Ps. 72:8–14; Isa. 11:6–9; Zech. 14:5–17) provided the background for the concept of an earthly millennium. The early rabbis drew on this and believed in a preliminary kingdom (see Beasley-Murray 1978: 288, building on Strack-Billerbeck). Combining Deut. 8:3 and Ps. 90:15, Akiba viewed it as a forty-year reign equal to the wilderness wanderings. Another rabbi used Mic. 7:15 and saw a four-hundred-year reign paralleling Israel’s stay in Egypt. Jehuda used Deut. 11:21 and saw it as four thousand years, the same amount of time as from creation to the present.