If you're going to utilize rabbinic presuppositions, you may find youself off the mark on the understanding of Scripture. The rabbinic approach, not unlike that employed by modern Christian liberals, is to discover the deeper, hidden meaning of the text. No every text has a "deeper meaning". It's pure presuppostion to suggest that it does.
It's apparent from the contexts that "day of the Lord" has primary reference to the immediate temportal judgment that God meted out on Israel and her enemies. E.g.,:
The word of the Lord came to me again, saying, "Son of man, prophesy and say, 'Thus says the Lord God: "Wail, 'Woe to the day!' For the day is near, Even the day of the Lord is near; It will be a day of clouds, the time of the Gentiles. The sword shall come upon Egypt, And great anguish shall be in Ethiopia, When the slain fall in Egypt, And they take away her wealth, And her foundations are broken down. "Ethiopia, Libya, Lydia, all the mingled people, Chub, and the men of the lands who are allied, shall fall with them by the sword." 'Thus says the Lord: "Those who uphold Egypt shall fall, And the pride of her power shall come down. From Migdol to Syene Those within her shall fall by the sword," Says the Lord God. "They shall be desolate in the midst of the desolate countries, And her cities shall be in the midst of the cities that are laid waste. (Ezekiel 30)Whether or not this somehow "hints" of a final "day of the Lord" or not is the debate at hand. But it cannot be assumed. Nevertheless, the primary teaching has to do with the immediate temporal judgments. That is the case in virtually all places where the phrase is used in the Bible. The context in large part dictates the meaning.
But not at the expense of the p'shat, the plain meaning. The plain meaning must be understood first before you get into remez, drash, and sod. As I said in the intro, I have no objection to the idea that Revelation has a preterist and historicist remez built into it (ignoring the dating issue when it comes to preterism, since Revelation was plainly written 20+ years after the destruction of the Temple), but the p'shat is plainly futurist, which is why all of the early Church fathers who were closest to the time and person that saw it written understood it that way.
Ditto on the Day of the Lord passages. There are remez galore in them, but the events plainly described have never taken place in history. For example, here is a section from one of the appendixes in which I address the issue of Isa. 13's fulfillment (please pardon any errors or typos, as I have not finalized it yet):
It has often been asserted that Isaiah 13 has already been fulfilled in history. In fact, Josh McDowell uses this as an apologetic proof in his Evidence That Demands a Verdict. However, there are several verses within this chapter that have no fulfillment in history. For example, v. 5 says that an army will “destroy the whole country.” Cyrus certainly did not destroy the whole country, nor did Alexander. Both conquered it intact. The closest one can come to finding this fulfilled in history is some of the wars between the Romans and the Parthians and Persians—none of which involved the Medes destroying Babylon as per v. 17. Rather, Babylon simply faded away in importance after the city of Selucia was built on the Tigris, resulting in Babylon's loss of trade.When the preterists and historicists are able to show that a) they have compared Scripture to Scripture before trying to overlay prophecy against history (as I did in the chart in my previous post) and b) that the prophecy was completely fulfilled in every last point, then and only then may they declare a prophecy fulfilled and having no future meaning (except, perhaps, as a remez or drash). To date, I've read numerous interpretations by both (including some detailed posts from OrthodoxPresbyterian in which he laid out the preterist interpretations of Revelation) and to date, I have yet to find one that is consistant with both of the principles above.McDowell seems to be aware that this verse and the others I will examine in a moment have no literal fulfillment in history, as he cites no verse after 19 as being fulfilled. But even within the part of the prophecy he cites, we find several problem passages:
v. 7—“Because of this, all hands will go limp, every man's heart will melt.” While this verse certainly applied to Belshazzar and his court (who literally saw “the handwriting on the wall”), the majority of Babylon were not recorded as being in fear when the Medes and the Persians attacked them. This same fact applies to vv. 14-18. When Cyrus took Babylon, he did so in such a way that most of the population didn't even know that they were conquered for three days after he took the royal palace!Given that all of the above passages have no fulfillment in history, we must regard Isaiah 13 to be a prophecy of the future—or at best, a prophecy with a partial past fulfillment and a complete future fulfillment, like Daniel’s prophecies of Antiochus. In fact, v. 9 ties Isaiah 13 to the Day of the Lord (see Isa. 2:2-22, Amos 5:18-27, and 2 Th. 2:1-4), which Sha’ul indicates is a day yet future that is tied to Messiah's Second Coming and our being gathered to Him. That being the case, we should reject the “allegorization” of verses 10 and 13 as being a mere idiom for the fall of a nation.v. 12—“I will make Man scarcer than pure gold, more rare than the gold of Ophir.” No such massive depopulation took place during the attack of the Medes and the Persians (see. v. 17). Again, the destruction of Babylon only took place much later, and then was only the result of gradual decay and the movement of the population to a city just twenty miles to the north.
v. 19—“She will never be inhabited or lived in through all generations; no Arab will pitch his tent there, no shepherd will rest his flocks there.” It is no secret that Saddam Hussein has spent the last twenty years and hundreds of millions of dollars rebuilding Babylon, albeit largely as a tourist trap. Therefore, it cannot be said that no Arab has "pitched his tent" in Babylon.