Summary

Those and other challenges and warning signs were called to encourage our pioneers to take a closer look at the prophecies, and to listen to both sides more carefully. Instead, both sides choose to cling to their stories. The train of prophetical thoughts of our pioneers in regard to the kings came to the full stop and a dead end when the conflict they considered turned into a defeat and an obscurity of the king of the North.

As it's been noted, the Adventist pioneers mostly used proper hermeneutical tools to approach the problem. Yet, the differences in their emphasis seem to be at the very heart of the unresolved Eastern Question. Those differences are not necessarily mutually exclusive, as some of Adventist scholars concluded. In fact, the differences between Uriah Smith and James White approaches had to encourage both sides to listen to each other arguments more closely, and not to try widening up what seemed to be a gap. However, as both great commentators followed their stated principles, representing one of the sides of historicism, it set up a stage for the conflict.

On behalf of Uriah Smith and his followers the problem was that in their attempt to preserve geographical and literal principles that had to stick to purely political and territorial dispute, irrelevant to the Great Controversy, as the last battle of the kings. On the other hand James White approached the issues from the perspective of the Great Controversy, while lowering the importance of a more literal interpretation of the prophecy pointing to the political and military conflict.

Both sides failed to consistently apply their own prophetic discoveries to prophetic narrative of Dan 11:40-45 as they excluded both the second beast and the kings from the East from their picture of the last battle. Also, none of the commentators succeeded in approaching the prophecy from a larger prophetic and historical perspective, failing to consider the previous biblical context of the prophecy, its progressive dynamics, and a possibility that the fulfillment of the prophecy is yet in the future.