Daniel 11:31
Daniel 11:3131His forces will rise up and desecrate the temple fortress. They will abolish the daily sacrifice and set up the abomination of desolation.
— "they will set up the disgusting thing that causes desolation" — is woven into the Watchtower's broader end-times framework. Across decades of publications the "disgusting thing" has been identified with the League of Nations (from 1919) and later the United Nations, an ongoing modern fulfilment read through the lens of 1914 chronology.
The historical referent was settled within living memory of the prophecy. Antiochus IV Epiphanes desecrated the Second Temple in 168 BCE by erecting a pagan altar over the altar of burnt offering and sacrificing a pig — the abomination of desolation Daniel foresaw. That original fulfilment is the reason Maccabean literature and Josephus both identify with Antiochus. Jesus then extended the pattern in the Olivet Discourse. Where records him warning of "the disgusting thing that causes desolation … standing in a holy place," records the same warning as "when you see Jerusalem surrounded by encamped armies, then know that the desolating of her has drawn near." Luke gives Jesus's own interpretive key. Cestius Gallus's legions surrounded Jerusalem in AD 66, the Jerusalem Christians fled to Pella (Eusebius, Church History 3.5.3), and Titus returned in AD 70 to destroy the city exactly as Jesus predicted. Two fulfilments — Antiochus and Rome — sitting on the historical record with dates, names, and surviving accounts. A third fulfilment in 1919 requires a bridge the text does not build.