Revelation 9:5
And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man. And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.
The five months are a prophetic period of one hundred fifty years marking the span of Ottoman power. During that time the command not to kill but to torment meant that this power harassed and afflicted its opponents without utterly destroying them. This tormenting period forms the first part of the larger time prophecy whose calculation pointed to the breaking of Ottoman power in 1840. That calculation embraced the successive prophetic periods that together predicted the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The prediction was fulfilled when the empire surrendered its independence on August 11, 1840.