Perhaps the greatest significance of Daniel’s seventy week prophecy is that it adds great credibility to the claim that Jesus is who He said He was – the Christ, the Messiah, the one predicted from that very first prophecy in the garden concerning the One who would crush the head of the Serpent.

Several Sundays ago, as we approached December 25^th, I brought two messages about the Wise Men of the Bible called, "The Magi: What were they all About?" In those sermons I explained the origin of this interesting class of men called "Magi" who followed the star and came to Bethlehem several months after the birth of Jesus to worship Him and bring Him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. I suggested the possibility that these Magi may have been ideological descendants of some of the officials in the courts of Nebuchadnezzar during the time of the prophet Daniel. As such, they may have been influenced by Daniel’s writings. Indeed, the writings of that prophet could well have been the impetus for their coming to visit this One who was "born king of the Jews." There was not enough time for me to elaborate on Daniel’s writings during those sermons. I simply alluded to them and moved on. But I did commit to bring a later message in which I would explain the prophecy of Daniel 9 that predicted, from Daniel’s day, the time of the appearance of Messiah. This will be that message.

Let’s go now to the ninth chapter of Daniel and the passage that is commonly referred to as the Seventy Weeks Prophecy. We’ll begin by reading the pertinent verses, then we’ll go back and consider their context.

The various interpretations of this passage are many. Let me admit that up front. What I give you here is my own best effort at understanding and explaining these verses. Prophetic scripture can be difficult to decipher. It is also often tied to other passages that present prophecy. Thus, a mistake in one area can throw an interpreter way off in another. If you are inclined to disagree with my conclusions about this passage after you have done your homework and given them careful study, I will still be your Christian brother and you will still be my Christian brother or sister. Blessedly, our salvation does not depend directly upon our ability to interpret prophecy.

As is so often the case when we open up the Bible somewhere in the middle and start reading, we’re breaking into a context, so let me begin by giving you the setting of this passage.

1. The Setting.

Jewish ancestral history begins with Abraham about 2000 years before Christ. Abraham was the father of the Hebrew race. Jewish national history is best dated from the time when Moses received the Law on Mount Sinai about 500 years later or approximately 1500 years before Christ.

The children of Israel had been delivered by God from Egyptian bondage and were headed for Canaan, the land God had promised to the descendants of Abraham. After spending 40 years wandering in the desert of Sinai because of disobedience, the Israelites entered Canaan and took possession of the land according to God’s command. Several major periods followed in which Israel was first ruled by judges and then by kings. The period of the kings peaked with the reign of David and his son, Solomon, about 1000 years before Christ. During the rule of David and Solomon, Israel prospered greatly and was obedient to the will of God for the most part.

In the latter days of Solomon’s administration however, the king departed from the ways of the Lord. The once powerful kingdom was torn by internal strife. When Solomon died, Israel split into two separate nations: Israel to the North and Judah to the South. For a time the two nations were at war.

It was during that troubled "divided kingdom" period, from about the 9^th to the 5^th century BC, that God sent prophets to both kingdoms to warn them of coming doom if they did not return to Him. We have the writings of those prophets in our Old Testament.

Neither kingdom listened to the prophets for very long so we find that the next step, judgment, was inevitable. The Northern Kingdom was first to go. They were invaded and fell to the Assyrians in 722 BC. The Southern Kingdom lasted a little longer, but came to an end when Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in 606 BC. Among those taken captive from Jerusalem was a teenager named Daniel for whom God had some special plans.

Another of the prophets, Jeremiah, who lived and preached just prior to the fall of Jerusalem, foretold the captivity of Judah by the Babylonians. His prediction, found in Jeremiah 29:10-11, said that the captivity would last 70 years. Here is what he said:

Jeremiah was the only prophet to specify the actual number of years that the captivity would last, and his prediction was fulfilled precisely. That is where we intersect our chosen text in the ninth chapter of Daniel.

In the first year of Darius, a new king over what had been Babylon, in approximately 538 BC, Daniel, an old man by that time, was reading the writings of Jeremiah and calculated that the time of the captivity - seventy years - was nearly complete. Let’s pick up the story in the first verse of Daniel 9…

"The books" here would be the writings of the Jewish prophets, including Jeremiah. Daniel was reading the very same words about the duration of the captivity we read just a moment ago.

Daniel is confessing the sins of his people that caused their exile. He continues this confession in the verses that follow. We won’t take time to read it this morning.

Then in verse 16, he makes a request.

At that point something altogether unexpected happened. Daniel was about to drop off to sleep when suddenly he was aware of someone else in the room with him.

The angel then proceeded to describe to Daniel what was going to happen to the Jews and to their city, Jerusalem. And most remarkably, he also revealed to Daniel a precisely timed prophecy for the coming of Messiah which was still in Daniel’s future. It was this passage, or the anticipation it produced among that Jews, that may have caused the Magi to come to Bethlehem to worship Jesus! Let’s see if we can make some sense of it.

2. The Sense

The next four verses fall naturally into two parts. Verse 24 is a general statement that covers the entire period under discussion. Verses 25-27 give a more detailed breakdown of the events of that same period and even go beyond it. We’ll take the general statement of verse 24 first.

This "seventy weeks" is literally, "seventy units of seven." Albert Barnes, in his commentary on Daniel, points out that the Hebrew word usually used to describe a week of seven days does not appear here. A literal translation of this would be, "Seventy sevens have been decreed…." It is very commonly held among students of prophecy that a day often represents a year in predictions like this. If that is the case here we have seventy sevens of years or 70x7 years – a period of 490 years. According to Gabriel, this amount of time was decreed by God for the Jews and their city so that six things could be accomplished:

1. "…To finish transgression…"
2. "…To make an end to sin…"
3. "… To make atonement for iniquity…"
4. "… To bring in everlasting righteousness…"
5. "… To seal up vision and prophecy…"
6. "… To anoint the most holy…" (The word "place" there in the NAS is added by the translators and is not in the original.)

So what do these things mean? Let’s see if we get any clues by reading the more specific predictions of the next three verses.

In verse 25, the seventy sevens time period is broken up into several parts.

"So you are to know and discern [says the angel Gabriel] that from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; it will be built again, with plaza and moat, even in times of distress.

At the time Gabriel revealed this to Daniel, Jerusalem lay in ruins. It had been that way for nearly 70 years. The wall was broken down and the city had been nearly leveled and burned with fire. Even if they were released from the captivity, the Jews had no home. So the angel speaks of something that must have greatly excited Daniel. At some point in the future from Daniel’s perspective, a decree was going to be issued to restore and rebuild the ruined city!

But there was something else in the angel’s prediction – something extra. Daniel is given a time table for something that was an integral part of these future plans - the coming of Messiah! From the decree to rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah would be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks - that is sixty-nine weeks. Using the day/year reckoning again, that would be sixty-nine sevens of years or 483 years. So, 483 years after the decree to rebuild Jerusalem that Gabriel predicted, Messiah would come on the scene! This was a remarkable prophecy in its time and one that we can study and verify today to see if it actually came true.

The obvious question to ask, of course, is whether there was such a decree to rebuild the city and if so, when, and by whom was it given? While that sounds simple on the surface, it is complicated by the fact that during the subsequent years after Daniel received this prediction, there were three or perhaps even four decrees that concerned the Jews and their return to their homeland. A careful study of each of these is necessary.

The time that followed this prediction takes us into the Bible books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Watching carefully for the four decrees, here is what we find after a careful study of those books and their corresponding timelines…

In 536 BC, Cyrus the Great of Persia issued a decree allowing all of the Jews who wished to return to their homeland to leave Persia and go back to Palestine. The decree is found in Ezra 1:1-4. It was issued less than two years after Daniel received his prophecy. Here is what it said:

Could this be the decree Gabriel had in mind? Would it fit the prophecy? Well, do the math. The decree was given in 536 BC. Taking that date 483 years into the future would bring us to 53 BC, a time that is much too early for the life and ministry of Jesus. (Contemporary Jewish scholars like to use this decree as the fulfillment of the angel’s words because it eliminates Jesus from consideration as Messiah.) Actually, there is something else wrong with concluding that this was the decree besides the fact that it wouldn’t verify Jesus as Messiah. If you look at the words of the decree again, you will find that there was no permission given by Cyrus to rebuild either the city or the walls. He permitted the Jews only to rebuild the temple. If you look again at our text in Daniel 9:25, you’ll see that Daniel’s prophecy specifically spelled out rebuilding the city, with plaza and mote, or, as the KJV says, with "street" and "wall." It was one thing to allow the Jews to rebuild their temple and quite another to allow them to rebuild the walls of their city with the potential that they might again become a major regional military power. Rebuilding the city and the walls was not a part of the decree of Cyrus. Thus I conclude that it was not the decree Gabriel referred to.

The next decree we find with regard to the Jews’ return was that of Darius I of Persia in 520 BC. It is recorded in Ezra 6:8-12:

Could this be the decree of Daniel’s prophecy? You probably noticed that the issue is the same with this one as with the last. The decree concerned rebuilding the temple and not the city or the walls. And of course, the math doesn’t work for this one either. 483 years beyond 520 BC brings us only to 37 BC. If this is the decree Gabriel referred to, then Jesus isn’t the Messiah. I must conclude, therefore, that this was not the decree spoken of by the angel.

The next decree we find given with regard to the Jews’ return was pronounced by Artaxerxes 1 (also called Artaxerxes Longimanus) in 457 BC. The text of the decree is much too long for me to read here, but it begins in Ezra 7:11 with these words:

The decree goes on to authorize money and material for sacrifices so the returning Jews could worship. At first it appears that the decree is missing any authorization for rebuilding the wall and the city. However, if we read on in Ezra to the place where Ezra is reflecting on the decree and its meaning, we find these words in Ezra 9:8-9:

Apparently this third decree authorized work on the temple and the walls – that latter work not being completed until the time of Nehemiah.

Before we do the math on this third decree, let me quickly mention the fourth, which actually wasn’t a full blown decree as was the case for the first three. In 444 BC, King Artaxerxes 1, the same king who had authorized Ezra’s return that we just considered, sanctioned his Jewish wine taster, Nehemiah, to procure materials for rebuilding the wall around the city of Jerusalem and gave him letters to assure his unhindered passage to that city. Here is what we read in Nehemiah 2:7-8 in Nehemiah’s own words:

As I said, there was not formal decree. Only letters authorizing Nehemiah to gather the materials and have safe passage through the various jurisdictions of the Kings domain. Nehemiah was simply going to help or restart the efforts to rebuild the wall that had been hindered since Artaxerxes’ initial decree.

Some students of the Bible prefer this last date as the one referred to by Gabriel and do some interesting mathematics in an effort to make it fit. However, it looks to me like the third date which corresponds to the initial decree of Artaxerxes in 457 BC is the right one, for which I will now do the math.

If you take the year 457 BC, the date of the third decree, and run it 483 years into the future, you end up with the year 26 AD. That needs to be adjusted one year ahead since there is no "0 AD" – the calendar goes directly from 1 BC to 1AD. That would push the resultant calculation of Daniel’s sixty-nine weeks to 27AD. Since Jesus was actually born in 4 BC(1) according to our calendar reckoning, 27AD would be the year that Jesus was baptized and began his ministry at age 30 – a perfect spot to land in fulfilling Daniel’s prophecy. And, I might enthusiastically add, a marvelous job of predicting on the part of the angel Gabriel!

We are out of time so if the Lord gives me life and health, I’m going to continue this message next Sunday morning when we meet. Before we close though, I’ll lightly touch on the significance of what we have seen so far.

Perhaps the greatest significance of Daniel’s seventy week prophecy is that it adds great credibility to the claim that Jesus is who He said He was – the Christ, the Messiah, the one predicted from that very first prophecy in the garden concerning the One who would crush the head of the Serpent.

Do you know this one called Messiah? Have you really placed your faith in Him? Do you realize how solid His claims are? Are you living for Him? I hope so, because one of these days He is going to return to and as surely as this prediction of Daniel came true, His prediction of salvation for those who accept Him and judgment for those who don’t will also come true.

If you are going to be ready for that day you need to surrender your life to Him. You need to confess your faith in Him before men. You need to turn away from your sins and commit to living by His commandments. You need to be baptized to have you sins washed away. And once you have done these things, you must be faithful to your profession until death. You must not turn away from it.

We’ll pick this message up again next week. I encourage you to respond to these things in whatever way you need to.

Footnotes: (Use your back button to return to your place)

1. "Although in most countries today time is reckoned from the birth of Jesus, a mistake occurred in fixing the date of this event. We have no record of the exact date of Jesus' birth. But we do know that the date adopted several centuries later as the beginning of the Christian Era was at least four years too late; that is, Jesus was born in 4 BC, or earlier, according to our reckoning." (From Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia Deluxe © 1999 The Learning Company, Inc. – Entry under "Jesus Christ."

Dave Redick is Minister of the Hwy 20 Church of Christ in Sweet Home, Oregon and Editor of The Preacher's Study. He may be reached at pstudysupport@comcast.net.

Copyright © 1996-2008 by The Preacher's Study. Permission is granted to subscribers to use this document in total or in sermon preparation in the context of the local congregation only. Publishing it in a book, on the Internet, or anyplace beyond the local congregation is prohibited.

All Scripture quotations and references are from the New American Standard Version unless otherwise stated.

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