Illuminated Bible

The street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times

Dan 9:24-25

Dan 9:24-25

24 Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy.

25 Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times.

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Explanations

The Seventy Weeks

The Seventy Weeks

Daniel 9 — The Seventy Weeks

Source: Christian Virtual Fellowship — Book of Daniel series (taught by Dustin Smith)

1. Setting the Scene — Daniel’s Prayer in Its Timeline

Daniel 9 has two parts: Daniel’s long penitential prayer (vv. 1–19) and Gabriel’s vision of the “seventy weeks” (vv. 20–27). The chapter only makes sense once you see how these two halves are connected — the vision is Gabriel’s answer to the prayer, not a separate, unrelated revelation.

The chapter is dated to “the first year of Darius the Mede,” which the book’s chronology places at 536 BC — exactly seventy years after the exile, dated in the chapter’s own opening verses to 606 BC. Daniel is reading the scrolls (Hebrew sepharim) of Jeremiah and notices Jeremiah’s prophecy that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years. Since seventy years have now passed and the Jews are still captives under Darius, with no temple and no control of their land, something isn’t adding up — and that discrepancy is what drives Daniel to pray.

This is one of the places where the Old Testament actually quotes the Old Testament — we’re used to the New Testament quoting the Old, but this is a rare case of one Old Testament figure reading and responding to another.

2. Reading Jeremiah 29 — The Real Promise Behind “Plans to Prosper You”

Daniel is reading Jeremiah 29:10–14 — the source of the popular (and often decontextualized) “plans to prosper you” verse. In its actual context, the passage doesn’t merely promise generic blessing; it lays out a sequence:

  1. Seventy years of exile in Babylon
  2. Israel will pray, seek, and call upon God with all their heart
  3. God will then restore their fortunes — bring them back to the land

The instruction to seek God “with all your heart” deliberately echoes the Shema language of Deuteronomy. Daniel reads this and realizes: seventy years are up, and the promised restoration — the land, the temple, the fortunes — has not happened. Following Jeremiah’s own instructions, Daniel obediently prays.

3. Daniel’s Prayer — Four Themes of Penitence

The prayer is one the teacher calls among the most under-appreciated — and most penitent — prayers in the Bible. Though Daniel is the “good guy” of the book, he doesn’t separate himself from the sin of his people; he prays as one of them, not above them.

Theme What Daniel Says
God’s righteousness God has kept His covenant; Israel’s suffering is not injustice but the covenant curse Israel brought on itself through disobedience. Daniel never accuses God of being unfair.
Love as obedience Loving God is not sentimental feeling but the obedience that keeps Israel in good covenant standing — and Israel has failed to do it.
Jerusalem and the people The prayer repeatedly pairs these two objects of reproach — the city (site of the sanctuary) and the people. Both become the focal points of Gabriel’s vision at the end of the chapter.
No merit, only mercy Second Temple Jews did not believe they earned salvation by works.

“We are not presenting our supplication before you on account of any merits of our own, but on account of your great compassion.” (Dan. 9:18)

The teacher singles this verse out as a direct rebuttal to the later Christian caricature — traceable to Luther and others — that Second Temple Judaism was a religion of earning salvation through merit. Daniel’s prayer shows the opposite: total dependence on God’s covenant loving-kindness.

4. Gabriel’s Reinterpretation — From 70 Years to “Seventy Sevens”

Gabriel — the same angelic revealer who explained the vision in Daniel 8 — arrives mid-prayer to give Daniel understanding. What follows is not simply an explanation of Jeremiah 29; it is a reinterpretation. Jeremiah spoke of seventy years of captivity followed by full restoration. Since that restoration plainly had not occurred, Gabriel multiplies the number by seven: it is not 70 years, but “70 sevens.”

The Hebrew word translated “weeks” is not a specific word for a seven-day period — it is simply the cardinal number seven. So the vision is literally “seventy sevens” have been decreed for Daniel’s people and holy city.

5. The Six Purposes of the Vision (Verse 24) — and a Hidden Textual Variant

Verse 24 lists six infinitives describing what the seventy sevens will accomplish. The teacher argues that several standard English translations (including the NASB he’s reading from) render these misleadingly.

# Infinitive What It Actually Means
1 Finish transgression Put an end to the desecrating cultic violations of the Jerusalem temple
2 Seal sins (original ketiv) Contain / keep sin in check — the ongoing function of the regular temple sacrifices
3 Cover iniquity (Hebrew avon) The same word Daniel used twice in his own prayer (vv. 13, 16) — Gabriel is answering Daniel’s specific prayer, not offering a vague generality
4 Bring in everlasting righteousness Perpetual covenant faithfulness, which the (currently absent) regular sacrifices were meant to secure
5 Seal up vision and prophet Not “prophecy” — the Hebrew word is for the person, the prophet (i.e., Jeremiah), whose vision is being brought to completion
6 Anoint the most holy place (the holy of holies) Authorize and rededicate the temple’s inner sanctuary for its intended purpose

Item #2 carries a notable textual issue. Hebrew manuscripts preserve two readings: the ketiv (“that which is written” — the original text) and the qere (“that which is read” — a later interpretive correction, the same phenomenon that later generations used to avoid pronouncing the divine name Yahweh). The ketiv reads “to seal sins” (contain/keep sin in check, plural); the qere reads “to make an end of the sin” (singular, definite). Most translations follow the later qere. The teacher deliberately follows the original ketiv, noting he is “naturally skeptical of anyone coming in and changing the original meaning.”

6. Three Periods, Not Two — Reading the “Seventy Weeks” Correctly

Verse 25 divides the seventy sevens into three segments, which together with verse 26–27 give the full structure:

Segment Length What Happens
1 7 weeks (sevens) From the decree to rebuild Jerusalem until an anointed prince
2 62 weeks (sevens) Jerusalem rebuilt “with plaza and moat,” vague “times of distress”
3 1 week (seven) The final, most detailed period — described in vv. 26–27

A critical, invisible-in-English detail: the Hebrew text carries a disjunctive accent mark called the atnach — a pause marker — separating “seven weeks” from “62 weeks.” This is a deliberate signal not to add them together into “69 weeks,” as many popular readings do. If the text meant 69, it would simply say 69. The two periods are meant to stay distinct.

The “anointed prince” of the first seven weeks is not necessarily “the Messiah.” The Hebrew word for “anointed” (mashiach) appears here without the definite article — an anointed one, not the Anointed One. In the Old Testament, priests as well as kings are called “anointed.” A strong historical candidate for this figure is Joshua the high priest, prominent in Haggai and Zechariah 3, and the first high priest to serve in the rebuilt Second Temple. The point: your translation has already made an interpretive decision by rendering this “Messiah the Prince” — a decision you should evaluate, not assume.

7. Why “Seven” Means Completion, Not a Calendar

The teacher argues strongly against treating “seventy weeks” as a literal chronological figure to be multiplied out to 490 years and mapped onto a future timeline. His case:

  • Seven is the apocalyptic number of completion throughout Daniel and Revelation, not typically a precise arithmetical count.
  • Jesus used the identical figure the same way. When Peter asked how many times to forgive — up to seven times? — Jesus answered “not seven times, but seventy times seven” (Matt. 18:21–22). No one thinks Jesus meant forgive exactly 490 times and then stop; the number communicates completeness, unending willingness to forgive.
  • The jubilee connection: 49 years (7 × 7) was the biblical jubilee cycle, marking release of debts. 490 is ten jubilees — reinforcing that the number’s freight is forgiveness and release, not a countdown clock.
  • Every attempt in history to use this passage to calculate a date for Christ’s return has been wrong — every single one.

“So let me ask you: do you think Jesus wants you to tally up the number of times you forgive your brother, and once you get to 490, you stop forgiving him at that point? No — I don’t think that’s what he means.”

8. The Anointed One “Cut Off” — Onias III, Not Jesus

Verse 26 reads: “the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing… and the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary.” Many readers immediately see this as a prophecy of Jesus’s crucifixion. The teacher argues, carefully, that it is not:

  • It is never quoted or alluded to anywhere in the New Testament — despite early Christian writers actively scouring the Old Testament (Isaiah 53, Hosea 6, Passover imagery) to prove Jesus’s suffering and death fit prophecy. Daniel 9 is never used this way.
  • The wording doesn’t fit Jesus’s story. Literally, “the anointed one will be cut off, and no one will come to his aid.” Jesus’s story is precisely the opposite — the Father did come to his aid, raising him from the dead. That is the whole point of the gospel.
  • A historical figure fits precisely: Onias III, the high priest murdered in 171 BC, with no one avenging or coming to his aid — a shocking event since the high priest was the effective leader of the Jewish people at a time with no king.
  • His brother Jason, a Hellenistic sympathizer, then seized the high priesthood with the backing of the Greek king Antiochus IV Epiphanes — the “little horn” figure already identified in Daniel 7 and 8.
  • A grammatical detail resolves an ambiguity in translation: the phrase usually rendered “its end will come with the flood” uses a Hebrew pronominal suffix that is masculine. But both “sanctuary” and “city” — the nearest antecedents — are grammatically feminine in Hebrew. The only masculine antecedent available is “the prince.” The correct reading is therefore “his end will come with the flood” — referring to the desolating prince (Antiochus), not the temple.

9. The Final Week — Antiochus IV and the Abomination of Desolation

Verse 27 zeroes in on the final “week” (seven-year period): the desolating ruler (Antiochus IV) makes a covenant with many, and in the middle of that week stops the sacrifices and sets up “the abomination that makes desolate” — the same language already encountered in Daniel 8.

Notably, the passage devotes disproportionate attention to this final week — roughly two-thirds of the entire vision covers just this last seven-year period, while the first sixty-nine weeks are compressed into a single verse. The teacher points out this is consistent with a pattern across the whole book: Daniel 2’s statue vision, Daniel 7’s four beasts, and Daniel 8’s ram and goat all skip quickly over earlier kingdoms to concentrate almost entirely on the final, climactic kingdom.

A striking numerical coincidence closes the loop: Onias III was murdered in 171 BC, and the temple was rededicated (sacrifices resumed) in 164 BC — a gap of seven years, matching the “one week” of verse 27.

10. Testing the Fit — Do the Six Purposes Match 164 BC?

The teacher runs each of the six infinitives from verse 24 back against the historical rededication of the temple in 164 BC (following the Maccabean revolt) to see whether the vision’s stated goals were actually accomplished at that point in history — rather than in the life, death, or return of Jesus.

Purpose Fulfilled by 164 BC Rededication?
Finish transgression (end desecrating temple violations) Yes — Antiochus’s desecration ended
Seal sins (regular sacrifices resume, keeping sin in check) Yes — sacrifices resumed
Cover iniquity (the sin Daniel prayed about) Yes — land and temple restored
Bring in everlasting righteousness (perpetual covenant faithfulness via sacrifice) Yes — temple functioning again
Seal up vision and the prophet (Jeremiah’s prophecy completed) Yes — fortunes fully restored
Anoint the holy of holies Yes — rededication ceremony did exactly this

None of these, the teacher argues, clearly or specifically fits events in the life of Jesus, his death, or the destruction of the temple in AD 70 — while all six fit the events of 164 BC precisely.

11. Confirmed by History — The Maccabean Sources

The earliest interpreters of these events read Daniel 9 exactly this way:

  • 2 Maccabees 4 records Menelaus’s temple theft, and the treacherous murder of Onias III by Andronicus — matching “the anointed one cut off, with no one to help him.”
  • 1 Maccabees 1:11 opens with “certain renegades came out from Israel… saying, come, let us make a covenant with the Gentiles around us” — matching the covenant “with many” in Daniel 9:27.
  • 1 Maccabees later describes the erection of “the abomination of desolation” on the altar, using the very same Greek phrase found in the Septuagint of Daniel — a deliberate quotation connecting the events directly to Daniel’s prophecy.

12. Devotional Application

The teacher closes with four practical takeaways, deliberately setting aside date-calculation and future-prediction:

# Takeaway
1 Imitate Daniel’s honesty and humility with God — his prayer models transparent confession, without self-justification.
2 Pray as a member of the community, not a “lone ranger.” Just as the Lord’s Prayer says “give us… forgive us,” Daniel prays on behalf of his whole people, not just himself.
3 Gabriel’s vision offered hope to a persecuted people that God had already decreed the defeat of their evil oppressor. In today’s uncertain and violent world, that same hope — the return of Christ to end evil and vindicate the righteous — is what believers have to offer others, not political or legislative solutions.
4 Just as “seventy times seven” was never meant as a forgiveness quota, believers are called to be as quick to forgive others as God is to forgive us.

Summary

The Seventy Weeks Is The Seventy Weeks Is Not
Gabriel’s reinterpretation of Jeremiah’s 70-year prophecy, multiplied by 7 A literal 490-year countdown to a future event
An answer to the specific sins Daniel confessed in his prayer A vague, generic statement about sin in the abstract
Fulfilled in the Maccabean period, culminating in the temple’s rededication in 164 BC A prophecy of the death of Jesus, the fall of the temple in AD 70, or Christ’s return
A vision about a historical “anointed one” (likely Onias III) cut off with no helper A description of Jesus’s crucifixion (never cited this way anywhere in the New Testament)
Built on Daniel’s prayer of corporate, merit-free confession and dependence on God’s covenant love An excuse to calculate dates or set timelines for future events

“The hope is not electing more leaders, or passing more laws, or outlawing more people, or kicking more people out of a nation. The hope is the return of Jesus. The hope is the kingdom of God — and that’s what we need to share with people.”