My friend, Tim Bulkeley, has written a brief but punchy and accurate blog post about prophets and prediction. In my opinion, he hits the nail on the head. Read it! Consider it!
If you don’t, well… you’ve been warned!
You’ll find the blog post here:
Prophets and prediction: when conservatism and Bible clash | Sansblogue.
Recently I’ve been discussing with a few folk the various ways of ‘solving’ the puzzle of the Seventy Weeks in Daniel 9. While this conundrum is sometimes called the ‘dismal swamp’ of Old Testament studies, others confidently assert that the Seventy Weeks are a direct prediction of Jesus. The former throw their hands up and say no solution exists for calculating the Seventy Weeks. The latter, who propose the Seventy Weeks are a prediction about Jesus, have to contort chronology and make the text of Daniel 9 refer to things that the text simply does not talk about—the angelic response to Daniel’s prayer comes to bear no relation at all to Daniel’s original concern about the end of exile in accordance with Jeremiah’s prophecy.
Now, as a Christian, I believe the whole Bible gravitates around Jesus. So when I read the Old Testament, one of the questions I ask is how it relates to Jesus. However, I do not think that Daniel 9 relates to Jesus as a direct prediction. Daniel 9 is, rather, an interpretation of events in the second century BC that then form a precedent or typology by which we can understand the significance of Jesus.
I’ve written an article explaining my view that Daniel 9 is primarily about the Antiochene Persecution of 167–164 BC, and it can be found at the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures (click HERE). In the article I re-examine the assumptions that usually frame discussion of this text. However, I’ll try to summarise them here (the article contains the fuller discussion).
Those who propose that Daniel 9 is a prediction of Jesus usually do so on the basis of seeing Dan 9.25 as a reference to Nehemiah rebuilding Jerusalem in 445 BC. From this, it is calculated that the text claims that there is a single period of 7 + 62 weeks of years (69 x 7 = 483), that then take us to AD 39. Unfortunately, this gets us nowhere. No one ‘messianically significant’ died in AD 39. The death of Jesus occurred in AD 33 (we can confirm that Antipas’ marriage to Herodias, which John the Baptist denounced, occurred in AD 31, and Pilate’s governorship was terminated in AD 36). In order to make Dan 9 a prediction about Jesus, we must claim that the 7 weeks and 62 weeks must actually be just a single period of 69 weeks (but that raises the question of why divide it into 7-week and 62-week periods to begin with), as well as claim that the figures are inexact anyway, because Jesus actually dies at the end of the 68th week. This simply does not match the text of Dan 9. Furthermore, this move makes no sense of all the other references to abominations and desecrations in the middle of the last (70th) week of Daniel. It seems to me that this kind of approach is deliberately aiming to align the 70 weeks with Jesus’ death, and in the end it still falls short, making the text erroneous at worst, or inexact at best. Methodologically, it all seems rather backwards and ends up with a rather tenuous view of Scripture.
Furthermore, the text of Dan 9 does NOT refer to the building of walls. It refers to the building of street and conduit, which seems to imply residential areas. The attempt to locate the beginning of the 70 weeks in Nehemiah’s day must equate ‘street and conduit’ with city walls, but there is nothing in the text that requires this. In fact, the text just simply does not say that. Artaxerxes did not issue a decree to return and rebuild Jerusalem. Nehemiah did not build streets and conduits—he repaired city walls. Therefore what Nehemiah does is quite simply not what the text of Dan 9 is looking at. To return and rebuild street and conduit is a way of talking about ‘resettling’ an urban area. In any case, even if for argument’s sake we allow the decree to rebuild Jerusalem to be something issued by Artaxerxes in 445 BC and carried out by Nehemiah, we are still at odds with the text. If the first 7-week period is connected to the rebuilding, then Jerusalem is rebuilt at the end of the 7-week period in 396 BC (49 years after 445 BC). But Nehemiah is said to have repaired the walls of Jerusalem in 52 days in 444 BC. If this is not what the text is claiming, then the 7-week period becomes meaningless as a distinction within the larger 69-week period to which it contributes. It just doesn’t make sense and it is simply not dealing with what’s in the text of Dan 9.
Also, few people stop to examine the Hebrew syntax of the relevant verses in Dan 9, but rather most carry unstated assumptions into their analysis. However, the following points need to be underlined:
The two-anointed-ones solution seems more sensible, and a period of overlap between the 7 weeks and 62 weeks seems warranted (see MY ARTICLE for further explanation). The result is that we can calculate precisely what Daniel was talking about, and stop dealing with round-about approximations and gymnastic contortion of the text.
O// Head of Antiochus IV. R// ΘΕΟΥ ΕΠΙΦΑΝΟΥΣ ΝΙΚΗΦΟΡΟΥ Zeus Nikephoros enthroned, ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΑΝΤΙΟΧΟΥ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The first anointed one is the first leader of the post-exilic community (either Sheshbazzar, Zerubbabel, or Joshua) and comes as the end of the 7-week period. This makes the 7-week period (7 x 7 = 49) the 49 years between 587 and 538 BC—that is, from the destruction of the temple to Cyrus’ decree for return. The second anointed one is a reference to Onias III, the last legitimate Zadokite high priest. He was deprived of the legitimate High Priesthood in Jerusalem when his brother, Jason, bribed Antiochus IV Epiphanes to gain the position. Onias III was subsequently killed by the Seleucids in c.171 BC, forever changing the nature and succession of the priesthood within Judaism. This makes the 62 weeks (62 x 7 = 434) run from 605 BC (the year that the book of Daniel begins the exile of Daniel and his three friends in Dan 1.1) to c. 171 BC (the year of Onias III’s death) And then the last (70th) week is the 7 years from 171 to 164 BC, the second half of which (times, time, and half a time) was characterised by Antiochus IV’s persecution of Jews. The 7 weeks and the 62 weeks are overlapping, but they fit the concerns of the book of Daniel. Everything adds up precisely.
Diagram of the Seventy Weeks of Daniel 9
All other so-called solutions can only come up with ball-park approximations that do not match historical events with any precision, and even then they are reliant on things that the text of Daniel simply does not say. As a Christian, I understand the compulsion to make this chapter say something about Jesus, since Jesus lies at the heart of Scripture. However, Daniel 9 simply does not work as a direct prediction about Jesus. Rather, this passage is saying that exile needs to be redefined. Exile is not just about absence from the land for 70 years. Rather, exile is about being under foreign rule. Jeremiah’s 70 years are reinterpreted and recontextualised as weeks of years. Even if you have returned to the land (note the importance of תשוב in 9.25) and have rebuilt Jerusalem (again, note 9.25), you can still be practically in exile if a foreigner rules over you, especially if that foreigner is killing anointed ones who are the legitimate leaders of your community. A particular Christian message can then be extrapolated from this and applied to Jesus by Christians (eg. Jesus is the anointed one par excellence who is unjustly put to death in supreme atrocity), but the text itself is not a direct prediction about Jesus. If it is, the text seems rather erroneous. It should, rather, be taken as a foreshadowing or precedent in line with classic typology, just as the New Testament seems to do with Old Testament prophecies.
The text of Dan 9.25–27, therefore, reads as follows [with my comments in brackets]:
25 Know and understand from the issuing of the word to return and rebuild Jerusalem [in 538 BC]: Until an anointed leader there will be 7 weeks [the 49 years from the temple’s destruction in 587 BC to 538 BC]. In 62 weeks [from the beginning of Daniel’s exile in 605 BC to 171 BC] you will have returned with street and conduit rebuilt, but with the anguish of the times. 26 And after the 62 weeks [in 171 BC], an anointed one will be cut off and have nothing [an allusion to the assassination of Onias III, as well as the fact that his legitimate priesthood was taken from him and his son did not succeed him]. The people of the coming prince [that is, the Seleucids] will ruin the city and the sanctuary. His/Its end will come like a flood, but until the end there will be war [note the Maccabean War]. Atrocities have been determined. 27 He/It will exacerbate covenant for many for one week, and in the middle of the week he will stop sacrifice and offering, and on the outskirts will be atrocious abominations [all this referring to Antiochus IV’s repression of Torah and desecration of the temple in 167 BC], only until the completion and the determination gushes over the Atrocious One.
What the text is doing is reinterpreting the idea of exile which is tied to the number 70 through Jeremiah’s prophecy. But because the notion of exile is being redefined, so too the significance of 70 is redefined. This is an example of recontextualising an older prophetic message for a new situation — something that was occurring throughout the Second Temple Period, including in the New Testament.
With Meagre Powers 