Part3
In Daniel we have the “accession year” and then one, two, three, etc. in Jeremiah we have one, two, three, four, etc. Instead of having a contraction between Daniel and Jeremiah what we actually have is an agreement.
The fact that the Babylonians counted their kings years differently was discovered not that long ago by Dr. E. Thiel, the great chronologist of the Hebrews, who wrote a book called “The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings” where if you are interested you will find a lot of useful information about the Kings.
Daniel 9: 1
Daniel 9 opens with the Jewish people under the LordÂ’s discipline, scattered among the nations and living in captivity in the land of Babylon. In 606 BCE king Nebuchadnezzar overran the land of Israel and took the city of Jerusalem. He then took some of the Jewish people into captivity in Babylon. So in Daniel 9 we have Daniel living in Babylon among the Jewish people and something dramatic has happened. Overnight the Medes and the Persians have overthrown the Babylonian Empire, which had controlled the Jewish people for sixty years. The man who overthrew the Babylonian Empire was the King of the Medo/Persian Empire a man called Cyrus the Great. Cyrus had an uncle called Darius the Mede and we find Biblical reference to him in
Daniel 5: 31
So Daniel 9: 1 tells us that it is DariusÂ’ first year of rulership and the date, which is very important to us, is 537 BCE (a useful source for checking this date and other historical details of the Empires of Babylon and of the Medes and Persians is the Cambridge Ancient History). At this time Daniel was a fairly old man, a highly placed political leader in Babylon and he turns to the book of Jeremiah and starts reading through his prophecies. Jeremiah lived before the Jewish people went into captivity in Babylon. Year after year Jeremiah preached to the Jewish people that if they continued in their ways, God would remove them from the land. When it occurred Jeremiah wrote about the history of King Nebuchadnezzar taking the land, and taking over Jerusalem. But he did not stop there, and in a remarkable passage in
Jeremiah 29: 1-15
Jeremiah gives the people of Israel hope, assuring them that the captivity will only last seventy years.
Daniel 9: 2
Daniel is reading Jeremiah and he knows the captivity will last seventy years and the first phase of the exile began in 606 BCE. If you add seventy years to 606 BCE you come to 536 BCE, so Daniel knows that if the 70 years began at the first phase of exile then IsraelÂ’s captivity will end in 536. Daniel started praying and
Daniel 9: 3-20
Is DanielÂ’s prayer God gives the answer in
Daniel 9: 21-23
The angel or archangel Gabriel, the same archangel who is going to announce the birth of the Messiah to Miriam (Mary), is going to give the GodÂ’s answer to DanielÂ’s prayer. The answer is
Daniel 9: 24-28
Just four verses and we will look at them in detail.
Daniel 9: 24
Notice first of all, the seventy weeks are determined on DanielÂ’s people the Jewish people and the city of Jerusalem. We have a problem because we all know what a week is it starts on Sunday and runs for the next seven days. So we read into the Scripture what we already know that seventy weeks are determined, but if we take this Scripture as literally seventy weeks, we will run into an awful lot of problems. The Hebrew word week is the word Shavua and it means seven it does not mean days, weeks, months, or years, it is the word for seven. Daniel 9: 24 is saying seventy times seven are determined on the Jewish people and the city of Jerusalem and there is no indication that it is days, weeks, months, years or anything else. There is another place in Daniel where the word Shavua is mentioned and this time it gives a clear time period to it.
Daniel 10: 2-3
In that passage the word Shavua is mentioned but it literally says in the Hebrew Shavua of days so here in this passage it is three seven of days. It is obvious it is not months or years, as no one could fast for twenty-one months let alone twenty-one years. In Daniel 9: 24 there is no qualification on the word Shavua.
Remember Daniel is standing in Babylon in 537 BCE, he is reading Jeremiah who said the captivity would last seventy years, and Daniel knows if you add seventy to 606 BCE the year the first phase of captivity began, you come to 536 BCE so Daniel knows in the next year or so the captivity may be over.
There are three points in GodÂ’s plan that we need to see;
To finish the transgression. In other words the Jewish people have sinned against God some time in the next year the judgement is over.
To make an end of sin, or in other words God is going to count them no more.
To make reconciliation for iniquity.
These three have to do with sin and it is both a lovely answer to DanielÂ’s prayer because the three Hebrew words here in relation to sin are the three words Daniel used when confessing the sin of the nation.
Daniel 9: 5
GodÂ’s answer to Daniel is that in seventy sevens it is all finished.
Thus it seems that there may have been an immediate application of the seventy sevens, namely the end of the exile in Babylon (the time between DanielÂ’s prayer and the first stage of the return from exile). Daniel may have been able to give immediate hope to his people, knowing that a decree would be given to herald the end of the exile after 70 years, and then after just over a year (reckoning the weeks literally) Jerusalem would be rebuilt. Yet, when it happened, the beginning of the return did not contain all of the elements of the 70 weeks, particularly the coming of the Messiah, whom we now know to be Jesus (Yeshua) and also the coming of the Abomination of Desolation. In addition, we now know that more about the history of the return at the time of Ezra and Nehemiah and so can add to the interpretation that Daniel might have imagined. In further studies we will look at the possible implication for other interpretations, which pointed more to the distant future.