Most of us who have studied end time prophecies are very familiar with the seventy ‘sevens’ of Daniel 9. It is one of the ‘go-to’ chapters in the Bible that scholars in the modern era use to determine end time events. Most popular interpretations teach that this prophecy, particularly the 70th week, is where we get the scriptural basis for the seven year Great Tribulation.
But is that really what the 70 sevens are about?
When reading anything in Scripture it's important to understand, ‘a text without a context is a pretext.’ It is also vital to make a serious attempt to understand the original audience and how they would have understood it.
The context
Chapter 9 of Daniel begins with him praying. He had been studying the writings of Jeremiah (25:11-12; 29:10) and understands that the exile was to last for 70 years. At the time of Daniel's prophecy, those years are coming to an end.
Daniel 9:20-22
“While I was speaking and praying, confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel and making my request to the Lord my God for his holy hill
while I was still in prayer, Gabriel, the man I had seen in the earlier vision, came to me in swift flight about the time of the evening sacrifice.
He instructed me and said to me, ‘Daniel, I have now come to give you insight and understanding.’ “
The first thing to understand is that this prophecy is coming to Daniel in response to his prayer. Daniel hasn't asked about the end times. He is petitioning about the Jewish people and the city of Jerusalem and the temple. So this answer Gabriel delivers is a specific response to Daniel’s prayer. Continuing in verse 23:
“As soon as you began to pray, a word went out, which I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed. Therefore, consider the word and understand the vision: “Seventy ‘sevens’ are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the Most Holy Place. Know and understand this: From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’ It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble. After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed. He will confirm a covenant with many for one ‘seven.’ In the middle of the ‘seven’ he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And at the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him. ”
Daniel referenced Jeremiah 29:10 at the beginning of the chapter and knew that the captivity was to last 70 years.
Jeremiah 29:10
“This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place.”
The seventy years are only mentioned one time in Jeremiah in that one verse. Undoubtedly he had read all of Jeremiah or at least large portions of it. So it is reasonable to assume that he had also read somewhat farther in Chapter 31:31-34.
“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
“when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
and with the people of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant
I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them, ” declares the Lord.
“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.
No longer will they teach their neighbor,
or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
and will remember their sins no more.”
With that background, knowing that a new covenant was coming, Daniel would likely have understood what he records in 9:24 to be the completion and fulfillment of the Old Covenant:
“Seventy ‘sevens’ are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the Most Holy Place.”
So Daniel was praying, confessing the national sins of the Jewish people and asking God to restore the nation and Gabriel came to tell Daniel the timeline left for the Jewish nation. Essentially there was another 490 years before God was going to bring his entire plan of redemption to completion.
Problems in counting.
There are a few difficulties in understanding the seventy ‘sevens.’ One of them is determining when to start counting. Jeremiah said the exile would be seventy years. In reality, Jerusalem fell in 586 BC to the Babylonians. Cyrus decreed that the Jews could return in 539 BC. That was only 47 years. But if we start counting from when Babylon first came against Jerusalem sometime around 608 BC we get closer to 70 years. Also from 539 BC, until the time of Christ is significantly more than 490 years.
But again, maybe that isn't where we should start counting. Verse 25 of chapter 9 doesn't say from the time the Jews can return. It says,
“From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild the city.”
Cyrus's decree was to build a temple and allow the Jews to return.” The verbiage in Daniel 9 doesn't say anything about the temple, nor does it say ‘a decree.’ It simply says ‘From the time the word goes out…’ Crucial to the restoration was building the wall. That didn't happen until the time of Nehemiah nearly a century later. If that is the case, we should start counting from the time of Ezra and Nehemiah which would have been around 450 BC. 70 ‘sevens’ would take us to around 40 AD. If we subtract one ‘seven’ we arrive at 33 AD. That is approximately the time of Christ's ministry.
Some insight is seen in 2 Chronicles 36:21:
“The land enjoyed its sabbath rests; all the time of its desolation it rested, until the seventy years were completed in fulfillment of the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah.”
From the time of the kingdom until the Babylonians took Jerusalem was approximately 400-450 years. If the land sabbaths had not been observed then seventy years would have been needed to fulfill that obligation. With the end of the exile the debt was paid. This adds up to roughly 490 years. Now in answer to Daniel's prayer, Gabriel is telling him that there is another 490 year period necessary to complete the Old Covenant and bring in the New.
Seven 'sevens' and sixtytwo 'sevens.'
One thing that is unclear in the vision is the distinction between the first group of sevens and the second group of sevens because it is not clearly explained in the vision. Some have opined that the first group, seven 'sevens which is fortynine years was the time it took to rebuild Jerusalem. This is very plausible but I think we can add that if we are to start counting from the time of Nehemiah, then fortynine years would take us to around 400bc. That is about the time Malachi laid down his quill. Part of this prophecy was to "to seal up vision and prophecy." That would be completed with the finishing of the Old Testament. Then would follow sixtytwo weeks, or 434 years of silence from the Holy Spirit. That is approximately the time from Malachi until John the Baptist.
From the time of Moses until Malachi there had not been a time period of more than about twenty years without some divine revelation from the Holy Spirit. Now there would be centuries with no word from the Holy Spirit.
The writer of the apocraphal book of 1 Maccabbees makes this statement in chapter 9 verse 27;
"So there was great distress in Israel, the worst since the time when prophets ceased to appear among them."
The Maccabeean rebellion occured around 165bc. So by this time nearly two and a half centuries had passed since the completion of the Old Testament. The absence of the prophets must have been acutely felt because it is significant that it was worthy of mention in this history.
So it would appear that Gabriel was telling Daniel that from the time the word went out, there would be fortynine years until the completion of the Old Testament and then another 434 years of silence until the Messiah would come.
The final ‘seven.’
Daniel 9:26-27
“After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed.
He will confirm a covenant with many for one ‘seven.’ In the middle of the ‘seven’ he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And at the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him.”
This is where it gets complicated and there are a number of possible interpretations for this. But there are some things we have to remember;
Verse 25 shows us the ‘Anointed one’ and the ‘ruler’ are one and the same. That can only mean Jesus.
The people of the ruler were the Jews. They rejected him for the most part.
Contemporary interpretations figure there is a time lapse and that the Great Tribulation is the final week. That is the sole reason the church believes that the Great Tribulation is a seven year period just before Christ returns. The problem is there is no indication that these weeks aren't to be understood as being consecutive.
Up until the early part of the nineteenth century there was no church teaching that believed that this final seven was about the end times. If you study both Matthew Henry's and John Gill's commentaries, they explain the seventieth week to end with the destruction of Jerusalem. The idea that there is a time lapse between week 69 and 70 didn't come about until the teachings of John Nelson Darby and C. I. Scofield.
This creates a serious problem because we have to ask ourselves, Was the church wrong for over eighteen hundred years and did God suddenly give us some new revelation? That would allow the possibility that the Canon of Scripture isn't closed. There isn't time to go into it here but upon investigation we see that dispensationalism, the pre-tribulation rapture and the seven year ‘Great Tribulation’ are the result of taking liberties with the texts. That, along with the ‘new revelations’ makes these interpretations completely impossible.
Here are some possible interpretations;
3.5 years later, Stephen becomes the first martyr which begins the persecution of Christians in Jerusalem and many Christians leave the city, thus ending the seventy weeks determined for the holy city. While the city of Jerusalem continued to survive for another 35 years or so, the end was unavoidable and the relationship with Rome steadily deteriorated until Titus finally destroyed the city and the temple in 70 AD.
The Abomination that Causes Desolation
The abomination that causes desolation causes a lot of confusion and I am convinced the reason for this is we assume that when the Bible speaks of it, it is referring to the same thing. But it happened in the middle of the 2nd century BC, when Antiochus Epiphenes, the Seleucid ruler placed a statue of Zeus in the temple and sacrificed a pig on the altar. It appeared to have happened when Emperor Caligula attempted to place a statue of himself in the temple. It is possible it will happen again. But that doesn't mean that this specific prophecy applies to a future abomination.
Also, some translations translate it as the ‘abomination that causes desolation,’ others, like the King James translate it as:
Daniel 9:27 KJV
“And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.”
This indicates more than one abomination. The fact that for the most part, the Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah and had made an idol out of the Mosaic law, was in itself an abomination and the disobedience of the Jews caused their desolation.
Here are some possible interpretations:
Around the time that Stephen was stoned, the emperor, Caligula attempted to place a statue of himself in the temple. Apparently he had succeeded in placing statues of himself in various synagogues but never succeeded in placing one in the temple.
Another interpretation is that once the persecution of the church began in earnest in Jerusalem and most Christians fled, it set the stage for the end of the city. Similar to the fall when God told Adam ‘on the day you eat the fruit you will die,’ Adam didn't die that day but death was now inevitable. This seems to be indicated by the sentence in verse 26:
“The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed.”
When the Jews rejected Jesus as their Messiah, they had pronounced the sentence on themselves, the end was inevitable even though it didn't come right away.
Matthew 27:25
“All the people answered, ‘His blood is on us and on our children!’ ”
In Matthew 24 Jesus predicted the end of Jerusalem.
“Do you see all these things?” he asked. “Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”
The writer of Hebrews also gives us an indication that it wouldn't end all at once.
Hebrews 8:13
“By calling this covenant ‘new,’ he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.”
At the time Hebrews was written, Jesus had established the New Covenant and allowed the Old Covenant to fade away. Once the temple was destroyed there was no way to continue the practices of the old system. The perfect sacrifice for the redemption of sin was accomplished through Jesus. There is no longer a need for priests, a temple or sacrifices. Jesus fulfilled all the Law.
Erroneous effects of dispensationalism.
Dispensational theology was never taught or believed until the time of Darby and Scofield. Without going into the complexities of the beliefs, this is where the idea that the rapture is going to whisk the church away and then God is going to renew the covenant with the Jews in some way, shape or form. The seventy weeks prophecy causes a problem because if you don't assume the time gap you have to conclude that God was done with the Old Covenant relationship with the Jews and Jerusalem and the Temple would be destroyed. That doesn't fit in with a dispensational view. But without taking such liberties with the text you have to conclude that with the end of the Old Covenant and the beginning of the New, the temple would be no more.
This does not mean that God doesn't still hold the Jews in a special regard. Paul indicates this in Romans 11. But we must understand that there is only one name given by which we must be saved. That goes for the Jews and the Gentiles. God has always spoken of a remnant and there exists a remnant today. There are a large number of ethnic Jews that have embraced Jesus as the Messiah and there will be more in the future.
Conclusion
“Do not go beyond what is written.” (1 Corinthians 4:6)
Understandably, there are things in this prophecy that are confusing and as such, the answers may be somewhat elusive. What we can discern is that Daniel was shown an approximate time table of the rest of the Old Covenant and God bringing in the New. As we read this we need to look at the context. Daniel was wanting to know when God was going to end the exile. Because he understood that the captivity was to last 70 years, when the angel said seventy ‘'sevens,’ it is very likely Daniel understood that to mean 490 years. There is nothing in the prophecy to indicate that there would be a gap between the 69th week and the 70th.
Contrast this prophecy with the 11th and 12th chapters which clearly are about the end of all things. At the end of the book, Daniel is confused and has questions. All he is told is to seal up the prophecy and go his way because the prophecy pertains to the distant future. There appears to be no such confusion on his part about the prophecy in chapter 9.
The problem arises when we get confused about some of the verbiage and we take liberties with the text in order to make it fit our understanding. When it says, “War will continue until the end,” it is easy to assume it means the end times. But the context is the end of the Old Covenant and ushering in of the New. Jerusalem fell in 70 AD, and the temple was destroyed so completely that there is no evidence the temple ever existed. There is nothing substantive to assume the prophecy in Daniel 9 has any meaning beyond the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of the Old Covenant.
