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 Lords 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 Darius 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
Israels captivity will end in 536. Daniel started praying
and
Daniel 9: 3-20
Is Daniels 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 Gods answer to Daniels 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 Daniels
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 Gods 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
Daniels 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
Gods 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 Daniels 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.