1 Prophecies about the Coming Messiah Robert C. Newman One of ...

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(25) Know therefore and understand that from the going forth of the word to restore andbuild Jerusalem to the coming of an anointed one, a prince, there shall be seven weeks.Then for sixty-two weeks, it shall be built again with squares and moat, but in a troubledtime. (26) And after the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be cut off, and shall havenothing....This latter translation follows the old Masoretic punctuation of the Hebrew Bible, where adivision in the sense is made between the seven weeks and the sixty-two weeks. 7 It does explainthe peculiar combination of 7 and 62 instead of their sum 69.In spite of these facts, the Masoretic punctuation may not date back before the ninth or tenthcentury AD, 8 and the parallelism of the passage favors the former translation. In the Hebrew, thephrase rendered Arestore and rebuild@ consists of the same pair of verbs as are translated Abuiltagain@ later in the verse. Likewise the word AMessiah/Anointed One@ is repeated. Thisparallelism may be sketched as follows:From the going forth of the word to build again JerusalemTo Messiah the Prince shall be 7 weeks and 62 weeks.Plaza and moat shall be built again...And after 62 weeks Messiah shall be cut off...This parallelism suggests that the passage is structured as a summary statement of two lines inwhich two events and two time-periods are mentioned, followed by several lines in which thedetails of each event are spelled out in turn. Thus we should expect one Messiah or anointedone, whose cutting off occurs after 69 weeks from the starting point. Perhaps the first sevenweeks, if one may hazard a guess, involve the rebuilding of the city. 9The usual procedure in interpreting this passage is to assume that the prophecy intends by theword >seven= or >week= a period of seven years, and then to proceed to make the calculationusing units of years. With the most likely starting point (the one we shall suggest below), thishas the anointed one cut off about 39 AD. As a result, most conservatives have opted for anearlier starting point or suggested that the years are actually >prophetic years= of only 360 days.None of this is necessary.7. See, for example, K. Elliger and W. Rudolph, Biblica Hebraica Stuttgartensia editio minor(Stuttgart: Deutsche Biblegesellschaft, 1984), p. 1404.8. Ernst Wurtwein, The Text of the Old Testament (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), p. 19.9. As suggested in the Berkeley Version. The Smith-Goodspeed and the New English Bibleimply such an interpretation by translating verse 25b: Afor sixty-two weeks it shall stay rebuilt /remain restored,@ but these translations of the verb shub find no warrant in the lexicons andmerely show the problem of adopting the Masoretic punctuation.4
The unit of measurement used here in Daniel is the >week= or >seven,= not the year. Thecontext, and possibly the unusual plural used for this word here, suggests that the author intendsus to understand the seven-year sabbatical land-use cycle rather than the seven-day week. 10 Thebiblical commands regarding this sabbatical cycle are given in Exodus 23:10-11 and Leviticus25:3-7, 18-22. The Exodus passage reads: AFor six years you are to sow your fields and harvestyour crops, but during the seventh year let the land lie unplowed and unused.@It is interesting that our context in Daniel 9 seems to point to this usage as well. Daniel has beenconcerned about the desolation of Jerusalem and the fact that the Israelites are scattered fromtheir land. He has just learned Afrom books@ that this desolation will last seventy years. Theprophecy of Jeremiah supplies the time-element for this scattering and desolation (Jer 25:11-12;29:10), but it appears that Lev 26:32-35 supplies the rationale: If Israel did not keep thesabbatical-year regulation, God would expel them from the land until the land could Aenjoy itssabbaths.@ 11Various suggestions have been made for the starting point of these seventy >sevens=: (1) God=sword at the fall of Jerusalem (586 BC; Jer 25:11-12; 29:10); (2) Cyrus= word in allowing thecaptives to return to Jerusalem (537 BC; 2 Chron 36:23; Ezra 1:2); (3) Artaxerxes= commissionto Ezra (458 BC; Ezra 4:11-12, 23); (4) Artaxerxes= commission to Nehemiah (445 BC; Neh2:1-6). 12 Of these four, only the last actually issued in the rebuilding of the city wall. In thusmaking Jerusalem fortified again, it became in ancient parlance once more a city and no longer avillage. We thus follow this fourth alternative, and Neh 2:1 dates Artaxerxes= sending Nehemiahto Jerusalem to the twentieth year of Artaxerxes 1, namely 445 BC. 13 So this is our startingpoint.Now we must make the calculation forward from 445 BC. But unlike many others, we shall usethe actual sabbatical cycles as units of measurement rather than just adding 7 x 69 years to thestarting point, since this follows the actual usage in Daniel. Recent work by Ben Zion10. Francis Brown, S. R. Driver and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the OldTestament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966): 988-989; Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, TheHebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994-2000), 4:1383-1384.11. The author of 2 Chron 36:21 explicitly applies this reasoning to explain the length of theBabylonian captivity.12. See J. Barton Payne, Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy (New York: Harper and Row, 1973),pp. 383-386.13. Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1964), section 336.5
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