What is Daniel’s 70 weeks prophecy?

Question 10075.

Daniel’s 70 weeks prophecy is, to my mind, the single most remarkable predictive passage in the Old Testament. In four verses Gabriel gives Daniel a measured period of 490 years for the nation of Israel, sets out what it will accomplish, divides it into three unequal portions, and pins its starting point to a datable royal decree.

It also happens to be the passage that decides a great deal else. How you read the 70 weeks will largely determine how you read Matthew 24, 2 Thessalonians 2 and the whole middle section of Revelation. So it deserves careful handling rather than a chart and a confident manner.

The setting: a man praying over a book

Daniel is an old man in Babylon, and he has been reading. “I, Daniel, perceived in the books the number of years that, according to the word of the Lord to Jeremiah the prophet, must pass before the end of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years” (Daniel 9:2).

Having worked out that the seventy years of exile are nearly up, he does not sit back and wait. He prays one of the great confessions of Scripture, identifying himself with his people’s sin, pleading God’s mercy rather than Israel’s merit.

While he is still speaking, Gabriel arrives, saying that at the beginning of Daniel’s pleas a word went out, and that he has come to give him insight and understanding. The answer to a prayer about seventy years is a revelation about 70 weeks.

I find that pattern instructive. Daniel asked about the end of an exile and was given the outline of the next five centuries and beyond. God frequently answers our smaller question by enlarging it.

It is worth noticing that Gabriel calls Daniel “greatly loved.” The man who receives the most precise prophetic timetable in the Old Testament receives it as an act of affection rather than as a reward for cleverness, which is a healthy thing to remember before opening any chart.

Weeks of years, not weeks of days

The Hebrew word is shabua, a seven or a heptad. It is used of a period of seven of something, and the context supplies the unit. Here the unit is years, and every serious commentator agrees, whatever they make of the rest.

The reason is straightforward. Daniel has just been meditating on seventy years of exile. Those seventy years, as 2 Chronicles 36:21 explains, corresponded to the sabbath years the land had not been given for 490 years. Sevens of years are the currency of the whole discussion.

So 70 weeks means seventy sevens of years, which is 490 years. If it meant weeks of days the period would be under a decade and a half, and nothing in the passage would fit.

This is the first place where careful reading matters. The 70 weeks are not a vague symbol of completeness. They are a measured quantity, and the passage proceeds to divide them precisely.

What the 70 weeks are for

Gabriel states six objectives: “Seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place” (Daniel 9:24).

Note first who the period concerns: “your people and your holy city.” Daniel’s people are Israel and his city is Jerusalem. The 70 weeks are not a prophecy about the Church, and reading them as one creates every difficulty this passage has ever generated.

Three of the six objectives deal with sin and three with what replaces it. Atonement for iniquity was accomplished at the cross. Everlasting righteousness brought in, prophecy sealed up as fulfilled, and a most holy place anointed have not yet been completed in any sense the words will bear.

That gap between what has happened and what has not is the first hint that the 490 years are not yet finished. Something remains outstanding, and Gabriel goes on to explain what.

Seven, sixty-two and one

The 70 weeks are divided unevenly. “From the going out of the word to restore and build 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 troubled time” (Daniel 9:25).

Seven sevens is forty-nine years, which fits the period of rebuilding under Ezra and Nehemiah with its opposition, its half-built walls and its trowel in one hand and sword in the other. Sixty-two sevens is 434 years more, bringing the total to sixty-nine sevens or 483 years.

Then verse 26 places two events after the sixty-ninth week: “an anointed one shall be cut off and shall have nothing,” and “the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary.”

Both of those are stated as occurring after the sixty-nine, and neither is placed inside the seventieth. That small grammatical detail carries an enormous amount of weight, and I will come back to it.

Counting from the decree

Four decrees relating to Jerusalem are recorded in the Old Testament. Cyrus in 538 BC and Darius later both concern the temple rather than the city. Artaxerxes issues one to Ezra in 458 BC concerning temple worship and civil administration.

The fourth is the one that matches Gabriel’s wording about restoring and building the city. Nehemiah asks the king to send him “to the city of my fathers’ graves, that I may rebuild it,” and receives letters and timber for gates and walls. Nehemiah 2:1 dates it to the month Nisan in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes, which is 445 BC.

Working with prophetic years of 360 days, as Scripture does when it equates forty-two months, 1,260 days and three and a half years, 483 years comes to 173,880 days. Sir Robert Anderson made that calculation famous in the nineteenth century and Harold Hoehner refined it in the twentieth.

On that reckoning the sixty-nine sevens of the 70 weeks run out within days of the moment Jesus rode into Jerusalem and was publicly acclaimed as the Son of David. Whether one accepts the calculation to the exact afternoon or allows a margin for calendar questions, the fit is astonishing.

And on that same day Jesus wept over the city and said, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” He then rebuked the city for not knowing “the time of your visitation.” A visitation has a date.

I hold the calculation with confidence but not with dogmatism. Ancient calendars are complicated, the accession year conventions of Persian kings are debated, and honest scholars land on slightly different years. What no adjustment can shift is that the 70 weeks place the coming and cutting off of the Messiah in the first century, exactly where He appeared.

The Anointed One cut off

Verse 26 says the anointed one is “cut off and shall have nothing.” The verb carries the sense of a violent excision, used elsewhere of a covenant-breaker being cut off from his people. It is a description of execution, written five centuries before crucifixion arrived in Judea.

“And shall have nothing” is arresting. He does not receive the kingdom at that point. There is no throne, no city delivered, no nation restored to Him. He is put to death having gained, in the terms of the prophecy, precisely nothing for Himself.

Isaiah 53 says the same thing from a different angle: cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of God’s people. The 70 weeks prophecy supplies the timing; Isaiah supplies the meaning.

Then the city and the sanctuary are destroyed by “the people of the prince who is to come.” Titus and the Roman legions did that in AD 70, four decades later. Notice that it is the people of the coming prince who destroy, not the prince himself, which points to a ruler who arises later out of that same stream.

Why there must be a gap

This is where interpretations divide, so let me set out the reasons plainly. First, the events of verse 26 are located after the sixty-ninth week and are not assigned to the seventieth. The destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 came thirty-seven years after the crucifixion, which is already a gap on any reading.

Second, the six objectives of verse 24 are not complete. Everlasting righteousness has not been brought in on the earth, and no most holy place has been anointed since. If the 70 weeks finished in the first century, Gabriel’s stated purposes failed, which is unthinkable.

Third, the events of verse 27 have no plausible first-century fulfilment. No ruler made a seven-year covenant with Israel and broke it after three and a half years, and no such figure met the described end, with desolation poured out on the desolator.

Fourth, and to my mind decisively, Jesus placed the abomination of desolation in the future when He spoke in Matthew 24 and tied it to His own visible return. If Daniel’s final week had already run, He could not have done so.

Gaps of this kind are common in prophecy. Isaiah 61 runs the year of the Lord’s favour and the day of vengeance together in one sentence, and Jesus stopped reading in the middle of it at Nazareth, closed the book and said that day the Scripture was fulfilled. Two thousand years now sit in that comma.

The seventieth week

Verse 27 describes it: “And he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator” (Daniel 9:27).

The “he” is the prince who is to come from the previous verse, and the seven-year agreement he makes with Israel is what begins the final week of the 70 weeks. Halfway through, he breaks it, stops the sacrificial system and installs an abomination.

This gives us the three and a half year periods that appear repeatedly in Revelation as forty-two months and 1,260 days. It also requires a functioning sanctuary, which is why I expect a temple to be rebuilt, as I explain in my answer on whether the temple will be rebuilt.

Jeremiah calls this period “a time of distress for Jacob,” and Jesus called it great tribulation such as has never been. The 70 weeks were decreed about Daniel’s people, and the final seven of them is Israel’s darkest and then finest hour.

It ends with the desolator judged and the six objectives fulfilled. Everlasting righteousness arrives with the King who brings it.

Other readings and why I decline them

Critical scholarship generally dates the book of Daniel to the second century BC and reads the whole thing as a description of Antiochus Epiphanes written after the fact. That solves the problem of predictive prophecy by denying that any occurred, and it stumbles over the numbers, which do not fit Antiochus at all.

A more conservative alternative runs all 70 weeks consecutively to the first century, taking the seventieth week as the ministry of Jesus and the years following, with the covenant being the new covenant. The difficulty is that Jesus ministered for around three and a half years, not seven, and that the destruction described belongs to AD 70.

A symbolic reading treats the numbers as expressing completeness without measuring anything. But the passage divides its numbers into seven, sixty-two and one, which is a strange thing to do with a symbol, and the sixty-nine demonstrably terminated where Gabriel said they would.

I hold the futurist reading because it takes the arithmetic seriously and because Jesus Himself read the passage that way. That is a rather strong pair of arguments.

Why the 70 weeks matter

They vindicate a literal method of reading prophecy. Sixty-nine sevens were fulfilled literally, to a nation, in a city, ending in an execution. Anyone who accepts that and then spiritualises the seventieth is changing hermeneutical horses in midstream.

They also keep Israel and the Church distinct. The 70 weeks concern Daniel’s people and Daniel’s city. The present age, in which Jew and Gentile are one body, is the mystery Paul says was hidden in former generations, and it sits in the interval.

And they give the tribulation its length and its structure. Seven years, divided in half by a decisive act of blasphemy, is the framework on which Revelation hangs. Without Daniel 9, Revelation is a picture book with no timetable.

What they never provide is a date for the return of Jesus. The clock stopped, and no one but the Father knows when it restarts. My answer on date-setting explains why I refuse every attempt to compute one.

They also answer a question people often ask about the fairness of prophecy. God did not leave Israel guessing about when to expect the Messiah. He gave a decree, a count and a terminus, and Jesus held the nation responsible for not knowing the time of its visitation. The information was there to be read.

So, now what?

Read Daniel 9 for yourself, slowly, with a pencil. Notice the prayer before the prophecy, because Gabriel came in answer to a man who was mourning over his people’s sin rather than calculating a schedule. That order matters.

Then let the fulfilled portion do its work on your confidence. If God kept 483 years of that promise to the day, the remaining seven are not in doubt, and neither is anything else He has told you. What would change in your week if you actually believed His timing was that exact?

“Seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place.”

Daniel 9:24, ESV

For Further Study

For those who want to go further, Charles Ryrie treats the passage clearly in his Basic Theology and in his notes on Daniel, and J. Dwight Pentecost gives it extended attention in Things to Come, which remains the standard dispensational treatment of prophetic structure. John Walvoord’s commentary on Daniel works through the chronological questions with care, and Lewis Sperry Chafer sets the prophecy in its wider theological frame in his Systematic Theology. Arnold Fruchtenbaum handles the Jewish background helpfully in The Footsteps of the Messiah, and Millard Erickson, writing from a different vantage point in his Christian Theology, is worth reading for a fair statement of the alternatives. Harold Hoehner’s Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ remains the most rigorous defence of the calculation itself.