Daniel 9:24 It is ordained that this people of thine, that holy city of thine, should wait seventy weeks before guilt is done away, sin ended, wrong righted; before God’s everlasting favour is restored, and the visions and the prophecies come true, and he who is all holiness receives his anointing.
25 Be assured of this, and mark it well; a period of seven weeks must go by, and another period of sixty-two weeks, between the order to rebuild Jerusalem and the coming of the Christ to be your leader. Street and wall will be built again, though in a time of distress;
26 and then sixty-two weeks must pass before the Christ is done to death; the people will disown him and have none of him. Then the army of an invading leader will destroy both city and sanctuary, so that his taking away will mean utter destruction; only a ruin is to be left when that war is ended.
27 High covenant he shall make, before another week is done, and with folks a many; but when that week has run half its course, offering and burnt-sacrifice shall be none; in the temple all shall be defilement and desolation, and until all is over, all is fulfilled, that desolation shall continue.✻
25 Be assured of this, and mark it well; a period of seven weeks must go by, and another period of sixty-two weeks, between the order to rebuild Jerusalem and the coming of the Christ to be your leader. Street and wall will be built again, though in a time of distress;
26 and then sixty-two weeks must pass before the Christ is done to death; the people will disown him and have none of him. Then the army of an invading leader will destroy both city and sanctuary, so that his taking away will mean utter destruction; only a ruin is to be left when that war is ended.
27 High covenant he shall make, before another week is done, and with folks a many; but when that week has run half its course, offering and burnt-sacrifice shall be none; in the temple all shall be defilement and desolation, and until all is over, all is fulfilled, that desolation shall continue.✻
The traditional account given of verses 24-27 is, that Daniel interprets the seventy years of Israel’s captivity as seventy weeks of years, and that the periods called ‘weeks’ are periods of forty-nine years, four hundred and thirty-four years, and seven years respectively, four hundred and ninety in all. The order to rebuild Jerusalem is, quite naturally, identified with that given in II Esd. 2, and dated b.c. 445. This would explain the preoccupation with prophecies about ‘the End’ which characterizes the outlook of our Lord’s contemporaries; Daniel’s prophecy was to fall due within the course of that century. It must be admitted, however, that widely different views have been held about the application of the prophecy in detail. Modern commentators, who understand the whole passage as a reference to Antiochus Epiphanes, and the profanation of the Temple in b.c. 167, are driven to very unconvincing explanations of the time-periods involved. Verse 27 is very obscure, and the text seems to have suffered in transmission. ‘All shall be defilement and desolation’; literally, ‘there shall be abomination of desolation’, cf. Mt. 24.15.