Page 263 - Daniel

to Daniel God’s purposes for Israel, culminating in Christ’s second
coming to establish His kingdom on the earth.

THE REVELATION OF THE SEVENTY WEEKS OF ISRAEL (9:24)

9:24 “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.”

The concluding four verses of Daniel 9 contain one of the most
important prophecies of the Old Testament. Although many divergent
interpretations have been advanced to explain this prophecy, they may

first be divided into two major divisions, namely, the Christological and
the non-Christo-logical views.

The non-Christological approach may be subdivided into the liberal
critical view and the conservative amillennial view. Liberal critics,
assuming that Daniel is a forgery, find in this chapter that the pseudo-
Daniel confused the seventy years of Israel’s captivity with the seventy
weeks of Gabriel’s vision. As Montgomery summarizes the matter in the
introduction to chapter 9, “Dan., having learned from the Sacred Books
of Jer.’s prophecy of the doom of seventy years’ desolation for the Holy

City, a term that was now naturally drawing to an end (1.2), sets himself
to pray for the forgiveness of his people’s sin and the promised
deliverance (3–19). The angel Gabriel appears to him (20–21), and
interprets the years as year-weeks, with detail of the distant future and
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of the crowning epoch of the divine purpose (22–27).” For
Montgomery, this is not prophecy at all but merely presented by the

pseudo-Daniel as if it were. Whatever fulfillment there is, it is a
fulfillment in history largely accomplished in the life and persecutions of
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Antiochus Epiphanes. In his summary, Montgomery states,

The history of the exegesis of the 70 Weeks is the Dismal Swamp of O.
T. criticism. The difficulties that beset any “rationalistic” treatment of
the figures are great enough, but the critics on this side of the fence do
not agree among themselves; but the trackless wilderness of