Biblion Bible Commentary
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Seventy Years in the Books
Daniel 9:1-3
1 In the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus, of the offspring of the Medes, who was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans— · WEB
The greatest prophecy in the book begins with an old man reading Scripture and doing arithmetic — and then praying about what he found.
In the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus, of the offspring of the Medes, who was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans Daniel 9:1.
Babylon has fallen. The date puts this in the first year of the new empire — the year Cyrus would issue the decree sending exiles home 2 Chronicles 36:22–23 Ezra 1:1 — and it is no accident that Daniel's calculations reached their term in the same season the political door opened. He was watching both.
I, Daniel, understood by the books the number of the years about which Yahweh's word came to Jeremiah the prophet for the accomplishing of the desolations of Jerusalem, even seventy years Daniel 9:2.
This is the most consequential act of Bible study in the Old Testament, and it is entirely ordinary. Daniel had received visions directly from heaven; here he is reading someone else's writings — the books, a collection already recognized as Scripture in his lifetime — and counting. Jeremiah had twice fixed the term: seventy years for Babylon, and then the return Jeremiah 25:11–12 Jeremiah 29:10. Daniel takes the number as a real quantity of years, applies it to a datable starting point, and concludes that the period is nearly spent. Prophecy in this book is treated as something to be read carefully and reckoned with arithmetically, not merely admired.
And there was a second, unfinished sum on his desk. The vision of the ram and goat had ended with a number nobody explained — 2,300 evenings and mornings, and a sanctuary to be set right — and with a prophet who did not understand it Daniel 8:14 Daniel 8:27. A man who has just watched one prophetic period run out on schedule is in the best possible frame of mind to ask about the other one, and the angel who arrives will begin exactly there Daniel 9:23.
I set my face to the Lord God, to seek by prayer and petitions, with fasting and sackcloth and ashes Daniel 9:3.
His response to a promise about to be fulfilled is not to wait for it but to pray for it. That is worth pausing on: he had God's word on the outcome, and it moved him to intercession rather than to passivity — the promise was the reason to ask, not a reason to stop asking Ezekiel 36:37 Luke 18:7–8. The posture is the full ancient vocabulary of grief and repentance, adopted by a man whose own record was clean enough that his enemies could find nothing in it Daniel 6:4. He fasts and sits in ashes for other people's sins.
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