Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Daniel · About this commentary
Lord, Hear; Lord, Forgive
Daniel 9:16-19
16 Lord, according to all your righteousness, please let your anger and your wrath be turned away from your city Jerusalem, your holy mountain; because for our sins and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and your people have become a reproach to all who are around us. · WEB
The petition asks nothing for the man praying, rests everything on God's own name, and ends in short broken imperatives.
Lord, according to all your righteousness, please let your anger and your wrath be turned away from your city Jerusalem, your holy mountain Daniel 9:16.
The first request, and the grounds are extraordinary: according to all your righteousness. One might expect mercy to be invoked against righteousness — spare us despite your justice. Daniel appeals to the righteousness itself, because the covenant God had bound himself to restore a repentant people, and to do so is now the just thing Leviticus 26:40–42 1 John 1:9. And notice the possessives, which run through the whole petition: your city, your holy mountain, your sanctuary, your people. He is not asking God to protect Daniel's interests.
Now therefore, our God, listen to the prayer of your servant and to his petitions, and cause your face to shine on your sanctuary that is desolate, for the Lord's sake Daniel 9:17.
Your sanctuary that is desolate — and this is where the prayer touches the vision that had left him ill. Chapter eight had shown a sanctuary trampled and its ministry taken away, with a promise that it would be set right Daniel 8:11–14; Daniel is praying about a sanctuary in ruins on a hill in Judea, and the answer he receives will speak of an anointing, a covenant, and a sacrifice caused to cease Daniel 9:24–27. The two are joined, and the joint is this prayer.
Cause your face to shine is the priestly blessing turned into a request Numbers 6:25 Psalms 80:3, and for the Lord's sake states the motive the whole petition rests on.
For we do not present our petitions before you for our righteousness, but for your great mercies' sake Daniel 9:18.
There is the sentence that governs everything. The most upright man in the book explicitly disclaims his own righteousness as a basis for being heard. He had every human credential — seventy years of faithfulness, an unblemished record, a den of lions behind him — and he sets none of it on the table. What he brings instead is your great mercies. This is the entire logic of how anyone comes to God, stated centuries before it was argued at length Titus 3:5 Ephesians 2:8–9 Luke 18:13, and it is stated by the one person in the narrative who might have been forgiven for trying the other approach.
Lord, hear. Lord, forgive. Lord, listen and do. Don't defer, for your own sake, my God, because your city and your people are called by your name Daniel 9:19.
The long, ordered prayer breaks at the end into fragments — four short imperatives, the address repeated three times, and no more sentences. This is what praying sounds like when a man has stopped composing. And the reasons given are still not his own: for your own sake, because the city and the people are called by your name. The last argument he can find is that God's reputation is bound up with a ruined city, which is the argument Moses used and God honored Exodus 32:12 Numbers 14:15–16 Ezekiel 36:22–23.
And the answer had already left heaven before the prayer was finished Daniel 9:23.
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