Biblion Bible Commentary
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While I Was Speaking in Prayer
Daniel 9:20-23
20 While I was speaking, praying, and confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and presenting my supplication before Yahweh my God for the holy mountain of my God— · WEB
Gabriel arrives at the hour of the evening sacrifice with an errand from the beginning of the prayer — and tells Daniel plainly which vision he has come to finish.
While I was speaking, praying, and confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel, and presenting my supplication before Yahweh my God for the holy mountain of my God Daniel 9:20.
The narrator lists exactly what he was doing when he was interrupted, and confessing my sin and the sin of my people keeps the two joined to the last — he never separated himself from them.
Yes, while I was speaking in prayer — the man Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the beginning, being caused to fly swiftly, touched me about the time of the evening offering Daniel 9:21.
The same messenger as before Daniel 8:16, sent back, and caused to fly swiftly — the haste is not his own initiative but something done to him. And the hour is exact: about the time of the evening offering. There was no offering. The altar was rubble and had been for decades; Daniel is keeping the sanctuary's clock in a city that has no sanctuary, praying at the hour the lamb would have been offered Exodus 29:39. Heaven arrives on that schedule, which is its own quiet answer about whether the ministry the horn had interrupted Daniel 8:11 was still recognized above.
Daniel, I have now come to give you wisdom and understanding Daniel 9:22.
The commission from the earlier chapter — make this man understand the vision Daniel 8:16 — is resumed in almost the same words. Nothing here is a new subject. Gabriel had left one thing unexplained, and he says so by returning to finish it.
At the beginning of your petitions the commandment went out, and I have come to tell you, for you are greatly beloved Daniel 9:23.
Three things in one verse, and each is worth its weight. At the beginning of your petitions — the answer was dispatched when he started, not when he finished; the whole long confession was prayed by a man for whom the reply was already in transit. The commandment went out: an order was issued, which means the answer is not Gabriel's improvisation but a decree from the throne. And you are greatly beloved, said to a man who had spent an hour cataloguing his people's guilt and disclaiming his own righteousness Daniel 9:18. He is told he is loved immediately after refusing to plead his merits — which is the order in which Scripture always puts those two things.
Therefore consider the matter and understand the vision.
And the last clause identifies the errand beyond argument. The vision — the one that had ended with a number nobody explained and a prophet who was ill for days Daniel 8:14 Daniel 8:27. Gabriel does not say I have a new prophecy for you; he says understand the vision, and then immediately gives a period of years cut off from a longer one, with a datable beginning Daniel 9:24–25. The seventy weeks are not a separate prophecy that happens to sit in the next chapter. They are the key handed back for the lock left open in chapter eight, and reading either one without the other loses what the angel came to supply.
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