Biblion Bible Commentary
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Seventy Weeks Are Decreed
Daniel 9:24
24 “Seventy weeks are decreed on your people and on your holy city, to finish disobedience, to make an end of sins, to make reconciliation for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most holy. · WEB
Seventy sevens are cut off for Daniel's people, and the six things they accomplish are the whole work of atonement.
Seventy weeks are decreed on your people and on your holy city Daniel 9:24.
Seventy sevens — the Hebrew says sevens, and the unit is years, as the chapter's own context requires: Daniel has been counting seventy years of desolation Daniel 9:2, the land's sabbaths were reckoned in seven-year cycles Leviticus 25:8, and the events the period contains cannot be crowded into 490 days. Four hundred and ninety years, then, decreed on your people and on your holy city — the two things Daniel had just been praying about Daniel 9:16–19. He asked about a ruined city and a scattered people, and he is answered with a term measured out for both.
And the verb translated decreed carries the sense of being cut off, marked out from something larger. That is the connection the angel came to make. He had been told to make Daniel understand a vision whose only unexplained element was a period of 2,300 Daniel 8:14 Daniel 8:26–27, and he opens by handing him a shorter period cut off from it — seventy sevens for Daniel's own people, sliced from the front of a longer line, with a starting point the next verse will date Daniel 9:25. One beginning, two lengths, and the shorter one is the calibration for the longer.
Then six things the seventy weeks are given to accomplish, and every one of them is the work of atonement rather than of politics.
To finish disobedience, to make an end of sins, to make reconciliation for iniquity — three phrases for one thing, the dealing with sin itself: transgression finished, sin brought to an end, and iniquity covered by a price paid. The middle verb is the sanctuary's own word for what blood does Leviticus 16:30 Leviticus 17:11, and no political restoration of a city could satisfy any of the three.
To bring in everlasting righteousness — not a repaired national standing but a righteousness that does not expire, from outside, brought in; the prophets had promised precisely this and located it in a person Isaiah 51:6 Isaiah 51:8 Jeremiah 23:6 Romans 3:21–22.
To seal up vision and prophecy — to authenticate them, to set the seal of fulfillment on what the prophets had said; the events of these weeks would confirm the whole prophetic witness rather than close it down Luke 24:44 Acts 3:18.
And to anoint the most holy — an anointing, at the end of the period, of what is most holy: the vocabulary of consecrating a sanctuary and its ministry Exodus 40:9 Exodus 29:36. The word for anointed is the word Messiah, and the next verse uses it of a person twice Daniel 9:25 Daniel 9:26.
Six accomplishments, and together they describe one event. The seventy weeks were measured out to reach the cross and what the cross established — which is why the chapter that began with a man praying about rubble ends with a covenant, a sacrifice, and an anointing.
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