Daniel 9:24-27 · A BibleBinge Study
The Seventy
Weeksand the clock nobody agrees on
Ninety-six Hebrew words. An angel interrupts a man mid-prayer to hand him a calendar. Two and a half thousand years later, serious people who love Scripture and believe every word of it still cannot agree on how to read it. Here is the passage, the history under it, the four best readings, and the honest case for each.
The whole thing in 60 seconds
Daniel is an old man in Babylon. He is reading Jeremiah, and he does the math: the exile is supposed to run seventy years, and seventy years are almost up. So he prays. He confesses. He asks God to act.
Before he finishes the sentence, Gabriel arrives with an answer that is bigger than the question. Not seventy years. Seventy sevens. Four hundred and ninety years, decreed on Daniel's people and Daniel's city, with six things to be accomplished inside them: transgression finished, sin ended, iniquity atoned for, everlasting righteousness brought in, vision and prophecy sealed up, and the most holy anointed.
Then Gabriel breaks the 490 into three uneven pieces. Seven sevens. Sixty-two sevens. And one final seven that behaves differently from the other sixty-nine.
The clock starts, Gabriel says, at the going out of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem. It runs to the Anointed One, the prince. Somewhere after that the Anointed One is cut off and has nothing, a coming prince's people flatten the city and the sanctuary, and a covenant is confirmed for one week before sacrifice stops in the middle of it.
- Which commandment starts the clock? There are four candidates in Ezra and Nehemiah, spread across ninety-odd years.
- How long is a year? Ordinary solar years, or 360-day "prophetic" years drawn from Revelation?
- Is the count continuous? Do the seventy sevens run straight through, or does the clock stop between the 69th and the 70th?
- Who is "he" in verse 27? The Messiah confirming a covenant, or a coming prince imposing one?
The prayer that started it
You cannot understand the answer until you have heard the question. Daniel 9 is one chapter, and verses 24 to 27 are the last four sentences of a conversation.
Daniel does arithmetic on Jeremiah
Verse 2 tells us exactly what Daniel was doing: 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.
He is reading Jeremiah 25:11-12 and Jeremiah 29:10. Seventy years, then Babylon gets judged and the exiles go home. It is now the first year of Darius the Mede, roughly 539 BC, and Babylon has just fallen. Daniel counts on his fingers and realizes the deadline is here.
This matters more than it looks. Gabriel is answering a man who was already treating prophecy as something you can count. Whatever else the seventy sevens are, they are God's response to a person doing chronology with a scroll open in front of him.
- 609 to 539 BC, Babylonian imperial dominance, which is what Jeremiah 25:11-12 addresses since the judgment falls on Babylon at the end.
- 605 to 536 BC, the first deportation (Daniel 1:1) to the return under Cyrus. This is the span 2 Chronicles 36:20-21 is describing.
- 586 to 516 BC, the temple's destruction to its completion under Darius (Ezra 6:15). Zechariah 1:12 and 7:5 are counting this one.
Why seventy years turns into 490
Here is the connection most people miss, and it is the single best thing you can hand a group that has never studied this.
2 Chronicles 36:21 says the exile lasted until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths. Leviticus 25 commanded Israel to let the land rest every seventh year. They did not. For how long? Long enough to owe seventy sabbath years.
Seventy missed sabbaticals, at one every seven years, means 490 years of covenant infidelity. Seventy years of exile is the invoice. And when Gabriel answers, he does not say "seventy years." He says seventy sevens. Four hundred and ninety. The exact length of the disease is the exact length of the cure.
Kenneth Gentry puts the point sharply: the time required to resolve the problem of Israel's sin is precisely the same time it took to create it.
Leviticus 26 reinforces it. Four separate times (26:18, 21, 24, 28) God warns He will discipline seven times more for sin. Sevenfold discipline is baked into the covenant Daniel is confessing under. Gabriel answers a seventy-year confession with a sevenfold-of-seventy decree.
The vocabulary of the prayer becomes the vocabulary of the answer
Daniel confesses using three words in verse 5: chata (we have sinned), awah (dealt perversely), pasha (rebelled). Gabriel's six assignments in verse 24 open with the same triad: pesha (transgression), chattat (sins), awon (iniquity). That is deliberate literary correspondence, not coincidence. Daniel names the disease in the categories of the covenant curse, and Gabriel announces the cure in the same categories. Teach it that way and verse 24 stops being a list and starts being an answer.
Bob Deffinbaugh also notes the connection back to 1 Kings 8:46-53, Solomon's dedication prayer, which anticipates a day when exiles will pray toward Jerusalem from a foreign land. That is precisely Daniel's posture in Daniel 6:10 and precisely the content of 9:16-19. Daniel is praying the prayer Solomon predicted somebody would have to pray.
The text itself
World English Bible. Tap any underlined phrase to open the note behind it. These are the exact spots where the four readings part company.
24“ are decreed on , to finish disobedience, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up vision and prophecy, and to .”
25“Know therefore and discern that from to , will be . It will be built again, with street and moat, even in .”
26“After the sixty-two weeks the Anointed One will be . will destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end will be with a , and war will be even to the end. Desolations are determined.”
27“ will with for one week. In the middle of the week he will cause the sacrifice and the offering to cease. On the will come one who makes desolate; and even to the full end, and that determined, wrath will be poured out on the desolate.”
The six assignments
Before Gabriel gives Daniel a single date, he gives him a job description. Six things the 490 years exist to accomplish. Three negative (sin dealt with), three positive (righteousness established). How much of this list you think is already finished is, in practice, the thing that determines which of the four readings you find persuasive.
Which decree starts the clock?
Gabriel says the count begins at "the going out of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem." Ezra and Nehemiah record four Persian decisions that could qualify, spread across roughly ninety years. Pick a different one and every date downstream moves. Tap a card.
The argument that it has to be a city decree
Verse 25 names one object for both verbs: restore and build take Jerusalem, not the temple. The temple is never mentioned in verse 25 at all. Add street and moat, which are civic and defensive works, and the picture is a city being reconstituted, not a sanctuary being repaired.
The clincher, on this reading, is Ezra 4:7-23. Artaxerxes himself had earlier ordered the wall work stopped: make these men cease, and that this city not be built. So before Nehemiah 2 there was a standing imperial prohibition on rebuilding Jerusalem. Whatever Cyrus and Darius authorized, it was not that. Nehemiah 2 is the reversal.
Held by: Anderson, Hoehner, Walvoord, Pentecost, Showers, MacArthur, Ice, and most dispensational writers.
The arguments against, all from our side of the aisle
- Vern Poythress points out that Isaiah 45:13 has God saying of Cyrus, he shall build my city and let my exiles go free. If Scripture itself calls Cyrus a city-builder, the case that only Nehemiah 2 qualifies weakens considerably. Josephus reports the city in Cyrus' decree too.
- Rick Lanser argues that lehashiv ("cause to return, restore") is about restoring Judah as a self-governing people under its own law, which is exactly what Ezra 7:25-26 does by appointing magistrates and judges with power of life and death. The physical building comes after. Note also that Nehemiah received letters, not a decree.
- Thomas McComiskey takes the most radical option: davar here is the prophetic word to Jeremiah, not any Persian edict at all. Grammatically it is available, and Daniel 9:2 uses the phrase that way two verses earlier.
- Rodger C. Young (JETS 65.3) takes Nisan 458 BC and argues the whole chapter runs on lunisolar sabbatical years per 2 Chronicles 36:21, landing at Nisan 16, AD 33.
Why 458 and 457 are both defensible, and 445 and 444 both
This is the part that makes people's eyes glaze, so here it is as plainly as it can be put. Ancient kings' years were counted from a fixed month, and different cultures used a different month. If you count from Nisan (spring), Artaxerxes I's seventh year begins in spring 458 BC. If you count from Tishri (autumn), the same seventh year straddles autumn 458 into 457, and Ezra's spring departure falls in 457.
The reason anyone takes Tishri reckoning seriously is internal to Scripture. Nehemiah 1:1 dates an event to Chislev, the ninth month, of the twentieth year. Nehemiah 2:1 dates a later event to Nisan, the first month, of the same twentieth year. The ninth month can only precede the first month inside one regnal year if the year runs autumn to autumn. Nehemiah is quietly telling us how he counts.
External evidence is genuinely contested. The Elephantine papyri (especially Kraeling 6 and the double-dated Sayce-Cowley papyrus of 416 BC) appear to support Jewish-style reckoning of Persian years; Richard Parker dismissed the key document as a scribal error, Bickerman and Depuydt proposed accession-date reckoning instead, and Leslie McFall rejected 457 outright. Meanwhile the Babylonian astronomical tablet BM 32234 fixes Xerxes' assassination in August 465 BC, which means a 457 start additionally requires the roughly seven-month interregnum under Artabanus reported by Manetho, Ctesias and Justin. Julia Neuffer and William Shea built that case; Rodger Young rejects it.
Bottom line: you can be a careful, Bible-believing chronologist and land on 458, 457, 445, or 444. The difference is not faith. It is which month you think a Persian scribe was counting from.
Exile to rubble: the actual timeline
The prophecy is anchored in real history with real kings and real construction projects. Filter by thread to follow one storyline at a time.
Run the numbers yourself
This calculator does real Julian Day Number arithmetic on the proleptic Julian calendar, the calendar actually in use in the ancient world. Change the start, change the year length, change the span, and watch where you land. It also tells you where the published scholars claimed to land, which is not always the same place.
- Genesis 7:11 and 8:3-4 count five months as 150 days, which implies 30-day months.
- Revelation 11:2-3 sets 42 months alongside 1,260 days in consecutive verses. Divide: 30 days per month, 360 per year.
- Revelation 12:6 (1,260 days), 12:14 ("time, times, and half a time"), and 13:5 (42 months) describe one span three ways, and the three only reconcile at 360.
- Daniel 7:25 and 12:7 use the same "time, times, and half a time" formula, tying Daniel's own vocabulary into the equation.
- Israel's calendar was lunisolar: twelve lunar months of about 354 days, corrected by inserting a second Adar roughly seven times every nineteen years. A fixed 360-day civil year existed nowhere in Hebrew or Babylonian practice.
- Daniel 9 never mentions a 360-day year. The 360-day figures appear only in the half-week texts, and those may describe a season in which "times" are deliberately altered (Daniel 7:25) rather than a normal calendar.
- Rick Lanser's objection: nowhere is a 360-day year applied to the other sixty-nine weeks. Extrapolating it across 483 years quietly shortens the span by about seven years.
- Kenneth Gentry's version: a yardstick you can stretch or shrink is not a yardstick.
Recompute the two famous calculations in strict Julian Day Numbers and neither lands where its author said it did.
Anderson ran 14 March 445 BC to 6 April AD 32 and called it 173,880 days. The actual interval is 173,882 days. His error was deducting three leap days because "the Julian calendar contains three leap years too many in four centuries," which imports the Gregorian rule into a span he was reckoning with Julian dates. Add exactly 173,880 days to his start and you land on 4 April AD 32. Worse, Nisan 14 in AD 32 does not fall on a Friday at all, so his terminus cannot produce a Friday crucifixion four days later.
Hoehner ran 5 March 444 BC to 30 March AD 33. The actual interval is 173,884 days. His slip was mixing units: he used the tropical year length (365.2422) to measure a span he then walked out on Julian calendar dates. Add exactly 173,880 days to his start and you land on 26 March AD 33.
This is not a reason to throw the whole approach out. Three or four days on a span of nearly half a millennium is astonishing precision by any human standard, and the underlying observation, that the sixty-nine weeks land in the ministry years of Jesus of Nazareth, survives the correction intact. But we should say the arithmetic out loud rather than repeat a number because it is famous. Content integrity means the discrepancy gets named, not laundered.
The four readings
Each of these is held by people who believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God. Each has a genuine strength the others struggle to answer. Tap through them, and watch the span diagram redraw for each one.
Side by side
Swipe the table sideways on a phone
Mainstream critical scholarship (Montgomery, Driver, Collins, Athas) places the seventieth week in 171-164 BC: Onias III murdered in 171 as the "anointed one cut off," Antiochus IV Epiphanes desecrating the temple in 167. It is a tidy fit for the surface details.
The problem is what it comes packaged with. That reading normally requires dating the book of Daniel to about 165 BC, so that the "prophecy" is history written after the fact. Conservatives reject that on several grounds: the vindication of Belshazzar by cuneiform evidence after centuries of critics calling him fictional, the manuscript evidence from Qumran that makes a 165 BC composition date extremely tight, and most directly, Jesus in Matthew 24:15 attributing the passage to "Daniel the prophet" and treating its central event as still in the future.
That last point is decisive and every camp knows it. Jesus, standing in roughly AD 30, points forward to an abomination of desolation about two hundred years after Antiochus. A purely Maccabean reading cannot survive that sentence.
But there is a conservative version worth having. A number of high-view scholars treat Antiochus as a genuine near referent or prefigurement while holding the ultimate referent to be Christ, or the antichrist, or both. E. J. Young does exactly this in Daniel 12. Joyce Baldwin, Tremper Longman, Iain Duguid and Sinclair Ferguson all work with layered fulfillment: Antiochus is the historical pattern, AD 70 is the covenantal enactment, and the man of lawlessness is the eschatological climax. Even dispensationalists effectively grant the typology in Daniel 8 and 11, where Antiochus is the acknowledged near referent of a figure who prefigures the coming prince. If you are teaching this to a group, the typological frame is usually the most useful thing you can hand them, because it lets them hold the historical detail and the forward reach at the same time without pretending one cancels the other.
Five places the whole argument turns
If you only have twenty minutes with a group, spend them here. These are the specific words and marks where careful, believing scholars part ways, and knowing them is the difference between having an opinion and understanding the question.
The gap: for and against
Does the clock stop between the sixty-ninth week and the seventieth? This is the single biggest structural disagreement in the passage, and almost every other difference follows from it.
The case for a gap
- Verse 26 says the Anointed One is cut off after the sixty-two weeks. Not during the seventieth. That phrasing puts the cross in an interval, not inside a numbered week.
- The destruction of the city in verse 26 happened in AD 70, which is roughly forty years past any candidate for the end of week sixty-nine. So every scheme, including the ones that deny a gap, has to account for an interval somewhere.
- Old Testament prophecy routinely telescopes the two comings into one sentence. Jesus stops mid-verse in Isaiah 61:2 when reading in the Nazareth synagogue (Luke 4:18-19), reading the favorable half and closing the scroll before the day of vengeance. Zechariah 9:9-10 does the same thing.
- Daniel 2 and Daniel 7 both contain a terminal phase that has demonstrably not happened yet, so unfulfilled remainder is normal in this book.
- Robert Gundry's argument: Jesus links the abomination to "great tribulation such as was not since the beginning of the world" followed immediately by His own return (Matthew 24:21, 29-30). AD 70 does not satisfy that sequence.
- Romans 11:25-27 explicitly holds open a future national turning for Israel, which is who the seventy weeks were decreed for.
The case against a gap
- The seventy sevens are decreed as one unit with one verb. Nothing in the text signals a pause, and inserting one of two thousand years is a very large load for a passage to carry silently.
- Gentry's point about the yardstick: if the units can stretch indefinitely, they are no longer measuring anything, and the apologetic value of the prophecy evaporates.
- Dispensationalists place AD 70 outside the count while insisting the count is precise. Critics say you cannot have both.
- Sam Storms reads verses 26 and 27 as parallel rather than sequential (an A-B-A-B structure), in which case the "after" of verse 26 is not establishing a timeline at all.
- The six goals of verse 24 are described as accomplished within the seventy weeks. If atonement was made at the cross, and it was, then the cross is inside the 490, not in a parenthesis outside them.
- Kline's covenantal point: hiding the entire church age inside an unannounced interval makes the passage teach something it never says.
The prophetic web
Daniel 9 is not a stand-alone puzzle. It sits inside a network of prophecy that runs from Leviticus to Revelation, and the connections are what make it teachable. Open a thread.
Where the weight falls
Here is the honest summary, and it is not the tidy one.
The futurists own the strongest case on the decree. Nehemiah 2 is the only Persian document that plainly authorizes rebuilding the city, and verse 25 is plainly about the city. They also own the most natural reading of the pronoun in verse 27, because "the prince who is to come" is sitting right there in the previous sentence.
The Christ-centered readers own the strongest case on the verb. Higbir is not karat. Verse 27 does not use the ordinary language for cutting a covenant, and "the many" is Isaiah 53 vocabulary. If the covenant of verse 27 is a covenant being enforced rather than signed, an antichrist has no business in the sentence.
The symbolic readers own the strongest case on genre. Daniel's numbers behave symbolically everywhere else in the book. Ten jubilees is a theological statement, and reading it as one avoids every chronological embarrassment the literal schemes run into.
The preterist-leaning readers own the strongest case on verse 26. It says the people of the prince destroy the city, and Titus' legions did exactly that in a way nobody has to speculate about. Jesus applies the abomination language to Jerusalem's fall with "let the reader understand" and "flee to the mountains," which are first-century instructions to first-century people.
Nobody owns all four. Anybody who tells you this is settled is either not reading the other side or not telling you the truth.
So what do you do with that? You hold the passage the way Gabriel handed it over: as an answer to a man on his knees who was worried God had forgotten His city. Everything the six assignments promise, the decisive thing among them, atonement for iniquity, has already happened at a specific hour on a specific Friday under a Roman governor whose name we know. Whatever is left over is left over in the hands of the same God who kept the first part on schedule.
Chuck Missler taught that Scripture works like a microscope and a telescope at the same time, and Daniel 9 is the proof text for that instinct. Zoom in and you find Persian regnal months and Nisan reckoning. Zoom out and you find that the God who counts sabbath years also counted the days to His Son's arrival. Both are the same act of care.
Discussion guide
Written for a men's group of any size. Nobody needs to have read anything in advance. Print this page (the layout is built for it) or just work down the screen.
A sixty-minute run sheet
Glossary
Sources and further reading
Everything below is either from scholars who hold a high view of Scripture or is flagged where it is not. Where a claim in this study came from somewhere, it came from here.
Books worth owning
- Alva J. McClain, Daniel's Prophecy of the Seventy Weeks. Still the clearest short statement of the dispensational case. Under a hundred pages.
- Sir Robert Anderson, The Coming Prince (1894). The book that put 173,880 days into circulation. Read it knowing the arithmetic needs correcting.
- Harold W. Hoehner, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ. The scholarly upgrade of Anderson, and the standard Dallas Seminary chronology.
- E. J. Young, The Prophecy of Daniel. The classic Reformed commentary, and the best statement of the consecutive messianic reading.
- Joyce Baldwin, Daniel (Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries). Short, careful, defends the sixth-century date, refuses to over-claim.
- Stephen R. Miller, Daniel (New American Commentary). The most usable technical commentary from a futurist angle.
- Iain Duguid, Daniel (Reformed Expository Commentary). If you want to preach it rather than diagram it.