Daniel Chapter 9 - The Seventy Weeks

Daniel 9:24-26 

"Seventy ‘sevens’ are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy. "Know and understand this: From the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’ It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble. After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be cut off and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed. 

Daniel Chapter 9. The Seventy Weeks (Halley Bible Handbook) 

The Captivity, which was then drawing to a close, had lasted 70 years. Daniel is here told by the angel that it would yet be "70 weeks" till the coming of the Messiah (24). 

The "70 weeks" is generally understood to mean 70 weeks of years, that is, 70 sevens of years, or seven times 70 years, that is 490 years. As if the angel were saying, The Captivity has been 70 years; the period between the Captivity and the Coming of the Messiah will be seven times that long. 

Seven, and cycles of seven, sometimes have symbolic meanings; yet the actual facts of this prophecy are most amazing, as follows: 

The date from which the 70 weeks was to be counted was the decree to rebuild Jerusalem (25). There were three decrees issued by Persian kings for this purpose (536 B.C., 457 B.C., 444 B.C., see under Ezra). The principal one of these was 457 B.C. 

The 70 weeks is subdivided into 7 weeks, 62 weeks, and 1 week (25, 27). It is difficult to see the application of the "7 weeks"; but the 69 weeks (including the 7) equal 483 days, that is, on the year-day theory (Ezekiel 4:6), which is the commonly accepted interpretation, 483 years. 

This 483 years is the period between the decree to rebuild Jerusalem and the coming of the "Anointed One" (25). The decree to rebuild Jerusalem, as noted above, was 457 B.C. Adding 483 years to 457 B.C. brings us to A.D. 26, the very year that Jesus was baptized and began his public ministry. A most remarkable fulfillment of Daniel's prophecy, even to the year. 

Further, within 3 1/2 years Jesus was crucified, that is, "in the midst of the one week" "the Anointed One" was "cut off," "purged away sin and brought in everlasting righteousness" (24, 26, 27). 

Thus Daniel foretold not only the Time at which the Messiah would appear, but also the Duration of his Public Ministry, and his Atoning Death for Human Sin. 

Some think that God's chronology was suspended at the death of Christ, to remain so while Israel is scattered, and that the last half of the "one week" belongs to the time of the End.