Daniel is reading Jeremiah. He finds the promise that Jerusalem's desolation will last seventy years, works out that the seventy are nearly up, and prays one of the great prayers of in Scripture. While he is still praying, the angel Gabriel arrives with an answer that is longer and stranger than the question.
Seventy weeks are decreed, Gabriel says. In Hebrew the word is simply 'sevens,' so the span is seventy sevens. They are divided oddly: seven, then sixty-two, then one. Somewhere in there an anointed one is cut off and has nothing, a coming prince destroys the city and the sanctuary, and in the final seven a is made and then broken halfway through, with sacrifice stopped and something appalling set up in its place.
Almost every word of that is disputed. When does the clock start? Is a 'seven' seven years, and if so are they solar years or something else? Who is the anointed one, and who is the prince? Does the seventieth week follow immediately after the sixty-ninth, or is there a gap? The four readings below have been held by serious Christians for a long time, and the differences between them are not small.
Daniel 9:24-27
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. 25"Know therefore and discern that from the going out of the commandment to restore and build Jerusalem to the Anointed One, the prince, will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks. It will be built again, with street and moat, even in troubled times. 26After the sixty-two weeks the Anointed One will be cut off, and will have nothing. The people of the prince who come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end will be with a flood, and war will be even to the end. Desolations are determined. 27He will make a firm covenant with many for one week. In the middle of the week he will cause the sacrifice and the offering to cease. On the wing of abominations will come one who makes desolate; and even to the decreed full end, wrath will be poured out on the desolate."
Every view here agrees that the passage is real prophecy, that it concerns the and the fate of Jerusalem's temple, and that it was given to a man in exile praying for his people. The disagreement is about the timetable and about who fills which role, not about whether God speaks through prophets.
The weeks run to Christ
The seventy sevens are 490 years running from a Persian decree to the coming of Jesus, whose death is the cutting off of the anointed one, with Rome's destruction of the temple in AD 70 as the aftermath.
What it claims
A decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem starts the count. Sixty-nine of the seventy sevens, 483 years, run from there to the Messiah. He is then cut off, meaning killed, and not for himself. The people of a coming prince, the Romans, destroy the city and the sanctuary. The seventieth seven is the period of Christ's ministry and its immediate aftermath, in which he confirms the covenant with many and, by his death, brings sacrifice and offering to an end.
Who holds it
The historic majority reading across , , and Protestant traditions. Held by Julius Africanus in the third century, Jerome, Calvin, Matthew Henry, and most commentators before the nineteenth century. Still the standard reading in Catholic and Orthodox teaching and in much of confessional Protestantism.
The texts it stands on
Daniel 9:25 The count begins with a word to restore and rebuild Jerusalem, which readers in this camp tie to Artaxerxes' decree in either 458 or 445 BC.
Daniel 9:26 'The anointed one will be cut off and have nothing' is read as the crucifixion.
Hebrews 10:8-14 Christ's single offering ends the sacrificial system, which fits 'he will cause sacrifice and offering to cease.'
Strongest case
It takes the word 'anointed one' in its most natural Christian sense and lands the arithmetic in roughly the right century without special pleading. It also explains why the passage was so important to the early church, and it accounts for the destruction of the temple, which happened, in the order the text gives.
Hardest question
The arithmetic only works if you choose the right starting decree, and there are at least three candidates in Ezra and Nehemiah that produce different answers. Critics point out that the calculations tend to be adjusted until they arrive where the interpreter already wanted to go.
Holding the map
It is worth naming what is at stake and what is not. None of these readings touches the deity of Christ, the , or the authority of Scripture. They differ over how prophetic time works and how tightly a prophecy binds to a calendar, and those differences run downstream into larger disagreements about the end of history.
It is also worth noticing how the differences cluster. If you hold that Israel and the church are two distinct programs, the gap view will look obvious. If you hold that the church is Israel fulfilled, the symbolic or the traditional messianic reading will. People rarely argue their way from one to the other verse by verse, because the verse-level disagreements are usually downstream of a bigger frame.
The oldest Christian reading is the messianic one. The most widely held reading in American evangelical churches today is the dispensational one. The most common reading in the academy is the Maccabean one. Knowing that much is worth as much as picking a side, because it tells you why the person across the table sounds so certain.
Questions that press on this one
None of these stands on its own. What you conclude here narrows what you can say there.
