Seventy Weeks Rightly Divided
“Seventy Weeks” refers to the prophecy received and recorded by the prophet Daniel, which decreed the timetable of events for the people of Israel and their holy city, Jerusalem.
The text of the prophecy is in the book of Daniel, chapter 9, verses 24-27, and this is what it says:
24 “Seventy weeks are determined For your people and for your holy city, To finish the transgression, 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 understand, That from the going forth of the command to restore and build Jerusalem Until Messiah the Prince, there shall be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublesome times.
26 “And after the sixty-two weeks Messiah shall be cut off, but not for Himself; and the people of the Prince* who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end of it shall be with a flood, and till the end of the war desolations are determined.
27 Then He shall confirm a covenant with many for one week; but in the middle of the week He shall bring an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of abominations shall be one who makes desolate, even until the consummation, which is determined, is poured out on the desolate.”
* “the people of the Prince” = Titus and his Roman legions
This magnificent prophecy came at the end of the seventy-year period of the Babylonian captivity, under which the prophet Daniel spent most of his adult life. This period of Jewish history, the exile of the southern kingdom of Judah in the 6th century BC, had been foretold by the prophet Jeremiah. Daniel had been praying, as it is written: I, Daniel, perceived in the books the number of years that, according to the word of the LORD to Jeremiah the prophet, must pass before the end of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years. (Daniel 9:2) …and even while he was praying, the angel Gabriel came and delivered the prophecy.
It predicts specific purposes to be accomplished within the span of seventy sabbatical ‘weeks’ — understood as weeks of years; literally, “seventy sevens”, or 490 years. This amazing prophetic decree was revealed to Daniel for his comfort and left to the Church for the confirming of our faith, and a testimony to the truth of Divine revelation.
This prediction of the promised Messiah not only specifies the time of His first advent, but also foretells the particular aspects of His ministry in the establishment of the new covenant.
As stipulated in the prophecy, from the going forth of the command to restore and build Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince there would be seven weeks and sixty two weeks, for a total of 69 weeks or 483 years.
…which brings us to the year 27 A.D., the very year when the Holy Spirit descended upon the Lord Jesus Christ at His baptism, and of the commencement of His incarnate ministry.
Then, in the middle of the final week (the last seven year period), in 30 A.D., He would be “cut off”, that is, crucified, bringing to an end the Old Testament economy by His death.
What a miraculously accurate prediction this was! The 490 years of the seventy weeks prophecy then concluded with the three and a half years that remained, during which period the gospel went forth with power after the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
Messiah and His disciples ‘confirmed’ that it was He who was the Promised One, who ratified the Abrahamic Covenant with His blood. The word confirm tells us that it already existed – it is the everlasting covenant that was made to Abraham. The covenant was confirmed with the Jews first, for seven years.
At that point the unbelieving Jews, who had stoned Stephen, in effect cut themselves off from the eternal blessings of the new covenant; and shortly thereafter, within that generation, judgment came as the Roman armies utterly destroyed the Jerusalem temple finally in 70 A.D.
Even so, all the wonderful blessings of this prophecy are made possible through Jesus Christ, the Holy One of God.
The 1st century AD saw the fulfillment of all the predictions of the seventy weeks prophecy.
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“For those who try to add hundreds, or thousands, or a million year smoke and mirrors gap between the 69th and 70th week of Daniel, whereas no such extra-biblical gap exists in the Hebrew text, be exhorted to apply the principle of Revelation 22:18!” -Michael E. Day