Daniel’s Prayer and Seventy Sevens

Daniel 9

            The first part of Daniel is straightforward enough. Daniel recognizes that he’s been in Babylon almost 70 years (605-538 BC) and prays that the Lord would keep His promise through Jeremiah that the exile would only last 70 years. One interesting note in Daniel’s prayer is the way that he contrasts the Lord’s righteousness with Israel’s sin. One scholar thinks that when we read “righteousness” in the Bible, we should not think of God’s “moral rectitude” but of His “covenant faithfulness.” That is, He had told them the consequences of violating the covenant terms, so He was just when He exiled them. But He also promised to hear and restore, and His righteousness would be proved by keeping that promise.

            Much more difficult is the promise of 70 sevens. At the outset, we need to acknowledge that 70 sevens is pretty obviously a symbolic phrase, probably of some divinely set span of time. But the temptation is to take it literally. Certainly by the century before Jesus, Jewish people were working those number and working them hard, because 70 time 7 is 490, and by 100 BC, it was closing in on 490 years since Daniel had begun his work. So, these verses were being applied feverishly and those times were filled with wild expectation that the day of God’s great intervention was at hand.

            Now, the early church inherited Daniel along with the rest of the Old Testament from their Jewish forebears. And there’s a lot in these verses that they would see in hindsight as referring to the Messiah. First, the Anointed One is literally the messiah. Second, there is a clear statement that the Anointed One would be killed Third, Jesus Himself had spoken of the abomination of desolation when He prophesied the destruction of the Temple. The final seven, then, was taken as the remainder of the era between Jesus resurrection and His second coming.

            Whatever we make of the details—and a lot has been written!—Jesus clearly referred to this chapter, too, so we have to struggle with it as we try to understand what He said about His own ministry.