The document provides an exegetical analysis of Daniel 9:24-27. It discusses the context of the passage within the book of Daniel and analyzes different interpretations of the "seventy weeks" prophecy. Key points include: - Daniel 9 presents itself as a complete story, with Daniel responding to Jeremiah's prophecy with prayer and repentance. Gabriel is then dispatched with an interpretation. - There are many problems interpreting the "seventy weeks", including what event triggers the timeline and how to understand the various time periods mentioned. - Historically, interpretations have focused on Christ, Antiochus Epiphanes, or an eschatological view spanning to the final kingdom of God.

1. Daniel 9:24-27 Exegesis
By Christopher C. MacDonald OT 8174 Fall 2015
NASBTextand TechnicalExegeticalNotes
24
“Seventy weeks have been decreed for your people (The message is being interpreted by the
angel Gabriel who has been sent swiftly upon the beginning of Daniel’s prayer – 9:20-21. It is in
reference to Daniel’s reading and response to Jeremiah’s prophecy of a seventy year exile as recorded in
Jer. 29.) and your holy city, to finish the transgression (What transgression? Many point to the
constant disregard of letting the ground lay fallow on the seventh year. Thus Sheetz citing Childs
(Introduction to the Old Testament asScripture,p. 617) says “In his prayer Daniel combines the
prophecy of Jeremiah with the punishment for disobedience which the law of Moses (Dan. 9.11) had
threatened. The land would lie fallow to make up for the Sabbaths which had been disregarded. Then the
writer is made to understand that the exile was only a foreshadowing of the final period of indignation.
Not seventy years,but seventy weeks of years was untended.”1
),to make an end ofsin, to make
atonement for iniquity(“The number of years in the prophecy, 490, is now generally recognized to be a
calculation of ten jubilee periods or seventy sabbatical cycles rather than a precise timetable.”2
), to bring
in everlasting righteousness,to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy place.(Keil
sees in the above six statements an arranged with three negatives countered with three positives “in such a
manner that in both cases the three cases stand in reciprocal relation to each other: the fourth statement
corresponds to the first, the fifth to the second, the sixth to the third – the second and the fifth present
even the same verb ~tx “3
) 25
So you are to knowand discern that from the issuing ofa decree to
restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince there will be seven weeks and sixty-two
weeks; it will be built again, with plaza (In some translations “streets” but better rendered here for as
1 Sheetz, Jordan M. The Concept of Canonical Intertextuality and the Book of Daniel (James Clarke& Co, Cambridge,
2011) p. 114
2 Merrill Willis,Amy C. Dissonance and the Drama of Divine Sovereignty in the Book of Daniel (T& T Clark,London
2010) p. 140
3 Keil,C.F. The Book of Daniel (Keil and Delitzsch Commentary of the Old Testament Vol. 9, Hendricksen, Peabody
1866) p. 341

2. Seow comments “the plazas that are the centers of lively economic and social activities in the city.”)4
and moat,(“unique in the Old Testament, although it is attested in some Aramaic inscriptions and in the
Dead Sea Scrolls with the meaning trench. In the Copper Scrolls from Qumran, for instance, one reads of
Solomon’s trench which appears to be part of the city’s defense system (DSST, 462).”5
) even in times of
distress. (The expression of streets and moat, therefore indicates the complete restoration of the city
proper – its socioeconomic infrastructures and its defense system.”6 26
Then after the sixty-two weeks
(434 years) the Messiah (simply “anointed one”) will be cut off and have nothing, and the people of
the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. And its end will come with a flood;
even to the end [k]
there will be war; desolations are determined. 27
And he will make a firm covenant
with the many for one week, but in the middle ofthe week (“the chronology uses the motif of the three
and a half years to signal to the second-century audience that the restoration is reasonably near. “7
) he will
put a stop to sacrifice and grain offering; and on the wing of [l]
abominations will come one
who[m]
makes desolate (Severalexegetes make a less passive translation such as “causing horror”
(Sheetz, p.115) and “a desolator] or better (cf. on Daniel 8:13 and Daniel 11:31) one that causeth
appalment:”8
), even until a complete destruction, one that is decreed,is poured out on the one
who makes desolate.” (Most commentators point to Antiochus Epiphanes, even conservative scholars
like Keil who make the point that Jesus could have easily made the point from Daniel and never
mentioned a thing.9
True, an argument from silence is not always convincing, but there seems no
compelling reason to grasp at the Modernist need for prophetic “proofs” via hard-pressed calculations that
are often dubious at best).
4 Seow, C.L., Daniel (Westminster John Know Press, Louisville2003) p.149.
5 Ibid., p. 149.
6 Ibid., p. 149.
7 Merrill Willis,Ibid.,p. 141
8 Cambridge Biblefor Schools and Colleges, Exegesis of Daniel 9:27 as cited at
http://biblehub.com/commentaries/daniel/9-27.htm on January 20, 2016.
9 Keil,Ibid., p.386.

3. Context of Daniel 9:24-27
The Book of Daniel presents itself as a collection of independent stories. There is ample evidence
from the Masoretic Text and early Septuagint versions that some of the stories may have been – at certain
times – grouped together independently of the entire book. As such, Tawny L. Holm, she sets forth
textual evidence that parts of Daniel chapters 4-6 “once circulated independently of the book, either as an
earlier collection or as an apocopated edition of Daniel. This earlier collection is balanced in that each of
the three stories contained in it takes place in the reign of a different king (Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar,
and Darius) and explore different varieties of royal hubris.”10
To add to this linguistic situation, the text itself transfers back and forth between Hebrew and
Aramaic. As Jin Hee Han summarizes,
The book starts with Hebrew, and switches to Aramaic from 2:4b. The shift is occasioned when
the narrator quotes the speech of the Chaldeans, who speak in Aramaic. Curiously enough, when
the Chaldeans stop speaking, Aramaic continues like Dorthy who does does not wake up from the
dream she is having in Kansas. In ch. 8 the narrator switches back to Hebrew.11.
Various possible reasons for this are presented,but like the possible specific interpretations of the
“seventy weeks,” it seems ultimately impossible to know with any real certainty why. It remains
important information with no obvious conclusions. Perhaps it is important more for what it excludes than
what it concludes.12
Chapter nine does present itself as a complete story so the immediate context of v.24-27 is straight-
forward with some distinguishing contents.
Aaron B. Hebbard notes the character of Daniel(which he refers to in his book as DanielC
as
opposed to Daniel8
– the text) saying:
10 Holm, Tawny L. Of Courtiers and Kings: The Biblical Daniel Narratives and Ancient Story-Collections (Eisenbrauns,
In, 2013) p. 481.
11 Han, Jin Hee Daniel’s Spiel, (University Press of America, Lanham 2008) p. 90.
12 I am thinking, for example, of the possibly misplaced idea thatDaniel is employing pesher interpretation in line
with the Qumran tradition (Niskanen,2004).This would both be historically too early and it would seem to be
contradicted by the non-exclusive/non-secretivenature of the text which is exemplified by its being half-donein
Aramaic.

4. Further evidence of… the personal piety of the hermeneut is the striking employment of the
Tetragrammaton that appears seven times in this particular chapter alone.13
To this we add (under the same light) that while Daniel is often working off of visions or dreams and
then being given divine interpretations for his audience – here the divine incendiary is the text of
Jeremiah 29.
Daniel’s response is not only emotional and expressed personally on behalf of the nation (using as
Hebbard points out “a first-person plural point of view,” Daniel is “an embodiment of a corporate prayer
of Israel.”14
He does this with no small measure of physicality,entering into true grief. His response to God’s
judgment in Jeremiah 29 is to seek God via repentance with prayer, fasting and the putting on of
sackcloth and ashes. God’s response is immediate – Gabriel is dispatched near or at word one.
The interpretation of the “seventy weeks” is often problematic, or as Dale Ralph Davis summarizes
after he first reviewed the vast sea of questions and responses from various exegetes and came up with the
title “Seventy weeks and twenty problems.”15
His list is fairly extensive but a good example is:
“What word (to restore and rebuild Jerusalem) is meant in 25a? Is that some prophetic word
(e.g. of Jeremiah)? Is it Cyrus’ decree of 538 BC (Ezra 1:1-4)? Or that of Artaxerxes I in 458 BC
(Ezra 7) or that of the same king in 445 BC (Neh. 2:1-8)?16
In the late 19th
century, C.F. Keil, a detailed and prolific scholar summarized what had become three
historical positions on verses 24-27:
1. Most of the church fathers and the older orthodox interpreters find prophesied here the
appearance of Christ in the flesh, His death, and the destruction of Jerusalem by the
Romans.
2. The majority of the modern interpreters on the other hand, refer the whole passage to
the time of Antiochus Epiphanes.
3. Finally, some of the church fathers and several modern theologians have interpreted the
prophecy eschatologically, as an announcement of the development of the kingdom of
God from the end of the Exile on to the perfecting of the kingdom by the second coming
of Christ at the end of days. 17
13 Hebberd, Aaron B. Reading Daniel as a Text in Theological Hermeneutics (Princeton Theological Monograph
Series 109.Pickwick Publications,Eugene 2009) p. 188-189.
14 Hebbard, Ibid., p. 189.
15 Davis,DaleRalph The Message of Daniel (Intervarsity,Downers Grove 2013) p.128.
16 Ibid., p. 128
17 Keil,Ibid., p. 336.

5. The text in question (v.24-27) as a great example of a passage that thousands of years later does not
easily invite being nailed down with any surety. Sometimes restraint in hermeneutics is every bit as
important as boldness. It would seem the more solid value of Daniel 9 is the example that Daniel himself
sets in response to Jeremiah 29, and then some of the lessons we can learn in general from the angel
Gabriel’s response as our first hermeneutical example in scripture.
It is Hebbard who points out that Daniel 9 is “the first time we observe Daniel interpret a scriptural
text; perhaps that we may properly for the first time identify as biblical hermeneutics.”18
Conclusions
A whole reading of Daniel reveals the unusual qualities of the man as set before us – but in this story
his response to the text is noteworthy.
God is free to re-interpret and expand the meaning of a previous text without violating its original
intent. We see this in NT re-applications of OT texts.19
It was the text that humbled Daniel and motivated him to seek God.
What elicited God’s swift response (through the angel) was his unprecedented “high esteem” for
Daniel (9:23) .
Every trial, dream, vision or this text seems to see Daniel respond with grace,wisdom and a purity
of heart that is uncanny. There is really no one like him in scripture. No one with more discipline; no one
so fearless when faced with death.
In his prayer in ch. 9 Daniel is unflinching in his praise for God’s character,and in his confession of
sin for himself and the nation. Daniel is a truth-teller. And if, as prophet, he has been God’s mouthpiece
to the people; now he is (like Moses) the people’s mouthpiece to God.20
18 Hebberd, Ibid.,p.186
19 Vlach,Michael NT use of OT Part 4: Contextual Use of the OT by the NT Writers, as cited at
http://theologicalstudies.org/resource-library/nt-use-of-ot/376-nt-use-of-ot-part-4-contextual-use-of-the-ot-by-
the-nt-writers on January 21, 2016.
20 Ibid., p. 189.

6. If his heartfelt response is humility then he is also humble as a hermeneut for as Hebbard points out,
By nature the hermeneut is not the ends, s/he is simply the means to the ends; in this humble
frame of mind and with a healthy self-understanding, the hermeneut can best function. In
postmodern lingo, the hermeneut cannot be egocentric but rather s/he must emphatically leave
room for the other and its otherness. As Derrida says, You cannot address the other, speak to the
other, without an act of faith, without testimony. (notes Caputo’s Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A
Conversation with Jacques Derrida, 22) In this sense Derrida has unwittingly described DanielC
who operates within the hermeneutics of faith.21
Daniel is willing to be overwhelmed by the text, even if what the angel has to say is terrifically bad
news for he balances this with God’s character as evidenced in verses 4, 7,9,10,13,14,15, and 16.
It is out of his intimacy with God that Daniel asks for immediate action and he is accommodated.
Again, such intimacy in no way guarantees the response one wants or is desirable – but Daniel models a
certain accessibility to God that is desirable for its own sake.
In the earlier work cited by Holm, we saw that the problem recorded in Daniel is often “royal
hubris.”22
Here in chapter 9, it is the hubris of Israelthat is in sharp focus. If the hubris of a king or nation
can bring it low for a generation, the hubris and transgression of Israelcan bring them low for many
generations. Thus is the cost for being God’s people. The punishment will continue.
Daniel’s rubric was scripture, prayer, repentance – and at times open subversion of an innocent kind
(refusing to eat the royal food and wine for example). Yet it is noteworthy that this subversion is done in
humility and not presumption. Daniel always gives the glory to God and sees himself as utterly
dependent. His prayer of confession is subversion in the truest sense of that word – a “sub-version” of
reality to what Israel has been acting out in either rebellion of non-compliance.
We live in an age where hermeneutics is somewhat of a forgotten art in the church at large. The
average believer is often taught to consume the texts like a product that has been re-packaged as sets of
principles for “betterment” that have little to do with loving God or outward service.
Daniel’s example, from youth, is one of a serious interpreter of scripture and spiritual realities from a
variety of vantage points (he was also advanced in wisdom literature and dream interpretation, 1: 4, 17).
21 Hebbard, Ibid., p. 188.
22 Holm, Ibid., p.121.

7. In the culture-at-large, I would present Daniel himself as an anti-hero rich with meaning. In a way I
think this is what E. L. Doctorow is doing in his novel The Book of Daniel where he ends with a reading
from the Old Testament drawing what critics find as critical thematic parallels between his protagonist
and the Daniel of the OT.23
Both are outsiders commenting on the futility the kingdoms before them,
perhaps the difference is the OT Daniel sees himself as tethered and that not of his own doing. He is
living via chesed - in covenantal love (9:4).
In our present milieu Doctorow writes,
Of one thing we are sure. Everything is elusive. God is elusive. Revolutionary morality is elusive.
Justice is elusive. Human character. Quarters for the cigarette machine.24
Daniel presents a definite non-moralistic yet revolutionary morality. He is striking in his “this is for
me” morality and his humility. He presents human character with a humble and shrewd edginess that
would, today, probably carry around quarters and half a pack of cigarettes even though he didn’t smoke.
He also has universal appeal as an anti-hero. To those attracted to the utter clarity and non-relativity
of radical Islam, Daniel the devout prays three times daily, refuses the kings food and wine and holds to a
certain inner purity – yet without violence and without wrenching the fate of nations out of God’s hands
via some form of Jihad. Meanwhile Daniel elicits God’s esteem as well as that of kings.
To the postmodern, Daniel functions under a sea of linguistic landmarks – many of which are not his
own – including his own name. He is both open to these signs and also directed. He is neither constrained
to ignore his culture(s) nor obligated to bow to them. And as one ready to die he is ultimately free in
every situation. In this he antedates the true notion of human freedom we enjoy in the West (existential
freedom specifically) by around two thousand years.25
23 Osborne, Kristen.McKeever, Christineed. "The Book of Daniel Quotes and Analysis". GradeSaver, 27 March 2012
Web. As cited from http://www.gradesaver.com/the-book-of-daniel/study-guide/quotes 21 January 2016.
24 Doctorow, E.L. The Book of Daniel (Random House, New York 2007) p. 42.
25 For Daniel is notexercising political freedom per se – he submits to his enslavement. But in certain situationshe
refuses to yield his existential (Kierkegaard) or spiritual freedom (Merton).

8. Bibliography
Davis, Dale Ralph The Message of Daniel (Intervarsity,Downers Grove 2013).
Doctorow, E.L. The Book of Daniel (Random House,New York 2007).
Keil, C.F. The Book of Daniel (Keil and Delitzsch Commentary of the Old Testament Vol. 9,Hendricksen,
Peabody 1866). Used primarily for textual/grammatical.
Merrill Willis, Amy C. Dissonance and the Drama of Divine Sovereignty in the Book of Daniel (T& T
Clark, London 2010).
Han, Jin Hee Daniel’sSpiel,(University Press of America, Lanham 2008).
Hebbard, Aaron B. Reading Daniel as a Text in Theological Hermeneutics (Princeton Theological
Monograph Series 109.Pickwick Publications, Eugene 2009)
Holm, Tawny L. Of Courtiers and Kings: The Biblical Daniel Narratives and Ancient Story-Collections
(Eisenbrauns, In, 2013).
Niskanen, Paul The Human and the Divine in History:Herodotus and the Book of Daniel (T&T Clark,
London 2004)
Seow, C.L., Daniel (Westminster John Know Press,Louisville 2003)
Sheetz, Jordan M. The Concept of Canonical Intertextuality and the Book of Daniel (James
Clarke & Co, Cambridge, 2011).
Valenta, David M. Crossing Boundaries: Feminist Perspectives on the Stories of Daniel and
Susanna (chapter 14 of Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Retrospect, Sheffield
Press, Sheffield 2013).
Wilson, Gerard H. “The Prayer of Daniel 9: Reflection on Jeremiah 29.” Journal for the Study of
the Old Testament 48 (1990).