Daniel's 70 Weeks: The Arithmetic and the Debate

The limits

What the evidence does not settle

1. The starting decree is debated even within apologetic circles: Artaxerxes 458 BC (Ezra 7), 445 BC (Nehemiah 2), or 444 BC (Hoehner). The length of the "year" (360-day prophetic vs. 365.25-day solar) changes the endpoint. The relationship between the sixty-ninth and seventieth weeks - consecutive or separated by a "gap" (the dispensationalist reading) - is internally debated within apologetic scholarship. The composition date of Daniel itself (sixth-century BC per tradition vs. second-century BC per critical consensus) frames the entire discussion.

2. 2nd-century vaticinium ex eventu, Onias III as mashiach

3. The 360-day "prophetic year" is imported into the passage, not read out of it. Daniel 9 says "sevens" and nothing about the length of a year; Israel's calendar was lunisolar and intercalated. Keep every other assumption and count 483 ordinary years from 445 BC and the total lands in the late 30s AD, nowhere near a triumphal entry. The precision of Anderson's result is manufactured by the convention he supplies, and the same is true of Hoehner's revision.

4. There are four candidate starting decrees — Cyrus in 538, Darius in 520, Artaxerxes to Ezra in 458, Artaxerxes to Nehemiah in 445/444 — spanning roughly ninety years, and the freedom to choose among them is by itself enough to reach almost any endpoint. Critical commentators add that the word in Daniel 9:25 (dabar, a word going forth) is the same word used of the divine word to Jeremiah at 9:2 and to Daniel himself at 9:23, which points to Jeremiah's oracle rather than to any Persian rescript.

5. The Maccabean reading (John J. Collins, Daniel, Hermeneia, 1993; Hartman and Di Lella, Daniel, Anchor Bible, 1978) fits the clauses in order and without arithmetic: the anointed one "cut off" is Onias III, murdered in 171 BC; the prince who comes is Antiochus IV; the abomination is the altar of 167 BC; and the half-week in which sacrifice ceases is the three years of desecration to the rededication in 164. The correspondence is textual rather than computed, which is precisely its claimed advantage.

6. The strongest single argument for a second-century date is not in chapter 9 at all. Daniel 11 tracks Seleucid dynastic history in fine detail down to Antiochus IV's last campaign and then predicts his death wrongly. That seam — accurate to a point, then astray — is where critical scholarship locates the boundary between history written backwards and genuine forecast, and it dates the composition to the years just before 164 BC.

7. The Masoretic accents place an athnach after "seven weeks," which yields two separate anointed figures, one after seven weeks and another after sixty-two, rather than a single 483-year span; the RSV, NRSV and JPS translate it that way. And nothing in the text separates the sixty-ninth week from the seventieth: the gap now stretched across it is approaching two thousand years, longer than the prophecy itself, and a method that permits an unbounded interval can accommodate any outcome at all.