Daniel9chapter 9

Daniel 9:1-2

Darius the Mede, son of Ahasuerus, is made king over the Chaldean kingdom, a figure the commentators cannot pin to a single monument, and the positions run from a separate ruler under Cyrus, commonly proposed as Gubaru or Cyaxares, to a title for Cyrus himself, named here with their holders rather than settled. In the first year of this reign Daniel understands by books the number of years the word of the Lord gave to Jeremiah, that the desolations of Jerusalem would run seventy years, the thread the Jeremiah brief already verifies at 25:11-12 and 29:10. Daniel reads Jeremiah's own scroll as Scripture even in his own generation, and the reading drives him straight to prayer rather than to calculation alone.

Daniel 9:3-6

Daniel sets his face to seek the Lord by prayer, supplication, fasting, sackcloth and ashes, the full apparatus of national mourning, and the confession that follows runs in the same key as Ezra's in Ezra 9 and the Levites' in Nehemiah 9, we have sinned repeated until it becomes the prayer's own refrain. He counts himself inside the guilt he shares by nation rather than by deed, since the youth who refused the king's food in chapter one has nothing personal to confess, and the bench reads this identification as the same pattern Moses and Nehemiah both carry, a righteous man praying as one of the guilty people. The prayer names no merit of its own from the first word.

Daniel 9:7-14

The confession turns forensic: righteousness belongeth unto thee, but unto us confusion of faces, and the curse poured upon Israel is named as the very curse written in the law of Moses, the covenant sanctions of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 come due. Daniel prays as a man who has read his own nation's indictment and signs it rather than disputing it, all this evil is come upon us, yet we made not our prayer before the Lord, admitting the neglect that let the judgment run its course. The Lord is righteous in all his works, the confession states, even the work of Jerusalem's own devastation.

Daniel 9:15-19

The appeal turns to plea, grounded in the Exodus itself, the Lord who brought his people out of Egypt with a mighty hand and gotten himself renown, asked now to act again for his own name's sake rather than for any righteousness of theirs. It rises to the fourfold cry of verse nineteen, O Lord, hear, O Lord, forgive, O Lord, hearken and do, which the older writers set beside Moses' intercession at the golden calf as one of Scripture's great pleadings for a whole nation. Daniel asks nothing on the ground of merit, we do not present our supplications before thee for our righteousnesses, but for thy great mercies, the confession's own last word before the answer comes.

Daniel 9:20-23

While Daniel is yet speaking, confessing his own sin and his people's, the man Gabriel returns, the same messenger of chapter eight, touching him about the time of the evening sacrifice, an offering that had not been made in the ruined temple for decades yet still marks the hour. Gabriel tells him the commandment came forth at the very beginning of his supplications, before the prayer was finished, the answer already sent the moment the praying began. Daniel is called a man greatly beloved, a title given him three times across the book, here and twice more at 10:11 and 10:19, each occasion opening a fresh unveiling of what is to come.

Daniel 9:24

Seventy weeks are determined upon Daniel's people and holy city, and six purposes are named for them in one breath: to finish the transgression, make an end of sins, make reconciliation for iniquity, bring in everlasting righteousness, seal up vision and prophecy, and anoint the most Holy. The traditional and dispensational reading, the site's own tradition, hears in these six purposes the finished work of the cross and the kingdom yet to be established in full; an older and a critical line confines the whole span to the Maccabean crisis and the rededication that followed it. Both are named with their holders, since the six purposes state the scope and the fulfillment itself is precisely what the positions divide over.

Daniel 9:25

From the going forth of the commandment to restore and build Jerusalem to Messiah the Prince runs seven weeks and threescore and two weeks, sixty-nine sevens in all, and the street and wall are rebuilt in troublous times exactly as Nehemiah's own record describes the work. The traditional line dates the commandment to Artaxerxes' decree of Nehemiah 2, and Missler's Daniel's Seventy Weeks works the sixty-nine sevens of prophetic years forward to Messiah's public presentation, while other readings date the terminus to an earlier decree or take the whole span typologically rather than as a chronometer. The positions are named with their holders and no date is set on this page beyond the ancient decrees the text and Nehemiah both already record.

Daniel 9:26

After the sixty-two weeks Messiah is cut off, but not for himself, a phrase the bench reads as substitutionary, dying not for his own sin but another's, and the timing places the cutting off after the sixty-nine weeks rather than within the seventieth. The people of the prince that shall come then destroy the city and the sanctuary, the near-universal reading applying this to Rome's legions under Titus in AD 70, decades after Messiah's own death, the prince himself distinct from his people. The end comes with a flood and desolations determined unto the end of the war, language the older writers read as the whole span of trouble running from the cross to the temple's fall.

Daniel 9:27

The final week opens with a covenant confirmed with many, then broken in its midst, sacrifice and oblation made to cease, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, the same phrase the book itself carries forward to 11:31 and 12:11 and the Lord cites at Matt 24:15 as still future in his own mouth, per the book's own thread. The traditional dispensational reading sets a gap between the sixty-ninth and seventieth weeks, the final week reserved for a still-future fulfillment; other readings read the sixty-two-and-one-week sequence as continuous, closing near the Jewish war. Both are named with their holders, and the parking order keeps any date or modern application off this page.