Daniel9chapter 9

This chapter starts with a man reading his Bible. Daniel says he "understood by books" — he had Jeremiah's scroll, and in it the promise that Babylon's dominion would run seventy years and then the exile would end.

The timing is why he is on his knees. Babylon had just fallen. If the seventy years were counted from the first deportation in 605 BC, the clock was nearly out. Within a year or two Cyrus would issue the decree that sent the first group home.

What he does with a promise about to be fulfilled is the surprise. He does not celebrate. He fasts in sackcloth and ashes and confesses — and he does it in the first person plural. "We have sinned." Daniel, of all people, includes himself in the guilt that caused the exile.

The answer that comes is the passage called the seventy weeks: a span of seventy sevens decreed for Daniel's people and city, running from a decree to restore and build Jerusalem, in which transgression is finished and everlasting righteousness brought in — and in which an anointed one is cut off, and the city and sanctuary are destroyed again. Christians from the earliest centuries have read the cutting off as the crucifixion and the destruction as Rome's sack of Jerusalem in AD 70. How the weeks are counted has been debated for two thousand years and is still debated.