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Daniel 9:20-22
New Catholic Bible
Daniel 9:20-22
New Catholic Bible
20 Seventy Weeks Are Decreed.[a] While I was still speaking, still occupied with my prayer and confessing my sins and the sins of my people Israel and presenting my supplication to the Lord, my God, on behalf of his holy mountain— 21 while I was still speaking in prayer, the man Gabriel, whom I had seen previously in a vision, swooped down on me in rapid flight at the time of the evening sacrifice.
22 He then spoke these words to me: “Daniel, I have now come down to you to give you understanding.
Read full chapterFootnotes
- Daniel 9:20 This prophecy is one of the best known and most difficult of the Old Testament. In this coded and therefore obscure passage some think they discover figures that correspond to the coming of the Messiah and provide a means of calculating the end of the world. But the author, who is a contemporary of Antiochus IV and caught up in the daily tragedy of persecution, has other concerns than to offer hidden calculations. His purpose is to proclaim the proximate end of the oppression. His counting, like that of Jeremiah, starts with the beginning of the Exile in 587 B.C.; but the years become weeks of years, that is, periods of seven years. Thus, what was originally thought of in relation to the return from exile and the rebuilding of the temple is now shifted to apply to the age of Antiochus IV. The first seven weeks, or forty-nine years, cover rather well the duration of the Exile, since it was in 538 B.C. that the priest Joshua presided over the reestablishment of the Jewish community in Palestine; but the rebuilding of the temple came in 515 B.C. (see Ezr 3–6) and the rebuilding of the city walls in 445 B.C. (Neh 1–7). And the following sixty-two weeks no longer correspond to history; in fact, from the edict of Cyrus in 538 B.C., to the assassination of Onias III the high priest in 170 B.C. (he is the anointed one of v. 26), sixty-seven years are lacking for the figures to match. Did the author perhaps make a mistake in counting? For the final week, however, and this is the one that interests the author (v. 27), the prediction turns out well. The alliance of the intriguers and apostates around the tyrant, and the disorders introduced into Jewish life by the complicity of the upper clergy after the death of Onias, lasted a week, or about seven years, from 171–164 B.C. In 167 B.C., the daily sacrifice in the temple was suppressed and replaced by the worship of Zeus; this was the abomination that causes desolation or supreme horror (1 Mac 1:54). Three and a half years, or a half-week, later, Jewish worship will be restored by Judas Maccabeus, while Antiochus dies.
