Daniel 9:25 Decree?

[The Author of my Faith]

Greetings, It has been a while since I have been on this board. I do not want to rehash what has probably already been discussed 1000 times on his board , but I am teaching along with one of my elders the Books of Ezra/Nehemiah during our Adult Sunday School and this Sunday we come to Nehemiah 2. We have 2 more weeks in Nehemiah 2 and then take a break for summer. We have a lot of new believers and people who have come out of Charismatic churches who attend our church now and I want to help them see how these books fit into the overarching story of the Bible. So Sunday we are going to look at Daniel 9:24-27 to see how Ezra/Nehemiah are connected to the 70 Weeks. This is not going to be an in-depth study of every view but an overview of the Seventy Weeks.

At this time, as an Amil, I believe that the 70 Weeks or 490 Years is not to be understood as literal. Even within an Amil framework, it seems there are different views on this. I see this passage as Apocalyptic and read it as I would number in Revelation. I see verses 26 and 27 as recapitulation and both refer to the Finished Work of Christ from our perspective but do have a view to the final day of the Lord.

I think the only consensus about this passage among Post/Amil/Historical Premil/Dispensational is that it is not an easy passage to understand

I have a pastor friend who is Reformed/Baptist and recommended The Coming Prince by Sir Robert Anderson which I started to read but he seems to take the Nehemiah 2 view which I think the Dispensational view also takes. I don't know much about him except that he was associated with Darby and the Plymouth Brethren which is where Dipsenationalsim was born. So not sure if his view is leaning dispensational.

QUESTION:
So here is my question. Out of what I see to be the options for the 4 Persian Decrees (Cyrus 538 BC, Darius 520BC, Artaxerxes in Ezra 7 457 BC, and Artaxerxes in Nehemiah 2 445 BC), does any of the math come out to the exact number of 490 years? Because I don't see it. I see a lot of number crunching that seems to be grasping for anything to make the numbers work which is why I am right now not taking the numbers as a literal Seven Weeks or 490 Years.

Thoughts?

Thank you

 

[iainduguid]

Hi Steve,
First to note that nowhere in the passage does it say "490 years"; it says "seventy sevens". Which immediately should make you think of Matt 18:22 ("How often should I forgive my brother?") The point is a number of ultimate completeness, not exact literality.

This section in Daniel is also triggered by meditation on Jeremiah's seventy years of exile (Dan. 9:2) - yet that itself is not an exact period of seventy years but a round number. So if the historical period of seventy years that Daniel is pondering is not a literal number, why would the apocalyptic figure of seventy sevens be literal?

You can find more details in my commentary, if you are interested.

 

[The Author of my Faith]

Hi Steve,
First to note that nowhere in the passage does it say "490 years"; it says "seventy sevens". Which immediately should make you think of Matt 18:22 ("How often should I forgive my brother?") The point is a number of ultimate completeness, not exact literality.

This section in Daniel is also triggered by meditation on Jeremiah's seventy years of exile (Dan. 9:2) - yet that itself is not an exact period of seventy years but a round number. So if the historical period of seventy years that Daniel is pondering is not a literal number, why would the apocalyptic figure of seventy sevens be literal?

You can find more details in my commentary, if you are interested.

Thank you, Iain, I listened to one of your sermons recently on the Seventy Weeks. And I read your commentary. Yes, I agree that 490 is not mentioned and that is why I hold to the nonliteral view as you mentioned in your excellent commentary (below) and I loved how you connected it to sanctification, very encouraging!

I am just trying to find out if anyone has been able to get to a literal 490, which I don't see, and as you said in your commentary many take the seventy sevens as a literal 490. I would like to see how they got to 490. If they did?



God’s Timescale
Thus far, the message Gabriel has brought to Daniel is good news. However, there is also bad news to come. This promised transformation—the new covenant of which Jeremiah spoke—will not arrive at the end of the seventy years of the exile. In fact, that period of judgment is simply a small part of a much larger plan of God, a plan which will not be completed in a period of seventy years but will take “seventy sevens” to work itself out (Dan. 9:24). God’s timescale is far bigger than Daniel had imagined.


Many understand these “seventy sevens” to be a literal period of 490 years. Since seven and seventy are both numbers of completeness in the Bible, others understand the figure that results when they are multiplied together as representing the ultimate in completeness. This is certainly the case in Matthew 18. In that passage, Jesus is responding to Peter’s question as to how often he should forgive his brother when he sinned against him. Should he forgive him as many as seven times? In reply, Jesus told him to forgive his brother seventy times seven times (Matt. 18:22). No one interprets this number literally, as if Peter were obligated to forgive his brother 490 times, but not on the 491st occasion. Rather, they recognize that the point Jesus was making was that Peter’s perspective on forgiveness was too small and needed to be expanded. So too here, the vision is challenging Daniel’s perspective on the timescale needed to do away with transgression and achieve restoration. It would not take a mere seventy years to accomplish a transformation in the hearts and lives of God’s people but seventy times seven to accomplish a complete and ultimate victory over sin and evil. However, this bad news is not intended to cause Daniel to despair. Even though its coming will occur after his lifetime, the promised new covenant will arrive in due season and it will accomplish everything that God has designed for it.


We need to hear the challenge that this passage poses to our expectations of the way God works in our lives. We live in the age of the “instant,” when we expect everything to come to us now, if not sooner. To satisfy our impatience, we have invented meals that can be prepared rapidly in a microwave, and rice that takes no more than a minute to cook. People can barely remember the days when they had to wait for televisions and radios to warm up before the program came on. How did we ever endure the suspense? The same “instant” attitude also carries over into our relationships, both with God and with our neighbor. We want instant sanctification for ourselves, demanding God to transform our lives in the twinkling of an eye and to remove immediately the sins that so frustrate us. We likewise want our spouses and our children to be made holy at once, or by next Tuesday at the very latest. Since we know that it is God’s will for us to be made holy ultimately, we expect it to be accomplished immediately!


Yet Daniel 9 shows us that God’s timescale for the sanctification of his people and the renovation of the world is far larger than we typically think. He is not as concerned as we are with fixing us right away, nor is he in the business of transforming our friends and family members into perfect saints immediately. To be sure, he will accomplish the complete transformation and sanctification of our lives eventually. As someone once said, “The mills of God grind slow, but they grind exceeding small.” He will not leave the project half-done, like a do-it-yourself project begun with enthusiasm and left to gather dust after our interest in it waned. Yet at the same time his work in us is a long-term project, not a transformation that will be accomplished by the wave of a magic wand. Our sanctification will literally take a lifetime—our lifetime—to be complete. We are all works of renovation in progress, and will be so until the day we die.

Daniel (Reformed Expository Commentary | REC)​

by Iain M. Duguid

 

[arapahoepark]

I believe that EJ Young in Daniel takes a similar approach. I could probably scan it if you want.

 

[Calvin Codger]

As a Partial-Preterist Postmillennial....
I understand it to predict the coming of the Messiah within a specific time frame of 490 years. Most likely, the clock started ticking
with Artaxerxes' decree aroudn 458 B.C. (Neh 2: 1). This places the anticpiated Messiah at the time of Jesus. This comports with the
"fact" that messianc expectation were very high in the first century. This prophecy probably fueled the motivation behind the Jewish
wars and therefore was probably a factor in precipitating the destruction of the temple.

 

[iainduguid]

The theory sort of demands a decree in around 458 BC, if you are to get an exact 490 years. But what Nehemiah gets permission to do (is the word "decree" used?) is simply to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem; the city and temple has already been rebuilt long before.

If you consider the passage without the preconceived idea that it must be literal, the evidence points in a different direction, I think. Consider. Daniel has been pondering Jeremiah's prophecy of a seventy year exile (Jer 25:11-12; 29:10). That seventy year period is itself hard to nail down in an exact fashion: it begins with "the whole land becoming a ruin and a waste" (Jer. 25:11), in a prophecy about the future given in 605 BC (fourth year of Jehoiakim; 25:1). So it can't be before 605 B.C. and it sure sounds like 586 BC. But it ends, according to 25:12 with punishing the king of the Babylonians and destroying their land, which surely happened with the Persian capture of Babylon in 539 BC. On the other hand, it seems like the seventy year clock is still ticking in 520 BC, in the prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah (which makes sense if you are counting from 586). But then the seventy years ends not with the destruction of Babylon (as Jeremiah 25:12 insists) but with the building of the temple in 515 BC (still not exactly 70 years but who's counting? Unless you think the seventy must be literal, of course).

Now let's return to Daniel's pondering of this passage in 539 BC, the first year of Darius (Dan 9:1) . He not only knows the exile will end and Babylon will fall, he has just seen it fall! No wonder he's thinking Jer 25:12 has been fulfilled, the exile is at an end, and now we get to go home. It is time for God to fulfill his promises about the restoration of his people and land. So he prays specifically for those things (Dan. 9:1-19).

Then an angel comes to him and tells him "When you began to pray, a decree (dabar) went out and I've come to tell you about it..." (9:23). Then in verse 25, the angel says, "from the issuing of the decree (dabar) to restore and rebuild Jerusalem..." - a decree to answer exactly what Jeremiah had been praying for (9:15-19)! Shortly thereafter (538 BC), King Cyrus issued a decree that the Jews could return home and rebuild their temple.

Do you imagine that when he heard about Cyrus' decree to rebuild Jerusalem and his temple, Daniel sat there thinking, "I wonder when the decree the angel talked about is going to happen?" No the decree of the earthly king was merely the reflex of the heavenly decree that was issued a year earlier in response to Daniel's prayer! Talk about the prayer of a righteous man availing much! But that means the seventy sevens must begin in 538 BC. Which precludes a literal 490 years.

 

[The Author of my Faith]

I believe that EJ Young in Daniel takes a similar approach. I could probably scan it if you want.

Thank you, I am going to buy his commentary. Thanks

As a Partial-Preterist Postmillennial....
I understand it to predict the coming of the Messiah within a specific time frame of 490 years. Most likely, the clock started ticking
with Artaxerxes' decree aroudn 458 B.C. (Neh 2: 1). This places the anticpiated Messiah at the time of Jesus. This comports with the
"fact" that messianc expectation were very high in the first century. This prophecy probably fueled the motivation behind the Jewish
wars and therefore was probably a factor in precipitating the destruction of the temple.

Thank you Calvin. So that would be 32 A.D.? The only issue I see is that there does not seem to be a decree in Nehemiah 2? Am I wrong on this? Thanks

 

[The Author of my Faith]

The theory sort of demands a decree in around 458 BC, if you are to get an exact 490 years. But what Nehemiah gets permission to do (is the word "decree" used?) is simply to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem; the city and temple has already been rebuilt long before.

If you consider the passage without the preconceived idea that it must be literal, the evidence points in a different direction, I think. Consider. Daniel has been pondering Jeremiah's prophecy of a seventy year exile (Jer 25:11-12; 29:10). That seventy year period is itself hard to nail down in an exact fashion: it begins with "the whole land becoming a ruin and a waste" (Jer. 25:11), in a prophecy about the future given in 605 BC (fourth year of Jehoiakim; 25:1). So it can't be before 605 B.C. and it sure sounds like 586 BC. But it ends, according to 25:12 with punishing the king of the Babylonians and destroying their land, which surely happened with the Persian capture of Babylon in 539 BC. On the other hand, it seems like the seventy year clock is still ticking in 520 BC, in the prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah (which makes sense if you are counting from 586). But then the seventy years ends not with the destruction of Babylon (as Jeremiah 25:12 insists) but with the building of the temple in 515 BC (still not exactly 70 years but who's counting? Unless you think the seventy must be literal, of course).

Now let's return to Daniel's pondering of this passage in 539 BC, the first year of Darius (Dan 9:1) . He not only knows the exile will end and Babylon will fall, he has just seen it fall! No wonder he's thinking Jer 25:12 has been fulfilled, the exile is at an end, and now we get to go home. It is time for God to fulfill his promises about the restoration of his people and land. So he prays specifically for those things (Dan. 9:1-19).

Then an angel comes to him and tells him "When you began to pray, a decree (dabar) went out and I've come to tell you about it..." (9:23). Then in verse 25, the angel says, "from the issuing of the decree (dabar) to restore and rebuild Jerusalem..." - a decree to answer exactly what Jeremiah had been praying for (9:15-19)! Shortly thereafter (538 BC), King Cyrus issued a decree that the Jews could return home and rebuild their temple.

Do you imagine that when he heard about Cyrus' decree to rebuild Jerusalem and his temple, Daniel sat there thinking, "I wonder when the decree the angel talked about is going to happen?" No the decree of the earthly king was merely the reflex of the heavenly decree that was issued a year earlier in response to Daniel's prayer! Talk about the prayer of a righteous man availing much! But that means the seventy sevens must begin in 538 BC. Which precludes a literal 490 years.

Iaian, thanks, makes the most sense to me as well. I don't see a decree in Nehemiah 2 and it seems that it forces the issue for a decree to get to 490 when one is simply not there. Understanding Apocalyptic literature it just makes the most sense that 70 is not to be taken literally. As one preacher rightly stated when attempting to read Apocalyptic Literature literally we have huge problems, like in Revelation 17:9, she is either one big woman or those are some pretty small hills Thank you for your insight.