Link to this page

https://gebible.app/messianic-prophecies/eschatological/seventy-weeks

Messianic Prophecies

Daniel 9:25-26

Eschatological

Show this passage in

WEB

Daniel 9:25-26

“Know therefore and discern that from the going out of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem to the Anointed One, the prince, will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks. It will be built again, with street and moat, even in troubled times. After the sixty-two weeks the Anointed One will be cut off, and will have nothing. The people of the prince who come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end will be with a flood, and war will be even to the end. Desolations are determined.

Read in context

Show the surrounding verses

“Know therefore and discern that from the going out of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem to the Anointed One, the prince, will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks. It will be built again, with street and moat, even in troubled times. After the sixty-two weeks the Anointed One will be cut off, and will have nothing. The people of the prince who come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end will be with a flood, and war will be even to the end. Desolations are determined. He will make a firm covenant with many for one week. In the middle of the week he will cause the sacrifice and the offering to cease. On the wing of abominations will come one who makes desolate; and even to the full end, and that determined, wrath will be poured out on the desolate.”

The fulfillment reading

How this passage is read as pointing to the Messiah.

On the fulfillment reading, the seventy-weeks chronology, calculated from Artaxerxes' decree (c. 445 BCE per Nehemiah 2:1), points to approximately 30-33 CE for the anointed one being "cut off," aligning with the traditional dating of Jesus' crucifixion. Sir Robert Anderson's calculation in "The Coming Prince" (1894) is taken to work out to the exact day of the triumphal entry. This reading takes "cut off and shall have nothing" (v. 26) to describe death without succession, fitting crucifixion, and reads the subsequent destruction of "the city and the sanctuary" (v. 26b) as matching the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.

The counter-reading

How this passage is read within its own context.

On the critical reading, the Anderson calculation depends on several contestable choices: 360-day "prophetic years," the selection of one decree among several options (Cyrus 538, Darius 520, Artaxerxes 458 or 445), and adjustments for calendar conversions — and different starting points yield radically different endpoints. This reading places the text's own context in the Maccabean crisis: the "abomination that desolates" (9:27) is taken to match the altar to Zeus that Antiochus IV erected in the temple in 167 BCE, as described in 1 Maccabees 1:54, and the murdered anointed one to fit Onias III, whose assassination is recorded in 2 Maccabees 4:34. On this account the passage's historical accuracy for the 2nd century BCE and its vagueness for any other period is the standard evidence for a Maccabean-era composition.

The fulfillment reading has two provenance panels and the counter-reading one. The extra panel records how the New Testament takes up these passages — including where it does not — because it is a canon that cites them, the fulfillment reading's own textual basis. The counter-reading engages the same passages through the Jewish exegetical and translational tradition — the Targums, the Talmud, the rabbinic commentators, and the medieval exegetes — with no parallel canon that cites them as its own textual basis. That difference is about which sources exist, not a judgment reached here.

How the New Testament uses this passage

The New Testament does not directly quote or allude to this passage.

In the Christian exegetical tradition

How the passage is read as messianic in the Christian interpretive tradition — the patristic writers, the Reformers, and later confessional commentators, named and dated in order from earliest to latest; a direct quotation is shown where a public-domain translation of the work survives.

  • Julius Africanus Sextus Julius Africanus Early Church / Ante-Nicene · c. 160 – c. 240 CE (Chronographiai, early 3rd c.)

    Africanus produced one of the earliest Christian computations of the seventy weeks, reckoning the 490 years from the twentieth year of Artaxerxes (which he placed c. 444 BCE) to the time of Christ. Finding that ordinary solar years overshot the target, he argued that the Hebrew reckoning employed shorter lunar years and converted the interval accordingly, so that the seventy weeks terminate at Christ's appearance. He read the destruction of the city and sanctuary (v. 26) as fulfilled in the later Roman ruin of Jerusalem.

    “And reckoning from that point, we make up seventy weeks to the time of Christ. For if we begin to reckon from any other point, and not from this, the periods will not correspond, and very many odd results will meet us.” Extant Fragments of the Chronography, Fragment XVI, on Dan. 9:25-26 — Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 6, ed. Roberts & Donaldson (Am. ed. A. C. Coxe), 1886

    Chronographiai (Chronographies), Book 5 — surviving only in fragments preserved by Eusebius and George Syncellus

  • Eusebius of Caesarea Eusebius Pamphili Early Church / patristic · c. 260 – 339 CE (Demonstratio Evangelica, c. 314–318 CE)

    Eusebius devoted extended argument to Daniel 9, treating the succession of 'anointed ones' as the line of Jewish high priests and rulers that culminated in Christ. He identified the anointed one who is 'cut off' after the sixty-two weeks (v. 26) with Christ, and read the ensuing destruction of the city and sanctuary as the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, marking the end of the Jewish polity. He canvassed more than one chronological scheme rather than insisting on a single arithmetic.

    Demonstratio Evangelica (Proof of the Gospel), Book 8, ch. 2

  • E. W. Hengstenberg Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg Confessional Lutheran · 1802 – 1869 (Christologie des Alten Testaments, 1829–1835)

    Hengstenberg mounted a detailed scholarly defense of the messianic reading against the rationalist Maccabean interpretation then dominant in German criticism. He dated the terminus a quo to the twentieth year of Artaxerxes and identified the anointed one cut off after the sixty-two weeks (v. 26) with Christ, whose death he held to be the prophecy's central subject. He argued that the passage's structure points beyond the Antiochene crisis to the atoning work described in v. 24.

    Christologie des Alten Testaments (Christology of the Old Testament) — the dissertation on the seventy weeks

  • Sir Robert Anderson Sir Robert Anderson, KCB British dispensational / Plymouth Brethren · 1841 – 1918 (The Coming Prince, 1894)

    Anderson calculated the sixty-nine weeks (483 years) using 360-day 'prophetic years' measured from the decree of Artaxerxes in Nisan 445 BCE (Nehemiah 2), arriving at the day of Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. He read 'cut off, and shall have nothing' (v. 26) as the crucifixion, which leaves the anointed one without earthly succession, and the subsequent destruction of city and sanctuary as the Roman ruin of 70 CE.

    The Coming Prince

In the Jewish exegetical tradition

How the passage is read in the Jewish interpretive tradition — the Targums, the Talmud, the rabbinic commentators, and the medieval exegetes, named and dated in order from earliest to latest; a direct quotation is shown where a public-domain translation of the work survives.

  • Saadia Gaon Saadia ben Joseph Geonic · 10th c.

    Attempts his own chronological calculation, arriving at different figures than the Christian tradition.

  • Rashi Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki Ashkenazi · 11th c.

    Interprets the anointed one who is "cut off" as Agrippa II, the last Jewish king, who lost power during the Roman war. Manuscript traditions vary.

    Jewish exegesis reads the ‘anointed one who is cut off’ outside the Christian frame: Rashi identifies him with Agrippa II, the last Jewish king, and Saadia Gaon and Abarbanel each work out chronologies of the seventy weeks that do not terminate in Jesus’ lifetime. No public-domain English translation of Rashi, Saadia, or Abarbanel on Daniel 9 is available to quote — all three survive in English only in modern, copyrighted editions (nineteenth-century treatments such as Pusey’s are polemical paraphrases rather than translations). Read in context

  • Abarbanel Isaac Abarbanel Sephardi · 15th c.

    Provides an extended alternative chronology that does not align with Jesus' lifetime.

Where this stands

Daniel 9:24-27, the "Seventy Weeks" prophecy, is one of the most chronologically debated passages in biblical scholarship. An angel reveals to Daniel that seventy "weeks" (shavu'im, likely meaning "sevens" of years = 490 years) are decreed. After sixty-two "weeks," "an anointed one shall be cut off." Critical scholars identify two "anointed ones": the first (v. 25) is debated — candidates include the high priest Joshua ben Jehozadak (c. 538 BCE) or Cyrus the Great, both of whom are called "anointed" in post-exilic texts — and the second (v. 26) is most commonly identified as the high priest Onias III, murdered in 171 BCE during the Seleucid crisis. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 97a-b) discusses the chronology with varying calculations. The passage was composed during the Maccabean period to make theological sense of the temple's desecration.