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Answering Daniel 9 Questions From the Hebrew Text: Daniel 9:25

Last time, I answered two questions. What is the unit of measurement in this prophecy? And, has it already been completed?  The unit of measurement was the shemittah year and shemittah period. And I went over the seven items to be fulfilled within the seventy sevens, none of which have been completed yet. We discovered that the tamid offering desolation, 2300 until evening and morning, must be fulfilled before the finish of the seventy sevens, and also that the ark of the covenant must be recovered to anoint the most holy place with the original oil. We also discovered that Israel will pledge faithfulness to Messiah before the end. This time period is also set to bring in everlasting righteousness for Jerusalem and Israel, to put down the rebellion of Satan, to shut him up, and to purge inquity from Israel and Jerusalem.

Some of you may be wondering about the passage in Jeremiah 3:16–17 concerning the Ark. The prophecy is true for the time period when the throne of the Most High, which is in heaven, comes down to Jerusalem. The meaning of this passage is that the Ark simply will not be needed anymore because the heavenly throne has come to earth. But before then. Before the end of the Seventy sevens, the original ark may be restored to the Third Temple when the Temple is rebuilt, because at first, when Messiah Yeshua restores the kingdom to Israel, he will be spiritually present with Israel as a nation in the Spirit, just as he is now spiritually present with the remnant of Israel in exile in every assembly and family of Israel.

Some will call my words speculation. But I hope for the best hope, and I do my best to base my hope on the best explanation from the Scriptural data. Sometimes, there is more than one possible explanation. I hope to have no fight with anyone about what does not really matter at present. On the other hand, I wish to say what does matter along the way, like faithfulness to Messiah, and acknowledging that he is true Almighty and Everlasting Life. Also, if anyone has a disagreement with me, I do listen to exhortation. But I have discovered that online exhortations most often evolve into an attack concerning indisputable truths, and thus interaction quickly becomes toxic, not so much to me but certainly to those who have to listen alongside. And believe me, I've fought those battles, but I wish to take from them only the knowledge gained and to present the truth in the most positive way possible without any toxic rancor. The worst possible outcome of a battle is for someone to steal my joy with words. And believe me, that can happen even if you technically win the battle. People are fragile, including me, and the soul needs nurture. Most often, I would rather not "win" a debate if winning it creates hard feelings that did not exist before.

   

On the screen, I have put the whole text of vs. 25. I know it might be small, but this is the only time you will see the whole thing, as I will extract the rest with close-ups. It says, most literally, "And thou should know, and thou should pay attention. From [the] going forth of [the] word for making restoration and for building Yerushalayim until an Anointed Leader be sevens, seven; and sevens, sixty and two. She will return, and she will have been built spaciously and diligently, and in the distress of the times."

I have added some the's into the text in my reading. Let's drill into the first two words:

   

If you notice the extra qamets vowel at the end of these verbs, it stands for the subjunctive mood, also called volative or cohortative in Hebrew. The sense is that thou "should" or thou will want to know, and that thou should or thou will want to pay attention. The Messenger of YHWH, speaking here, wishes us to understand this part of the prophecy in particular. Pay attention, gain insight, ponder it, and consider it. He is inviting us to understand his words.

   

"From [the] going forth of [the] word for making restored and for building Yerushalayim." The question we want to discover the answer to here is, "When was the starting point of the Seventy Sevens?"

The verb שׁוּב is the root of the word "for making restored." This verb root can mean to cause something to return a previous state or to cause a return somewhere. I read the words "for making restored Yerushalayim in both senses.  Both were done under Nehemiah. Nehemiah restored the walls of the city, and then they caused the city to be reinhabited. According to Nehemiah 11:1, they cast lots to bring 1 out of every 10 people in the province of Judea to live in the city.

The word to rebuild the city is given in Nehemiah 2: "Then the king said to me, "What are you requesting?" So I prayed to the God of Heaven. And I said to the king, "If it pleases the king, and if your servant has found favor in your sight, that you send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers' graves, that I may rebuild it."  And the king said to me (the queen sitting beside him), "How long will you be gone, and when will you return?" So it pleased the king to send me when I had given him a time....Now the king had sent with me officers of the army and horsemen."

The rebuilding of the city is specifically connected to restoring the walls that had recently been broken down. According to Nehemiah 1:3, "And they said unto me, The remnant that are left of the captivity there in the province are in great affliction and reproach: the wall of Jerusalem also is broken down, and the gates thereof are burned with fire."

The backstory is this. In the later end of the reign of Xerxes, under the eye of Esther and Mordecai as the Prime Minister of Persia, they were rebuilding the city of Jerusalem, even though no decree had been issued for it. The people just went ahead and rebuilt it. Then came the reign of Artaxerxes I. They were almost finished rebuilding it when the revolt of Inaros broke out in Egypt in 458 BC. Judah's enemies complained to the king about the city and slandered Judah, saying that when they finished the city, they too would rebel, and so the king made them stop building the city. But the king reserved it for himself to issue a decree to rebuild it. For he states in Ezra 4:21, "until a decree is made by me." The revolt of Inaros lasted until 454 BC. But a few years later, in 449 BC to 446 BC, the Persian Satrap Megabyzus revolted against the king, and so Judea was cut off from the Persian Empire for a time. At the end of this revolt, when the armies of the king and the armies of the Satrap were fighting, the local enemies of Judah took occasion to take revenge on Jerusalem. They broke down the walls and burned the gates with fire. This is the reason that Nehemiah received the news from his brother as fresh news and went into mourning.

For this reason, Nehemiah's work was a repair job on the walls and the gates after the city had been rebuilt by earlier efforts, though without a decree from the crown. And this is why his work was done in 52 days.

Besides Nehemiah, other times are proposed to begin the prophecy. Jewish interpreters begin with the destruction of the city by Babylon. But this desparate move was engineered to avoid any connection to Messiah Yeshua. Some scholars try to connect it to the decree in Ezra 1:3, "Whoever is among you of all his people, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel—he is the God who is in Jerusalem" (ESV), but this view also denies any fulfillment by Messiah since it was too soon, and no mention is made of rebuilding the city in this passage.

Most fixate on the decree in Ezra 7:13, "I make a decree that anyone of the people of Israel or their priests or Levites in my kingdom, who freely offers to go to Jerusalem, may go with you. 14 For you are sent by the king and his seven counselors to make inquiries about Judah and Jerusalem according to the Law of your God." But this is a similarly desparate move. When Ezra arrived, Jerusalem didn't need to be built or inhabited. The city had already been restored  and the people to it.

What exposes the Ezra-Decree theory as faulty is that Ezra did not go to Jerusalem on the date that its advocates suppose. They assumed that because the book of Ezra comes before Nehemiah that Ezra speaks of Artaxerxes I in connection to himself in Ezra 7. They assumed that the covenant formed in Daniel 9:27 to cause the sacrifice and offering to cease was Messiah himself. As we shall see, this isn't correct. They also, like the Jewish interpreters, generally said that the Seventy Sevens were over and done with. But in the previous video, I demonstrated that they cannot be, because seven items listed in vs. 24 have not been completed.

So only Nehemiah can meet the detailed criteria in this passage. The year he went to rebuild the city, and repopulate it, was 445 BC. How do we arrive at 445 BC since the BC/AD system was not used then? Nehemiah states it was the 20th year of Artaxerxes. For sound reasons, scholars do not doubt that this was Artaxerxes I. The Venus Astronomical Table VAT 5047 supplies sufficient planetary and lunar observations to securely date his 11th year to 454 BC. The 20th year is 9 years later, in 445 BC. Even without this tablet, there are sufficient other records to arrive at the same conclusion.

   

On the last word of this clause, the Masoretic Text places a major disjunctive accent, e.g. שִׁבְעָ֑ה. That's the glyph that looks like the upside-down y between the ayin and the heh. The force of this accent is that of a period or semicolon. This implies that two anointeds are to be comprehended in the one usage of מָשִׁיחַ here, "until [an] anointed leader be sevens seven; and sevens, sixty and two." That is, an anointed comes at the end of seven sevens, and an anointed comes at the end of sixty two sevens. To make this point clearer, we could just translate the waw with the word "also" instead of "and", e.g., "until an anointed leader, be sevens seven; also sevens sixty and two."

   

This is what the traditional accent mark implies. We should not attribute the placement of the accent here to Rabbinic mischief, though there is certainly mischief in what they make of it. But the very fact that the text does not say "sixty and nine sevens" with respect to one anointed suggests there are two. The breaking of the time into two subsets suggests two anointeds.

So from 445/444 BC, we move forward seven sevens, or seven shemittah years, and come to the year 403/402 BC, which is the seventh of the seven sevens. Ezra sets out from Persia in 398 BC and arrives and finishes his reform work in 397 BC before the 62 sevens begin.  Ezra says it was the 7th year of Artaxerxes, which we know was Artaxerxes II.

We can also determine from the priestly line that Ezra served as governor of Judea after Nehemiah. Nehemiah was contemporary to Eliashib, and Ezra to Johanan. It has also been pointed out that if Ezra came 13 years before Nehemiah, he was such a complete failure that he would never be worthy of his position after having neglected to teach the Torah. Ezra surely was present in Jerusalem with Nehemiah as a young priest who read the Torah to the people, but at that time he had none of the stature or the mandate he was given after seven sabbatical years passed. Nehemiah was the senior statesman before Ezra's career advanced.

The sixty two sevens bring us forward to the second anointed, which is Messiah Yeshua himself. The 62nd sabbath year was AD 32/33. When it finished, Messiah was in the last half year of his ministry, from Tishri AD 33 to Nisan AD 34.

   

"She will be restored."  "She" refers to the city, that is, Jerusalem.  "And she will have been built spaciously." Nehemiah records that the city was large for the number of workers in it and the number of people in it, and few houses were built. So it was spacious. R'chov also means street, on account of a street being a wide space between buildings. But the word appears to have the force of an adverb here.

"And dilegently."  As they finished it in 52 days, they were really diligent about the work.

"And in the distress of the times." One only has to read the book of Nehemaih to understand the threats that surrounded his work from all kinds of enemies.