This EXCELLENT SAINT, who uttered the response, was THE ORACLE himself; who before appeared to Isaiah in glory, sitting on his throne between the Seraphim, Isai. vi. 1, and now appeared to Daniel, "as a man, standing before him," and bidding the other angel, whom he called Gabriel, to explain the vision to the prophet; who was so overpowered with the divine presence, that he fell on his face, in a deep sleep or trance, towards the earth, till Gabriel touched him, and restored him to his senses, and set him upright, and then explained to him, more particularly, (as we have seen,) the former historical part of the vision; concluding with a reference to the latter chronological part, or "vision of the evening-mornings," that it "was true," or would be verified by the accomplishment; but that the accomplishment was remote, or "for many days," and that "the vision was sealed," and its further disclosure shut up for the present.

66

Shocked at the calamities predicted to befal his people, during some long continued period of desolation and oppression, Daniel fainted, and was sick for some days. Afterwards he arose, and did the king's business. And he was astonished at the vision, but none understood" how the daily sacrifice should be taken away, or when the period of 2300 days should begin or end, viii. 15-27.

THE THIRD VISION.

Three years after, a further insight into the last mysterious vision was given to the prophet, immediately after his admirable prayer and confession of his own sins, and the sins of his people, and supplication for the holy mountain of his God; that his people might be restored from the Babylonian captivity, now drawing to a close, and the city be rebuilt: "Yea, while I was speaking in prayer, even the man Gabriel, whom I had seen in the foregoing vision, (viii. 16,) flying swiftly, touched me about the time of the evening oblation, and informed me, and spake to me, and said :

IX. 22. "O Daniel, I am now come forth to give thee understanding and information.

23. "At the beginning of thy supplications THE ORACLE came forth, and I am come to tell thee [His response,] for thou art greatly beloved. Therefore consider the matter, and understand the vision."

THE PROPHECY OF THE SEVENTY WEEKS *.

24. "Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people, and

This illustrious prophecy Sir Isaac Newton justly represents as the foundation of the Christian religion; for "we have, in this short prophecy, a prediction of all the main periods relating to the coming of THE MESSIAH; the time of his birth, that of his death, that of the rejection of the Jews, the duration of the Jewish war, whereby he caused the city and sanctuary to be destroyed, and the time of his second coming,” -"for it is not to be restrained to his first coming only." Newton on Daniel, p. 25, 137.

To deny these, and their application to JESUS CHRIST, has been the great object of Jewish writers. And David Levi, treading in the steps of his predecessors, has attempted to explain away the meaning of the prophecy in these respects, while he undesignedly verifies the present interpretation in others; and, upon the whole, is a valuable auxiliary to the present interpretations. See his Letters to Dr. Priestley. 1. He judiciously counts the time by weeks of years. "These seventy weeks," says he, " are, without doubt, 490 years." Thus adopting the authority of the ancient Versions, and most approved Jewish and Christian expositors, and rejecting the reveries of Michaelis, Dathe, Blaney, those Christian professors of Hebrew, who count not "70 weeks," but "70 seventies," 4900, or many seventies," by a vague and indefinite

hypothesis.

2. He correctly terminates the prophecy with the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, with Mede and Scaliger, A.D. 70.

3. Though he nominally begins the prophecy with the former destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, professing to follow the incorrect chronology of Ganz, (shewn before to fall short of the truth no less than 166 years,) yet, in reality, he dates the commencement from the time of Nehemiah's reform, B.C. 420, as may appear from the following sketch of his argument: Letters, &c. Part II. 80-102.

"The Jewish nation, at their return from Babylon, did not undergo a thorough reformation, but on the contrary, still continued in many of their sins; for, in the first place, they had not entirely put away the strange women, (Neh. xiii. 4—24,) neither did they give the proper portion to the Levites, (ver. 10,) they also profaned the sabbath, (ver. 15,) and oppressed each other with usury, (ver. 1—3.) And they persisted in their sins during the second temple. The prophet Daniel, therefore, foretold that GOD, of his long suffering toward Judah, would wait, not only seventy years, (as in the Babylonish captivity,) but even seven times seventy years; after which, their kingdom should be cast off, and their dominion cease, and they themselves return in captivity by the Romans."

4. And he thus excellently explains the magnificent exordium of the prophecy.

Seventy weeks are determined," 1. "to finish the transgression," i. e. IDOLATRY; 2. "to accomplish their sin," i. e. WHOREDOM; and 3. "to make atonement for iniquity," i. e. MURDER, which they added to their former sins, instead of repenting, during the second temple.

Here Levi candidly confesses the leading sins of his nation, especially that crying sin of MURDER, from "the murder of the prophet Zechariah the son of Barachiah, even between the sanctuary (vaov) and the altar," Matt. xxiii. 35, soon after their return, to the murder of JESUS CHRIST, which filled up the measure of theirs and their forefathers' iniquities, and which was retaliated by "the oppression, misery, and almost universal contempt under which, he complains, the Jewish nation are still labouring."—" All this was to come upon them," says he, "for the abominations which they had committed

upon thy holy city, to complete the transgression and consummate sins; to expiate iniquity, and introduce everlasting righte

during both the first and second temples." And he apprehends that "this is to last until they shall either thoroughly repent, or receive the full punishment for all their iniquities,” and then “to bring in everlasting righteousness," or by means of the restoration of the Jews, to bring all nations to the knowledge of the ONE TRUE GOD, Isai. ii. 2, 3, and xviii. 3, and Zeph. ver. 3-9. Letters, Part 1. and II. 5. He supposes the parenthetical prediction, ver. 25, to refer to the first return, after the Babylonish captivity, and "the continued troubles and alarms they underwent from their enemies, during the building of the temple and repairing the wall," as mentioned by Ezra, iv. 1-12, and Nehemiah, iv. 16. But this cannot be; for the promise to Daniel, "thou shalt return," was not fulfilled at the first return, which he survived, and soon after died in captivity; it remains, therefore, to be fulfilled, at the last return, at the resurrection of the just, as expressly repeated to Daniel at the close of the book. "But go thou thy way till the end, for thou shall rest [till then,] and shalt stand in thy lot at the end of [the 1260] days," xii. 13.

6. He rightly considers the important term, Dabar, both in ver. 23 and 25, as equivalent to the fuller expression, 127, Dabar Iahoh, "the word of the Lord," at the beginning of the chapter, ix. 2; and, indeed, that the PERSONAL WORD, or ORACLE, is meant in this prophecy, appears from the parallel prophecy of Ezekiel, evidently alluding to Daniel's intercession and supplication for his people, which THE ORACLE declared to Ezekiel should be ineffectual to avert the second captivity, even though it were supported on each side by those two most powerful intercessors, Noah and Job, Ezek. xiv. 12-20.

Levi justly censures the rendering of this term, "commandment," in the English Bible, "by which Christians have confounded the prophecy, and bewildered themselves, so as to have no fixed period from whence to begin the seventy weeks." See the preface to this volume.

7. The last clause of the exordium, "to anoint the Holy of Holies," he understands of "the consecration of the second temple." But the most learned Jewish doctors, Abarbanel, Manasseh ben Israel, &c. confess, that the Holy of Holies, or sanctuary of the second temple, was never anointed or honoured with the Shechinah, or divine glory, like Solomon's. And Nachmanides has given the true exposition: "This Holy of Holies is THE MESSIAH who is sanctified (or separated) from the sons of David." It should therefore be rendered THE SAINT OF SAINTS, to remove the ambiguity.

And THE SAINT OF SAINTS was actually "anointed with the HOLY GHOST, and with POWER," at his baptism, and again, at his transfiguration, Acts x. 38; and "with the oil of gladness above his fellows," at his resurrection, Psalm xlv. 7, ii. 7, Heb. i. 1—8. Levi unskilfully objects, that the emphatic, or demonstrative prefix, is wanting to up, Messiah, or "anointed;" but it is superfluous, because of "THE LEADER," to which it is adjoined.

And THE MESSIAH was also "THE LEADER," as we have seen that epithet applied to him, 1 Chron. v. 2, Isai.lv. 4, Matt. ii. 6, citing Micah v. 2. Both, therefore, are epithets of CHRIST; David Levi, then, is guilty of a palpable violation of the unity of the prophecy, (of which he can scarcely be conceived to have been ignorant,) when he split these terms; appyling Messiah, or the anointed, to king Agrippa, who, he says, was cut off by Vespasian, in the middle of the last week, A.D. 66; and the Leader, to Cyrus, ver. 25, and to Titus, ver. 26, thus introducing a trinity of persons into the prophecy, the most revolting and incomprehensible.

ousness; and to seal up SAINT OF SAINTS.

vision and prophecy, and ANOINT THE

The hypothesis indeed, confutes itself: Cyrus could not be the first leader, nor Titus the second. For the first was to come after seven weeks and sixty-two weeks, or sixtynine weeks, near the close of the prophecy. Nor could Cyrus come after the seven weeks singly, as he understands it; because the seven weeks actually commenced long after his death. And Titus could not be the second leader, because the word of the original is uniformly applied in the Old Testament, either to the kings of Israel or Judah, or to the rulers of their households, and never to a foreign or hostile prince. See Calasio's Concordance.

Agrippa was king of Galilee, and never was "anointed" king of the Jews; nor was he cut off in A. D. 66: for both he and his sister Berenice, (the mistress of Titus,) were alive in A. D. 69, when they assisted Vespasian against Vitellius. Josephus also cites two letters of Agrippa, written after his history of the Jewish war. And Photius, in his Bibliotheca, cites Justus the Tiberian, as representing that Agrippa received an enlargement of his kingdom from Vespasian; and died after a long reign of fifty-one years, in the third of Trajan, A. D. 100.

8. Levi renders literally the concise phrase, ver. 26, 1, “and not to him,” as if signifying "there shall be no more of him,” (Agrippa,) for “after his death, there shall be no more kingly power to the Jewish nation unto this day." But the Vulgate expresses its true meaning: Et non erit ejus populus qui eum negaturus est. "And the people that shall deny him shall not be his;" as Moses predicted,

"Their own iniquity hath corrupted his children, (now) not his,
A perverse and crooked generation," Deut. xxxii. 5.

9. Following the English Bible, Levi renders the Hebrew, Chanaph, “overspreading;" but it literally signifies "a wing,” and here probably denotes the same as #TEPVytov rov ispov, the "pinnacle of the temple," Matt. iv. 5, or the portico, or battlement of the temple, or "holy place," where “the abomination of desolation," or the idolatrous, and therefore abominable desolating standards of the Romans were to be “placed” at the siege, Matt. xxiv. 15. See Vol. I. p. 430. "The daily sacrifice, then absolutely taken away" at the destruction of the temple, was "virtually abrogated" when THE MESSIA was cut off, according to Eusebius. See Vol. I. p. 94–100.

P.S. The three aforesaid professors of Hebrew, Michaelis, Dathè, and Blaney, conspired to set aside the prophet Daniel's testimony to the violent death of the MESSIAH, by a most unwarrantable change of the received punctuation; reading the verb, actively, iachreth, "He shall cut off" [the people of the Jews,] instead of ichareth, passively, "he shall be cut off;" in defiance of all the ancient Versions, and the grammatical construction of the whole passage, and of the parallel passage of Isaiah, liii. 8.

"He was cut off from the land of the living:

Through the wickedness of my people [Isaiah's people,]

He was smitten to death."

Here the corresponding verb, Nigazar, is indisputably passive, and must be rendered, “He was separated, or cut off." See a critique on the German professors, Michaelis, Dathe, and Eichorne, respecting this prophecy, in the Inspector, p. 194–199. Eichorne rejected the book of Daniel entirely; and Michaelis, after labouring with much perverse ingenuity, like the cuttle fish, to perplex and confound the meaning, concludes, that "so far from counting the prophecy of seventy weeks, the great bulwark of the

25. Know then and understand:

From the going forth of THE ORACLE to restore [thy people] and to rebuild Jerusalem, until MESSIAH THE LEADER, shall be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks.

(Thou shalt return, [and thy people, at the end of the vision of 2300 days,] and Jerusalem shall be rebuilt, both the street and the breach [of the wall,] even in straitness of times.)

26. "And after the sixty-two weeks shall MESSIAH be cut off+; and [thy people] shall not be His: a people of THE LEADER TO COME shall destroy both the city and the sanctuary §; and its end shall be in a deluge. And until the end of the war, desolations are decreed.

27. But one week shall establish a [new] covenant with many ||; and half of the week shall abrogate the [daily] sacrifice and oblation ¶. And upon the pinnacle [or battlement of the temple shall stand] the abomination of desolation **, even until the consummation [of the 2300 days ++:] But, then the decreed [desolation] shall be poured [in turn] upon the Desolator ‡‡.

This chronological prophecy, (which I have attempted to render more closely and intelligibly, supplying the ellipses necessary to complete the sense of the concise original,) was evidently designed to explain the foregoing vision, especially in its chronological part of the 2300 days: at the end of which the predicted "desolation of the Jews" should cease, and their " sanc tuary be cleansed," or their temple finally be rebuilt; by determining a certain fixt point or epoch within it, namely, the destruction of the city and temple of Jerusalem by the Romans, A.D. 70, for, counting backwards from thence seventy weeks of days, or 70 x 7490 years §§, we get the beginning of the period,

Christian religion, he, on the contrary, was most apprehensive of its cause being undermined thereby."

* Deut. xxx. 3; 2 Sam. vii. 10; Isai. lx. 10; Tobit xiv. 5, &c.

+ Isaiah liii. 8.

Exod. vi. 7; Deut. xxxii. 5; § Dan. viii. 12: Matt. xxii. 7;

Isai. xlix. 8; Jer. xxxi. 31;

Heb. vii. 27.

**Matt. xxiv. 15.

Hos. i. 9; John xix. 15.
John xi. 48.

Heb. ix. 15; John xi. 42; Acts ii. 41, iv. 4, vi. 1—7.

++ Dan. viii. 14; Luke xxi. 22; Rom. xi. 25.

‡‡ Numb. xxiv. 24; Isai. li. 22, 23; Luke xxi. 24.

§§ Days are put for years in scriptural and prophetic language, see Levit. xxv. 8; Numb. xiv. 4; Ezek. iv. 6.