come forth to give thee skill, and understanding. Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most holy. Know, therefore, and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the prince, shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks. The street shall be built again and the wall, even in troublous times. And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself. And the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary: And the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined. And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: And, in the midst of the week, he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease; and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate,"

Now we shall consider this remarkable prediction in the following order: first, The time-seventy weeks; secondly, The Messiah ;-and, thirdly, the evils which, in after times, should befall the Jews,

1. In discussing the time-seventy weeks-a question immediately arises, what kind of weeks are here intended? And our answer is, that weeks of years are intended; in which weeks, every day stands for a year: So that the seventy weeks signify four hundred and ninety years. Nor is this unusual in the scriptures; for, on the subject of the jubilée, (Lev. xxv.

3.) this direction is given: "And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years. And in ( Numbers, xiv. 34) the mode of accounting a day for a year is employed: "After the number of the days in which ye searched the land, even forty days (each day for a year) shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years." And the same method of computing is employed, in Ezekiel, (iv. 6.); "Thou shalt bear the iniquity of the house of Judah forty days: 1 have appointed thee each day for a year. "Among the Jews," says Prideaux, "as there were sabbatical days, whereby their days were divided into weeks of days, so there were sabbatical years, whereby their years were divided into weeks of years; and this last sort of weeks is that which is here mentioned; so that every one of the weeks of this prophecy contains seven years; and the whole number of seventy weeks contain four hundred and ninety years; at the end whereof this determined time expired: After which the Jews were no more to be the peculiar people of God, nor Jerusalem his holy city; because then the economy which he had established among them was to cease, and the worship which he had appointed at Jerusalem was wholly to be abolished." a To this passage from Prideaux we may add one from Bishop Chandler, on this prophecy: "There are but two sorts of weeks in Scripture; weeks of days, and weeks of years. Daniel, when he speaks of the ordinary weeks, calls them weeks of days (x. 3) as if he had a mind it should be observed, where he makes no such distinction in his prophecy,

R

he is to be understood of weeks of years... These seventy weeks will be easily found not to consist of weeks of days; for all put together make but one year four months, odd days; a space of time too short to crowd so many various events into as are here specified; nor can any such time be assigned between the two captivities wherein such like events did happen. Taking them ther for sabbatical weeks, and they amount in the whole to four hundred and ninety years. Or leave out the seventieth week, and the sixty nine weeks will equal four hundred and eighty three years, about which time they were to look for Messiah, the prince, supposing they knew where truly to begin the reckoning. And for this also Daniel gave them direction:... Count, saith he, from the going forth of the decree to build Jerusalem again, unto Messiah the prince, seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks, i. e. four hundred and eighty three years, and after the last sixty two weeks, the Messiah shall be cut off; and after that the city and temple shall be raized; he is one and the same person, Messiah the prince, that shall come and that shall be cut off, and both shall preceed the destruction of that people." "

b

The kind of weeks intended by the prophet being then weeks of years, in which each day stands for a year, the next question is, when do these weeks begin and end? Upon this subject there is a great variety of opinion among the learned: But, without entering into the discussion of this variety, we shall state what appears best to explain the prophecy. Now the seventy weeks, or four hundred and ninety years, are to end with the death of Christ, who is called by Daniel, the Messiah, or the Anointed. For, according to

b Chandler's def. f Christ, p. 136.

v. 24.

66

t

"Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city;" or, "Seventy weeks are cut out upon thy people and upon thy holy city," alluding to the practice among the Hebrews, of numbering, by cutting notches: But the accomplishment of the vision is united with "making reconciliation for iniquity; " or, as Sir. I. Newton translates the words, “ to expiate iniquity,” which was done by Christ's death; and therefore the accomplishment of the vision and the death of Christ must be considered as meeting at the same time. For in this seventy weeks, sin was to be expiated; everlasting righteousness to be brought in; the vision and prophecy, or prophet, were to be sealed, or consummated; and the most holy to be anointed. "For, by joining the accomplishment of the vision with the expiation of sins, the four hundred and ninety years are ended with the death of Christ. Now the dispersed Jews became a people and city when they first returned into a polity or body politick; and this was in the seventh year of Artaxerxes Longimanus, when Ezra returned with a body of Jews from captivity, and revived the Jewish worship; and by the king's commission created Magistrates in all the land, to judge and govern the people according to the laws of God and the king ( Ezra, vii. 25). There were but two returns from captivity, Zerubbabel's, and Ezra's: in Zerubbabel's they had only commission to build the temple; in Ezra's they first became a polity or city, by a government of their own. Now the years of this Artaxerxes began about two or three months after the summer solstice, and his seventh year fell in with the third year of the eightieth Olympiad; And the latter part thereof, wherein Ezra went up to Jerusalem, was in the year of the Julian Period

four thousand two hundred and fifty-seven: Count the time from thence to the death of Christ, and you will find it just four hundred and ninety

The Jews themselves indeed knew well how to interpret this prophecy; for, "this saying is still extant, in the Talmud, as the tradition of former times,— In Daniel is delivered to us, the end of the Messias,i. e. the term wherein he ought to come, as Jarchi explains it. And another Jew of high antiquity, R. Berachia, observed, that the end or period of the future redemption, was revealed to two men, Jacob and Daniel. But higher than both is the age of R. Nehumias, for he lived fifty years before Jesus Christ, yet then he declared, as he is cited by Grotius, that the time fixed by Daniel, for the Messias, could not go beyond those fifty years." d

But we may make the period of the seventy weeks, or four hundred and ninety years, terminate still more exactly, by computing backwards, not merely from the year in which Christ died, but with Prideaux, from the Month. Now the death of Christ was at the time of the Passover, which was always celebrated in the middle of the Month Nisan. And from that time backwards, till the Month Nisan, when Ezra (Ez. vii. 9) "began to go up from Babylon," is just four hundred and ninety years. For having fixed the end of the four hundred and ninety years at the death of. Christ, "it doth necessarily determine us where to place the beginning of them; that is, four hundred and ninety years before. And, therefore, the death of Christ, as most learned men agree, falling in the

Sir. I. Newton's obs. p. 130-1.

d Chandler's def. p. 141