The Seventy Weeks of Daniel
Thomas Allen
In “Daniel’s 70 Weeks,” which is based on a lecture by Emma Moore Weston, Charles Gilbert Weston gives a different explanation of Daniel’s 70 weeks or 490 years than that given by dispensationalists. (https://www.gospeltruth.net/scofield.htm.)
Daniel 9:24-27 (World English Bible) reads:
24 “Seventy weeks are decreed on your people and on your holy city, to finish disobedience, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most holy.
25 “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. 26 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. 27 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.”
In Daniel 9:24-27, each day equals a year. The 70 weeks or 490 years began with the Jews returning to Jerusalem from Babylon in 457 BC. Thus, rebuilding Jerusalem accounts for the first seven weeks or 49 years. From the return to Jerusalem until the baptism of Jesus accounts for 69 weeks or 483 years. So far, Weston and the dispensationalists agree. The last week or seven years is where they disagree.
Weston understands the second part of verse 26 (“The people of the prince . . .”) to be a parenthetical statement because it is outside the 70 weeks. Titus is the prince and the Roman soldiers are the people who destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in 70 AD and turned the country into an uninhabitable desolation.
Verse 27 pertains to the final week or seven years of the 70 weeks or 490 years. This final week is where the principal disagreement between Weston and dispensationalists occurs. Whereas Weston has the final week or seven years immediately following the 69 weeks or 483 years, dispensationalists have a lengthy gap between the 69 weeks and the final week.
Many dispensationalists identify the covenant in verse 27 as a treaty between the Antichrist and the Israelis, who are, according to John, antichrist. After three and a half years, the Antichrist breaks the agreement, and the Great Tribulation begins. Other dispensationalists have the Great Tribulation beginning at the start of the seven years. Most have the Christians being raptured at the Great Tribulation’s beginning whenever it occurs. The Great Tribulation ends when Christ returns.
Weston objects to this explanation. This covenant is the New Covenant that the Messiah makes.
According to Weston, the final week or seven years is “the dawn of the Son of righteousness . . . and the focal point of the Covenants of promise, of typology and of prophecy. . . . This one week is the historical, chronological, moral and redemptive fulcrum of all the ages of the human race.” (P. 29.)
At the end of the 69 weeks or 483 years, God identified Jesus as His Messiah when John baptized him. The 69 weeks or 483 years began in 457 BC with Artaxerxes’ decree and ended in 27 AD when God identified Jesus as His Messiah. In 27 AD, the final week or seven years began. In 34 AD, three and a half years after Jesus was crucified, the final week ended with the death of Stephen and the scattering of Christians in Jerusalem.
Thus, Daniel’s prophecy of 70 weeks or 490 years has been fulfilled. It began in 457 BC and ended in 34 AD.
Copyright © 2024 by Thomas Coley Allen.
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