The Prophecy of Seventy Weeks is the narrative in chapter 9 of the Book of Daniel in which Daniel prays to God to act on behalf of his people and city (Judeans and Jerusalem), and receives a detailed but cryptic prophecy of "seventy weeks" by the angel Gabriel. The prophecy has been the subject of "intense exegetical activity" since the Second Temple period. James Alan Montgomery referred to the history of this prophecy's interpretation as the "dismal swamp" of critical exegesis.
Summary
In the Book of Daniel, Daniel reads in the "books" that the desolation of Jerusalem must last for seventy years according to the prophetic words of Jeremiah (verse 2), and prays for God to act on behalf of his people and city (verses 3–19). The angel Gabriel appears and tells Daniel that he has come to give wisdom and understanding, for at the beginning of Daniel's prayer a "word" went out and Gabriel has come to declare this revelation (verses 20–23):
Composition and structure
Chapter outline
The consensus among critical scholars is that chapters 1–6 of the Book of Daniel originated as a collection of folktales among the Jewish diaspora in the Persian/Hellenistic periods, to which the visionary chapters 7–12 were added during the persecution of the Jews under Antiochus IV in 167–163 BCE. The authors of the tales apparently took the name Daniel from a legendary hero mentioned in the Book of Ezekiel, and the author of the visions in turn adopted him from the tales. The point of departure is Jeremiah's seventy years prophecy as opposed to a visionary episode, but more than half the chapter is devoted to a rather lengthy prayer.
Daniel's prayer
Modern critical scholars have sometimes argued that Daniel's prayer in verses 3–19 is secondary to chapter 9, as it contrasts sharply with the difficult Hebrew that is characteristic of Daniel. Still, it might be that the author(s) of the chapter incorporated (or adapted) a traditional prayer in the course of composition, in which case the prayer would not be a later addition. Proponents of the view that the prayer is secondary argue that the context requires a prayer of illumination and not a communal confession of sin, and the beginning and end of the prayer are marked by duplications in verses 3–4a and verses 20–21a that are most plausibly interpreted as redactional seams. However, these considerations have not proved decisive, and arguments in favor of the prayer's authenticity have also been advanced. In particular, the concluding passage in verses 20–27 contains several allusions to the language in the prayer, suggesting that it was included purposefully by the author(s) of the chapter, even if it was not originally composed by them.
Gabriel's revelation
It has also been argued that there is a "pre-Maccabean core" to the prophetic revelation delivered by Gabriel in verses 24–27, and that certain linguistic inconsistencies between the seventy weeks prophecy and other Danielic passages suggest that the second century BCE author(s)/redactor(s) of the Book of Daniel took over and modified a preexisting oracle that was already in circulation at the time of composition. These ideas have been further developed to suggest that the different redactional layers represented in this text reflect different eschatological perspectives, with the earliest one going back to a priest named Daniel who accompanied Ezra from Babylon to Jerusalem in the fifth century BCE and the latest one to an unnamed redactor who edited this prophecy in the second century BCE so that it would function (along with other parts of the Book of Daniel) as part of "a prophetic manifesto for world domination." It is also argued that the prophecy exhibited a high degree of literary structure at an earlier stage of its development in such a way that the six infinitival clauses of verse 24 were chiastically linked to six divisions of verses 25–27 via an elaborate system of word counts, resulting in the following reconstruction of this earlier redactional stratum: