Daniel 9 explained: Daniel's Prayer and Gabriel's Timeline

Daniel reads Jeremiah (vv. 1-3)

Under a king the text calls Darius the Mede, whom historians have not clearly identified, Daniel reads Jeremiah's promise that Jerusalem would lie ruined for seventy years (Jeremiah 25:11 and 29:10). In response he fasts and prays in sackcloth and ashes, rough cloth and dust worn as signs of grief and repentance.

Confession and plea (vv. 4-19)

Daniel counts himself among the guilty and says Jerusalem's ruin is the disaster the law of Moses warned would follow broken faith, so God has acted justly. Recalling the escape from Egypt, he asks for mercy because of God's great mercy and his own name, not because the people deserve it.

Gabriel arrives (vv. 20-23)

While Daniel is still praying, Gabriel, the messenger from his vision in chapter 8, comes at the hour of the evening offering, though the Temple lies in ruins and no offering is being made. He says an answer went out as soon as Daniel began to pray, and he has come to explain it because Daniel is greatly loved.

Seventy sets of seven (vv. 24-25)

Jeremiah's seventy years become seventy sets of seven, usually read as 490 years, ending with wrongdoing forgiven and the most holy anointed (the NIV takes this as the Temple's inner sanctuary). The count starts from an order to rebuild Jerusalem, but no one agrees which order, and the Hebrew punctuation may place an anointed leader after 49 years rather than the 483 that these translations suggest.

A killing and a desolation (vv. 26-27)

Then an anointed one is cut off, usually taken to mean killed, a coming ruler's people destroy the city and Temple, and the sacrifices are stopped as something abhorrent brings ruin to the Temple. The Hebrew is very hard here, the translations differ, and it is unclear whether the 'he' who makes a covenant with many is the anointed one or that ruler.

Who is meant? (vv. 24-27)

Many modern scholars link it to 167 BC, when the Greek king Antiochus IV stopped the sacrifices and defiled the Temple, with the murdered high priest Onias III as the anointed one, while traditional Jewish interpreters often tie the 490 years to Rome's destruction of the Temple in AD 70. Christians have long read it as pointing to Jesus, whose title Messiah means anointed one, and Jesus refers back to Daniel's abomination when warning of Jerusalem's fall (Matthew 24:15).

Key verse: Daniel 9:18

Where Christians differ

Christians differ on whether the seventy sets of seven lead to Jesus' death and Rome's destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, to a final seven years still in the future under a last great enemy (a view common among some evangelical Protestants), or mainly to the crisis under Antiochus IV, with Jesus seen as a later and fuller fulfilment.

Something to think about

Daniel confesses wrongs done by his ancestors and leaders as if they were his own; when, if ever, does it make sense to take on responsibility for what your family, community or country has done?