Chapter Five: The Seventy Weeks

The dispensational system stands or falls on Daniel 9:24–27. This is not an overstatement. The entire architecture of future-tense eschatology—the tribulation period, the final Antichrist, the gap between the church age and the fulfillment of God’s program for Israel—rests on a specific reading of this passage. If the reading holds, the system has an Old Testament foundation. If it does not hold, the system is suspended in the air.

The text describes seventy weeks decreed for Israel and for Jerusalem. The Hebrew word translated “weeks” is shabuim, meaning units of seven. Seventy units of seven: 490 years. These are decreed to finish the transgression, put an end to sin, make atonement for iniquity, bring in everlasting righteousness, seal both vision and prophet, and anoint a most holy place. The 490-year period is then subdivided: seven weeks, then sixty-two weeks, then one final week. After the seven and sixty-two weeks—sixty-nine total—an anointed one shall be cut off.

The dispensational reading proceeds as follows. The sixty-nine weeks run from the decree to restore Jerusalem to the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. The math works to a close approximation of the first century. At that point, the anointed one is cut off. Then—and this is the move on which everything depends—there is a gap. The seventieth week is suspended. The clock stops. The church age begins: an unspecified parenthesis, not anticipated in the passage, inserted between the sixty-ninth and seventieth weeks. The seventieth week will resume at some future point, constituting the seven-year tribulation period.

The gap is not in the text.

Open the Scofield Reference Bible to Daniel 9:26 and the note reads: this verse “is obviously an indeterminate period.” One word is doing the theological work. Obviously. Not “arguably” or “may be understood as”—self-evident. The indeterminate period is presented without defense, because the reader is expected to see it as the plain meaning of the passage. Then, at verse 27, the note makes the structure explicit: “Between the sixty-ninth week, after which Messiah was cut off, and the seventieth week, within which the little horn of Daniel 7 will run his awful course, intervenes this entire Church-age.” The Church-age—the 2,000-year parenthesis that is nowhere in Daniel’s text—appears in Scofield’s note as a plain reading of the passage. The reader has no way of knowing they are receiving a theological conclusion imported from outside the text and presented as its obvious meaning. That is the mechanism this volume has been describing.

The reading Scofield presents as obvious is not the reading that Catholic biblical scholarship, Reformed scholarship, or mainstream academic scholarship treats as obvious. The New American Bible Revised Edition, the authorized Catholic study Bible, identifies the anointed one of Daniel 9:26 as Onias III, the high priest murdered in 171 BC, and the leader as Antiochus IV of Syria. The desolating abomination is identified as “probably a pagan altar”—the altar Antiochus erected when he desecrated the Temple in 167 BC. The Catholic notes state further that the 490 years “are not to be taken literally.” Reformed and covenant theology scholarship reads the passage messianically, seeing the seventy weeks fulfilled in Christ and the events of AD 70, without the church-age parenthesis the dispensational system requires. None of these traditions finds an indeterminate period in the passage. The word obviously in Scofield’s note is not a description of what the text says. It is an instruction about how the reader should receive what follows.

Read the passage without the prior conclusion and there is nothing that requires a pause between the sixty-ninth and seventieth weeks. Nothing in Daniel 9 introduces a parenthetical age. Nothing signals that the clock will stop, hold for two thousand or more years, and then resume. The gap is imported from outside the text—from the prior theological conclusion that the church age must be a parenthesis in God’s program for Israel—and then read back into the passage as if the text required it.

Hold simultaneously that the seventy weeks are a continuous unit and that the anointed one cut off is Jesus, and the passage describes the completion of God’s redemptive purpose—finishing transgression, putting an end to sin, making atonement, bringing in everlasting righteousness—as accomplished in the events of the first century. The cutting off of the Messiah and the destruction of the city and the sanctuary in verse 26 point to the crucifixion and to AD 70. The seventieth week describes a period of covenant confirmation and ultimate resolution that the New Testament authors understood as fulfilled in Christ.

Dispensational scholars argue that not all six purposes named in verse 24 were fully accomplished in the first century—that everlasting righteousness and the anointing of a most holy place await a future fulfillment. It is a fair reading of the text’s ambitions. The partial preterist response is that the New Testament authors read exactly these accomplishments in Christ’s finished work. Hebrews understands the atoning work as complete and unrepeatable. Paul understands righteousness as already brought in for those who are in Christ. The anointing of a most holy place is understood as the Spirit’s consecration of the new temple—the church as the dwelling place of God. The six purposes do not require a gap. They require Christ. The gap is needed only if the six purposes are first assumed to be incomplete.

You do not need the gap. You need the gap if you need the tribulation period. You need the tribulation period if you need the pre-trib rapture. The gap is not a reading of Daniel. It is a conclusion in search of a text to hold it up. The people in the pews who were handed this framework were not told it rested on an interpretive move the text does not require. They were told it was what Daniel said.

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