Stop 10. Daniel's seventy weeks

At B2 the black line splits into three. The first place they part is a prophecy in Daniel 9: "Seventy weeks have been determined concerning your people and your holy city" (Daniel 9:24). Most readers take the weeks as weeks of years, so seventy weeks is 490 years.

Look at the gray box low on the chart. It shows three ways of counting.

The dispensational count starts with Nehemiah 2 in 445 BC. Using years of 360 days, it reaches AD 32 after 69 weeks. Then it stops. The 70th week is still future. (Calculated: Sir Robert Anderson said the count came to exactly 173,880 days. His own start and end dates give 173,882.)

The partial preterist count (Kenneth Gentry) starts with Ezra 7 in 457 BC and reaches Jesus' baptism after 69 weeks, about AD 26. The 70th week is Jesus' ministry, with the cross in the middle.

The full preterist count of David Green starts with Cyrus in 538 BC. It stretches the 70th week from Jesus' ministry all the way to AD 70. Don Preston, in what was read for this chart, gives no starting year, but he also puts the cross in the 70th week and its end at AD 70. That makes the "week" about 40 years long.

The question is whether the 70th week follows the 69th at once, or whether the whole church age falls in between. That question is B2, and the three lines go their own ways from here.

Picture: Chart 2, B2 and the Daniel box. Layers: all three end-times views.