On the seven times and the 1,260 days
The river of water from the mouth of the serpent
The nature of the seventy sevens
The anointing in Daniel 9:24-27
The acceptable year of the Lord
Meredith G. Kline and the Seventieth Week
Belshazzar's feast and Daniel's 70 weeks
How were Daniel's prophecies sealed?
The Church's covenant and the 70 weeks
Martin Luther on Daniel's 70th week
What covenant is meant in Daniel 9:27?
Dispensationalism and the one week covenant
Why the gap before the 70 weeks?
Bertholdt's list of methods for adjusting the 70 weeks
E. W. Hengstenberg on the termination of Daniel's 70 weeks
Which temple is meant in Daniel 9:26-27?
The covenant confirmed in the 70th week
Does John interpret Daniel's 70 weeks prophecy?
Babylonian astronomy and the 70 weeks
The land promise and the 70 weeks
In the quest for solution to the puzzles presented by Daniel’s prophecy
of the 70 weeks, many curious devices have been employed. Otto Zöckler
quoted the following list of methods that scholars had devised for
interpreting the 70 weeks, by Leonhard Bertholdt (1806). They are
methods that various commentators on Daniel had “adopted in order to
obviate, by means of exact calculation, the discrepancy between the termin.
a quo and ad quem, which was either too large or too
small.” [1]
The seventh method listed above was invoked by William Lloyd (1627-1717), bishop of Worcester, who was responsible for introducing dates based upon Ussher’s chronology into the 1701 English Bible. Lloyd reckoned 483 years from a permit given to Nehemiah to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem in the 20th year of Artaxerxes Longimanus (Neh. 2:1), from which he counted years of 360 days each. A similar approach has become popular among dispensationalists in the USA, but they rarely mention Bishop Lloyd, or Brinch, but associate the idea with the ultradispensationalist, Sir Robert Anderson, who was a Scotland Yard detective. Lloyd applied the 70th week to the period 63 AD - 70 AD, thus invoking a gap between the 69th and 70th weeks. Dispensationalism extends the gap to a yet future seven years.
Lutheran scholar Theodor Friedrich Dethlof Kliefoth (1810-1895) employed a mystical approach to Daniel’s seventy weeks, corresponding to item 8 in the above list, in which the first section of seven weeks extend from the decree of Cyrus to the advent of Christ, “regardless of the fact that that period does not consist of seven weeks of years, nor of seven centuries, nor of any cycle whatever, whose aggregate of years is divisible by seven –the sixty-two sevens from Christ to the time of the great apostacy, or of the antichrist at the end of earthly history (during which period of indefinite duration the church is to be ‘built’ and ‘restored,’ or brought back to God), and finally, the last week from the great apostacy to the appearing of Christ, the last judgment, and the consummation of the world.” [2]
Another approach, by U.S. lawyer Philip Mauro (1859-1952), was to try to change ancient chronology, to fit the dates indicated by Daniel’s prophecy.
Mauro was sure that the 70 weeks began with the decree of Cyrus. Mauro assumed that the units in all sections of the prophecy are the same, and they are weeks of years. But this the time span from the decree of Cyrus, to the appearance of Christ, seemed to be about 82 years too much. Mauro supported Martin Anstey’s Bible Chronology, published in 1913. Anstey attempted to revise conventional chronology, to fit his interpretation of Daniel’s seventy weeks prophecy, in which all sections consisted of weeks of seven years. [3]
Later in his career, Mauro prepared the brief used by Democrat politician William Jennings Bryan, at the Tennessee-Scopes trial at Dayton in July 1925. In the trial, teacher John T. Scopes was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act by teaching the theory of evolution. Scopes was defended by Clarence Darrow, and supported by the American Civil Liberties Union. Bryan won the case, but died five days after the trial ended on July 26, 1925.
1. Otto Zöckler. The book of the prophet Daniel theologically and homiletically expounded. In: Lange’s Commentary on the Holy Scriptures: Ezekiel, Daniel. C. Scribner & co., 1876. [See p. 208.]
3. Philip Mauro. The Seventy Weeks and the Great Tribulation
Copyright © 2011, 2013 by Douglas E. Cox
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