The Seventy Sevens
“24 Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy.”
As I wrote in a previous blog entry, the word weeks is analogous to sevens– i.e. seven days in a week. There is a counting of seventy sets of seven units of some kind. To determine what the sevens are, we need some context from ancient Israel.
First, we will go back to the beginning of Daniel Chapter 9. “In the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus, of Median descent, who was made king over the kingdom of the Chaldeans— 2 in the first year of his reign, I, Daniel, observed in the books the number of the years which was revealed as the word of the Lord to Jeremiah the prophet for the completion of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years.”
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Daniel+9&version=NASB
As a result of Israel’s disobedience to God, God used the Babylonian Empire to pronounce judgement upon them. Jerusalem was destroyed, along with the Jewish Temple, and a great number of their people were exiled from the land and taken elsewhere into the Babylonian Empire. The Jewish prophet, Jeremiah, recorded this exile would last for seventy years. But why seventy years?
Leviticus chapter 25 gives us one clue:
The Lord then spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying, 2 “Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, ‘When you come into the land which I am going to give you, then the land shall have a Sabbath to the Lord. 3 For six years you shall sow your field, and for six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its produce, 4 but during the seventh year the land shall have a Sabbath rest, a Sabbath to the Lord; you shall not sow your field nor prune your vineyard.
The next chapter of Leviticus gives us another clue:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2026&version=NASB
“You shall not make for yourselves idols, nor shall you set up for yourselves a carved image or a memorial stone, nor shall you place a figured stone in your land to bow down to it; for I am the Lord your God. 2 You shall keep My Sabbaths and revere My sanctuary; I am the Lord. 3 If you walk in My statutes and keep My commandments so as to carry them out, 4 then I shall give you rains in their season, so that the land will yield its produce and the trees of the field will bear their fruit. 5 Indeed, your threshing season will last for you until grape gathering, and grape gathering will last until sowing time. So you will eat your food to the full and live securely in your land. 6 I shall also grant peace in the land, so that you may lie down, with no one to make you afraid. I shall also eliminate harmful animals from the land, and no sword will pass through your land. 7 Instead, you will chase your enemies, and they will fall before you by the sword; 8 five of you will chase a hundred, and a hundred of you will chase ten thousand; and your enemies will fall before you by the sword. 9 So I will turn toward you and make you fruitful and multiply you, and I will confirm My covenant with you. 10 And you will eat the old supply, and clear out the old because of the new. 11 Moreover, I will make My dwelling among you, and My soul will not reject you. 12 I will also walk among you and be your God, and you shall be My people. 13 I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt so that you would not be their slaves, and I broke your yoke and made you walk erect.
14 ‘But if you do not obey Me and do not carry out all these commandments, 15 if, instead, you reject My statutes, and if your soul loathes My ordinances so as not to carry out all My commandments, but rather to break My covenant, 16 I, in turn, will do this to you: I will summon a sudden terror against you, consumption and fever that will make the eyes fail and the soul languish; also, you will sow your seed uselessly, for your enemies will eat it. 17 And I will set My face against you so that you will be defeated before your enemies; and those who hate you will rule over you, and you will flee when no one is pursuing you. 18 If also after these things you do not obey Me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins. 19 I will also break down your pride of power; and I will make your sky like iron and your earth like bronze. 20 Your strength will be consumed uselessly, for your land will not yield its produce and the trees of the land will not yield their fruit.
21 ‘Yet if you show hostility toward Me and are unwilling to obey Me, I will increase the plague on you seven times according to your sins. 22 I will also let loose among you the animals of the field, which will deprive you of your children and eliminate your cattle, and reduce your number so that your roads become deserted.
23 ‘And if by these things you do not learn your lesson regarding Me, but you show hostility toward Me, 24 then I in turn will show hostility toward you; and I, even I, will strike you seven times for your sins. 25 I will also bring upon you a sword which will execute vengeance for the covenant; and when you gather together into your cities, I will send a plague among you, so that you will be handed over to the enemy. 26 When I break your staff of bread, ten women will bake your bread in one oven, and they will bring back your bread in rationed amounts, so that you will eat and not be satisfied.
27 ‘Yet if in spite of this you do not obey Me, but act with hostility against Me, 28 then I will act with wrathful hostility against you, and I for My part will punish you seven times for your sins. 29 Further, you will eat the flesh of your sons, and you will eat the flesh of your daughters. 30 I then will destroy your high places, and cut down your incense altars, and pile your remains on the remains of your idols, for My soul will loathe you. 31 I will turn your cities into ruins as well and make your sanctuaries desolate, and I will not smell your soothing aromas. 32 And I will make the land desolate so that your enemies who settle in it will be appalled at it. 33 You, however, I will scatter among the nations, and I will draw out a sword after you, as your land becomes desolate and your cities become ruins.
34 ‘Then the land will restore its Sabbaths all the days of the desolation, while you are in your enemies’ land; then the land will rest and restore its Sabbaths. 35 All the days of its desolation it will have the rest which it did not have on your Sabbaths, while you were living on it. 36 As for those among you who are left, I will also bring despair into their hearts in the lands of their enemies. And the sound of a scattered leaf will chase them, and even when no one is pursuing they will flee as though from the sword, and they will fall. 37 They will then stumble over each other as if running from the sword, although no one is pursuing; and you will have no strength to stand before your enemies. 38 Instead, you will perish among the nations, and your enemies’ land will consume you. 39 So those of you who may be left will rot away because of their wrongdoing in the lands of your enemies; and also because of the wrongdoing of their forefathers they will rot away with them.
40 ‘But if they confess their wrongdoing and the wrongdoing of their forefathers, in their unfaithfulness which they committed against Me, and also in their acting with hostility against Me— 41 I also was acting with hostility against them, to bring them into the land of their enemies—or if their uncircumcised heart is humbled so that they then make amends for their wrongdoing, 42 then I will remember My covenant with Jacob, and I will remember also My covenant with Isaac, and My covenant with Abraham as well, and I will remember the land. 43 For the land will be abandoned by them, and will restore its Sabbaths while it is made desolate without them. They, meanwhile, will be making amends for their wrongdoing, because they rejected My ordinances and their soul loathed My statutes. 44 Yet in spite of this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them, nor will I so loathe them as to destroy them, breaking My covenant with them; for I am the Lord their God. 45 But I will remember for them the covenant with their ancestors, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt in the sight of the nations, so that I might be their God. I am the Lord.’”
46 These are the statutes and ordinances and laws which the Lord established between Himself and the sons of Israel through Moses on Mount Sinai.
And lastly, in Second Chronicles chapter 36 we see recorded the punishment decreed by God toward Israel that fulfills the word given to Jeremiah:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Chronicles+36&version=NASB
15 Yet the Lord, the God of their fathers, sent word to them again and again by His messengers, because He had compassion on His people and on His dwelling place; 16 but they continually mocked the messengers of God, despised His words, and scoffed at His prophets, until the wrath of the Lord rose against His people, until there was no remedy. 17 So He brought up against them the king of the Chaldeans, who killed their young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary, and had no compassion on young man or virgin, old man or frail; He handed them all over to him. 18 He brought all the articles of the house of God, great and small, and the treasures of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king and his officers, to Babylon. 19 Then they burned the house of God and broke down the wall of Jerusalem, and burned all its fortified buildings with fire and destroyed all its valuable articles. 20 He took into exile those who had escaped from the sword to Babylon; and they were servants to him and to his sons until the rule of the kingdom of Persia, 21 to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths. All the days of its desolation it kept the Sabbath until seventy years were complete.”
Notice how it says in 2 Chronicles, “until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths. All of the days of its desolation it kept the Sabbath until the seventy years were complete.” Israel did not keep the Sabbaths or the covenant, apparently, for seventy years worth of Sabbaths. God tells the Israelites in Leviticus 26 the land will get its Sabbath rest one way or another, “34 ‘Then the land will restore its Sabbaths all the days of the desolation, while you are in your enemies’ land; then the land will rest and restore its Sabbaths. 35 All the days of its desolation it will have the rest which it did not have on your Sabbaths, while you were living on it.”
Remember, God stated to them, the punishment would increase seven fold in Leviticus 26, “18 If also after these things you do not obey Me, then I will punish you seven times more for your sins.” The Israelites never listened and never obeyed, whether it was before the time of the Babylonians or after. Daniel affirms this point in Daniel 9:13 when he is praying to God and asking for forgiveness for his people when he realizes the seventy years of captivity spoken of by Jeremiah are about to end, “Just as it is written in the Law of Moses, all this disaster has come on us, yet we have not sought the favor of the Lord our God by turning from our sins and giving attention to your truth.”
So, we have the seventy years the land was granted its Sabbaths because of the seventy times Israel did not honor the decrees or God’s Sabbath. God told them their punishment would be multiplied seven times over for further disobedience, as Daniel acknowledges in Daniel 9:13. So, we now have seventy times seven, which equals 490.
If we take the seventy sevens in Daniel 24, we have a total of 490.
Daniel prays to the Lord when he recognizes the seventy years of captivity are about to expire. God, in turn, sends Gabriel, the Angel, to speak to Daniel and tell him that there are, in fact, seventy times seven years from a decree to rebuild and restore Jerusalem until the issue is fully resolved–the seventy years that the land is restored its Sabbaths for the seventy years it did not receive those Sabbaths multiplied by the seven fold punishment for the continued transgression equals 490 years.
Seventy sets of seven.