Seventy weeks are determined upon your people and upon your 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.
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Aquinas Study Bible
AD 2017
seventy weeks= 490 years: this began with Artaxerxes to the crucifixion of Christ and 3 and a half years beyond. In this passage God allows Jerusalem to be rebuilt and a further set of years of living according to the Law. Here Jesus is referred to as Most Holy.
Seventy weeks (viz. of years, or seventy times seven, that is, 490 years) are shortened; that is, fixed and determined, so that the time shall be no longer. (Challoner)
This is not a conditional prophecy. Daniel was solicitous to know when the seventy years of Jeremias would terminate. But something of far greater consequence is revealed to him, (Worthington) even the coming and death of the Messias, four hundred and ninety years after the order for rebuilding the walls should be given, (Calmet) at which period Christ would redeem the world, (Worthington) and abolish the sacrifices of the law. (Calmet)
Finished, or arrive at its height by the crucifixion of the Son of God; (Theod.) or rather sin shall be forgiven. Hebrew, "to finish crimes to seal (cover or remit) sins, and to expiate iniquity. "
Anointed. Christ is the great anointed of God, the source of justice, and the end of the law and of the prophets, (Acts x. 38. and 1 Corinthians i. 30; Romans x. 4.; Calmet) as well as the p...
Because the prophet had said, "Thou didst lead forth Thy people, and Thy name was pronounced upon Thy city and upon Thy people," Gabriel therefore, as the mouthpiece of God, says by implication: "By no means are they God's people, but only thy people; nor is Jerusalem the holy city of God, but it is only a holy city unto thee, as thou sayest." This is similar to what we read in Exodus also, when God says to Moses, "Descend, for thy people have committed sin" (Ex. 32:7). That is to say, they are not My people, for they have forsaken Me. And so, because thou dost supplicate for Jerusalem and prayest for the people of the Jews, hearken unto that which shall befall thy people in seventy weeks of years, and those things which will happen to thy city.
I realize that this question has been argued over in various ways by men of greatest learning, and that each of them has expressed his views according to the capacity of his own genius. And so, because it is unsafe to pass judgment upon the op...
