Here’s another in a series on messianic prophecies.  Take a look at Daniel 9:24-26.

There’s a reference here to the Anointed One (the messiah) coming to Israel, and a time line is given. A decree is issued, the Messiah comes, he is killed, and then  the city is destroyed.

OK, let’s try to understand this. Some may disagree with what I will cover here, but many scholars believe the following is the best explanation.

First, there is an issue of the number of years involved. Daniel refers to “sevens,” which most Bible scholars understand as a group of seven years. He says there will be a total of 69 of these sevens from a decree to rebuild Jerusalem until the messiah comes. Let’s suppose that those refer to a seven-year series. We must then multiply 69×7 to get the total number of years, which comes out to be 483. But since the Jews used a 360-day year, we need to multiply 483×360 to see how many total days Daniel was talking about. This ends up with a large number – 173,880. Let’s convert this to years that we are comfortable with, which are composed of 365 days. Have I lost anyone yet? We take 173,880 and divide it by 365. This will give us the total number of years we would compute –476.

Fine, but we don’t know yet the starting point of this time., which Daniel says is the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem. Again, this is not a settled point, but many Bible scholars think it refers to the decree of Artaxerxes in 445 B. C., which allowed Nehemiah to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the city which had been destroyed by Babylon.

One last bit of math is necessary here. Starting at 445 BC, we mark off 476 years and end up at 31 A. D. This, of course, is during the time of Jesus’s ministry. Sounds pretty accurate, doesn’t it?

But are Christians just reading in these numbers in an attempt to twist them to conform to the life of Jesus? Let’s look at what the Jewish reaction to them has been. In the Qumran community, famous for the Dead Sea Scrolls, there was great fervor during Jesus’s time because they had done the same calculating. In the Babylonian Talmud, completed between 200-500 A.D., there’s a reference to this passage in Daniel:” these times were over long ago.” Again, it sounds like the Jews themselves came up with roughly the same dating. Finally the highly respected 12th-century rabbi Maimonides was quoted as saying that the end times had already come without a sign of the Messiah. He urged rabbis not to spend time calculating the days of Messiah as laid out by Daniel because they would be disappointed. Once more,  careful readers placed Daniel’s prophecy in the early first century

So these verses by Daniel are tantalizing because they suggest Jesus is the fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecy. Even if some critics want to late date Daniel to 100 B. C., this would still leave the mystery of how he was able to foresee the ministry of Jesus.