24 SEMINARY STUDENT JOURNAL 4 (SPRING AND FALL 2018)
seventy weeks to coincide with sabbatical cycles, this is circumstantial evidence for
the seventy-weeks prophecy’s mfluence on messianic expectation.?! Although an
examination of the coherence of Wacholder’s chronology 1s beyond the scope of
this research, note that Wacholder’s chronology is one year off from
Zuckermann’s “standard” chronology and has come under critique.
The preceding survey reveals that a consensus currently exists among
contemporary scholarship regarding the interpretation of the seventy-weeks
prophecy leading to a climate of messianic expectation among certain sectors of
first-century Jewish society. The scholars discussed in this survey assemble the
evidence mn various ways, but all arrive at similar conclusions. What remains for
this research 1s to mvestigate their primary sources to determine the strength of
the evidence for the consensus position.
Survey of Primary Literature
The following evaluation of the primary sources will proceed from (1) those that
provide circumstantial evidence for the consensus view that the seventy-weeks
prophecy influenced first-century Jewish messianic expectation to (2) those that
provide unambiguous support for the consensus view. A major cluster of
circumstantial evidence 1s represented most comprehensively in Jubilees but also
includes the Apocalypse of Weeks (1 Enoch 93; 40247), the Animal Apocalypse
(1 Enoch 85-90), and the Damascus Document.”> These sources develop, to a
greater or lesser extent, a chronology that periodizes history according to seven-
21CE. Devorah Dimant, “I'he Seventy Weeks Chronology (Dan 9:24-27) in the Light
of New Qumranic Texts,” mn The Book of Danzel in Light of New Findings, ed. A. S. van der
Woude (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1993), 57-76. Dimant argues for a
universal sabbatical chronology of history that lies behind Dantel’s seventy weeks and 1s
expressed in other texts such as Jubilees and the Apocalypse of Weeks.
22Gentry, “Danitel’s Seventy Weeks,” 37. See 1bid., 371028, where on this point Gentry
follows the critique of independent researcher and Adventist apologist Bob Pickle,
“Dantel 9’s Seventy Weeks and the Sabbatical Cycle: When Were the Sabbatical Years?”
Pickle Publishing, 2007, accessed March 20, 2020, http://www.pickle-publishing.com/
papers/sabbatical-years. htm.
20On the Damascus Document, see Ben Zion Wacholder’s reconstruction and
translation of 4QQ268 1, 1-5 in The New Damascus Document: The Midrash on the Eschatological
Torah of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Reconstruction, Translation, and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2007),
24-27: “1:1 |As for the Divisions of the] Eschatological [Epochs|: Surely they will occur
(as was presaged) |according to all (the number of) its days and a|ll 1:2 [(the number of)
the cycles of] [ts festivals,| when its beginning (was) and ending (will occur); for [(God)]
has fore[told the firs|t 1:3 [as well as the latter things and] what will transpire thereafter in
them (the Divisions of the Eschatological Epochs), since H[e has set up Sabbaths and His
covenantal festivals 1:4 [for eternity (and) since one may neith|er advance [nor post|pone
their] festivals, [their months or 1:5 their Sabb|aths].”