THE SEVENTY-WEEKS PROPHECY OF DANIEL 9:24-27. . . 21
1 Enoch “to the period after the final redaction of the book of Daniel.”¢ Also in
Fitzmyer’s view, mterpretive decisions reflected mn the translation of the
Septuagint do not bear on the question of how Daniel 9:24-27 was interpreted in
the rest of extant Second Temple literature. Based on those determinations, this
study will take as given that, regardless of how early or late one dates Daniel,
Daniel dates early relative to the Second Temple literature surveyed in this study.”
Survey of Secondary Sources
In 1997, John J. Collins wrote that the consensus of “the late 1980’s,” “which held
that messianism was not an essential or even important part of Judaism around
the turn of the era,” had been challenged by “the release of the unpublished [Dead
Sea] Scrolls 1n 1991.78 Yet as far back as 1981, Roger 'T. Beckwith asserted that
there 1s strong evidence to show that the Essenes, the Pharisees, and the Zealots all
thought that they could date, at least approximately, the time when the Son of
David would come, and that in each case their calculations were based upon
Dantel’s prophecy of the 70 weeks (Dan. 9, 24-27), understood as 70 weeks of
3.
years.
In addition, by 1980, Beckwith had attempted to reconstruct the Essene
calculation of the seventieth week when “the Messiahs were to be manifested,”
finding that 1t “would begin between 10 and 6 B.C. and would end between 3 B.C.
Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The One Who Is to Come (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 56—
57, 84.
"This dates Daniel earlier than the earliest form of the Aramaic Levi Document (third
or carly second century BC), which was not under consideration by Fitzmyer. However,
the conclusions of this research can still hold if one dates Daniel later than the Aramaic
Levi Document, because its jubilees were likely added later (see n31 for further
discussion).
8John J. Collins, “Jesus, Messtanism and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” mn Qumran-Messianism,
ed. James H. Charlesworth, Hermann Lichtenberger, and Gerbern S. Oegema (liibingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 1998), 102, 106. Cf. J. H. Chatlesworth, “From Messianology to
Christology: Some Caveats and Perspectives,” in Judaisms and their Messiahs at the Turn of the
Christian Era, ed. Jacob Neusner, William Scott Green, and FErnest S. Frerichs (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 251. See also James H. Charlesworth, “From
Messtanology to Christology: Problems and Prospects,” in The Messiah: Developments in
Earliest Judaism and Christianity, ed. James H. Charlesworth et al. (Minneapolis, MN:
Fortress, 1992), 35.
Roger I. Beckwith, “Daniel 9 and the Date of Messiah’s Coming in Hssene,
Hellenistic, Pharisaic, Zealot and Early Christian Computation,” Rex 10, no. 4 (1981):
521.