20 SEMINARY STUDENT JOURNAL 4 (SPRING AND FALL 2018)
their view is not idiosyncratic but rather stands within a tradition of Jewish and
Christian interpretation.
However, for Christians who interpret the seventy weeks of Daniel as a
prediction of the first advent of Jesus Christ,> a question of prophetic intelligibility
remains to be answered: At the time when the messianic prediction was believed
to be fulfilled, could contemporaries have been able to identify the Messiah as the
one predicted by the seventy weeks? For a prophecy that 1s unintelligible to those
among whom it 1s fulfilled 1s arguably not a prophecy in the biblical tradition
(Deut 18:22; Amos 3:7; and esp. Dan 12:4).3
Toward answering this question, the purpose of this paper is to investigate
how the interpretation and calculation of the seventy-weeks prophecy of Daniel
9:24-27 fluenced the development of messianic expectation in first-century
(AD) Judaism. Research ito interpretations of the seventy weeks in extant
Second Temple literature yields general precedents for mterpreting the prophecy
as a messianic prediction. When combed with a record of first-century, time-
based messianic expectation, these constitute both direct and circumstantial
evidence that it would have been possible for Jesus’s contemporaries to interpret
events in his life as a fulfillment of Daniel’s seventy-weeks prophecy.
The influence of Daniel looms large in sectarian first-century Judaism. Daniel
is one of the books most alluded to in the New Testament! and the ninth most
copied book found at Qumran.> In lieu of an exhaustive survey of the primary
literature, this research will use secondary sources as a guide to the Second
Temple literature available in critical editions. These secondary sources have been
selected for their focus on Second Temple messianism and the reception of
Daniel 9:24-27.
The majority of the secondary sources cited in this research hold to a late date
tor the book of Daniel, which pushes the date of its completion as far as the latter
half of the first century BC. Joseph A. Fitzmyer observed that this causes
problems for determining whether Daniel or the Septuagint comes first in the
development of the messianic idea. On the other hand, he dates the Similitudes of
“See, e.g., Peter |. Gentry, “Danitel’s Seventy Weeks and the New Exodus,” Southern
Baptist Journal of Theology 14, no. 1 (2010): 26—44.
SStephen R. Miller takes Daniel 12:4 to mean that “as the time of fulfillment draws
nearer, the ‘wise’ will seek to comprehend these prophecies more precisely, and God will
grant understanding (‘knowledge’) to them” (Danze/, NAC 18 [Nashville, ITN: Broadman &
Holman, 1998], 321).
Craig A. Evans, “Daniel in the New Testament: Visions of God’s Kingdom,” in The
Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, ed. John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint, V'I'Sup 83
(Leiden: Brill, 2001), 2:490.
Peter W. Flint, “The Daniel Tradition at Qumran,” in The Book of Daniel: Composition
and Reception, 2:328.