The Wind in His Fists

When I wrote my first post regarding Nehemiah’s Wall, I lacked a few interesting details.  From Daniel 9:24-26 (NAS):

“Seventy ’sevens’ are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish  transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy. ”Know and understand this: From the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ’sevens,’ and sixty-two ’sevens.’ It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble. After the sixty-two ’sevens,’ the Anointed One will be cut off and will have nothing.

Taking the “sevens” to be seven years, Daniel says that there will be 483 years from the issuing of the decree to rebuild Jerusalem to the time when the Messiah is killed.  Since the Jewish calender consisted of 12, 30-day months, this is equivalent to 476 of our years. 

Nehemiah 2 records the decree of Artaxerxes, issued in that king’s twentieth year:

And I said to the king, “If it please the king, let letters be given me for the governors of the provinces beyond the River, that they may allow me to pass through until I come to Judah, and a letter to Asaph the keeper of the king’s forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the gates of the fortress which is by the temple, for the wall of the city and for the house to which I will go ” And the king granted them to me because the good hand of my God was on me.

Atrazerxes’ reign began in 464 B.C. (according to the Harper Atlas of the Bible, 1987), which puts the decree at 444 B.C.  This decree is not to be confused with that of Cyrus, who decreed the reconstruction of the temple in Jerusalem at an earlier date (586 B.C.?).

 The 444 B.C. date for the decree puts the date of the Messiah’s death at 32 AD, or right about the time of Christ’s crucification.

 The book of Daniel was found among the famous Dead Sea scrolls, and cannot be dated after 125 B.C., even by critical scholars (Price, Randall.  1996.  Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls).  Of course, conservative Biblical scholars claim it is from the sixth century BC, which is what the book itself seems to claim.  Liberal scholars cannot accept such an early date because they cannot accept the existance to true prophecy.  Daniel contains detailed prophecies about the empires of Persia, Greece, and Rome.  In any case, it predates the coming of Christ by more than 150 years.