The 'seventy weeks' of Daniel

“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.” Daniel 9:24
Daniel 9:24-27 contains one of the most amazing prophecies in the whole Bible, if we will take the time to understand it. Gabriel tells Daniel that seventy ‘sevens’ (or ‘weeks’ in some Bibles) have been determined: 69 of them from the commandment to rebuild Jerusalem to the coming of Messiah, and then the final ‘seven’ being the time of the Great Tribulation, when the Antichrist comes on the scene. We know that this last ‘seven’ is seven years. In fact in Jewish thought, there were several kinds of ‘weeks’ or ‘sevens’ – a week of seven days, a week of seven weeks (c.f. the Feast of Weeks, also called Pentecost or Shavout), a week of seven months (the religious calendar), and a week of seven years, as is in view here (and e.g. Lev. 25:8). In the Bible, a year is treated as 360 days. So that means, there would be 69 x 7 x 360 = 173,880 days from the commandment to rebuild Jerusalem to the coming of Messiah. Those dates are well-known from history. The commandment to rebuild Jerusalem (note: the city, not the temple) was given by Artaxerxes on 14 March, 445 BC. The public revealing of Messiah took place at the Triumphal Entry, on 6 April 32 AD – exactly 173,880 days to the day. What’s more, in 270 BC the Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek (called the Septuagint) – and this prophecy is contained in it. So we can be sure that it wasn’t post-dated.
Let’s now look at what was to be accomplished during the seventy weeks: 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 (or, the Most Holy Place). I think we can all agree that these haven’t happened yet. But the 70th week has not yet taken place. At the present time we are in an interval, between the 69th and 70th weeks. Just as the 69 weeks were fulfilled to the day, we can be sure that the 70th week will also be fulfilled. Jesus will return again, having dealt with the sin of the world for good, and bringing in His Kingdom of everlasting righteousness.