The Gentile Times Reconsidered Chronology Christ

The Seventy Years for Babylon 219
with Jerusalem, speaking of them as “the number of years . . . for
fulfilling the devastations of Jerusalem.” (Daniel 9:2, NW) It was clear
from Jeremiah’s letter that the completion of Babylon’s seventy
years would entail the “fulfilling of the desolations of Jerusalem”
(by the return of the exiles), and it is this consequence that Daniel lays
the stress on in his statement. 31
Read in isolation from the wider context, however, these words
could easily be misinterpreted to mean that Daniel equated the
seventy-year period with the period of Jerusalem’s desolation.
Some Bible translators have understood the text that way. Thus
Tanakh, a translation published by the Jewish Publication Society in
1985, speaks of “the number of years that . . . were to be the term of
Jerusalem’s desolation—seventy years .” Similarly, The New International
Version (NIV) presents Daniel as saying that, “I understood from
the Scriptures . . . that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years.”
Both of these translations, however, are freely paraphrasing the
passage, which neither speaks of the “term” of Jerusalem’s
desolation, nor that it would “last” seventy years. None of these
words are found in the original text. They have been added in an
attempt to interpret the text. There is no compelling reason to accept
this interpretation, not only because it is arrived at by a
paraphrasing of the text, but also because it is in direct conflict
with Jeremiah’s own prophecy. 32
It should be noted that Daniel himself does not equate the
seventy years with the period of Jerusalem’s desolation. It is only
the expiration of the seventy-year period―not the period as a whole
— that he relates to the “fulfilling of the desolations of Jerusalem.”
This focusing on the end of the period is totally absent in the two
translations quoted above (Tanakh and NIV), as they both fail to
31 Dr. C. F. Keil, one of the greatest Hebrew scholars of the 19th century, noticed in
his grammatical analysis how Daniel connected and yet distinguished the two
periods, concluding: “Consequently, in the first year of the reign of Darius the
Mede over the kingdom of the Chaldeans the seventy years prophesied of by
Jeremiah were now full, the period of the desolation of Jerusalem determined by
God was almost expired?’ —C. F. Keil, Biblical Commentary on the Book of Daniel
(Edinburgh: Clark, 1872), pp. 321, 322.
32 A number of critical scholars, who regard the book of Daniel as a late composition
from the end of the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–164 B.C.E.), have argued
that Jeremiah’s original prophecy of the seventy years was repeatedly reinterpreted
and reapplied by the later Bible writers Ezra, Zechariah, and Daniel. There is no
reason to discuss these theories here, especially as there is wide disagreement on
them among these scholars.