Daniel 9 and the Messiah before the Temple's destruction

If you are Jewish, you may have seen Christians use Daniel 9 to calculate the exact year of the Messiah’s coming, and found the arithmetic forced. You would be right to be wary. The “seventy weeks” are usually read as seventy sevens of years, but where the count starts, how the years are reckoned, and how the final week fits are all disputed. Christian interpreters have produced confident calculations that do not agree with each other. Nothing here depends on any of them.

The Hebrew word in Daniel 9:25-26 is mashiach, “anointed,” and it appears without the definite article. In the Hebrew Bible priests and kings are anointed, and even Cyrus, a Persian, is called the LORD’s mashiach (Isaiah 45:1). Christian translations that print “the Messiah” with a capital letter read a conclusion into the text. “An anointed one” is what the Hebrew says.

What follows needs no arithmetic. Daniel 9 sets out a sequence. An anointed one is cut off, and after that the city and sanctuary are destroyed. If the destruction is the one that came in AD 70, the anointed one belongs before it.

The passage opens with six things decreed for Daniel’s people and holy city: to restrain transgression, to end sin, to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place (Daniel 9:24). The setting is Jerusalem, Israel’s guilt, and its restoration. The phrase “to atone for iniquity,” lechaper avon, uses the language of the Temple service.

The vision then moves in order (Daniel 9:24-27):

• Jerusalem is restored and rebuilt, in troubled times.
• After the sixty-two weeks, “[the] anointed one will be cut off, and he will be no more.”
• Then the people of a coming prince destroy the city and the sanctuary.
• Sacrifice and offering cease, and desolation follows.

The Hebrew yikaret, “will be cut off,” is used elsewhere for a death, often a violent or untimely one. Whatever else the passage means, that order is in the text.

Which destruction does Daniel mean? Here the strongest support for the Christian reading comes from Jewish interpreters.

Rashi, the great medieval commentator, reads Daniel 9:26 as the Roman destruction of Jerusalem. On the people of the prince who destroy the city and sanctuary, he writes:

“That is Titus and his armies.” (Rashi on Daniel 9:26, in Chabad.org’s edition)

Rashi identifies the anointed one who is cut off as King Agrippa, the last Jewish king before the destruction. A present-day Orthodox explanation published by Aish likewise places Daniel 9:26 at the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, while rejecting the Christian identification of the anointed one.

The historian Josephus, a Jewish eyewitness to the war, describes the burning of the Temple and the demolition of Jerusalem under Titus in AD 70 (The Jewish War, Book 6). The destruction is not in question, and neither is its weight; it is remembered every year on Tisha B’Av.

So the AD 70 horizon is not a Christian invention imposed on the passage. Christians and these Jewish readers agree on when the sanctuary falls, and disagree about who the anointed one is.

Most modern critical scholars read Daniel differently. They date the book’s final form to the 160s BC, during the persecution under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV, who defiled the Temple and stopped its sacrifices. On this view, the anointed one cut off is the high priest Onias III, who was murdered around 171 BC, and the passage describes events the author had just lived through.

That reading has real strengths. Daniel 8 and 11 describe Antiochus in detail. The cessation of sacrifice and the abomination of desolation fit his desecration of the altar in 167 BC, which the Maccabees reversed three years later in the rededication remembered at Hanukkah.

The difficulty is Daniel 9:26 itself. It says the city and the sanctuary will be destroyed. Antiochus profaned the Temple and persecuted the faithful, but he did not destroy Jerusalem or its sanctuary. Rome did, in AD 70. On that point, Rashi’s reading fits the words more directly than the modern one.

Many people lived and died before AD 70, so dates alone prove little. The Christian case is that Jesus fits the passage as a whole, not only its timing.

• He was cut off. Jesus was executed around AD 30, about forty years before the Temple fell.
• His death was proclaimed as atonement. Daniel 9:24 looks for an end of sin and atonement for iniquity. Paul’s letters, written in the AD 50s while the Temple still stood, already hand on the teaching that “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3). Jesus’ followers were saying this before the sacrifices ceased, not as an explanation afterward.
• He fits the wider pattern. Isaiah 53 describes a servant “cut off out of the land of the living” for the transgression of others, and Zechariah 12:10 a pierced one whom Jerusalem mourns. The page on Jesus and messianic prophecy sets these passages side by side.

After AD 70, the rabbis taught that repentance, prayer, and deeds of kindness take the place of the sacrifices that could no longer be offered. That answer has sustained Jewish life for nearly two thousand years. The Christian answer is different: that the atonement Daniel looked for was accomplished by an anointed one cut off before the sanctuary fell.

This page does not prove that Jesus is the Messiah. Whether God vindicated him is the subject of the resurrection as messianic vindication. What Daniel 9 adds is a question of timing that any answer has to meet.