²⁴ “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.
  ²⁵ “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.
  ²⁶ After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be cut off and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed.
  ²⁷ He will confirm a covenant with many for one ‘seven.’ In the middle of the ‘seven’ he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on a wing of the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him.”

In verse 24, we find the complete statement regarding the seventy sevens, followed by a breakdown in the subsequent verses. These “sevens” are not literally seventy “weeks”, which is the word used in Spanish (which would make 490 days - 70 weeks x 7 days a week = 490 days). Each one of the days is prophetic, with the clarification in Ezekiel 4:6.

“After you have finished this, lie down again, this time on your right side, and bear the sin of the house of Judah. I have assigned you 40 days, a day for each year.”

So, herein lies the answer, in that each day is actually one year. It was not uncommon to use a day to represent a year. Daniel’s prophecy refers to 490 years. God has dealt with Israel in spans of 490 years, but the times that Israel has been exiled or not living according to God’s plans are not taken into account (Numbers 6:12 - He must dedicate himself to the LORD for the period of his separation and must bring a year-old male lamb as a guilt offering. The previous days do not count, because he became defiled during his separation). For example:

• since the birth of Abraham until the Exodus were 505 years, minus the 15 years that Ishmael lived with Abraham equals 490 years.
• since the Exodus until the dedication of Solomon’s temple were 604 years, minus the 114 years of oppressions during the times of the Judges equals 490 years.
• since the dedication of the temple until Cyrus’ decree were 560 years, minus the 70 under which they had been taken captive equals 490 years.
• Daniel’s 490 years, which we will explore momentarily.

Naysayers may interpret this as some form of numerology or a manipulation of numbers so that we can obtain the number we desire, but we see that Jesus himself demonstrated that the number 490 has a spiritual or divine significance (Matthew 18:22 - Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy times seven.”); seventy times seven is 490. These numbers have a significance: 7 is the perfect number, the perfection of God; 70 is 7 times 10, which is the number which symbolizes man’s imperfection (the ten nations of Daniel 7, the statue with the ten toes, etc.)

In these seventy sevens, there are six goals: (1) to finish transgression, (2) to put an end to sin, (3) to atone for wickedness, (4) to bring in everlasting justice, (5) to seal up vision and prophecy, and (6) to annoint the most Holy (verse 24). All of this will be completed by the end of the last “seven”.

The seventy sevens began in the Hebrew month of Nisan (April) in 445 B.C. (Nehemiah 2). Verse 25 of Daniel 9 foretold what would happen during the first seven sevens (49 years): “It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble” (in Spanish, in times of anguish).

After the first seven sevens, 62 more sevens would transpire, and the Annointed One (Messiah in Spanish) would be “cut off” (killed) - verse 26. This means that since the beginning of the seventy sevens until the death of Christ, there would have been a lapse of 49 years of reconstruction (the first seventy sevens - 7x7=49), and the 434 years of the 62 sevens (62x7=434). Adding 49 and 434 gives us 483. This leaves us with 7 years remaining, because we began with 490 years, and if you subtract 483 from 490, you get 7, or that last “one seven” from verse 27.

That was the easy part - now comes the hard part! Let’s begin with the year that the prophecy of the seventy sevens began: 445 B.C. Whip out your old arithmetic books, because we are going to represent this as negative 445 (-445). Think of it this way: when the temperature drops below 0 degrees Farenheit, we can say that it is, for example, 10 degrees below zero, or minus ten (-10) degrees. OK, I’m glad that makes sense. So, because the years before Christ (B.C.) are below zero (kind of, as we will see), let’s label them as being mathematically negative. So, we begin at -445 and add the 69 sevens that transpired so far (or 483). We get: -445 + 483 = 38, but 38 has no relevance in history, and we know that Christ did not die on that year. What appears to be a problem is easily resolved with the knowledge that prophetic years are actually only 360 days, and not 365.25 days, as are true years. Prophetic years use lunar months, or months of 30 days each, and 12x30=360. The Bible tells us that the anti-Christ will govern for 42 months, while it sometimes states 1,260 days. If you divide 1,260 by 42, you get exactly 30, the days in a lunar month. To convert prophetic years into our calendar years, you first multiply the prophetic years by 360, to obtain the total number of days. Then you divide those days by 365.25 to obtain the total number of modern calendar years. This two-step process can be summed up in one step:

prophetic years X 360 ÷ 365.25 = our calendar years

In this case, you apply the formula in the following manner: 483 x 360 ÷ 365.25, or you can take the two-step process, for simplicity. First, multiply 483 by 360, which gives you 173,880. So, there are 173,880 days in the first 69 sevens (with the last seven yet to be discussed). Divide 173,880 by the number of days in our calendar year, 365.25, to get 476.057495. So, 476.057495 years equals the first 69 sevens of Daniel’s prophecy. Let’s start all over, with 445 B.C. If we take 445 B.C., represented as -445, and add 476.057495, we get 31.057495, but this is still not the year in which Christ died, the event mentioned in verse 26. Something that many people overlook is that there was no “0” year. In other words, the years jumped immediately from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D., with no 0 in between, as there is with the temperature (-1, 0, 1, ...) This means that we have to add 1 to our result, giving us 32.057495. Recall that the seventy sevens began in April; Christ was crucified in April. He began his ministry on 30 A.D. and it lasted for 3 years: 30, 31, and 32 - and 32 is the result we obtained in our calculation.

Now for the all-important last “seven”, the 70th one. This is simply the seven years of the great tribulation. Recall what Numbers 6:12 states, that God “clock” stop when his his people (Israel) are out of their land or abiding against his divine plans. The clocked stopped on the 69th seven and it will resume when the “time of the gentiles” has finished. At that time, God will once again deal with his people, which will be during the reign of the anti-Christ.

The Calculation

As previously stated, it seems like the calculation shown above is merely a manipulation of numbers in order to arrive at a desired number. However, this exact same formula aides us in calculating the rebirth of Israel. Let’s examine Ezekiel 4:4-6:

  ⁴ “Then lie on your left side and put the sin of the house of Israel upon yourself. You are to bear their sin for the number of days you lie on your side.
  ⁵ I have assigned you the same number of days as the years of their sin. So for 390 days you will bear the sin of the house of Israel.
  ⁶ “After you have finished this, lie down again, this time on your right side, and bear the sin of the house of Judah. I have assigned you 40 days, a day for each year.

Adding the numbers in verses 5 (390) and 6 (40) yields 430. So, Ezekiel needed to lie on his sides a total of 430 days. Verse 5 states that the number of days equals the number of years, so we have 430 years. Let’s examine how this determines when Israel would be reborn.

1. Ezekiel said the Jews were to be punished for 430 years because they had turned away from God. As part of the punishment, the Jews lost control of their homeland to Babylon. Many Jews were taken as captives to Babylon.
2. Babylon was later conquered by Cyrus the Great, in 539 BC. Cyrus allowed the Jews to leave Babylon and to return to their homeland, but only a small number of the Jews returned. The return had taken place sometime around 536 BC, about 70 years after Judah lost independence to Babylon. If you subtract 70 from 430, you see that there remain 360 years.
3. Because most of the Jews chose to stay in pagan Babylon rather than return to the Holy Land, the remaining 360 years of their punishment was to be multiplied by 7. The reason is explained in Leviticus 26:18 (If after all this you will not listen to me, I will punish you for your sins seven times over), 26:21 (If you remain hostile toward me and refuse to listen to me, I will multiply your afflictions seven times over, as your sins deserve), 26:24 (I myself will be hostile toward you and will afflict you for your sins seven times over), and 26:28 (then in my anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over.). So, in Leviticus, the Bible states that if the people did not repent while being punished, the punishment would be multiplied by 7. By staying in pagan Babylon, most of the people had refused to repent for turning away from God.
4. If you take the remaining 360 years of punishment and multiply by 7, you get 2,520 years. As with Daniel’s seventy sevens, these are lunar years, based on a 360-day calendar. Using the above formual to convert lunar years to solar years, we perform the following calculation: 2,520 x 360 = 907,200 days. 907,200 ÷ 365.25 = 2,483 years.
5. 536 B.C. will be represented as -536. Perform the addition: -536 + 2,483 = 1947. Remember that there was no “0” year, so we have to add 1 to compensate, leaving us with 1948.

When was Israel reborn and recognized as an independent country? May 14, 1948 (5708 in the Jewish calendar). The same formula worked twice; this is no numerical manipulation.