Daniel 9:24 Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy.
Detailed Timeline
Set 1 — Finish the Transgression (515 BC – 445 BC)
The Second Temple was completed on the third day of Adar, in the sixth year of Darius I — dated to approximately March 12, 515 BC (Ezra 6:15). This fulfilled Jeremiah's seventy-year prophecy of exile (Jer. 25:11, 29:10), measured from the first Temple's destruction in 586 BC. The reason the Jews were exiled was because of their transgression for seventy weeks in not keeping the sabbath year. So since they didn't keep 70 sabbath years God exiled them for seventy years to give the land rest. This is what is referred to as "to finish the transgression".
Artaxerxes I's decree authorizing Nehemiah to rebuild Jerusalem's wall followed in the month of Nisan, the king's twentieth year — 445 BC (Neh. 2:1–8). The interval between these two independently dated, textually attested events is exactly seventy years.
Set 2 — Make an End of Sin (445 BC – 46 AD)
This set opens with Artaxerxes' decree (445 BC), dated by Sir Robert Anderson to 1 Nisan, March 14, 445 BC (Julian). Anderson's 1894 calculation — refined by Harold Hoehner in 1977 — measures 69 weeks (483 years) as 173,880 days of 360-day "prophetic" years from that date, landing on April 6, 32 AD: Palm Sunday, four days before the traditional crucifixion date. This calculation is well-established in dispensational scholarship, though contested by critics who reject the 360-day-year premise and Anderson's specific start-date assumptions.
However, rather than placing the Messiah's "cutting off" (Dan. 9:26) at the conclusion of the 69th week, I place it at the first year of that week. In Galatians 2:1 Paul goes up to Jerusalem "fourteen years" after a prior visit is read here as marking the point at which the ministry of reconciliation became the church's official ministry (the Jerusalem council) — landing at 46 AD, which independently coincides with the terminus of a full 490-solar-year count from 445 BC. Jesus making an end of sin on the cross does not conclude that same year. Acts is very clear that there was still some question about whether or not they still needed to keep the Jewish rules concerning animal sacrifices, kosher eating and circumcision. That was resolved at this conference 14 years later.
Set 3 — Make Reconciliation for Iniquity (46 AD – 536 AD)
This set of 70 weeks of years opens at the Jerusalem council's formalization of the Gentile mission. The mission as laid out by Paul is that we have received the ministry of reconciliation. The Apostolic Fathers (Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp) write as direct successors to the apostles through the late first century. Persecution under successive emperors (Nero, Domitian, Decius, Diocletian) accompanies steady expansion until Constantine's conversion and the Edict of Milan (313) end state persecution. The Council of Nicaea (325) produces the first ecumenical creed; three further councils — Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451) — settle Trinitarian and Christological doctrine through the work of Athanasius, the Cappadocian Fathers, Augustine, Jerome, and John Chrysostom.
The set closes on a genuinely notable historical marker. The Byzantine historian Procopius, writing as a contemporary, recorded that in 536 AD "the sun gave forth its light without brightness... like the sun in eclipse" for the entire year — an atmospheric dust-veil event, now understood as volcanic in origin, that historians regard as the most severe episode of Northern Hemisphere cooling in the last two thousand years. During this time the ministry of reconciliation was codified.
Set 4 — Bring in Everlasting Righteousness (536 AD – 1026 AD)
The rise of Islam and the rapid Arab conquests of the 630s–700s strip the church of its ancient heartlands — Jerusalem (637), Alexandria (641), Carthage (698) — permanently ending Christian political dominance across the regions. Islam and Judaism are both trying to establish a righteousness of their own during this time.
We have the Islamic conquest, and we have Spanish inquisition and other atrocities. People are doing what is right in their own eyes and trying to justify it with their religion whether it is Islam, Judaism or a dominionism version of Christianity. But behind the scenes there are Christians who come to see that Jesus is our righteousness and our works in trying to bring in the kingdom are bloody rags.
Set 5 — Seal Up the Vision (1026 AD – 1516 AD)
This set's boundary is anchored by two independently, precisely dated events that both fall in 1516. Erasmus's Novum Instrumentum omne — the first published Greek New Testament on March 1, 1516, becoming the textual basis for Luther's, Tyndale's, and the King James translations. In the same year, Ottoman forces under Selim I captured Jerusalem from the Mamluks in the final weeks of 1516 (the war concluding with the Battle of Ridaniya in January 1517), beginning four centuries of Ottoman rule over the city.
Set 6 — Seal Up the Prophecy (1516 AD – 2006 AD)
Opens with Erasmus's Greek New Testament (March 1516) and Luther's Ninety-Five Theses (October 1517) arriving within eighteen months of each other, together fueling the Reformation. The British and Foreign Bible Society (1804), the Gideons International (1899, dedicated specifically to Scripture distribution), and Wycliffe Bible Translators/SIL International (1942 onward, translating Scripture into previously unwritten languages) drive Scripture into the majority of the world's major languages by the close of the twentieth century.
For the Jews, this period runs from the absorption of Sephardic exiles into Ottoman territory after 1492, to the Balfour Declaration and Allenby's capture of Jerusalem from Ottoman rule (1917 — exactly four hundred years after the Ottoman conquest that opens this set), the Holocaust (1933–1945), the establishment of the State of Israel (1948), the Six-Day War and reunification of Jerusalem (1967), and the Yom Kippur War (1973). All prophetic fulfillments.
The set closes in 2006: Hamas wins the Palestinian legislative elections in January; the Second Lebanon War runs July–August; Saddam Hussein is sentenced to death in November and executed by hanging in Baghdad on December 30, 2006 — within the final two days of the calendar year. The pieces being put in place for the upcoming wars.
This period begins with Ottoman forces under Selim I capturing Jerusalem and ends with Saddam Hussein being executed.
1. Finish the transgression refers to Israel finishing the transgression they made in not keeping the sabbath years.
2. Make an end of sin is the once for all sacrifice Jesus made to redeem us. This is the gospel that we are saved by grace.
3. Make reconciliation for iniquity is the fact that we have been given the ministry of reconciliation.
4. Bring in everlasting righteousness, the church is God's Poiema, masterpiece, created for good works, not for military conquest.
5. Seal up the vision refers to having a complete translation of the Greek New Testament.
6. Seal up the prophecy refers to printing and publishing the Bible, with over 8 billion Bibles having been published as well as internet versions.
