the abomination of desolation, that which is decided, until the full accomplishment, shall be poured upon the desolate." time for the Christians to fly: And accordingly many took the advice which our Saviour had given them, and fled from Judea into the mountains: At the commencement of the profanation many withdrew to Pella, a town beyond Jordan, and by this means were rescued from the impending fate of the city. Mark xiii. 20, and Luke xxi. 18. -that which is decided, until the full accomplishment, shall be poured upon the desolate."-The word I take to be a feminine absolute, and with the prefixed (which Houbigant deems superfluous) to be equivalent to a substantive of the neuter gender, and the nominative case to the verb that follows: The Gr. has σvvTeλeta. Michaelis thinks the word denotes something "decided by the lot of fate." Suppl. p. 945. See the like word at Chap. xi. 36. The days of vengeance were now come, when all things which were written should be fulfilled. And that it was a general opinion that the entire destruction of the city was previously determined by Providence, may perhaps be collected from a passage in Josephus, De Bel. Jud lib. vi. c. 4, which he refers to the temple. "The sentence of God had already determined that it should be consumed with fire; and now the fatal day, after many years, was come, which was the 10th of the month Loi (or August), the day on which the king of Babylon had fired it once before, yet it was now set on fire by our own countrymen, who were indeed the cause thereof." The latter part of which passage may incline us to believe, that the havoc occasioned by the besieged themselves was a circumstance not unlikely to be alluded to in this prediction. See the former note. How fully the prediction was accomplished in this last respect must be notorious to every one who has read, or will read, Josephus's history on the Jewish war. The author was an eye-witness of the desolations, and he observes that never any city suffered such things, and that it was so levelled that none who had seen it before could believe it had ever been inhabited. Jerusalem was indeed then trodden down of the Gentiles, and so must remain, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled, i. e. as Mr. Lowth has observed, till the times of the fourth monarchy, spoken of Ch. ii. and vii. are expired. And this is doubtless the meaning of the full accomplishment here in the text : Its fate was decided, and would be gradually fulfilling, as we see it has been ever since. The word nn "shall be poured" is a metaphorical term borrowed from the effusion of metals, and is therefore a just symbol of the wretched state of this desolated people, who were to be melted down among all the nations of the earth; yet still to be so far kept separate and distinguished, that their fate might be marked, and their final restoration in God's due time fully evinced. Vulg. has "perseverabit," and Mr. Mede, "shall continue." Josephus tells us, in the same book above cited, that many of the Jews were afterwards massacred in other cities and countries, especially in Syria and Egypt; and he freely owns "that those calamities and desolations very justly fell upon his countrymen; and that had not the Romans come against these criminals, they would have been swallowed up by an earthquake, or perished by a deluge, or have been consumed by fire, like Sodom; the Jews being more impious than any of those unhappy people that had thus suffered." Philostratus also relates, that when the neighbouring nations wished to crown Titus on account of his victory, he told them that he was unworthy of that honour, as he himself had not been the author of such works, but had only lent his hands to the Deity, who was demonstrating his resentment against the Jews. See de Vit. Apollon. lib. vi. c. 14. During the war 97,000 were taken, and 1,100,000 slain; and the authors of the Univ. Hist. vol. x. p. 688, 8vo, reckon the whole amount of the captives and slain to have been 1,445,000, besides 10,000 slain at Jotapa, and multitudes that died in caves, woods, deserts and exile, of which no computation could be made. The demerits of the Jews, their punishment and the cause of it, seem justly and beautifully intimated in the following lines of Prudentius. Apoth. adv. Jud. Quid mereare, Titus docuit: docuere rapinis Judæus, postquam patriâ de sede revulsus, Sanguine respersus commista piacula solvit. What hath been hitherto offered, I trust, may be deemed a sufficient explanation of the true and proper sense of the astonishing prophecy contained in the four last verses. Yet, lest the sense here given should be mistaken, or not duly attended to in this detached form, I will beg leave to recapitulate it, or to state the sense of the angelic message with all due deference in the following summary; but previously reminding the reader that the original word rendered weeks throughout the prophecy strictly signifies sevens, which word is adopted in Purver's translation, and may be referred either to days or years. Seventy weeks of precision, or precise weeks, remain upon thy people and upon thy holy city Jerusalem, to restrain their rebellion or apostasy from God, and to put an end to sins and expiate iniquity, or to bring to a conclusion their sufferings and the punishment that occasioned them, and to introduce the righteousness of ancient times, and to seal the vision of the prophet Jeremiah, and to restore the religious rites and holy things to their proper uses. This first deliverance from the captivity shall be accomplished within seventy weeks of days; but this term shall be typical, or a prelude to another more glorious deliverance, which from its commencement to its full and final period shall be comprehended in the same number of sevens or weeks, yet not of days, but of times or years. And this longer period shall be distributed into three portions, of seven weeks, and then of sixty-two weeks, and lastly of one week, each of which will be distinguished by extraordinary events, as the prophecy now proceeds to shew. For know and understand, this interesting business induces me thus solemnly to recal your attention, that from the passing of an edict to rebuild your city Jerusalem, that had been destroyed by fire, until Messiah the Prince, or from the 20th of Artax. Long. when this edict will be delivered to Nehemiah, till that important hour, when the Messiah shall be offered up, and thereby triumph as a prince over death and hell and all his enemies, shall be seven weeks and threescore and two weeks, or sixty-nine weeks of years: And the term is thus divided because the former part shall be distinguished by the building of the city, which shall be fully completed with its streets and walls in that narrower limit of the times. Then after the three score and two weeks, or at the passover next following their termination, shall Messiah be cut off by an ignominious death, and a total desertion. Yet though none shall be for him, or he shall be altogether forsaken at that time, his princely authority will still be manifested: for the people of the prince that shall come, or the Roman army in the service of the Messiah, when his business upon earth is completed, and the gospel fully published, shall destroy both the Jewish city and sanctuary; and they shall come up against it like an inundation, and shall cut down with a general ruin, and to the end of a war decisive of the nation of the Jews there shall be desolations. Yet the one week of years that remains to complete the number typified in the former deliverance, this space of seven years shall make firm a covenant of security and protection to many, when those who are in Judea will escape to the mountains; and in the midst of the week the sacrifice and meat-offering, or the whole ritual of the Jewish worship, shall cease: And when upon the borders of the temple, represented by an expanded wing, shall be the abomination of desolation, either the dead bodies of the slain, or the idolatrous ensigns, together with the Roman armies encompassing Jerusalem, then the desolations shall presently follow, and shall continue till a full accomplishment of the decided fate of this devoted people shall be poured upon the desolate, or until the times of the Gentiles shall be fulfilled. I could offer many useful remarks on this extraordinary prediction, especially by way of inference, but for the sake of brevity I shall confine myself to the three following. In the first place, We may from this interpretation collect a fair reason why the reign of Darius the Mede is taken so much notice of by Daniel, as it seems to have been useful, if not necessary, toward limiting the period alluded to in the former part of this prediction. Secondly; From hence may be deduced a sufficient vindication of the doctrine of a secondary sense belonging to prophecy. Yet those who shall be still unwilling to allow a double sense in prophecy, need not object to this interpretation on that account; for if the secondary or typical sense of ver. 24 be dropped, the interpretation of the latter part of the prediction not necessarily depending upon it, may be complete without it. And thirdly, We see the expediency likewise of generally adhering to the original text, or at least of attempting to correct it with the utmost precaution, and upon the justest principles, as this very difficult passage, according to the sense here given, has required scarce any alteration at all. Archbp. Secker has enlarged very much on this prophecy; and indeed the whole of his second volume of MS. notes, and a considerable part of the first, are upon this subject. Though the limits I have proposed for my work would not allow me to avail myself in any measure of his observations, yet I will just beg leave to mention here an extract that he has made from a posthumous tract on the weeks, of a Mr. Johnson of Cranbrook, printed at London in 1748. "He concludes (p. 378) that if he had hitherto lived an infidel, the CHAPTER X. 1 IN the third year of Cyrus, king of Persia, a Reve conviction wrought in him by a just consideration of the certain sense and perfect completion of this divine oracle is so full, that he should think it his duty to do and suffer all that human nature, supported with divine grace, could, rather than forfeit his faith." THIS Chapter contains the preparatory circumstances to the final Revelation that was made to Daniel in the two last Chapters of the Book. The Vision was to be of great extent, and is therefore ushered in with a Preface of considerable length; in which are pointed out the Humiliation of the Prophet, the attention that was paid to it, the appearance of the divine Messenger, the impression it made on Daniel's mind, the Design of the Vision, and the Strength from Heaven with which he was favoured, in order to enable him to comprehend it, with other circumstances relating to the Angels that make the discovery. 1. In the third year of Cyrus, king of Persia.—That is, after the death of Darius, or the 72nd year from the commencement of the captivity, the 214th of the area of Nabonassar, and the 5th of his reign, according to the canon: Then, as follows in one MS. 17 "the word of Jehovah was revealed." By this time the prophet must have been at least 90 years of age, and persons have often been favoured with stronger and farther illuminations a little before their deaths, as was the case of Isaac and Jacob, in the Book of Genesis. דבר The kingdom of Elam, from the son of Shem of that name, was considerable among the nations, in the time of Abraham, under Chedorlaomer, Gen. xiv. 4, 5, and seems to have continued increasing and flourishing afterwards till it was subdued by the united powers of Media and Babylon: By an union with the Medes it recovered this defeat, so as to become the seat of extensive or universal empire under the name of Peres or Persia, in the first year of Cyrus. |