The Highway Forums General Discussion Theology Discussion Forum Daniel 9:25/Nehemiah 2:1-8+accurate Jewish history

I don't think that I have ever before experienced such confusion over a single Biblical issue than that of the specifics involving the Dan 9:25 verse.

According to the actual wording of Daniel 9:24-25, I find the rebuilding of the city to be exclusive to just that-the city itself (Not the Temple), that which should have involved a 49 year timeframe. From the Artaxeres decree to Nehemiah in 445/444BC to the end of the first "Seven" or 49 years approximately, such would take us to the end of the canonized Old Testament, oddly enough. Unfortunately, I can't find anything in the historical portrait proving necessarily that the city itself was being rebuilt over this 49 yr timeframe exclusively.

I have read commentaries proclaiming everything from the city's walls having been rebuilt over a 90 day timespan to one involving six months total, some say nine months and others 10-15 years.

Few, apparently, have concluded that the rebuilding phase matches the 49 yr timeframe between 445BC/444BC perfectly, but of course none of us were living during this time, so there's no way of confirming these suspicions to be accurate, either.

Somehow/someway, in his Bible commentary, Jimmy Swaggart contends that the city was rebuilt over a 141yr time period beginning in 445/444BC but he doesn't provide any supporting evidence. To make that work into the first "Seven," Swaggart contends that there was a "Stop gap" mechanism to the weeks of seven years involving Daniel 9:24-25, in this select instance, one allowing for a 49 yr time period of total completion taking part over the entire 141 yr period.

I am here to find out whether or not any of you can provide me with accurate information about the rebuilding of the city itself (Not the Temple-the Temple itself was built between 538BC-516BC give or take two years, somehow they have that part figured out and thus it would involve the Cyrus decree for sure), I am for the first time in this walk prepared to assume that God Himself simply will not answer this for me, and perhaps here is where Faith itself enters, would that not be true.

I have witnessed enough things in this life to know, beyond any doubt, that Jesus is real. All the more important, He Himself represents everything good and precious there could ever be from the full standpoint of love's innocense where humility and selflessness is such a precious part of that, and thus perhaps there's a certin truth relating to this personal experience in that God has been teaching me to just trust in the heart itself and the specific things that I've witnessed along the way in this life's journey that testify to His Son and then live out this life to the best of my ability like His Son did, this through Faith itself.

Nonetheless, I do still wish that He would provide some type of certainty concerning this matter of Daniel's 69 weeks, because one would think there would be a way of distinctly proving all such things relating to the prophecy, but I don't think there is historically, not unless one of you can provide me with a historical work confirming the specific timeframes involved.

If that can't be done, I'll just simply have to discount all such theories involving the rebuilding of the city that suggest such was accomplished over a matter of days, weeks on up to 10-12 years. The sheer volume of those available across the internet on this only confirms the distinct level of chaos and that at least a portion of this is embedded in the guess work of the human mind itself, regardless, I suppose. Meaning, just because one or two people proclaim that the city was rebuilt in 10-12 years doesn't mean that is so. Here again then, perhaps in select cases, some of the OT is meant to make our Faith in the One that counts deeper and more meaningful.

Just as a follow-up to this, I spoke w/ a gifted Christian historian that was able to confirm the specifics of the city's rebuilding having taken place during the specific 444BC-395BC timeframe. This was once again a situation where my lack of OT knowledge got the better of me because I didn't understand the timelines.

Jim pointed out that there's strong Biblical evidence to support the fact the city's rebuilding might have started around 450BC and he felt that it was very reasonable to believe that it would have taken 49 years for the city to be rebuilt from that point forth.

I couldn't embrace this since it only took Nehemiah to get those walls up in just 52 days-here then, a 10-12 yr timeframe would have made a lot of sense.

However, once a person considers each and every little detail involving the entire city's reconstruction, this in a time and place w/o any modern day technological capacities, it's extremely plausible to believe it would have taken the full 49 yrs for the city to be rebuilt. The realities would demand that type of timeframe, in fact.

One thing Jim mentioned is that he felt it could have taken even longer than the 49 yrs to complete the city's rebuilding, but yet if Dan 9:25 says that it would take a "Seven" to do so, we must accept God's Word and thus believe the city's rebuilding would have been completed around 395BC.

The point is that the prophecy fits the timeline and adds up in the physical sense of the labor related realities of the day and age the ancient Jews were living in.