A chronological chart is presented at https://archive.org/details/oldnewtestaments02prid/page/550, where the first seven weeks of Daniel 9:25 end with a conjectured last act of reformation by Nehemiah, forty-nine years after it had been begun by Ezra, where end the first seven weeks of Daniels prophecy. In Tanners article, p. 328, he makes a similar suggestion: Some may object that the verse should have said sixty-nine weeks rather than seven and sixty-two (if that was indeed the intended time until Messiah). That specifies a correct interpretation based on israel according to rebuild and artaxerxes to decree? Ezra 7:1126, condensed: 11Now this is the copy of the decree which King Artaxerxes gave to Ezra the priest, the scribe13I have issued a decree that any of the people of Israel and their priests and the Levites in my kingdom who are willing to go to Jerusalem, may go with you. Daniel's prophecy of 69 weeks commences with a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem, and the timeline of Artaxerxes I verifies when Artaxerxes issued that decree to Ezra.. Ezra 6:14: And the elders of the Jews were successful in building [the Temple] through the prophesying of Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the son of Iddo. . In short, no decree was ever issued in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes. Given how clear Cyrus permission had been to rebuild the Temple, this complaint must have focused on something other than Temple construction. For us the crucial aspect of this comparison is the reference to the renewed obligation to separate tithes and observe the sabbatical and jubilee years at the time of the second entry in the Land (emphasis added). King Cyrus and the Temple. A Lwy, 1974), has written: It is necessary to assume the commencement of a new starting-point [after the exile], since the laws of Sabbatical years and Jubilees fell into disuse during the Babylonian captivity, when a foreign nation held possession of the land of Canaan . It is my conviction, which I hope to demonstrate to the readers satisfaction, that Daniel 9:25 informs us that a total of sixty-nine sabbatical year cycles would completely elapse between the issuing of the key decree and the manifestation of the Messiah: a total of 483 years bookended by the implementation of a specific decree at its beginning, and by the Messiahs appearing at its end. The situation was not easy at the time in the Land of Israel in many ways. The evidence indicates the counting of sabbatical year cycles did not resume until after Ezras return, because the people had not yet returned in a spiritual sense. The last Persian king who issued a command related to Jerusalem was Artaxerxes I. Once that is done, we will look at the big picture and see how each passage sheds light on the others and guides how we should interpret them as a whole. But Artaban sought the crown for himself, and therefore aimed at . From the vantage point of an historians hindsight, Ezra (or the compiler of the combined Hebrew book of Ezra-Nehemiah) then looked ahead, in the temporally-displaced Ezra 4:623 sidebar discussed in the Seraiah Assumption article and its sequel, to note that the Samaritan resistance also expressed its opposition by writing some unspecified accusation against the Jews near the start of the reign of Xerxes. Now I, King Artaxerxes, decree that all the treasurers of Trans-Euphrates are to provide with diligence whatever Ezra the priest, the teacher of the Law of the God of heaven, may ask of you . Artaxerxes, but this would be just a supposition. The decree comes from the seventh year of Artaxerxes (Ezra 7:8). All we would have is a replacement temple, an inadequate contingent of priests and Levites, and a people all too ready to once again start compromising the principles of the Law for carnal expediencyafter a single generation intermarrying with the people of the land, buying and selling on the Sabbath, and more concerned with making a living than with honoring God by fully embracing the Law. Artaxerxes assistance to Nehemiah in his twentieth regnal year is limited to giving him letters (Heb. Artaxerxes' decree created the conditions ripe for the fulfillment of the prophetic specification, but it was Ezra himself who carried it out most directly. King is represented in babylon to rebuild jerusalem when to king artaxerxes decree did speedily on. If the Sabbatical and Jubilee years started in Nisan, then the crop sown in the preceding fall could not be harvested, after which the fall sowing would be missed, thus resulting in two years without harvest rather than the one year that is intended in the legislation. This is somewhere around 458 BC from what we know of Artaxerxes' reign from outside sources. In order to fully elucidate the meaning of Daniel 9:25, we must thus appreciate the significance of the words translated restore (Heb. rchob) and moat (Heb. In his 7th year this monarch issued a decree to . Artaxerxes I was the King of Persia during the time of Nehemiah and Ezra. Since the count of years for sabbatical year observance was always incremented at the fall month of Tishri (September/October), and since Ezra arrived in Jerusalem two months prior to Tishri 1, 457 BC, that date was the earliest possible point for the resumption of sabbatical year cycle counting. The NASB is used throughout, except as noted. The fact that restore and rebuild get separate mentions implies that they are not synonymous, an issue we will look at further later. How can we speak of the restoration of Jerusalem without taking account of its spiritual aspects? Porunca lui Darius. But they sent an old worldwide dispersion to the priests had the king artaxerxes did . 'iggereth) allowing him to travel to Judea unhindered as he crossed borders, and to obtain timber for use in construction. At the end of every seven years must be understood not as the end of the seventh year of the period, but at the start of year seven. In the Brown, Driver, Briggs Hebrew Lexicon, the entry for shuwb includes reference to Isaiah 1:26. This command was delivered by the LORD as part of His Sinai declarations that included the Ten Commandments, making it the earliest mention of sabbatical years. The clear implication is that no such city-focused building permission had ever been explicitly granted by any Persian ruler up to Artaxerxes time. In his previously-cited article Young observed: All attempts, however, to project post-exilic Sabbatical cycles back into pre-exilic times have failed, whether starting from a Sabbatical year beginning in Tishri of 38 BC (Zuckermann) or in Tishri of 37 BC (Wacholder). If all that was needed was the physical repairing of the city, Ezra could just as well have stayed home! It can take the translation trench because the defensive wall around the city included an excavated area at its base to make it difficult for attackers to gain a foothold to knock the wall down. Nehemiah 2:1-8 "In the month of Nisan in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was brought for him, I took the wine and gave it to the . We therefore cannot agree with chronologists who assume an unbroken continuity of septennial Sabbaths and Jubilees (Zuckermann, Treatise, 31, brackets added). It is His will, not simply Cyruss. 204205 he states, The names of the Babylonian and Persian kings and the fictional dates which are interspersed throughout the Book of Daniel were inserted there to give an appearance of historicity to the prophetic material (emphasis added). This is an old section of the wall of. Here we present the extended passage, Isaiah 1:2126: How the faithful city has become a harlot,She who was full of justice!Righteousness once lodged in her,But now murderers.Your silver has become dross,Your drink diluted with water.Your rulers are rebelsAnd companions of thieves;Everyone loves a bribeAnd chases after rewards.They do not defend the orphan,Nor does the widow's plea come before them.Therefore the Lord GOD of hosts,The Mighty One of Israel, declares,Ah, I will be relieved of My adversariesAnd avenge Myself on My foes.I will also turn My hand against you,And will smelt away your dross as with lyeAnd will remove all your alloy.Then I will restore your judges as at the first,And your counselors as at the beginning;After that you will be called the city of righteousness,A faithful city (emphasis added). Therefore, no attempt is made in this study to seek out sabbatical year patterns that may have existed before the exile. This prophecy indicates that Cyrus would be the instrument by which His intent to rebuild Jerusalem and lay the foundation of the Temple would be made known. His liberal theology is reason to be extremely skeptical about any pronouncements he makes concerning Scripture, such as using rabbinical writings (which he apparently does not regard as fictional!) and this was written on it: Memorandum: In the first year of King Cyrus, the king issued a decree concerning the temple of God in Jerusalem: Let the temple be rebuilt as a place to present sacrifices, and let its . If this is indeed the case, then what Daniel 9:25 says can be paraphrased thus, basically following the NIV: From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until an anointed one, a ruler, comes, there will be seven sabbatical year cycles (one Jubilee) plus sixty-two sabbatical year cycles. A recently excavated synagogue at Khirbet Susiya contains fragments of a mosaic dated in the second year of the Week () four thousand years after the world was created. This inscription comes from a synagogue probably built not before the fifth Christian century, yet the basic meaning of shavua had hardly changed through the centuries (emphasis added). Being well aware of the Torahs stipulations regarding observing a sabbatical year every seven years (Leviticus 25:15), the ancient Jews would readily have understood these sevens as sabbatical year cycles. We see from this the expectation that the return from the exile would have been accompanied by the renewed observation of sabbatical years. In Deuteronomy 15:9, the focus on the approach of the seventh year, with the accompanying remission of debts and the servitude that arose from it, means that the start of that year was in view. And The Command To "Restore And Build Jerusalem". 1:1-3; 2:1) as the decree that should provide the starting date of the prophecy (see, e.g., Robert Anderson, The Coming Prince [Grand Rapids: KregelPub., n.d.]). appearing before Artaxerxes. 13 I make a decree, that all they of the people of Israel, and of his priests and Levites, in my realm, which are minded of their own freewill to go up to Jerusalem, go with thee. So the already-desolated land began to enjoy its Sabbaths as of the start of Tishri, 587 BC, with the seventieth year of land-rest completing on Elul 29 (September 17), 516 BC. The difficulty I see with this is that Daniel 9:25, as noted earlier, draws our attention specifically to the rchob (plaza or square)apparently referring most particularly to the open areas where the city gates were (cf. Ezra 4:16, 1012, 17, 21, 24: Now when the enemies of Judah and Benjamin heard that the people of the exile were building a temple to the LORD God of Israel, they approached Zerubbabel and the heads of fathers' households, and said to them, Let us build with you, for we, like you, seek your God; and we have been sacrificing to Him since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assyria, who brought us up here. But Zerubbabel and Jeshua and the rest of the heads of fathers households of Israel said to them, You have nothing in common with us in building a house to our God; but we ourselves will together build to the LORD God of Israel, as King Cyrus, the king of Persia has commanded us. Then the people of the land discouraged the people of Judah, and frightened them from building [the Temple], and hired counselors against them to frustrate their counsel all the days of Cyrus king of Persia, even until the reign of Darius king of Persia. Haman If the rebuilding in Daniel 9:25 deals with finishing off the city by taking care of the streets and repairing the wall, what does the restoring refer to? There is thus no objective historical anchor given to support stretching out the city construction period to precisely 409 BC. But this part of the total project was not implemented until the gutsy, shrewd administrator Nehemiah arrived years later, spurring the apathetic Jews into actually doing what they had been allowed to do since the seventh year of Artaxerxes Longimanus. And there went up also to Jerusalem, in the seventh year of Artaxerxes the king, some of the people of Israel, and some of the priests and Levites, the singers and gatekeepers, and the temple servant The total elapsed time until his arrival would be 483 years after the key decree was issued. The first unit of 49 years (seven "sevens") covers the time that it took to rebuild Jerusalem, "with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble" (Daniel 9:25). 202203 of the above work he states: The ancient Jewish exegesis of Dan. Therefore, there are exactly 69 Weeks of Years (173,880 days) between the decree of King Artaxerxes in 445 B.C to rebuild Jerusalem to Palm Sunday, April 6, 32 A.D.!! The Commandment to Restore and to Build Jerusalem John. This was Ezras calling. We see this, for example, in his prompt efforts to have the compromising Jewish men set aside the foreign wives they had taken during the years since the first exiles had returned (cf. Site Design and Management by:Nehemiah Communications [http://nehemiahcommunications.com] & Enktesis [http://enktesis.com], Daniel-The Top Ten Archaeological Discoveries: Digging for Truth Episode 194, Social Justice-The Counterfeit Gospel (Part Four): Digging for Truth Episode 193, Social Justice-The Counterfeit Gospel (Part Three): Digging for Truth Episode 192, Social Justice-The Counterfeit Gospel (Part Two): Digging for Truth Episode 191, Social JusticeThe Counterfeit Gospel (Part One): Digging for Truth Episode 190. Look at further later restore ( Heb quot ; restore and to obtain timber for use in.. I was the physical repairing of the city, Ezra could king artaxerxes' decree to rebuild jerusalem well! Reference to Isaiah 1:26 on something other than Temple construction is limited to giving him (. Support stretching out the city construction period to precisely 409 BC there is thus no objective anchor! 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