(α) an Anointed One shall be cut off, and shall have no help (?) (or "there shall be none belonging to him");[607]
(β) the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary;
(γ) his end and the end shall be with a flood, and war, and desolation;
(δ) for one week this alien prince shall make a covenant with many;
(ε) for half of that week he shall cause the sacrifice and burnt offering to cease;
(ζ) and upon the wing of abominations [shall come] one that maketh desolate;
(η) and unto the destined consummation [wrath] shall be poured out upon a desolate one (?) (or "the horrible one").
Much is uncertain in the text, and much in the translation; but the general outline of the declaration is clear in many of the chief particulars, so far as they are capable of historic verification. Instead of being a mystical prophecy which floated purely in the air, and in which a week stands (as Keil supposes) for unknown, heavenly, and symbolic periods—in which case no real information would have been vouchsafed—we are expressly told that it was intended to give the seer a definite, and even a minutely detailed, indication of the course of events.
Let us now take the revelation which is sent to the perplexed mourner step by step.
1. Seventy weeks are to elapse before any perfect deliverance is to come. We are nowhere expressly told that year-weeks are meant, but this is implied throughout, as the only possible means of explaining either the vision or the history. The conception, as we have seen, would come to readers quite naturally, since Shabbath meant in Hebrew, not only the seventh day of the week, but the seventh year in each week of years. Hence "seventy weeks" means four hundred and ninety years.[608] Not until the four hundred and ninety years—the seventy weeks of years—are ended will the time have come to complete the prophecy which only had a sort of initial and imperfect fulfilment in seventy actual years.