Leviticus 26:34

Hebrew Bible

33 I will scatter you among the nations and unsheathe the sword after you, so your land will become desolate and your cities will become a waste. 34‘Then the land will make up for its Sabbaths all the days it lies desolate while you are in the land of your enemies; then the land will rest and make up its Sabbaths. 35 All the days of the desolation it will have the rest it did not have on your Sabbaths when you lived on it. 36 “‘As for the ones who remain among you, I will bring despair into their hearts in the lands of their enemies. The sound of a blowing leaf will pursue them, and they will flee as one who flees the sword and will fall down even though there is no pursuer.

2 Chronicles 36:21

Hebrew Bible

20 He deported to Babylon all who escaped the sword. They served him and his sons until the Persian kingdom rose to power. 21 This took place to fulfill the Lord’s message spoken through Jeremiah and lasted until the land experienced its sabbatical years. All the time of its desolation the land rested in order to fulfill the seventy years. 22 In the first year of King Cyrus of Persia, in fulfillment of the Lord’s message spoken through Jeremiah, the Lord motivated King Cyrus of Persia to issue a proclamation throughout his kingdom and also to put it in writing. It read: 23 “This is what King Cyrus of Persia says: ‘The Lord God of heaven has given me all the kingdoms of the earth. He has appointed me to build a temple for him in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Anyone of his people among you may go up there, and may the Lord his God be with him.’”

Daniel 9:2

Hebrew Bible

1 In the first year of Darius son of Ahasuerus, who was of Median descent and who had been appointed king over the Babylonian empire— 2 in the first year of his reign I, Daniel, came to understand from the sacred books that the number of years for the fulfilling of the desolation of Jerusalem, which had come as the Lord’s message to the prophet Jeremiah, would be 70 years. 3 So I turned my attention to the Lord God to implore him by prayer and requests, with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes.

 Notes and References

"... It is generally accepted by scholars today that Daniel 9:24–27 reflects a paradigm of inner-biblical interpretation, according to which the later text has transformed and updated Jeremiah’s 70 years of exile into 70 weeks of years, or 490 years. According to this common reading, the author of Daniel 9 did not perceive the dismal Judean reality following the return to the Land in the Persian period – all the way down through the constant clashes between the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires in the Hellenistic period – as the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s words of hope and restoration. Therefore, the writer found it necessary to extend the expiration date of the prophecy originally directed to the Babylonian exiles, all the way into the mid-second century B. C. E. The method by which this supposed reinterpretation was accomplished is similar in some degree to the mode of interpretation found in chapters 7 and 8. Those chapters contain vivid visions, which are interpreted symbolically on Daniel’s behalf. Each aspect of the visions is understood to reflect a particular idea, entity or event, and the divine revelation to Daniel is only meaningful on this interpretive level. In a similar vein, the suggested approach to Daniel 9 also assumes the use of “symbolic exegesis” according to which the word “year” is reinterpreted as “week.” The primary difference between the interpretive model of chapters 7 and 8 on the one hand and chapter 9 on the other, is that the former employs objects for the interpreted symbols, while the latter treats Jeremiah’s prophetic utterance in the same way. In this sense, the method of interpretation found in Daniel 9 (according to the prevalent view) is most similar to pesher exegesis, as evidenced extensively in the Qumran scrolls. An interesting consequence of this approach, according to which this vision extends Jeremiah’s original prophecy of 70 years, is that Daniel 9 stands in opposition to the position expressed explicitly at the end of the Book of Chronicles (2 Chronicles 36), which clearly assumes that Jeremiah’s prophecy was indeed fulfilled in the time of Cyrus, when the Judeans were allowed to return to the Land and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem ... the text of 2 Chronicles 36 has also been analyzed extensively as an example of inner-biblical interpretation, since it offers a basis for the length of the seventy-year exile, as the result of the nonobservance of the sabbatical years for the land as prescribed in Leviticus 26:34–35, 43 ..."

Segal, Michael The Chronological Conception of the Persian Period in Daniel 9 (pp. 283-303) Journal of Ancient Judaism, Vol. 2, 2011

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