Recent Expositions of Daniel. By Prof. W. H. Green, D. D. [pp. 397-424]

P7ecent Ezmpositions of Daniel.
It is true that the mneaning put upon the first two clauses by
Zdckler, might admit of their being applied in a lower sense
to the criminality which culminated in the desecration of God's
temple by Antiochus, as well as to that which found its acme
in that more awful crime at which the earth quaked, and the
sun was darkened. But the correct interpretation of those
clauses makes them substantially equivalent to the third, and
refers them in like manner to the putting away of sin by the
only effectual offering, thus precluding the possibility of any
other than a Messianic sense.
It is vain, therefore, to plead as parallel the language of our
Lord appended to a prediction which had blended reference
to the destruction of Jerusalem and to the end of the world:
"This generation shall not pass till all these things be
fulfilled;" or that other declaration, which rings through the
Old Testament: "The day of the Lord is at hand," and is reechoed in the New: "The coming of the Lord draweth nigh."
Where, as in these cases, a predicted event finds its fulfilment
in successive stadia or cycles, it may be said to come to pass
on the completion of the first stadium, of which those that
follow will be but the substantial reproduction in higher potency. But Daniel's seventy weeks were to effect a result
which admits of no double or doubtful interpretation. The
atonement for sin, which was to find place within this limnit,
allows of no degrees and no inferior application. It can be
nothing less than the sacrificial death of the incarnate Son of
God.
But a second objection equally fatal to the view under consideration is, that the seventy weeks, upon Z6ckler's own
showing, extend not to the overthrow of Antiochus and the
Maccabean deliverance, but many years beyond it. This he
does not affect to conceal or cover up, but plainly avows. He
claims, p. 179, that the seventy weeks, or 490 years, should
be reckoned from the same point of time with the seventy
years predicted by Jeremiah, of which he conceives it to be
an expansion or modification. Jeremiah's prophecy furnished
the occasion of that of Daniel, suggested its form, supplied it
with its number seventy, and, he contends, determines the date
from which it was to be computed. About this date there
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