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

Recent Exyositions of Daniel.
in general, and in that of Daniel in particular, a day stands for
a year. For this hypothesis, widely as it has been adopted,
there is absolutely no support. It has no confirmation from
the fact that "week" is in Dan. ix. 24ff. used to denote a
week of years; for the Hebrew term here employed means
properly a "heptad" or a "septenary," and, though commonly
used of seven days as the most familiar hebdomadal period, is
quite as applicable, according to its derivation, to a period of
seven years, or, in fact, to any other whole made up of seven
parts. That the weeks are weeks of years, is intimated by
events being assigned to them which must necessarily require
more than seventy ordinary weeks for their accomplishment.
And the Mosaic law, with its sabbatical system and its cycles
of sevens extended to years as well as days, habituated the
Jews to regularly recurring periods of seven years; and these
were brought to mind with special prominence at this very
time by the seventy years of exile being declared to be in lieu
of these neglected sabbaths of years, 2 Chlron. xxxvi. 21.
But that a term properly denoting a heptad or cycle of
seven should be used in application to years, does not warrant
the conclusion that a day in the language of prophecy may be
taken to signify a year, much less that this can be accepted as
a fixed canon of interpretation.
Two other passages are adduced to prove the canon, but
they are quite as little to the purpose. Tlhe rebellion of the
children of Israel in consequence of the evil report of the
spies was punished by their being condemned to wander in
the wilderness forty years, a year for every day that the
spies had been searching the land, Num. xiv. 34. But this is
not a prediction stated in days and fulfilled in years. They
are not told that they must remain forty days in the desert,
and then required to remain forty years, as they oiught to have
been in order to support the hypothesis in question. The term
in the sentence is unambiguously declared to be forty years,
and coincides exactly with the period of the infliction, only the
sentence itself was designed to be a perpetual reminder of the offence which had induced it, and was made so to be by connecting the forty years' wandering with the forty days' searching.
In Ezekiel iv. 4-6 the prophet was directed to lie a certain
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