Background: Daniel's Timelines: 70 Weeks and 3½ Years
A Note for Group Leaders Before You Start
This is the densest session in the introduction, covering two distinct but related time schemes (Daniel’s 70 “weeks” and Revelation’s parallel 3.5-year expressions). If your group tends to meet weekly without the constraint of a single Sunday service, consider splitting this into two sessions — Part 1 on the 70 weeks, Part 2 on the 3.5 years — rather than rushing through both in one sitting. What follows is written as one complete session, but the natural break point is marked clearly below.
Opening Hook
Ask your group: has anyone tried to build a timeline chart of end-times events from Daniel and Revelation’s numbers — 70 weeks, 1260 days, 42 months, “time, times, and half a time”? These numbers have fueled more speculative date-setting than almost anything else in Scripture. Tonight we’re going to do the math carefully, see where it points with real precision (startlingly, to the cross itself), and be honest about which steps in the count are contested among careful readers of Daniel.
Part 1: The 70 Weeks
The full argument is in The seventy weeks.
What a “week” means here. God commanded a Sabbatical year every seventh year (Leviticus 25:1-7), which Israel never actually kept. When exile came, it lasted 70 years — one year for every missed Sabbatical year (2 Chronicles 36:20-21), which means 70 missed Sabbaticals span 7×70=490 years, roughly the whole span of Israel’s national existence to that point. That’s why a “week” in Daniel means seven years, not seven days — deliberately echoing the Sabbath pattern.
The prayer and its answer. Daniel, aware of Jeremiah’s 70-year promise (Jeremiah 29:10), prays for his people (Daniel 9:3-19) and receives an answer covering “seventy sevens” — 490 years — decreed to finish transgression, end sin, atone for wickedness, bring in everlasting righteousness, seal up vision and prophecy, and anoint the Most Holy Place (Daniel 9:24-27). Taken together, these six goals go well beyond anything achieved in history except what Jesus accomplished on the cross.
Fulfilled twice — put this early. Two readings of the seventy weeks carry real weight, and the explanation holds both. The first fulfilment is Antiochus IV: Onias III, the last high priest of the old line, is pushed out when Antiochus takes the throne in 175 BC and murdered in 171 BC; sacrifice stops in December 167 BC when the altar to Zeus goes up in the temple; the temple is rededicated in December 164 BC — three and a half years later, and seven years after Onias was cut off. 1 Maccabees 1:54 already describes that altar in Daniel’s own words. What that fulfilment cannot deliver is verse 24: transgression was not finished and everlasting righteousness did not arrive with the Maccabees. Jesus is the fulfilment that reaches those six goals. If someone objects that a prophecy must mean one thing, point them to Isaiah 7:14-16 — the sign given to king Ahaz, born in Ahaz’s own lifetime, and heard again centuries later in Mary's son.
How the count actually runs — and where it pauses. This is the part your group will want on a whiteboard. The weeks are real years, but they are not counted straight through: twice the count stops and waits. The word to restore and rebuild Jerusalem goes out through Jeremiah in 588/587 BC, as the city falls (Jeremiah 30:18). Seven sevens, 49 years, bring us to 539 BC, when Cyrus — called God’s anointed in Isaiah 45:1 — issues his decree. Then the count pauses: Cyrus gives the order, but it takes almost a century before Jerusalem stands again as a walled city, which happens under Nehemiah around 440 BC. From there sixty-two sevens, 434 years, run while the city stands “in times of trouble,” through Persians, Greeks, the Syrian-Egyptian kingdoms and finally Rome — and reach 6 BC, the birth of Jesus. The count pauses a second time until His public ministry begins.
Say plainly that the pauses are part of the scheme, not a patch over a gap: that is how the explanation’s source, Gerhard Maier, reads the passage. And say just as plainly that other careful readers count differently — straight through from Artaxerxes’ decree (445/444 BC), or taking the numbers as symbolic rather than calendrical. The conclusion the session is built on, that the seventy sevens converge on the cross, is strong; the decade-by-decade arithmetic is one proposal among several, and your group deserves to know that.
The last “week,” and the cross. After the sixty-two sevens, “the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing” — Jesus, not Cyrus this time. “Cut off” in Aramaic can also mean “cut a covenant” — He died in order to make one. In the middle of the final seven-year period, sacrifice and offering end, because they’re no longer needed after the cross (Hebrews 10:1-18). The final seven years are AD 27 — Jesus’s baptism, dated from Tiberius’s fifteenth year (Luke 3:1) — to AD 34, the stoning of Stephen and the gospel’s decisive turn toward the Gentiles, with the cross at the midpoint in AD 30. Hold that dating with appropriate openness: it is a carefully reasoned proposal, not a certainty the whole argument depends on. The explanation also reads the Jewish war of AD 66–73 as a reflection of that same week forty years later — the temple destroyed at its midpoint, the sacrifices ending with it.
Part 2: The 3.5 Years
The full argument is in The secret of the 3.5 years.
The math. Revelation’s chapters 11-13 use three different expressions for what turns out to be the same length of time, assuming a 30-day month: 1260 days = 42 months = “time, two times, and half a time” = 3.5 years. Five separate references (Rev 11:2, 11:3, 12:6, 12:14, 13:5) all point to this same underlying period.
Original-language and background note: Elijah’s drought. Elijah announces a drought against Jezebel’s Baal worship that lasts, per Jesus’s own reference to it, 3.5 years — even though 1 Kings itself never states the exact duration. The whole episode turns on one question: who is the true God, the one who sends rain and fire from heaven? Notably, the second beast in Revelation 13 performs that exact same feat — calling down fire — a deliberate, unsettling echo of Elijah’s Mount Carmel test, this time performed by a counterfeit.
How the 3.5-year pattern already surfaced in Daniel. The 70 weeks resolve, in their final period, into two half-weeks of 3.5 years each — one commonly read as covering Jesus’s earthly ministry, the other extending into the age of the church that follows. Revelation takes that half week up and makes it a picture of the whole time between the two comings.
What the three time periods likely describe. Chapter 13’s beast activity begins right after the cross, once the devil realizes he cannot destroy Israel directly, and runs until Christ’s return. The woman (representing God’s people) is protected in the wilderness for the same span. The temple’s outer court, no longer used for sacrifice, is trampled by the nations for the same period — again running from the cross to the second coming. That leaves the two witnesses' 1260 days, which likewise span the whole age between Christ’s two comings — a real clue, given how long that is, that “the witnesses” function much more plausibly as the church itself than as two individual end-times figures (we’ll pick this up fully in the Two Witnesses session much later in the series).
Why the text switches units — and the loose end that remains. Days here, months there, “times” elsewhere, for what is mathematically the same length of time. The days mark the witnesses’ testimony and God’s provision for Israel; the months mark the devil’s reign and the trampling of the temple’s outer court; the years, or “times,” mark God’s hidden work. Richard Bauckham has shown that the split is deliberate: 42 months is the beast’s number, 1260 days the church’s, and the two belong to 36, the root of the beast’s 666, and to 1225, the number of the people of God (Climax of Prophecy, pp. 400–402). What the pairing makes clear is that the devil’s rule and the church’s God-given rule run side by side through the same span. One loose end is worth naming for your group rather than smoothing over: the woman’s protection is described with “days” in Rev 12:6 and with “times” in 12:14 — the same event in two different units.
Discussion Questions
Understanding the text:
- Why does the “seventy sevens” prophecy point so precisely toward the cross, even though the exact decade-by-decade math is more contested than a quick read might suggest?
- What does the switch between “days,” “months,” and “times” for the same underlying length of time suggest is happening in Revelation 11-13 — and what does it mean that the beast’s span and the church’s are exactly as long as each other?
- How does the Elijah/Mount Carmel background illuminate what’s happening when the second beast in Revelation 13 calls down fire from heaven?
So what for us: 4. Daniel’s precise, sober arithmetic converges on the cross rather than a random future date. How does that reshape your instinct to look for coded predictions of near-future events in these same numbers? 5. The “1260 days” almost certainly describes the whole church age, not a short future tribulation period. If the church has already been living out its “1260 days” of witness for two thousand years, what does that suggest about your own role in that ongoing story right now? 6. This session modeled holding a conclusion firmly (the cross is the target) while holding some details loosely (the exact chronology, the second pause in the count). Where else in your own faith could you benefit from that same combination of confidence and humility?
Closing Prayer Prompt
Thank God for the staggering precision of a prophecy written centuries in advance that converges on the cross itself. Ask for the wisdom to hold Scripture’s genuinely mysterious details with humility, without needing to force every number into a tidy chart before you can trust the God who gave it.