The Book of Daniel 95 the second under Darius Hystaspis. (Ezra 6.) The third in the seventh year of Artaxerxes.'(Ezra 7:12-26.) All of these concern the temple. The fourth in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes was the only one to restore and rebuild a walled town. The Book of Daniel was translated into Greek about 123 B. C., forty years after the death of Antiochus Epiphanes. This prophecy of the Seventy Weeks troubled the Jewish translators. I t foretold disaster to ; Jerusalem. City and sanctuary would be destroyed. They had been destroyed 464 years before by Nebuchadnezzar. Would they be destroyed again? The translators were unwilling to believe that such a calamity would occur again. Could they not make out that the words referred to the troubles under Antiochus ? I t was true that he had destroyed neither city nor temple, but he had polluted the temple. Perhaps that was equivalent to destruc- tion. At all events they did not dare- to say that another destruction of Jerusalem lay in the future. But there stood the words. From the going forth of com- mandment to restore Jerusalem unto Messiah the Prince would be seven weeksi and three score and two weeks, 483 years. They could do nothing with those words. They left them out, and mangled the rest of the passage to give ob- scurely the impression that the disasters there foretold were a thing of the past. This mistranslation of a Divine oracle to make it say what they wished it to say was a high-handed proceeding, but it did not prevent its fulfillment. At the time appointed Messiah came and was crucified and Jerusalem fell. The critics’ efforts to force some meaning, other than a prediction of Christ, into this prophecy is thus seen to be not without precedent. SUPPOSED INACCURACIES But the rationalistic. interpretations of the forementioned great prophecies are so unnatural, so evidently forced in order
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