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new devastation of the holy city is placed in view, cannot influence us to escape from the idea of the second coming of Christ in the last time along with the building of Jerusalem during the seven heptades, since it was even revealed to the prophet that not merely would a cruel enemy of the saints of God (in Antiochus Epiphanes) arise out of the third world-kingdom, but also that a yet greater enemy would arise out of the fourth, an enemy who would perish in the burning fire (Dan 7:12, Dan 7:26.) in the judgment of the world immediately before the setting up of the kingdom of glory.
Thus neither the placing of the contents of the seven weeks in the eschatological future, nor yet the placing of these weeks at the beginning instead of at the end of the three periods of time which are distinguished in Dan 9:25-27, is established by these arguments. This Fries (Jahrb.f. deutsche Theol. iv. p. 254ff.) has observed, and rightly remarked, that the effort to interpret the events announced in Dan 9:26. of the tyranny of Antiochus, and to make this epoch coincide with the close of the sixty-two year-weeks in the chronological reckoning, cannot but lead to the mistake of including the years of Babylon in the seventy year-weeks - a mistake which is met by three rocks, against which every attempt of this kind must be shattered. (1) There is the objection that it is impossible that the times of the destruction and the desolation of Jerusalem could be conceived of under the same character as the times of its restoration, and be represented from the same point of view; (2) the inexplicable inconsequence which immediately arises, if in the seventy year-weeks, including the last restoration of Israel, the Babylonish but not also the Romish exile were comprehended; (3) the scarcely credible supposition that the message of the angel sent to Daniel was to correct that earlier divine word which was given by Jeremiah, and to make known that not simply seventy years, but rather seventy year-weeks, are meant. Of this latter supposition we have already shown that it has not a single point of support in the text.
In order to avoid these three rocks, Fries advances the opinion that the three portions into which the seventy year-weeks are divided, are each by itself separately to be reckoned chronologically, and that they form a connected whole, not in a chronological, but in a historico-pragmatical sense, “as the whole of all the times of the positive continuance of the theocracy in the Holy Land lying between the liberation from Babylonish exile and the completion of the historical kingdom of Israel”; and, indeed, so that