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to this view, Christ, in His discourse, interpreted the prophecy of Daniel, Daniel 11, of the abomination of desolation which should come, and had come, upon Jerusalem and Judah by Antiochus Epiphanes, as a type of the desolation of the sanctuary and of the people of God in the last time, wholly in the sense of the prophecy, which in Mat 24:36 passes over from the typical enemy of the saints to the enemy of the people of God in the time of the end.
Thus the supposition that Christ referred Dan 9:26 and Dan 9:27 to the overthrow of Jerusalem by the Romans loses all support; and for the chronological reckoning of the seventy weeks of Daniel, no help is obtained from the New Testament.
We have now to take into consideration the second view regarding the historical reference of the seventy weeks prevailing in our time. The opponents of the genuineness of the book of Daniel generally are agreed in this (resting on the supposition that the prophecies of Daniel do not extend beyond the death of Antiochus Epiphanes), that the destruction of this enemy of the Jews (Ant. Ep.), or the purification of the temple occurring a few years earlier, forms the terminus ad quem of the seventy weeks, and that their duration is to be reckoned from the year 168 or 172 b.c. back either to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans, or to the beginning of the Exile. Since now the seventy year-weeks or 490 years, reckoned from the year 168 or 172 b.c., would bring us to the year 658 or 662 b.c., i.e., fifty-two or fifty-six years before the commencement of the Exile, and the terminus a quo of Jeremiah's prophecy of seventy years, a date from which cannot be reckoned any commencing period, they have for this reason sought to shorten the seventy weeks. Hitzig, Ewald, Wieseler, and others suppose that the first seven year-weeks (= forty-nine years) are not to be taken into the reckoning along with the sixty-two weeks, and that only sixty-two weeks = 434 years are to be counted to the year 175 (Ewald), or 172 (Hitzig), as the beginning of the last week filled up by the assault of Antiochus against Judaism. But this reckoning also brings us to the year 609 or 606 b.c., the beginning of the Exile, or three years further back. To date the sixty-two year-weeks from the commencement of the Exile, agrees altogether too little with the announcement that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem during sixty-two weeks it shall be built, so that, of the most recent representatives of this view, no one any longer consents to hold