Who is the “he” in verse 27? Dispensationalism's Interpretive Fallacy
24 Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy.
25 Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times.
26 And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined.
Exegesis of Daniel 9:27: A Grammatical-Historical Interpretation Demonstrating Christological Fulfillment
The prophecy of the Seventy Weeks in Daniel 9:24–27 constitutes one of the most precisely structured oracles in the Hebrew Scriptures, delivered through the angel Gabriel in response to Daniel's prayer of repentance during the Babylonian exile (Dan. 9:1–23). Situated historically in the first year of Darius the Mede (ca. 539 B.C.), the vision extends Jeremiah's prognostication of a seventy-year desolation upon Judah for sabbath violations (Jer. 25:11–12; 29:10; cf. 2 Chron. 36:21; Lev. 25:2–4, 8–12), transposing it into a schematic of seventy “sevens” (שִׁבְעִים שָׁבֻעִים, šiḇʿîm šāḇuʿîm)—a heptadic intensification denoting 490 years of divine determinative action (ḥāpaḵ, “decreed”) upon “your people and your holy city” (Dan. 9:24a), viz., Israel and Jerusalem. This pericope employs the grammatical-historical method's imperatives: attending to the Masoretic Text's syntax, semantics, and poetic parallelism within its sixth-century B.C. Sitz im Leben, while anchoring fulfillment in verifiable first-century A.D. events without recourse to allegory or typological foreshortening. The structure unfolds chiastically across vv. 24–27, with v. 27 serving as the apex: an antithetical parallelism wherein the Messiah's covenantal confirmation (A) antitheses the cessation of sacrifices (A'), framed temporally by the “one week” (B/B') and its midpoint (C). The six soteriological teloi of v. 24—(1) to restrain (kallāʾ) transgression (pešaʿ), (2) to seal up (ḥātam) sin (ḥaṭṭāʾt), (3) to atone (kāpar) for iniquity (ʿāwōn), (4) to introduce everlasting righteousness (ṣedeq ʿôlāmîm), (5) to seal up vision and prophet (ḥāzam wənāḇîʾ), and (6) to anoint a most holy (qōdeš qādāšîm)—converge eschatologically in the Anointed One (māšîaḥ nāḡîd, “Messiah the Prince,” v. 25), whose vicarious excision (kārēṯ, v. 26) effects these ends.
Grammatically, the pronominal antecedent of wəhiḡbîr (“and he shall confirm,” Hiphil perfect of ḥāḡaḇar, “strengthen”) in v. 27a is the nearest masculine singular subject: māšîaḥ (“Messiah”) from v. 26a, not the distal “prince who is to come” (nāḡîd... lābōʾ, v. 26b), whose “people” (ʿam)—the Romans—wrought Jerusalem's devastation in A.D. 70. This syntactic proximity, reinforced by the chiastic unity of vv. 25–27, precludes an abrupt shift to a futurist interloper; the Hebrew's revelational pattern of repetition-with-elaboration (v. 26 || v. 27) integrates the Messiah's “cutting off” (yikkāreṯ, Niphal imperfect, denoting violent extirpation; cf. Isa. 53:8) into the seventieth week's midpoint (ḥāṣî haššāḇûaʿ, “midst of the week”). The “covenant” (bərîṯ) thus confirmed is not a novel pact (kāṯar, “cut,” would denote initiation) but the Abrahamic-Mosaic edifice (Gen. 15:18; Exod. 19–24) intensified eschatologically as the New Covenant (Jer. 31:31–34; Ezek. 36:26–27), ratified by the Messiah's blood for “the many” (lārabbîm, partitive genitive denoting the faithful remnant; cf. Isa. 53:11–12; Matt. 26:28). Temporally, šāḇûaʿ ʿeḥāḏ (“one week”) evokes a literal heptad (19x in the OT as temporal units; LXX hebdomas), symbolizing seven prophetic years via the day-year principle (Num. 14:34; Ezek. 4:6), commencing with Artaxerxes I's decree to restore Jerusalem's polity (Neh. 2:1–8; 445/444 B.C., Nisan). The aggregate 490 years (70 × 7 × 360-day years) yield 173,880 days to Christ's triumphal entry (A.D. 33), marking the terminus of the sixty-ninth week (7 + 62 = 483 years; Dan. 9:25).
Historically, this timeline aligns impeccably: from 457 B.C. (adjusted for the 360-day calendar and intercalations) to Christ's baptismal anointing (A.D. 27; Luke 3:1, 21; Acts 10:38), fulfilling the māšîaḥ nāḡîd presentation. The seventieth week (A.D. 27–34) encompasses Christ's 3.5-year ministry (higbîr bərîṯ lārabbîm, confirming the covenant through parables, healings, and didactic discourses to the “many” disciples), culminating midway (A.D. 31) in his crucifixion (yāšbîṯ, Hiphil imperfect of šāḇâṯ, “cause to cease”), which obsoletes the Levitical cultus (zeḇaḥ wəminḥâ, "sacrifice and oblation"; Heb. 10:1–18). The veil's rending (Matt. 27:51) and apostolic witness (post-resurrection preaching to A.D. 34, Stephen's martyrdom; Acts 7) complete the week, sealing the teloi: Christ's *kāpar* atones universally (Rom. 3:25), inaugurating ṣedeq ʿôlāmîm via justification (Rom. 3:22), authenticating prophecy (Heb. 1:1–2), and anointing the heavenly qōdeš qādāšîm (Heb. 9:11–12, 24). The "overspreading of abominations" (šiqquṣê šōmēm) and desolation (məšōmēm) evoke the “abomination of desolation” (šiqqûṣ šōmēm, v. 27c; cf. 11:31; 12:11), fulfilled proximally in the Roman encirclement and temple profanation (A.D. 70; Luke 19:41–44; 21:20–24; Matt. 23:37–38; 24:15), a divine kālâ wəneḥărēṣ (“consummation and that determined,” v. 27d) poured upon apostate Israel (šōmēm, "desolate one"; cf. Lev. 26:31–33; Deut. 28:49–52). Christologically, this excision—anticipated in the Suffering Servant (Isa. 53:4–12)—transitions typology to antitype: the paschal Lamb (John 1:29; 1 Cor. 5:7) terminates shadows (skia; Col. 2:16–17; Heb. 10:1), reconciling Jew and Gentile in one body (Eph. 2:13–16), abolishing the “law of commandments in ordinances” (dogmata, ceremonial diataxeis) through his flesh.
Thus, Daniel 9:27 unveils the Messiah's telic agency: not mere prediction, but the grammatical-historical nexus wherein Yahweh's covenant fidelity (ʾĕlōhîm nēʾēmān, Dan. 9:4) irrupts soteriologically in the incarnate dābār (John 1:14), fulfilling the exile's redemptive arc from Babylonian šôʾâ to eschatological šālôm.
Addendum: Dispensationalism's Interpretive Fallacy in Transmuting a Messianic Oracle into an Antichrist Prognostication
Dispensationalism, emergent in the nineteenth century via John Nelson Darby and systematized in the Scofield Reference Bible, bifurcates Daniel 9:24–27 by interposing an unheralded “gap” (mystērion, per Eph. 3:3–6) of indeterminate duration (ca. 2,000 years) between the sixty-ninth and seventieth weeks, relegating the latter to a futurist tribulation wherein the “he” (hûʾ) of v. 27 denotes not the Messiah but a Roman-derivative Antichrist (ho anthrōpos tēs anomias, 2 Thess. 2:3–4; Rev. 13:1–10). This “prince who is to come” (nāḡîd... lābōʾ, v. 26b) ostensibly confirms a seven-year covenant (bərîṯ) with Israel, only to abrogate it midway via temple desecration, inaugurating the "Great Tribulation" (Matt. 24:21). Such exegesis, while purporting literalism, contravenes the grammatical-historical method's canons, imposing an eisegetical schema that transmutes a quintessentially Christotelic pericope (cf. early patristic consensus: Irenaeus, Against Heresies 5.25–26; Hippolytus, Treatise on Christ and Antichrist 6–7) into a futurist excursus.
Grammatically, the antecedent fallacy is patent: wəhiḡbîr (v. 27a) cannot leapfrog the proximal *māšîaḥ* (v. 26a) to alight upon a subordinate “prince,” violating Hebrew pronominal concord and chiastic cohesion; the LXX's kai krataiōsei diathēkēn pollōis (“and he will strengthen a covenant with many”) preserves this Messianic tether, unelided by any disjunctive waw. Contextually, the teloi of v. 24—atonement and righteousness—demand a divine agent (kāpar, ṣedeq), not a satanic parody; the Antichrist's covenant would subvert, not confirm (ḥāḡaḇar), Yahweh's bərîṯ (v. 4), rendering the Hiphil causative incoherent. Historically, this futurism traces to Counter-Reformation Jesuit Francisco Ribera (1585), who decoupled the weeks to deflect Protestant identifications of papal Antichrist (cf. Luther, Smalcald Articles II.4; Calvin, Institutes 3.25.6), later Protestantized by Darby amid millennialist revivalism. The “gap” lacks exegetical warrant—Daniel's consecutive heptads (7 + 62 + 1) mirror the exile's unbroken seventy years (Dan. 9:2)—and analogical appeals to Isaiah's “anointed” dual fulfillment (Isa. 61:1–2; Luke 4:18–21) falter, as Daniel's chronology is explicit, not poetically telescoped.
Theologically, Dispensationalism's arithmetic undergirds this error: insisting on literal 365.2422-day years for the seventieth week's halves (3.5 years = 1,278 days, not the symbolic 1,260 of Dan. 7:25; Rev. 11:3; 12:6), it yields an 18-day discrepancy, vitiating the purported precision of a halved tribulation (42 months ≈ 41.5). This selective literalism—eschewing the year-day principle (Num. 14:34)—privileges a pretribulational rapture (harpazō, 1 Thess. 4:17) and Israel-church dichotomy, obfuscating the New Covenant's grafted unity (Rom. 11:17–24; Eph. 2:11–22) and the historical terminus in A.D. 34. By displacing Christ's yāšbîṯ (cessation of sacrifices) to an eschatological impostor, Dispensationalism dilutes the cross's once-for-all efficacy (Heb. 9:26–28; 10:14), projecting unfulfilled teloi indefinitely and engendering chronometric “time warps” that evade first-century realization (Acts 3:18–26).
In sum, this hermeneutic—born of confessional polemic, not textual fidelity—eclipses the māšîaḥ's luminous fulfillment, subordinating soteriology to speculative futurism.
The above article was Groked under the direction of Jack Kettler and perfected using Grammarly AI. Using AI for the Glory of God!
“For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:4-5)
Mr. Kettler, an author who has published works in the Chalcedon Report and Contra Mundum, is an active member of the RPCNA in Westminster, CO, with 21 books defending the Reformed Faith available on Amazon.