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Daniel’s “Seventy Weeks” 29

Our main conclusions -- of which we will provide ample proof -- are:

1/. The canon of Ptolemy is untrustworthy as a basis for a system of chronology since its statements
have not been authenticated in any way. Therefore, we should reject it in determining the beginning
of the 483 years.

2/. “The commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem,” from which the prophetic period of 70
weeks began to run (Daniel 9:25), was the decree of Cyrus the Great -- referred to in Ezra 1:1-4.

3/. The 483-year period of Daniel 9:25 -- reaching “unto the Messiah, the Prince” -- ended at the
baptism of the Messiah in the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar, when he was 30 years of age.

1. The Canon of Ptolemy

Ptolemy was not contemporary to the events of the Persian Empire, whose chronology he
attempted to construct -- but flourished more than six centuries after that Empire began. Therefore,
we cannot accept him as an authority for the events of that period. As a matter of fact, he never
claimed that he had access to any of the records of the Persian period. Not only are the chronologi-
cal statements of Ptolemy entirely without corroboration, but they are flatly contradicted by author-
ities that can be corroborated and are more reliable than he. He is contradicted by the Persian
traditions preserved by Fidusi and by the Jewish National traditions preserved in the Sedar Olam.
Whereas Ptolemy estimates that there were TEN Persian kings in all, Josephus (an earlier writer and
a reliable historian of the late first century A.D.) gives only SIX. What’s interesting about this is the
fact that it agrees much better with the statement of the angel to Daniel in the 3rd year of Cyrus. The
angel said there were yet four kings of Persia to stand up, the fourth being clearly identified as the
great and wealthy Xerxes -- whose expedition against “the realm of Grecia” is known from secular
history to have ended in disaster.

Those who accept the canon of Ptolemy must believe there were eight kings between Cyrus
and Xerxes, who was the last of the Persian kings, and must accept the length of years which Ptol-
emy assigns to their respective reigns. This he figures to be a total 205 years. In contrast with Ptol-
emy’s estimates, both the Jewish and Persian traditions make the period of the Persian Empire a
period of only 52 years (Anstey, The Romance of Bible Chronology, p. 232). While we do not ac-
cept the estimates of Josephus any more than those of Ptolemy -- and have no need of either since
we are using the chronology found in the Bible -- the statements of the former do serve to show that
the latter are not to be relied upon.

Author Martin Anstey states –

There are no contemporary chronological records whatever to fix the dates of any of the
Persian monarchs after Darius Hystaspes. The clay tablets of Babylon fix the chronology,
for the reigns of Cyrus, Cambyses, Pseudo-Smerdis, and Darius Hystaspes; but they do not
determine the date of any subsequent Persian king. The dates which have reached us, and
which are now generally received as historical, are a late compilation made in the 2nd cen-
tury A.D. and found in Ptolemy’s canon. They rest upon the calculations or guesses made by

The Berean Voice March-April 2003