notice—though I am unwilling to detain myself for questions—days being put for years. This is denied, notwithstanding the plain suggestion of such an idea both in the passage in Numbers and in that in Ezekiel.
The seventy weeks, however, stand strongly in the way; and the ingenuity of criticism has been called into service to say that it is simply seventy sevens, not seventy weeks, and may thus literally be years. Now, if the conventional reading[1] be taken, it is simply weeks. If not, it cannot mean sevens at all, but seventy seventies. I think this criticism, therefore, must result either from ignorance or dishonesty. It is either seventy weeks or seventy times seventy, not seventy sevens.
But as regards the numbers here, there is a more important remark I have to make, and that is, that, looked at as in crisis, and literally, it appears to me that this is not the last half week at all. In the last half week at Jerusalem, they are
- ↑ i.e. by points.
throughout: the bringing down the Revelations to the same sense seems to me simply depriving us of them, and merely to amount to this, that when the Apostle uses prophetic language to carry it up into further scenes, we are arrested where the former prophecy left us: simply, I conceive, darkening, instead of en- lightening.
