Daniel 9:1

Verse 1 dates what follows with care. It is “the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus, of the seed of the Medes”, which is 539 or 538 BC, immediately after Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon. The fall of the city is told in Daniel 5, and the story of Daniel in the lions’ den comes from the reign of this same Darius (Daniel 6). Chapters 7 and 8 gave Daniel visions in symbols. Chapter 9 opens with a named year and a known political setting, so the prophecy later in the chapter stands within real history.

The name Darius, Dârᵉyâvêsh, is Persian in origin and was borne by several Persian kings. The father named here, Ahasuerus, is a different man from the Persian king of Esther’s time. “Of the seed of the Medes” gives Darius’s people. Zeraʻ means seed or grain, the seed that is sown, and from there it comes to mean offspring, so the phrase names his descent from the Medes. The Medes and Persians together took Babylon, and this detail shows the Medes at the front in the first years of ruling it.

“Which was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans” uses the verb mâlak, to reign or to become king, in a form that means to be made king. Someone else put Darius on this throne, most likely Cyrus, who had conquered Babylon, so Darius held a delegated authority at a time of change. The realm of the Chaldeans is the Babylonian empire, which until that year had been the greatest power in the world.

The change of power in verse 1 was God’s doing. Long before, Daniel had told Nebuchadnezzar that another kingdom would arise after his (Daniel 2:39). Isaiah had called Cyrus the LORD’s anointed (Isaiah 45:1), and Jeremiah had set seventy years for Babylon (Jeremiah 29:10). So the date in verse 1 marks the moment when those words were coming true, and the end of the captivity was at hand. God raises up kingdoms and brings them down according to his purpose. The same dream in Daniel 2 ends with the kingdom God himself sets up, “a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed” (Daniel 2:44).

Verse 2 repeats the date, “In the first year of his reign”, and then Daniel speaks in his own voice: “I Daniel understood by books”. His name, Dânîyêʼl, is formed from Dân, judge, and ʼêl, God, and means “God is my judge”. All his life he stood in a pagan court as a faithful witness to God’s judgments, and here he discerns God’s judgment and its timing from the written page.

The word for books, çêpher, means a writing, a scroll or a document. Daniel had received visions before this, and here his understanding comes from careful reading of prophecy that was already written. God’s written word was enough to show him what God was doing.

What he understood was “the number of the years”, a set count for the length of Jerusalem’s desolation. God had given that number through another prophet, for “the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah the prophet”, and Daniel received Jeremiah’s scroll as the word of the LORD. One prophet learned from another, because God’s message is one from first to last.

Jeremiah’s prophecy was that the LORD “would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of Jerusalem”. To accomplish the years is to bring them to completion, and it is God who does it. The word for desolations, chorbâh, comes from a root meaning drought or dryness, and it means a ruin or a waste place. It describes Jerusalem and the temple as the Babylonians left them, the judgment God brought on his people for their disobedience.

That judgment had a set length. God fixed it from the start, and so it was finite. By the first year of Darius the people had been in exile for nearly seventy years, years of great suffering and longing for home. When Daniel read the number and counted the years, he saw that the time of restoration was near. The Chronicler, looking back, says that the land kept its sabbaths through those years, in fulfilment of the word of the LORD by Jeremiah (2 Chronicles 36:21). God declares “the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10), and here a number spoken decades earlier arrived on time.

Daniel’s response to knowing God’s timing was to seek God earnestly. The verses that follow are his long prayer of confession and intercession for his people (Daniel 9:3–19), and that prayer brought the angel Gabriel with the prophecy of the seventy weeks (Daniel 9:20–27). Jeremiah’s seventy years stand behind that larger prophecy, which reaches far beyond the return from exile and sets out a timeline for Israel’s future and the coming of the Messiah. So a date and the reading of a scroll open one of the great messianic prophecies of the Bible.

God brought Jeremiah’s prophecy to pass at its appointed time, and in the same way he sent his Son: “when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son” (Galatians 4:4). The return from Babylon pictures the greater freedom Christ gives from sin and death: “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36). The desolations of Jerusalem find their final answer in the new Jerusalem, where Christ reigns and sorrow and death have passed away (Revelation 21:1–4).

Daniel read the word of the LORD that came to Jeremiah, and Jesus is the Word himself, who was with God and was God (John 1:1) and was made flesh (John 1:14). He came to fulfil the law and the prophets (Matthew 5:17), and after his resurrection he told his disciples that all things written of him in the law of Moses, the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled (Luke 24:44). We read the Scriptures, as Daniel did, to understand the One they speak of. He is King over every realm, and every knee will bow to him (Philippians 2:9–11).

Daniel was an old man with long experience of God and visions of his own, and he still sat down with a prophet’s scroll and counted the years. God’s word is “a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105), and the Bereans “searched the scriptures daily” (Acts 17:11). Steady, prayerful reading of Scripture is how you come to know God’s purposes and his timing, and what Daniel learned brought him straight to prayer for his people.

Kingdoms rose and fell around Daniel, and every change of rulers lay within God’s plan. The God who set a limit to Jerusalem’s ruin still governs the nations and keeps his promises, and you can bring the desolations you see to him in prayer, as Daniel did, trusting him to restore.