Daniel 9:3

In the verse just before this passage, Daniel understands from the books that the LORD had told Jeremiah the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years (Daniel 9:2, Jeremiah 25:11–12, Jeremiah 29:10). The chapter is set in the first year of Darius the Mede, around 538 BC. Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed Jerusalem and its temple in 586 BC, and the people of Judah were scattered through a foreign empire. Daniel had been carried to Babylon among the first exiles in 605 BC, so he prays now as an old man who has spent most of his life in exile.

God’s promise that the exile is ending moves Daniel to pray. What God has revealed becomes the reason to seek him, and Daniel asks God to do what he has said. Moses pleaded for Israel in the same spirit (Exodus 32:11–14), and so did the early church when it prayed for boldness (Acts 4:23–31).

The prayer stands in Daniel 9 after the vision of the ram and the goat in Daniel 8, and God’s answer follows at once, in the revelation of the seventy weeks (Daniel 9:20–27). It is among the great prayers of confession in Scripture.

“And I set my face unto the Lord God” describes firm resolve. The verb nâthan is the everyday word “to give”, used with a very wide range for putting, setting and making, and pânîym, “face”, is plural in form and always used as a singular. Set together, the two words make an idiom for turning one’s whole attention one way and holding it there. Luke uses the same picture when Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51). Daniel turns to the Lord, ʼĂdônây (often written Adonai), a title used only of God that names him as sovereign master, and to God, ʼĕlôhîym (Elohim), the name of the supreme God.

He goes “to seek by prayer and supplications”. The verb bâqash means to search out or seek, and in worship it is seeking God himself. The word for prayer, tᵉphillâh, comes from pâlal, “to judge”, which by extension means to intercede or pray, and it covers prayer of every kind: praise, confession, thanks and asking. Supplications, tachănûwn, are pleas for grace and mercy, from the root meaning to be gracious. So Daniel comes with prayer in all its fullness and with urgent requests for favour, and he uses the same word near the end when he asks God to hear “his supplications” (Daniel 9:17).

“And I prayed unto the LORD my God, and made my confession”. The LORD is Yᵉhôvâh, God’s covenant name, and Daniel calls him “my God”. The verb for confessing, yâdâh, comes from the picture of holding out the hand, and in this form it means to confess, to praise and to give thanks. Daniel’s prayer does all of these, because it owns Israel’s sin openly and gives God the honour of being right.

He begins with who God is. “O Lord, the great and dreadful God” joins gâdôwl, “great”, with yârêʼ, a word from the verb “to fear” that also means to revere. God’s holiness and power rightly fill us with awe, the fear of the LORD that leads to worship and obedience, and Daniel says so before he asks for anything. In the same breath he calls God the one “keeping the covenant and mercy”. The covenant, bᵉrîyth, is the binding agreement God made with his people, with Abraham and at Sinai. Mercy, cheçed, is God’s steadfast and loyal love, which holds firm when his people falter. Moses describes God in these terms in Deuteronomy 7:9, Nehemiah opens his own prayer with them (Nehemiah 1:5), and when the LORD proclaimed his name to Moses he spoke of his mercy and his justice together (Exodus 34:6–7).

This covenant love is kept “to them that love him, and to them that keep his commandments”. Love for God shows itself in keeping what he commands, and the covenant calls for both. Daniel knows that Israel has failed in each, so he grounds his hope in God’s faithfulness, and that is why the prayer starts here.

Daniel’s confession gathers in verses 5, 6, 10 and 11, and each verse adds to the picture.

“We have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled” piles four verbs on one another. To sin, châṭâʼ, is properly to miss, to fall short of the mark God has set. To commit iniquity, ʻâvâh, is to twist what is right. To do wickedly, râshaʻ, is to be in the wrong and act wickedly, guilty before God. To rebel, mârad, is to revolt against rightful authority, and the authority here is God. Then Daniel says how it happened: “even by departing from thy precepts and from thy judgments”. To depart, çûwr, is to turn aside. The precepts, mitsvâh, are God’s commandments, and the judgments, mishpâṭ, are his just decrees. Israel turned away from what God had plainly said. A psalm makes almost the same confession, “We have sinned with our fathers, we have committed iniquity, we have done wickedly” (Psalm 106:6), and David owns his own sin as frankly (Psalm 51:3–4).

Verse 6 names the sin that made all the rest worse: “Neither have we hearkened unto thy servants the prophets”. The verb shâmaʻ means to hear, and to hear with attention, which in Scripture carries the sense of obeying. The prophets, nâbîyʼ, were God’s spokesmen, and Daniel calls them God’s servants, ʻebed, who “spake in thy name”. The name, shêm, stands for God’s own authority, so to turn from his prophets was to turn from him. They spoke “to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land”. The kings, melek, and the princes, sar, a word for any chief, ruler or official, governed the nation. The fathers, ʼâb, are the ancestors and heads of families. “All the people of the land”, ʻam and ʼerets, takes in everyone else. Every rank of the nation, across the generations, heard God’s word and refused it.

Jeremiah records the LORD sending his servants the prophets to Israel again and again (Jeremiah 7:23–26). Chronicles says that God sent his messengers out of compassion for his people and that they mocked them “till there was no remedy” (2 Chronicles 36:15–16), and the Levites confess the same in Nehemiah’s day (Nehemiah 9:26–30). God’s persistence in sending prophets to a stubborn people shows his patience and his desire for them to return.

Verse 10 says it again with the law in view: “Neither have we obeyed the voice of the LORD our God, to walk in his laws”. “Obeyed” is the same verb, shâmaʻ, that is “hearkened” in verse 6, and it comes back in verses 11 and 14. The voice, qôl, is God speaking to his people. To walk, yâlak, is used here of the way a person lives, and the laws, tôwrâh, are the instruction God gave through Moses. God “set before” Israel these laws through his servants the prophets, so Israel sinned with the light in front of it. Moses had set life and death before the people and urged them to choose life (Deuteronomy 30:19–20), and James calls us to be “doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1:22–25).

Verse 11 gathers it all up: “Yea, all Israel have transgressed thy law, even by departing, that they might not obey thy voice”. The verb ʻâbar is a very broad word for crossing over or passing beyond, and here it is stepping across the boundary of God’s law. “Departing” is çûwr again, the turning aside of verse 5, and “obey” is shâmaʻ. “All Israel” speaks of the nation as a whole, though some within it stayed faithful.

“O Lord, righteousness belongeth unto thee, but unto us confusion of faces, as at this day”. Righteousness, tsᵉdâqâh, is rightness, justice and moral uprightness, and Daniel says that all of it lies with God. Even the exile was right, because God has dealt justly in every part of it. The Levites say the same, “thou art just in all that is brought upon us” (Nehemiah 9:33), and a psalm says, “The LORD is righteous in all his ways” (Psalm 145:17). Paul says it of everyone: “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

The shame falls on all the people: “to the men of Judah, and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and unto all Israel, that are near, and that are far off, through all the countries whither thou hast driven them”. Judah and Jerusalem bore the Babylonian conquest. “All Israel” also takes in the northern tribes, scattered earlier. “Near” and “far off” together cover the whole dispersion, whether in Babylon or in more distant lands. The cause is “their trespass that they have trespassed against thee”. Noun and verb come from the same root, maʻal, which speaks of breaking faith, the betrayal of a trust. Israel was unfaithful to the God who had bound himself to them.

Verse 8 says it a second time and names the leaders: “O Lord, to us belongeth confusion of face, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against thee.” The verb is châṭâʼ, the sin of verse 5, and it is sin “against thee”, a personal offence against the God of the covenant. The law had warned of this shame (Leviticus 26:36–39), Ezra’s prayer is full of the same shame (Ezra 9:6–7), and a psalm speaks of the shame of God’s people before their enemies (Psalm 44:15–16).

“To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses, though we have rebelled against him”. Daniel has just said what belongs to Israel, and now he says what belongs to God. Mercies, racham, is tender compassion, and the word can also mean, by extension, the womb, so it carries the compassion of a mother for her child. Forgivenesses, çᵉlîychâh, is pardon, the release of a penalty and the clearing of the guilty. Both are plural in Hebrew, as in the KJV, and the plurals speak of compassion and pardon without measure. They belong to God by nature, and he gives them freely.

The second half confesses the very thing that makes these mercies needed. “Rebelled” is mârad, the open revolt of verse 5. God’s mercy meets his people in their rebellion and reaches them in spite of it. Here lies Daniel’s one ground of hope, and it is the God whom Scripture praises everywhere: “The LORD is merciful and gracious” (Psalm 103:8), “a God ready to pardon” (Nehemiah 9:17), a God who calls the wicked to return to him, “for he will abundantly pardon” (Isaiah 55:7).

The second half of verse 11 explains the exile: “therefore the curse is poured upon us, and the oath that is written in the law of Moses the servant of God, because we have sinned against him.” The curse, ʼâlâh, is an imprecation or curse, and the word can also mean an oath. Strong’s derives it from a root meaning to adjure, curse or swear, and these were the sworn penalties attached to the covenant. “Poured”, nâthak, means to flow forth or pour, and the judgment came on Israel like liquid poured from a vessel, in full measure. The curses are written out in Leviticus 26:14–39 and Deuteronomy 28:15–68: famine, disease, defeat, exile and the ruin of the land and its cities. “The law of Moses” is the law God gave through Moses in the first five books of Scripture, and Daniel calls Moses “the servant of God” because he passed on God’s own word.

Verse 12 says that God kept that word: “And he hath confirmed his words, which he spake against us, and against our judges that judged us”. “Confirmed” is qûwm, “to rise”, and in this form it means to raise up or set up. God raised his spoken words into fact. “Our judges that judged us”, from shâphaṭ, to judge, decide or govern, are the nation’s rulers, the kings, princes, priests and elders entrusted with justice. They carried the heavier responsibility, because they often led the people astray.

“By bringing upon us a great evil” pairs gâdôwl, “great”, with raʻ, “evil”, which here is calamity. The great evil was the Babylonian siege, the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, and the long exile foretold in Jeremiah 25. “For under the whole heaven hath not been done as hath been done upon Jerusalem” says the judgment was unmatched, because it fell on God’s own city and his chosen people. The whole of Lamentations 1:1–22 mourns that ruin.

Verse 13 points to the law again: “As it is written in the law of Moses, all this evil is come upon us”. The evil is the same word, raʻ, and everything happened as Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 had said it would. Then comes the saddest line of the confession: “yet made we not our prayer before the LORD our God, that we might turn from our iniquities, and understand thy truth.” The verb behind “made our prayer” is châlâh, which most often means to be weak or sick. It can also mean to entreat someone’s favour, which one lexicon explains as, literally, weakening the face of the one entreated, and Strong’s as stroking. Iniquities, ʻâvôn, is perversity and moral crookedness, and the word also carries the guilt and punishment that follow it. Truth, ʼemeth, is stability, certainty and trustworthiness, God’s reliable word with its promises and its warnings.

The calamity was meant to send Israel back to God, and it found them still unbending. Even under judgment they held back from seeking his favour, kept hold of their sin and stayed blind to what God was doing in their suffering.

“Therefore hath the LORD watched upon the evil, and brought it upon us”. To watch, shâqad, is to be alert, even sleepless, on the lookout for good or for ill. The LORD kept close watch over the calamity he had warned of and brought it in its time. He told Jeremiah at his call that he watches over his word to perform it (Jeremiah 1:12), and Daniel has seen that happen.

“For the LORD our God is righteous in all his works which he doeth”. Righteous, tsaddîyq, means just and lawful. Every work God does, judgment included, agrees with his holy character. “For we obeyed not his voice” names the cause once more, with shâmaʻ, to hear and heed, and qôwl, his voice.

“And now, O Lord our God, that hast brought thy people forth out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand”. With “And now” Daniel turns from confession toward his request, and he begins by remembering the Exodus, the event that made Israel a nation. Mighty, châzâq, means strong, hard or intense, and the hand, yâd, is a common picture of power and of the one through whom something is done. A “mighty hand” is God’s own power at work for his people. When Israel saw that great work against Egypt, they feared the LORD and believed him (Exodus 14:31), and the Levites remember it in their prayer (Nehemiah 9:9–10).

“And hast gotten thee renown, as at this day”. The word for renown is shêm, “name”. By the Exodus God made himself a name, and Daniel says it still stands in his own day. That name comes back at the close of the prayer, when Daniel pleads for the city and people “called by thy name”.

“We have sinned, we have done wickedly”. Daniel returns to châṭâʼ and râshaʻ from verse 5. Set beside God’s mighty acts, Israel’s sin looks all the darker, and so Daniel’s plea will rest on who God is and what he has done.

“O Lord, according to all thy righteousness, I beseech thee, let thine anger and thy fury be turned away from thy city Jerusalem, thy holy mountain”. Here Daniel makes his first direct request. He asks that God’s anger and fury, poured out on the city, be turned away. He calls Jerusalem “thy city” and “thy holy mountain”, the place that belongs to God and is set apart for him, and so he appeals to God’s honour and to God’s commitment to the place he chose.

“Because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and thy people are become a reproach to all that are about us”. Daniel owns the sins of his own generation and of the fathers before them, as Israel did when the people “stood and confessed their sins, and the iniquities of their fathers” (Nehemiah 9:2). Reproach, cherpâh, is scorn, disgrace and contempt. The neighbouring nations looked on the ruined city and mocked, taking its ruin as a sign that Israel’s God was weak or had abandoned his people. A psalm cries, “We are become a reproach to our neighbours” (Psalm 79:4), and Isaiah pleads with God to remember, “we are all thy people” (Isaiah 64:9). The prophets had promised restoration after the judgment (Isaiah 40, Jeremiah 30–33), and that hope stands behind Daniel’s plea.

“Now therefore, O our God, hear the prayer of thy servant, and his supplications”. “Now therefore” draws the plea from everything before it. God is ʼĕlôhîym, “our God”, and the supplications are tachănûwn, the pleas for grace of verse 3. Daniel calls himself God’s servant, as he called the prophets.

“And cause thy face to shine upon thy sanctuary that is desolate”. The verb ʼôwr means to be or become light, and here, in its causing form, to make shine. When God’s face shines on his people, they have his favour, his blessing and his presence. This is the blessing the priests spoke over Israel, “The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee” (Numbers 6:25–26), and the prayer of a psalm in a time of ruin, “Turn us again, O God, and cause thy face to shine; and we shall be saved” (Psalm 80:3). The sanctuary, miqdâsh, is a consecrated place, and here it is the temple in Jerusalem, God’s dwelling among his people and the centre of their worship and atonement. Its ruin was the clearest sign of judgment. Daniel longs for God himself to turn his face toward that place again and fill it with his presence and favour. His people have borne confusion of face (verses 7 and 8), and now he asks God to let his own face shine.

“O my God, incline thine ear, and hear; open thine eyes, and behold our desolations, and the city which is called by thy name”. To incline, nâṭâh, is to stretch out or bend, and Daniel asks God to bend his ear toward their prayer and listen closely. He asks God to look on “our desolations”, the ruined city and temple and the moral and spiritual ruin behind them. The city “called by thy name” belongs to God and carries his name, so its ruin touches his honour.

“O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive; O Lord, hearken and do”. The cry “O Lord” comes three times, each with a request that presses further. “Hear” is shâmaʻ. “Forgive” is çâlach, to forgive, pardon or spare, and it asks God for the forgivenesses that belong to him (verse 9). “Hearken”, qashab, is close, attentive listening, the ear pricked up. “Do” asks God to act, and “defer not” pleads with him to act without delay.

“For thine own sake, O my God: for thy city and thy people are called by thy name.” The verb qârâʼ, to call or name, together with shêm, name, speaks of ownership. To be called by God’s name is to belong to him, to be set apart for him and to bear his reputation before the world. Moses had said that all the peoples of the earth would see that Israel was “called by the name of the LORD” (Deuteronomy 28:10), and God had chosen Israel as a people for himself (Deuteronomy 7:6–9).

Daniel stood between God and his people as an intercessor, confessing sins he shared in as one of them. Jesus is the perfect intercessor, tempted as we are, “yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15), and he “ever liveth to make intercession” for those who come to God by him (Hebrews 7:25). He set his face toward Jerusalem and the cross (Luke 9:51), and he “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:7). Daniel confessed that Israel had refused God’s commandments. Jesus kept his Father’s commandments and abides in his love (John 15:10), and by his obedience many are made righteous (Romans 5:19). He came to fulfil the law (Matthew 5:17), and in him God did “what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh” (Romans 8:3).

Daniel owned that the curse of the law had been poured out on Israel. All who rest on the works of the law are under that curse (Galatians 3:10), and “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us”, so that the blessing of Abraham comes to us through him (Galatians 3:13–14). He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). He was “despised and rejected of men” (Isaiah 53:3) and “wounded for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:5–6). He “endured the cross, despising the shame” (Hebrews 12:2), and so the confusion of face that belongs to us is taken away. God “hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

At the cross God declares his righteousness, “that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Romans 3:25–26). He sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 4:10), and in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace (Ephesians 1:7). Christ’s own blood obtained eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:11–14), because God so loved the world (John 3:16). The mercies and forgivenesses that Daniel said belong to God are given to us in Christ.

Daniel confessed that Israel refused the prophets. God has now spoken to us by his Son (Hebrews 1:1–2), the prophet like Moses (Deuteronomy 18:15) and the Word made flesh (John 1:14). “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11), and the crowd cried out to crucify him (Luke 23:21). Jesus wept over Jerusalem and foretold another judgment on it (Luke 19:41–44, Matthew 23:37–38). All that the prophets wrote pointed to him (Luke 24:44), and his sheep hear his voice (John 10:27). God grants repentance unto life (Acts 11:18), and Jesus is himself the truth that Israel failed to understand (John 14:6).

Daniel prayed for a ruined sanctuary and a city called by God’s name. Jesus spoke of the temple of his body (John 2:19–21), and God now shines in our hearts “to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). Believers are built together “for an habitation of God through the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:19–22), a church Christ will present to himself holy and spotless (Ephesians 5:27), and the holy city, new Jerusalem, will come down from God, who will dwell with his people (Revelation 21:2–3). Through Christ God makes the new covenant he promised, in which he says, “I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:31–34, Hebrews 8:6–13). Jesus glorified his Father’s name on earth and prayed for those the Father had given him (John 17:4–6). His whole prayer in John 17 is the prayer of the great intercessor for the people now called by God’s name. Because of him we come boldly to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:14–16), as children who cry, “Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15).

Daniel’s prayer gives us a way of praying that begins with who God is. It opens with the great and dreadful God who keeps covenant, it confesses sin honestly and in the first person, it takes the need of God’s whole people as its own, and it rests every request on God’s mercy and God’s name. A long and faithful life brought Daniel to say “we have sinned”, and he found his footing in the truth of verse 9, that mercies and forgivenesses belong to the Lord.

The prayer also shows us who God is. He is righteous in all his works, and he keeps his word, his warnings and his promises alike. He watches over what he has said and brings it to pass. His mercies are great, and he answers prayer that rests on them, as he answered Daniel. The cry “O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive” is one he welcomes from everyone called by his name, and when we see the ruin that our sin or our people’s sin has brought, verse 18 gives us the words: “we do not present our supplications before thee for our righteousnesses, but for thy great mercies.”