Exploring the Dismal Swamp: The Identity of the Anointed One in Daniel 9:24-27‪.‬

Daniel 9:24-27 is notoriously complex, comprising what has been well denoted by James Montgomery as a "most vexed passage." (1) Unfortunately, the same verses are a key to ch. 9, "if not to the whole book" of Daniel, so they are not easy to ignore. (2) Calvin, who claimed "not usually to refer to conflicting opinions," regretted the fact that he could not "escape the necessity of confuting various views of the present passage." (3) Despite Calvin's confidence that this was finally possible, Montgomery's analogy of the "dismal swamp" springs easily to mind as the interpreter seeks to assemble the constituent parts of the passage into a coherent interpretive whole. With so many angles of interpretation needing to be held together, progress feels much like wading through a swamp, uncertain of what pitfalls lurk beneath the ooze. One of the particular vexations is the identity of the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of vv. 25 and 26-a vexation in that there has been little agreement on the identity of that figure or those figures, and in that most treatments seem to ignore the evident link with what has been anointed in v. 24. (4) My contention is that this link ought not to be ignored, but that in the various contexts of the book of Daniel as a whole, of ch. 9, and of vv. 24-27, the most natural understanding of the anointed one in vv. 25 and 26 is as that which is anointed in v. 24, namely, the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. (5) Therefore the identity and fate of the anointed one of both v. 25 and v. 26 are a specification of what happens to the holy of holies.