What is the context?
The final verse describes a covenant confirmed with many for one week. In the middle of the week, sacrifice and offering cease. An abomination brings desolation, until the decreed destruction falls on the desolator.
The identity of the person referred to as he is a central question. So is the relationship between this week and the preceding periods. The verse itself gives the covenant, the interruption of sacrifice and the decreed end of the desolation; readers assemble those details differently.
The conclusion sets a limit even to the desecration. The desolator does not possess authority to decide the final outcome.
How is this passage commonly understood?
Wesley understands Christ as confirming the new covenant and His death as ending the former sacrificial order. Gaebelein reads a future ruler’s covenant with Jewish people during a final seven-year period, separated from the earlier weeks.
The USCCB notes understand the covenant and interrupted worship within Antiochus’s persecution. These positions differ over the subject, timing and covenant; none should be presented as the uncontested reading.
Where does this fit in God's plan?
In Matthew 24:15–22, Jesus explicitly directs His hearers to Daniel’s language about the abomination of desolation. He gives practical instructions to flee and speaks of severe trouble whose days are cut short for the elect’s sake.
Jesus therefore treats Daniel’s warning as something His followers need to understand and act upon. The connection does not remove all questions about the seventy weeks. It places watchfulness, prayer and the preservation of God’s people within Jesus’ own teaching, rather than leaving the prophecy only as a disputed calculation.
What is our position?
We don't have a position on this passage yet. When our study reaches a conclusion the text supports, it will appear here.