Nehemiah Builds the Wall
Event · 446 BC
Daniel’s Seventy Weeks
Sixty and nine weeks, 446 BC–AD 31 173,880 days, in years of 360 days
What the Bible Says
- “in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes the king” Nehemiah 2:1
Each year here fits these numbers, as the years between the points they count from.
The Years
- The Year 446 BC
- Daniel’s seventy weeks, counted from Nehemiah 2:1. Ussher: 455 BC
- “In the 20 year of the reign of Artaxerxes, in the 9 moneth called Cisleu, Nehemias being then at Susa”
“In the month Nisan, in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes the king” (Nehemiah 2:1), 446 BC, the king sent Nehemiah to build the city of his fathers’ sepulchres (2:5): the going forth of the commandment from which Daniel’s weeks are counted. Daniel’s sixty and nine weeks, “from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince” (Daniel 9:25), are 483 years of 360 days (a month of thirty days: the hundred and fifty days of the flood are five months, Genesis 7:11, 24; 8:3-4), 173,880 days, to Sunday the eleventh of the first month, AD 31, when the Lord came into Jerusalem as King (Zechariah 9:9; Luke 19:37-42), and after them “shall Messiah be cut off” (Daniel 9:26). The text names the month, not the day: by the moon, 173,880 days before that Sunday is about the 1st of April, 446 BC, the seventh of Nisan. Nehemiah counts the king’s years from autumn: the month Chisleu and the Nisan after it are both “in the twentieth year” (Nehemiah 1:1; 2:1). Xerxes was slain in the summer of 465 BC. Counting the months before Artaxerxes’ first autumn as his first year, as the years of Judah’s kings are sometimes counted, his twentieth year runs from the autumn of 447 BC to the autumn of 446 BC, and its Nisan is 446 BC. The Persians counted a king’s years from spring and did not count the months before it, which puts this Nisan in 445 BC; some put it in 444 BC. Ussher dates Nehemiah’s commission 454 BC, counting Artaxerxes from 473 BC.
Where the year isn’t Ussher’s, the text sets it, and the note says how. Ussher’s years and sentences are from his Annals of the World (1658), quoted as printed.
