a period reckoned as seven: a unit of seven days (a week) or of seven years
At its root the word means simply "a sevened thing," a bundle of seven built straight from the ordinary number "seven." Most often that bundle is seven days: an everyday week. Jacob must complete the seven-day wedding celebration for one daughter before receiving the other, and a mother is set apart for two such weeks after the birth of a girl.
In the plural the word also became the name of a festival. Israel counted seven weeks from the spring barley offering to the wheat harvest, and the pilgrimage feast at the end of that count was called simply "Weeks" (later known by its Greek name, Pentecost). Jeremiah uses the same plural for the fixed "weeks of the harvest" that God faithfully keeps year after year.
In the book of Daniel the unit quietly shifts from days to years. Daniel's "seventy weeks" are seventy sevens of years, a scheme drawn from Jeremiah's seventy years of exile and from the law's sabbath-years. When Daniel does mean ordinary weeks of days, he says so plainly, as with his three weeks of mourning.
The week and the sabbath belong together in Israel's calendar even though they come from different words: the seventh-day rest, שַׁבָּת, closes the seven-day cycle. Whether a reader is counting days, harvest weeks, or the long years of Daniel, it is always the number seven doing the structuring.
Nuances
Whether Laban's "week" in the Jacob and Rachel account is a seven-day wedding feast or a further seven years of service.
- majorityA seven-day wedding celebration for Leah, after which Jacob receives Rachel and then works another seven years.; E. A. Speiser, Genesis (AB 1, 1964), 227; G. J. Wenham, Genesis 16-50 (WBC 2, 1994), 236-237
- minorityA second seven-year term of service before Rachel is given.; J. Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, ad loc.
Whether Daniel's masculine plural form for "weeks" is itself a deliberate signal that these are heptads of years rather than of days.
- minorityThe masculine plural is a purposeful marker for weeks-of-years, set against the feminine plural used elsewhere for weeks-of-days.; G. F. Hasel, "The Hebrew Masculine Plural for 'Weeks' in the Expression 'Seventy Weeks' in Daniel 9:24," AUSS 31 (1993): 105-118
- majorityThe masculine plural is simply a feature of the book's late Hebrew; the years-sense is supplied by the Jeremiah and Leviticus 25 framework, not by the form, which Daniel 10 must still qualify with "of days."; J. J. Collins, Daniel (Hermeneia, 1993), 352; J. E. Goldingay, Daniel (WBC 30, 1989), 226