It would be difficult and tedious to trace the course of discussion fully to which the passage has given rise. A very general outline must suffice. It had been maintained by some who contended for “sevens of years,” that the word translated weeks (שָׁבֻעִים _shabuim_) was the regular masculine plural of שֶׁבַע (_sheba_), seven, and ought, therefore, to be translated sevens.[38] But שָׁבֻעִים (_shabuim_), as was alleged in reply, “is not the normal plural of the Hebrew term for seven.” The normal plural is שִׁבְעִים (_shibim_); but that is the term for _seventy_, and cannot mean sevens.[39] It seems now admitted on all hands, that both שָׁבֻעִים (_shabuim_) and the feminine form שָׁבֻעוֹת (_shabpuoth_) are plural forms of שָׁבוּעַ (_shabua_), which, according to the etymology of the word, signifies a hebdomad or septemized period.[40] The only question that remains, therefore, regards the use of the word. _What is its use?_ So that after much controversy, the matter stands very much as Mede left it. “The question,” says he, “lies not in the etymology, but in the use, wherein שָׁבוּעַ (_shabua_) always signifies _sevens of days_, and never _sevens of years_. Wheresoever it is _absolutely_ put, it means of days; it is nowhere thus used of years.”[41] Besides the places in Daniel, the word occurs absolutely elsewhere, in some one or other of its forms, _eleven_ times, and _in every one of these cases with the sense of weeks of days_.[42] It is true that if we except the places in Daniel, there is no instance in Scripture where the masculine plural שָׁבֻעִים (_shabuim_) is used to denote weeks. The word elsewhere used for that purpose is uniformly שָׁבֻעוֹת (_shabpuoth_) in the feminine. But we confess ourselves at a loss to understand {xxiv} why so much should be made of this. The word which Daniel uses is confessedly the masculine plural[43] of the same word, which in the singular is translated “week,” and in the feminine plural “weeks;” and although there are instances in various languages of the masculine and feminine plurals having different significations, yet, in the absence of anything like proof that such is the case here, we must be guided by the use of the word in its other forms throughout the Scripture, when we come to interpret the peculiar form that occurs in Daniel. What good reason can be given for departing from the analogy of the other forms? This, it must be confessed, is entirely on the side of the Year-day principle; and the objection resolves itself into nothing more than this, that it is a peculiar form of the word which Daniel uses.