level the ideas communicated are synonymous.11 The same can be said about the second such statement Gabriel makes to Daniel in Daniel 9:24, when he says, ‘Seventy weeks are decreed … to finish the transgression’. The idea that transgression has a full measure that will be fulfilled before the end will come seems to have informed the thinking of both Jesus, who told the brood of vipers (i.e. seed of the serpent) to ‘fill up … the measure of your fathers’ (Matt. 23:32), and Paul, who said that the