2.6 Daniel

Since prophecy is often used as a reason for faith I decided to investigate this in the hope it would provide some conclusive evidence. As part of this exercise I had to verify as best I could when Daniel had been written. Dating our earliest copy for example would put a line in the sand and make it impossible for anyone to claim it had not been written until later.

The earliest fragments of Daniel that have been found were with the Dead Sea scrolls from the caves at Qumran. The oldest scroll, 4QDanc, has been dated to 125 BC which is significantly later than the narrated events which are set in the sixth century BC. Although this alone does not prove a late date for the book, neither does it provide evidence for an early date, all we know is that it had been written by that time. Further investigation needs to be carried out to try and determine whether Daniel was written before or after the events the book contains, i.e. whether it’s prophecy or history. What we can tell is that by 125 BC the book was sufficiently sacred to warrant being stored with the other scrolls, which include Biblical, apocryphal and non-biblical texts.

To investigate further we need some additional information, and to me some of that comes from an analysis of how the Bible got to us. We know Daniel is in the Old Testament and therefore has its roots in the Hebrew world so it is to the canonisation of the Hebrew Bible that we need to look. The Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, is split into three sections the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings. The obvious place to include Daniel would be in the Prophets with the likes of his contemporaries Jeremiah and Ezekiel, but this is not where it is found. Instead, Daniel has found its way into the Writings with things like Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Esther and Ezra. This raises the question of why it is not where it might be expected.

Further investigation suggests that in the development of the Hebrew Bible the Torah and Prophets became canonised before the Writings. So at the time when the Prophets section was closed Daniel was probably either not considered canonical or had not yet been written/completed. The suggestion being that it was only by the time the books in the Writings were canonised that Daniel carried sufficient weight to be included. So we need to find out when canonisation of both the Prophets and the Writings happened.

Scholars are far from united on when the canon was fixed but some of the evidence is from the Wisdom of Sirach/Ecclesiasticus, which is a part of the Apocrypha. It dates to around 200 BC and includes a history of Israel which lists men from the Torah and Prophets. It also includes some men from the Writings, but the list excludes Daniel. The prologue to the Greek version (written around 130 BC) mentions both the ‘Torah’ and ‘Prophets’ but not the ‘Writings’ – it just says the rest of the books. This suggests that at this time the Prophets has been fixed but the Writings had not; there was just a collection of works that would later, perhaps with some changes, become the Writings. We get a similar picture to this from the Septuagint as well.

The hypothesis that Daniel was written/completed around this time seems to fit well with the fact that Daniel accurately names the empires as far as Greece but fails to name the Roman Empire. He also gives a very detailed account of Antiochus IV Epiphanes up to around 168 BC, but fails to give an accurate prediction of his death in 164 BC.

Further evidence for a later date includes loan words, which include Greek loan words for musical instruments in chapter 3 which would indicate that it was written after Alexander the Great’s conquest in 330 BC. It has also been suggested that although the author of Daniel was familiar with the history of Near Eastern imperial power from the fifth to the second centuries they had an incomplete and erroneous view of historical details in the second half of the sixth century, which is the time when Daniel is supposed to have written the book.

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