Dating the Book of Daniel

A Cornerstone of Prophecy, God has much to show us by looking at the book of Daniel as an example

Hello all,

I am sorry for the delays in my articles. My whole family came down with COVID a couple weeks ago. On top of that with all the other concerns of life I have not had much time to write. Hopefully that will change in the future. I hope you continue to find these articles interesting. If you have not subscribed please help me out by doing so here…

Before we dive in however, I should warn you this article is rather long and as such I have decided to provide an executive summary for those who do not have the time to read all the way through, though I would of course, encourage you to read the whole thing.

Executive Summary

Daniel is an incredible book of prophecy. It’s prophecies are extremely detailed and in some cases fulfilled to such precision that they blow the mind. This is why many scholars have sought to demonstrate that Daniel was not in fact written around 536 BC as this article will attempt to demonstrate at the layman level, but in fact much later, sometime between 186 and 175 BC, during the Maccabean period. Scholars classify their reasons under internal and external evidence. For internal evidence they believe that Daniel 1) contradicts the historical record in places, or 2) other evidence of the period described does not corroborate it. Both of these accounts can be shown to be false and in some cases Daniel is more accurate than the scholars expected. As for external evidence they believe that since 1) Daniel is not included in some lists of inspired works of the Maccabean period, or 2) the language employed in Daniel is more typical of Maccabean usage of Aramaic, that these are evidence of a later date. As this article demonstrates, 1) is meaningless when considered in light of church history and 2) is actually a point in Daniel’s favor since it does not employ the more widely used Greek one would expect if it was composed in the Maccabean era. Finally, evidence is explored that vindicates Daniel by showing that Daniel described things he only could have known had he been a contemporary of the events and kings like he said he was.

A Cornerstone of Prophecy

Daniel is perhaps the most famous of all the books of prophecy, and for good reason. In the book we have prophecies about the Messiah, the future rise and fall of kingdoms, and prophecies directly concerning the fate of the Jewish people. It is truly a marvelous book and it is where we will spend much time in the coming weeks.

We are still looking at indisputably fulfilled prophecy to see what this can teach us about interpreting end times prophecies. We could probably spend years here if we so desired but after the book of Daniel I will move on to our main subject at hand.

For the time being however, we will camp in Daniel for a while. In order to understand it however, we have to accurately understand when Daniel was written. This will help us to see if what is written is history or prophecy and once we do that, you will find that you have yet more evidence to bolster your faith in the reliability of the Bible.

Some preliminaries

Cultural traditions are important. An interesting nugget regarding this is that our books are grouped into sections, both the Hebrew and Western canons do this though they diverge somewhat from each other. A brief summary of the difference can be found below.

In any discussion of the Old Testament canon it is of importance to distinguish between that of the Hebrew Bible and its counterpart in other versions of Scripture. The degree of difference in the idea of a canon of sacred writings can be seen by reference on the one hand to the Samaritan version, in which only the Pentateuch was accorded canonicity, and on the other to the LXX, which included the writings known as the Apocrypha. Furthermore, while in many versions the books listed were generally the same as those of the Old Testament canon, the order and number were apt to differ considerably, as was the length of certain of the compositions. The Hebrew canon comprises twenty-four books arranged in three major divisions which are designated the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings respectively. By contrast, the various Christian Bibles, following the general pattern of the Greek and Latin versions, recognized thirty-nine books as canonical, dividing Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, and Ezra-Nehemiah into two books each, and regarding the Minor Prophets as twelve separate works.¹

What is interesting about this is that Daniel, in the Hebrew canon, is put with “the Writings”. This is very interesting considering the numerous prophecies in the book. Though Daniel was viewed as inspired Scripture by at least the second century BC, it was not considered a book of prophecy in the same way that Isaiah or Ezekiel was. R.K. Harrison again elaborates.

The assigning of this work to the third division of the Hebrew canon appears to have been the common practice in Judaism long before the supposed Council of Jamnia, and seems to have been based upon the conviction that Daniel could not be regarded as a prophet in the same sense as Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel. The Talmud (Baba Bathra 15a) indicates clearly that Daniel was never placed among such prophets, though it is evident that Daniel was widely accepted as Scripture from the second century B.C. onwards. If the pseudepigraphic material designated 1 Enoch borrowed from Daniel (compare 1 Enoch 14:18–22 with Dan. 7:9, 10), the section involved, which was probably written prior to 150 B.C., would testify to the use of Daniel as authoritative Scripture at that time.²

It is important to remember however, as Harrison points out elsewhere in his book, that the prophetic office involved a mediatorship between God and the people the prophet was supposed to address. Daniel didn’t really do this, at least in the sense of mediating between God and the people of Israel and as such is likely the reason he is not included in “the Prophets” section of the Hebrew canon.

As you will see throughout this study, however, the opinions on Daniel, it’s date, and nature are quite divergent and there are many different opinions about it. For the most part the liberal world attempts to limit the authorship of the book to the early second century BC whereas the traditional date is that Daniel wrote the book sometime in the sixth century BC. There are of course reasons why they do this, reasons we will look at in future studies. The primary reason I believe they do this is because Daniel is quite eerie and prescient. His knowledge is extremely specific, knowledge so specific that if you don’t believe in God it becomes impossible to understand how Daniel could’ve known what he did in advance. This is one of the reasons we will look at Daniel next, it contains numerous prophecies that are believed by almost all scholars to be fulfilled already. It is an incredible book and I’m looking forward to going through it with you all.

Dating the Book of Daniel

The Background of the Debate

To begin with, I noted earlier that the opinions on Daniel are quite varied. R.K. Harrison makes a good point about the consequence of this truth:

The foregoing selection will be sufficient to indicate the great divergence of opinion regarding the questions of integrity and authorship, and, by implication, the date of the book or its supposed parts. This very situation is unfortunately self-defeating, for as Rowley has pointed out, if there is so little consensus of opinion as to which were the earlier parts, it is difficult to have much confidence in the method whereby these varying results were reached.³

This is an important point and should be kept in mind as we go through this study.

So what are the objections to the standard date? Our study begins with a man named Porphyry. E.J. Young provides some background on him:

In the commentary several references have been made to the opinions of Porphyry, who was one of the earliest hostile critics of the Old Testament. This noted antagonist of the Christian Faith was probably born in 232 or 233 A.D. It appears also that he was from the city of Tyre in Phœnicia, for he speaks of himself as a Phœnician. However, some of the early writers refer to him by the designation Bataneotes, probably indicating thereby that he was from the region of Batanea, within the Hauran. Although this name was evidently intended to be a term of disdain, it may also possibly contain an illusion to the fact that his birthplace was not Tyre, but some obscure section of the Hauran.⁴

It seems that Porphyry actually knew some early Christians such as Origen and met him in person. However, he would become a strong opponent of Christians and eventually write a mangum opus titled Against the Christians. E.J. Young provides more details:

Such was the background and training of this great antagonist of Christianity. His magnum opus was the monumental work Against the Christians, comprising fifteen books and written in Sicily when Porphyry was about forty years old. It was suppressed by Constantine, but apparently copies still existed at a later date, for in 448 the emporer[sic] Theodosius II and Valentine again decreed that it be destroyed. From this time on, copies are no longer to be found, and it is even questionable whether Jerome himself actually possessed one.⁵

So apparently it was influential enough for the “Christianized” emperors to feel the need to ban the work. What survives today is quotations from Christian works refuting Porphyry.

One of his more influential books of his magnum opus was book 12 which was entirely an attempted refutation of the book of Daniel, or at least, disagreeing that Daniel wrote the book. E.J. Young, explains again:

Most important, however, of Porphyry’s criticisms of the Old Testament is that which he directed against the book of Daniel. “Porphyry,” says Jerome, who in his commentary has preserved this criticism, “wrote his twelfth book against the prophet Daniel, denying that it was composed by him whose name it bears, but rather by someone who was in Judea during the times of Antiochus, who is called Epiphanes.” What we have in the book are not prophecies uttered by Daniel, but a narration by an unknown author of events which had already transpired. Consequently, according to Porphyry, in the narration of events up to the time of Antiochus, we have true history, but anything beyond that time is false, since the writer could not know the future.⁶

This is incredibly biased and circular reasoning. It is the same reasoning that Hume used in his arguments against miracles. To paraphrase Hume argued that miracles were impossible since our every day experience precludes their occurrence. As such, since miracles are not common and they violate the laws of nature, they cannot be real. Talk about bad reasoning. The whole argument over miracles is hinged on whether or not those rules of nature are subject to God and His whims or not. They assume what they want to prove and say “THUS IT IS PROVED!”

It is good to know this reasoning existed prior to our modern times. It is equally fallacious then as it is now.

Nevertheless, despite the bad reasoning this doesn’t mean that it wasn’t influential. Dating Daniel to the Maccabean period (ie. the 2nd century) is still the favorite tactic of skeptical scholars.

R.K. Harrison comments again:

Objections to the historicity of Daniel were copied uncritically from book to book, and by the second decade of the twentieth century no scholar of general liberal background who wished to preserve his academic reputation either dared or desired to challenge the current critical trend.⁷

Gee, sounds an awful lot like the evolutionary debate today. Bullying and threatening environment? Check. Anti-God bias? Check.

Yet despite the bad reasoning, it doesn’t mean the conclusion is incorrect. So let’s look at the evidence and see what we can conclude about the dating of the book of Daniel. These categories can be broken into the following types of evidence:

1. Internal Evidence

2. External evidence

Objections to Daniel based on Internal Evidence

There are several debates based on internal evidence that I am not qualified to rebut and as such I will not discuss them as they can get pretty technical. There are however, some basic objections my resources and research can shed light on. I will go over three such objections:

1. The improper date of the capture of Jerusalem in Daniel 1:1

2. The lack of the historical record’s agreement with Nebuchadnezzar’s affliction of insanity

3. Inaccurate records on kingship in the times of Belshazzar and Nabonidus.

We will then proceed to look at some external evidence, and draw some conclusions.

Objection #1: The improper date of the capture of Jerusalem in Daniel 1:1

Daniel 1:1 reads as follows according to the Lexham English Septuagint (LES): “In the third year of King Jehoiakim of Judah, after Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, had arrived at Jerusalem, he began to besiege it.”⁸

You might be wondering why this is a problem. The problem comes in that if you compare this with other historical sources, such as Jeremiah 25:1 “The word that came to Jeremiah against all the people of Judah in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah.” (LES)

That passage goes on to describe Israel being taken captive for 70 years by Nebuchadnezzar saying it will occur that very year described in 25:1. History records that 25:1 actually was the case which would mean Daniel 1:1 is off by one year and is thus counted by some scholars as an anachronism (ie an error in the text that shouldn’t be there if Daniel is genuine).

What are we to make of this?

R.K. Harrison comments:

This alleged error actually rests upon a scholarly misunderstanding of methods of chronological reckoning in antiquity. Superficially Daniel 1:1 refers to the arrival of Nebuchadnezzar to besiege Jerusalem in the third year of Jehoiakim, whereas Jeremiah 25:1 implies that this event took place in the fourth year of Jehoiakim, which was equated with the first year of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.

This difference of one year can be accounted for by the fact that in Babylonia the year in which the king ascended the throne was designated specifically as “the year of the accession to the kingdom,” and this was followed by the first, second, and subsequent years of rule. In Palestine, on the other hand, there was no accession year as such, so that the length of rule was computed differently with the year of accession being regarded as the first year of the particular reign. Daniel thus reckoned according to the Babylonian system of chronology, while Jeremiah followed the normal Palestinian pattern. Consequently, the third year of the Daniel-system of computation would be identical with the fourth year in that employed by Jeremiah, an explanation that removes the alleged difficulty.⁹

Further, this becomes a point in Daniel’s favor actually because as R.K. Harrison goes on to comment:

It should be noted also that the reference in Daniel does not state that Jerusalem was captured in the third year of Jehoiakim (605 B.C.), but merely indicates that Nebuchadnezzar took with him to Babylonia certain Judaean hostages as evidence of good faith on the part of Jehoiakim, whom Nebuchadnezzar rightly suspected of being a political opportunist. This accords with the general situation depicted in Jeremiah 25:1, where the actual fall of Jerusalem had not yet taken place. Had the author of Daniel been an unknown Jew of the second century B.C., as critical scholars have been wont to insist, it is unlikely that he would have followed the obsolete Babylonian chronological system of computation in preference to his own Palestinian method, which had the sanction of so important a personage as the prophet Jeremiah.¹⁰

So chock one point up for Daniel’s authenticity.

Objection #2: The lack of the historical record’s agreement with Nebuchadnezzar’s affliction of insanity

Basically, here the skeptics argue that history does not record this event elsewhere. Since Daniel is the only source for this information and is not corroborated by the historical record it must be false.

This type of argument has been used ever since there have been skeptics of the Bible. It has proven to be fallacious every time. Sometimes we don’t have good reason to think an event would be recorded outside a specific source simply because it would be embarrassing to record. This is one reason why historians consider information that would embarrass the recorder as being pretty much automatically genuine. An example would be why the New Testament authors recorded women as the ones to first discover the empty tomb of Jesus. This fact would be embarrassing to the biblical authors given that 1) they weren’t the ones to discover the tomb, 2) Women were considered to be second class citizens in that culture. So it’s embarrassing on two counts at least and thus lends credence to the story.

But just because something is not recorded elsewhere doesn’t mean it is false. Indeed we have good reason given the mindset of the Ancient Near Easterners that they would have avoided recording such an event for precisely this reason.

R.K. Harrison comments:

The inhabitants of the ancient Near East were always highly superstitious, and while every form of disease was regarded as the malign work of the underworld deities who entered into the apertures of the head and began to create disturbances within the body itself, the incidence of mental affliction was regarded as possession par excellence by demonic powers. In consequence the mentally infirm were accorded a degree of fear and superstitious veneration that was never bestowed upon individuals who were the victims of other kinds of pathology, and this fact accounts for the general attitude adopted in the Old Testament narratives towards madmen. This unholy dread of the mentally ill has persisted in the Orient to the present day, where there are far fewer facilities for the hospital treatment of mental conditions than for other kinds of illnesses. It can also be observed that a similar attitude of superstition is by no means unknown in the modern western world, where traditional medieval approaches to the problems of insanity die very hard. In antiquity, therefore, the most that could be done with a mentally disabled person was to banish him from society (cf. Mark 5:3), and to let subsequent events take their normal course.¹¹

Given their superstitious beliefs about the mentally afflicted we should not be surprised to see an absence in the historical record of such an event.

But, as will be laid out below, the historical record is NOT silent about this event. There are other testimonies that, though veiled in how they reference it, are consistent with what Daniel describes.

Harrison records:

History is, however, by no means silent as to the madness of Nebuchadnezzar, despite the understandable reluctance of contemporary writers to record or discuss the matter. It was only some three centuries after the death of Nebuchadnezzar that a Babylonian priest named Berossus preserved a tradition stating that Nebuchadnezzar was taken ill suddenly towards the end of his reign. As recorded in the writings of Josephus, Berossus stated that, after a reign of forty-three years, Nebuchadnezzar became sick within a very short time of commencing the construction of a certain wall, and subsequently died. Since sickness prior to death was so common, then as now, there would seem to have been no point in recording the matter had it not actually comprised a discreet way of referring to some embarrassing ailment that polite persons refrained from mentioning.

A different tradition, as preserved by Eusebius, went back to Abydenus (second century B.C.), and this recorded that in the last days of Nebuchadnezzar the king was “possessed by some god or other,” and going up to the roof of his palace he announced the coming of a “Persian mule” (Cyrus) who would bring the people of the land into slavery. Having uttered this startling prediction he then disappeared from the city. This tradition seems to be a somewhat garbled reflection of the narrative in Daniel 4:31, but on the other hand it may have been preserved in such a form deliberately so as to conceal the presence of mental derangement and thus avoid an offense against propriety.¹²

Further, Sir Henry Rawlinson recovered a damaged Babylonian inscription from the time of Nebuchadnezzar II. According to Harrison it reads:

For four years the seat of my kingdom in my city … did not rejoice my heart. In all my dominions I did not build a high place of power, the precious treasures of my kingdom I did not lay out. In the worship of Merodach my lord, the joy of my heart in Babylon, the city of my sovereignty, I did not sing his praises and I did not furnish his altars, nor did I clear out the canals.¹³

The reason this is significant is because Nebuchadnezzar built A LOT. He built many different magnificent buildings. He was known for this and then for four years he just simply stopped building. Again, this is not overt confirmation, but compared to his earlier years there are far fewer inscriptions recording what happened during his reign.

Related to this issue, some scholars have proposed based on a fragmentary copy of a document entitled “The Prayer of Nabonidus” that Daniel 4 (which records Nebuchadnezzar’s insanity) was wrongly attributed to Nebuchadnezzar and should have been attributed to Nabonidus. However, this hypothesis must be rejected:

In their comparisons, Milik and Freedman have not paid adequate attention to the differences between the two sources, for it is quite clear that entirely separate traditions are involved here. Fragmentary though the Qumran “Prayer of Nabonidus” is, there can be no doubt that it belongs properly to the realm of folk-lore and popular tradition, and that in all probability it preserved an account of some illness, whether of a staphylococcal or other variety, that overtook Nabonidus during his period of residence in Arabia. It is unnecessary to suppose that he was virtually unknown in Palestine, since the extent of his activities in the neighborhood of Teima would almost certainly be familiar to the residents of Jerusalem and its environs.

To the present writer the Qumran “Prayer of Nabonidus” must be assigned to the area of legend, and in consequence is most probably haggadic in nature. The apocryphal additions to the book of Daniel, to judge by their popularity and persistence, show that the Biblical tradition of Daniel attracted a good deal of legendary material, and it may well be that the Qumran “Prayer of Nabonidus” is to be related to the type of pietism that produced the stories of Bel and the Dragon and of Susanna. On the other hand, it may perhaps constitute a near—contemporary of the apocryphal composition entitled The Prayer of Manasseh, to which it is closely related both in form and content.¹⁴

Moreover, the affliction of Nebuchadnezzar is not an unheard of form of mental illness. Harrison writes:

The illness described in Daniel, however, constitutes a rare form of monomania, a condition of mental imbalance in which the sufferer is deranged in one significant area only. The particular variety of monomania described is known as boanthropy, another rare condition in which Nebuchadnezzar imagined himself to be a cow or a bull, and acted accordingly. The European “werewolf” legends are based upon another infrequently encountered form of monomania known as lycanthropy. Rendle Short described yet another variety, avianthropy, in which the patient was convinced that he was a cock-pheasant, and roosted in a tree each night instead of sleeping in a bed.¹⁵

He moreover, goes on to elaborate witnessing a similar type of illness that Nebuchadnezzar would’ve exhibited:

The present writer, therefore, considers himself particularly fortunate to have actually observed a clinical case of boanthropy in a British mental institution in 1946. The patient was a man in his early twenties, who reportedly had been hospitalized for about five years. His symptoms were well-developed on admission, and diagnosis was immediate and conclusive. He was of average height and weight with good physique, and was in excellent bodily health. His mental symptoms included pronounced anti-social tendencies, and because of this he spent the entire day from dawn to dusk outdoors, in the grounds of the institution. He was only able to exercise a rather nominal degree of responsibility for his physical needs, and consequently was washed and shaved daily by an attendant. During the winter of 1946-47, when the writer observed him, he wore only light underclothing and a two-piece suit, with or without a sweater, during his daily peregrinations. The attendant reported to the writer that the man never wore any kind of raincoat or overcoat, and that he had never sustained such ill effects as coryza, influenza or pneumonia.

His daily routine consisted of wandering around the magnificent lawns with which the otherwise dingy hospital situation was graced, and it was his custom to pluck up and eat handfuls of the grass as he went along. On observation he was seen to discriminate carefully between grass and weeds, and on inquiry from the attendant the writer was told that the diet of this patient consisted exclusively of grass from the hospital lawns. He never ate institutional food with the other inmates, and his only drink was water, which was served to him in a clean container so as to make it unnecessary for him to drink from muddy puddles. The writer was able to examine him cursorily, and the only physical abnormality noted consisted of a lengthening of the hair and a coarse, thickened condition of the finger-nails.

Without institutional care the patient would have manifested precisely the same physical conditions as those mentioned in Daniel 4:33. After having passed through a difficult and debilitating period occasioned by the Second World War and its aftermath, the writer was soberly impressed by the superb physical condition of the patient. His skin exhibited all the clinical indications of a healthy body; his muscles were firm and well-developed, his eyes were bright and clear, and he appeared to manifest a total immunity to all forms of physical disease. According to the attendant he was quiet in his behavior, reasonably co operative for one so far divorced from reality, and never damaged institutional property¹⁶

So in summary:

1. Daniel describes an affliction that is known to psychologists though it is extremely rare

2. The embarrassment associated with the illness would’ve made it unlikely to be recorded by other entities more favorable to the king

3. Despite 2) we still have some external accounts corroborating the event.

Let us examine the last objection before we briefly move on to discuss objections based on external evidence.

Objection #3: Inaccurate records on kingship in the times of Belshazzar and Nabonidus

This issue can be briefly stated and briefly resolved.

Yet another objection to the historicity of Daniel has involved the relationship between Belshazzar and Nabonidus. According to Daniel the former was king, whereas in cuneiform records it was Nabonidus, father of Belshazzar, who was actually the ruler of the Neo-Babylonian empire before it fell to Cyrus in 539 B.C. ¹⁷

However, as Harrison goes on to comment this can be resolved by the fact that archaeological investigation has revealed that during much of Nabonidus his eldest son, Belshazzar acted as co-regent.

As so often happens in Biblical criticism the item of critique actually becomes a point in the Bible’s failure. All the critics end up doing is that they put their ignorance on parade.

Objections to Daniel based on External Evidence

This section will not take long. Mostly these objections are based on linguistic evidence within the text itself and comparing those linguistic elements to what we know outside the book.

Humourously enough, Harrison is so underwhelmed by the evidence here that he feels compelled to begin his external evidence section with this disclaimer:

The fact is that critical scholars have made out an extremely poor case for a Maccabean dating (for example, the summary by S. B. Frost, IDB, I, p. 765), and the weaknesses of their position have become even more evident since the discovery of the Qumran manuscripts. Although an almost desperate appeal has been made to the fact that Daniel occurs in the third section of the Hebrew canon rather than among the prophets in the second section as an indication of late date, this circumstance merely testifies that Daniel was not regarded as having occupied the prophetic office as such. He was not a prophet in the classic sense associated with Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others of the literary coterie for the simple reason that he did not function as a spiritual mediator between God and a theocratic community, despite the fact that he was endowed with certain conspicuous prophetic gifts. Like Joseph of old, he was a Hebrew statesman in a heathen court, and not a “writing prophet” or spiritual mediator in the commonly understood sense.¹⁸

He then describes two types of objections here:

1. Others within the Maccabean period do not include Daniel on their list of inspired books

2. The linguistic evidence within the text as compared to the period it would’ve been written in doesn’t match.

External Evidence Objection #1: Others within the Maccabean period do not include Daniel on their list of inspired books

This point is relatively easy to deal with. Consider our own canon of the New Testament Scriptures.

First, did you know that this is not the first time such a debate has arisen in the church and that what we now have as canon was attempted to be changed by several heretics (Marcion being the first)? For those who are not familiar with Marcion, Marcion was an early heretic in the church who claimed that the God of the New Testament and the God of the Old Testament were different gods. The God of the Old Testament was a ruthless and vengeful god and Jesus came to save us from this god. This is a heresy for several obvious reasons. The point is that his canon only included the following books:

1. The Gospel of Luke - which was heavily edited

2. Paul’s letters - also edited

There are quite a few books missing in there and yet if you were to look at the historical record Marcion’s “canon” would be one of the first canons you would come across yet it was soundly rejected by the church of the day and Marcion was condemned. Some scholars disagree with this, but many scholars believe that Marcion started with a larger list of books (the known canon) - likely the Muratorian canon and edited it down to books he agreed with. Some believe that Marcion’s canon came first and the Muratorian canon was formed as a response - though this is a minority position from my understanding.

Regardless, the point is that we should expect similar results throughout history. Just because a particular document we find doesn’t include Daniel as an inspired book, does not mean it is not, nor that the wide majority of Jews at the time did not receive it as such. In fact we have good reason to believe, based on the discoveries of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls that Daniel was widely read in the Maccabean period and therefore must predate it.

Harrison comments:

The shallowness and erroneous nature of such a position has been amply demonstrated by the Qumran discoveries, which make it impossible to deny the popularity of Daniel at that period, if the numbers of copies and fragments of the composition may be taken as furnishing any indication at all of the situation.

A proper assessment of the evidence provided by Ecclesiasticus should include recognition of the possibility that Ben Sira deliberately excluded Daniel from his list of notables for unknown reasons, as he did also with Job and all the Judges except Samuel, as well as Kings Asa and Jehoshaphat, Mordecai, and even Ezra himself. Ecclesiasticus is clearly limited in its usefulness as a ground of appeal for establishing the historicity of certain well-known Hebrew personages, if, indeed, it should ever be employed at all in this manner. It can be remarked, however, that there are allusions to Daniel and his book in Maccabees (1 Macc. 2:59ff.), Baruch (1:15–3:3), and the Sibylline Oracles (III, 397ff.), all of which are at least second—century B.C. compositions, and these works attest to the familiarity of the Daniel tradition at that time.¹⁹

Once again, the scholars seem to be grasping at straws.

External Evidence Objection #2: The linguistic evidence within the text as compared to the period it would’ve been written in doesn’t match.

Harrison explains:

The linguistic evidence that critical scholars once advanced with such enthusiasm as proof of a Maccabean date for Daniel has undergone sobering modification of late as a result of archaeological discoveries in the Near East. In 1891 S. R. Driver could write quite confidently that the Persian words in Daniel presupposed a period of composition after the Persian empire had been well established; the Greek words demanded, the Hebrew supported, and the Aramaic permitted a date subsequent to the conquest of Palestine by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. This aphorism was widely quoted by English writers in succeeding decades, and as far as the Aramaic sections were concerned, H. H. Rowley sought to substantiate the assertions of Driver by means of several publications and articles. However, subsequent discoveries and studies have shown the dangers inherent in appealing to the presence of Aramaic elements as incontrovertible evidence for a late date of composition.²⁰

The argument here essentially seems to be that because Aramaic was a more widely known dialect later in history that the presence of Aramaic within our earliest copies of Daniel must mean that Daniel was composed later. However, as Harrison later points out, the Aramaic dialect which is related to Hebrew, is quite old. We have evidence that Aramaic goes back as far as the time of Laban of Laban and Jacob fame. In Genesis 31:47 Laban used the designation Jegar-sahadutha, which effectively means “witness-heap” though my understanding is that it is not a direct corollary. So if Aramaic can be traced that far back, why would we expect that its presence in Daniel means it is later?

Yet once again, the argument turns against the scholars here:

The studies of Rosenthal have shown that the kind of Aramaic employed in Daniel was that which grew up in the courts and chancelleries from the seventh century B.C. on and subsequently became widespread in the Near East. Thus it cannot be employed as evidence for a late date of the book, and in fact it constitutes a strong argument for a sixth-century B.C. period of composition. The Aramaic sections of Daniel (2:4b–7:28) are by nature closely akin to the language of the fifth-century B.C. Elephantine papyri and that of Ezra (Ezra 4:7–6:18; 7:12–26), while the Hebrew resembles that of Ezekiel, Haggai, Ezra, and Chronicles, and not the later Hebrew of Ecclesiasticus, as some writers have maintained, arguing from Hebrew fragments preserved in rabbinic quotations and also from the Syriac of the Peshitta version. More recent studies in Biblical Aramaic have cast grave doubts upon the advisability of distinguishing sharply between eastern and western branches of the linguistic group, as older scholars were wont to do, thus seriously weakening the force of the assertion by Driver.

It is now known that Persian loan-words in Daniel are consistent with an earlier rather than a later date for the composition of the book. In this connection scholars have now become aware that the term “satrap,” which was once thought to have been Greek in origin, was actually derived from the Old Persian form kshathrapān, which also occurred in cuneiform inscriptions as shatarpānu, giving rise to the Greek term “satrap.” That Persian words should be used of Babylonian institutions prior to the conquests of Cyrus need not be as surprising as Driver supposed, since the work was written in the Persian rather than the Neo-Babylonian Period….In the interests of objectivity it should be noted in passing that the Persian terms found in Daniel are specifically Old Persian words, that is to say, occurring within the history of the language to about 300 B.C.²¹

So it would seem that early dating yet again wins the day.

Evidence for Daniel’s authenticity (or early date)

We have already seen several points in favor of Daniel’s authenticity just by examining the arguments against Daniel. These will be summarized below:

1. It records things that only someone close to the events would’ve known, such as Belshazzar being king at the time he was.

2. The linguistic evidence more closely links it with the sixth century BC than the second century BC.

3. Copies of Daniel had been widely circulated throughout the Jewish culture by the time of Maccabeans arguing against a late date and for an early date.

This leads us to the following points:

4. As stated by a critic of Daniel as summarized by Harrison in his Introduction to the Old Testament

It seems clear from a straightforward reading of the narratives in the work that the author possessed a more accurate knowledge of Neo-Babylonian and early Achaemenid Persian history than any other known historian since the sixth century B.C. Even Pfeiffer, who was one of the more radical critics of Daniel, was compelled to concede that it will presumably never be known how the author learned that the new Babylon was the creation of Nebuchadnezzar, as the excavations have proved, and that Belshazzar, mentioned only in Babylonian records, in Daniel, and in Baruch (1:1), which is based upon Daniel, was functioning as king when Cyrus took Babylon in 539 B.C. ²²

Daniel just exhibits too much accurate knowledge that has been verified by archaeology and history to be a coincidence or a fake.

5. Daniel’s accounts of relationships between pagan and Jewish peoples do not match the attitudes of the Maccabean period.

As quoted in The New American Commentary on Daniel by Stephen R. Miller:

Another argument against the Maccabean view is that the pagan governments in the historical accounts in Daniel do not exhibit a hostile attitude toward the Jews, contrary to conditions under Antiochus IV. Even Montgomery asserts: “It must be positively denied, as earlier conservative comm., and now Mein., Holscher, have rightly insisted, that Neb. and Darius are types of the infamous Antiochus, or that the trials of the confessors in the bk. represent the Macc. martyrdoms.” Neither was Daniel an antagonist of Nebuchadnezzar but even seems to have admired him. In almost every instance, Daniel was a friend of the monarch, and the king exhibited great respect and even affection for him. Such a scenario certainly does not correspond to the time of Antiochus, when the godly Jews were being persecuted and murdered by that pagan despot. These Jews did not admire Antiochus but despised his evil ways. Even if the stories were written earlier than the second century B.C. and adapted by a Maccabean author, it seems logical to expect that he would have changed elements of the stories to fit his present situation.²³

6. Lastly, if Daniel was written in the Maccabean period we would expect that it would use predominantly Greek terms since Greek was the dominant language of the day.

Indeed, as I hope to show elsewhere in future articles, this was the reason for the formation of the Septuagint, the Greek Translation of the Old Testament. Hebrew was dying out as a language by the mid 200s BC and a new translation was needed. The translation I believe was begun in the late 300s but regardless, the point stands that Greek exerted a predominant influence on the language of the day. Miller comments:

In fact, the meager number of Greek terms in the Book of Daniel is a most convincing argument that the prophecy was not produced in the Maccabean period, the heart of the Greek era. By 170 B.C. Greek-speaking governments had controlled Babylon and Palestine for 150 years, and numerous Greek terms would be expected in a work produced during this time. Most of the apocryphal books were either written or translated into Greek in the second or first centuries B.C., displaying the profound influence of Greek upon the language at about the time when some argue Daniel was composed. Kitchen aptly notes that in Daniel, Persian terms are used for government terminology where one would expect a writer of the second century B.C. to have employed Greek expressions.²⁴

It would seem then we have good reason to believe Daniel was written by 536 BC (This is approximately when Daniel claims to have received the final prophecy of the book which begins in Chapter 10 verse 1), if not a little later.

One Last Point

Finally, one of my favorite forms of argumentation is to grant the point the opponent is trying to make in order to rebut them anyway. Let’s suppose for a second that Daniel was written by 186 BC (ie the Maccabean period), what then? Well, it would mean the prophecies of Daniel 8 are null and void and merely describe history that happened.

That’s a bummer, but not the end of the world and it doesn’t mean that Daniel is not inspired Scripture. As we will see in our investigation of Daniel, Daniel contains:

1. Prophecies of Armageddon

2. Prophecies of the Messiah

3. Prophecies of future kingdoms even if allowed to have been written in the Maccabean period.

And many of these (though certainly not all) can be shown to have come to pass, and the skeptic would still have to demonstrate how that’s even possible (it’s not).

Nevertheless I only concede this point to demonstrate something temporarily. There is in fact ample reason to believe that Daniel is being honest about when he wrote the prophecies down and thus that Daniel was composed no earlier than 536 BC. But certainly not much later. Maybe a decade or so.

I believe Daniel was written much earlier than the critics desire it to be and as such I hope our future investigations of these prophecies will astound and amaze you and strengthen your faith in the inerrant word of God.

If you made it to the end, congratulations! It’s my longest article to date and I hope you found it worth it! In a word:

If you would be so kind, please subscribe below if you liked this article.

1. R. K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1969), 262.

2. Ibid, 1106–1107.

3. Ibid, 1109.

4. Edward J. Young, The Prophecy of Daniel: A Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980), 317.

5. Ibid, 318

6. Ibid, 318-319 (emphasis mine)

7. R. K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1969), 1111.

8. For those of you who may be wondering what this is, the Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Old Testament that predates Christ by several hundred years. It preserves a textual tradition in the Old Testament that is different than what we commonly use now known as the Masoretic text. Because the Septuagint is an earlier witness to the Hebrew text, as strange as this may seem, I will be trying to use the Septuagint wherever possible. The Masoretic text was composed several hundred years AFTER Christ though proto versions of it were likely around shortly after. Because the Septuagint is closer to preserving a textual tradition of the Hebrew that is what I will be trying to use for Old Testament references.

9. R. K. Harrison, Introduction to the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1969), 1112.

10. Ibid, 1112–1113 (emphasis mine)

11. Ibid, 1114.

12. Ibid, 1114 - 1115

13. As quoted in Ibid, 1115

14. Ibid, 1119

15. Ibid, 1115 - 1116

16. Ibid, 1116 - 1117

17. Ibid, 1120

18. Ibid, 1123.

19. Ibid, 1123-1124

20. Ibid, 1124.

21. Ibid, 1125-1126 (emphasis mine)

22. Ibid, 1120

23. Stephen R. Miller, Daniel, vol. 18, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 27.

24. Ibid, 30.