The Lion's Den

Because if somebody just says, Antiochus IV Epiphanes is a bad dude, and let’s hope God comes in and saves us, that’s not as effective as saying, I found this text from this ancient prophet. And this ancient prophet says, don’t know who this is, but there’s a person who’s going to be coming who’s a really bad dude, and God’s going to deliver us, injecting it with that artificial antiquity. And this notion of real prophecy provides a lot more power, a lot more authority to the text. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

I mean, I don’t know if you should call me Dan. Maybe you should call me Belteshazzar. Beltel. Belteshazzar.

No, it’s got to be your bull. What now? We watched. We watched Tommy Boy the other night. I had to show my girls.

Yeah. We’re diving into the book that. After which you and I are both named.

Our namesake. Yes.

Ostensibly, Daniel is a book in the Bible. I don’t know if you guys knew that, but I assume you did. You’re all.

And I don’t know if fewer people probably knew that. If you look at our old cover image for our podcast, you can see some Hebrew letters in the background. If you look in the upper right, you see the Hebrew Daniel.

So, yeah, even on our web. On our YouTube, if you’re watching this on YouTube, there’s, like, Hebrew letters sort of swirling around us, and. And one of them might be that. That name. I don’t know how. How it’s cropped. Yeah, we. Yeah, we. So you.

So you.

You chose that image specifically because we were both Daniels, and that’s.

We thought that would be funny. Yeah.

So.

Because little.

Little Easter egg for you, everybody.

Because we’re 11 years old, we might as well be.

Anyway. Yeah. So let’s just dive in because we. We got a lot to cover. Yeah. You know, growing up, I’m gonna say this, Dan. Growing up, I. I obviously felt some sort of connection to this book just because it was my name and there. And it has one of the cooler stories in the Bible, and that is the lion’s den story. Daniel gets thrown into a lion’s den. I don’t want to bury the lead here, but that’s kind of all I remembered from it. So.

Yeah.

When I. When I dove back into it to prep for this segment, for this episode, I was confused. I’m just gonna say it. This book is a mess.

Yeah.

They needed to employ any amount of writing skill or narrative structure or anything. It is. I don’t. I have a hunch you’re going to tell me a lot of interesting stuff about how this book came to be and the fact that this book. I. If I’ve learned one thing from doing this show with you for as long as we’ve been doing this show, it is that there is no way one person wrote this book.

Yeah, we’re gonna. We’re gonna get into what’s going on with some of the literary structure and. And, yeah, it’s gonna get weird, as it so frequently does on our show. And I. I think with. And I, I think with, with texts like Daniel, you have two different, you have a spectrum of people’s awareness of Daniel. On one end, you’ve got the people who have sat down and read it beginning to end, and those people are messed up in the head because Daniel messes you up in the head. On the other end, you have people who have basically heard stories from it. They’re aware of a few different, sometimes proof texts, sometimes specific stories from Daniel. You know, Daniel in the lion’s den, you know, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego from the fiery furnace and from the great poets, the Beastie Boys.

And so there’s a lot of just kind of random spotty knowledge about the book of Daniel in the zeitgeist and, and in the air. And that’s how I think the majority of people know about Daniel but have never read, sat down and read it from beginning to end, which is, is no small feat. That’s a tall order to begin with.

I mean, it’s not a long book, but in biblical standards, by biblical standards, it’s not, you know, it’s, it’s what, 12 chapters?

12 chapters. 12, you know, dense chapters.

Dense and, and also hard to read sometimes. You know, you get into, you get into a lot of lists a lot of the time that are repeated. As a guy with ADHD, this book, I gotta say.

Yeah. And repetition was an important part of some of the literary conventions anciently. But I think one of the, one of the more interesting things that a lot of people, the people who have come at Daniel academically, or at least from a more concerted devotional perspective, are aware that it’s actually written in two different languages. See, Daniel is written in Hebrew from Daniel 1:1

to the first half of Daniel 2

4. And then the second half of Daniel 2

4 is written in Aramaic. And it is Aramaic from there all the way through to Daniel 7 , verse 28, or the very end of chapter 7. And then beginning in chapter 8, we revert back to Hebrew all the way to the end of chapter 12. And so it is when you’re reading it in the original languages, it’s odd, it’s a little confusing. And one of the more confusing things for scholars is that this division is Hebrew, then Aramaic, then back to Hebrew does not align with the main division of the book because we have chapters 1 through 6, which are court tales, where we’re telling these stories about Daniel and Daniel’s companions and the kings of Babylon, Media and Persia.

And we’re going to get to what on earth Media is doing there. And then chapters 7 through 12 are basically apocalyptic visions.

Right.

And oddly enough, even that division, that simple dividing in half 1 through 6 and 7 through 12 doesn’t align with how scholars think the text actually came together. And so I, I didn’t know exactly. We don’t, we don’t have an outline for, for today’s episode. As usual, we’re just going to wing it and, and hopefully things work out. But what do you think?

We have great wings. There’s nothing you can do about it.

What, what do you think makes the most sense? Do you want to talk about how the text came together, language, the dating, authorship, all this, and then get into the details or do you want to talk about some of the details?

Let’s sort of walk through the book first as you encounter it and then we’ll understand. And then, and then maybe you can bring in some understanding about like, okay, where, why it is, what it is.

Okay. And this is, this is pretty simple because the chapters are kind of self contained in a lot of ways. You have one story per chapter. Yeah.

And they don’t necessarily, they don’t go in chronological order.

Right.

They bounce around chronologically. They don’t always agree with each other as to like what has happened. It does seem like there’s some.

Huh? Well, yeah, it’s, it’s kind of like a sitcom where it was like everybody was happy and then the next episode starts with everybody’s angry.

Right. Yeah.

So it’s, it is a little sitcom-ish in that sense.

Yeah, it does feel. Yeah, it feels. These are each very distinct and they all start sort of in the middle of something and they all, and they end abruptly and it’s, it’s, it’s. Yeah, it’s crazy. Chapter one sort of introduces Nebuchadnezzar, who, who is the king of. What’s his area called? Babylonia.

Born in Babylonia, moved to Arizona.

Can you, by the way, can you. What’s the difference? Is there a difference between Babylonia and Babylon? What is that?

Babylon’s a city. Babylonia is a term that people used to use to refer to, like, the broader region. Yeah, but. Okay, nobody, nobody really says Babylonia much anymore in the scholarship.

Okay, so, so what was he the king of then?

He was the king of Babylon. Yeah, Nebuchadnezzar was the king of Babylon. And so Daniel starts with the, the, the. The destruction of Jerusalem, the exile. And we have Nebuchadnezzar saying, send me people from the royal families from among the elite. We’re going to train them up for three years, and then they’re going to be our court officials and things like that.

Okay, but wait a minute, wait a minute. He doesn’t just say that. He says, send me your sexy boys who are super, super smart. He says, send me your, your handsome boys who are. Who are without blemish. I mean, it’s a little, it’s a. It starts out, we launch with a little bit of homoeroticism. Yeah, probably.

I would say that what’s going on here is this idea that for court officials, you want people who are going to be squeaky clean and who are going to look nice. So I don’t know that it’s so much. And kind of an erotic thing as very similar to. In ancient Israel, you want your sacrifices to be without blemish and to be pretty. And so here it’s like, if we’re going to. If we’re going to take these folks and we’re going to train them and turn them into our court officials, we need the people who are, you know, tall enough, who are slim enough, who look nice enough. So I think that’s probably what’s going on. Although at the same time, there, there were. That kind of homoeroticism was not absent from Babylon. And you also had eunuchs who were going to be in charge of different kinds of things. So there’s a lot we don’t know about this, partly because the text was written in a much later period, and we don’t know to what degree.

They’re just kind of making up stuff about two centuries before and the degree to which they have some kind of access to knowledge that we may not have about what’s going on in these courts.

Yeah. I even had a question you, you know, you mentioned eunuchs, and I, you know, in one version, because I, this is why this, this is why this job is hard. But I, I, I’m reading in two versions. You know what I mean? Because I’m trying to understand, I’m trying to see differences as I’m reading. So in, in, I think in, in the NRSV, it says the, you know, that the palace guy, the, the, anyway, the, the, the, the, the guy in charge of the palace is the one that Daniel is dealing with and blah, blah. I think this is in chapter two in the King James Version, it says the eunuch master is the one who’s, who’s doing this. And I was like, is Daniel, are Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, are they eunuchs? Is that possible?

I mean, lots of things are possible. I don’t, I don’t know that that fits any, any current thinking about Daniel. Let me just.

Well, I’m starting the thinking now. I, I do have to say sorry. I’m bouncing around a lot. I apologize. But also in chapter one, among the handsome genius boys are Daniel. And not Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, but rather Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.

Right.

And they’re all given, all of them, including Daniel, are given other names. Belteshazzar for Daniel, and then Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego for the other guys. And this book cannot decide what to call anybody. Like, as you go through the book, Daniel bounces back and forth. Yeah, the, the other three, at one, they stay Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah for a bit, and then suddenly they flip. And once they flip, they’re just Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego for the rest of the thing. It’s, it’s confusing.

And this is, this is one of the pieces of data that points in the direction of originally independent stories being brought together and being harmonized. And so that’s what. And, and so chapter one is to what’s going on, which was probably added a bit later. And what they’re doing there is saying, oh, by the way, these are the same people. They were just like, your name is now this and now. So when you see us bouncing back and forth, just keep in mind those are the same people. And it’s a way to, I don’t know if there’s a name for this kind of activity. It’s not poisoning the well. It’s kind of sweetening the well. You’re, you’re kind of leading them into a specific interpretive framework to gloss over the inconsistencies.

Dumping a bunch of Kool Aid into the well.

Yeah, okay. I did find. I did find this. This is coming from Carol Newsom’s 2014 commentary on Daniel. By the way, I would highly recommend, if you want more on Daniel, more than you’re going to hear from us today. And a lot less moronic as well. We’ve got John Collins, his 1993 Hermeneia Commentary Series. Commentary on Daniel is one of the best. And then the other one that I would say is one of the best is Carol Newsom’s 2014 Old Testament Library commentary on Daniel. But from Newsom’s commentary, we’ve got this statement on Daniel’s identity. And this is. This is actually an article written by somebody else, but they say talking about Daniel’s appearance in many contexts. His beardless face, handsome visage, and court status suggest his particular identity as a court eunuch. Foreign youths serving in many imperial courts throughout history were not typically allowed to do so unless they had been castrated. And many readers have assumed the same rule held for Daniel.

So I guess there is some thinking in that direction. I’m like.

I’m like a Bible scholar, Dan. I don’t know if you realize.

This, just without any of the training, I’m. I’m sure there’s some folks out there who are thinking right now, just get to the damn point. So let’s. Let’s go through the chapters real quick. Chapter one, we get the introduction of Daniel and his companions. We get the list, by the way, that. This is. They changed their names. And then we get the story about the food where they’re like, we’re going to give you some of the king’s portion, which would have been quite, quite the honor. They’re going to eat the wine. There was not a lot of meat available back then, so meat and the king’s wine. And so there’s a lot of kind of power and authority associated with this. We’re going to, you know, fill you full of the king’s meat and wine, and this will make you powerful. And. And Daniel says, no, thank you. We’re just going to eat. We have this word that means seeds. And it’s not clear if it’s like we’re just going to eat handfuls of seeds or if we’re going to eat stuff grown from seeds.

If it’s like, NRSV has vegetables.

Yeah. So it’s not exactly clear what’s going on there, but the idea seems to be. We’re going to stay away from these symbols of imperial power, and we’re going to give us 10 days. We’ll do an experiment. We’ll show you that we end up being in better shape than the folks who are eating the king’s stuff. And. And there’s not really a case to make that, like, the text says that we don’t want to be defiled, but there’s no law anywhere in the Hebrew Bible in any tradition that is known from this period that prohibits them from one, eating meat or two, drinking wine.

Yeah, it was very confusing to me. I was just like, why, though? It never says. It never gives us a good why.

And I think this is probably. We’re going to get to it later, but this is coming from a later time period than it is set, where we have larger empires trying to impose cultural restrictions on Judaism. And one of the things is dietary restrictions and identity markers. And so in my opinion, what’s going on here is they’re saying we’re not going to internalize these markers not only of Babylonian identity, but of Babylonian hegemony. We are going. And. And hegemony means like rule by some foreign entity of some kind. Somebody has come in and is ruling over you. And so in my opinion, this is a rejection of that and saying we’re going to maintain our own ethnic identity by avoiding the foods that you are providing to us and just eating our own foods, even though there’s no actual requirement or expectation that they eat only vegetables and drink only.

I think that’s a. That makes sense. But I am. Right. I didn’t read any explicit reason. Right. There’s no explicit reason listed in the. In the book about why they don’t.

It just says it. They don’t want to be defiled, but there’s no explanation of why these foods would defile them. And it doesn’t make sense, given what we know about Judaism in the. In that time period.

And. Well, yeah, and. And it also, like, the other thing that confuses me about it is that later, Daniel’s totally happy to take the robes and the gold and whatever. Anyway, we’ll get to it.

We’ll get to it. So. And. And this is why there’s an argument to. To be had about whether this book is trying to help people incorporate themselves into the empire. Is this a little more in the style of Esther, where it’s like, we’re going to ingratiate ourselves. This is how you do it successfully so that you can work within the empire, or is this a book saying, no, we’re going to be insular, and we’re going to stay, keep ourselves separated from it because it’s not entirely consistent. So there has been a lot of debate about what the ultimate goal of this book is in that regard. Yeah. So that brings us to chapter two, where we have Nebuchadnezzar, who has a bad night one time, a bad trip of some kind, and says to his court magicians and prophets and everybody, I had a dream. You got to tell me what the dream was, and then you got to interpret it for me or I’m going to kill you. Which is not something that anyone ever did anciently, but makes for a cool story, I guess.

It. I mean, it just seems absurd. He’s like, you have to interpret my dream, but first you have to tell me what the dream was so that I know that you’re legit.

Yeah, what am I paying you for if you can’t even do this one thing? It reminds.

It reminds me of the. The Far Side comic where the. The cops bust in on a. On a fortune teller, and they’re like, because you didn’t know we were coming. That’s why you’re under arrest.

And, and. And Daniel comes waltzing in and is like, yeah, I’ll tell you. And this is a dream about this statue, which. Which is. Has a few different parts to it. I’m gonna pull it up and so I can read directly from.

I got it if you want me.

You got it? Yeah, go ahead, read the. Read the description.

The head of the statue was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its midsection and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay.

Yes. And there have been a lot of. Of artistic depictions of this statue, but this is. This is kind of the. The Fourfold Kingdom’s vision. And there have been a lot of different attempts to. To make sense of this over the years. From the initial publication of this book, within a century of this book having been written, the Romans take over. And so almost immediately, you have a bunch of people trying to read the Romans into it, which means that you have to reconfigure other things. But basically, this is the kingdom of Babylon, the kingdom of Media, the Median Kingdom, the kingdom of Persia, and then the Hellenistic kingdom, beginning with Alexander the Great. And then the. The toes and the clay at the bottom is representative of what is known as the Diadochi or the Diadochoi, which is the. The battle of successors after the death of Alexander the Great. And this is one of the indications of when this book was written, because it goes right up to a period where there’s a lot of detail and a lot of accuracy, and then it’s like.

And then the end times are going to come and then everything is. Is no longer accurate. So if you, if you think at all critically about who may have been writing this and when it’s. When there’s the most detail, when there’s the most accuracy, and when they say God returns, it’s right before that, right?

As it turns out, the easiest way to write a prophecy is to write it about the time that you’re actually in right now and pretend that it was written 100 years ago.

And this was something that was noticed by non-Christian and non-Jewish authors in like the third century CE. something that was noticed by non Christian and non Jewish authors in like the third century CE. There was a pagan writer who was like, yeah, I read your book Daniel there. And based on, you know, a lot of stuff is accurate, a lot of stuff is inaccurate. You get the most detail right around this period in what we now refer to as the Maccabean period in biblical studies. And then it suddenly gets totally inaccurate when it talks about God swooping in and saving everybody. So it seems like it was right there in the middle of the second century that it was written. And you have Christian authors who are like, no, no, no, getting a little annoyed with this pagan author. But this statue has to be reinterpreted if you want this to be something that goes any further forward in time than Antiochus IV Epiphanes. I mean, we will talk about later.

I feel like it’s pretty obvious that the iron is the United States of America and the clay parts are just the. The dirty liberals or something.

And I’m not going to argue with you there, but the. One of the. And we’ll talk a little bit more about it later. But one of the keys to reinterpreting things, particularly if you want to get the Romans in there, that’s what most folks want to do because that allows them to demonize either the Catholic Church or the Roman Empire or whatever, right? But you have to combine the empire of the Medes and the Persians. And this is problematic for a number of reasons. But the presence of the Medes is problematic in its own right. So that’s chapter two, chapter three. We’ve got this commandment. Somebody says, hey, we got this statue for you, King. And we’re going to say everybody has to worship it. Or you get thrown in a fire and Daniel and his three companions refuse to worship it. And they get thrown in the fire and, and they are not harmed. And Nebuchadnezzar famously looks into the fire and says I see a fourth like unto the Son of God.

According to the King James Version, which is a mistranslation of the Aramaic. Pretty straightforward. In Aramaic it says bar elahin, which means not the Son of God, but a son of the gods, plural. And so this is, this is a Babylonian king representing a Babylonian perspective. But we still have this Semitic convention about referring to a member of a certain class by saying a son of that class. So a son of the gods is a god, a son of the prophets is a prophet. A son of Adam is a human being. So so it’s just saying that looks like a deity in there with them. And that has been reinterpreted as a reference to Jesus by later readers.

Right.

Then we get into chapter four. We have. The king sees. Has a dream about a tree. And Daniel interprets this as a reference to seven years and basically self imposed exile where the king is going to leave human civilization and go dwell in the desert and, and get. Freak out for a while. Yeah, get, get hairy.

It’s the Burning Man.

Yeah, probably. And, and this, this is connected with the idea that a king at the end of the Babylonian empire named Nabonidus actually used to would go into the Arabian peninsula and just hang out for years at a time while his son Belshazzar kind of co-regent in his stead. So we have this weird reassignment of the things that Nabonidus does. By the way, Nabonidus is the one who was all into dream interpretation and stuff like that. Nabonidus was the hippie, not Nebuchadnezzar. But Daniel is reassigning all these things to Nebuchadnezzar.

Daniel the book, not the character.

Daniel the book. Right.

Can I also mention one thing that happens, one weird thing that happens in chapter four, which is that suddenly like we get through most of chapter 4 and then in verse 34, Nebuchadnezzar comes back from his exile and suddenly the book, the rest of the book is in first person by the character of Nebuchadnezzar. So it’s like it said, like suddenly it says when that period was over, I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven and my reason returned to me. That wasn’t how this book, no, this chapter started. It never goes back to that. It’s. Yeah, very weird. Do you. Is there a reason for that or do we. That’s not a part of like a known convention or anything, is it?

There’s some coming in and out of, of first person. And this is a part of the idea is that you’re, you’re trying to represent, you know, how. You remember when Blair Witch Project came out, the found footage genre, huh? It’s kind of like we’re gonna mix in these different genres to give it a flavor of authenticity. And so like that. That’s why they would say, and then there was this letter and it’s, I, the king, write this letter. And you know, it’s the same person writing the whole thing, but they’re switching voice and everything in order to give it kind of a, a flavor of authenticity.

I love the idea of biblical found footage.

That is, yeah, it’s, it’s really what’s going on with a lot of these, in a lot of these places where it’s like. And then there was a decree made. And here’s the decree. We, we happen to find it. Then we get into chapter five, and now we’ve got Belshazzar, who’s supposed to be Nebuchadnezzar’s son. Belshazzar was not Nebuchadnezzar’s son. And this is funny, I, I see a lot of videos where people are like, critical scholarship is all garbage. They used to think there was never somebody named Belshazzar. And then we found an inscription about Belshazzar. And one, this does not remotely solve the overwhelming majority of the historical and textual problems with the book of Daniel . But two, that discovery was made in the 19th century, so when critical scholarship was still in its infancy trying to learn how to walk. So it’s not the, the slam dunk that a lot of people think it is.

But also for every, like sci. I, I love the criticisms of any science or any, any academic study where they’re like, aha, you were wrong, and therefore everything is. We should throw it all out the window. What are you talking about? Being, being wrong and then assimilating new ideas and changing to, and making those adjustments, that’s what’s critical. That’s what scholarship’s all about.

Yeah, that’s, that’s the scientific process. However, when you’re coming from a position where it’s, it’s a zero-sum game and you’re thinking in, in black and white binaries of inerrancy and, you know, totally worthless. It has to be the one and not the other. And if you can, and if you can show error, then that means they obviously belong on the other side of that binary, which means they can be dismissed, which is. It’s kind of a methodological shoehorn that was developed over generations of trying to come up with more and more sophisticated ways to make the apologetic position sound more rational and two, to reinforce it against rationalism. So it is both adopting and at the same time rejecting a lot of the principles of rationalism to try to reinforce itself. But anyway, I digress. We get into chapter five, and now we got Belshazzar is the king that we are having to deal with. And this is where we get.

He’s like, hey, remember the. All the vessels we took from the temple? Let’s bring him out and let’s just play with him for a little bit. Well, you know, we’ll.

Let’s play temple, you guys.

Yeah, let’s play. Let’s toss the Jewish not-pigskin around in the backyard for a little bit. And then we get the finger of God writing Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin on the wall, freaking everybody out, really killing the vibe. And. And then we have to have Daniel come in and interpret what’s going on here. And the idea.

And it is just a hand that just appears out of nowhere and just scribbles on the wall.

That.

That would be pretty freaky. And those. Those words, are they words that actually mean anything in any language, or were they nonsense words that Daniel. And that’s why they needed Daniel to interpret it?

No, they’re. They’re words, but they don’t make a ton of sense in. In any kind of context. Mene is a mina, so that’s a unit of measurement. Tekel is a shekel. In Aramaic, surprisingly enough, the shin letter, the sh sound is. Is usually written with a. With a character that indicates T. Okay. Parsin means half a mina or a mina. So you’ve got a mina. A mina. A shekel and a half mina.

So a yard. A yard, a dollar and a foot and a half.

Yeah, something like that. It’s. It doesn’t make a whole ton of sense, which is why they need to bring Daniel in.

Right.

Hey, what’s going on here?

Because that’s a confusing thing for a mystical hand to just throw up on your. On your wall.

Right? That’s. That’s not. That’s not entirely helpful. The law of parsimony is. Doesn’t hold here. And, yeah, the perspicuity of scripture is a little. A little muddled. And then Daniel says, hey, this is a. You’re a loser. You’re. You’re. You know, you’re screwing around with, with sacred things like you shouldn’t be. And so your kingdom is going to be taken away and it’s going to be given to the Medes and then to the Persians. And that’s what happened.

And Daniel does not get murdered for this. Like, no, the king’s like, he says the worst thing in the world.

Yeah.

Doesn’t he also say that, that the king’s gonna die? That Belshazzar is gonna die?

Yep.

And Belshazzar’s just like, cool, man, thanks. Here’s the robe I promised you.

Yeah, you deserve, you deserve a reward for all this. And then in that very night, the king dies. And then we get somebody who goes by Darius or Darius, if you’re nasty. The Mede. There was no such character or figure in history. Darius or Darius was a Persian. And here’s where I’m going to talk briefly about what’s going on with the Medes. The Median kingdom, if you can call it a kingdom, it was not large, it was not influential, is up in the mountains to the east of Mesopotamia. It’s a part of modern day Iran. And the Medes were not relevant to the Babylonians. The Medes were somebody that the Persians dealt with, as the Persians were, were making their way to go down, to take over Babylon. And so the Medes are only relevant from a Persian perspective, which tells us one thing, that this part of the Book of Daniel is being written through a Persian interpretive lens.

In other words, they are trying to represent this history from a Persian point of view, which means this is being written later, Persian period, at the earliest, probably even a little later than that. And so the Medes have no relevance to Babylon or to the Jewish folks who were in Babylon. They only have relevance if you’re reconstructing this history from a Persian point of view and doing so inaccurately.

Were there Persian Jews? Is that who we’re talking about?

We’re talking about Jewish folks who are a part of the Persian empire. So because Persia takes over, conquers Babylon in 539 BCE and so you this thus beginneth the Persian period. And so the Jewish folks who are living in exile are now under a new empire and the Persian Empire is a little more accommodating. And so it seems that this is probably someone educated within the Persian system or something like that.

So, okay, sorry, let me just make sure I’ve got this right. We have the Babylonian. So the exile is not just Babylonian exile. They remain exiled as the Persians take over.

Right. And the Persians are the ones who actually allow the folks to return back to the land of Israel. This is Cyrus, who does.

Cyrus. Right, got it. Okay.

Right.

That has. All right, we’ve. Pew, pew, pew. I’m. I’m getting it. I’m starting to understand.

Okay, so in chapter six, we have Darius the Mede, who has this. The. It says that the folks are trying to get back at the Jewish people, and they don’t know what to do. So they tell the king, hey, release this decree. You’re not allowed to pray to anybody but the king for 30 days or you get thrown into where?

The den of lions.

The den of lions. You can rent the whole seat, but.

You’ll only need the edge.

So this. The. The famous story of Daniel being thrown into the lion’s den. And again, we have resolution. In the end, the king rewards Daniel, everybody’s happy, and cue credits. And then the next chapter, we have a flat. We’re starting with a flashback because suddenly we’re back to Belshazzar.

Yeah, it was very confusing.

Yes. Now, chapter seven begins the second half of the book. Remember, we have chapters one through six, which are these court tales, and they’re primarily divided into two different types. We have tales of conflict and tales of contest. And so the conflict is where you have the locals saying, we’re going to get those Jewish people. And so they’re like, we’re going to build a statue, and you have to worship it or we’re going to tell the king to make it so you can’t pray. And so that’s. That’s the conflict. And then the contest is, who can answer this grand question about this dream? Who can interpret this? All the locals fail.

Three.

Yeah. Dan. And Daniel has to show up and show that he can do it. So these are— This is— This is kind of a stock literary genre from this time period, but that’s 1 through 6, and then 7 through 12 is apocalyptic visions. And we’re going to go back to Belshazzar and we get the famous vision of the Son of Man who comes to the Ancient of Days. And— And I think the most fascinating part about this story, apart from the— The fact that we’re using Rider of the Clouds storm deity imagery, we’ve got the Son of Man coming to the Ancient of Days. Our oldest Greek translation of this passage, there’s a mistranslation, because this preposition “coming to the Ancient of Days” in Greek would be heos. But in our earliest Greek version, it’s not heos, it’s just hos. Which is very close, but means “as.” And so it says the Son of Man comes as the Ancient of Days, which means the Son of Man is a manifestation of the Ancient of Days or God.

And so here is kind of the beginning of this notion that there is some special figure. And remember, Son of Man is this convention where to refer to a member of the group, you call them a son of that group. So it just means a mortal, a human.

Right?

Now it’s going to take on titular qualities. It’s going to become this special title because there’s this Son of Man who’s manifesting the Ancient of Days. And so this is probably related to some of the Enochic literature and other tales about this, this Son of Man figure from the apocalypses. Okay, but that’s chapter seven.

And is that sort of the, the, the kernel from which the, the Trinity concept is, is bubbling up or—

I, I would argue that it is one, one bubble coming up to the surface of that later rolling boil of, of the development of the Trinity.

We’re gonna have to talk about the Trinity at some point.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll get to it.

We’ll get to it, guys.

We’ll get there. And then we’ve got this in chapter 8, another eschatological vision which, where we—

Have Persia, ends of days, guys, end times. End times, yeah.

Which are soon, if—any day now—if, yeah, if TikTok is to be believed. We have Persia, Media and Greece. And so now we’re actually explicitly naming the country of Greece rather than earlier, where we just said, yeah, thighs of—

Bronze and stuff, a really powerful country place.

And then we get to chapter nine. Now we’re going back to Darius or Dareios, and we have this vision of 70 weeks, which is something that many of you may have heard come up on social media within the last several weeks. Because this, this has to do with the Rapture, this has to do with when the end times are coming. So basically the idea is something’s going to happen in 70 weeks of years. And so that’s 70 times 7, and that’s 490. And— And then you’ve got these years and scholars have, like, from the moment this was published, people are like, oh, we got to figure out, we got to calculate, we gotta— Right, try and find out what’s going on here. And even early Christians were like, oh, it means this, that and the other, and how does Rome come into play? And again, it’s got to be variable. And there’s not really a, a good answer except for one. So we start with 70 weeks, and then we’re gonna have a week of something, and then we’re gonna have 62 weeks of something, and then we’re gonna have another week of something.

Now, when you try to lay this out end to end, it doesn’t make any sense. It seems to be talking about how long the Babylonian exile is going to last, which means it’s starting around 605, 604 BCE, which is where Jeremiah says, We’re going to have 70 years of this. But if you understand this first week to run concurrently with the 62 weeks, which is a. Which is a logical way to understand what’s going on here. 62 weeks of years. That gives us 439ish years, something like that. But if you do the math and you start at 605-604 BCE, it brings you to 171, 170 BCE, where it says an anointed one will be killed. And guess what? The high priest Onias III was assassinated in 170 BCE. And remember, when we think all this is taking place right around this time period. And so here we get this very accurate prophecy, ex eventu prophecy, where if we start when the Babylonian exile traditionally is identified as starting, and we count 62 weeks of years, we get to the assassination of Onias III.

I’m still confused on the weeks of years things does that. Are you saying, like, you just multiply the number by seven and then you call that year? Okay, yeah, like a week is seven. So the weeks of years is not a real thing. You guys, I’m just gonna. I’m just gonna point that out.

Yeah. So then we get into chapter 10. And now we’re dealing with Cyrus the Persian, who is explicitly mentioned in Isaiah 45 as God’s anointed. And in the Greek translation, God’s Christ. So this is Cyrus the Persian. We have this story about the prince of princes of Persia and the prince of Greece, and they’re fighting against Michael, who is the archangel, the head prince. And this is a reflection of the early idea that every nation had its own patron deity. In this period, in the Hellenistic period, the deities all get squished down, and they’re all angels now. And so prince of. Of Persia, prince of Greece, Michael the Archangel. These are the guardian angels over the nations. And then for chapter 11, we go back to Darius and we have this vision of kings of the south and kings of the north. Now here we’re talking about the. The Diadochi, the successors to Alexander the Great. In the north, we have the Seleucids.

In the south, we have the Ptolemies, Egypt is the Ptolemaic rulers, you have the Seleucids in Syria. And, and they’re constantly doing battle where Israel is right in the middle. And so control of Israel is, is being traded back and forth. Another indication that this is being written around the 170s, 160s BCE. And then chapter 12 is the conclusion of the book where we have Michael come in and saying, great job. We’re going to wrap it all up now. And then these two other individuals show up and the book is drawn to a convenient and perfect close. So that is a. That is a short and, and chaotic run through of what’s going on in the book of Daniel .

So we’ve run through sort of the plot points of Daniel, and along the way, I think we’ve discussed a lot of the things that we need to know about the book, but, man. Yeah, so talk us through.

Make sense of it.

Yeah, make it make sense.

Make it make sense. Yeah. So when we look at all of these prophecies and what they seem to be aiming at, what we get at is that this text is coming together around between 167 and 164 BCE, which is a period of oppression of the Jewish communities on the part of a Seleucid ruler named Antiochus IV Epiphanes. And this is the, this great, this horn that is talked about. This is the big baddie, the bad guy that’s causing all this trouble. And so the scholarly consensus is that it was in this period when this text was written. And we’re looking back and we’re setting this in a much earlier time period so that the prophecies in between the setting and the actual composition of the text seem like they’re all true. And the point is kind of particularly of the apocalyptic part, is to kind of fantasize about God stepping in and pulling back the fabric of reality to show who’s actually in charge, to show that God is going to deliver Israel and that there’s going to be this triumph over evil.

And Antiochus IV Epiphanes is the epitome of that evil.

Is there a sense in which, because I know a lot of times when you’re under an oppressive ruler, you can’t write directly about that oppressive ruler without being, you know, murdered or whatever. So is there a sense that they, that they were using this historical time period that was meaningful to them as a, as, as a sort of analog or as a stand-in for their current situation, but so that they could write about it. Kind of encoded language so that they, you know, they didn’t run afoul of Antiochus.

Is that, am I saying Antiochus? Yeah, some people say Antiochus. Was that. That’s because they don’t know what they’re talking about.

So mean.

Kidding. I still have made a decision about Darius or Darius, so I’m just, just joking. That’s, that’s certainly frequently a part of this, but there are a number of different rhetorical purposes that are converging here. One is to try to arrogate more authority to this because if somebody just says Antiochus IV Epiphanes is a bad dude and let’s hope God comes in and saves us, that’s not as effective as saying, I found this text from this ancient prophet and this ancient prophet says, don’t know who this is, but there’s a person who’s going to be coming who’s a really bad dude and God’s going to deliver us. That’s a lot more powerful, that’s a lot more authoritative. And so kind of injecting it with that artificial antiquity and this, this notion of real prophecy provides a lot more power, a lot more authority to the text.

And remind me if we’re, if this is being written in the 160s, the, the exilic period was in, in the, where was that?

The five hundreds.

Five hundreds. Okay, yeah, that’s what I was thinking.

Right. So this is, this is, the second temple has already been built. And now we’re having Antiochus IV Epiphanes threatening to destroy the second temple. He’s defiling it. And, and so the prophecies in the early, the earliest part of this, where we have the history of Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians and everything, the history is not incredibly accurate. We’ve got this Belshazzar as the son of Nebuchadnezzar, which is not accurate. He was the son of Nabonidus. We have some messed up things going on there. Then we get the Medes, who were never involved in Babylon at all and are only kind of a historical relic of a Persian memory. And so this is being, this is coming from the Persian period. And then we’re getting the most accuracy in the most detail once we get down to this big bad ruler who’s going to come in. And then Antiochus IV Epiphanes dies around 164, 163 BCE and the deliverance of God that is prophesied, that is on the doorstep, never materializes.

And so that’s what makes that period the most likely period of composition. We have Greek loan words in the text. We have Persian loan words in the text. But let’s talk a little bit about scholars, how scholars have reconstructed how this came together, because it was not just a dude in 167 BCE who sat down and wrote all of this. Some of these stories probably come from the late Babylonian period or the early Persian period.

Especially. Especially if the text was originally in multiple languages. Obviously, it’s not just a dude.

Yeah. And. And this has been a difficult thing to resolve as well. And I think Carol Newsom’s arguments. Again, check out Carol Newsom’s commentary on this if you want a fuller case. But I, I think she makes a good case for how we got the languages the way they were, because they, they don’t align with how scholars think the text came together. Exactly. But we probably have these court tales again, tales of conflict and tales of contest in chapters four through six that were probably in circulation Late Babylonian period, Early Persian period. They were probably edited later on. Things were changed. Some things were added in, some things were taken out. They’re supplemented by additional court tales from chapters two and three. So we’ve got four through six is the core. And then we’re going to add on chapters two through three. And then Daniel one gets added as an introduction. And now we are.

And the, the court tales of one through six are Aramaic. Daniel one is Hebrew. And so the, the introduction is coming in in Hebrew to kind of provide a. A reassurance that, that this is more native. This is not this, this entirely foreign thing. We’re in a period now where, where Hebrew is part of our national identity. And so we want it to be in Hebrew. So we have a Hebrew introduction added to the beginning. And then we have. What are we going to do about 7 through 12? Because 7 is also in Aramaic. It’s 8 through 12 that are in Hebrew. And so one way to solve this is to think that this apocalyptic vision in chapter seven, which is distinct from the apocalyptic visions of Daniel eight through 12, was next to be added on. So it was four through six. Then we get two through three, then we get the intro in chapter one, and then we get chapter seven added on in the Hellenistic period.

And then we have 8 through 12 that were added toward the very end. That would have probably been what was composed by the. Whoever was writing between 167 and 164 BCE and they probably would have done a tiny bit of light fiddling with what came before. And that gives us a Hebrew introduction. And then we have the Aramaic stuff, which includes this late apocalyptic text. And then we go switch back to Hebrew for the author who again wants to emphasize this, this Hebrew identity by adding 8 through 12 in Hebrew at the very end. And so the text probably originates. Some of the stories originate in the Late Babylonian period, but the text primarily comes together in the Persian and Hellenistic period and is finalized between around 167 and 164 BCE.

Yeah. You know, it’s funny, I, I said at the beginning of, of this, of the episode that I sensed that it was multiple people writing. I think it’s interesting because once you tune your mind to this doesn’t have to be written by the same people. This, you know, once you, once you’re thinking along those lines, it becomes obvious when, when. Not always, but it frequently becomes obvious when something has like, whoa, we have just made a major shift. It’s very unlikely that this was the same thing.

Yeah, yeah, that’s. That, that’s a dogma that, that a lot of scholars are. Have to. To wrestle with because on the devotional side of things, you want it to all be from one author. You want it to be historical and historically accurate. And that’s a difficult thing to kind of maintain and also engage with the text as it is. It’s just. You can’t make sense of a lot of this unless you are open to multiple authorship. And once you are open to multiple authorship, so much stuff falls into place. It’s not all perfect. There are still complexities. There are still arguments about, well, how do we solve this issue? And for instance, chapter seven being added after the introduction of chapter one and before chapters eight through, through 12. Like, that’s not how all scholars resolve this. But I think that’s, that’s the one that makes the most sense to me. But yeah, if, if you’re not open to multiple authorship, then you’re forced to try to impose these assumptions upon the text to make the text make sense, and you can’t really make it make sense as a single production of the early to mid, early to late Babylonian period.

I mean, Daniel is, is writing stories for 80 years if we, if we take all this seriously. And, and there’s just not a way to make that make sense.

Well, I think that, yeah, I mean, I, it’s a fascinating book and, and it’s, it’s a wonderful, like, sort of microcosm to look at these issues, these issues of, of, of multivocality. And, and, you know, it’s, it, it, it’s a great place to sort of localize that discussion because it’s, it is so different and it, you know, it makes so many leaps and, and I love hearing about, you know, the Persian period and the Babylonian period. Like, that’s actually really cool when you think about it in those terms.

Oh, it’s fascinating. And one of the things I love to hear from fans of my social media content is how much more interesting the Bible becomes when you’re open to this. Folks who have never taken the Bible seriously are fascinated by these things when they’re approached critically. And one more thing that I didn’t mention, but our earliest textual witness to the Book of Daniel is from the Dead Sea Scrolls and paleographically has been dated to around 115-ish BCE—in other words, only about 50 years removed from the actual composition of the text. And so it quickly, most likely it very quickly became a very popular text. If we already have copies at Qumran within 50 years of its composition.

Wait, sorry, I. Suddenly I’m realizing we. So is that Dead Sea scroll attestation of Daniel? Is that one document written in both the Hebrew and the Aramaic?

I think we only have fragments of it.

Okay.

And so I don’t know that we have a single manuscript that preserves both Hebrew and Aramaic, but that seems to be our earliest attestation where we have everything preserved. Yeah. Oh, I, I think I forgot to mention as well, or at least I may not have accurately represented it, there is a theory that chapter one was added in Aramaic but then translated into Hebrew.

Okay.

So. So that is a. Another thing that could have happened, but I don’t remember. If we have a manuscript that preserves both Hebrew and Aramaic from the Dead Sea Scrolls, somebody will know.

I blame the whole Aramaic thing on the Chaldeans. I think that they were the. They were. Can I just say I had to go down a little Chaldean rabbit hole?

Yeah.

Because as I was reading it, I was. I. You know, in chapter two, it says, so the king commanded that the magicians, the enchanters, the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans be summoned. And I was like, wait a minute, I’m gonna look up what a Chaldean is. And I’m only saying it right because you already corrected me before we started the show. It’s not Chaldeans, but it’s Kaldeans. Anyway, I looked that up because I’m like, oh, what kind of magic user is a Chaldean? No, it’s just. It’s. They’re from a different country. Yeah.

A different part of the Babylonian empire. So it would have been a different ethnic group.

It just feels like. So they commanded the magicians, the enchanters, the sorcerers and the Chaldeans to come in. Like, it just felt so weird that they were just.

That.

That was just a sort of geographic group of people. I don’t understand that. Apparently. Apparently the Chaldeans were very, very mystical.

Well, yeah. That they would associate different ethnic groups with different. Different talents and. And different industries and. And things like that. So, you know, the Iranians were all astrologers, so.

Right, that’s right.

Yeah.

So the three wise men. We’ll get to them.

The Magi. Yeah.

All right. Oh, and there weren’t three of them anyway. We’ll get to that. Thanks to you guys for tuning in. We appreciate it. If you would like to become a part of keeping our show going and making us very happy, you can become a patron of the show by going over to patreon.com/dataoverdogma, where you can get an ad-free version of every episode at a certain level. At another level, you can get not only that, but our after party where there’s extra bonus content. So thank you so much to all of our patrons. And if you want to reach out to us, you can do so. contact@dataoverdogmapod.com is the way to do that. And other than that, we’ll just see you next week.

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