Daniel

(c. 165 b.c.)



Old Testament book with apocalyptic and messianic themes, sometimes construed as foretelling the date of the death of Jesus Christ.
Daniel is a sage in Hebraic folk tradition, whom the unknown author of this book makes its protagonist and, in part, its narrator. It begins with him as a youth and tells of his being among the Israelites deported from Jerusalem to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 b.c. He becomes a palace servant and wins favor by interpreting the king’s dreams. Many years afterward, he announces the fall of Babylon in the dramatic episode of the Writing on the Wall. Much of the book is taken up with symbolic visions and explanations of them, in which Daniel “foretells” historical developments that were actually past at the time of the book’s composition. The belief that it is an authentic product of the sixth century b.c., so that these passages actually are predictive, has caused considerable misunderstanding. However, the claim to prediction cannot be entirely dismissed.
Daniel is not classed as prophecy by Jews; it counts as a Sacred Writing only. It was composed—or, at any rate, put in its present form—about 165 b.c. during a crisis endured by the Jewish community in Palestine. The country was then part of a Syrian kingdom under Antiochus IV, a descendant of one of Alexander’s generals. He tried to impose religious conformity. In 171, a supporter of his killed the Jewish high priest Onias. During the next few years, the Temple was plundered, the daily sacrifice in it was stopped, and a statue of Zeus was set up inside it. Many Jews resisted the changes, and some were martyred. In 164, Judas Maccabeus and his brothers led a revolt, and eventually a successor of Antiochus recognized Jewish independence.
The author of Daniel (to assume, for convenience, that there was only one or only one principal author) reflects this crisis and the hope of recovery. One of his aims is to encourage the faithful to stand firm; the stories of Daniel in the earlier chapters are meant to show the superiority of his God-given wisdom. The author sketches a long historical panorama. Nebuchadnezzar dreams about a great image made of different materials. A stone “cut by no human hand” strikes its feet. It topples over and falls to pieces, and the stone expands until it fills the world. Daniel explains the different sections of the image in terms of a series of kingdoms, identifiable as the Babylonian, the Median, the Persian, and the Greek. Since the book was written long after the asserted date of the dream, when all the kingdoms had come and gone, most of this is prophecy after the event. But the stone is a genuine future image: it is the everlasting Israelite kingdom that God will found on the ruins of the others.
Later in the book, Daniel is portrayed having a dream of his own that confirms Nebuchadnezzar’s. It is about four beasts corresponding to the same four monarchies. The fourth has ten horns, probably representing successors of Alexander in various parts of his empire, plus an aggressive “little horn” that uproots three of the others—Antiochus IV himself, who defeated three other rulers in the course of his wars. The dream culminates in the supremacy of “one like a son of man,” the first foreshadowing of a phrase applied to Jesus. Later again, Daniel has further visions covering Alexander’s conquest
of Persia, the division of his empire, the rise and tyranny of Antiochus, and his anticipated downfall. Most of this is prophecy after the event, but there is still the prediction of Israel’s deliverance and future glory. Interesting for the history of Judaism is a passage about a resurrection of the dead, a new theme in the Bible.
There is a remarkable crux in chapter 9. Here, Daniel is made to recall a prophecy by Jeremiah about the Chosen People going through seventy penitential years in Babylonian captivity. From his vantage point centuries later, the author can look back over the time that has elapsed since then. Though the Jews are reestablished in Zion, they have attained neither peace nor purification. He imagines the angel Gabriel speaking to Daniel and reinterpreting Jeremiah’s words. “Seventy years” means “seventy weeks of years,” that is, 490 years (70 × 7). Gabriel draws an obscure distinction between the first seven “weeks” and the subsequent sixty-two, but after a total of sixty-nine an “anointed one” is to be “cut off,” in other words, killed; while the ensuing final week will bring war and chaos, with Jerusalem suffering at the hands of “the prince who is to come.”
Undoubtedly, the author is thinking of current events and hoping that Antiochus’s onslaught is a “darkest hour before the dawn” that closes the period and will be followed by the promised good time at last. The anointed one is the murdered high priest Onias. The trouble is, however, that it is impossible to make up 490 years between Jeremiah and Antiochus. Moreover, the author gives the passage a secondary meaning by defining the starting point of the count quite differently. The 490 years begin “from the going forth of the word to restore and build Jerusalem.” Jeremiah says nothing about a rebuilding of the ruined city after the exiles return from Babylon, and although some did return after Babylon’s fall, there was no serious rebuilding. The phrase, in fact, only makes sense apart from Jeremiah. The “word to restore and build Jerusalem” can hardly be anything but a commission given by the Persian king Artaxerxes I to Nehemiah, in 445 b.c. It was Nehemiah who, with the king’s authority, got the rebuilding under way at last, after nearly a century of desolation.
If we test this surprising but exact starting point, which gives an alternative timescale, and count forward 490 years, we are well into the Christian era. The sixty-ninth week is to bring the killing of the “anointed one,” and on this basis, the term anointed one has another significance. “Anointed” is the literal meaning of the word Messiah, of which Christos, or Christ, is the Greek form; and the fatal sixty-ninth week extends from a.d. 31 to 38, within most of which time Pilate was procurator of Judea. The long count beginning from the Persian king’s order scores a hit or a very near miss with Pilate’s execution of Christ.
This interpretation, in essence, was formerly accepted by Christian commentators as the primary one. It still appears in Ronald Knox’s notes to his translation of the Bible, published in 1955.