The Book of Daniel

32^ The ruler mentioned in this part of Daniel 9:26 and of 9:27 is not Jesus Christ, but the future Antichrist, because his people destroy Jerusalem and its sanctuary, because Christ never “confirmed” an already-existing covenant, and because Christ never broke such a covenant. Also, this person causes sacrifices to cease in the midst of Daniel’s seventieth week. While Christ made such offerings unneeded, He did not make temple sacrifices cease immediately, since they continued to be offered until the destruction of the temple in A. D. 70. This “prince” is the wicked person of Daniel 7:25, who there “changes times and laws” for “a time and times and the dividing of time”—that is, for a year, two years, and half a year, or 3 1/2 years, exactly the same length of time as the one in Daniel 9:27 changes times and laws by causing the sacrifice and oblation to cease.

33^ It is noteworthy that the gospel of Luke was written c. A. D. 56-60, and, since Jerusalem was destroyed in A. D. 70, Jesus’ own words, spoken in A. D. 33 and enscripturated before the prophecy was fulfilled, are also an unmistakable instance of predictive prophecy. In 1 Timothy 5:18, the epistle of 1 Timothy, written by the apostle Paul c. A. D. 62-66, quotes Luke 10:7 as a book of “scripture.” It is very difficult to quote from and call a book Scripture that has not yet been written. Note that the quotation also happens a number of years before the Lord Jesus’ prediction recorded in Luke was fulfilled. Furthermore, the gospels of Matthew and Mark also record Jesus’ prophecy of the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem, and both of these were also written far before A. D. 70. For more information on the dating of the various New Testament books, see, among others, Introduction to the New Testament, Henry Thiessen, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1950.

34^ In relation to the argument that the vowels of the Hebrew Bible are late and arbitrary corruptions of the Hebrew consonantal text, Bruce Waltke notes:

In addition to ancient evidence for the general validity of the MT [Masoretic Text], there is modern evidence, both systematic and incidental. On the whole the grammar of the MT admirably fits the framework of Semitic philology, and this fact certifies the work of the Masoretes. When in the 1930s Paul Kahle announced his theory that the Masoretes made massive innovations, Gotthelf Bergsträsser sarcastically observed that they must have read Carl Brockelmann’s comparative Semitic grammar to have come up with forms so thoroughly in line with historical reconstructions. Further, there are numerous individual patterns of deviation within the MT which reflect ancient phonological and morphological features of Hebrew known from other sources; yet again, numerous isolated oddities in the MT have been confirmed by materials unearthed only in this century. The evidence shows that the language of the MT represents the grammar of the Hebrew used during the biblical period. (Bruce K. Waltke and Michael Patrick O’Connor, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax [Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990], 28)

See also the evidence for the inspiration and preservation of the Hebrew vowels in the essay “Evidences for the Inspiration of the Hebrew Vowel Points,” Thomas Ross, at http://faithsaves.net/Bibliology/.

35^ Emmanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2^nd rev. ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 115, 117, 284.

36^ Emmanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2^nd rev. ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 123.

37^ Emmanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2^nd rev. ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 184.

38^ Emmanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2^nd rev. ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 190.

39^ Emmanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2^nd rev. ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 9. Because of Tov’s anti-supernatural presuppositions, he wishes to have an “assumption of corruptions in the biblical text” (10, cf. 232), but he admits that this idea is simply his unproven and un-provable “assumption,” not a proven fact.

40^ Emmanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2^nd rev. ed. (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2001), 23.

41^ Paul D. Wegner, A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible: Its History, Methods & Results (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 231.

42^ See Clay Jones, “The Bibliographical Test Updated,” Christian Research Journal 35:3 (2012) for sources and further information.

43^ Emmanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2^nd rev. ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 104-105.

44^ Stephen R. Miller, Daniel, vol. 18, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994), 50.

45^ Stephen R. Miller, “Daniel, Book Of,” ed. Chad Brand et al., Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2003), 387.

46^ Gerhard F. Hasel, “Chapter II: Establishing a Date for the Book of Daniel,” in Symposium on Daniel: Introductory and Exegetical Studies, ed. Frank B. Holbrook, vol. 2, Daniel and Revelation Committee Series (Washington, DC: Biblical Research Institute, 1986), 148.

47^ Joyce G Baldwin, “Is There Pseudonymity in the Old Testament?” Themelios: Volume 4, No. 1, January/September 1978 (1978): 8, 11.

48^ Young notes:

The book of Daniel purports to be serious history. It claims to be a revelation from the God of heaven which concerns the future welfare of men and nations. If this book were issued at the time of the Maccabees for the purpose of strengthening the faith of the people of that time, and the impression was thereby created that Daniel, a Jew of the sixth century were the author, then, whether we like it or no—the book is a fraud. There is no escaping this conclusion. . . . It is one thing to issue a harmless romance under a pseudonym; it is an entirely different thing to issue under a pseudonym a book claiming to be a revelation of God and having to do with the conduct of men and to regard such a book as canonical. . . . [T]here is no evidence that . . . [t]he Jews of the inter-testamental period . . . ever did the second. (Edward J. Young, An Introduction to the Old Testament. [Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977], 363)

49^ Joyce G Baldwin, “Is There Pseudonymity in the Old Testament?” Themelios: Volume 4, No. 1, January/September 1978 (1978): 7.

50^ Joyce G Baldwin, “Is There Pseudonymity in the Old Testament?” Themelios: Volume 4, No. 1, January/September 1978 (1978): 8.

51^ The first known Jewish opponent of Daniel’s authorship of the Book of Daniel was Uriel Acosta, who wrote in the 1600s. No evidence of Jewish opposition exists from the inter-testamental period, the ancient church period, or the medieval period. The only known opponent of Daniel’s authorship before that time is the pagan Porphyry, who explicitly based his opposition on his philosophical rejection of Biblical miracles; there is no evidence that he even claimed to possess any factual or historical evidence for his position. See Edward J. Young, An Introduction to the Old Testament. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977), 362-363.

52^ Albert Barnes, Notes on the Old Testament: Daniel, Vol. 1 (London: Blackie & Son, 1853), 8.

53^ Roger T. Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism (London: SPCK, 1985), 357.

54^ See, e. g., Flavius Josephus et al., Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary: Judean Antiquities Books 8-10, Vol. 5 (Boston; Leiden: Brill, 2005), 205-317; “Josephus, Biblical Figures in,” in Jacob Neusner, Alan J. Avery-Peck, and William Scott Green, eds., The Encyclopedia of Judaism (Leiden; Boston; Köln: Brill, 2000), 1788.

55^ Flavius Josephus and William Whiston, The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1987), Antiquities 10:266-270.

56^ Flavius Josephus and William Whiston, The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1987), Antiquities 11:337-339. Note the extensive and careful defense of the genuineness of Josephus’ testimony in E. W. Hengstenberg, Dissertations on the Genuineness of Daniel (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1848) 225-233.

57^ Flavius Josephus and William Whiston, The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1987), Contra Apion 1:8. Note the discussion in E. B. Pusey, Daniel the Prophet: Nine Lectures, Delivered in the Divinity School of the University of Oxford, with Copious Notes (London: John Henry and James Parker; Rivingtons, 1864), 292-295.

58^ Gleason Archer Jr., A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, 3rd. ed. (Chicago: Moody Press, 1994), 410. Note that even the body of anti-supernaturalist critics of Scripture who deny the book of Ezekiel to the historical Israelite prophet bearing that name do not place the composition of Ezekiel late enough to deny the existence of genuine predictive prophecy in Daniel.

59^ Pusey remarks:

[I]t has been remarked long ago, that Ezekiel names as characteristics of Daniel, qualities which appear in him in early life. In the eleventh year, [Ezekiel 26:1] (i.e. as Ezekiel dates, of Jehoiachin’s captivity, [Ezekiel 1:2] B.C. 588) Ezekiel, in his prophecies to the prince of Tyre, says in irony [Ezekiel 28:2]; Behold thou art wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that they can hide from thee. Of the manifold varieties of human wisdom, Ezekiel selected that form, for which Daniel was celebrated [Daniel 1:17, 20] in the 2nd year of Nebuchadnezzar, i.e. the 5th of Jehoiakim, B.C. 606, eighteen years before this date. It is that for which the king praises the God of Daniel, that He is a revealer of secrets, seeing thou couldest reveal this secret [Daniel 2:47]. In asking him to explain his own later dream as to himself, the king says to him, no secret troubleth thee [4:9]. The Queen-mother spake of him to Belshazzar, shewing of hard sentences and dissolving of doubts were found in the same Daniel [5:12]. One who had his wisdom from God, but was placed by a heathen king as head over those far-famed wise-men, the Magi, might well stand as an eminent pattern of Divine wisdom in man. Tyre and its prince boasted themselves against the people of God in its overthrow, and plumed themselves on their human wisdom and sagacity. It is an anti-Theistic boast. Human wisdom would be wiser than Divine. The prince of Tyre claimed by his wisdom to have created all this wealth for himself [Ezekiel 28:4-5]. He despised Hebrew wisdom and the wisdom of God in it, because it was oppressed. The event, Ezekiel says, should shew. Plainly, unless Ezekiel had meant to speak of a contemporary, over against the contemporary prince of Tyre, the wisdom of Solomon had been the more obvious instance to select.

In the other place in Ezekiel [14:13-21], God says, that, when the time of His judgment upon the land was come, whether it were famine, or noisome beasts, or the sword, or the pestilence, no righteousness of any individuals in it should avert His then irrevocable sentence; and, as pre-eminent instances of righteousness, He gives Noah, Daniel and Job. It is objected, “How came Ezekiel to mention Daniel his contemporary? And, if he did, how came he to place him between those two ancient patriarchs, Noah and Job?” . . .

Daniel now, in the 6th year [Ezekiel so dates chapter 8:1 in the sixth year, in the sixth month. He dates chapter 20 in the seventh year, in the fifth month.] of the captivity of Jehoiachin, had, according to his book, passed through some twelve years of greatness, trying above others to men, for its novelty and his youth. There is then, at least, nothing inharmonious in the selection of Daniel, to be united with Noah and Job. Rather it has a special force, that God joined with those two great departed patriarchs, a living saint. The Jews, as they trusted afterwards because Abraham was their father [Matthew 3:9; Luke 3:8; John 8:33, 39], so now they hoped that, amid their own unholiness, they should be spared for the righteousness or intercession of others. To cut at the root of this hope, God singles out the great living example of righteous life, and pronounces him, in this early life, one of His chief saints, and says, that, though not he only, but two also of the greatest before him, were among them, their holiness should be unavailing except for themselves. The eyes of all the Jews must have been the more fixed upon Daniel, the more marvellous his rise, at that early age, from being a captive boy, though of royal blood, to be ruler over the whole province of Babylon, and chief over the governors of all the Magi of Babylon. The more depressed their lot, the more they must have looked to him, whom God, in His Providence, had so raised up to be a bright star in the night of their captivity, a protection to themselves, declaring the glory of their God.

In this case, also, had not the selection of a contemporary had an especial force, we should have looked rather for one of the names of the righteous men of old, who interceded with God, as Abraham. But Noah, Daniel, and Job, do all agree in these things; 1) that all had had especial praise of God, over against the world. Noah was the unlistened-to preacher of righteousness during those 120 years in which the flood was delayed. God singles out Job, in answer to Satan who had been going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it [Job 2:2. See Zündel, Daniel, p. 264.], as his domain and his kingdom. “How greatly Daniel’s piety and prayer weighed in that scale, wherein Belshazzar was too light, the fact may attest, that he, like David and Abraham, and afterwards, the Virgin at Nazareth, was marked out as one greatly beloved, whereas the word of God comes to the contemporary prophet, son of man” [Ib. p. 266, 7; Lu 1:27, 8; Dan. 9:23, 10:11].

2) All the three stood too, as representatives of a distinct relation of God to the world; Noah at the head “of the newly cleansed and as it were reborn world;” Job, as a worshipper of God in purity among the heathen world; Daniel, as the revealer, to the heathen world, of that kingdom, which was hereafter to supersede and absorb the kingdoms of the world [Zündel, p. 267].

The order in which the three saints stand is explained by the application which Ezekiel makes of their history. All were holy, all interceded; but Job was heard, for the time, least of all. It is a climax of seeming failure [Hävern. on Ezek. 14:14. p. 207]. To Noah, his wife and his three sons and their wives were given; Daniel delivered his three friends by his prayer to God; Job was for the time bared of all. He sanctified [his sons and daughters] and rose up early in the morning, and offered burnt offerings, according to the number of them all, for Job said, It may be that my sons have sinned; and he saved neither son nor daughter [Job 1:5]. In Job especially was that fulfilled, which Ezekiel gives as the result of the whole, “though these three men were in it, they shall deliver neither sons nor daughters, they only shall be delivered” [14:16, 18].

The mention of Daniel, then, by Ezekiel, in both cases, has the more force from the fact that he was a contemporary; both correspond with his actual character, as stated in his book. Granted the historical truth of Daniel, no one would doubt that Ezekiel did refer to Daniel, as described in his book. But then the objection is only the usual begging of the question. “Ezekiel is not likely to have referred to Daniel, a contemporary, unless he was distinguished by extraordinary gifts or graces.” “But his book not being genuine, there is no proof that he was so distinguished.” “Therefore,” &c.

Scripture is in harmony with itself. Ezekiel is the first witness to the book of Daniel. The book of Daniel explains the allusions of Ezekiel. No other explanation can be given of Ezekiel’s words. Ezekiel manifestly refers to one, well known to those to whom he spoke; one, as well known as the great Patriarchs, Noah and Job. Such was Daniel, under whose shadow they of the captivity lived. But, apart from him, where is this man, renowned for his wisdom, holy as the holiest whose memory had survived from the foundation of the world; whom the Jews would recognize at once, as they would Noah and Job? “He does but name him,” says an opponent rightly [Bleek, p. 284], “because he could presuppose that he was already sufficiently known by all as a pattern of righteousness and wisdom.” (E. B. Pusey, Daniel the Prophet: Nine Lectures, Delivered in the Divinity School of the University of Oxford, with Copious Notes [Oxford: John Henry and James Parker, 1864], 102–107)

60^ See “Modern Rationalism and the Book of Daniel,” Gleason Archer (Bibliotheca Sacra 136 [1979] 133-134) for conclusive evidence against the anti-supernaturalist argument based on the alternative formations d≈aœnˆî}eœl and d≈aœni}eœl. (Note that the LXX renders both forms as Danieœl.) The desperate anti-supernaturalist argument that the Daniel referenced by Ezekiel is not the righteous and wise servant of Jehovah who authored the book of Daniel and who is compared to Noah and Job as comparable righteous worshippers of Jehovah, all three of whom are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, but is an ungodly worshipper of the god Baal called Dan’el who is referenced in a ancient legend, is surely an argument made out of desperation in order to avoid the obvious implications of Ezekiel’s validation of the Jewish prophet Daniel and his inspired Book. Archer comments:

[The anti-supernaturalist theory that] the Daniel referred to in Ezekiel must have been the ancient hero named Dan’el, whose life story is narrated in the Ugaritic legend of AqhΩat (dating from about the fifteenth century B.C.) . . . [has extremely] serious difficulties[.] . . [T]he Lord’s declaration quoted in Ezekiel 14:14, 20 and 28:3 amounts to this: Even though such godly leaders as Noah (at the dawn of history), and Job (in the time of Moses or a little before), and Daniel (from the contemporary scene in Ezekiel’s own generation) should all unite in interceding for apostate Judah, God could not hear their prayers on behalf of that rebellious nation. . . . The . . . difficulty with identifying the Daniel of Ezekiel 14 with the Dan’el of the Ugaritic epic is found in the character and spiritual condition of Dan’el himself. When the legend of AqhΩat is studied in its full context, which relates the story of Dan’el, the father of young AqhΩat, it is found that he is praised as being a faithful idol-worshiper, principally occupied with seven-day periods of sacrifices to the various gods of the Canaanite pantheon, such as Baal and El. His relationship to Baal was especially close, and he made bold to petition him for a son, so that when Dan’el became so drunk at a wild party that he could not walk by himself, his son might assist him back to his home and bed, to sleep off his drunken stupor. Later on, after the promised son (AqhΩat) is born, and is later killed at the behest of the spiteful goddess Anath, Dan’el lifts up his voice in a terrible curse against the vulture (Samal) which had taken his son’s life. He prevails on Baal to break the wings of all the vultures that fly overhead, so that he can slit open their stomachs and see whether any of them contains the remains of his dead son. At last he discovers the grisly evidence in the belly of Samal, queen of the vultures. He then kills her and puts a curse on Abelim, the city of the vultures. The next seven years he spends in weeping and wailing for his dead son, and finally contrives to have his own daughter (PaghΩat) assassinate the warrior Yatpan, who was also involved in AqhΩat’s murder seven years before.

From this portrayal of Dan’el it is quite apparent that he could never have been associated with Noah and Job as a paragon of righteousness and purity of life. Nothing could be more unlikely than that a strict and zealous monotheist like Ezekiel would have regarded with appreciation a Baal-worshiper, a polytheistic pagan given to violent rage and unremitting vengefulness, a drunken carouser who needed assistance to find his way home to his own bed. Apart from a passing mention of Dan’el’s faithful fulfillment of his duties as a judge at the city gate—a requirement expected of all judges according to the Torah—there is no suggestion in the Ugaritic poem that he is any outstanding hero of the faith, eligible for inclusion with Noah and Job. It is therefore quite hopeless to maintain this identification of Ezekiel’s “Daniel” with the Dan’el of Ugaritic legend. (Ibid).

Thus, the Legend of Aqhat frequently mentions Dan’el’s worship of Baal, frequently connects Dan’el and drunkenness, emphasizes Dan’el’s son Aquat disobeying the goddess Anath, who kills Aqhat for his impiety, and speaks of a plot with Dan’el and his daughter to deceive and commit murder. The Legend of Aqhat never even once uses the adjectives “righteous” or “wise” for Dan’el. A simple reading of Ezekiel 14:14, 20; 28:3 and the pagan Legend makes any identification of the person spoken of by Ezekiel and the person specified in the Legend an instance of insanity. Only the extreme difficulty for anti-supernaturalism contained in Ezkeiel’s reference to the man Daniel, author of the inspired book of Daniel, explains anyone’s affirming what is so obviously false. The fact that such extreme measures must be pursued in order to attempt to eliminate Ezekiel’s testimony illustrates how powerful an evidence it is in favor of Daniel’s sixth century authorship of the book bearing his name, and thus of the reality of predictive prophecy.

For translations of the Legend of Aqhat, see Mark S. Smith and Simon B. Parker, Ugaritic Narrative Poetry, Vol. 9, Writings from the Ancient World (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997), 49-78, 196-205 or N. Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, 2nd ed., Biblical Seminar, 53 (London; New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 242–312.

61^ Thus, the “Book of Zechariah has . . . a direct connection with that of Daniel” (See Charles H. H. Wright, Daniel and His Prophecies [London: Williams and Norgate, 1906], xviii ff. for a discussion; cf. Pusey, Daniel the Prophet, 355-359; see also Zechariah 2 and its vision of the four horns, which cannot be understood without Daniel.). Pusey notes: