The Book of Daniel

G. Miscellaneous Evidences for the 6^th Century Date of Daniel
Furthermore, the Book of Daniel predates the split of the Essenes from the Pharisees and Sadducees. Beckwith notes:

[B]oth the Essenes and the rest of the Jews accepted Daniel into the canon. . . . [Yet] Daniel is not an apocalypse of Essene origin. How, then, can its enormous influence on the Essenes be explained, and their acceptance of it as canonical, unless it had been known before Maccabean times? The Essenes seem to have dated their own definite emergence as a party between 171 and 167 BC . . . and any apocalypse produced from then on, if it had not come from the Essenes, would have come from their rivals, and would therefore not have secured Essene acceptance. . . . This extraordinary difference of treatment [in contrast with other books such as 1 Enoch] strongly suggests that Daniel cannot have been either of sectarian origin or of recent origin. Well before the emergence of the three contending religious parties in the Maccabean period, two of the books of 1 Enoch had already been written . . . probably dat[ing] from the second half of the third century . . . yet even so they had only achieved acceptance in narrow circles, as the later books of 1 Enoch were also to do. The Book of Daniel, on the contrary . . . [received] nationwide acceptance, as nothing less than Holy Scripture. The simplest explanation of this phenomenon would be that Daniel is the oldest of the apocalypses; that it did not, like the rest, have a secretive (much less a sectarian) origin; and that the production of other apocalypses, in imitation of it, was due not only to its impressive character as literature, but to the fact that, when they began to be written, it was already . . . [set] for a place in the canon.¹⁰⁶

Since the Book of Daniel predates the rise of the Essene sect, it also necessarily existed before the date assigned it by the anti-supernaturalist.

The idea that long periods of oral tradition preceeded the time when prophecies were written down has no support in the ancient historical evidence. On the contrary, the historical data uniformly support prophets recording their predictions immediately. Thus, the claim that later generations of disciples of a murky figure in the past could have created Daniel’s prophecies centuries after the alleged events and assigned them to the prophet has no support whatever in any ancient historical parallels. Kitchen notes:

Therefore we must now concisely review the question of oral presentation and the impact of writing, not as a theoretical exercise but as our extant external sources show it to be at first hand. Right from the presently attested beginning, at Mari, and at all other periods . . . as these messages were commonly of importance primarily to the king (whether in Mari in the nineteenth/eighteenth centuries or Assyria in the seventh), officials invariably relayed them promptly back to the royal palace—not orally, but in writing, and sent on with the least possible delay. An official might stress (no. 217) that he had sent on “the exact wording” of a prophetess. Such reports had to include any special circumstances, such as notice of symbolic actions by the prophet concerned—like the ecstatic at Mari who requested a lamb, and proceeded to devour it raw, a symbol of a devouring plague that would come if the local towns did not produce the expected sacred sacrifices. . . . Thus, at Mari, Nur-Sin sent on to King Zimri-lim the texts of three messages from two different prophets of the local forms of Adad, as lord of Kallassu and as lord of Aleppo. Another letter has three successive prophetic messages in their local historical context, the second being a response to a query sent by the king. This begins to be a forerunner of the Hebrew prophetical books, with prophecies in their historical contexts. . . .
Such procedures are also evident much later in the Neo-Assyrian examples, written on large tablets containing a whole series of pronouncements by various prophets and prophetesses. . . . [T]he picture is of individual prophecies quite promptly written down, which subsequently can be brought together into collective tablets for future reference. And named prophetic speakers are in a massive majority over unnamed ones.
In other areas the relationship of oral pronouncement and written record is the same. The early-second-millennium Egyptian text of Neferty depicts King Snofru eagerly reaching for his writing case, to take out a scroll, (pen and) ink palette and so to write down the sage’s words as spoken. Clearly this was understood as a natural thing to do; it does not leave much scope for long, imaginary periods of “oral tradition”! In Papyrus Chester Beatty IV of the late second millennium, the general allusions to the sages who foretold the future exalt their writing, not a “mouth to mouth” tradition of orality. In the West Semitic world, Zakkur king of Hamath lost no time in commemorating his deliverance from his foes, with appropriate mention of the promise of that deliverance via the seers and diviners of his deity Baal-shemayn. We would never have known of “The Book of the Afflictions of Balaam Son of Beor” if somebody had not set it out in neat lines of ink-written script on a plastered and whitened wall, for all the world like the pages of an oversized papyrus scroll. Clearly, just telling people by word of mouth was not deemed a sufficient means of record or of diffusion.
Thus, throughout the centuries, across the biblical world, the firsthand external evidence shows clearly and conclusively that the record of prophecies among contemporaries and their transmission down through time was not left to the memories of bystanders or to the memory-conditioned oral transmission—and modification—by imaginary “disciples” of a prophet or their equally imaginary successors for centuries before somebody took the remnants at a late date to weave them into books out of whole new cloth, having little or nothing to do with a reputed prophet of dim antiquity whose very name and existence might thus be doubted. For the mass of highly ingenious guesswork and scholarly imagination along these lines, poured out of the presses for over a century now, and never more than in recent decades, there is not one respectable scintilla of solid, firsthand evidence. Not one.
Quite the contrary. When ancient prophets (from Mari onward) spoke out, witnesses could be summoned to attest the authenticity of the actual process of scribing the very words, the ipsissima verba, of the prophet, to ensure that the real thing was sent to the king, and to eliminate any querying of the wording and content of the message(s) concerned from the start. There is worse. On one occasion a Mari seer explicitly demanded that a scribe of top-quality skills be employed to record his message in good style! . . .
The need for accurate and acceptable record and transmission of such prophecies resulted in their being archived both at Mari and in Assyria. At Mari, being within letters, they were filed as royal correspondence, for reference as events unfolded—evidently, in connection with possible fulfillment or new developments. In Assyria, prophecies collected under Esarhaddon were still kept in the archived files of Assurbanipal. They formed a “protobook” of prophecies, retained through the years for reference. Thus, for example, the goddess Ishtar had promised Esarhaddon victory over Mugallu of Tabal, but this prophetic promise was only fulfilled later under his son and successor Assurbanipal.
The fact is that the ultimate test of prophecy was its fulfillment. Thus an accurate, independent, and permanent record of prophecies was needed, to stand as lasting witness for when possible fulfillment might occur or be required to be checked. Human memory would crystallize and fade with time, and people die off, leaving no credible record (or no record at all). That was of no more use to ancient governments than to modern ones—and was as true for early Israel and Judah as for Mari or Assyria. The Hebrews’ need of prompt and faithful copies was as essential to check prophecy against fulfillment as anywhere else. When an infuriated Amaziah, priest at Bethel, sent word to Jeroboam II way up in Samaria, reporting the prophet as seditious, he would hardly have trudged all of thirty weary miles or more to shake his fist before the king to denounce Amos (Amos 7). Like numberless other officers before and after him (from Mari to Nineveh and beyond), he would have summoned the Bethel shrine’s scribe and sent a letter off by mounted messenger to the court at Samaria, we may be sure. As our external sources teach us, that was how it was done. And if he himself was not ready with a pen . . . Amos need not have gone far to find someone to write down his prophecies, both as witness against their future fulfillment and to refute any false claims sent to Samaria by Amaziah. Before Amos, the “Balaam” prophecy at Tell Deir Alla was written out promptly on a plastered wall. That it was all left to memory both then and for the next three hundred years is surely absurd in the light of the overwhelming external record of normal prophetic usage. [I]n a Hebrew prophet’s life . . . the example of Jer. 36 . . . suggests very strongly that the record of a prophet’s oracles and deeds was built up as he went along[.] . . .Theories of long chains of “disciples” transmitting (and perhaps even drastically editing) memories and then written text simply have no tangible documentary basis, by contrast with what Mari, Assyria, Egypt, and the rest have to teach us in matters of fact.¹⁰⁷

An anti-supernatualist contention that later disciples or editors compiled and edited Daniel’s predictions to make them fit the facts receives no support from the extant evidence. Daniel wrote the book that bears his name in the sixth century.

H.) Weak Arguments for a Late Maccabean Date for Daniel
If the evidence for Daniel’s sixth-century authorship of the book bearing his name is so strong, why do some continue to argue that the book was written in the Maccabean period c. 165 B. C.? By far, the most important reason that advocates maintain the late date is their a priori faith that God cannot miraculously intervene in history.¹⁰⁸ If one assumes miracles such as predictive prophecy are impossible, then the idea that Daniel did not write the book bearing his name necessarily follows: “Daniel did not prophesy the second century in the sixth because this would be impossible.”¹⁰⁹ No amount of historical evidence, and no degree of impausibility, must be allowed to overthrow dogmatic anti-supernaturalism. For example, Towner writes:

We need to assume that the vision as a whole is a prophecy after the fact. Why? Because human beings are unable accurately to predict future events centuries in advance and to say that Daniel could do so, even on the basis of a symbolic revelation vouchsafed to him by God and interpreted by an angel, is to fly in the face of the certainties of human nature. So what we have here is in fact not a road map of the future laid down in the sixth century B.C. but an interpretation of the events of the author’s own time[.]¹¹⁰

Such dogmatic anti-supernaturalism is not a matter of the intellect and of historical evidence, but of the will, a will in rebellion against God and unwilling to submit to His Lordship. Consider the words of the president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (the largest atheist organization in the United States), Dan Barker, on the related question of whether God miraculously raised His Son, Jesus Christ, from the dead:

Even if Jesus . . . rose from the dead [and] there’s a God [and] I don’t deny any of that . . . does NOT mean that he is my Lord. . . . I will go happily to hell. It would be worse of a hell for me to bow down before a Lord . . . regardless of the . . . historicity issue. . . . Even if I agreed 100%, I would still reject that Being as a Lord of my life . . . to live and enjoy . . . life unshakled from the demands . . . [of a] Lord. . . . I cannot accept Jesus as Lord. . . . To me, I think that’s more important than all this historicity stuff, [in] which . . . I might be wrong. . . . [When asked,] “What I’ve heard from you is even if He rose from the dead, you still would not accept him as Lord.” [Barker replied,] I’m proud of that.¹¹¹

Since the God of the Bible—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—exists and can predict the future, He is the living and true God, and all people are accountable to Him and need to submit to Him. Since He can predict the future, His claims in Isaiah 46:9-10 are verified: “I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure.” For many, submission to the living God is simply not an acceptable conclusion. Consequently, the book of Daniel is denied to the historical sixth-century figure of that name and dated to a time when, the anti-supernaturalist hopes, the power of its predictive prophecies can be weakened enough to be ignored.

While anti-supernatural bias is unquestionably the most important reason the sixth-century date for the book of Daniel is rejected, other reasons are also proffered. For example, the presence of words of Greek origin in Daniel is alleged to prove that the book was not written during the time of the Babylonian and Persian empires, but after the rise of the Greek-speaking empire of Alexander the Great. In 1900, Samuel Driver wrote: “The verdict of the language of Daniel is thus clear. . . . [T]he Greek words demand . . . a date after the conquest of Palestine by Alexander the Great (b. c. 332).”¹¹² “[A]dvocates of the second-century date of the book [have] failed to change significantly their standard presentation since Driver—and this despite recent discoveries.”¹¹³ Extensive recent evidence, however, demonstrates the invalidity of this anti-supernaturalist argument. Harman explains:

When S. R. Driver, at the end of the nineteenth century, made his comment on the linguistic situation in Daniel, it was assumed that the Greek words in Aramaic had to be dated later than the conquests of Alexander the Great. Now, however, much more evidence is available to show that Greek influence came very much earlier, a fact that J. A. Montgomery acknowledged in his commentary published as long ago as 1927: “The rebuttal of this evidence for a low date lies in the stressing of the potentialities of [Greek] influence in the Orient from the 6th [century] and on.”¹⁰ Much more evidence is now available to show that Greek influence in the Middle East was widespread, stemming from contacts prior even to 1000 bc.¹¹ This leads to the conclusion that “The presence of Greek words in an Old Testament book is not a proof of Hellenistic date, in view of the abundant opportunities for contacts between the Aegean and the Near East before Alexander.”¹² The few Greek words that appear are all musical terms that may well have been in currency in several languages.¹¹⁴

The three words of possible or probable Greek origin in the book of Daniel are all words for musical instruments (Daniel 3:5, 7, 10, 15)¹¹⁵ which would have been extant in Babylon and Persia in Daniel’s day. Archer explains:

The names of musical instruments . . . have always circulated beyond national boundaries as the instruments themselves have become available to the foreign market. These three . . . circulated with their Greek names in Near Eastern markets, just as foreign musical terms have made their way into our own language, like the Italian piano and viola. We know that as early as the reign of Sargon (722–705 b.c.) there were, according to the Assyrian records, Greek captives who were sold into slavery from Cyprus, Ionia, Lydia, and Cilicia. The Greek poet Alcaeus of Lesbos (fl. 600 b.c.) mentions that his brother Antimenidas served in the Babylonian army. It is therefore evident that Greek mercenaries, Greek slaves, and Greek musical instruments were current in the Semitic Near East long before the time of Daniel.”¹¹⁶

Harrison notes:

The linguistic evidence that critical [anti-supernaturalist] 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 Greek words demanded . . . 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[.] . . . [However, the] presence of three Greek names for musical instruments . . . no longer constitutes a serious problem in the criticism of the book, because as Albright has shown, it is now well recognized that Greek culture had penetrated the Near East long before the Neo-Babylonian period. The early nature and extent of Greek influence in the entire area can be judged from the presence of Greek colonies in mid-seventh-century B.C. Egypt at Naucratis and Tahpanhes, as well as by the fact that Greek mercenary troops served in both the Egyptian and Babylonian armies at the Battle of Carchemish in 605 B.C. . . . Furthermore, while the names of the instruments mentioned may appear to be Greek in nature, the instruments themselves are of Mesopotamian origin. . . . The antiquity of the . . . “harp” . . . has been amply demonstrated by the work of Woolley at Ur, precluding the necessity of positing a Greek original for this type of instrument. . . . The [presence of the] “psaltery” . . . both on Assyrian reliefs and in eastern Mediterranean culture in the first millennium B.C. generally is amply attested. . . . In the light of the foregoing evidence, therefore, the arguments for the Maccabean dating of Daniel can hardly be said to be convincing.¹¹⁷

In fact, the presence of merely three Greek words—and those only for musical instruments—actually poses a significant problem for advocates of a second-century date of Daniel:

Actually, the argument based upon the presence of Greek words turns out to be one of the most compelling evidences of all that Daniel could not have been composed as late as the Greek period. By 170 b.c. a Greek-speaking government had been in control of Palestine for 160 years, and Greek political or administrative terms would surely have found their way into the language of the subject populace. The books of Maccabees testify to the very extensive intrusion of Greek culture and Greek customs into the life of the Jews by the first half of the second century, particularly in the big cities. . . . This is especially significant in view of the fact that the Aramaic of Daniel was a linguistic medium which readily absorbed foreign terminology. It includes approximately fifteen words of Persian origin, almost all of which relate to government and politics. It is hard to conceive, therefore, how after Greek had been the language of government for over 160 years, no single Greek term pertaining to politics or administration had ever intruded into Palestinian Aramaic. The same generalization holds good for the Hebrew portions of Daniel as well. . . . [T]he Hebrew chapters contain not a single word of Greek origin.¹¹⁸

Thus, as the Hebrew and Aramaic of Daniel supports its sixth-century composition and undermines a second-century date for the book, so the very rare words of Greek origin in the book actually provide further support its early origin rather than providing a case for a late date.¹¹⁹

Anti-supernaturalists also like to argue that Daniel’s references to “Darius the Mede” (Daniel 11:1; 5:31-6:28; 9:1) are references to a mythical figure who the alleged forger of Daniel confused with Darius I Hystaspes (521–486 B. C.). ¹²⁰ One anti-supernaturalist writer stated:

Darius the Mede appears therefore to have been the product of . . . the historical confusion of the author’s mind and . . . the fame of the great Darius Hystaspis and . . . induced the Biblical writer to ascribe in a vague way certain events of the life of the former to the reign of the latter. It seems apparent that the interpolation of Darius the Mede must be regarded as the most glaring inaccuracy of the Book of Daniel. In fact, this error of the author alone is proof positive that he must have lived at a very late period, when the record of most of the earlier historical events had become hopelessly confused and perverted.¹²¹

However, subsequent evidence makes clear that Darius the Mede¹²² was a historical person “mentioned in numerous cuneiform texts [who] was appointed by Cyrus as the ‘Governor of Babylon and the Region beyond the River.’”¹²³ His position as a subordinate ruler¹²⁴ is affirmed in the text of Daniel, which teaches that he received the kingdom from another (Daniel 5:31)¹²⁵ and was “made king”¹²⁶ (Dan 9:1).¹²⁷ History demonstrates that Cyrus did not assume the title “King of Babylon” for a period of time, only the title “King of Lands.”¹²⁸ Thus, “there is too much evidence of him as a person in history . . . to dismiss him as fiction[.] . . .The archaeological information of recent years thoroughly undermines the rationalistic skepticism of the historical existence of Darius the Mede and that he is the result of a confusion.”¹²⁹ Daniel’s record concerning Darius the Mede is historically accurate.¹³⁰

Anti-supernaturalists have also affirmed that Daniel dated the accession of Nebuchadnezzar to the throne erroneously. Daniel 1:1 states: “In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah came Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon unto Jerusalem, and besieged it.” However, Jeremiah 25:1, 9; 46:2 refers to related events in the “fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king of Judah.” Consequently, the anti-supernaturalist S. R. Driver argued: “Whether [Daniel 1:1] is historically correct is doubtful. Jehoiakim’s reign lasted eleven years (b. c. 608–597); and the Book of Jeremiah (25:1) equates his fourth year with the first year of Nebuchadnezzar.”¹³¹ However, the discovery that the Babylonians and Judeans employed a different method of reckoning the beginning of a king’s reign eliminates the alleged contradiction. Clear historical evidence demonstrates that when a new king ascended the throne, Judeans reckoned the calendar year in which he assumed power as the first year of his reign, while Babylonians considered the start of the next calendar year to be the first year of a new king’s reign. In other words (using a modern calendar), if a new king ascended to his throne on July 12, 1973, then Judeans would reckon January 1, 1973 as the first year of his reign, while Babylonians would reckon January 1, 1974 as his first year. Waltke explains:

But how can one square the statement in Daniel 1:1 that Nebuchadnezzar in his first year as king besieged Jerusalem in the third year of Jehoiakim with the statement in Jeremiah 25:1, 9; 46:1 that Nebuchadnezzar defeated Pharaoh Necho in the fourth year of Jehoiakim? . . . Daniel is using the Babylonian system of dating the king’s reign whereas Jeremiah is using the Palestinian system of dating.¹³² In Babylonia the year in which the king ascended the throne was designated specifically as “the year of 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 king’s reign. If this plausible explanation is correct, the alleged contradiction actually supports a sixth century date for the book. Had the author Daniel been an unknown Jew of the second century B.C., 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.¹³³

Indeed, the author of Daniel is clearly aware of the book of Jeremiah, as the work records Daniel reading the book of Jeremiah (Daniel 9:2). The fact that Daniel does not specify the “fourth year” as specifically found in Jeremiah, in accordance with the Judean or Palestinian dating system, but instead speaks of the “third year,” in accordance with the sixth-century Babylonian dating system, is so far from being a contradiction that it provides further corroboration for Daniel’s authorship of the book bearing his name. Would a second-century Jewish forger “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”?¹³⁴ Certainly not.

Anti-supernaturalists also claim that Daniel’s references to “Chaldeans” both as a nationality (Daniel 5:30; 9:1) and as a class of magicians and ministers of pagan gods (Daniel 2; 3:8; 4:7; 5:7, 11) is a historical blunder that requires a late date for the book.¹³⁵ However, the fifth-century historian Herodotus refers to the Chaldeans as a nationality¹³⁶ and also uses the term for a special class of ministers to pagan deities:

In the Babylonian temple there is another shrine below, where there is a great golden image of Zeus, sitting at a great golden table, and the footstool and the chair are also gold; the gold of the whole was said by the Chaldeans to be eight hundred talents’ weight. Outside the temple is a golden altar. There is also another great altar, on which are sacrificed the full-grown of the flocks; only nurslings may be sacrificed on the golden altar, but on the greater altar the Chaldeans even offer a thousand talents’ weight of frankincense yearly, when they keep the festival of this god; and in the days of Cyrus there was still in this sacred enclosure a statue of solid gold twenty feet high. I myself have not seen it, but I relate what is told by the Chaldeans.¹³⁷

As this quotation demonstrates, Herodotus not only “spoke of the Chaldeans in ethnic terms” and also “recognized their priestly office,” but even explicitly “accepted the fact that certain of their religious procedures went back to at least the time of Cyrus.”¹³⁸ There is no reason whatsoever to think that Daniel could not have employed Chaldean in the dual way that Herodotus employed the word. Wilson concludes:

Summing up, then, the testimony of the ancient classical writers who have written about Babylon, we find that they make a distinction between the Babylonian, or Chaldean, people or peoples on the one hand, and the Chaldean priests or astrologers on the other; and that this distinction is held by them to have existed from the earliest tims to the time in which they respectively wrote. . . . []There is no evidence to show that . . . the author of Daniel . . . does not emply the term . . . “Chaldean” . . . consistently and that it may not have been used in Aramaic as a designation of a class of Babylonian wise men, or priests, as early as the sixth century B. C.¹³⁹

Daniel’s use of the word Chaldean is entirely consistent with a date for the traditional date of his composition of the book c. 530 B. C.

The arguments against Daniel’s sixth-century authorship of the book bearing his name are weak and unconvincing.¹⁴⁰ They are fundamentally based upon a faith that God cannot intervene in history and perform miracles. Waltke notes:

But the question naturally arises, If the evidence for a sixth-century date of composition is so certain, why do scholars reject it in favor of an unsupportable Maccabean hypothesis? The reason is that most scholars embrace a liberal, naturalistic, and rationalistic philosophy. Naturalism and rationalism are ultimately based on faith rather than on evidence; therefore, this faith will not allow them to accept the supernatural predictions. . . . The committed antisupernaturalist, who can only explain the successful predictions of Daniel as prophecies after the fulfillment . . . is not likely to be swayed by any amount of objective evidence whatever.¹⁴¹

Opponents of Daniel’s authorship of the book of Daniel do not hold their view because of the evidence, but maintain their position because of their anti-Biblical faith and despite the evidence.