This is the fourth in a series on critical biblical scholarship. For more, follow the RELATED links on each article.
A lot of people are familiar with the story of Daniel in the lions’ den. Slightly less of us are familiar with the story of his friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace (and many of those only because of the Beastie Boys song). But I’d like to go into the much less familiar territory of how Daniel is dated by critical scholars who question the Bible’s veracity and to how those arguments are rebutted by conservative (which is to say those who read the Bible as trustworthy) scholars.
Dating Daniel
The book of Daniel claims of itself to have been written during the period of the exile of the Jews into Babylon and into the empire of the Medo-Persians who conquered Babylon, which would put its final date of composition at around 530 B.C.
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This date is contested by critical scholars for a handful of reasons, but the most pertinent ones have to do with the fact that Daniel claims to know about future events which he delivers information about through prophetic oracles. If you think the Bible is trustworthy in its relation of supernatural events, this won’t be a very persuasive argument for you. But if you rule out the supernatural a priori, then obviously Daniel must have been written after the events he claimed to prophesy about.
What are the prophecies in Daniel that critics use to late date it? In chapter 8, Daniel has a vision of a ram with two horns fighting a goat with one big horn. The two-headed ram is explicitly identified as the dual kingdom of Medo-Persia and the goat is identified as Greece, a kingdom coming from the west and conquering everything–including the ram. This implies that the goat’s one big horn is Alexander the Great. We then read that, “The goat became very great, but at the height of its power the large horn was broken off, and in its place four prominent horns grew up toward the four winds of heaven.”
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We know that Alexander’s kindgom was divided into four, and one of them, the Seleucid kingdom, would have a significant impact on the Jewish people. This is where the critical dating comes in. Daniel says that one of the four horns grows in power and directs itself toward Palestine. It then takes away the temple sacrifices and worship. This is Antiochus IV, called Epiphanes (or “God manifest”).
In addition, Daniel 11 has a lot of very specific biographical details about Antiochus’ life, though from verses 36-45, it either shifts to describing a different king (that some exegetes have identified as antichrist) or it begins to give incorrect data about Antiochus’ life before his death. Critical scholars opt for the latter interpretation and date the writing of Daniel to just before the book begins to give data which they view as false prophecy. This places the writing around 167 B.C.
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The problem with this reading of Daniel is that Daniel doesn’t just provide data up to the time of Antiochus, but up to the time of Christ.
In Daniel’s 2nd and 7th chapters, we find two different accounts of the same series of events which were yet future to Daniel. The first from the perspective of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, and the second from the perspective of God. In chapter 2, we read of Nebuchadnezzar’s vision of a great statue with four different sections made of different elements, representing four kingdoms—the first the Babylonians, the second the Medo-Persians, the third the Greeks, and the fourth the Romans. In the end, a stone cut without human hands is hurled at the feet and the image comes crashing down. It would be during this fourth empire—the Roman—that God’s kingdom would be inaugurated.
In chapter 7, we see this from God’s perspective: these pagan powers were not a beautiful statue, but crude beasts which will be judged in God’s coming kingdom on earth.
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Critical scholars reinterpret the beasts and statue to make the fourth kingdom Greece instead of Rome, so that their version of Daniel isn’t writing about future events but present day ones. The problem with that interpretation is that the third beast matches many of the characteristics of the goat (explicitly referred to as Greece) in Daniel 8. Instead of a swift goat, it’s a leopard (also known for its swiftness) and this one has four heads and four wings, which is reminiscent of Daniel’s description of the leopard as “crossing the whole earth without touching the ground” before its horn is broken and four new horns grow in its place.
In addition, in Daniel chapter 9 Daniel has a vision wherein he sees that 490 years after the call to rebuild the Jerusalem temple, a Messiah will come and be put to death in order to “finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the Most Holy Place” (Daniel 9:24, NIV). The timing of this prophecy results in an end date at around 27 AD—the beginning of the ministry of Jesus. Add this to Daniel’s claim that at the time of the fourth empire, Rome, God’s kingdom would be inaugurated—a prophecy that was fulfilled by Christ’s resurrection and the church which it created.
Critical Double Standards
But there are other problems with dating Daniel to the 160s BC. Stephen Miller, in his commentary on Daniel, gives us one example that underlines the special pleading and circular reasoning of the critical perspective. Critical scholars had suggested that a number of Psalms probably dated to the time of Antiochus IV due to their content, but this hypothesis was broadly abandoned when manuscripts of these Psalms were found at Qumran which dated to the late second century BC. Writes Miller:
“W. H. Brownlee remarks that ‘it would seem that we should abandon the idea of any of the canonical psalms being of Maccabean date, for each song had to win its way in the esteem of the people before it could be included in the sacred compilation of the Psalter. Immediate entrée for any of them is highly improbable.’ Yet concerning Daniel, Brownlee states, ‘None of the Dead Sea Scroll copies of Daniel are so early as to dispute the usual critical view concerning the book’s authorship, although one Daniel manuscript from Cave Four is to be dated not more than fifty years later than its composition.’ If the discovery of the Psalter in the second century B.C. is sufficient evidence to push the date of that document back before 332 B.C., should not the same evidence indicate that Daniel was written before the second century” (Stephen B. Miller, The New American Commentary Vol. 18 – Daniel,
Kindle Edition.)?
Such fuzzy reasoning and double standards on the part of critical scholars led Old Testament scholar Brevard S. Childs to remark:
“The often used cliche of ‘freedom from dogma’ seems now largely rhetorical. Nor can the categories of historical versus dogmatic be seen as intractable rivals. Rather, the issue turns on the quality of the dogmatic construal. It is undoubtedly true that in the history of the discipline traditional dogmatic rubrics have often stifled the close hearing of the biblical text, but it is equally true that exegesis done in conscious opposition to dogmatics can be equally stifling and superficial” (Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology of Old and New Testaments:Theological Reflection of the Christian Bible, Kindle edition.).
When one assesses all of the data on Daniel, this one must conclude that the critical perspective tries too hard to come up with a naturalistic explanation for its composition that simply strains plausibility.