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This timeline is also attached as a PDF file. Daniel and HistoryStudents of history must often assess credibility. For example, when two historical records contradict each other (e.g. Herodotus and Xenophon), which – if either! – should you believe? There are many reasons why this is not an easy question
to answer, and even if one decides to accept a given historian’s record of a particular event, one may consider the other historian’s report of a different situation more credible. Most of the time, historians are describing events they have not personally witnessed, which leaves them at the mercy of their sources – although a healthy scepticism can help a historian avoid being too badly misled by unreliable sources. I am
not a historian, I am a Bible student. However, I find history fascinating, particularly where it relates to the Bible. I also have a healthy dose of scepticism, so when many scholars (theologians and historians) dismiss Daniel as religious fiction and assign a composition date of the third or early second-century BC for the first six chapters, and 167-164BC for the later chapters, I ask why. The answer seems to be
that the amazing accuracy of the description of historical events in the latter half of Daniel causes sceptics to claim that they must have been written after the events occurred. Yet the Bible presents them as God-inspired prophecies of the future. I don’t think we need much logic to question the sceptics’ assumption. After all, what author nowadays could hope to get away with writing a book containing lots of
detail of recent events and then trying to convince people that it had been written hundreds of years ago but only just discovered! True, people may be gullible, but this demands an unlikely depth of gullibility! To have anyone believe my story, I would need to promote my newly-discovered scroll before the events it described took place or I would be fighting an uphill battle with little hope of success. In other words, I would need to be a genuine prophet who could tell the
future. In general, the events described in the Bible read as if they were written or reported by people who were present – or at least living in the same time. The details of Daniel read as if they were written at the time they describe by someone who knew what they were writing about. In the second half of the book – the chapters containing very detailed prophecies – the writer uses “I, Daniel”[1] or “me,
Daniel”[2] nine times.
In past centuries, people said Daniel could not be authentic because it included Persian terms that they believed to be anachronistic. Over time, though, most of these so-called anachronisms have been demonstrated not to be anachronisms at all. This is, of course, a recurring theme of Biblical criticism: critics dismiss the Bible because of supposed
anachronisms or other alleged errors, only to find later that it was they who were wrong, not the Bible. Unfortunately, this rarely inspires such critics to reverse their position and proclaim the truth of the Bible; instead, they generally find another point of objection – something which has not yet been proved wrong.
So we need to consider what evidence there is for Daniel’s date of writing. Was Daniel
composed at the time it describes?The first half of the book of Daniel presents itself as a description of events in the life of Daniel during the exile of the Jews in Babylon; that is, the sixth century BC. This section narrates events without making any claim as to who the author was. As stated earlier, the second half presents visions of the future that Daniel claimed to have seen. ScholarsFor generations, scholars have decried the book as a fraud: a piece of religious fiction written hundreds of years after the time it describes. On what basis do they make these claims? In his book “Daniel: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and
Preaching”, W. Sibley Towner begins his discussion of Daniel chapter 8 with the following gems: “In fact, of course, we need to assume that the ‘many days hence’ ([Daniel 8] v. 26) to which the vision is addressed is the actual time of the author’s own life.”[3] and “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, 167-164 B.C.”[4] I cannot but wonder at
the motivation of such writers, let alone the source of their categoric confidence that the all-powerful God described in the Bible must conform to their limitations. I can’t agree with such scholars. Indeed, I can’t really view them as scholars. If bias blinds you to any other conclusion than your own predetermined one, you are not a scholar. Not all authors state such anti-God reasons for rejecting the
claims of sixth century authorship, and perhaps this is not the underlying conviction of all. Nevertheless, I have yet to see any arguments sufficiently strong to warrant accepting a late date for the composition of Daniel. Apart from anything else, the last six chapters claim to be accounts directly from Daniel the prophet. If he is not the originator of this text, then those chapters were written by a liar – and
if he lies about who he is, why should we listen to anything else he wrote? Support for an early originSo what evidence is there for a six-century origin of Daniel? Eight manuscripts with parts of the book of Daniel have been found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls in three different caves.[5]Eight manuscripts with parts of the
book of Daniel have been found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls in three different caves.16 Six of them are somewhat newer, but two are written in the script of the second century BC and dated to the late second century BC, no later than about 115 BC. The first of these (4QDan\c) contains Daniel 10:5–9, 11–16, 21; 11:1, 2, 13–17, 25–29, while the second (4QDan\e) has five small fragments of Daniel 9:12-17. Some commentary on Daniel has also been found in two caves.[6].
Manuscripts of Psalms and Ecclesiastes discovered at Qumran have caused scholars to revise their suggested dates for some Psalms and the Book of Ecclesiastes several centuries earlier because that is how long it took for Jewish writings to be accepted as canonical. Applying the same logic to the book of Daniel causes us to conclude that Daniel was also written hundreds of years before the date of the second century BC accepted by many scholars in preference to accepting that God has
predicted the future very accurately in the Bible. Ezekiel was contemporary with the time described in the book of Daniel and he names Daniel on three occasions (although he uses a different spelling). It is often suggested that the wise men from the east came to Israel because of the “seventy week prophecy” of Daniel, as well as the star they saw. This
suggestion is not unreasonable. Josephus, writing in about 93-94AD, states that when Alexander the Great visited Jerusalem in about 323BC, he was shown some of the prophecies of Daniel which predicted that a Greek would defeat the Medo-Persian empire. This contradicts the idea that those prophecies were written between 167BC and 164BC – a suggestion based largely on the fact that the details are too accurate. I do
not consider extreme accuracy in prophecy to be a problem! The fact that Alexander did indeed allow the Jews to maintain their religious practices as stated by Josephus may lend credibility to his report. The purpose of the above review is to show that there is no reason to dismiss Daniel as a historical narrative that was written considerably closer to the times it reports than any other historian such as Herodotus or
Xenophon. This adds another, more dependable, voice to the collection of historians one should refer to when trying to decide what actually happened at that time. Timeline of Daniel’s lifeWhen we read of Daniel in the Bible, we can do so with confidence that he was a real person who lived the life described in the book of Daniel and was given the prophetic visions that the book
presents. Some are incredibly detailed and were proved accurate hundreds of years after Daniel’s death. Jesus himself described Daniel as a prophet and told his followers to look for the fulfilment of the horrors Daniel had prophesied. Exact fulfilment of prophecies in the past gives us confidence that the prophecies not yet fulfilled will be fulfilled at the proper time. As to the life of Daniel, we know of many events in his life, but there are also many things we don’t know. We don’t know his age at any stage and we know almost nothing of his ancestry. What we do know is that, depite being an outsider and a foreigner, he achieved and maintained a position of astonishing importance in the world’s leading empire for about 70 years, even as the empire changed leaders, loyalty and ethnicity around him. Such an achievement
is unparalleled in the history of humanity. An earlier version of this timeline was distributed some time ago in this newsletter. Some improvements have been made. See also
Notes
[1] Daniel 8:15, 27; 9:2; 10:2, 7; 12:5
[2] Daniel 7:15, 28; 8:1
[3] “Daniel: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and
Preaching” by W. Sibley Towner (https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/_/ChpqDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PT115&dq=%22We+need+to+assume+that+the+vision+as+a+whole+is+a+prophecy+after+the+fact%22)
[4] “Daniel: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching” by W. Sibley Towner (https://books.google.com.au/books?id=ChpqDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT115&lpg=PT115&dq=%22We+need+to+assume+that+the+vision+as+a+whole+is+a+prophecy+after+the+fact%22&source=bl&ots=XqRnXjhHWn&sig=ACfU3U19YXMiKcZleqiJmyfAeOjjgGPshA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiS4I3znJODAxVm8DgGHcBSDvcQ6AF6BAgIEAM#v=onepage&q=%22We%20need%20to%20assume%20that%20the%20vision%20as%20a%20whole%20is%20a%20prophecy%20after%20the%20fact%22&f=false)
[5] Cave 1: 1QDan\a (1Q71) (Daniel 1:10–17; 2:2–6 in Hebrew), 1QDan\b (1Q72) (Daniel 3:22–30 in Aramaic). Cave 4: 4QDan\a (4Q112) (Daniel 1:16–20; 2:9–11, 19–49; 3:1–2; 4:29–30; 5:5–7, 12–14, 16–19; 7:5–7, 25–28; 8:1–5; 10:16–20; 11:13–16 in Hebrew), 4QDan\b (4Q113) (Daniel 5:10–12, 14–16, 19–22; 6:8–22, 27–29; 7:1–6, 11?, 26–28; 8:1–8, 13–16 in Hebrew), 4QDan\c (4Q114) (Daniel 10:5–9, 11–16, 21; 11:1–2, 13–17, 25–29 in
Hebrew), 4QDan\d (4Q115) (Daniel 3:8–10?, 23–25; 4:5–9, 12–16; 7:15–23 in Hebrew), 4QDan\e (4Q116) (Daniel 9:12–17 in Hebrew). Cave 6: 6QpapDan (6Q7) (13 papyrus fragments with Daniel 8:20–21; 10:8–16; 11:33–36, 38; 8:16–17 in Hebrew).
[6] 4Q Eschatological Commentary A (4Q174) has quotations from many Bible passages including Daniel 12:10; 11:32, followed by midrashic commentary. 11QMelch (11Q13) contains commentary on Daniel 9:25 in
Hebrew.
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