RE:
The LXX and the Qumran texts place Daniel in Scripture. Josephus said explicitly that Daniel's work was still being read in his day, that he was a prophet and that he was divinely-inspired (see a previous post for the reference). Thus, based on this data before us, the fact remains that the book of Daniel was canonical by late BC and continued as such throughout the 1st c. AD. Can we put this specific issue to bed?
------------------------------------------------------
Daniel in the canon? Yes. Is he in the canon as a prophet? No. This is because the OT is divided into three parts.
Daniel is in LXX along with other books that are in the canon and that are not. In Daniel’s case, it is in the Hebrew Testament under the 3 rd category of “Other Writings”. Even Josephus acknowledged that this exists. Daniel’s presence in Qumran is simply as one of many texts. Being at Qumran does not make a text part of the canon either. In fact, a couple of the Qumran texts throw some light on where some of Daniel’s stories originated (e.g., the story of Nabonidus and his ulcer). As to whether Daniel was placed in the canon late in BC or early AD, I have no way to verify.
Josephus is a historian. If a rabbinical council in Janina did not resolve the question of Daniel, then I don’t think Josephus on his own account will settle the matter either. But there is still the problem of Daniel’s contents. Another ancient historian, Herodotus, closer to the original subject matter by several centuries, attests that “Astyages had reigned 35 years before he was deposed in the manner I described . … Cyrus treated him with great consideration and kept him at his court until he died.”
He was the last king of the Medes. Akkadian: Istemegu.
Darius in Old Persian is Darayavarhush or “Guardian of good”. What does it mean in Mede? Anything?
----------
Quoting T. Henshaw’s “The Writings, the Third Division of the Old Testament Canon, 1963, Humanities Press, NY.
“The first clear conception of the Canon meets us in the pages of the Jewish historian Josephus. In his Contra Apionem (I. 38-43), written to establish the antiquity of the Jews and the trustworthiness of their history, he writes,
‘We have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another; but only 22 books, which contain the records of all past times and which are rightly believed in. And of these, five belong to Moses, which contain the laws and the tradition of the origin of mankind till his death for a period of 3,000 years. From the death of Moses until the reign of Artaxerxes, king of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes ( or Ahasuerus), the prophets who came after Moses wrote down the things that were done in their times in 13 books. The remaining books contain hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of human life.’ …
Since Daniel in Chapter 9, verses 1 to 2 seems to claim that he was active after Ahasuerus, by the words of Josephus Daniel has already disqualified himself as a prophet.
In as much as Daniel and Esther both fall into the bin of Other Writings, they are worth examining for some of their features.
In the January 1, 2012 Watchtower appeared an article titled, “Imitate their Faith: She Acted Wisely, Bravely and Selflessly”. In a sidebar, there are several defenses of the veracity and historicity of the story, including the strange absence of God’s name in this Bible book.
As to the existence of Esther's mentor Mordecai: “What is more, secular records do show that a man named Marduka, a Persian equivalent of Mordecai, served as a court official in Shushan at the time described in the book.” ... Hmmm. Marduka. Like Marduk the Babylonian god?
It was the Cyrus Cylinder that decreed that the Jews and other captive peoples in Babylon could return to their homelands, but the WT presumes that there was some sort of religious persecution that prevented the author of Esther ( was it Esther? I mean, if Daniel wrote Daniel…) from using the name of God even once. Something that the author of Daniel did not have to deal with evidently. But they fooled the censors! The name was put it in there as an acrostic. With 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet and no vowels, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is there several times, diagonal, vertical and across. The WatchTower article fails to mention that another criticism of the book is that Mordecai’s background is quite similar to Daniel’s since Esther 2:5-7 (NWT) relates:
“A certain man, a Jew, happened to be in Shushan the castle and his name was Mordecai the son Ja’ir, the son of Shimei, the son of Kish a Benjaminite, who had been taken into exile from Jerusalem with Jeconiah, the king of Judah, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon took into exile. And he came to be the caretaker of Hadassah, that is, Esther, the daughter of his father’s brother.” If Mordecai had been deported from Jerusalem to Babylon in the reign of Jeconiah or Jehoiachin in 598 BC, that would made him over 125 years old when in the 12 th year of Xerxes I (474 BC) he became grand vizier. But that’s nothing compared to the claim of Daniel, who attests to have served under the son of Ahasuerus, Darius.
If Judith, for example, were excluded from the canon and placed in what has been called variously the deutero-canon or apocyrpha depending on circumstances, there is the implication that some of the books we have inherited from the ancient Jews might simply be stories or novellas, not composed exactly like Aesop’s fables, but at the very least in common with them since they might have a moral in the telling. The story of Daniel is less vindictive than Esther’s, but they are both nationalistic. They are also about poor people who made good at the centers of power.
That the WatchTower would attest to the veracity of both the Esther and Daniel books is not surprising. and not much of a reference. Had the WatchTower claimed that there was a work of fiction somewhere in the Protestant Canon, that would have been of much more significance.
As to the first Darius, who reigned after Cyrus and Cambyses, in his succession he had to confront several revolts. These included the Medes. The full translation of the Darius Behustin inscription is on Wikipedia. Sections 31-33 deal with the revolts of the Medes led by Phraortes whom Darius deals with ruthlessly during campaigns in 522 and 521.
As to putting this to bed, I would say that had Matthew not decided to make passing reference to Daniel and English language readers were more aware of how Thucydides referred to the invaders from Asia, in the US there would be a lot less belligerence broadcast on UHF TV channels every night.
