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FAILED APOCALYPTICISM: THE BOOK OF DANIEL
The Book of Daniel is cited by apologists and conservative Christians as an example of fulfilled prophecy. No one, they assert, could have written so clearly about future events without divine inspiration. The book of Daniel purports to predict, from the perspective of the sixth century BCE, events leading up to the second-century BCE, culminating with the Seluecid rulership of Antiochus Epiphanes. If Daniel was indeed written in the sixth century BCE, as its author claims, than it indeed represents predictive prophecy. So the question becomes:
Was Daniel written in the sixth century BCE, or by a much later writer who merely pretended to write in the sixth century BCE?
Unfortunately for the apologists, there can be little doubt that the latter option is the correct one. Moreover, this dating is not in any way based on some alleged anti-supernatural prejudices, it is not hinged upon the issue of prophecy at all, but on consistent and and overwhelming indications within the text itself. Joseph Mccabe summarizes the view of most OT scholars when he says that "it is now beyond question that the man who wrote Daniel, and pretended to be alive in 539 B.C. (when Babylon fell), did not live until three or four centuries later" (Story of Religious Controversy, Ch. 7) .
1) First, Daniel was written primarily in Aramaic, and Aramaic did not replace Hebrew as the commonly spoken language of the Jews until well after the sixth century. Some of the sections are written in Hebrew, but there are a number of indications that those sections were "deliberately translated from Aramaic into Hebrew, since much of the Hebrew text follows the grammer of Aramaic rather than that of Hebrew. Further, there are a number of Greek and Persian words salted through the text that would not have been used until after the time of Hellenistic influence following Alexander the Great [330BCE]. Had the work been written in the Aramaic of the Chaldean court, it would have contained no Persian, and the Aramaic of both the Chaldean and Persian courts would have contained no Greek" (Callahan, 151) .
2) The book of Daniel gives away its late authorship by the words it uses, and the ways it uses them. For example, at 2:2 refers to "Chaldean" as synonymous with "enchanter" or "astrologer." This is in itself an indication of very late authorship, for if Daniel had really "been written at the time of the Chaldean empire, 'Chaldean would have referred to a nationality. It was only centuries after that time that the word Chaldean became synonymous with astrologer" (Callahan, 166) . Furthermore, the author of Daniel consistently uses a very late form of name for the Chaldean king Nebuchadrezzar, yet, "even in the Hebrew sections, the name is rendered as Nebuchadnezzar. This is a much later rendering of the name. In Ezekial and most of Jeremiah the name is written with an 'r' after the syllable 'chad'" (Callahan, 152).
3) Daniel is not just wrong in his history, he is so absurdly wrong that there can be no doubt that he wrote long after the time he purports to write from. Randel Helms notes:
"The book of Daniel presents itself as being written in the sixth century BCE, during the reigns of the Babylonian rulers Nebuchadrezzar and Belshazzar and the Persians Cyrus and Darius. From that point in time it presents itself as predicting events in the ancient near east during the fifth, fourth, third and second centuries BCE. But strangely, whenever Daniel talks about the sixth century it is vague and inaccurate, and when it talks about the second century it is quite detailed and exact. This gives us a clue as to the actual time of writing. With regard to the sixth century BCCE, the book opens by declaring:
"In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and laid siege to it. The Lord delivered Jehoiakim king of Judah into his power, together with all that was left of the vessels of the house of God; and he carried them off to the land of Shinar" (1:1-2)
But in fact Jehoiakim reigned for eleven years; it was only in the first year of his son and successor Jehoiachin that Nebuchadnezzar laid seige to Jerusalem, captured it, and 'carried off all the treasures of the house of the Lord' (see II Kings 28:8-13, JER 36:9,29). The author of Daniel is quite weak on his facts about the sixth century BCE, and continues to be so in his account of the fall of Babylon to PErsia in the year 539. He writes that 'Belshazzar king of the Chaldeans was slain, and Darius the Mede took the kingdom' (5:30). But of course it was Cyrus the Persian who conquered Babylon (see Ezra 1:1); there never was a king Darius the Mede. The author Daniel confusedly imagines that Cyrus succeeded Darius (though Darius in fact succeeded Cyrus' son), and imagines that Belshazzar was the son of Nebuchadrezzar (5:11), though he was in fact the son of Nabonidus. Nabonidus, in turn, was 'not related to any of his predecessors' (ABD, IV, 973), including Nebuchadrezzar; so the author of the book of Daniel was ignorant even of the lineage of the ruler, Belshazzar, in whose court Daniel was said to be the 'chief of magicians' (5:11). Thus it ought not surprise the attentive reader of the Book of Daniel that modern critical scholars are unanimous in their conviction that Daniel "actually comes from the second-centrury BCE" (ABD, II, 33) and that its pretense of coming from the sixth century is a literary fiction intended to impress its readers with the supposed accuracy of its foreknowledge of the next several hundred years" (Helms, 20-21).
4) Another indication that Daniel was written during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes is that when he predicts events past that time, he is quite wrong. Note how well Daniel 'predicts' the actions of Antiochus, which are in actuality events of the very recent past.
"Armed forces dispatched by him will desecrate the sanctuary and the citadel and do away with the regular offering. And there they will set up the abominable thing that causes desolation" (11:31)
As is abundantly clear from Daniel itself (also, as independently attested by 1 Macc 1:4, the earliest witness to Daniel), the reference here is to Antiochus' setting up of an altar to Zeus (the abominable thing) in the temple sanctuary, to which were performed sacrifices. Antiochus, at the same time, did indeed also "do away with the regular offering[s]" of the Jews at the temple. The Maccabbees account, written just a little later by an author who knew the book of Daniel) also points undeniably to this conclusion, for it describes the very same events using Daniel's own words:
"[T]he king sent agents with written orders to Jerusalem. . . burnt offerings, sacrifices, and libations in the temple were forbidden; sabbaths and feast days were to be profaned; the temple and its ministers to be defiled. . . On the fifteenth day of the month of Kislev in the [Seleucid calendar] years 145 [167BCE], the abomination of desolation was set up on the altar" (1 Macc 1:44-45. 54)
We can see that when Daniel refers to his 'ACTUAL' future [later than 167BCE], rather than his immediate past, he proves himself to be no prophet at all. For example, he predicted that Antiochus would perish "between the sea and the holy hill, the fairest of hills" (11:44) . There is no doubt that Daniel here refers to Jerusalem ("holy hill") and to the Mediterranean. Well, Daniel was wrong about that. Antiochus actually died in Persia, 164BCE (Helms, 34).
Even more wrongly, Daniel predicted that "at that moment" when Antiochus died [which Daniel wrongly thought would occur between Jerusalem and the Sea],
"shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book. And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt" (12:1-7)
All of this should sound very familiar to readers of the New Testament, for both Mark and Revelations [as well as the apocryphal 4 Esdras] model themselves upon these same failed apocalyptic prophecies (more on this below). Daniel had predicted triumphantly that the "fourth beast" (7:23), the Hellenistic empire of Alexander and his successors (including Antiochus, who was referred to as the "little horn" by Daniel), would be the last pagan empire to have dominion over the Jews, after which "the kingdom and the dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey them" (7:27) . Anyone who is familiar with the New Testament will immediately note that this is false, for following the Seleucids came the Romans, and the Romans not only exercised their dominion over the Jews, but in 70CE also raided and destroyed the "holy hill" itself, ending the second temple period.This leads us to another apocalyptic work, written in dependence on Daniel, known as the Gospel of Mark.
DANIEL AND MARK: A TRADITION OF FAILED APOCALYPTICISM
(From Helms, p 1ff )
Central to the Gospel of Mark is its insistence that those who saw Jesus in the flesh would also see him come again as the Son of Man: "He also said, 'I tell you this: there are some of those standing here who will not taste of death before they have seen the kingdom of God already come in power'" (Mk 9:1). This spectacularly wrong prediction has puzzled readers ever since. Mark is quite clear about his expectations; when the High Priest of Israel asks Jesus on the night of his arrest, "Are you the Messiah?" Mark has Jesus answer, "I am; and you [plural] will see the son of man seated at the right hand of the power and coming on the clouds of heaven" (KM 14:62). Mark is of course alluding to the apocalyptic vision in Daniel chapter 7: "I saw one like the son of man coming with the clouds of heaven;. . . sovereignty and glory and kingly power were given to him" (Dn 7:13-14). . .
It is not too much to say that a key to the mind of Mark lies in the book of Daniel, for Mark was the first Christian writer to use that book in an effort to understand the implications of the destruction of Jerusalem's temple by a Roman army in 70CE. In the chapter before Jesus' interrogation by the high priest, Mark has Jesus declare that the temple would be "thrown down," "not one stone. . .left upon another"' for the "abomination of desolation" would be set up, and then,
after that distress, the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give her light; the stars will come falling from the sky, the celestial powers will be shaken. They will then see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. (MK 13:2, 14, 24-25)
Just as Mark found the "son of man" in Daniel 7:13, he found the "Abomination of desolation" in Daniel 12:11, and read those passages as applying to his own time. . .
(from Helms, p 36 )
The gospel of Mark was written soon after the year 70 in and for a Christian group that was undergoing intense persecution. It is not surprising that apocalyptic hope would flourish in such circumstances or that the deliverance promised in the book of Daniel would be read with joy. As John Dominic Crossan puts it, Mark, writing to a "community that has suffered severely from lethal persecution," performs one of the most typical literary devices of apocalyptic: "He has Jesus foretell as distant future what [Mark] knows full well as immediate past" (1995, 17).
Not only does Mark employ the fictive device of the apocalyptic seer "foretelling" the immediate past of the author, he uses the very words of the Book of Daniel in its Septaugint Greek version as the basis for Jesus' "prediction" of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70CE. Mark is the first Christian writer to do so, the first to percieve that Daniel was "really" about the Jewish war with Rome rather than the Maccabean war with Syria, and the first to see the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 as the prelude to what Daniel called the coming of the son of man on the clouds of heaven to establish the kingdom of god.
Using the Greek Septaugint version of the apocalyptic discourses in Daniel as his model, Mark presented in his thirteenth chapter as apocalyptic discourse of Jesus in which Jesus' future (that is, Mark's present and near past) is regarded as foreordained and predetermined. Just as Daniel revealed to Nebuchadnezzar "what must take place [dei genesthai] in the last days" (Dan 2:28 LXX), so Jesus reveals to his disciples what "must take place [dei genesthai] before the end" (Mk 13:7). When Antiochus IV set up an altar to Zeus in Jerusalem's temple in 167BCE, I Maccabees calls it the "abominatio of desolation" (1:54). The Greek version of Daniel calls it the same, "the abomination of desolation [to bdelygma eremoseos]," declaring that its establishment presages the "time of the end," a time of "tribulation as has not been [thlipsis hoia ou gegonen]" (Dan 12:1, 11 LXX).
Likewise for Mark, the setting up of the "abomination of desolation [bdelygma tes eremoseos]" will be a time of "tribulation as has not been [thlipsis hoia ou gegonen]" (Mk 13:19). We know from Josephus that in August of the year 70, "the Romans brought their standards into the temple area, and erecting them opposite the East Gate sacrificed to them there, and with thunderous acclamations hailed Titus as Imperator" (351). Mark is directly dependent upon the vocabulary of Septaugint Daniel in his effort to understand the events of 70. Mark's thirteenth chapter contains not an actual speech of Jesus, whose language was Aramaic, but a statement from Mark himself in the literary form of apocalyptic discourse about his own time. In this chapter, Mark is as fully as apocalyptic as the book of Daniel, and just as wrong in his predictions. . .
Just as the author of Daniel was wrong in his apocalyptic expectation that Antiochus' establishing the altar to Zeus in the temple meant that within three and a half years his "people will be delivered" (Dan 12:1, 12), Mark was equally wrong in his hope that Roman sacrifices to the eagle standard in the temple in August 70, meant that "the end is near, at the very door" (Mk 13:30). Apocalyptic predictions are necessarily self-disconfirming, and always have to be reinterpreted by the next generation that was not supposed to appear.