Ep 34: The Lion's Den

00:00Because if somebody just says, "Antic is the fourth Episthenes is a bad dude and let's hope God comes in and saves us,"

00:09that's not as effective as saying, "I found this text from this ancient prophet."

00:14And this ancient prophet says, "Don't know who this is, but there's a person who's going to be coming who's a really bad dude and God's going to deliver us."

00:23And injecting it with that artificial antiquity and this notion of real prophecy provides a lot more power, a lot more authority to the text.

00:33Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

00:39And I'm Dan Beecher.

00:40And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion

00:48and combat the spread of misinformation about the same.

00:52How are things today, Dan?

00:53I mean, I don't know if you should call me Dan.

00:56Maybe you should call me Belte Chazar, Belte Chazar.

01:00Belte Chazar.

01:01No, it's got to be your bull.

01:03What?

01:06No, we watched Tommy Boy the other night.

01:09I had to show my girls.

01:11Yeah, we're diving into the book that after which you and I are both named.

01:19Our namesake, yes.

01:20Ostensibly, Daniel is a book in the Bible.

01:24I don't know if you guys knew that, but I assume you did.

01:28And I don't know if fewer people probably knew that if you look at our old cover image for our podcast, you can see some Hebrew letters in the background.

01:37If you look in the upper right, you see the Hebrew Daniel.

01:40Yeah, even on our web, on our YouTube, if you're watching this on YouTube, there's like Hebrew letters sort of swirling around us

01:49and one of them might be that name.

01:52I don't know how it's cropped.

01:54Yeah, you chose that image specifically because we were both Daniels and that's fun.

01:59That would be funny.

02:00Yeah, because a little Easter egg for you, everybody.

02:04Because we're 11 years old.

02:06We might as well be anyway.

02:10Yeah, so let's just dive in because we got a lot to cover.

02:15You know, growing up, I'm going to say this, Dan, growing up, I obviously felt some sort of connection to this book just because it was my name.

02:26And it has one of the cooler stories in the Bible.

02:30And that is the lion's den story.

02:32Daniel gets thrown into a lion's den.

02:34I don't want to bury the lead here, but that's kind of all I remembered from it.

02:40So yeah, when I dove back into it to prep for this segment for this episode, I was confused.

02:51I'm just going to say it.

02:53This book is a mess.

02:56Yeah, they needed to employ any amount of writing skill or narrative structure or anything.

03:05It is, I don't, I have a hunch, you're going to tell me a lot of interesting stuff about how this book came to be and the fact that this book.

03:14If I've learned one thing from doing this show with you for as long as we've been doing this show, it is that there is no way one person wrote this book.

03:25Yeah, we're going to get into what's going on with some of the literary structure and yeah, it's going to get weird as it so frequently does on our show.

03:36And I think with texts like Daniel, you have two different, you have a spectrum of people's awareness of Daniel.

03:44On one end, you've got the people who have sat down and read it beginning to end.

03:49And those people are messed up in the head because Daniel messes you up in the head.

03:55On the other end, you have people who have basically heard stories from it.

04:00They're aware of a few different sometimes proof text, sometimes specific stories from Daniel.

04:07You know Daniel in the lion's den.

04:09You know, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego from the fiery furnace and from the great poets.

04:16The Beastie Boys. And so there's a lot of just kind of random spotty knowledge about the book of Daniel in the zeitgeist and in the air.

04:28And that's how I think the majority of people know about Daniel, but have never sat down and read it from beginning to end, which is no small feat.

04:38That's a tall order to begin with.

04:40I mean, it's not a long book, but in biblical standards. By biblical standards, it's not, you know, it's what, twelve chapters?

04:47Twelve chapters, twelve, you know, dense chapters.

04:50Dense and also hard to read sometimes.

04:54You know, you get into a lot of lists, a lot of the time that are repeated.

05:00As a guy with ADHD, this book I gotta say.

05:04Yeah, and repetition was an important part of some of the literary conventions, anciently.

05:10But I think one of the more interesting things that a lot of people, the people who have come at Daniel academically, or at least from a more concerted devotional perspective are aware that it's actually written in two different languages.

05:24See, Daniel is written in Hebrew from Daniel 1 1 to the first half of Daniel 2 4. And then the second half of Daniel 2 4 is written in Aramaic.

05:37And it is Aramaic from there all the way through to Daniel 7 verse 28, or the very end of chapter 7.

05:45And then beginning in chapter 8, we revert back to Hebrew all the way to the end of chapter 12. And so it is, when you're reading it in the original languages, it's odd.

05:58It's a little confusing.

06:00But, and one of the more confusing things, things for scholars is that this division is Hebrew, then Aramaic, then back to Hebrew does not align with the main division of the book.

06:12Because we have chapters 1 through 6, which are courts tales, where we're telling these stories about Daniel and Daniel's companions and the kings of Babylon, media, and Persia.

06:26And we're going to get to what on earth media is doing there.

06:30And then chapter 7 through 12 are basically apocalyptic visions. And oddly enough, even that division, that simple dividing and have 1 through 6 and 7 through 12, doesn't align with how scholars think the text actually came together.

06:47And so, I didn't know exactly. We don't have an outline for today's episode. As usual, we're just going to wing it and hopefully things work out. But what do you think? We have great wings. There's nothing you can do about it.

07:00What do you think makes the most sense? Do you want to talk about how the text came together, language, the dating authorship, all this, and then get into the details, or do you want to talk about some of the details?

07:15Let's sort of walk through the book first as you encounter it. And then maybe you can bring in some understanding about why it is what it is.

07:28Okay. And this is pretty simple because the chapters are kind of self-contained in a lot of ways. You have one story per chapter.

07:35Yeah. And they don't go in chronological order. They bounce around chronologically. They don't always agree with each other as to what has happened. It does seem like there's some...

07:50Huh? Well, it's kind of like a sitcom where everybody was happy and then the next episode starts with everybody's angry.

07:59Right, yeah. So it is a little sitcomish in that sense. Yeah, it does feel... Yeah, it feels... These are each very distinct and they all start sort of in the middle of something and they end abruptly and it's crazy.

08:19Chapter one sort of introduces Nebuchadnezzar, who is the king of, what's his area called, Babylonia? Mm-hmm. Born in Babylonia, moved to Arizona.

08:32Can you... By the way, what's the difference? Is there a difference between Babylonia and Babylon? What is that?

08:39Babylon's a city. Babylonia is a term that people used to use to refer to, like, the broader region. Yeah, but nobody really says Babylonia much anymore in the scholarship.

08:53Okay, so what was he the king of that? He was the king of Babylon. Yeah, Nebuchadnezzar was the king of Babylon. And so Daniel starts with the destruction of Jerusalem, the exile, and we have Nebuchadnezzar saying, "Send me people from the royal family."

09:08From among the elites, we're going to train them up for three years and then they're going to be our court officials and things like that.

09:16Okay, well wait a minute, wait a minute. He doesn't just say that. He says, "Send me your sexy boys who are super, super smart."

09:25He says, "Send me your handsome boys who are without blemish." I mean, it's a little... It starts out. We launch with a little bit of...

09:39Yeah, probably.

09:41I would say that what's going on here is this idea that for court officials, you want people who are going to be squeaky clean and who are going to look nice.

09:50So I don't know that it's so much and kind of an erotic thing as very similar to in ancient Israel, you want your sacrifices to be without blemish and to be pretty.

10:03And so here it's like, if we're going to take these folks and we're going to train them and turn them into our court officials, we need the people who are tall enough, who are slim enough, who look nice enough.

10:17So I think that's probably what's going on, although at the same time there were that kind of homoeroticism was not absent from Babylon.

10:26Right.

10:27And you also had eunuchs who were going to be in charge of different kinds of things.

10:34So there's a lot we don't know about this, partly because the text was written in a much later period and we don't know to what degree they're just kind of making up stuff about two centuries before

10:46and the degree to which they have some kind of access to knowledge that we may not have about what's going on in these courts.

10:52Yeah, I even had a question, you know, you mentioned eunuchs and, you know, in one version, because this is why this, this is why this job is hard.

11:03But I'm reading in two versions, you know what I mean, because I'm trying to understand, I'm trying to see differences as I'm reading.

11:17You know, that the palace guy, the, anyway, the guy in charge of the palace is the one that Daniel is dealing with and blah, blah, blah. I think this is in chapter two. In the King James version, it says, the UNIC master is the one who's who's doing this.

11:36And I was like, is Daniel.

11:39Are they, are they, are they, eunuchs? Is that possible? I mean, lots of things are possible. I don't, I don't know that that fits any, any currents thinking about Daniel. Let me just, well, I'm starting the thinking now.

12:00I do have to say, sorry, I'm bouncing around a lot. I apologize. But also in chapter one, among the handsome genius boys are Daniel and not Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, but rather, Hannah, Hannah, Hannah, Nia, Michelle, and Azaria.

12:22And they're all given, all of them, including Daniel, are given other names, Beltas, Shazar, for Daniel, and then Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego for the other guys. And this book cannot decide what to call anybody.

12:36Like, as you go through the book, Daniel, Beltas back and forth, the other three at one, they stay, Hannah, Hannah, Nia, Meshach and Abednego for the rest of the thing, it's, it's confusing.

12:58And this is, this is one of the pieces of data that points in the direction of originally independent stories being brought together and being harmonized.

13:07And so that's what, and so chapter one is kind of an intro to what's going on, which was probably added a bit later. And what they're doing there is saying, Oh, by the way, these are the same people.

13:20They were just like, your name is now this. And now, so when you see us bouncing back and forth, just keep in mind those are the same people. And it's a way to, I don't know if there's a name for this kind of activity.

13:33It's not poisoning the well, it's kind of sweetening the well. You're kind of leading them into a specific interpretive framework to gloss over the inconsistencies.

13:44Dumping a bunch of Kool-Aid into the well. Yeah. Okay. I did find, I did find this. This is coming from Carol Newsom's 2014 commentary on Daniel.

13:53By the way, I would highly recommend if you want more on Daniel, more that you're going to, then you're going to hear from us today and a lot less moronic as well.

14:02We've got John Collins, his 1993 Hermannaya commentary series commentary on Daniel is one of the best. And then the other one that I would say is one of the best is Carol Newsom's 2014 Old Testament Library commentary on Daniel.

14:17But from Newsom's commentary, we've got this statement on Daniel's identity. And this is, this is actually an article written by somebody else. But they say, talking about Daniel's appearance, in many contexts, his beardless face, handsome visage and court status suggest his particular identity as a court

14:38for in youths serving in many imperial courts throughout history were not typically allowed to do so unless they had been castrated and many readers have assumed the same rule held for Daniel.

14:49So I guess there is some thinking in that direction. I'm like, I'm like a Bible scholar, Dan. I don't know if you realize this. Just without any of the training.

14:59I'm sure there's some folks out there who are thinking right now, just get to the damn point. So let's, let's go through the chapters real quick. Chapter one, we get the introduction of Daniel, his companions, we get the little by the way. This is the change of their names.

15:15And then we get the story about the food where they're like, we're going to give you some of the king's portion, which would have been quite the honor. They're going to eat the one. There was not a lot of meat available back then. So meat and the king's wine.

15:29And so there's a lot of kind of power and authority associated with this. We're going to fill you full of the king's meat and wine and this will make you powerful. And Daniel says, no, thank you. We're just going to eat.

15:46We have this word that means seeds, and it's not clear if it's like, we're just going to eat handfuls of seeds or if we're going to eat stuff grown from seeds. If it's like, yeah, NRSV has vegetables.

15:59Yeah, so it's not exactly clear what's going on there. But the idea seems to be we're going to stay away from these symbols of imperial power. And we're going to give us 10 days. We'll do an experiment.

16:13We'll show you that we end up being in better shape than the folks who are eating the king's stuff. And there's not really a case to make that like the text says that we don't want to be defiled.

16:25But there's no law anywhere in the Hebrew Bible in any tradition that is known from this period that prohibits them from one eating meat or two drinking wine.

16:35Yeah, it was very confusing to me. I was just like, why though? It never gives us a good why? And I think this is probably, we're going to get to it later.

16:46But this is coming from a later time period, then it is set where we have larger empires trying to impose cultural restrictions on Judaism. And one of the things is dietary restrictions and identity markers.

17:01And so in my opinion, what's going on here is they're saying, we're not going to internalize these markers, not only of Babylonian identity, but of Babylonian hegemony.

17:14We are going and hegemony is means like rule by some foreign entity of some kind. Somebody has come in and is ruling over you. And so in my opinion, this is a rejection of that and saying we're going to maintain our own ethnic identity by avoiding the foods that

17:36you are providing to us and just eating our own foods, even though there's no actual requirement or expectation that they eat only vegetables and drink only water.

17:46I think that's a that makes sense. But I am right. I didn't read any explicit reason, right? There's no explicit reason listed in the book about why they don't.

17:57It just says it. They don't want to be defiled, but there's no explanation of why these foods would defile them. And it doesn't make sense given what we know about Judaism in that time period.

18:08And well, yeah. And it also, like the other thing that confuses me about it is that later, Daniel's totally happy to take the robes and the gold.

18:18We'll get to it. We'll get to it. And this is why there's an argument to be had about whether this book is trying to help people incorporate themselves into the empire. Is this a little more in the style of Esther, where it's like we're going to ingratiate ourselves?

18:35This is how you do it successfully so that you can work within the empire. Or is this a book saying, no, we're going to be insular and we're going to keep ourselves separated from it because it's not entirely consistent.

18:50So there has been a lot of debate about what the ultimate goal of this book is in that regard. So that brings us to chapter two, where we have Nebuchadnezzar, who has a bad night, one time, a bad trip of some kind, and says to his court magicians and prophets and everybody, I had a dream.

19:13You got to tell me what the dream was, and then you got to interpret it for me, or I'm going to kill you, which is not something that anyone ever did, anciently, but it makes for a cool story.

19:25I guess it, I mean, it just seems absurd. He's like, he's like, you have to interpret my dream. But first you have to tell me what the dream was so that I know that you're legit.

19:36Yeah, what am I paying you for if you can't even do this one thing? It reminds me of the far side comic where the cops bust in on a fortune teller, and they're like, because you didn't know we were coming. That's why you're under arrest.

19:54And, and, and Daniel comes waltzing in, and is like, yeah, I'll tell you. And this is a dream about this statue, which, which has a few different parts to it.

20:08I'm going to pull it up and so I can read directly from. I got it. If you want. You got it. Yeah, go ahead. Read the, read the description.

20:15The head of the statue was a fine gold. It's chest and arms of silver. It's midsection and thighs of bronze. It's legs of iron. It's feet, partly of iron and partly of clay.

20:27Yes. And there've been a lot of artistic depictions of this statue, but this is, this is kind of the, the fourfold kingdoms vision.

20:39And there have been a lot of different attempts to, to make sense of this over the years from the initial publication of this book within a century of this book having been written the Romans take over.

20:51And so almost immediately you have a bunch of people trying to read the Romans into it, which means you have to reconfigure other things. But basically this is the kingdom of Babylon.

21:04The kingdom of media, the median kingdom, the kingdom of Persia and then the Hellenistic Kingdom, beginning with Alexander the Great and then the toes and the clay at the bottom is representative of what is known as the Diodoki or the Diodohoy, which is the battle of successors after the death of Alexander the Great.

21:25And this is one of the indications of when this book was written, because it goes right up to a period where there's a lot of detail and a lot of accuracy.

21:37And then it's like, and then the end times are going to come. And then everything is, is no longer accurate.

21:42So if you, if you think it all critically about who may have been writing this and when, it's when there's the most detail, when there's the most accuracy.

21:53And when they say God returns, it's right before that. Right. And as it turns out, the easiest way to write a prophecy is to write it about the time that you're actually in right now and pretend that it was written a hundred years ago.

22:08And this, and this was something that was noticed by non-Christian and non-Jewish authors in like the third century CE, there was a pagan writer who was like, yeah, I read your book, Daniel there.

22:22And based on, you know, a lot of stuff is accurate. A lot of stuff is inaccurate. You get the most detail right around this period in, we now refer to as the Maccabean period in biblical studies.

22:34And then it suddenly gets totally inaccurate when it talks about God swooping in and saving everybody. So it seems like it was right there in the middle of the second century that it was written.

22:44And, and you have Christian authors who were like, no, no, no, getting a little annoyed with this, with this pagan author.

22:51But this statue has to be reinterpreted if you want this to be something that goes any further forward in time than Antiochus IV epiphanies. I mean, we'll talk about later.

23:04I feel like it's pretty obvious that the iron is the United States of America and the clay parts are just the, the dirty liberals or something.

23:22And we'll talk a little bit more about it later, but one of the keys to reinterpreting things, particularly if you want to get the Romans in there, that's what most folks want to do because that allows them to demonize either the Catholic Church or the Roman Empire or whatever.

23:36But you have to combine the empire of the Medes and the Persians. And this is problematic for a number of reasons, but the presence of the Medes is problematic in its own right.

23:50So that's chapter two, we get the statue. Okay. Before we go on to chapter three, let's pause for a brief break and then we'll come back with some more Daniel.

23:58Exciting.

24:03All right, we're back. When we last left Daniel, he was, he was interpreting dreams, doing a great job. No, because there's happy we're on to chapter three. Go.

24:12Chapter three, we've got this commandment. Somebody says, Hey, we got this statue for you king and we're going to say everybody has to worship it or you get thrown in a fire.

24:24And Daniel and, well, yield companions refuse to worship it and they get thrown in the fire and they are not harmed and Nebuchadnezzar famously looks into the fire and says, I see a fourth like unto the son of man.

24:40According to the King James version, which is a mistranslation of the Aramaic pretty straightforward in Aramaic, it says, bar alahin, which means not the son of God, but a son of the gods plural.

24:57And so this is this is a Babylonian king representing a Babylonian perspective, but we still have this Semitic convention about referring to a member of a certain class by saying a son of that class.

25:09So a son of the gods is a God. A son of the prophets is a prophet. A son of Adam is a human being. So, so it's just saying that looks like a deity in there with them.

25:23And that has been reinterpreted as a reference to Jesus by later readers.

25:28Then we get into chapter four, we have the king sees has a dream about a tree and Daniel interprets this as a reference to seven years and basically self imposed exile where the king is going to leave human civilization and go dwell in the desert

25:47and get heric out for a while. Yeah, get get Harry. It's the burning man. Yeah, probably. And this, this is connected with the idea that a king at the end of the Babylonian empire named Nabonitis

26:07actually used to would go into the Arabian peninsula and just hang out for years at a time while his son Belchasar, it's kind of co-regent in his stead.

26:20So we have this weird reassignment of the things that Belchasar does. By the way, Belchasar is the one who's all into dream interpretation and stuff like that.

26:29Belchasar was the hippie, not Nebuchadnezzar, but Daniel is reassigning all these things to Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel the book, not the character. Daniel the book, right.

26:40Can I also mention one thing that happens, one weird thing that happens in chapter four, which is that suddenly, like we get through most of chapter four and then in verse 34, Nebuchadnezzar comes back from his exile.

26:55And suddenly the book, the rest of the book is in first person by the character of Nebuchadnezzar. So it's like, it's like suddenly, it says, when that period was over, I, Nebuchadnezzar lifted my eyes to heaven and my reason returned to me.

27:14That wasn't how this book, how this chapter started, it never goes back to that. It's very weird. Is there a reason for that? That's not a part of a known convention or anything, is it?

27:28There's some coming in and out of a first person, and this is a part of the idea is that you're trying to represent, you know how, you remember when Blair, which project came out, the found footage genre, it's kind of like we're going to mix in these different genres to give it a flavor of authenticity.

27:51And so that's why they would say, and then there was this letter, and it's either king, write this letter, and it's the same person writing the whole thing, but they're switching voice and everything in order to give it kind of a flavor of authenticity.

28:06I love the idea of biblical found footage. Yeah, it's really what's going on with a lot of these in a lot of these places where it's like, and then there was a decree made, and here's the decree. We happen to find it. Then we get into chapter five, and now we've got Belshazzar, who's supposed to be Nebuchadnezzar's son, Belshazzar was not Nebuchadnezzar's son, and this is funny, I see a lot of videos where people are like, critical scholarship is all garbage, they used to think there was never somebody named Belshazzar, and then we found an inscription about Belshazzar's son.

28:35And one, this does not remotely solve the overwhelming majority of the historical and textual problems with the book of Daniel, but two, that discovery was made in the 19th century.

28:48So when critical scholarship was still in its infancy, trying to learn how to walk, so it's not the slam dunk that a lot of people think it is.

28:58But also for every, I love the criticisms of any science or any academic study where they're like, "Aha, you were wrong, and therefore everything is, we should throw it all out the window."

29:12What are you talking about? Being wrong and then assimilating new ideas and changing to making those adjustments, that's what scholarships all about.

29:25Yeah, that's the scientific process. However, when you're coming from a position where it's a zero-sum game and you're thinking in black and white binaries of inerrancy and totally worthless, it has to be the one and not the other.

29:41And if you can show error, then that means they obviously belong on the other side of that binary, which means they can be dismissed, which is, it's kind of a methodological shoehorn that was developed over generations of trying to come up with more and more sophisticated

30:00ways to make the apologetic position sound more rational and to reinforce it against rationalism. So it is both adopting and at the same time rejecting a lot of the principles of rationalism to try to reinforce itself.

30:16But anyway, I digress. We get into chapter five and now we've got Belshazzar is the king that we are having to deal with. And this is where we get, he's like, "Hey, remember all the vessels we took from the temple? Let's bring them out and let's just play with them for a little bit."

30:33Let's play temple, you guys. Let's talk the Jewish knot pigskin around in the backyard for a little bit. And then we get the finger of God writing many, many tackles on the wall, freaking everybody out, really killing the vibe.

30:51And then we have to have Daniel come in and interpret what's going on here on the idea. And it is just a hand that just appears out of nowhere and just scribbles on the wall.

31:02That would be pretty freaky. And those words, are they words that actually mean anything in any language or were they nonsense words that Daniel, and that's why they needed Daniel to interpret it?

31:14No, they're words, but they don't make a ton of sense in any kind of context. Menet is a mena, so that's a unit of measurement. Tekel is a shekel and Aramaic. Surprisingly enough, the shin letter, the SH sound is usually written with a character that indicates T.

31:37Parson means half mena or mena. So you've got a mena, a mena, a shekel, and a half mena.

31:46So a yard, a yard, a dollar, and a foot and a half.

31:52Something like that. It doesn't make a whole ton of sense, which is why they need to bring Daniel in to say, "Hey, what's going on here?"

32:00That's a confusing thing for a mystical hand to just throw up on your wall. Right. That's not entirely helpful.

32:08The law of parsimony doesn't hold here. And the perspicuity of scripture is a little muddled.

32:18And then Daniel says, "Hey, this is your loser. You're screwing around with sacred things like you shouldn't be, and so your kingdom is going to be taken away, and it's going to be given to the Medes and then to the Persians."

32:35And Daniel does not get murdered for this. He says the worst thing in the world. Doesn't he also say that the king is going to die, that Belchys are going to die?

32:48And Belchys are just like, "Cool, man, thanks. Here's the rule I promised you."

32:52Yeah, you deserve a reward for all this. And then in that very night, the king dies. And then we get somebody who goes by Darius or Darius, if you're nasty, the Mede.

33:06And there was no such character in history. Darius or Darius was a Persian. And here's where I'm going to talk briefly about what's going on with the Medes.

33:18The median kingdom, if you can call it a kingdom, it was not large. It was not influential.

33:23Up in the mountains to the east of Mesopotamia, it's a part of modern-day Iran. And the Medes were not relevant to the Babylonians.

33:34The Medes were somebody that the Persians dealt with as the Persians were making their way to go down to take over Babylon. And so the Medes are only relevant from a Persian perspective.

33:49Which tells us one thing, that this part of the book of Daniel is being written through a Persian interpretive lens. In other words, they are trying to represent this history from a Persian point of view, which means this is being written later Persian period at the earliest, probably even a little later than that.

34:12And so the Medes have no relevance to Babylon or to the Jewish folks who were in Babylon. They only have relevance if you're reconstructing this history from a Persian point of view and doing so inaccurately.

34:27Were there Persian Jews? Is that who we're talking about? We're talking about Jewish folks who are a part of the Persian Empire. Because Persia takes over a conqueror's Babylon in 539 BCE.

34:44And so this thus begineth the Persian period. And so the Jewish folks who are living in exile are now under a new empire. And the Persian empire is a little more accommodating.

34:58And so it seems that this is probably someone educated within the Persian system or something like that.

35:05So, okay, sorry, let me just make sure I've got this right. We have the Babylonian. So the exile is not just Babylonian exile. They remain exiled as the Persians take over.

35:16Right. And the Persians are the ones who actually allow the folks to return back to the land of Israel. This is Cyrus who does Cyrus.

35:24Right. Got it. Okay. Right. That has. All right. We've, pew pew pew. I'm getting it. I'm starting to understand. Okay. So in chapter six, we have Darius, the Persian king who has this.

35:39It says that the folks are trying to get back at the Jewish people and they don't know what to do. So they tell the king, hey, release this decree. You're not allowed to pray to anybody but the king for 30 days.

35:49Or you get thrown into where? The den of lions. You can rent the whole seat but you'll only need the edge.

35:59So this is the famous story of Daniel being thrown into the lion's den. And again, we have resolution in the end. The king rewards Daniel. Everybody's happy and cue credits.

36:12And then the next chapter, we have a flat. We starting with a flashback because suddenly we're back to Belchasar. Yeah, it was very confusing.

36:21Yes. Now chapter seven begins the second half of the book. Remember, we have chapters one through six, which are these court tales and they're primarily divided into two different types.

36:31We have tales of conflict and tales of contest. And so the conflict is where you have the locals saying we're going to get those Jewish people.

36:39And so they're like, we're going to build a statue and you have to worship it or we're going to tell the king to make it so you can't pray.

36:45And so that's the conflict. And then the contest is who can answer this grand question about this dream? Who can interpret this? All the locals fail.

36:55Yeah. And Daniel has to show up and show that he can do it. So these are, this is kind of a stock literary genres from this time period, but that's one through six. And then seven through twelve is apocalyptic visions.

37:09And we're going to go back to Belchasar and we get the famous vision of the son of man who comes to the ancient of days. And I think the most fascinating part about this story, apart from the fact that we're using

37:24the writer of the clouds storm deity imagery. We've got the son of man coming to the ancient of days. Our oldest Greek translation of this passage. There's a mistranslation.

37:36Because this preposition coming to the ancient of days in Greek would be hails. But in our earliest Greek version, it's not hails, it's just hosts, which is very close, but means as.

37:51And so it says, the son of man comes as the ancient of days, which means the son of man is a manifestation of the ancient of days or God.

38:02And so here is kind of the beginning of this notion that there is some special figure. And remember, son of man is this convention where to refer to a member of the group, you call them a son of that group.

38:16So it just means a mortal, a human, right. Now it's going to take on titular qualities. It's going to become this special title because there's this son of man who's manifesting the ancient of days.

38:29And so this is probably related to some of the inocic literature and other tales about this, this son of man figure from the apocalypse. Okay.

38:38But that's chapter seven. And is that sort of the kernel from which the Trinity concept is bubbling up or?

38:47I would argue that it is one bubble coming up to the surface of that later rolling royal of the development of the Trinity.

38:58We're going to have to talk about the Trinity. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We'll get to it. We'll get to it, guys. We'll get there. And then we've got this in chapter eight, another eschatological vision where we have Persians of days, guys, and times.

39:12Yeah, and times, yeah, which are soon. If any day now, if, yeah, if Tiktok is to be believed, we have Persia, media and Greece. And so now we're actually explicitly naming the country of Greece rather than earlier where we just said.

39:30Yeah, shins of bronze and stuff. A really powerful country place. Yeah. And then we get to chapter nine. Now we're going back to Darius or Darius.

39:44And we have this vision of 70 weeks, which is something that many of you may have heard come up on social media within the last several weeks, because this, this has to do with the rapture.

39:58This has to do with when the end times are coming. So basically the idea is something's going to happen in 70 weeks of years. And so that's 70 times seven.

40:11And that's 490. And then you've got these years. And scholars of like, from the moment this was published, people are like, Oh, we got to figure out. We got to calculate. We got to try and find out what's going on here.

40:24And even early Christians were like, Oh, it means this, that and the other. And how is Rome coming to play? And again, it's got to be your bull.

40:32And there's not really a good answer, except for one. So we start with 70 weeks. And then we're going to have a week of something. And then we're going to have 62 weeks of something. And then we're going to have another week of something.

40:46Now, when you try to lay this out end to end, it doesn't make any sense. It seems to be talking about how long the Babylonian exile is going to last, which means it's starting around 600, five, six hundred four BCE, which is where Jeremiah says

41:00we're going to have 70 years of this. But if you understand this first week to run concurrently with the 62 weeks, which is a, which is a logical way to understand what's going on here.

41:1162 weeks of years, that gives us four hundred and thirty nine-ish years, something like that. But if you do the math and you start at 605, 604 BCE, it brings you to 171, 170 BCE, where it says an anointed one will be killed.

41:31And guess what? The high priests on Nias III was assassinated in 170 BCE. And remember when we think all this is taking place? Right around this time period.

41:45And so here we get this very accurate prophecy, X of N2 prophecy, where if we start when the Babylonian exile traditionally is identified as starting, and we count 62 weeks of years, we get to the assassination of Onias III.

42:00I'm still confused on the weeks of years things. Are you saying like you just multiplied the number by seven and then you call that year? Okay. Yeah. Like a week is seven. So the weeks of years is not a real thing, you guys. I'm just going to point that out.

42:17Yeah. So then we get into chapter 10, and now we're dealing with Cyrus, the Persian who is explicitly mentioned in Isaiah 45 as God's anointed, and in the Greek translation, God's Christ. So this is Cyrus, the Persian.

42:33We have this story about the princes of Persia and the prince of Greece, and they're fighting against Michael, who is the archangel, the head prince. And this is a reflection of the early idea that every nation had its own patron deity.

42:49In this period, in the Hellenistic period, the deities all get squished down, and they're all angels now. And so Prince of Persia, Prince of Greece, Michael, the archangel. These are the guardian angels over the nations.

43:03And then for chapter 11, we go back to Darius, and we have this vision of kings of the South and kings of the North. Now here we're talking about the Diodoki, the successors to Alexander the Great. In the North, we have the solusids. In the South, we have the Ptolemies. Egypt is the Ptolemaic rulers. You have the solusids in Syria, and they're constantly doing battle where Israel is right in the middle.

43:31And so control of Israel is being traded back and forth. Another indication that this is being written around the 170s, 160s BCE.

43:40And then chapter 12 is the conclusion of the book, where we have Michael come in and say, "Great job. We're going to wrap it all up now." And then these two other individuals show up.

43:51And the book is drawn to a convenient and perfect close. So that is a short and chaotic run through of what's going on in the book.

44:05I think that's excellent. I think let's leave it there and take another break. We'll be right back with trying to make sense of everything we just heard.

44:12All right. So we've run through sort of the plot points of Daniel. And along the way, I think we've discussed a lot of the things that we need to know about the book.

44:27But man, yeah, so talk us through a little bit more. Yeah, make it make sense. Make it make sense. Yeah. So when we look at all of these prophecies and what they seem to be aiming at,

44:45what we get at is that this text is coming together between 167 and 164 BCE, which is a period of oppression of the Jewish communities on the part of a saluted ruler named Antiochus IV Epiphanes.

45:04And this is this great, this horn that is talked about. This is the big baddie, the bad guy that's causing all this trouble.

45:15And so the scholarly consensus is that it was in this period when this text was written and we're looking back and we're setting this in a much earlier time period so that the prophecies in between the setting and the actual composition of the text seem like they're all true.

45:33And the point is kind of, particularly of the apocalyptic part is to kind of fantasize about God stepping in and pulling back the fabric of reality to show who's actually in charge to show that God is going to deliver Israel and that there's going

45:50to be this triumph over evil and Antiochus IV Epiphanes is the epitome of that evil. Is there a sense in which because I know a lot of times when you're under an oppressive ruler, you can't write directly about that oppressive

46:09ruler without being murdered or whatever. So is there a sense that they were using this historical time period that was meaningful to them as a sort of analog or as a stand-in for their current situation so that they could write about it kind of encoded

46:28language so that they didn't run afoul of Antiochus? Antiochus is that I might say? Yeah, some people say Antiochus, but that's because they don't know what they're talking about.

46:41So mean.

46:43I still have made a decision about Darius or Darius, so I'm just joking.

46:51That's certainly frequently a part of this, but there are a number of different rhetorical purposes that are converging here. One is to try to irrigate more authority to this, because if somebody just says, Antiochus IV Epiphanes is a bad dude and let's hope God comes in and saves us,

47:09that's not as effective as saying, "I found this text from this ancient prophet." And this ancient prophet says, "Don't know who this is, but there's a person who's going to be coming,

47:20who's a really bad dude and God's going to deliver us." That's a lot more powerful, that's a lot more authoritative, and so kind of injecting it with that artificial antiquity and this notion of real prophecy provides a lot more power, a lot more authority to the text.

47:39And remind me, if this is being written in the 160s, the Exilic period was in the, where was that? The 500s. The 500s, okay. Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

47:52Right, so this is the second temple has already been built, and now we're having Antiochus IV Epiphanes, threatening to destroy the second temple. He's defiling it.

48:03And so the prophecies in the earliest part of this, where we have the history of Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians and everything, the history is not incredibly accurate.

48:13We've got this Belchasar as the son of Nebuchadnezzar, which is not accurate. He was the son of Nebuchadnezzar, we have some messed up things going on there.

48:23There, then we get the Medes, who were never involved in Babylon at all, and are only kind of a historical relic of a Persian memory.

48:34And so this is coming from the Persian period, and then we're getting the most accuracy and the most detail once we get down to this big, bad ruler who's going to come in.

48:44And then Antiochus IV Epiphanes dies around 164, 163 BCE, and the deliverance of God that is prophesied, that is on the doorstep, never materializes.

49:00And so that's what makes that period the most likely period of composition. We have Greek loan words in the text, we have Persian loan words in the text, but let's talk a little bit about how scholars have reconstructed how this came together.

49:16Because it was not just a dude in 167 BCE who sat down and wrote all of this. Some of these stories probably come from the late Babylonian period or the early Persian period.

49:29Especially if the text was originally in multiple languages, obviously it's not just a dude.

49:35Yeah, and this has been a difficult thing to resolve as well, and I think Carol Newsom's arguments, again, check out Carol Newsom's commentary on this if you want a fuller case.

49:46But I think she makes a good case for how we got the languages the way they were, because they don't align with how scholars think the text came together exactly.

49:55But we probably have these court tales, again, tales of conflict and tales of contest in chapters four through six that were probably in circulation late Babylonian period early Persian period.

50:10They were probably edited later on things were changed and things were added in some things were taken out.

50:16They're supplemented by additional court tales from chapters two and three. So we've got four through six is the core, and then we're going to add on chapters two through three.

50:28And then Daniel one gets added as an introduction. And now we are, and the the court tales of one through six are Aramaic. Daniel one is Hebrew. And so the introduction is coming in in Hebrew to kind of provide a reassurance that this is more native.

50:53Not this this entirely foreign thing we're in a period now where where Hebrew is part of our national identity. And so we want it to be in Hebrew. So we have a Hebrew introduction added to the beginning.

51:07And then we have, what are we going to do about seven through 12 because seven is also in Aramaic. It's eight through 12 that are in Hebrew. And so one way to solve this is to think that this apocalyptic vision in Daniel chapter seven, which is distinct from the apocalyptic visions of Daniel eight through

51:2612 was next to be added on. So it was four through six, then we get two through three, then we get the intro in chapter one, and then we get chapter seven added on in the Hellenistic period.

51:38And then we have eight through 12 that were added toward the very end. That would have probably been what was composed by the whoever was writing between 167 and 164 BCE, and they probably would have done a tiny bit of light fiddling with what came before.

52:01And that gives us a Hebrew introduction. And then we have the Aramaic stuff, which includes this late apocalyptic text. And then we go switch back to Hebrew for the author, who again wants to emphasize this, this Hebrew identity by adding eight through 12 in Hebrew at the very end.

52:21So the text probably originates some of the stories originate in the late Babylonian period, but the text primarily comes together in the Persian and Hellenistic period and it's finalized between around 167 and 164 BCE.

52:38You know, it's funny. I said at the beginning of this of this episode that I sensed that it was multiple people writing. I think it's interesting that because once you tune your mind to, this doesn't have to be written by the same people.

52:57You know, once you're thinking along those lines, it becomes obvious when not always, but it frequently becomes obvious when something has like, whoa, we have just made a major shift.

53:11It's very unlikely that this was the same thing.

53:15Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's a dogma that a lot of scholars have to wrestle with, because on the devotional side of things you want it to all be from one author, you want it to be historical and historically accurate.

53:31And that's a difficult thing to kind of maintain and also engage with the text as it is.

53:37It's just, you can't make sense of a lot of this unless you are open to multiple authorship. And once you are open to multiple authorship, so much stuff falls into place.

53:49It's not all perfect. There are still complexities. There are still arguments about, well, how do we solve this issue and for instance, chapter seven being added after the introduction of chapter one and before chapters eight through 12.

54:03Like, that's not how all scholars resolve this, but I think that's, that's the one that makes the most sense to me.

54:08But yeah, if, if you're not open to multiple authorship, then you're forced to try to impose these assumptions upon the text to make the text make sense.

54:18And you can't really make it make sense as a single production of the early to mid, early to late Babylonian period. I mean, Daniel is writing stories for 80 years if we, if we take all this seriously.

54:36And, and there's just not a way to make that make sense.

54:48And it's, it's a wonderful, like sort of microcosm to look at these issues, these issues of, of, of multi-vocality and, and you know, it's, it's, it's a great place to sort of localize that discussion because it is so different.

55:11You know, it makes so many leaps and I love hearing about, you know, the Persian period and the Babylonian period. Like, that's actually really cool when you think about it in those terms.

55:22Oh, it's, it's fascinating. And one of the things I love to hear from, from fans of my social media content is how much more interesting the Bible becomes when you're open to this.

55:35Folks who have never taken the Bible seriously are fascinated by these things when they're approached critically. And, and one more thing that I didn't mention but our earliest textual witness to the book of Daniel is from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

55:50And paleographically has been dated to around 115 ish BCE. In other words, only about 50 years removed from the actual composition of the text. And so it quickly, most likely it very quickly became a very popular text.

56:11If we already have copies at Kumran within 50 years of its composition. Wait, sorry, I suddenly I'm realizing we so is that Dead Sea Scroll attestation of Daniel.

56:27Is that one document written in both the Hebrew and the Aramaic?

56:33I think we only have fragments of it. Okay. And so I don't know that we have a single manuscript that preserves both Hebrew and Aramaic but that seems to be our earliest attestation where we have everything preserved. Yeah.

56:47Oh, I think I forgot to mention as well, or at least I may not have accurately represented. There is a theory that chapter one was added in Aramaic but then translated into Hebrew. Okay. So, so that is another thing that could have happened.

57:05Um, but I don't remember if we have a manuscript that preserves both Hebrew and Aramaic from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Somebody went over to me. I blame the whole Aramaic thing on the Chaldeans. I think that they were they were.

57:19Can I just say I had to go down a little Chaldeans rabbit hole. Yeah, because as I was reading it, I was, you know, in chapter two, it says, so the king commanded that the magicians, the enchanters, the sorcerers and the Chaldeans be summoned.

57:32And I was like, wait a minute, I'm going to look up what a Chaldeans is. And I'm only saying it right because you already corrected me before we started the show. It's not Chaldeans, but it's Chaldeans. Anyway, I looked that up.

57:43Because I'm like, Oh, what kind of magic user is a Chaldeans? No, it's just, it's they're from a different country.

57:51Yeah, a different part of the Babylonian Empire. So it would have been a different ethnic group.

57:56It just feels like so they commanded the magicians, the enchanters, the sorcerers and the Canadians to come in.

58:03Like it just felt so weird that they were just that that was just a sort of geographic group of people. I don't understand that.

58:09Apparently the Chaldeans were very, very mystical.

58:13Well, yeah, they would associate different ethnic groups with different different talents and different industries and things like that.

58:21So, you know, the Iranians were all astrologers. So, right. That's right. Yeah. So the three wise men will get to them.

58:28The Maga. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Oh, and there weren't three of them. Anyway, we'll get to that.

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