Book of Daniel

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A young exile reads a king’s dream that the king himself cannot recall, and tells him what it means: a colossal statue of gold, silver, bronze, and iron, struck at the feet by a stone cut from no human hand, the whole image shattered to chaff while the stone grows into a mountain that fills the earth. That dream, in the second chapter, sets the terms for everything the book will say. The Book of Daniel joins a set of court tales to a sequence of apocalyptic visions and draws from both a single claim — that the violent succession of empires is already mapped and counted, and that a kingdom not raised by human hands will outlast all of them. It is named for its visionary protagonist, the Judean carried into exile, but the book is a thing in its own right: a short text of twelve chapters whose afterlife is out of all proportion to its length.

Two halves

The text falls plainly in two. The first six chapters are stories set in the Babylonian and Persian courts, where Daniel and his three companions keep faith under foreign kings. A young captive refuses the royal table and thrives on plain fare; he reads the dream of the four-metal statue that no court diviner can recover; three men walk unburned in the furnace stoked seven times hot, a fourth figure beside them; Nebuchadnezzar is driven from his throne to graze like an ox until he confesses heaven’s rule; a hand writes on the plaster of Belshazzar’s feast the words mene, mene, tekel, parsin — numbered, numbered, weighed, divided — and that night the city falls; and Daniel, thrown to the lions for praying against an irrevocable decree, is found at dawn untouched. These are tales of the diaspora: a counsel for living faithfully under a power one cannot overthrow, where the empire’s own god-kings are made to bow.

The last six chapters change voice and key. They are first-person visions in Daniel’s own mouth, and the empires that were backdrop to the tales now rise as monsters. Four beasts come up out of a churning sea — lion, bear, leopard, and a fourth too terrible to name, with iron teeth and ten horns. Thrones are set, and the Ancient of Days takes his seat, his garment white as snow, the books opened; the beasts are stripped of dominion. Then, with the clouds of heaven, comes one like a son of man, brought before the Ancient of Days and given an everlasting kingdom that shall not pass away. A ram and a he-goat enact the wars of Persia and Greece; an angel measures out seventy weeks of years; a long final survey runs through the kings of the north and south to a tyrant who sets up the abomination that makes desolate. The vision ends with the dead waking from the dust, some to everlasting life and some to everlasting contempt — and Daniel told to seal the words until the time of the end.

The bilingual seam

Daniel is bilingual in a way no other biblical book has matched. It opens in Hebrew, shifts into Aramaic at the moment the Babylonian wise men begin to speak (2:4), stays in Aramaic through the whole central span, and returns to Hebrew at the start of chapter eight. The seam does not fall where the genres divide: the Aramaic carries the last of the court tales and the first of the visions alike, crossing the book’s main hinge at chapter seven. Scholars have long read this as a deliberate architecture rather than an accident of compilation. In a study from 1972 André Lenglet set out the case that chapters two through seven form a single concentric unit — a chiasm in which the two visions of four kingdoms (chapters two and seven) frame two tales of deliverance (the furnace and the lions’ den), which in turn frame two judgments on a Babylonian king (chapters four and five). On that reading the four-kingdom vision of chapter seven answers the four-metal statue of chapter two across the whole arch, and the book’s structure restates its argument before a word of interpretation is added.

Two registers of time

On the visions’ setting the registers diverge sharply, and the divergence is the book’s most discussed feature. The text presents itself as the work of a sixth-century exile, a counselor to Babylon and to the Persians who followed, foreseeing centuries he did not live to see. Critical scholarship reads it the other way. The visions describe the remote past in broad strokes and the second century BCE in fine, accurate detail — the marriages and campaigns of Hellenistic kings, the desecration of the Jerusalem temple — until, at the projected death of the persecutor in chapter eleven, the precision fails and the forecast does not match the event. From that seam scholars date the apocalyptic chapters to the persecution under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, between roughly 167 and 164 BCE: the king who outlawed the Jewish cult, rededicated the temple to Olympian Zeus, and set up on the altar what chapter eleven calls the abomination that makes desolate. The book is then a vaticinium ex eventu — past events written as prophecy spoken long before, so that the one genuinely future thing it claims, the end of the tyrant and the kingdom that follows, would carry the authority of everything it had already foretold. The court tales likely circulated earlier as diaspora wisdom; the visions were composed to answer a present catastrophe, and the two bodies were bound into one book in the heat of that crisis.

On this reading the four kingdoms are Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece — the last figured by the iron legs of the statue and the fourth beast — and the stone that breaks them, the kingdom raised by no human hand, is the hope the book was written to sustain. The crisis it answered is the one the books of the Maccabees narrate from the other side, as revolt; Daniel answers it not with the sword but with a map of time in which the sword is already counted out.

Canon and versions

Where Daniel sits in the Bible depends on whose Bible it is. In the Jewish Tanakh the book stands among the Ketuvim, the Writings, placed near the close of the canon between Esther and Ezra–Nehemiah rather than among the Prophets — for the prophetic office is the bearer of the prophet’s direct oracle, the word delivered as from the mouth of the Lord, and Daniel speaks instead as a reader and recipient of dreams and visions, a seer at court. The Greek and Latin churches, following the Septuagint, set it instead among the Prophets, as the last of the major prophets after Ezekiel, and read its visions as forward-looking in the strict sense. The same book occupies two different places in the architecture of revelation, and the two placements encode two judgments about what kind of book it is.

The Greek tradition also carries more of it. Against the twelve chapters of the Hebrew-Aramaic text stand two longer Greek versions — the Old Greek and the later revision attributed to Theodotion, which the church came to prefer — and both include three passages absent from the Masoretic Text: the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men, inserted into the furnace scene of chapter three; the tale of Susanna and the elders; and Bel and the Dragon, in which Daniel exposes two cults as frauds. Catholic and Orthodox canons receive these additions as scripture; the Jewish and most Protestant canons do not, ranking them instead among the Apocrypha. The eight manuscripts of Daniel recovered from Qumran — among the most-attested books in the Dead Sea Scrolls library — preserve the language seam exactly where the received text shows it, and the oldest of them dates to the late second century BCE, within a lifetime of the crisis the visions answer.

What the book gave the world

Few short texts have cast a longer shadow over how the West has imagined the end. Daniel is the seedbed of apocalyptic literature in the strict sense — the genre of a heavenly disclosure, mediated by an angel, of the hidden shape of history and its term — and it supplies that genre’s working vocabulary. The succession of empires; the beasts from the sea; the throne of judgment and the opened books; the angel Gabriel, named here for the first time as the interpreter who comes to explain a vision the seer cannot read — all of these enter the tradition through this book. So does resurrection: chapter twelve, with its sleepers waking from the dust to life or to contempt, is the first plain statement in the Hebrew scriptures that the dead will rise to judgment, a hinge in the development of Second Temple Judaism and the eschatologies that grew from it.

Its single most consequential phrase is the one like a son of man. In Daniel the figure who comes with the clouds is a human likeness set against the bestial empires, given the dominion the beasts are stripped of — and whether it names the faithful people, an angelic prince, or a coming deliverer is left open. The Gospels take it up as a title: at his trial Jesus answers the high priest by joining the son of man coming on the clouds (Daniel 7) to the figure seated at God’s right hand, and the chapter becomes a charter of Christian hope. The Revelation of John draws on Daniel throughout — the beast, the thrones, the sealed scroll, the reign that follows judgment. The adjacent visionary literature of the era, above all the Book of Enoch, develops the same heavenly courts and the same son-of-man figure in parallel, so that Daniel stands not alone but at the center of a whole library of disclosed ends.

The four-kingdom scheme had the longest career of all. Read as a calendar of world history rather than a coded portrait of one crisis, it became a master key by which later readers located their own moment on the road to the end: the four empires of the statue were stretched to reach Rome and beyond, and the political doctrine of a translatio imperii — empire passing in sequence toward a final order — traces its root to Daniel’s second chapter. Medieval and early-modern millenarians returned again and again to its numbered days and sealed visions, reading the seventy weeks and the time, times, and half a time as a clock that could be set against their own age; the abbot Joachim of Fiore built his great scheme of the ages on the same Danielic frame. Esoteric readers treated the book as a cipher deliberately closed — “seal the words until the time of the end” — and so as one written for a reader not yet born. To this day it furnishes the standing furniture of how the end is pictured: the kingdom of God that comes from outside the world to end the empires, and the dead raised to meet it.

The book and its readers

The scholarly recovery of Daniel turned on reading its prophecy backward from its own present. The two standard critical commentaries in English remain Louis F. Hartman and Alexander A. Di Lella’s The Book of Daniel in the Anchor Bible series (Doubleday, 1978), which sets the Maccabean dating in full philological detail, and John J. Collins’s volume in the Hermeneia series (Fortress Press, 1993), the fullest English commentary on the book in more than half a century, which reads it against the apocalyptic literature, the Pseudepigrapha, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. André Lenglet’s 1972 study of the concentric structure of chapters two through seven framed the later debate over whether the bilingual seam is a literary design or a fault line of composition. The additions carried only in Greek — Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, the Song of the Three — are surveyed in the critical literature on the Septuagint and its later revision by Theodotion, and the question of which Greek Daniel the early church actually read remains a live matter of textual scholarship. The Aramaic Apocalypse from Qumran (4Q246), whose surviving lines name a son of God and the Most High in a Danielic frame, anchors the figure of the son of man in the second-century milieu that produced the visions, and is read alongside the canonical chapter as part of a common stock of imagery rather than as derivative of it.

Beneath the dream-reading and the beasts, the book stakes a single wager about time: that history has a shape and a term, that the powers which present themselves as absolute are already numbered and weighed and divided, and that what is sealed now will be made legible at the close. The statue stands gleaming and enormous, and the stone that no hand cut is already in motion toward its feet; the empires keep their hour, and the hour is counted. That is the book’s last word to its reader — not that the end is near or far, but that it is fixed, and that the faithful are to keep the words until it comes.

→ In the library: Charles — The Book of Enoch (1912) · Charles — The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913)

→ Related: Eschatology · Revelation · Kingdom Of God · Gabriel · Emanation · Apocalypse · Book Of Enoch · Second Temple Judaism · Tanakh · Joachimite Apocalypticism