Book of Daniel

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The Book of Daniel is a book of the Hebrew Bible — placed among the Prophets in Christian Bibles and among the Writings in the Jewish canon — that joins a set of court tales to a sequence of apocalyptic visions, and from them draws a single claim: that the violent succession of empires is already mapped, and that a kingdom not raised by human hands will outlast all of them.

The text falls in two halves. The first six chapters are stories set in the Babylonian and Persian courts, where Daniel and his companions keep faith under foreign kings — the fiery furnace, the writing on the wall, the den of lions, the interpretation of dreams no court magician can read. The last six are visions in Daniel’s own voice: four beasts rising from the sea, a succession of world-empires figured as a great statue, and a court of judgment in which “one like a son of man” is brought before the Ancient of Days and given everlasting dominion. The book is also bilingual in a way no other has matched, shifting from Hebrew into Aramaic at chapter two and back to Hebrew at chapter eight, a seam scholars still weigh.

On the visions’ setting the registers diverge sharply. The book presents itself as the work of a sixth-century exile under Nebuchadnezzar and his successors. Critical scholarship, reading the precise detail the visions give of the second century and the vagueness of their projected end, dates the apocalyptic chapters instead to the persecution under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV around 167–164 BCE — making Daniel a work that encodes its own present as prophecy spoken long before. On that reading the four kingdoms are Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece, and the kingdom that breaks the others is the hope the book was written to sustain.

Few short texts have cast a longer shadow. Daniel supplies the Western apocalyptic vocabulary — the sequence of empires, the resurrection of the dead named plainly for the first time in the Hebrew scriptures, the angel Gabriel as interpreter of visions — and the Revelation of John draws on it directly. The phrase “son of man” passed into the Gospels as a title; the four-kingdom scheme became a master key by which later readers, Jewish and Christian alike, tried to locate their own moment on a fixed calendar of the end. Esoteric and millenarian movements returned to its numbered days and sealed visions repeatedly, treating the book as a cipher awaiting its hour.

What the book holds out, beneath the dream-reading and the beasts, is a wager about time: that history has a shape and a term, that the powers that seem absolute are counted and provisional, and that what is hidden now will be made legible at the close. Whether that close is read as imminent, distant, or already accomplished has divided its readers for two thousand years.

→ 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