Daniel in the lion den

Unbelievers reject the traditional date and authorship of Daniel.

i) In theory, Daniel could be written much later, and still be historical, as well as prophetic. By way of comparison, take Donald Weinstein’s recent biography of Girolamo Savonarola, Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (Yale University Press, 2011).

Imagine a “skeptic” using the following argument:

Since this “biography” was written centuries after the fact, the Quattrocento setting is obviously fictional. Likewise, since the book was published in 2011, the prophecies attributed to Savonarola are clearly vaticina ex eventu.

Indeed, on linguistic considerations alone, this is fictional. After all, it’s quite impossible that a 15C Italian monk spoke English, yet all of the sayings attributed to Savonarola are in English!

ii) But let’s examine the liberal objection from another angle. If Daniel is really about events during the Maccabean period, why would the author situate the story during the 6C Babylonian Exile?

One liberal explanation might be that it would be politically hazardous for the writer to directly attack the Seleucid regime. That would be seditious. That would expose him and his readers to reprisal on a charge of high treason. So he veils his attack as a political allegory, set in a bygone era.

iii) At first blush, that seems logical, but it’s immediately beset by problems when we compare the liberal explanation to the actual text. For Dan 1-6 doesn’t read like a political allegory of the Antiochean crisis. According to extrabiblical sources–the very sources which unbelievers rely on to “disprove” Daniel–Antiochus ordered the destruction of the Hebrew Scriptures, forbad circumcision, kosher food, and Sabbath-keeping. On top of that, he desecrated the Temple by sacrificing pigs on the altar.

But if Dan 1-6 constitute a political allegory of the Antiochean crisis, then we’d expect the narrative to have a central, juicey villain who does things comparable to Antiochus. Yet Nebuchadnezzar, Darius, and Cyrus are depicted in a fairly sympathetic light. Hardly the arch-villain of Antiochean proportions. The only bad guy is Belshazzar, and his career is cut short.

For his part, Nebuchadnezzar isn’t attempting to suppress the Jewish religion. That didn’t even occur to him. The command to prostrate oneself before the golden statue doesn’t specifically target the Jewish captives. Rather, it’s directed at Babylonian bureaucrats, as a way in which his official subordinates pledge their fealty to the monarch. Daniel’s friends are swept up in this because they happen to be courtiers, and not because they are Jewish, per se.

Chaps 1-6 contain other examples of palace intrigue, but that cutthroat treachery is pretty generic for life at court.

In fact, liberals like Collins and Goldingay admit that chaps 1-6 don’t mesh with a Maccabean sitz-im-leben. They date that to the Persian period.

Put another way, they dispute the unity of Daniel. They think chaps 1-6 were composed independently. But other issues to one side, if chaps 1-6 aren’t allegorizing the Antiochean persecution, then that dissolves the rationale for a fictional, Babylonian setting, at which historical distance the author can safely critique the contemporary policies of Antiochus Epiphanes.