If Daniel predicted that a messianic
age would ensure at the end of Antiochus’s reign, which is the view of those
who hold the Maccabean date of writing, how could later Jewish believers who
observed that this event failed to materialize accept the book as divinely
inspired? The Septuagint translators and Qumran scribes lived only decades
after Daniel was supposedly written, and they considered Daniel canonical. Yet
Antiochus had come and gone, and the messianic age had not arrived. The book’s
pronouncement were proven to be fallacious. These Jewish scholars were
certainly acquainted with Deut 18;22: “If what a prophet proclaims in the name
of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has
not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously.” If Daniel had predicated
the arrival of the messianic age immediately after Antiochus’s death, the book
would have been thoroughly discredited in the eyes of Jewish believers. It
would never have found its way into the canon but would have suffered the same
fate as the other pseudoprophetic books of that period. (Stephen R. Miller, Daniel:
An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture [The New
American Commentary 18; Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1994], 37)
