Sunday, January 21, 2024

Stephen R. Miller vs. claim Daniel Predicted a Messianic Age beginning at the end of Antiochus's Reign

  

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)