G. SECOND-CENTURY DATE
With this discussion in the background, there are several internal
features of Dan 7–12 that suggest a date of composition between the late fourth
and mid-second century BCE in the context of the reigns of the Diadochi and the
persecutions of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The references to Daniel in the Dead
Sea Scrolls and the books of Maccabees offer a rough terminus ad quem for the composition of the visions. They do very
little, however, to adjudicate between an early and a late date of composition.
There is no preestablished interval of time needed between a writing down of a
text and its reference or copying in later documents. The assessment of date of
composition must come, then, from evidence internal to the visions themselves.
Below, we will assess the arguments for a date of composition between the
fourth and second centuries BCE, including Daniel’s historical focus, cultural
references, anachronistic minutiae, features of the Qumran manuscript evidence,
and genre.
1. Historical Focus, Genre, and Tenor
We argued above that the court tales likely preserve traditions that
originated in the context of the Babylonian court. The visions differ markedly
from the court tales, however, in their historical focus, genre, and tenor. The
court tales focus their content almost entirely on events that take place in
the late Neo-Babylonian and early Persian Empires, while the focus of the
visions is entirely on events that take place in the Hellenistic period, the
succession of the Diadochi and the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The way in
which gentile rulers are portrayed also shifts dramatically between the first
and second halves of the book. The Babylonian rulers are presented as somewhat
capricious and heavy-handed in their punishments of choice, but they are also
malleable, and each story ends with their acknowledgment in one way or another
to the Jewish deity and a respect for the various Jewish protagonists. The
perspective on gentile rule described in the court tales aligns more directly
with what one might expect from a Judean audience living under Babylonian or
Persian rule. External records that have been recovered from the sixth-century
Judean settlement Al-Yahudu, immediately outside Babylon, support an ambivalent
or even positive understanding of Babylonian kings. These records demonstrate
that many of the Jewish exiles lived in comfortable communities where they
pursued jobs, owned land, and generally prospered. These records do not alter
the difficulties of living under foreign rule or the reality that the events
surrounding the exile, the defeat and destruction of Jerusalem and its walls,
and the deportation of a significant segment of the city’s population between
597 and 586 BCE were deeply traumatic events that left an indelible mark on the
writings and theology of the Old Testament, and on its portrayal of the
Babylonian kings.166 But it does highlight a potential cultural
shift that corresponds to the relatively ambivalent and occasionally positive
portrayal of the Babylonian kings in the court tales, as compared to the
portrayal of gentile rulers in the visions. Any positive shifts on the part of
foreign kings are markedly absent from the visions, where kings instead set
themselves wholeheartedly against God and his followers, and the eventual
vindication of God’s people comes at the end of time rather than within the
narrative structure itself.
The result of this shift in focus and presentation suggests that the
visions of Daniel presuppose Jews living under Hellenistic rule as their
primary audience. The visions speak directly into the context of the
persecutions endured by the Jews under the succession of the Diadochi (Dan 7,
see commentary) and late Seleucid kings. They are designed to speak directly
into that context and to assure a beleaguered community of the assurance of
God’s victory over evil despite the ongoing presence of current suffering. This
claim to a particular implied audience (an extension of Wayne Booth’s “implied
reader”) is affirmed through internal evidence within the visions: Daniel
preserves the matter “in his mind” (Dan 7:28); the angelic mediator commands
Daniel to “seal up the vision” (Dan 8:26) and to keep the words “secret and
sealed until the time of the end” (Dan 12:9). Such commands indicate that their
message was intended for an audience who was presently experiencing the events
contained therein. The trope of the “hidden text” accounts for an understood
distance between the character of Daniel and the intended audience of the
visions in the fourth–second centuries BCE. This trope, however, is a common
feature of the apocalyptic literature, which often ascribes the content of a
vision to a venerable figure from the past (see discussion in “VIII. Genre of
Daniel” below).
2. Issues of Culture
The visions also contain cultural ideas that become prominent in the
Persian and early Hellenistic period but were virtually nonexistent in the
Assyro-Babylonian period that preceded them. Persian ideas, particularly those
associated with Zoroastrianism, abound in the second half of the book of
Daniel. In contrast to Assyro-Babylonian polytheism, comparable in its broad
shape to the polytheism evidenced in the ancient Near East from the beginning
of writing to the middle of the first millennium, Zoroastrianism introduced a
new paradigm of operations and relationships in the divine realm.
The distinctives of Zoroastrian belief that differentiate it from
Assyro-Babylonian polytheism are numerous. Despite an idealistic monotheistic
rhetoric, Zoroastrianism remains polytheistic in the fact that it recognizes a
cosmos full of divine powers, and is distinguished by its prominent dualism,
which is the current reality for them, but not primordial.
Such dualistic ideas simply do not exist in the Babylonian world, and
yet, arguably, we meet them in full flower in the book of Daniel. Angelology,
resurrection, and postmortem judgment of the dead are present in nascent form in other witnesses from the Old
Testament. Nevertheless, the developed form of these beliefs that we see in
Daniel is of a markedly different sort, evincing a period of extensive
development between early witnesses to this belief and the form presented in
Daniel. Their presence in Daniel’s visions suggests a late Persian (at the
earliest) or Hellenistic composition of this portion of the book, since the
ideas have at this point developed extensively as compared to other witnesses
in the Hebrew Bible. It is one thing to believe future events can be predicted;
it is quite another to consider that large-scale cultural and philosophical
concepts of the future are incorporated into the description of visions, not as
predicted developments, but as assumed backdrop.
So too, Daniel demonstrates an abundance of Hellenistic cultural
ideas, ideas that simply would have been foreign to an earlier audience.
Foremost among them are the reference to the watchers and the role of angelic
beings, and the group known as the maśkîlîm
(1:4; 11:33, 35; 12:3, 10), the heroes of the Maccabean period. Paul Kosmin has
recently made a compelling case that the emphasis on the “changing of the times
and seasons” functions as a response to a specifically Seleucid development in
measuring periods of time. These concepts will be treated at length in the
commentary below as they occur in the book.
It is possible, of course, for proponents of a sixth-century dating to
argue that Daniel is simply an unusually innovative theological text, one that
prefigures and even influences significant theological and cultural
developments within Judaism and its expression. There are, however, also
several anachronistic minutiae in Daniel, details that betray a second-century
perspective in architecture or landscape and that strongly suggest an author
writing from a Hellenistic context. Daniel 8:1 sets a vision that purportedly
takes place in the “third year of the reign of King Belshazzar” in the “Citadel
of Susa,” a citadel that was not completed until the time of Xerxes in the
early fifth century (see commentary on 8:2). So too, in Dan 8:20, the ram is
identified as representing the kingdom of the “Medes and Persians.” This dual
designation for the Achaemenid Empire was not adopted until after the time of
Darius I (r. 522–486 BCE) at the earliest, though it becomes well known in the
biblical books of the fifth century. Between Cyrus and Darius I, the Achaemenid
Empire was described as the empire of the “Medes,” and after that the term
“Persian” began to be used more prominently. Based on the information currently
extant (which is considerable), Xerxes was the first to be identified as a king
of “Media and Persia.” The visions of Daniel not only describe political and
religious events that occur during the Hellenistic occupation of Judea, they
are also communicated against the architectural and political landscape of Hellenistic
Judaism. This moves the discussion well beyond the question of prophetic
prediction of events.
3. Manuscript Evidence from Qumran
The evidence of the manuscripts of Daniel from Qumran conveys the
popularity and the importance of Daniel traditions within late Second Temple
Judaism. The physical character of the manuscripts, however, might also convey
additional information about the form
of those traditions during their early transmission. Some of the manuscripts of
Daniel found at Qumran support a literary model wherein the visions were not
understood in the second and first centuries as the latter half of an already
established “book of Daniel,” but rather as part of a still-developing
anthology of Daniel traditions. Andrew Perrin points out that 4QDana
and 4QDanb, two first-century manuscripts of Daniel, preserve a
space between the end of Dan 7 (in Aramaic) and the beginning of Dan 8 (in
Hebrew). Scroll 4QDana 14, 10 includes a full line vacat, separating the two sections, and
4QDanb begins Dan 8:1 at or near the top of a column with an
extended blank space preceding it. These blank spaces appear in many other
Qumran manuscripts to indicate a division between discrete sections of a work
(see 1QapGen ar V, 28–29). The significance of these data is not that a blank
line alone suggests that the Daniel
traditions were still developing in the last centuries of the turn of the era.
The significance of this observation is that it corresponds to arguments related to genre, tenor, focus, cultural
context, and language that suggest that what we know as the book of Daniel was,
even in the second century, still an “emerging traditio[n] of thematically
related content,” in which the Hebrew visions of Dan 8–12 are the latest
component.
4. Apocalyptic Writing in the Context of Second Temple Judaism
Finally, we turn to the fully developed apocalypticism that
characterizes the visions of the latter half of the book of Daniel. Daniel 7–12
are apocalyptic texts. The earliest known comparative apocalypses apart from Daniel originate in the third
century BCE. While there are precursors to the apocalyptic genre already in the
Hebrew Bible (new genres rarely burst onto the scene fully formed), arguably
including Ezek 38–39; Isa 24–27, Joel, and portions of Zechariah, and while
apocalyptic texts demonstrate the influences of both prophetic and wisdom texts
from the Hebrew Bible, the visions in the second half of Daniel demonstrate the
closest affinities to other “historical apocalypses,” such as the Animal Apocalypse
and the Apocalypse of Weeks (third or second century BCE), 4 Ezra (first
century CE), and 2 Baruch (first century CE). While a much more thorough
treatment of the apocalyptic genre is contained below (see section VIII.C,
“Apocalyptic Literature”), Daniel’s affinity with the apocalyptic genre, which
flourished within Judaism and Christianity in the period between the third
century BCE and third century CE, contributes to the argument for a later date
for Daniel’s visions. (Aubrey E. Buster and John H. Walton, The Book of
Daniel, Chapters 1-6 [New International Commentary on the Old Testament;
Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005], 40-45)
