Six Comments on Daniel


What follows are six short exegetical comments on the Book of Daniel written for Dr. Tim Meadowcroft's postgraduate class on the Book of Daniel in the first semester of 2017 at Laidlaw College.

Contents
1. Hebrew Supremacism
2. Contest and Mystery in Daniel 2 and 4
3. The Court Conflicts
4. The First Year of King Belshazzar
5. A Return to the Sacred Language
6. The Climactic Apocalypse



The Book of Daniel: A Babylonian-Yemenite Manuscript
Edited by Shelomo Morag
1973


1. Hebrew Supremacism

As well as “set[ting] the scene for the subsequent stories of court life,”1 the first chapter of the book of Daniel does much to establish one of the many underlying themes of these subsequent stories: the racial and (especially) cultic superiority of the “conquered” Israelites over the “conquering” Babylonians. From a certain perspective, chapter one could be seen as Hebrew-supremacist propaganda.

Through a series of none-too-subtle descriptions, the author of this chapter of Daniel shows that, contrary to their present political context, the best of the best that Babylon has produced (the king, his courtiers and his wise men) were simply no match for these four impressive specimens of the royal tribe of Judah (vv. 3-6). These Hebrews actually get healthier and better looking (v. 15) and, “in all matter of wisdom and understanding … ten times better than all the [Babylonian] magicians and enchanters” (v. 20 NRSV), by refusing what is considered the best diet in the kingdom (v. 16)—the food Nebuchadnezzar himself eats (v. 5).

Given that this chapter was written in Hebrew, whereas the text containing the subsequent stories (2:4a-6:28) is written in Aramaic, the lingua franca of the ANE at the time,2 it is not unreasonable to presume this material was composed for an Israelite audience exclusively. Miller tells us that “the employment of the two languages was a deliberate device on Daniel’s part,”3 suggesting that this introductory material is in Hebrew because it gives “an account that would have been of little interest to a Gentile audience.”4 Writing in his own, relatively little-known language was also a highly effective means whereby the author could secretly express his in-group preferences to his compatriots.

In the text, the author’s jingoism is on immediate display, when he contradicts the empirical evidence of the events surrounding the siege of Jerusalem and insists that Jehoiakim was not defeated by Nebuchadnezzar’s superior might—“or the superiority of his gods, which he did not always clearly distinguish from himself”5—but was actually handed over by the superior planning and execution of the defeated king’s own God (vv. 1-2). Miller, citing Baldwin, tells us that even the descriptor the author chose to use for Babylonia was employed for the pro-Israelite polemical impact it would make on a Hebrew audience. “The land of Shinar is a deliberate archaism ... synonymous with opposition to God.”6

As for illustrating the Israelite's cultic superiority, no point of difference between their religion and that of the pagan nations could do this better than the inability of conquering idol-worshippers to capture the Hebrew God. Meadowcroft reminds us that it was “a common action for a victorious ancient near eastern king”7 to ransack a defeated nation’s temples and place some of its contents into his temple’s treasury, in order to show, as Nebuchadnezzar tried to do (v. 2d), “the superiority of his own gods.”8 It is certain that, were Israel’s God an idol of some kind, it would have been taken captive as a sign of complete victory. But, as it was, Nebuchadnezzar had to settle for the vessels of the temple; which was not a meaningless haul, by any measure, but definitely not the coup de grâce that capturing the national deity would have been.





Footnotes:


1. T. J Meadowcroft and Nate Irwin, The Book of Daniel (Singapore: Asia Theological Association, 2004), 21.
2. Stephen R. Miller, Daniel, NAC (Nashville, TN: B & H, 1994), 48.
3. Ibid., 47.
4. Ibid., 48.
5. James Montgomery Boice, Daniel: An Expositional Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2003), 15.
6. Italics in original. “Shinar, site of the tower of Babel (Gn 11:1–9; cf. 10:10), was synonymous with opposition to God; it was the place where wickedness was at home (Zc 5:11) and uprightness could expect opposition.” J. G. Baldwin, Daniel, TOTC (Downers Grove: IVP, 1978), 78, quoted in Miller, Daniel, 59.
7. Meadowcroft and Irwin, The Book of Daniel, 23.
8. Ibid.




Nebuchadnezzar
by William Blake


2. Contest and Mystery in Daniel 2 and 4

Through the events of the second and fourth chapters of Daniel several things foreshadowed in the book’s opening chapter are now realised. One of the more significant of these is the slow revelation to the king of the sovereign power and preternatural knowledge of Yahweh, what Meadowcroft calls “the process … by which Nebuchadnezzar is gradually forced to acknowledge the God of Daniel.”9 This process is foreshadowed by the ironic juxtaposition of Nebuchadnezzar’s recognition of the superior wisdom of the four young Hebrew recruits (1:20) and his ignorance as to the wisdom’s ultimate source.10 Integrally related to this is the author’s presaging his eponymous hero’s contribution to the king’s forced acknowledgement of God in these chapters, with his early remarks about Daniel’s God-given “insight into all visions and dreams” (v. 17 NRSV).11

Along with the material in chapters 3 and 5, how to classify the court tales recounted in our two chapters has been a perennial exegetical question among scholars and the subject of a great deal of debate. Gammie, bemoaning the refusal of many to consider the stories of chapters 1-6 as just as apocalyptic as those in 7-12, regrets that “they have been classified rather as court tales, popular romances, martyr legends, aretalogies, paradigmatic stories or dramatized wisdom or belonging to haggadic genre.”12 In a recent Mission Studies article, Meadowcroft uses the inclusive term “court tales of conflict and contest”13— showing possible agreement with the hermeneutical distinction Humphreys makes between the two types of court competition found in the first half of Daniel; by which metric, the tales of chapters 2 and 4 fall squarely into the “court contest” column:
In the … conflict [tale] one faction seeks the ruin of the other; the tale centers on this, and, in the resolution, the due punishment of the one and the reward of the other side are noted. In the [other type of tale] the format is that of a contest: the hero succeeds where all others fail. The resolution notes the reward of the hero, but not necessarily the punishment of those who fail (although this can be present at least as a threat, as in Daniel 2).14
In the contests of each of our two chapters, Daniel triumphs heroically because, among all the Babylonian wise men, it is to him alone God reveals the heavenly “mystery,” or “secret,” behind Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams (2:27, 30, 47; 4:6). The Aramaic term for mystery is rāz and, not surprisingly, “appears in the OT only in Dan[iel] 2; 4:6.”15 As to its etymology, it seems to be a Persian loanword, whose concept “goes back to the Hebrew term, sôd, which designates both a ‘council’ and the ‘secret decisions’ rendered in the council.”16 Several times in the preexilic Jewish literature, sôd was used to refer to the heavenly decisions and decrees of God’s council.17 From this, the postexilic literature developed the “concept of the divine mysteries or secrets (designated by sôd or rāz in Hebrew, and by mystērion in Greek) concerning a large variety of things which God reveals to men, often in symbolic language.”18 For the later Qumran community, Goldingay tells us, rāz “[became] almost a technical term for an enigma that can only be interpreted by God’s revelation, and particularly for God’s hidden purpose at work in history ….”19

Through his use of the literary device of internal foreshadowing and revelation, the “omniscient narrator” of Daniel becomes a reflection in miniature of the foreshadowing and revealing God he glorifies in chapters 2 and 4. So, too, in using his authorial sovereignty to weave his major motif throughout the events of these chapters, he mirrors the very sovereignty of God that constitutes that major motif.





Footnotes:


9. Ibid., 37.
10. Ibid.
11. “This statement is borne out in subsequent narratives.” Ibid., 36.
12. John G. Gammie, “The Classification, Stages of Growth, and Changing Intentions in the Book of Daniel,” JBL 95 (June 1976): 191–2.
13. T. J Meadowcroft, “‘Belteshazzar, Chief of the Magicians’ (NRSV Daniel 4:9): Explorations in Identify and Context from the Career of Daniel,” Mission Studies 33 (2016): 26.
14. W. Lee Humphreys, “A Life-Style for Diaspora: A Study of the Tales of Esther and Daniel,” JBL 92 (June 1973): 219.
15. Goldingay is using Hebrew Bible verse numbers. In the English OT, those verses are 2:18, 19, 27, 28, 29, 30, 47, 4:9 [6]. John E. Goldingay, Daniel, WBC 30 (Waco, TX: Word, 1989), 47.
16. Louis Francis Hartman and Alexander A. Di Lella, eds., The Book of Daniel, AB 23 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2008), 139–140.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Goldingay, Daniel, 47.




Greek Manuscript of the Book of Daniel
circa 200 C.E.


3. The Court Conflicts

In Chapter 6, the same Darius introduced at the end of the previous chapter (5:31) is found installing “throughout [his] whole kingdom … three presidents, including Daniel [and] one hundred and twenty satraps” (6:1 NRSV). It is in this administrative capacity, we are told, that Daniel distinguishes himself above his peers (v.3); as opposed to chapters 2, 4 and 5, where he rises to prominence thorough his superlative divining of dreams. Whatever the exact duties of Daniel’s role, the same “excellent spirit” (5:12) that accounted for his talent as an interpreter of dreams, endowed him with all the commendable characteristics of an exemplary civil servant (vv. 4-5).20 While admitting that the meaning of the Aramaic sarkin (“presidents”), a “loanword from Persian,”21 is not entirely clear, Meadowcroft is comfortable in preferring the gloss “chief ministers” over the NIV’s “administrators.”22 As well, the word is generic enough for Goldingay to conclude it is “apparently not a technical term.”23 That notwithstanding, the term’s semantic domain includes enough statecraft to make it compatible with the political context the author is establishing to house Daniel’s coming court conflict.24

Daniel’s excellent spirit also gives him enough faith to endure this coming court conflict with courage and equanimity, in the same way that Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego faced the furnace in chapter 3 (no embarrassing “unknotting” for Hebrew heroes, as there is with Belshazzar in 5:625). Hartman and Di Lella outline clearly the similarities of these parallel martyr stories. In both, the protagonists “are willing to suffer death rather than deny their faith [and] are saved from death by God’s intervention, [the antagonists] suffer the dire fate that had been intended for the martyrs, [and eventually] the pagan king profess[es] his faith in the God of Israel.”26 The stories also share “the common motif of Oriental tales about rival courtiers.”27

That being said however, the stories also have several interesting dissimilarities. There are the obvious differences like the number of protagonists, the pagan kings and their reactions to the heroes’ supposed transgressions and guilty verdicts—Nebuchadnezzar was contorted with rage (3:15), whereas Darius was inconsolably distressed (6:14, 18)—and “the nature of the threatened punishment[s]”28 were widely divergent. A less obvious difference is the positive and negative aspect to the way the protagonists fail the religious tests to which they are subjected. The action in chapter 3 is negative, in that “the three Jewish men refuse to participate in idolatrous worship.”29 In chapter 6, Daniel fails the test through positive action, by “continu[ing] to practice his Jewish religion even after it is proscribed by the pagan king.”30

Another similar element of the two events not mentioned above is the intervention by a mysterious figure that appears, deus ex machina, to assist our heroes at the moment of seemingly certain death. Although only named as such in chapter 6, there is little doubt that, in both the fiery furnace (3:25) and the lion pit (6:22), the figures are angels sent by God as divine protectors.31 It is possible that the reason the figure is correctly identified in the second ordeal is because, internally, it is Daniel, rather than Nebuchadnezzar, who is reporting what happened. Controversially, Miller suggests it is more likely that the angel with Daniel was not just “a member of the angelic host, but … the divine angelic messenger [himself], the angel of the Lord.”32 As he tells us in his interpretation of the other angelic being, Millar's “angel of the Lord” refers to “God himself in the person of his Son Jesus Christ.”33 Be that as it may, in both cases, the salvation was complete; not the slightest evidence of injury was found on any of the Jewish heroes (3:27; 6:23c).





Footnotes:


20. Meadowcroft and Irwin, The Book of Daniel, 118.
21. HALOT, s.v. סְרַךְ.
22. Meadowcroft and Irwin, The Book of Daniel, 117; So, too, Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 192–3.
23. Goldingay, Daniel, 120, referencing R. G. Kent, Old Persian (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1950).
24. “Chap. 6 is a tale of court conflict and intrigue … the story of the fall and rehabilitation of a minister of state,” Goldingay, Daniel, 122; Humphreys, “A Life-Style,” 219, distinguishes court conflicts from court contests. The former involve “one faction seek[ing] the ruin of the other;” the latter, a “hero succeeds where all others fail.”
25. Meadowcroft and Irwin, The Book of Daniel, 103.
26. Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 196.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 197.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Meadowcroft and Irwin, The Book of Daniel, 129.
32. Miller, Daniel, 129.
33. Ibid., 123–4.




One of four cuneiform-inscribed cylinders of Nabonidus
discovered at Ur in 1854 by J.G. Taylor


4. The First Year of King Belshazzar

The first interpretive detail to give us pause in chapter 7 is the regnal dating of the opening verse. From the outset, the book’s inner chronology doubles back from the end of chapter 6, “the early years of the reign of Darius the Mede … to the first year of Belshazzar’s reign [somewhere] between [the time of] chs. 4 and 5.”34 Thus reset, it continues forward into the future through the next five chapters and records, in order, another “[vision] during the [third year] of Belshazzar, one in the first year of Darius and … one in the third year of Cyrus.”35 In abruptly halting the narrative flow with this backward leap in time, and then carrying on sequentially, it is possible that the final redactor was structuring Daniel 7 to function “as the ‘literary hinge’ on which the [entire] book swings.”36 As Meadowcroft and Irwin note, while its genre and content point “forward to the visions of the rest of the book,”37 linguistically, literarily and thematically, chapter 7 harkens back to the tales and trials of the previous chapters.38Lacocque would agree, speaking as he does of “the parallels between chapter 7 and chapter 2,”39 whilst at the same time declaring that “the vision reported in chapter 7 … constitutes the veritable centre of the book.”40 If the chapter is the hinge, the vision is the hinge pin.

While the chronological shift might indeed suit some greater function served by the chapter, this need not have been its original purpose. The dating here (and that of the proceeding chapters) might simply be historically accurate, that is, the actual date when Daniel had his vision.41 Miller appears to accept the date at face value when he speculates on “God’s reason for choosing Belshazzar’s first year [in which] to reveal this vision.”42 Perhaps, Miller suggests, in order to allay the concerns held by the exiled Hebrews regarding their fate under the newly ascended Belshazzar, “the vision was imparted to assure [them] that they were secure [and that] Israel would survive and play an important role in the end times.”43 Yet the book’s obvious composite nature, the persistent questions regarding its historicity and time of final redaction, as well as the high likelihood of its being pseudepigraphical, all militate strongly against the possibility that the dating is not serving editorial ends.44 As does the conspicuous coincidence of all four apocalyptic visions occurring in either the first or third years of their respective monarch’s reigns.45 Meadowcroft and Irwin wonder, not unreasonably, whether the dating might not be the result of literary considerations, rather than historical ones; “that [it] reflects a literary convention wherein significant [events] are ascribed to particular regnal years.”46 This makes sense, and is consistent with the habitual preferencing of the narrative above chronological exactness that we see done throughout the Book of Daniel.47

This editorial prioritizing is also evident in the attribution of the regnal year to Belshazzar, as he was not technically the king, but only the coregent of the king.48 He was also the king’s son, as is noted in 5:2, 11 and 18. Contrary to chapter 5, however, we know from an inscribed cylinder discovered in 1854 in “Ur of the Chaldeans” (Gen 11:28), that the father of Bēl-šarra-uṣur (a transliteration of the Akkadian form of Belshazzar) was not Nebuchadnezzar, but Nabonidus (556-539 B.C.E), his forth successor.49 From one of Nabonidus’ own Harran stelae found in 1956, we know that he spent a decade away from his throne in a place in the Arabian desert called “Tema,” leaving his son in charge back in Babylon.50 It seems likely that the first year of Nabonidus’ decade-long absence was chapter 7’s “first year of king Belshazzar of Babylon.”





Footnotes:


34. Carol A. Newsom, Daniel: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2014), 215.
35. Meadowcroft and Irwin, The Book of Daniel, 133.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. André Lacocque, The Book of Daniel (Atlanta: John Knox, 1979), 123.
40. Ibid., 122.
41. Meadowcroft and Irwin, The Book of Daniel, 134.
42. Miller, Daniel, 194.
43. Ibid.
44. See, for example, Newsom, Daniel, 6–12; Lacocque, The Book of Daniel, 1–12.
45. Meadowcroft and Irwin, The Book of Daniel, 134.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. This is not unusual. “Belshazzar had had the kingship in Babylon entrusted to him and it is natural enough for a Jewish story to be dated by his years.” Goldingay, Daniel, 159.
49. Matthias Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar: The Ancient Near Eastern Origins and Early History of Interpretation of Daniel 4 (Boston: Brill, 1999), 57–58.
50. James Bennett Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 562–563.




Modern Aramaic text of Daniel


5. A Return to the Sacred Language

The canonical text of Daniel chapter 8 is written in Hebrew, marking the end of the Aramaic portion of the book (2:4b-7:28).51 In chapter 2, the segue from Hebrew to Aramaic—the language of the Chaldeans—is crafted into a natural occurrence of the narration by use of the phrase “The Chaldeans said to the king (in Aramaic)” (v. 4a NRSV), whereas in chapter eight the change is abrupt and without editorial comment. In both cases, however, the reasons for continuing in the newly adopted languages are equally uncertain.52 One’s preferred explanation for this will depend to a great extent on one’s views regarding the book’s composition vis-à-vis authorship, dating, and final redaction. For example, Miller, apparently in support of the more traditionalist view, suggests that Daniel’s choice of language was contingent upon the relevance a respective section would have to its target audience.53 The material of interest only to Jews is in Hebrew; the material “concern[ing] Gentile kings whose activities would have been of interest to a world audience [is] written in a language that non-Jews could understand.”54 An author whose facility with the language of his youth had been impaired by his operating in an Aramaic world into his old age would certainly explain the “clumsy and almost tortuous”55 Hebrew encountered throughout the book.

Lacocque, on the other hand, is a proponent of the more contemporary view of a single pseudonymous redactor in the Maccabean period (168 B.C.E—63 C.E.) compiling various older Daniel court tales with his own freshly authored material.56 For him, “the ‘Aramaic’ mentioned in Daniel 2.4b … symbolizes the foreign language Daniel learned at the royal court.”57 In this, he endorses Plöger’s idea that “the languages [used] correspond to the book’s fundamental structure [whereby the] kinship of chapters 2 and 4, 3 and 6, and 2 and 7 [resulted in] these chapters [being] written in a common [Aramaic] tongue.”58 Anticipating critique, Lacocque grants that chapter 8 also shares a strong kinship with chapter 7, but then insists that its switch to Hebrew is justified because, for the first time in Daniel, “Israel moves into the foreground.”59 Contra Miller’s notion of bilingual authorship, Lacocque believes it is crucial to grasp that the middling Hebrew material was originally composed in Aramaic and then translated by the final redactor.60

Porteous seems most comfortable with the idea of a single second century B.C.E. author, strongly endorsing as he does Rowley’s suggestion that the languages were chosen because their respective sections were written at different times for different purposes.61 According to this theory, the first to be composed were the Aramaic parts: starting with chapters 2-6, “to encourage those … suffering under … Antiochus Epiphanes;”62 then chapter 7.63 Next came the Hebrew material: the eschatological visions and the 1-2:4 introduction which replaced the first part of chapter 2.64 Proteus also makes note of the less skillful Hebrew of chapters 8-12, describing the “literary style [as] noticeably inferior.”65 Rather than seeing this as evidence of another hand, he simply attributes it to “the [same] writer’s being more at home in Aramaic than in Hebrew.”66 In spite of this linguistic discomfort, the author wrote in Hebrew in hopes of imbuing “his detailed pronouncements on contemporary history [with] authority by [writing them] in the sacred language.”67

A final word must be said about the superior quality of the Hebrew of Daniel’s prayer in 9:4-20. Unlike all the other Hebrew in Daniel, and particularly the surrounding material in the rest of the chapter, it “does not show the slightest signs … of having been translated from Aramaic.”68 Lacocque concurs, stating that this “beautiful prayer of confession … has been transmitted to us in its original language.”69 Porteous allows that it “possess[es] positive literary qualities of its own.”70





Footnotes:


51. Meadowcroft and Irwin, The Book of Daniel, 155.
52. Ibid.
53. Miller, Daniel, 47–48. See also Miler’s material on authorship, 22-43.
54. Ibid., 48.
55. “… especially in ch. 11.” Meadowcroft and Irwin, The Book of Daniel, 155.
56. Lacocque, The Book of Daniel, 8–10.
57. Ibid., 13.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid, 13–14.
61. Norman Porteous, Daniel: A Commentary, 2nd rev. ed., OTL (London: SCM, 1979), 18–19.
62. Ibid., 18.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.,119.
66. Ibid., 120.
67. Ibid.
68. Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 245–246.
69. Lacocque, The Book of Daniel, 178.
70. Porteous, Daniel, 137.




Dionisius fresco of Daniel's four beasts at the Virgin Nativity Cathedral


6. The Climactic Apocalypse

Because the last three chapters of Daniel successively relate parts of the same final apocalypse, scholars tend to deal with them “together as a single whole,”71 and make comparisons to the previous chapters accordingly. So while Hartman and Di Lella subdivide this climactic apocalypse into three parts that roughly correspond to the divisions of the three final chapters, they still see that the apocalypse, as a whole, “fill[s] out the first four enigmatic apocalypses [of] chs. 2, 7, 8, 9.”72 Comparing the vision that begins in chapter 10 with those before it will uncover both similarities and differences.73 For example, according to Meadowcroft, the vision’s format of “direct angelic revelation” resembles that of chapters 7 and 8, yet it is unlike the format of chapter nine, where we have an “encounter with God through Scripture reading, prayer and midrash.”74 Meadowcroft also sees the climactic vision of 10-12 as “a continuation, and … a culmination, of the answer to the question posed in 8:13.”75

Newsom sees the relationship between the apocalypses of 10-12 and 8 as particularly close.76 Firstly, she notes that the later narrative “develop[s] the interest in historical patterns of power [first] outlined [in the narrative of chapter 8].”77 Then, citing Willis, Newsom provides a comprehensive list of “narrative details and vocabulary”78 shared by these two revelations:79
Daniel on the bank of the river (10:4//8:2); Daniel’s posture and trance (10:8-10//8:16-18); the shattering of Alexander’s kingdom and the dispersion of his power (11:4//8:8); the inability to stand against the power of a king … (11:15//8:4); the reference to the “beautiful land” (11:16, 41//8:9); the description of Antiochus as acting deceptively … (11:24//8:25); the references to the end and the appointed time … (11:27, 35, 40//8:17, 19); the desolation of the [“temple”] and the disruption of the [“regular burnt offering”] (11:31//8:11); Antiochus doing as he pleases … (11:36//8:11); Antiochus exalting himself … even above the Most High (11:36-37//8:10, 11, 25); the reference to Antiochus’s words and deeds as “wonders” … (11:36; 12:6//8:24); a reference to the completion of the wrath … (11:36//8:19); the command to keep the words secret and seal the book (12:4//8:26); the description of angelic figures (12:5//8:13-14); the question “How long?” (12:6//8:13-14); Daniel’s failure to understand (12:8//8:27).80
After examining its language and character, Newsom concludes that the revelation of 10-12 is “a revisiting and deepening of the revelation in ch. 8, providing both with a more finely grained historical account and the fully resolved ending that [is] absent from ch. 8.”81

There are also several resemblances between the final apocalypse and the one preceding it in chapter 9; things such as Daniel’s fasting, or the angelophany and angelic discourse functioning as the medium of revelation.82 Each of the two incidents also contain “a meditation on the structure of history,”83 albeit the later one is a much more profound “investigation of [them] … in a detailed chronicle of events.”84 Porteous notes that, in 10:11 and 9:13, “Daniel is addressed as ‘greatly beloved’”85 Collins, reviewing the similarities in all the apocalypses, states that “even in ch. 9 the ‘end’ also involves the end of transgression and the beginning of everlasting righteousness.”86

When referring to chapters 7-12, Collins makes distinctions between “four units,”87 meaning 7, 8, 9 and 10-12. All of these units he takes to have been written around the same time, seeing “no evidence of a significant time lapse between the composition of chs. 8, 9, and 10-12 [and believing] Daniel 7 may be no more than a few months older than Daniel 8.”88 As well, it strikes him as certain that all the visions in these units were considered complementary by the final redactor, about whom Collins finds “no good evidence [to suggest] was anyone other than the author of chs. 8-12.”89





Footnotes:


71. Ibid., 149.
72. Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 275–276. These subdivision are The Prologue (10:1–11:1), The Revelation of the Future (11:2–12:4), and The Epilogue (12:5-13).
73. Meadowcroft and Irwin, The Book of Daniel, 203.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid.
76. Newsom, Daniel, 327.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid., 327–328.
80. Amy C. M. Willis, Dissonance and Drama of Divine Sovereignty in the Book of Daniel (New York: T & T Clark, 2010), 159; quoted in Newsom, Daniel, 327–328. All transliterations in the original have been elided by ellipses or translated and placed in square brackets.
81. Newsom, Daniel, 328.
82. Ibid., 326.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. Porteous, Daniel, 152.
86. John J. Collins, Daniel: With an Introduction to Apocalyptic Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984), 103.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid., 101.
89. Ibid., 103.




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