Theopedia

Book of Daniel

And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed… it shall stand forever.

— Daniel 2:44

Overview

The Book of Daniel narrates the career of Daniel, a young Judean noble carried captive to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar, who rose to high office under the Babylonian and Persian courts and received a series of visions concerning the kingdoms of the world and the kingdom of God. The book is placed among the Prophets in the English canon but among the Writings, or Hagiographa, in the Hebrew canon.1 Its two halves join court narrative with apocalyptic vision, and its revelations bear so close a relation to those of Revelation that the two books “mutually interpret each other.”2

Timeline

  • Daniel selected for Nebuchadnezzar’s court: Daniel and three friends are taken to Babylon after Jerusalem falls. Chosen for their ability, they decide not to defile themselves with the king’s food (Dan. 1).
  • Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the great image: Daniel explains the king’s forgotten dream of a statue standing for a series of kingdoms. A stone grows into a mountain filling the earth: God’s own kingdom (Dan. 2).
  • The fiery furnace: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse to worship the king’s golden statue and are thrown into a blazing furnace. A fourth figure walks with them, and they come out unharmed (Dan. 3).
  • Nebuchadnezzar humbled: After boasting about his own greatness, Nebuchadnezzar is driven from his throne to live like an animal for seven years, until he admits that the Most High God rules (Dan. 4).
  • Belshazzar’s feast and the handwriting on the wall: At a feast using cups from Jerusalem’s temple, a hand writes King Belshazzar’s judgment on the wall. Daniel explains it; Babylon falls that night (Dan. 5).
  • Daniel in the lions’ den: Jealous officials trick King Darius into banning prayer to anyone but himself. Daniel keeps praying anyway and is thrown to the lions, but God shuts their mouths (Dan. 6).
  • Daniel’s visions of the future: In his own visions, Daniel sees four world empires pictured as four beasts. Further visions reveal the near future, the Messiah’s coming, and the resurrection of the dead (Dan. 7-12).

Author and Date

Jewish and Christian tradition has held Daniel himself, a sixth-century BC exile who lived to see the fall of Babylon to the Medes and Persians, to be the book’s author.3 Its unity is conceded even by critics who dispute its authorship: the two halves “are so related that the one implies the existence of the other,” and the book as a whole speaks in Daniel’s own voice and, in its final chapter, is ascribed to him by name (Dan. 12:4, 9).4 The uniform tradition of the Jews received it on this ground into the canon of the Old Testament. Christ himself treats Daniel as a true prophet, warning his disciples of “the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet” (Matt. 24:15).5

Critical scholarship has generally rejected sixth-century authorship for at least the visions of chapters 8-12, arguing that their precise correspondence to the successors of Alexander the Great and the persecution of the Jews under Antiochus IV Epiphanes points to composition in the Maccabean crisis of the mid-second century BC rather than to genuine predictive prophecy written nearly four centuries earlier.4 Against this, Barrows argues that the Jews who fixed the canon would not have received a book written “under the illustrious name of Daniel” as late as the age of Antiochus, and that the book of Baruch, itself no later than the Maccabean period, already makes use of Daniel.6 He adds that the book’s language, mixing Hebrew and Aramaic forms characteristic of the exilic and post-exilic period, agrees with Daniel’s own age rather than with a much later Jewish author.7

Historical and Literary Context

The book is set across the Babylonian exile and the transition to Persian rule, from Daniel’s deportation under Nebuchadnezzar through the reigns of Belshazzar, Darius the Mede, and Cyrus the Persian (Dan. 1:1-2; 6:28).3 Its text itself reflects that transitional setting: the book shifts from Hebrew into Aramaic (“Chaldee”) partway through 2:4 and continues in Aramaic through the end of chapter 7, before returning to Hebrew for chapters 8-12.7

Structure

The book divides into a series of court narratives and a series of apocalyptic visions, an opening chapter introducing both.8

  • Chapter 1: Daniel and his three companions are selected for service in Nebuchadnezzar’s court and educated in Babylonian learning.
  • Chapters 2-6 (narrative, largely in Aramaic): God’s kingdom is set against the kingdoms of the pagan world through Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a great image (chap. 2), the deliverance of Daniel’s three companions from the fiery furnace (chap. 3), the humbling of Nebuchadnezzar’s pride (chap. 4), Belshazzar’s feast and the handwriting on the wall (chap. 5), and Daniel’s deliverance from the lions’ den (chap. 6).
  • Chapters 7-12 (vision, in Hebrew from chap. 8): Daniel himself receives a series of visions, beginning with a second, complementary vision of four world empires under the image of four beasts (chap. 7), followed by more particular revelations concerning the nearer future, the coming of the Messiah, and the resurrection.8

Major Themes

God’s sovereignty over the nations. Daniel’s narratives and visions alike present pagan empires as instruments in the hand of a sovereign God rather than powers acting on their own authority. Hodge cites Daniel among the chief biblical texts for the doctrine that “the providential government of God extends over nations and communities of men,” quoting the book directly: “He doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth” (Dan. 4:35); “He changeth the times and the seasons; He removeth kings and setteth up kings” (Dan. 2:21); “The Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men and giveth it to whomsoever He will” (Dan. 4:25).9 Calvin draws the same texts into his account of civil government, noting that even Nebuchadnezzar, “an active invader and devastator of other countries,” held his kingdom only because “the God of heaven hath given thee a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory” (Dan. 2:37).10

Faithfulness under pressure. Two of the narrative chapters turn on the protection and deliverance of God’s faithful servants under persecution from heathen kings and princes: Daniel’s three companions in the fiery furnace and Daniel himself in the lions’ den.8 Charnock observes that God characteristically withholds a display of his power until his people have exhausted every human resource: he “awakened not himself to deliver Israel, till they were upon the brink of the Red Sea; nor to rescue the three children, till they were in the fiery furnace; nor Daniel, till he was in the lion’s den.”11

The Son of Man and the coming kingdom. In Daniel’s vision of chapter 7, four beasts rising from the sea give way to a heavenly throne room in which “the Ancient of Days” is seated and “one like a son of man” is given an everlasting dominion (Dan. 7:9-14). Sears traces the vision’s own two-part pattern of symbol and interpretation: the mystery concerns four kingdoms that will be overthrown, after which “the saints of the Most High” receive the eternal kingdom of God (Dan. 7:17-18, 27).12 Christ takes up this same title as his own throughout the Gospels, and applies the vision’s imagery of his coming “on the clouds of heaven” to himself at his trial before the Sanhedrin (Matt. 26:64).

The seventy weeks. In chapter 9, Daniel reads Jeremiah’s prophecy that Israel’s captivity would last seventy years (Dan. 9:2; cf. Jer. 25:11-12) and prays for its fulfillment. The angel Gabriel answers with a further revelation: Jeremiah’s seventy years are reconfigured into seventy weeks of years, at the end of which God will “finish the transgression,” “atone for iniquity,” and “bring in everlasting righteousness” (Dan. 9:24), and in the midst of which “Messiah shall be cut off” (Dan. 9:26). Sears notes that this reinterpretation draws on the Old Testament’s own Jubilee motif, so that “at the ultimate tenfold Jubilee the camp will go free, the land inheritance will be enjoyed and clan fellowship renewed.”13

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 22, “The Greater Prophets,” 322. ↩

  2. Barrows, 324. ↩

  3. Barrows, 322-323. ↩ ↩2

  4. Barrows, 324-325. ↩ ↩2

  5. Barrows, 326. ↩

  6. Barrows, 325. ↩

  7. Barrows, 326-327. ↩ ↩2

  8. Barrows, 323-324. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  9. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), chap. 11, “Providence,” 587-588. ↩

  10. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 20, sec. 26, 671. ↩

  11. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 2, “Discourse X: On the Power of God,” 84. ↩

  12. Philip Chase Sears, “The Jewish Apocalyptic Mystery Schema,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 33-34. ↩

  13. Sears, “The Jewish Apocalyptic Mystery Schema,” 35. ↩