The dating of Daniel: Why is it controversial?

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On another website, mainly frequented by Anglicans, I was following a thread about the dating of Daniel. The older view was that it was written during, or soon after, the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, but the present-day consensus seems to be that it was written 400 years later, in the Hellenistic period, and that “Babylon” and “Nebuchadnezzar” are code names, so to speak, referring to Syria and the Seleucid kings.

It was an interesting discussion on Biblical history, until the debate suddenly began to get quite emotional, with angry denunciations of “liberals” who dare to cast doubt on traditional teachings. I don’t understand that reaction. What is so special about Daniel that Christians find themselves compelled to defend one side or the other in a question that is, after all, strictly a matter of history?
 
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It is wrongly assumed that a “literal” reading (which both doesn’t exist and is wrong) is the only way to be faithful to the teachings of God. These same people get upset over traditional attributions elsewhere in the Scripture being said to be doubtful
 
Probably because it ties directly into prophecy and the eschatological understanding of the end.

Similar to those who believe that Revelation was written after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. This later date gives rise to the possibility that Revelation has to be referring to a still unknown future date. Because it wouldn’t be much of a prophecy if John was trying to warn people about events that already occurred Lol
 
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My understanding is that it is controversial because the book of Daniel gives very specific details about Antiochus IV and his persecution, and so most scholars feel that it ‘must’ have been written after the facts. Typical scholar bias.
 
For Catholics, the earlier dating makes more sense to consider the fourth Kingdom in Daniel to be the Roman Empire, the era from which Christianity would spring. The later dating makes Daniel more of an after-the-fact or contemporaneous account of what was going on at the time.

I used to be pretty well-read on this topic, but I’ve forgotten a lot of it so I could be off on these points. There is a lot to it.

I recommend the Ignatius Study Bible version of Daniel, or “A Catholic Introduction to the Bible - The Old Testament” by Drs. Brant Pitre and John Bergsma.

Daniel is a great Book, quite clearly St. Daniel the Prophet was a favorite of Jesus, and its apocalyptic style of writing is fascinating.
 
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Crusader13 said:
Probably because it ties directly into prophecy
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Dan_Defender said:
My understanding is that it is controversial because the book of Daniel gives very specific details about Antiochus IV and his persecution, and so most scholars feel that it ‘must’ have been written after the facts.
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This! The debate is whether this represents ‘prophecy’ or ‘after-the-fact reporting’. The debate, as you might imagine, can get rather heated…
 
Tolle_Lege said:
“A Catholic Introduction to the Bible - The Old Testament” by Drs. Brant Pitre and John Bergsma.
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Do you happen to remember, offhand, whether they come down on one side or the other in this question of dating?
 
@Crusader13, @Dan_Defender, @Tolle_Lege, @Gorgias

Thank you all for clearing up the mystery. If it’s the older date, Daniel is foretelling the future, but if it’s the later date, it’s a different kind of book altogether. That explains why some readers will take the issue personally: they feel that their faith in God depends on the Biblical evidence that He can inspire His prophets to foretell the future, and consequently that the “liberals” are deliberately seeking to undermine their faith.

Now that you have answered my original question, perhaps you would be so kind as to consider a follow-up question: Which of the two dates would get your vote?

Among the arguments listed in support of the later dating, one of them, in particular, strikes me as something that can’t easily be dismissed with a generalization about “liberals” and their atheistic intentions. The introduction to Daniel in the Jerusalem Bible refers to it as “Nebuchadnezzar’s orchestra.” In Chapter 3, the list of musical instruments appears three times, in verses 5, 7, and 10. In Daniel’s Aramaic, several of the instruments have Greek names, raising the obvious question: Who could have been speaking Greek in Babylon at such an early date? By the time Alexander the Great marched across the Middle East bringing the Greek language with him, Nebuchadnezzar had been dead for two hundred years. How is this difficulty answered by those who maintain that the traditional dating is the correct one?

 
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Bible Hub provides fuller details. These are the Aramaic nouns that Daniel uses, together with the Greek terms that appear in the Septuagint. The first two are straightforward Aramaic words, in both cases nearly identical to the corresponding Hebrew word. The last four, however—the terms designating three stringed instruments of the lyre or harp type, and the bagpipes—are clearly borrowings from Greek. These four words are found nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, outside the book of Daniel.

The English terms in the first column are those used in four translations I have looked at, the JB, ESV, NIV, and RSVCE. Here is the word list, in Daniel’s own order:

horn • קֶרֶן (qeren) • σάλπιγξ (salpinx)
flute or pipe • מַשְׁרוֹקִיתָא (mashroqita) • σύριγξ (surinx)
lyre or zither • קִיתָרוֹס (qitaros) • κιθάρα (kithara)
trigon or lyre • סַבְּכָא (sabbeka) • σαμβύκη (sambuké)
harp • פִסַנְטֵרִין (pesanterin) • ψαλτήριον (psaltérion)
bagpipe • סוּמְפוֹנְיָה (sumponaia) • συμφωνία (sumphonia)

https://biblehub.com/interlinear/daniel/3-5.htm

https://biblehub.com/sepd/daniel/3.htm
 
They have a fairly long section that deals with arguments for both date ranges, but I believe they lean on a 6th century date of authorship. However, they don’t cover the argument that you spoke of, with regards to the use of Greek for the naming of the musical instruments.

However, they do summarize that the use of Aramaic and Greek could be the result of sections of Daniel dealing with world events and issues (hence the use of Greek) and the issues pertaining to Israel necessitated the use of the Aramaic and Hebrew.
 
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I don’t have a position on early or late dating but I would caution against the supposition that the use of foreign words gives secure dating owing to the frequent use of contemporary loan-words and also the habit of scribes of updating names to suit contemporary understanding
 
BartholomewB said:
What is so special about Daniel that Christians find themselves compelled to defend one side or the other in a question that is, after all, strictly a matter of history?
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The Book of Daniel is unique among OT canon. It’s the only full piece of apocalyptic literature in the OT (7-12), similar to how the Book of Revelation is to the NT. I’ll add that it doesn’t take a scholar to notice how easily misunderstood apocalyptic literature is, especially in regards to the Bible.

Apocalyptic literature is a literary genre that is highly symbolic. The authors use symbols and numbers to portray various elements of life. The themes of this genre are centered around addressing the problem of innocent suffering and providing hope to the audience. However, apocalyptic literature is often mistaken of being about prophecy and future events. The authors actually use current events and wrap it in futuristic and symbolic characterizations to show how God is still in control and we should have hope in God.

Often in the past, especially among fundamentalist Protestant denominations, this understanding can be controversial, because Protestant fundamentalists read the Bible differently. For someone who reads the Bible in a strict literal sense, the text seems prophetic. However, for the Jewish audiences of the time, they would know that the events were not prophetic but current.
BartholomewB said:
Now that you have answered my original question, perhaps you would be so kind as to consider a follow-up question: Which of the two dates would get your vote?
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The Book of Daniel was written during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. That’s the general consensus among biblical scholars today. Given the literary genre and how accurate the descriptions are, this dating seems to be the most explanatory. The Book of Daniel is apocalyptic literature, so the events must be current. And since the descriptions are so accurate, it seems fitting that the text would have been written as the events were happening. That’s my understanding of the Book of Daniel.
 
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Scott Hahn and Curtis Mitch, in their commentary on the Book of Daniel for Ignatius Press, acknowledge that the Greek loanwords are “evidence that the Book of Daniel appeared in the Hellenistic period” but believe “it is not a necessary inference, since elements of Greek culture began to penetrate the Near East as early as the eighth century B.C” (p. 22). There is, however, no scholarly support given for their assertion.

In their introduction to Daniel, they explain that “[e]stablishing the authorship and date of the Book of Daniel is a matter too complex to admit simple answers” (p. 14). They conclude that, while there is much evidence in support of both the traditional and modern arguments, there’s more evidence in favor of a “modified” traditional position that the book’s origin comes from the sixth century B.C. based on testimony from Daniel, but that “the canonical form of the book postdates the lifetime of Daniel” (Ibid).
 
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Daniel is important because Jesus referred to himself as ‘Son of Man’ - a striking reference to Daniel - over seventy times. And Daniel says: “I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man , and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed” (Daniel 7:13-14).

Daniel is important as well because of the prophecy which predicted the Messiah coming in 500 years. Which was exactly when Jesus came.

The early Christians relied heavily on Daniel as a proof text for Jesus being the Messiah, and as proof of prophecies fulfilled.
 
For some time, liberal scholars have savaged Daniel, and insisted it was written long after the actual events.

This claim was pretty much demolished after the Dead Sea Scrolls were found at Qumran, which contained some 8 manuscripts of Daniel. In fact, there were more copies of Daniel than any other book found at Qumran, suggesting a great reverence for the text. These were copies of much earlier manuscripts of Daniel. The Qumran copies have been dated to 100 to 150 BC.

Liberal scholars long insisted Daniel had been made up about 160 BC. This date now has to be thrown out, since there is simply not enough time for the book to circulate and become part of the canon of Jewish texts (I use to word canon loosely, since they did not have a definitive canon at the time).

Moreover, the 8 Qumran Daniel texts had come from two different, divergent books of Daniel. This could only have happened if Daniel had been copied over such a long time that two different books of Daniel had emerged. Again, this smashes the liberal argument that Daniel was created in about 160 to bits.
 
annem said:
And Daniel says: “I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man , and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed” (Daniel 7:13-14) .
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Jesus quotes, time and again, in all three Synoptic Gospels, those words of Daniel’s about the coming of the Son of Man. I fail to see, however, how that has a bearing on the dating. Jesus could equally well have been quoting a 200-year-old prophecy as a 600-year-old prophecy, couldn’t he?
 
Personally i favor the earlier date just because any prophetic book in the Bible can be said that was written after the fact. So to me, it is either all or none of them are after the fact reporting.
Having said that, yes there are Greek names in the Book used not just for the musical instruments, but also the names of the trees in the story of Daniel and Susanna. In that I would like to see what terms are used in the Dead Sea Scrolls, as they contain the Book of Daniel. I haven’t researched that yet.
 
BartholomewB said:
I fail to see, however, how that has a bearing on the dating. Jesus could equally well have been quoting a 200-year-old prophecy as a 600-year-old prophecy, couldn’t he?
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Yes, he could have been quoting from any prophecy, 10 or 1,000 years previous. But it is significant that Daniel prophesied that the “son of man…all peoples, etc” would appear in 490 years. And then he did. Pretty much to the day.
 
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