Daniel

Daniel is unusual before a reader gets to a single argument about its meaning, because it is written in two languages. Daniel 1:1 through 2:4a is Hebrew. Then, in the middle of a sentence, the text switches to Aramaic and stays there through the end of chapter 7. Chapters 8 through 12 return to Hebrew. Only Ezra does anything comparable, with its own Aramaic sections (Ezra 4:8 to 6:18 and 7:12-26), and no explanation for the switch commands full agreement, though the shift roughly tracks a shift in subject matter: the Aramaic section deals with the fate of Gentile empires in language a Gentile audience across the Persian empire could read, while the surrounding Hebrew sections frame the book for a Jewish audience.

The content divides just as cleanly. Chapters 1 through 6 are court tales: a young exile and his friends navigate a pagan empire's food, education, and threats without losing their identity, and a series of stories, the fiery furnace, the writing on the wall, the lions' den, show God vindicating faithfulness inside imperial power rather than against it. Chapters 7 through 12 are apocalyptic vision: four beasts, a son of man given dominion, a ram and a goat, and an extended, detailed vision of the wars between the Hellenistic kingdoms that runs through chapter 11 into chapter 12's promise of resurrection.

This lesson's honest section concerns when that second half, and by extension the finished book, was written. Two positions have been argued for more than a century, each by serious scholars working from real evidence, and this course is not going to tell you which one is right, because the evidence itself does not settle it. What it will do is give you both cases at their strongest.

The traditional position places Daniel's origin in the sixth century BC, written by or shortly after an exile who lived through the events chapters 1 through 6 describe, under Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Darius the Mede and Cyrus. The strongest evidence for this case is a detail that skeptical scholars once used against the book and that archaeology later reversed.

For a long time Belshazzar was known from no source outside Daniel, and critics took his absence from the standard king lists as evidence that the book had invented him. The discovery and translation of the Nabonidus Cylinder and the related Verse Account of Nabonidus changed that. These texts show that Belshazzar was the son of King Nabonidus, and that Nabonidus spent a decade of his reign away from Babylon at the oasis of Tayma in Arabia, leaving Belshazzar as regent in the capital. That single fact explains a detail in Daniel 5 that had puzzled readers for centuries: when Belshazzar offers to reward whoever can read the writing on the wall, he can only promise to make that person 'the third highest ruler in the kingdom' (5:16, BSB), not second. He could not offer second place, because he held it himself. Nabonidus, absent or not, was still first. This is exactly the kind of small, load-bearing detail that a much later writer working from folk memory would be unlikely to get right by accident.

The book's Aramaic supplies a second argument. Linguists classify it as Imperial Aramaic, the standardized administrative dialect used across the Persian empire, and some specialists argue its grammar and vocabulary sit more comfortably in the Persian period than in the markedly different Aramaic found in documents from the second century BC. Daniel's accurate depiction of Babylonian court life more generally, the separate classes of wise men named in chapter 2, the magicians, enchanters, sorcerers and astrologers (the word the BSB footnotes as 'Chaldeans'), corresponds to real distinctions among Mesopotamian scholarly and priestly guilds, and Nebuchadnezzar's boast in chapter 4, 'Is this not Babylon the Great, which I myself have built as a royal residence' (4:30, BSB), matches what his own building inscriptions claim about himself. None of this proves a sixth-century date by itself, but taken together it is the kind of texture that defenders of an early date regard as difficult to fake from a distance of centuries.

One genuine weak point in this case should be named rather than hidden. Darius the Mede, who according to Daniel 5 and 6 receives the kingdom after Belshazzar's fall, is not clearly identifiable in any source outside the book. Proposals identify him with Gubaru, a governor Cyrus appointed over Babylon, or treat 'Darius the Mede' as a throne name or title for Cyrus himself, but none of these is certain, and defenders of the early date hold this as an open historical puzzle rather than a solved one.

The alternative position places Daniel's final composition in the 160s BC, during the Jewish crisis under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and treats the book as a work of encouragement written for a persecuted community rather than as a sixth-century composition preserved unchanged for four hundred years. The strongest evidence for this case sits in chapter 11.

From 11:2 through roughly 11:39, the vision tracks the wars between the Ptolemaic kingdom of the south and the Seleucid kingdom of the north with striking precision, matching known history in fine detail down to marriage alliances, shifting fortunes, and finally the actions of a 'despicable person' (11:21, BSB) who seizes the kingdom by intrigue, desecrates the temple, and sets up 'the abomination of desolation' (11:31, BSB), an event that matches Antiochus IV's desecration of the Jerusalem temple in 167 BC and that 1 Maccabees describes in almost identical language. Then, from 11:40, the vision's precision breaks down. The account of this king's end, pitching his royal tents between the sea and the beautiful holy mountain (11:45), does not match what actually happened to Antiochus IV, who died in Persia in 164 BC of illness, or possibly during a failed attempt to rob a temple in Elymais, not in a climactic final battle in Judea. Critical scholars read this seam, precise up to 167 to 164 BC and inaccurate after it, as the point where genuine historical narrative, written after the fact, gives way to real but mistaken prediction, and they take that seam as evidence that the book was completed during the crisis itself.

The Greek loanwords in chapter 3 add a second line of argument. The instruments named at Nebuchadnezzar's command to bow before the golden image include qaitros and pesanterin, transliterations of the Greek kithara and psalterion (the BSB renders them zither and harp), and sumponyah, related to the Greek symphonia (rendered pipes). Some scholars have argued these words presuppose the wide cultural diffusion of Greek language that followed Alexander's conquests after 331 BC, which would place at least this material after that date. Others respond that Greek traders, mercenaries and colonists were active across the Near East well before Alexander, attested in Assyrian and Babylonian sources and in Herodotus's account of Greek mercenaries in Egypt from the seventh century BC onward, and that loanwords for musical instruments, an area where vocabulary travels easily along trade routes, do not require a post-Alexander date to explain. This point is genuinely contested in both directions.

A third argument concerns the book's place in the Hebrew canon. Daniel sits not among the Prophets but in the Writings, the Ketuvim, alongside books like Ezra, Nehemiah and Chronicles. Some scholars take this placement as evidence that Daniel was composed after the collection of the Prophets had already closed, since an earlier prophetic book would more likely have been grouped with Isaiah and Ezekiel. Others note that placement in the Writings may simply reflect Daniel's genre, court tale and apocalyptic vision rather than classical prophetic oracle, and that other older wisdom material sits in the Writings for the same reason, so the argument from placement alone is not decisive either way.

A genuine weak point in this case should be named as plainly as the last one. Fragments of Daniel from Qumran, including copies dated by palaeographers to within decades of the 160s BC, show the book already circulating, copied and evidently valued in a community not far removed from the proposed moment of composition, which leaves a narrow window for a brand new work to be written, disseminated and received as ancient scripture. Defenders of the late date answer that crisis literature can spread quickly and that pseudonymous apocalyptic was a recognised and accepted form in the period, but the tightness of that window is a real pressure on the case rather than a detail to be waved through.

Both cases rest on real evidence, argued by careful scholars, and this course will not resolve the debate for you, because it cannot honestly be resolved from the evidence available. What can be said is where the weight of each argument actually falls. The sixth-century case rests most heavily on the Belshazzar detail, which is hard to explain as later invention. The second-century case rests most heavily on the precision-to-vagueness seam in chapter 11, which is hard to explain as coincidence if the whole vision was written in the sixth century looking forward four hundred years.

Manuscript evidence adds one more data point worth knowing rather than a decisive one. Fragments of Daniel were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in numbers that indicate the book was already established, copied and valued well before the site's occupation ended in the first century AD. Defenders of a second-century date read this as consistent with rapid acceptance following the Maccabean crisis. Defenders of a sixth-century date read the same evidence as consistent with a much longer prior history. The manuscripts confirm the book existed and mattered by that point; they do not by themselves settle when it was written.

Whichever date a scholar prefers, the book's theological claim does not change. Daniel 2, 4 and 7 all make the same argument in different forms: empires that look permanent, Babylon, Persia, Greece, are not, and the God of Israel sets up and removes kings on a timetable no emperor controls. If the book was written in the sixth century, that claim was a promise spoken into an exile with no visible end. If it was written in the second century, the same claim was a promise spoken into a persecution with no visible end. Either way, it was written for people who needed to hear that the empire currently crushing them was not the last word, which may be why the book has kept speaking to readers under both kinds of pressure ever since.