Today’s reading: Daniel 12; 1 Timothy 3-4
It has been a long time since I have read the apocryphal chapters of Daniel, but reading them this morning, they just really don’t fit with the rest of the book.
If you weren’t already aware, there are two extra chapters in the book of Daniel in the apocryphal tradition. These chapters do not appear in the older copies of the book, but were included in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures), which was the version of the Scriptures used by much of the early church. As such, some traditions, such as Catholicism, consider these chapters to be canonical.
If you’re curious to read them yourself, if you search on a site like Bible Gateway with a translation selected that doesn’t include the apocryphal books, these chapters won’t come back in your search, but if you select a translation like the New American Bible Revised Edition you will be able to search for Daniel 13 or 14 and then read them yourself.
I remember reading them a long time ago, when I had probably only read the book of Daniel once, and I thought they were great stories and I saw nothing off about them, other than them being out of order with the rest of the book. But at this point, having read Daniel many times, studied it with friends, and taught from it numerous times, when I read these two chapters, it is beyond clear that they have no place in this book. The best way I can describe them is fan-fiction, and somewhat poorly written fan-fiction a that. They are about Daniel (at least tangentially), but they don’t come anywhere near matching the rest of the book stylistically, nor do they do a good job of making Daniel sound like he does in the rest of the book. I have read good fan fiction before, where whoever wrote it tried to match the author’s writing style, and how the author has various characters carry themselves and speak, but whoever wrote these chapters doesn’t seem to have bothered. It more-so seems like they had some ideas for stories and thought Daniel could be a good character in their stories, so they wrote him into them and then those writings somehow found their way to being associated with the book of Daniel.
So they are kind of fun and curious stories if you want to give them a read, but if you’ve read Daniel more than once, or if you have just been paying attention to how the book is written, I’m betting you’ll agree pretty quickly that these chapters clearly do not belong with the rest of the book.
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