Today’s reading: Daniel 2; Colossians 2
I just wanted to make a quick note about the dating of Daniel this morning.
This will be short because I am about to run out the door to a men’s retreat with my church this morning and won’t have any internet or cell service there, so I will probably say more about this later in the book when I have more time, but the prophecy in this chapter is the starting point for some of the contention around the dating of the book of Daniel, so I wanted to say something here.
There is contention about whether the book was written in the 500s or the 200-100s BC. When I learned about the debate, it was framed to me (including by conservative scholastic commentaries) that the contention is primarily around prophecy. If events, dreams, predictions, etc. really took place in the 500s BC, then it is all scarily accurate foreknowledge, so as a result the majority of scholars want to late-date the book, putting it in the 200s-100s BC so that none of the prophecy is predictive and is instead looking back over previous events, and is therefore easy to get accurate. The result is that if you believe in prophecy, you will say Daniel was written in the 500s, and if you don’t believe there is a God who can declare the future and/or who speaks into human history, then you have to late-date the book.
The reason I want to say something here is that this was strongly challenged for me by Dr. Michael Heiser. I will try to remember to find his podcast episode(s) and like them later on where he talks about this, because I certainly can’t regurgitate all the info off the top of my head, but he basically calls the current “conservative vs. liberal theologian” argument completely wrong. He doesn’t deny the debate exists in that frame, but he points to conservative scholarship that also late-dates the book due to literary features of it rather than the prophetic content. If I remember correctly, two of the biggest considerations were the style of Hebrew it is written in (which aligns more with the later date), and even more so the genre. Dr. Heiser pointed out that Daniel is a perfect example of the Apocalyptic genre which was hugely popular among Jews in the 200s-100s BC, and the earliest example we have of the genre is in the late 300s BC. This would me that an early dating of Daniel would make it a perfect example of a genre that wouldn’t exist and/or be used again for 200-300 years.
There is a lot more to say about this, but I am already late and need to run out the door.
I was honestly just a bit shaken when I learned there is an entirely different/more rational side to this debate than I was ever presented, so I wanted to call it out for you guys as well as we get into the book.
(Also, sorry if this is riddled with typos. I don’t have time to edit this morning…)
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