Bible Difficulties (63 page)

-with its emphasis on the last days (chap. 7, as well as in chap. 8, with its special attention to the third kingdom)--the prediction of the date of Christ's first advent and the framework of the Seventy Weeks (chap. 9), and then the detailed account of the confrontation between the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires and the career of the two Little Horns (chap. 11).

In order to avoid the impact of the decisive evidence of supernatural inspiration with which Daniel so notably abounds, it was necessary for rationalistic scholarship to find some later period in Jewish history when all the "predictions" had already been fulfilled, such as the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes (175-164 B.C.), when such a pious fraud could most easily be prepared. In order to do this, however, it was necessary for J.D. Michaelis and J.G. Eichhorn (who in the eighteenth century revived the old Maccabean date hypothesis of the third-century neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry) to make a few adjustments in the evidence of the text. For the actual text of Daniel indicates that the empire sequence was as follows: first kingdom: Chaldean; second kingdom: Medo-Persian; third kingdom: Greek; fourth kingdom: Roman. But since the Roman Empire did not take over the Holy Land until 63 B.C., it was necessary to eliminate that identification altogether in order to preserve the rational defensibility of a Maccabean date hypothesis.

The Maccabean period would have been around 167 to 165 B.C., or over a hundred years before Pompey seized Palestine for the Romans; so that would have allowed a successful prediction to remain in the Book of Daniel, a hundred years in advance of the fulfillment.

Consequently the effort was made to prove that the fourth kingdom was Greek rather than Roman and that the true sequence was Chaldean, Median, Persian, and Greek. Otherwise the late date theory could not survive, for it was not late enough to account for Pompey.

In the article on "Darius the Mede," we will furnish the evidence for the rejection of that revised identification and demonstrate that the fourth kingdom has to be Rome after all.

But in this preliminary discussion we shall be centering our attention on the linguistic evidence in Daniel that tends to eliminate all possibility of dating the composition of Daniel any later than the Persian period. With the wealth of new data from the manuscripts of the Dead Sea caves (the Qumran literature), it is possible to settle this question once and for all. Now that we have at least one fairly extensive midrash originally composed in third-century B.C. Aramaic and several sectarian documents in second-century Hebrew, it has become possible to perform a careful linguistic comparison of the Aramaic and Hebrew chapters of Daniel and these unquestionably 285

third-or second-century B.C. documents, which were close to the era of the Maccabean struggle.

If Daniel had in fact been composed in the 160s, these Qumran manuscripts should have exhibited just about the same general characteristics as Daniel in the matter of vocabulary, morphology, and syntax. Yet the actual test results show that Daniel 2-7 is linguistically older than the Genesis Apocryphon by several centuries. Hence these chapters could not have been composed as late as the second century or the third century, but rather--based on purely philological grounds--they have to be dated in the fifth or late sixth century; and they must have been composed in the eastern sector of the Aramaic-speaking world (such as Babylon), rather than in Palestine (as the late date theory requires). The evidence for this is quite technical, and hence it would hardly be suitable for this type of encyclopedia (which does not presuppose a thorough knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek on the part of most of our reading public). But those who have had training in Hebrew and Aramaic are encouraged to consult the summaries of this evidence as contained in this author's
A Survey of Old Testament Introduction
(pp.

391-93). But my more thorough and definitive work, "The Aramaic of the Genesis Apocryphon Compared with the Aramaic of Daniel," appears as chapter 11 in Payne,
New Perspectives
. See also my article "The Hebrew of Daniel Compared with the Qumran Sectarian Documents," in Skilton,
The Law and the Prophets
(chap. 41).

The following conclusion concerning the Apocryphon comes from my
A Survey of Old
Testament Introduction
(p. 169):

"The fact that Targumic and Talmudic words abound in this document indicates a considerable interval in time between its composition and that of
Ezra
and
Daniel
. Its use of normal Semitic word order in the clause as over against Daniel's policy of placing the verb late in the clause points to a definite difference either in geographic origin (which would eliminate the possibility of
Daniel's
Maccabean composition in Palestine) or in time of composition. Either inference is fatal to the pseudepigraph theory. It is fair to say, therefore, that the overall testimony of this scroll [The Genesis Apocryphon] leads to an abandonment of a long-cherished position of higher criticism, and makes the genuineness of Danielic authorship an even more attractive option than it was before."

In
New Perspectives
(pp. 480-81), we find the following concluding remarks:

"In the light of all the data adduced under the four categories just reviewed, it seems abundantly clear that a second-century date for the Hebrew chapters of
Daniel
is no longer tenable on linguistic grounds. In view of the markedly later development in the areas of syntax, word-order, morphology, vocabulary, spelling and word-usage, there is absolutely no possibility of regarding
Daniel
as contemporary [with the sectarian documents]. On the contrary the indications are that centuries must have intervened between them....But any fair-minded investigator when faced with such an overwhelming body of objective data pointing to the temporal interval of centuries between the two bodies of literature must conclude that a second-century date for the book of Daniel is completely out of the question....The complete absence of Greek loan-words, apart from 286

musical instruments of international currency [mentioned in Dan. 3:5], points unmistakably to a time of composition prior to the Alexandrian conquest. It is utterly inconceivable that after 160 years of Greek overlordship (as the Maccabean theory insists) there would be a complete absence of Greek terms pertaining to government and administration, whether in the Aramaic chapters or in the Hebrew, in a literary product of the 160s B.C. But now that the considerable body of new documentation exhumed from the First Qumran Cave has been published and subjected to thorough analysis, it becomes patently evident that the Maccabean-date theory, despite all of its persuasive appeal to the rationalist, is altogether wrong. Only a dogma-ridden obscurantist can adhere to it any longer, and he must henceforth surrender all claim to intellectual respectability."

Are we then driven back to the late sixth century B.C. for the composition of the Book of Daniel? Since Daniel himself must have been born between 620 and 615 B.C., we can hardly assume that he lived beyond 530, to the age of 85 or 90. This means that the final form of his memoirs was completed by 530 and that we should look for a linguistic locus of about that period if his work is genuine. Unquestionably he lived to see the Fall of Babylon to the Medo-Persian armies of Cyrus the Great in 539. He served under Cyrus's viceroy, Darius the Mede, for a year or so, and thus became deeply involved with the new Persian terminology that had begun to infiltrate the Aramaic of Babylon in matters of administration and government. The fifteen loan-words from Persian that appear in Daniel's Aramaic are adequately accounted for by the close contact Daniel enjoyed with Persian officialdom during the 530s. Once we establish that the Book of Daniel must have been composed before the Greek conquest--and therefore back in the Persian period--there is no good reason for refusing the adequacy of a 530 date. Certainly the phenomenon of successful prediction of events extending even into the first century A.D.

becomes a characteristic that can only point to divine inspiration behind it, and all the presuppositional incentive for late dating the book has been removed. We may as well accept it for what it purports to be, the personal composition of Daniel himself (as is affirmed by 7:1-2, 15, 28; 8:1, 15, 27; 9:2, 21-22; 10:1-2; 12:5).

For the consistent Evangelical, however, the matter is definitely settled by the reference to Daniel that occurs in Christ's Olivet Discourse (Matt. 24:15). There Jesus mentions

"the abomination of desolation which was spoken of through [
dia
with genitive] Daniel the prophet." The phrase "the abomination of desolation" (or "which makes desolate") occurs in Daniel 9:27; 11:31; 12:11. The important thing to observe is that Christ was not simply referring to some book in the Old Testament named "Daniel" but rather to the agency of Daniel personally, since
dia
with the genitive always implies personal human agency. If these words of Christ are reliably reported--as of course they are--we can only conclude that Christ personally believed that the historic personage Daniel was the author of the book that contained this eschatological phrase. Moreover Christ made it plain that the fulfillment of the prediction concerning this "abomination of desolation" yet lay in the future. It was not fulfilled by what happened back in 168 B.C., even though a type of this abomination may have been erected by Antiochus in the Jerusalem temple.

Is Daniel 1:1 wrong about the date of Nebuchadnezzar's invasion?

287

Daniel 1:1 says that Nebuchadnezzar first invaded Palestine in the "third" year of Jehoiakim of Judah. But Jeremiah 46:2 says that the first year of Nebuchadnezzar was the

"fourth" year of Jehoiakim. Which is right? Actually, both are right. Nebuchadnezzar was crowned king of Babylon in 605 B.C., which according to the Babylonian system would have been the "accession year" of Nebuchadnezzar. His first regnal year did not begin, therefore, until New Year's Day in 604. But according to the Judean system, the accession year counted as the first year of a king's reign. Since Jehoiakim was appointed king of Judah in 608 by Pharaoh Necho, 605 would be reckoned his fourth year (which Jeremiah, as a resident of Jerusalem, would naturally have followed). But according to the Babylonian reckoning (which Daniel, as a resident of Babylon naturally followed), 605 would have been Jehoiakim's "third" year (reckoning his first regnal year from New year's Day 607). Hence both statements are correct, and both come out to the same year: 605--the year of Nebuchadnezzar's great victory at the Battle of Carchemish.

Why does Daniel refer to soothsayer-priests as
Chaldeans
?

Daniel 2:2 first introduces the "Chaldeans" (Heb.
Kasdim
) as a class of astrologer-priests, along with the "magicians, the conjurers, and the sorcerers." Obviously there is nothing ethnic about this use of the term. From the ethnical standpoint, Nebuchadnezzar himself and most of his political and military leaders were "Chaldeans." Some have argued that this nonethnic use of the term in Daniel 2:2 and elsewhere reflects a confusion in the understanding of the late author of the Book of Daniel, who probably wrote around 165 B.C. This theory is completely shattered, however, by the fact that the real author of "Daniel" (namely, Daniel himself, writing around 530 B.C.) also uses
Kasdim
in an ethnic way. In Daniel 5:30 he refers to Belshazzar as "the king of the Chaldeans" (Aramaic
malka' Kasda'e
). (Probably the certain "Chaldean men" [
gubrin
Kasdain
] in Daniel 3:8, who were the accusers of Daniel's three friends, were high government officials rather than soothsayer-priests [so Brown-Driver-Briggs,
Lexicon
, p.

1098].) Such a varying use of the term cannot be explained by a theory of late authorship.

The fact of the matter is that the author of Daniel used this name in two different senses: (1) as astrological, (2) as ethnical. How could this have come about? Is there any explanation for these homonyms? Yes, there is, but it is to be found in the handing down of an ancient term through three languages.

As Robert Dick Wilson of Princeton pointed out (
Studies in the Book of Daniel
, Series 1

[New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1917]), the Sumerian combination
Gal-du
would have meant "Master Builder," a title given to those astrologer-priests who drew star charts by dividing the visible stars up into little rooms on a chart resembling the floor-plan of a house. The term
Gal-du
so appears in a tablet dated in the fourteenth year of Shamash-shumukin of Babylon (668-648 B.C.).

Confusion of
Kal-du
(the Akkadian spelling of Sumerian
Gal-du
) with the name of the Chaldean nation came about as follows: That name, originally
Kasdu
or
Kasdu
later came to be pronounced
Kaldu
in the Babylonian dialect of Akkadian. This resulted from a modification of a sibilant to an
l
before a dental; thus, the preposition
istu
("out of") was pronounced
ultu
in later Babylonian;
astur
("I wrote") was changed to
altur
. The final 288

stage came in the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire under Nabopolassar and his son Nebuchadnezzar; for in this time of national resurgence (having thrown off the Assyrian yoke at last), they tried to restore their literary language to its earlier classical form. This meant that all the sibilants that had become
l
before dental consonants had to be changed back to their original sibilants. It was only natural, therefore, for the
Kaldu
, which originally came from
Kal-du
(
Gal-du
), to be unhistorically changed to
Kasdu
(the plural of which was
Kasdi
, Hebrew
Kasdim
, Aramaic
Kasdin
, or
Kasda'e
in the emphatic state).

This term thus fell together with the ethnic
Kaldu
(plural
Kaldi
), which had come originally from
Kasdu
. (Note that the Greeks picked up the name before the Neo-Babylonian reform, for they called the nation
Chaldaioi
, whence comes our English translation "Chaldeans.")