Panel essay · Daniel · November 9–15, 2026 · Academic scholar
Written by an AI persona in the voice of a non-Latter-day-Saint Hebrew Bible academic — not a real scholar.
Daniel 1–7 holds some of the Bible's most familiar stories and some of its most argued-over texts. A reader moving from the lions' den (ch. 6) to the beasts from the sea (ch. 7) crosses a genre boundary and probably several centuries of composition. What follows is the picture most critical scholars work with; where the evidence is contested, I say so.
The book opens in Hebrew. At 2:4 the king's wise men answer him, in the King James wording, "in Syriack," which translates the Hebrew ʼaramit, "in Aramaic." From the next words on, the book is in Aramaic, the courtiers' language, through the end of chapter 7. Hebrew resumes at 8:1.
The language break does not match the content break. Chapter 1 is a court tale in Hebrew; chapter 7 is an apocalyptic vision in Aramaic. Chapters 1–6 tell stories about Daniel in the third person; chapters 7–12 report Daniel's own visions in the first person. Chapter 7 belongs to both halves at once.
A. Lenglet ("La structure littéraire de Daniel 2–7," Biblica 53, 1972) gave the most influential account of the Aramaic block. He argued that chapters 2–7 form a concentric arrangement: chapters 2 and 7 both lay out four successive kingdoms ended by God's kingdom; chapters 3 and 6 are both stories of faithful Jews delivered from execution; chapters 4 and 5 are both stories of divine judgment on an arrogant king. Read that way, chapter 7 is the capstone of a designed unit, not a fresh start.
The usual reconstruction, laid out at length in John J. Collins's Hermeneia commentary (Daniel, 1993) and Carol Newsom's Old Testament Library commentary (Daniel, 2014), runs roughly so. An Aramaic collection of tales about a wise Jew at a foreign court circulated first. In the 160s BCE a writer or circle added the vision of chapter 7 in Aramaic to finish it, wrote chapters 8–12 in Hebrew, and supplied a Hebrew introduction (ch. 1) so the book would begin and end in the national language. It is a hypothesis, not a proof, but it explains the awkward facts economically.
Chapters 1–6 belong to an ancient genre: the wise courtier from a subject people at a foreign king's court. Joseph (Gen. 37–50) and Esther are biblical examples; outside the Bible the closest is the Story of Ahiqar, an Aramaic tale set at the Assyrian court, surviving on a fifth-century BCE papyrus from the Jewish military colony at Elephantine in Egypt. Ahiqar too is a counselor brought down by rivals and vindicated.
Scholars commonly distinguish two plots. In tales of contest (Dan. 2, 4, 5), the king faces a problem his own experts cannot solve, and the foreign captive succeeds where they fail. The lists of failed "magicians" and "astrologers" (2:2; 4:7; 5:7–8) are pointed. In tales of conflict (Dan. 3, 6), rivals use the hero's religion to trap him, and he is saved from death.
W. Lee Humphreys ("A Life-Style for Diaspora," Journal of Biblical Literature 92, 1973) argued that the tales in Daniel 1–6 and Esther offer a model for Jews living under foreign rule. What stands out is how cooperative Daniel 1–6 is. Daniel accepts a Babylonian education and name. He serves Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, and Darius loyally, and the king is never the real villain. Darius spends a sleepless, fasting night hoping Daniel survives (6:18–20). The lines are drawn narrowly: no defiling food (1:8), no worship of the image (3:18), no break in prayer (6:10). Short of those lines, a Jew can serve the empire and prosper. That diaspora ethic fits the Persian or early Hellenistic period, before the crisis of the 160s.
The tales' theology is political. Their God "removeth kings, and setteth up kings" (2:21), and chapter 4 says three times (4:17, 25, 32) "that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will." Empires hold power on loan.
The tales have rough edges too, and they should be read as they are. The conflict stories end in mass violence: Nebuchadnezzar threatens to dismember anyone who blasphemes the Jews' God (3:29), and Darius throws the accusers into the den with "their children, and their wives" (6:24). The narrator does not comment; that was how ancient court literature imagined royal justice, and a modern reader need not admire it.
For critical scholars, the best dating evidence lies where the tales tell the sixth century differently from contemporary sources.
The date in 1:1. Daniel opens with a siege of Jerusalem "in the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim," that is, about 606 BCE. No Babylonian source records one. Jeremiah 25:1 equates Jehoiakim's fourth year with Nebuchadnezzar's first, and Jeremiah 46:2 puts the Babylonian victory at Carchemish in that fourth year. Internally, too, Daniel trains three years (1:5) yet interprets a dream in Nebuchadnezzar's "second year" (2:1).
Belshazzar. Chapter 5 calls Belshazzar "king" and repeatedly makes Nebuchadnezzar "his father" (5:2, 11, 18). Cuneiform sources confirm Belshazzar was real, which older skeptics doubted, but place him differently. A foundation cylinder of Nabonidus from the moon-god's temple at Ur prays for "Belshazzar, ... the eldest son," of Nabonidus, not of Nebuchadnezzar, and does not call him king. The Nabonidus Chronicle repeatedly notes "the king (was) in Tayma," an Arabian oasis, while "the prince" stayed with the army: Belshazzar was, in effect, regent. Defenders note that "father" can mean predecessor in Semitic usage; critical scholars see a memory compressed by time, which knows Belshazzar's name and that Babylon fell on his watch, but not the dynasty.
Darius the Mede. "Darius the Median took the kingdom" (5:31) and organizes it in chapter 6. No such king appears in any source outside Daniel. The Nabonidus Chronicle has Babylon taken in 539 BCE by "Ugbaru, governor of Gutium, and the army of Cyrus," with Cyrus entering weeks later. H. H. Rowley's Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the Book of Daniel (1935) concluded, after reviewing the proposed identifications, that the figure is not historical. The best-known defense is D. J. Wiseman's suggestion ("Some Historical Problems in the Book of Daniel," 1965) that 6:28 be read "in the reign of Darius, even the reign of Cyrus the Persian," making the two one person. Most critical scholars think Darius the Mede reflects a schema rather than a person, for reasons the four kingdoms make clear.
Greek instruments. The orchestra in 3:5 includes three instrument names generally recognized as Greek loanwords: qitharos (Greek kitharis, a lyre), pesanterin (Greek psaltērion), and sumponyah (Greek symphōnia). Greek words are not impossible before Alexander, since Greek mercenaries and traders were in the Near East. Conservative writers make that point and note that three words is few, but the loanwords fit a Hellenistic-era text most easily.
None of this makes the authors dishonest. Court tales are not chronicles; the discrepancies matter as evidence of date and genre.
A fragmentary Aramaic text from Qumran, the Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242), preserves a first-person account by the last Babylonian king. He was afflicted "with an evil ulcer" for "seven years" at Tayma, and an exorcist, "a Jew" of the exiles, pardoned his sins.
The parallels with Daniel 4 are close: a Babylonian king speaking in the first person (4:1–18, 34–37), seven years or "seven times" of affliction (4:16, 23, 25, 32), a Jewish exile who helps him, and a public declaration honoring the God of the Jews. The historical Nabonidus did spend about a decade at Tayma, so many scholars think a story first told about that eccentric absentee king was transferred to the better-known Nebuchadnezzar. The surviving Qumran copy is younger than Daniel and the direction of influence is argued, so the Prayer is evidence of an older tradition behind chapter 4, not proof. Popular diagnoses of Nebuchadnezzar with "boanthropy" start from the wrong question: if the story began with Nabonidus, there is no royal case history to diagnose.
The statue in chapter 2, with its head of gold, chest of silver, belly of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of iron mixed with clay (2:32–33), draws on an old idea. Hesiod's Works and Days (lines 109–201) describes successive human races of gold, silver, bronze, and iron, declining in quality, with an age of heroes oddly inserted before the iron age. Daniel maps that decline onto political history.
The four-empire sequence has its own background. Joseph Ward Swain ("The Theory of the Four Monarchies," Classical Philology 35, 1940) argued that the scheme of Assyria, Media, Persia, then Macedon originated in Persian historiography and passed to Greek and Roman writers. David Flusser ("The Four Empires in the Fourth Sibyl and in the Book of Daniel," Israel Oriental Studies 2, 1972) found the same scheme in the fourth Sibylline Oracle. Daniel's version swaps in Babylon for Assyria, since Babylon destroyed Jerusalem, and keeps Media in second place. Hence a Median king between Belshazzar and Cyrus.
On this reading the four kingdoms are Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece. The "kingdom divided" of iron and clay (2:41) is the split of Alexander's empire, especially between the Seleucids in Syria and the Ptolemies in Egypt. "They shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another" (2:43) fits the failed marriage alliances between those two dynasties, which Daniel 11:6 and 11:17 describe more openly. The alternative sequence, Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome, is the traditional Christian reading, and Jerome defended it against Porphyry. It requires counting the Medes and Persians as one kingdom, though Daniel treats them separately (5:28, 31; 6:28). It must also explain why the later visions, read most naturally as Seleucid history, stop in the 160s BCE.
The stone "cut out without hands" (2:34, 45) is, within the book, the kingdom "the God of heaven" sets up, which "shall never be destroyed" (2:44). "Without hands" means not human work, and the stone that becomes "a great mountain" (2:35) may evoke Zion. The text identifies the kingdom by its origin and its permanence, not by its institutions.
The critical dating rests above all on chapter 7. Four beasts rise from "the great sea" stirred by "the four winds of the heaven" (7:2–3). The fourth beast has ten horns, and a "little horn" uproots three of them, has "a mouth speaking great things" (7:8), makes war on "the saints of the most High," and will "think to change times and laws" for "a time and times and the dividing of time" (7:25), that is, three and a half years.
Almost all critical scholars identify the little horn as Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid king who in 167 BCE banned Jewish sabbath and festival observance and installed a pagan altar in the Jerusalem temple (1 Macc. 1:41–54). "Change times and laws" fits the abolition of the Jewish calendar and Torah observance closely. The roughly three-year profanation, ended by the Maccabean rededication in 164 BCE, approximates the vision's "time and times and the dividing of time." Because the visions are precise up to the persecution and vague after it, scholars date chapter 7 and the later visions to about 167–164 BCE. The argument is old: we know the third-century philosopher Porphyry's version because Jerome quoted it to refute it in the prologue to his Commentary on Daniel, reporting Porphyry's claim that the book was composed by "some individual living in Judaea at the time of the Antiochus who was surnamed Epiphanes."
Then comes the throne scene. The "Ancient of days" with hair "like the pure wool" sits on a fiery, wheeled throne surrounded by "thousand thousands" (7:9–10). "One like the Son of man" comes "with the clouds of heaven" and receives everlasting dominion (7:13–14). The Aramaic kebar ʼenash means "one like a human being." The beasts are empires; what is the human figure?
J. A. Emerton ("The Origin of the Son of Man Imagery," Journal of Theological Studies 9, 1958) argued that the scene reuses Canaanite myth known from Ugarit. In those texts the aged, white-haired El presides over the divine council, and the younger Baal, called the "rider of the clouds," defeats the sea and receives kingship. Daniel keeps the two figures distinct, which is unusual in Israelite religion, where Yahweh himself rides the clouds.
Interpretation divides. The angel gives the kingdom to "the saints of the most High" (7:18, 22, 27), supporting a collective reading in which the figure symbolizes faithful Israel. Collins argues instead that the "holy ones" in Daniel are usually angels, and that the figure is an individual heavenly being, most likely Michael, Israel's angelic patron (10:21; 12:1), receiving the kingdom for the people he represents. Either way, the phrase was not yet a title. It became one in later Jewish texts and the Gospels, where Jesus' answer at his trial (Mark 14:62) combines Daniel 7:13 with Psalm 110:1, but that history should not be read back into the Aramaic of the 160s BCE.
A similar caution applies to 3:25. The KJV's "the form of the fourth is like the Son of God" renders Aramaic bar ʼelahin, more naturally "a son of the gods," a divine being in polytheist Nebuchadnezzar's idiom. The king himself explains that God "hath sent his angel" (3:28).
In the Hebrew Bible Daniel stands among the Writings, not the Prophets, often taken as a sign that it arrived after the prophetic collection had closed. The Greek tradition, in versions known as the Old Greek and "Theodotion," preserves a longer Daniel, with the Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Young Men inside chapter 3 plus the tales of Susanna and Bel and the Dragon (all in R. Timothy McLay's NETS translation). The hero's name may also be older than the book: Ezekiel 14:14, 20 names "Daniel" with Noah and Job as proverbially righteous, and the Ugaritic Aqhat epic features a figure named Danel who judges the cases of widows and orphans. John Day ("The Daniel of Ugarit and Ezekiel and the Hero of the Book of Daniel," Vetus Testamentum 30, 1980) argued that Ezekiel's Daniel is this ancient figure; the identification is debated.
A historical-critical reading does not reduce Daniel to a forgery. It shows a book built in layers. The tales answer a long-running problem, how to keep faith while serving someone else's empire, and say a Jew can thrive under a foreign king without giving up what matters. The vision answers an emergency, an empire turned persecutor, and says the empires are beasts whose time is measured. The defiant "but if not" of 3:18 links the two layers. It is spoken by men who do not know whether they will be rescued. For the book's first readers under Antiochus, many of whom were not rescued, that may have been the most important line in the book.