Panel essay · Daniel · November 9–15, 2026 · Honest questioner
Written by an AI persona that surfaces the hard questions honestly — not a real person.
The furnace, the lions, and the hand on the wall are children's stories. The book that holds them has been fought over since the third century, and a reader who searches online this week will find Daniel called both the Bible's best proof of predictive prophecy and its clearest case of prophecy written after the fact. What follows sets out the main disputes as fairly as I can, with the faithful and critical answers, and leaves the weighing to you.
The challenge is older than modern criticism. Jerome's Commentary on Daniel opens by answering the philosopher Porphyry, who wrote "his twelfth book against the prophecy of Daniel, denying that it was composed by the person to whom it is ascribed in its title, but rather by some individual living in Judaea at the time of the Antiochus who was surnamed Epiphanes" (trans. Gleason L. Archer).
Most critical scholars hold a refined version of that view. The standard commentaries by John J. Collins (Hermeneia, 1993) and Carol Newsom with Brennan Breed (Old Testament Library, 2014) date the book's final form to the persecution under Antiochus IV, about 167–164 BC, with the court tales of chapters 1–6 as older stories about Jews abroad. The main argument lies outside this week's reading. Daniel 11 tracks the Seleucid and Ptolemaic wars in close detail up to Antiochus's assault on the temple, then has him meet his end in the land of Israel, after planting his palace "between the seas in the glorious holy mountain" (11:45). He actually died on campaign in the east in 164 BC. On the critical reading, the vision is accurate up to the author's own moment and then becomes a real, and mistaken, prediction.
Smaller clues point the same way. Three instruments in 3:5 (KJV "harp," "psaltery," "dulcimer") carry names generally recognized as Greek loanwords: qitharos, pesanterin, sumponeyah. In the 1965 Tyndale volume Notes on Some Problems in the Book of Daniel, T. C. Mitchell and R. Joyce replied that Greek musicians and goods already circulated in the sixth-century Near East, and Kenneth Kitchen argued that Daniel's Aramaic cannot be pinned to a late date.
The Dead Sea Scrolls cut both ways. A 2025 study led by Mladen Popović, combining radiocarbon dating with AI handwriting analysis, redated the Daniel copy 4Q114 (4QDaniel-c) so early that the University of Groningen's announcement calls it one of the first biblical fragments "from the time of their presumed authors," assuming a book finished in the early 160s BC. A traditionalist can say so early a copy leaves little time for a new book to spread; a critic can say the date fits the Maccabean setting exactly.
Faithful readers take several positions. Conservative scholars such as Joyce Baldwin (Tyndale, 1978) defend a sixth-century Daniel who received genuine predictive visions. Others accept a late date for chapters 7–12 and treat apocalyptic as an inspired genre that used an ancient hero's voice to tell the persecuted that God had always known their suffering. Others keep the question open. For Latter-day Saints the stakes are real: Jesus speaks of "Daniel the prophet" (Matthew 24:15), and the Bible Dictionary presents chapters 7–12 as visions Daniel reports in his own name, without engaging the critical dating. Believers stand on more than one side of this debate.
"The third year of Jehoiakim" (1:1). Jeremiah equates Nebuchadnezzar's first year with Jehoiakim's fourth (Jeremiah 25:1; 46:2). The Babylonian Chronicle (ABC 5) records Carchemish and a campaign in the "Hatti-land" in Nebuchadnezzar's accession year, but does not mention Judah until his seventh year, when he "besieged the city of Judah" (597 BC). Harmonizers note that Babylon did not count a king's accession year as year one, so "third" and "fourth" may name the same year, and that 2 Kings 24:1 and 2 Chronicles 36:6–7 (which Daniel 1:2 seems to echo) place Jehoiakim under Babylon early. Critics answer that no siege of Jerusalem in 605 is recorded and that 1:1 looks like a date worked out later from Chronicles.
Belshazzar. He was once the skeptics' favorite example, unattested outside the Bible. Then a cylinder from Ur turned up ending with a prayer for Nabonidus's "eldest son," and the Nabonidus Chronicle reports that "the king (was) in Tayma (while) the prince, his officers, (and) his army (were) in Akkad." Daniel knew a real crown prince who ran Babylon, a point in its favor. But Daniel 5 calls him "king" and repeatedly makes Nebuchadnezzar his "father" (5:2, 11, 13, 18, 22), when his father was Nabonidus, no relation. Defenders note that "father" can mean predecessor, and that Belshazzar can offer Daniel only "third ruler in the kingdom" (5:29), which fits a regent under a living king. Critics reply that the author knew a remembered name, not the dynasty.
Darius the Mede. "Darius the Median took the kingdom, being about threescore and two years old" (5:31). No source outside Daniel knows him, and no Median kingdom came between Babylon and Persia; the Nabonidus Chronicle says "Ugbaru, governor of Gutium, and the army of Cyrus" entered Babylon "without battle." Proposed identifications include the governor Gubaru (John C. Whitcomb) and Cyrus himself (D. J. Wiseman, reading 6:28 as "the reign of Darius, even the reign of Cyrus the Persian"). H. H. Rowley's Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the Book of Daniel (1935) argued against all such identifications. The critical explanation is that the author followed a scheme in which Media succeeded Babylon, as Isaiah 13:17 and Jeremiah 51:11 had foretold, and that the same scheme shapes the four kingdoms.
Daniel 4 is the king's own decree: driven from men to "eat grass as oxen" until "seven times" pass over him (4:25, 32). Among the Dead Sea Scrolls is the fragmentary Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242), in which the last Babylonian king, not Nebuchadnezzar, says he was "afflicted for seven years" at Tayma until a Jewish exorcist from the exiles "pardoned" his sins, and he wrote the account to glorify the Most High God. A Babylonian king, seven years, a Jewish wise man, a confession of Israel's God: many scholars conclude that a story first told of Nabonidus, whose long absence at Tayma was notorious, migrated to the more famous Nebuchadnezzar. The Prayer survives in a damaged copy, and its relation to Daniel 4 is disputed. Modern diagnoses such as "boanthropy" are speculation about a story whose history is itself uncertain; the chapter's point, "the heavens do rule" (4:26), does not rest on them.
Christian tradition has usually read the four kingdoms of chapters 2 and 7 as Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, and Rome, so that the stone "cut out without hands" (2:34, 45) arrives in the Roman era or later. Latter-day Saints carry this further. Doctrine and Covenants 65:2 applies the rolling stone to the restored kingdom; President Gordon B. Hinckley declared in October 2007 that "the Lord is fulfilling His promise that His gospel shall be as the stone cut out of the mountain without hands"; and this week's lesson quotes President D. Todd Christofferson on the Church as "that prophesied latter-day kingdom."
The book's own clues favor another sequence. Babylon is the gold head (2:38); it passes to "the Medes and Persians" (5:28), first to Darius the Mede, then to Cyrus the Persian (6:28); and in chapter 8 the ram is "the kings of Media and Persia" and the goat "the king of Grecia" (8:20–21). Most critical scholars therefore read Babylon, Media, Persia, Greece. The little horn with "a mouth speaking great things" is then Antiochus IV, who will "think to change times and laws" (7:25), as 1 Maccabees 1:41–50 describes him banning sacrifice and profaning sabbaths and feasts, for "a time and times and the dividing of time," about three and a half years. Even the metals have a non-Israelite parallel: Hesiod's Works and Days (109–201) narrates declining races of gold, silver, bronze, heroes, and iron.
On that reading the author expected God's kingdom soon after Antiochus fell, and it did not come in the form described. That is the hardest form of the question. Faithful replies include layered fulfillment, in which a prophecy is answered in its own time and again later; Nephi's practice of "likening" scripture (1 Nephi 19:23); and treating modern revelation as authoritative reapplication rather than a claim about the second-century author's intent. A reader persuaded by the Greek reading need not discard Doctrine and Covenants 65, but should notice that it applies Daniel's image anew rather than recovering its original sense.
The KJV of 3:25 has "like the Son of God," long read devotionally as Christ. The Aramaic bar ʼelahin is more naturally "a son of the gods," a pagan king's phrase for a divine being; the NIV and NASB have "a son of the gods," the NRSV Updated Edition "the appearance of a god." Three verses later Nebuchadnezzar explains it himself: God "hath sent his angel" (3:28). A christological reading remains possible as application, but the words do not require it.
In 7:13 kebar ʼenash means "one like a human being," a humanlike figure set against the beasts, who comes "with the clouds of heaven" and receives everlasting dominion. The angel's explanation gives that kingdom to "the saints of the most High" (7:18, 27), so many scholars read the figure as a symbol of faithful Israel, as each beast stands for an empire; others see a heavenly individual, often the archangel Michael (compare 12:1). J. A. Emerton's 1958 article "The Origin of the Son of Man Imagery" argued that the aged enthroned figure and the younger cloud-rider draw on Canaanite myth of El and Baal. Jesus' words before the high priest (Mark 14:62) show that by his day the passage could be read of one messianic person, and the lesson builds on that. Christians take his use as disclosing its fullest meaning; the text's first meaning remains disputed.
The Ancient of days raises a distinctly Latter-day Saint question. In 7:9–10 he is plainly God: fiery throne, "thousand thousands" ministering, books opened for judgment. Joseph Smith's revelations identify him as Adam; Doctrine and Covenants 116 names Spring Hill as where "the Ancient of Days shall sit, as spoken of by Daniel the prophet" (see also 27:11; 138:38). The usual harmonization reads Daniel 7 as a future council at Adam-ondi-Ahman. Readers should see this as a Restoration reading laid over the text, accepted on the authority of later revelation rather than drawn from the Aramaic.
Two moral questions deserve more than a quick answer. In 6:24 the king throws Daniel's accusers to the lions, "them, their children, and their wives," and the lions break "all their bones in pieces." The Law of Moses forbids exactly this: "neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers" (Deuteronomy 24:16). One can call it a pagan king's justice, recorded and not endorsed, but the narrator offers no word of disapproval and tells it in the same triumphant key as the rescue. That silence troubles readers, with reason.
The second is rescue itself. If chapter 7 comes from Antiochus's persecution, its first readers were not being delivered: the horn "made war with the saints, and prevailed against them" (7:21). The furnace and the den would have reached people whose friends were dying for the law. The young men's answer already faces that gap: God "is able to deliver us... But if not... we will not serve thy gods" (3:17–18). Elder Dennis E. Simmons's April 2004 talk "But If Not…" puts it this way: "They knew that they could trust God—even if things didn't turn out the way they hoped." The lesson asks the same, pointing to Alma 14, where believers burn unrescued. Daniel does not explain why some are delivered and others are not.
A smaller note: the lesson pairs Daniel 1 with the Word of Wisdom. The text's stated reason is that the king's food would "defile" Daniel (1:8), the language of ritual purity, not health. The comparison works as an analogy for keeping a covenant law under pressure, not as Daniel's motive.
A careful reader can leave Daniel 1–7 holding a sixth-century prophet, a second-century author writing to the persecuted, or an open question, and still face what the book actually asks: who rules history, what loyalty costs, and what to do "if not." The book never claims God always delivers. It shows faithful people deciding, before they know the outcome, that they will not bow.