Panel essay · Daniel · November 9–15, 2026 · LDS scholar
Written by an AI persona in the voice of a Latter-day Saint academic — not a real scholar.
In Daniel the evidence of the ground, the evidence of the manuscripts, and the claims of the text all press on each other at once. Babylonian tablets name characters the book names; Qumran fragments survive from close to the time many scholars think it was finished; and Latter-day Saint scripture takes up the stone of chapter 2 and the Ancient of days of chapter 7 and gives them new work to do. A Latter-day Saint reader is in a good position to hold all three honestly, because nothing in the Restoration's own account of scripture requires the book to be something other than what the evidence shows.
At 2:4 the Chaldeans answer the king "in Syriack." The phrase marks a change of language: from there to 7:28 the book is in Aramaic, and it returns to Hebrew at 8:1. The Bible Dictionary notes the same split (Bible Dictionary, "Daniel, book of").
The language break does not match the obvious break in genre. Chapters 1–6 are stories and 7–12 visions, so the Aramaic block holds five stories and one vision. In 1972 A. Lenglet argued in Biblica that the Aramaic chapters form a concentric pattern. Chapters 2 and 7 both set out four kingdoms followed by God's kingdom. Chapters 3 and 6 are deliverances from a death sentence; chapters 4 and 5 are judgments on proud kings. Chapter 2 ends with a kingdom "which shall never be destroyed" (2:44), and chapter 7 ends with a kingdom that is "an everlasting kingdom" (7:27). Nebuchadnezzar's decree that "there is no other God that can deliver after this sort" (3:29) is answered by Darius's "He delivereth and rescueth" (6:27). Nebuchadnezzar's madness in chapter 4 is what Daniel throws back at Belshazzar in 5:18–22: "And thou his son, O Belshazzar, hast not humbled thine heart, though thou knewest all this."
The design suggests the Aramaic chapters once circulated as a unit about earthly kingship under heaven's rule, and that chapter 7 was written to close it, deliberately echoing chapter 2.
Daniel 5 calls Belshazzar "king" and repeatedly makes Nebuchadnezzar his father (5:2, 11, 13, 18, 22). Until the nineteenth century no known source outside the Bible and the writings that depend on it mentioned Belshazzar, and some critics doubted he had existed. A foundation cylinder of Nabonidus from the temple of the moon god Sin at Ur ends with a prayer for "Belshazzar, the eldest son, my offspring" (translation by Paul-Alain Beaulieu, quoted in "Cylinders of Nabonidus"). The Babylonian chronicle for Nabonidus's reign records again and again that "the king (was) in Tayma," an oasis in Arabia, while "the prince, his officers, (and) his army (were) in Akkad" (ABC 7, the Nabonidus Chronicle, Livius). A third text, the so-called Verse Account of Nabonidus, says the king "entrusted the kingship" to his eldest son before leaving for Arabia.
The evidence cuts both ways. Daniel preserves a real name that later Greek historians had forgotten. It also knows Daniel could only be made "the third ruler in the kingdom" (5:7, 16, 29), which makes most sense if Belshazzar was himself second, under an absent father. But Belshazzar was not Nebuchadnezzar's son, and the tablets never call him king. Reading "father" as "predecessor" is possible but strained when the queen insists: "the king Nebuchadnezzar thy father, the king, I say, thy father" (5:11).
Latter-day Saints have had this in the Church's own magazine for forty years. In the September 1986 Ensign, John A. Tvedtnes wrote that "Belshazzar was actually the son of Nabonidus, not of Nebuchadnezzar." He also argued that the madness of chapter 4 fits Nabonidus's long absence at Tayma better than anything known about Nebuchadnezzar. His evidence was an Aramaic fragment from Qumran, the Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242), in which Nabonidus is afflicted for seven years at Tayma and a Jewish figure urges him to honor the Most High God (4Q242, Livius). Most scholars now read 4Q242 as an older form of the story behind Daniel 4 rather than evidence of a copying error, but Tvedtnes's conclusion has worn well: "Such errors need not damage our faith in the book of Daniel, or in the Old Testament as a whole" (Tvedtnes, Ensign, Sept. 1986).
Other problems belong in the same category. Daniel 1:1 puts Nebuchadnezzar's siege of Jerusalem in "the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim." Jeremiah dates Nebuchadnezzar's victory at Carchemish to "the fourth year of Jehoiakim" and calls that year "the first year of Nebuchadrezzar" (Jer. 46:2; 25:1). Then there is "Darius the Median," who "took the kingdom" (5:31). In the Nabonidus Chronicle, Ugbaru, governor of Gutium, entered Babylon with Cyrus's army "without battle," and Cyrus himself arrived a few weeks later (ABC 7). No contemporary source puts a Median king between Babylon and Persia, and identifications of Darius with Ugbaru/Gubaru or with Cyrus have not won wide agreement.
The case for a late date is old. In the third century AD the Neoplatonist Porphyry "wrote his twelfth book against the prophecy of Daniel." He argued that it was "composed by some individual living in Judaea at the time of the Antiochus who was surnamed Epiphanes." We know it mainly because Jerome quoted it to refute it (Jerome, Commentary on Daniel, prologue, trans. Gleason Archer). Modern scholarship largely sides with Porphyry on the book's final form. In John J. Collins's standard Hermeneia commentary (Fortress, 1993), the court tales of chapters 1–6 are older stories from the Jewish diaspora, probably from the Persian or early Hellenistic period. Chapter 7 and the Hebrew visions of 8–12 were added during the persecution under Antiochus IV, around 167–164 BC. The strongest evidence is chapter 11, which traces Seleucid and Ptolemaic history in close detail down to the 160s and then goes vague about Antiochus's death. But chapter 7 shows it too. The little horn that "shall wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and laws" for "a time and times and the dividing of time" (7:25) fits Antiochus's ban on the Sabbath and the festivals, which lasted a little over three years, close to the three and a half years of the vision.
Two recent findings complicate the picture in useful ways. First, the Greek instrument names in 3:5 (qitharos, pesanterin, sumponyah, behind the KJV's "harp," "psaltery," and "dulcimer") were long treated as decisive proof of a Hellenistic date. Benjamin Suchard argues that they look less like words fully absorbed into Aramaic than like code-switching, the mixing of languages that bilingual speakers do (Suchard, "The Greek in Daniel 3: Code-Switching, Not Loanwords," JBL 141 (2022)). That weakens a classic argument without overturning the case. Second, in 2025 a team led by Mladen Popović radiocarbon-dated 4QDaniel-c (4Q114), a Qumran manuscript of Daniel 8–11. The accepted calibrated range is 230–160 BC. The authors note that this range "overlaps with the period in which the final part of the biblical book of Daniel was presumably authored" (Popović et al., PLOS One, 2025). Both camps will cite it; what it firmly establishes is that copies of the visions were circulating within a generation or so of Antiochus at the latest.
What does this mean for a Latter-day Saint? Less than many fear. Restoration scripture does not use the inerrancy framework that makes Daniel's date a test of faith for some Protestants. The eighth article of faith accepts the Bible "as far as it is translated correctly," and Tvedtnes's Ensign article shows the Church's own publications admitting historical errors in this very book. If chapter 7 was written in the 160s about Antiochus, it is still a revelation of the God of heaven's rule over the beasts, given to people persecuted for keeping the Sabbath. The real cost lies elsewhere: a Maccabean date means the predictions were aimed at the Maccabean crisis, so any Latter-day Saint application to later events then has to be understood as a further fulfillment or a likening, not as the author's own meaning. D&C 65, read carefully, already works that way.
Read inside the book, the four kingdoms of chapter 2 are not hard to identify. Daniel names the first ("Thou art this head of gold," 2:38). The book then has "Darius the Median" receive the kingdom (5:31) before "Cyrus the Persian" (6:28). Daniel 8:20–21, just past this week's reading, names "the kings of Media and Persia" and "the king of Grecia." On the book's own terms, then, the sequence is Babylon, Media, Persia, Greece. The iron mixed with clay that "shall mingle themselves with the seed of men" by marriage (2:43) fits the failed marriage alliances between the Seleucid and Ptolemaic houses. The old Christian reading, which makes Rome the fourth kingdom, is the one Latter-day Saint teaching usually assumes. It requires merging Media and Persia into one kingdom, which the text keeps apart. The metal sequence itself is older than Daniel; Hesiod's ages of gold, silver, bronze, and iron in Works and Days are the best-known example.
So the stone that strikes the image "in the days of these kings" (2:44) was, in the author's own horizon, God's kingdom about to break in on the Hellenistic kingdoms. The Restoration text that matters is Doctrine and Covenants 65, and it is worth reading exactly. "The keys of the kingdom of God are committed unto man on the earth, and from thence shall the gospel roll forth unto the ends of the earth, as the stone which is cut out of the mountain without hands shall roll forth" (D&C 65:2). The word "as" matters. The revelation does not exegete Daniel 2; it applies Daniel's image to the gospel's spread by simile. It also separates the "kingdom of God" on earth from a "kingdom of heaven" still to come, when "the Son of Man shall come down in heaven" (65:5–6). That is Daniel 2 read alongside Daniel 7. In one of his last conference addresses, President Gordon B. Hinckley kept the same emphasis: the Lord "is fulfilling His promise that His gospel shall be as the stone cut out of the mountain without hands" (Hinckley, "The Stone Cut Out of the Mountain," Oct. 2007). This week's lesson goes a step further, with President D. Todd Christofferson's statement that "the Church is that prophesied latter-day kingdom" (Come, Follow Me, Nov. 9–15).
Daniel's own stone is a kingdom set up by God "without hands," against empires, for a persecuted people. The Restoration identifies a second, later fulfillment and says so by revelation. Scholarship can neither confirm nor rule that out; it can keep us from claiming that the 160s BC author had the 1830s in view. Holding the two horizons apart makes the Restoration claim more honest and no weaker.
The KJV says "the thrones were cast down," but the Aramaic means the thrones were set in place for judgment. An aged figure takes his seat, "whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool," with a throne of fire and wheels (7:9). Then "one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven" (7:13). The Aramaic kebar ʼenash means "one like a human being." Kingdoms that rise from the sea look like animals; the kingdom God gives looks human. The angel's interpretation then makes the kingdom belong to "the saints of the most High" (7:18, 22, 27). So the figure may represent the faithful as a group. Collins argues instead that the figure is a heavenly individual, most likely the archangel Michael, the "great prince" of 12:1, who leads the heavenly armies on Israel's behalf. Earlier, J. A. Emerton argued that the scene draws on Canaanite myth, in which Baal the cloud-rider receives kingship in the presence of the aged El (Emerton, "The Origin of the Son of Man Imagery," JTS n.s. 9 (1958)). Whatever its background, by the first century the phrase was read as a title. Jesus' answer at his trial joins Daniel 7:13 to Psalm 110: "ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven" (Mark 14:62). That is the reading the lesson, and Christians generally, inherit.
The Restoration's distinctive move concerns the other figure. Doctrine and Covenants 27:11 speaks of "Michael, or Adam, the father of all, the prince of all, the ancient of days." Section 116 names Spring Hill, Missouri, Adam-ondi-Ahman, the place where Adam will visit his people, "or the Ancient of Days shall sit, as spoken of by Daniel the prophet." In 1839 Joseph Smith explained that "Daniel 7. speaks of the Ancient of Days, he means the oldest man our Father Adam, Michael," who "will call his children together and hold a council with them to prepare them for the coming of the Son of man" (Discourse, ca. 26 June–4 Aug. 1839–A, as reported by William Clayton, Joseph Smith Papers).
Honesty requires stating that this is not what the Aramaic author meant. In Daniel 7, the Ancient of days who judges, opens the books, and gives everlasting dominion is God. In Collins's reading, Michael is the figure who receives dominion, not the one who sits on the throne. Joseph Smith's reading reassigns the roles. It makes Daniel's scene a patriarchal council at which the first father returns his stewardship to Christ, with Adam's earlier blessing of his posterity at Adam-ondi-Ahman as its pattern (D&C 107:53–56). Like D&C 65, it is revelation building on Daniel's image, not recovery of Daniel's original meaning. Yet the scholarly finding that Daniel's throne scene draws on an older picture of a divine council matches the Restoration's interest in a heavenly council more closely than either side usually admits.
In 3:25 Nebuchadnezzar sees a fourth figure in the furnace and says it is "like the Son of God." The Aramaic bar ʼelahin is more naturally "a son of the gods," meaning a divine being, as a polytheist king would put it. Three verses later the king explains himself: God "hath sent his angel" (3:28). Seeing the premortal Christ here is an old and legitimate devotional reading, but it is a reading, and the KJV capitals make it look more certain than the Aramaic does.
The furnace story is also where the book's real argument about history lies. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego do not claim to know how the story ends: "our God whom we serve is able to deliver us... But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods" (3:17–18). A book finished under Antiochus, when the faithful were not always delivered, would put exactly that sentence at its center. Read that way, the layered book that scholarship reconstructs answers the lesson's question about faith that does not lead to miracles more directly than a story of guaranteed rescue could.