Daniel Prophet and Man of God

Session 2

I. Daniel in the Den of Critics

Daniel comes highly recommended to us. The Scriptures consistently and emphatically testify to the authenticity and authority of the Book of Daniel. Ezekiel, a contemporary of Daniel, speaks of this man in the highest of terms. He is singled out by Ezekiel, along with Noah and Job:

Then the word of the Lord came to me saying, “Son of man, if a country sins against Me by committing unfaithfulness, and I stretch out My hand against it, destroy its supply of bread, send famine against it, and cut off from it both man and beast, even though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in its midst, by their own righteousness they could only deliver themselves,” declares the Lord God. “If I were to cause wild beasts to pass through the land, and they depopulated it, and it became desolate so that no one would pass through it because of the beasts, though these three men were in its midst, as I live,” declares the Lord God, “they could not deliver either their sons or their daughters. They alone would be delivered, but the country would be desolate. Or if I should bring a sword on that country and say, ‘Let the sword pass through the country and cut off man and beast from it,’ even though these three men were in its midst, as I live,” declares the Lord God, “they could not deliver either their sons or their daughters, but they alone would be delivered. Or if I should send a plague against that country and pour out My wrath in blood on it, to cut off man and beast from it, even though Noah, Daniel, and Job were in its midst, as I live,” declares the Lord God, “they could not deliver either their son or their daughter. They would deliver only themselves by their righteousness” (Ezekiel 14:12-20).

It is significant that Ezekiel (14:14, 20) respectfully referred to his contemporary Daniel by quoting God as saying, "Even if these three men--Noah, Daniel and Job--were in it [i.e., a rebellious land], they could save only themselves." Some writers argue that this "Daniel" could not refer to Ezekiel's contemporary but to the old Canaanite hero Dan'el, whose story is in the Ugaritic legend of Aqhat, who must have been nearly contemporary with Job. But a careful reading of the Aqhat epic reveals that Dan'el, the father of Aqhat, was a dedicated idol-worshiper, occupied with blood sacrifices to El, Baal, and other pagan gods for weeks at a time. They depict him as getting so drunk at one of his banquets that he could not walk home. He uttered vengeful curses against the eagle or vulture that killed his son and finally split open the belly of the bird that ate Aqhat's body, killed it, and put a curse on the entire City of Vultures. The next seven years he spent weeping and mourning for his dead son and finally induced his daughter to murder a warrior named Yatpan, implicated in the death of Aqhat seven years before.

It is difficult to see in all this a moral and spiritual superiority that would impress Ezekiel (to say nothing of Yahweh, whom he quotes) as putting Dan'el on a level with Noah and Job. As to the grouping of these three, it is significant that Noah lived a good fifteen hundred years or more before Job, and Job about fifteen hundred years before Daniel, Ezekiel's contemporary. What God seems to be saying, therefore, in Ezekiel 14:14, 20 is that even though outstanding heroes of faith--like Noah at the beginning of postdiluvial history and Job in the Patriarchal Age in the middle of the second millennium--were to combine with godly, gifted Daniel to intercede for apostate Judah, their most earnest intercession would not avail to turn back God's penal judgment against his faithless people. Therefore, we conclude that the Ezekiel references (including another one in 28:3) strongly support the authenticity of Daniel as Ezekiel's contemporary.

If Daniel’s righteousness is in view in this text, Ezekiel also refers to his wisdom in this indictment of the “leader of Tyre”:

The word of the Lord came again to me saying, “Son of man, say to the leader of Tyre, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “because your heart is lifted up and you have said, ‘I am a god, I sit in the seat of gods, in the heart of the seas’; yet you are a man and not God, although you make your heart like the heart of God—behold, you are wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that is a match for you” ‘” (Ezekiel 28:1-3).

Just as Daniel spoke of our Lord, the Messiah (see, for example, Daniel 9:24-27), our Lord spoke of Daniel. In His Olivet discourse, He refers to Daniel as “the prophet” (Matthew 24:15) and then lays out the events of the last days as the fulfillment of Daniel’s prophecies.

Others in the New Testament, who may not quote directly from Daniel, reflect the profound impact Daniel’s writing had on their thinking. Paul’s doctrine of the Antichrist draws heavily from Daniel 7 and 11. The Book of Revelation draws from Daniel’s prophecies and from the symbols he employs.¹ Virtually every New Testament writer has been influenced by or has drawn from Daniel in some way.²

Since the Scriptures show Daniel in such favorable light, it is indeed remarkable to find Daniel under greater attack from certain “scholars” than any other Old Testament book. The skeptical scholars have a serious problem with the Book of Daniel: its prophecies of future events, particularly those during the Maccabean period, are too precise. For such prophecies to have been made, and then be precisely fulfilled, would require the supernatural, and this is not acceptable to those who reject a sovereign God who is in control of history.

The fundamental issue is that of prophecy,³ the ability of God to foretell the future through His inspired prophets. The assumption that the Book of Daniel does not contain predictive prophecy makes it necessary to explain why the latter chapters of Daniel so accurately depict what has already taken place, especially during the 400 “silent years” between the Old and New Testaments. The anti-supernaturalist explanation is simple: Daniel is not a book of prophecy but of history; Daniel was not written in the 6^th century B.C. but in the 2^nd century.

Kraeling, who holds this view, represents it in these words:

For the Christian reader Daniel is a prophetic book. This is because he is called a prophet in the New Testament (Matt. 24:15) and because of the profound influence, especially of the visions, on Jesus and early Christianity. In our English Bible the book of Daniel follows Ezekiel. Not so in the Hebrew Bible, where it stands not among the prophets but among “the Writings.” From the standpoint of the book’s own suppositions the author (at any rate of the visions) was a man living in the time of the Chaldean and Persian kings. But this, in the view of all critical scholars, is a masquerade. Since prophecy, as we have seen, was virtually outlawed in the second century B.C., the idea came up to publish predictions under the name of some wise man or prophet of long ago. The pattern was provided by ancient Egyptian tales of wise men or seers who prophesied to a ruler about what would happen in the future—how his dynasty would end in social chaos and be replaced by a new one bringing blessing to the country. Jewish authors took over the pattern but gave it a new importance by providing a finale consisting of judgment over a current empire that had trodden down their people and the coming of the kingdom of God or of the Messiah. Thus was born the apocalyptic literature of which Daniel is the oldest specimen.⁴

J. Sidlow Baxter, a conservative evangelical scholar, summarizes the critical view this way:

To our skeptical critics the book is merely one of the pseudepigrapha, or Jewish writings of the first and second centuries B.C., issued under a spurious name. It was written about 164 B.C., to hearten loyal Jews amid their trials in the time of the Maccabees. This means that it was written three and a half centuries after the time which it pretends. Its miracles are imaginations. Its predictions are simply history pretended to be foretold three hundred and fifty years later.⁵

Critical scholars have cited various lines of evidence to support their conclusion. Further inquiry and more recent data not only provide conservative biblical scholars with the ability to refute the arguments of the critical scholars; it has even caused some liberal scholars to rethink their position.⁶ Listed below are some arguments of those who attack the accuracy and authority of Daniel and the response of conservative scholarship to them.

Read Pg. 17. Of Daniel commentary by Bultema.