I almost returned Mr. Bradford's article with a notice that I could see no value in publishing something that did little more than plow the same ground that Everette Hatcher had covered in his articles on the book of Daniel. Hatcher spent much of his time mentioning sources that agreed with his 6th-century B. C. authorship position but not much time discussing the reasons the authors gave for maintaining this position, and we have now seen Michael Bradford do the same thing. He referred us to what writers like C. F. Pfeiffer, Flavius Josephus, and James Strong said or thought, but not once did he take the time to discuss the rationales for their conclusions. As I tried to explain to Hatcher, this kind of apologetics proves nothing except that the writer has been able to find books and articles that agree with his religious position, but I have yet to see a religious belief that has not had at least some books and articles published in support of it. Therefore, if the mere citing of printed materials that agree with one's position constitutes proof that this position is true, then there is no religious belief that cannot be proven true.
The quality of some of Bradford's sources was also questionable. He relied on The New Geneva Study Bible for support, but one would hardly expect a source like this to take an untraditional view of the Bible. As evidence that Darius the Mede was an actual historical character, Bradford quoted a passage from Josephus, but in so doing, he really did no more than cite the Old Testament as his proof, because Josephus obviously relied on the Jewish scriptures as a primary source of his information. Anyone who has done much reading at all in Antiquities of the Jews has surely recognized that Josephus's history of the Jews, for the most part, is simply a rehashing of biblical accounts. Since the book of Daniel said that Babylon fell to Darius the Mede, it isn't at all surprisingly that Josephus would echo that claim.
Like all inerrantists who have tried to defend the 6th-century B. C. authorship of Daniel, Bradford recognizes that proving the historicity of Darius the Mede is crucial, so in quoting Josephus he very selectively chose that which helped his case and left out that which didn't. A look at a much longer part of the fourth section of Antiquities 10:11, which Bradford quoted only in part, will show some important information that Bradford omitted. I will italicize the part of this section that Bradford tried to present as evidence that Darius the Mede was an actual historical person and a "kinsman" of Cyrus the Great.
When Daniel had told the king that the writing upon the wall signified these events, Baltasar [Belshazzar] was in great sorrow and affliction, as was to be expected, when the interpretation was so heavy upon him. However, he did not refuse what he had promised Daniel, although he were become a foreteller of misfortunes to him, but bestowed it all upon him: as reasoning thus, that what he was to reward was peculiar to himself, and to fate, and did not belong to the prophet, but that it was the part of a good and just man to give what he had promised, although the events were of a melancholy nature. Accordingly, the king determined so to do. Now after a little while, both himself and the city were taken by Cyrus, the king of Persia, who fought against him; for it was Baltasar, under whom Babylon was taken, when he had reigned seventeen years. And this is the end of the posterity of king Nebuchadnezzar, as history informs us; but when Babylon was taken by Darius, and when he, with his kinsman Cyrus, had put an end to the dominion of the Babylonians, he was sixty-two years old. He was the son of Astyages, and had another name among the Greeks (Antiquities, 10:11.4).
No doubt many read through Bradford's truncation without wondering what Josephus meant by the first sentence in the part that Bradford quoted: "And this is the end of the posterity of king Nebuchadnezzar." What was the end of the posterity of king Nebuchadnezzar? No one could know by just reading the part that Bradford selectively quoted, but when we see the statement in its full context, we can tell that Josephus was saying that the death of Baltasar [Belshazzar] was the end of Nebuchadnezzar's posterity. In other words, Josephus, like the writer of Daniel, apparently thought that Belshazzar was Nebuchadnezzar's son.
This mistaken belief of the writer of Daniel was discussed in detail in my replies to Hatcher ("Bad History in the Book of Daniel," TSR, July/August 1998, pp. 6-7). Almost two complete pages were used to quote Daniel 5:1-23 in its entirety and then to analyze it to show that the writer obviously thought that Belshazzar was Nebuchadnezzar's son, but in reply Hatcher said only that there was no word in Hebrew or Aramaic for "grandfather" and then summarily waved the entire discussion aside with the terse comment that "the critic Philip R. Davies concluded, `The literal meaning of "son" should not be pressed,'" (March/April 1999, p. 5). He made no attempt at all to reply to my analysis of the passage in Daniel 5, which clearly indicates that the writer thought that Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar were father and son, so I published the entire passage again and summarized the previous analysis (July/ August 1999, pp. 2-3). This crucial material has never been answered, and Bradford, who indicated in his article that he had followed the debate between Hatcher and me, said nothing about this important point either.
My replies to Hatcher noted that Babylonian records identified Belshazzar as the son of Nabonidus, who wasn't even related to Nebuchadnezzar, and this is a point that Hatcher didn't dispute. Given the wide recognition that Nabonidus and Belshazzar were father and son, I assume that Bradford is also aware of the problem that Daniel 5:1-23 presents to the theory that this book was written by a 6th-century B. C. Jewish official in the Babylonian government. How would such an official have made the mistake of thinking that Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar were father and son? How much credence can we give to what Josephus thought concerning Darius the Mede if Josephus, like the writer of Daniel, thought that Belshazzar was Nebuchadnezzar's son? That Josephus thought this would merely indicate that he was relying on the book of Daniel as his primary source of information, so why should the opinion of Josephus be trusted concerning who Darius the Mede was if he was only echoing what the Bible said.
In my replies to Hatcher, I twice pointed out that the apocryphal book of Baruch, which has been assigned a 2nd-century B. C. date, indicates that there was a mistaken belief at this time that Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar were father and son. This was shown in a letter that allegedly accompanied a contribution that Babylonian captives sent to priests who were still in Jerusalem.
They [the Babylonian captives] sent this message: The money we are sending you is to be used to buy whole-offerings, sin-offerings, and frankincense, and to provide grain-offerings; you are to offer them on the altar of the Lord our God, with prayers for king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and for his son Belshazzar, that their life may last as long as the heavens are above the earth. So the Lord will strengthen us and bring light to our eyes, and we shall live under the protection of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and of Belshazzar his son; we shall give them service for many a day and find favour with them (Baruch 1:10-12, REB version).
The writer of Daniel thought that Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar were father and son. A 2nd-century B. C. writer who forged a book in the name of the 6th-century B. C. scribe Baruch also thought that they were father and son, and Josephus thought that when Belshazzar was killed, this ended the "posterity" of Nebuchadnezzar, who in reality wasn't even an ancestor of Belshazzar. These facts certainly support the 2nd-century B. C. view of authorship much more than the traditional belief that Daniel was written by an important official in the 6th-century B. C. Babylonian court. It stretches imagination to the limit to find an explanation for why a chief official in Babylon could have made such a mistake about contemporary government, but no strain at all is put on the imagination of the person who simply recognizes that somehow this mistaken impression existed centuries later and was incorporated in a work that someone forged in the name of a 6th-century Jewish captive in the Babylonian court.
The impression that Belshazzar was a descendant of Nebuchadnezzar is not the only problem in the text that Bradford quoted from Josephus. Bradford said that "it is known from extra-Biblical sources that Cyrus the Persian was not present at Babylon the day that it fell to the Medo-Persian army" (p. 3, this issue). Besides begging the question of whether there was ever such a thing as a "Medo-Persian army," Bradford gave nothing to support the claim that Cyrus wasn't present when Babylon fell except to list Pfeiffer as his source. My own research (which I won't cite because of the unimportance of the point) has indicated that Cyrus didn't actually lead the Persian attack that captured Babylon but did enter the city a few days later and ruled from there until the following year when he moved his headquarters to Ecbatana, but the larger context of the passage in Josephus is, to say the least, confusing about whether Cyrus was present when Babylon fell. First, Josephus said that "both himself [Belshazzar] and the city were taken by Cyrus, the king of Persia, who fought against him," but then later, he referred to "when Babylon was taken by Darius." Such inconsistency hardly makes Josephus a reliable source to settle the question of whether Darius the Mede was an actual historical person.
In the "important references" that Bradford saw in the passage from Josephus, he included the claims that Cyrus was a "kinsman" of Darius [the Mede], who was "the son of Astyages," but, as we noticed above, Josephus also thought that Belshazzar was a direct descendant of Nebuchadnezzar, whose "posterity" came to an end with Belshazzar's death. If Josephus knew no more than this about the kinships of 6th-century B. C. Babylonian monarchs, why should we assume that he knew any more about the kinships of Persian rulers? In his preface to Antiquities, Josephus said that his intention was to write a history "as interpreted out of the Hebrew Scriptures" (1:2.5), so with no more evidence than the mere say-so of a writer who used the Jewish scriptures as his primary source of information, I can hardly accept Bradford's apparent belief that this passage from Josephus proves that Darius the Mede was an actual historical character. Since the book of Daniel presented him as a real person, then quite naturally this was all the proof that Josephus needed, so if he expects rational readers to accept the historicity of Darius the Mede, Bradford will have to do more than just cite a reference that Josephus made to him.
At this point, Bradford let his imagination run wild. Josephus said not only that Darius [the Mede] was a "kinsman" of Cyrus but that he was the son of Astyages and "had another name among the Greeks." I understand this to mean that Josephus was saying that Darius had another name among the Greeks, but Bradford seems to think it meant that Astyages had another name, because Bradford attempted to "reconcile this text in Josephus with a related text in Daniel 9:1, which refers to Darius as the son of Ahasuerus." Unfortunately, Bradford's reconciliation consisted of crass speculation that can hardly qualify as a "simple exegesis" on which he claimed to be basing his conclusions. Exegesis is a word that means to take the meaning out of a text as opposed to eisegesis, which puts into the text the meaning that one wants, and Bradford is obviously doing the latter, for at this point, expressions like "it is probable that" and "it is possible that" prefaced the conclusions that Bradford forced in order to get the "reconciliation" he wanted. Probabilities and possibilities, however, hardly constitute the kind of evidence that Bradford needs to prove the historicity of a person who was mentioned nowhere else except in the Bible and in works that have been based on the Bible. If Darius the Mede was a real person, then why didn't the records of that period mention a ruler of such prominence? We don't have to wonder if Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Cyrus, Evil-Merodach, Artaxerxes, Sennacherib, Tilgath-Pileser, and other Gentile kings mentioned in the Bible were actual historical persons, because extrabiblical records confirm that they were real, but we are supposed to believe that a king who conquered Babylon, issued edicts, and made extensive administrative reforms during his reign (Dan. 6) went completely unmentioned in the contemporary records of both Babylon and Persia. It is far more credible to believe that a document that exhibits signs of a later authorship was indeed written well after the fact by someone who was confused about 6th-century B. C. history.
Bradford's probabilities and possibilities: In his quest to reconcile Josephus's claim that Darius [the Mede] was the son of Astyages [the last Median king] with the claim in Daniel 9:1 that Darius was the "son of Ahasuerus," Bradford said "it is probable that the name Ahasuerus could have been a general name or title applied to some kings at that time and place in history, and that the more specific name of the father of Darius the Mede was Astyages" (p. 3). It was "probable," and it "could have been." That hardly sounds like conclusive evidence. In support of his "could have been," Bradford cited Ezra 4:6 and said that the Ahasuerus mentioned here was "king Cambyses of Persia," but a look at this text, which Bradford made no attempt at all to explicate, will show that this is baseless speculation.
Then the people of the land discouraged the people of Judah, and made them afraid to build, and they bribed officials to frustrate their plan throughout the reign of King Cyrus of Persia and until the reign of King Darius of Persia. In the reign of Ahasuerus, in his accession year, they wrote an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem (vs:4-6).
What is there is this text to show that the Ahasuerus mentioned here was "king Cambyses"? Consulting even general reference works like Bible dictionaries or encyclopedias will show that scholarly consensus certainly doesn't agree with Bradford. New Bible Dictionary identifies Ahasuerus as Xerxes I, who reigned from 485-465 B. C., and, commenting specifically on Ezra 4:6, it says, "An alternative but improbable theory is that the king here [Ahasuerus] is Cambyses, the successor of Cyrus" (1982, p. 21). A very reasonable interpretation of the passage is that it chronologically referred to Persian reigns. The people near Judah opposed the rebuilding activities in Jerusalem from the days of Cyrus to the reign of Darius, and then "in the days of Ahasuerus," they sent a written accusation to Ahasuerus. When interpreted like this, Ahasuerus was a successor to Darius the Great and not the same person as Darius's predecessor Cambyses, and Artaxerxes (mentioned in verse 7 as the recipient of still another letter) was the successor of Ahasuerus. This is exactly the way that editors of general reference works see the order of succession, as seen in the above quotation from New Bible Dictionary. In its discussion of the Persian Empire (1987, p. 816), Eerdmans Bible Dictionary lists the Persian kings in this order: Cyrus (559-530), Cambyses (529-522), Darius the Great (522-486), Xerxes (485-465), and Artaxerxes (465-425). In discussing Xerxes, it identified him as "Ahasuerus in Ezra and Esther." Under Ahasuerus, Eerdmans says, "A son of Darius the Great, he is the Ahasuerus who reigned between Cyrus and Artaxerxes (Ezra 4:5-7)."
Why does Bradford think, contrary to what scholarly reference works say, that the Ahasuerus in this text was Cambyses? He didn't say. He just said that he was, so how can I be expected to reply to Bradford's assertion that Ahasuerus in this text was Cambyses when I don't even know his reasons for making the assertion except, of course, that he is desperately looking for something to give at least a semblance of credibility to his traditional view of the book of Daniel? I have given my reasons--and supported them--for rejecting Bradford's claim that Cambyses was called Ahasuerus in Ezra 4:6, so if he intends to stick to his position, he will have to support it. Argumentation by mere assertion doesn't prove anything.
Even the Bible itself indicates that writers did not use "Ahasuerus" as a title. Ezra 4, for example, referred to a succession of Persian kings by their names Cyrus (vs:3-4), Darius (v:5), Artaxerxes (vs:7-11). Sandwiched in the middle of these names was "Ahasuerus" (v:6), so Bradford's claim requires us to believe that the writer referred to three Persian kings by their names but for some inexplicable reason used the title "Ahasuerus" to refer to a fourth king in the same context? How likely is that? On through Ezra, the writer mentioned Cyrus, Darius, and Artaxerxes over 20 more times, and always--without exception--he referred to them by name and never by the title "Ahasuerus." Furthermore, the book of Esther referred to "king Ahasuerus" at least twenty-five times (1:2,3,10,15,16, 17,19; 2:1,12,16,21; 3:1,6,7,8,12; 6:2; 7: 5; 8:1,7,8,12; 9:2,20,30; 10:1,3). If, as Bradford contends, "Ahasuerus" was used only as a title, that would make such references as these mean the equivalent of saying "king Pharaoh," and that would make all of the references to "king Ahasuerus" nonsensical in meaning, somewhat like saying "king king."
The reference materials and biblical passages that I have cited in this matter show major problems in Bradford's claim that Ahasuerus was just a title that was applied to several kings, but for the sake of argument, let's just suppose that Ahasuerus was a "general name or title" that was applied to Cambyses and other kings. How would this prove Bradford's claim that the "Ahasuerus" in Daniel 9:1, of whom Darius the Mede was said to be the "son," was the Astyages whom Josephus identified as the father of Darius the Mede? It wouldn't, but Bradford needs a reconciliation between Daniel 9:1 and the text in Josephus in order to have a halfway credible extrabiblical reference to "Darius the Mede," so he gets one by just arbitrarily declaring that "it is probable" that Ahasuerus was another name or title for Astyages. When a biblical inerrantist needs a reconciliation, he doesn't require much evidence.
Biblical reference books, however, don't seem to think too much of Bradford's "reconciliation." Eerdmans Bible Dictionary said in its second definition of Ahasuerus, "According to Dan. 9:1, the father of Darius the Mede. Josephus (Ant. x.11.4) calls him the son of Astyages I (Cyrus' grandfather, ca. 585-550), but this is highly unlikely" (1987, p. 30). Eerdmans didn't just say that it was unlikely that Darius the Mede could have been the son of Astyages but highly unlikely, and it is highly unlikely for the reasons noted above. Ahasuerus was used consistently in the Old Testament in reference to a Persian king who reigned between Darius the Great and Artaxerxes I. The chronology of his reign (485-465) is much too late for him to have been the father of a king who reigned in Babylon in 539 B. C. To prove otherwise, Bradford must show that it is plausible to believe that a Median king could have been the son of a Persian king who did not even reign until 54 years after his son had reigned in Babylon. If Bradford can stretch his imagination that far, what can I say except that he is a biblical inerrantist?
There is only one loose end left on this point. Bradford said I had claimed that "Darius the son of Ahasuerus" in Daniel 9:1 was "actually a reference to king Darius of Persia" (p. 3, this issue), but that isn't what I said. I have read through my article in which Bradford claimed that I said this (July/August 1999), but I could not find any place where I said that the Darius in Daniel 9:1 was a reference to king Darius of Persia. In a section subtitled "Darius the son of Ahasuerus?" I pointed out exactly what I have noted above: Ahasuerus was a Persian king who began his reign in 485 B. C., so it isn't at all likely that he could have been the father of a Median king who had reigned in Babylon in 539 B. C.
I suspect that Bradford had in mind something that I had said a year earlier in the July/August 1998 issue.
The Son of Ahasuerus: In 9:1, the writer of Daniel described the mysterious "Darius the Mede" as the "son of Ahasuerus, of the seed of the Medes," but Ahasuerus (better known as Xerxes) was the king of Persia from 485-465 B.C., so it isn't at all possible that "Darius the Mede," who allegedly reigned in Babylon in 539 B. C., was the son of someone who had not yet been born. Ahasuerus was the Persian king who allegedly made Esther his queen in the book named after this Jewish heroine. Since his father was Darius the Great, the writer of Daniel may have confused his Dariuses and anachronistically made a son of Darius the Great the king who had captured Babylon. At any rate, he made a historical mistake that would be understandable for an author writing four centuries later, but it is not a mistake that we could reasonably expect an important contemporary official of Babylon to make ("Bad History in the Book of Daniel," p. 8).
So all I was really saying was that an author writing long after the fact, without access to accurate sources of information, could have confused the king who had conquered Babylon with a Persian king named Darius who reigned much later. After all, there were three Persian kings named Darius, who all reigned after Cyrus.
I didn't present this theory as a historical fact but merely as a sensible explanation for why the writer of Daniel thought that someone named Darius had conquered Babylon and reigned there immediately afterwards. Although the theory is certainly not historical fact, it has been proposed by some very respectable scholars as a plausible explanation for why the writer of Daniel would have thought that Babylon was captured by a king named Darius. H. H. Rowley, for example, has proposed this explanation.
More serious is the styling of Darius a Mede. For both Cyrus and Darius Hystaspes were certainly Persians. But if our author [of Daniel] supposed that Darius preceded Cyrus, this further mistake would naturally follow. For he might well know that Cyrus established the Persian empire, and the knowledge that there had been a Median empire earlier than the Persian would lead him to call Darius a Mede (Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires of the Book of Daniel, p. 57).
Norman W. Porteous also thought that this was a reasonable explanation for the presence of the mysterious "Darius the Mede" in the book of Daniel.
The successor of the historical Nabonidus was the historical Cyrus and there never was a Darius between them. But there was a Darius, Darius Hystaspes, who captured Babylon after the death of Cambyses in 520 B. C. and the tradition of this capture and the name of the conqueror, with which may have been associated some memory of his achievements, may have been attached to the apocryphal figure. There are thus actual historical reminiscences as possible ingredients in the story, but we are for all that once more in the realm of legend (Commentary on Daniel: The Old Testament Library,1965, pp. 83-84).
Rowley even proposed a reason why a 2nd-century B. C. Jewish writer would have thought that the Medes had been the conquerers of Babylon, and that reason was the simple fact that the Hebrew prophets had predicted that Babylon would fall to the Medes.
It has been pointed out, and especially by Charles [Critical Commentary on Daniel, pp. 141ff], that he [the author of Daniel] would be influenced in this confusion by Scriptural prophecy. For Jeremiah had prophesied that Babylon should fall before "an assembly of great nations from the north" [50:9, 41], and had further specified them as the Medes [51:11, 28]. So, too, Isaiah xiii [17] had predicted the overthrow of Babylon by the Medes. It was indeed natural that the Hebrew prophets should look for the downfall of the Chaldaean regime at the hands of the Medes. For it was by them that Nineveh was destroyed, and though Nebuchadnezzar was then, and remained, the ally of the Medes, he seems to have felt a certain nervousness of them; and when he used his good offices to bring about peace between Media and Lydia [Herodotus, Hist. i.74], his desire was probably to prevent his neighbour and ally from becoming too powerful. And at the beginning of the reign of Nabonidus we find that Monarch forming an alliance with Cyrus, who was to revolt against Astyages. Apparently at a later date the author of Isaiah xxi hailed Elam and Media as the prospective conquerors of Babylon. This was doubtless written after Cyrus, king of Anshan, in southwest Elam, had brought the rest of Elam under his sway, when to the Hebrew observer it appeared likely that these two powers might unite in the destruction of Babylon. And since Elam is mentioned first, it is possible that the passage dates from a time after the absorption of Media by Cyrus. Already, then, hope was moving from the Medes to Cyrus, on whom they soon became centred in the writings of deutero-Isaiah [Isa. 41:2, 25 ff; 44:28; 45:1 ff; 46:1 f; 47:1 ff; 48:14]. But the author of the book of Daniel, in the absence of any exact history of the period, seems to have been misled by the earlier hopes, and to have assumed that though the Persians shared in the overthrow of the Babylonian empire, the throne of Babylon fell to the Medes (Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the Book of Daniel, pp. 57-58).
Perhaps Hatcher and Bradford could see the force of this hypothesis if they would just read the prophecies where Isaiah and Jeremiah predicted that the Medes would destroy Babylon. In a typically long prophetic tirade against Babylon, Isaiah warned that "the day of Yahweh is at hand" and that it would come as "destruction from the Almighty" (Is. 13:6). "Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them," Isaiah continued (v:17), "And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldeans' pride shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah" (v:19). Later, the prophet envisioned a "watchman" on a tower who saw troops of men riding in pairs, which was the watchman's cue to shout, "Fallen, fallen is Babylon, and all the images of her gods lie shattered on the ground" (21:8-9). Earlier, in the chapter, Elam and Media had been identified as the instruments that Yahweh would use to bring about the destruction of Babylon (v:2). I don't have the space to quote Jeremiah's prophecies in their entirety or to examine similar prophecies against Babylon, but if Hatcher and Bradford will read them (Jer. 50:8-46; 51:11-28), they will see that he too predicted the destruction of Babylon at the hands of the Medes: "Yahweh has stirred up the spirit of the kings of the Medes, because his purpose concerning Babylon is to destroy it" (51: 11).
Hatcher and Bradford may claim that I too am resorting to possible scenarios, but mine (which has the support of some of the most highly respected Old Testament scholars) is not just crass speculation; it is at least based on biblical predictions. Today, we will see biblical inerrantists lean over backwards to find ways to remove discrepancies from the Bible. They will stretch credulity beyond the breaking point, for example, to try to prove that Ezekiel's prophecies against Tyre and Egypt were accurately fulfilled when all of the evidence clearly points to the contrary. We have no reason to think that modern Bible believers are any different from their counterparts who lived centuries ago, so if a 2nd-century B. C. Jewish writer did indeed forge a book about Babylon's downfall, it certainly isn't hard to believe that, in the absence of libraries and other sources of information to consult, he would have assumed that what highly respected prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah had prophesied about Babylon's defeat had surely happened exactly as Yahweh had spoken through them, and as noted above, these prophets had predicted that the Medes would be Yahweh's instrument of destruction. This is a far more plausible explanation for the writer's inclusion of Darius the Mede in the book of Daniel than the could-have-been attempts that Hatcher and Bradford have made to prove that this Darius the Mede was a real person. After all has been said and done, one stubborn fact remains: the extrabiblical records of that time made no reference at all to a Darius the Mede, although characters of much less importance were mentioned.
At this point, I too am plowing the same ground that has already been covered in the debate on the book of Daniel, because all of the materials quoted above from the works of Rowley and Porteous have already been cited in my exchanges with Everette Hatcher. He basically left their arguments untouched, and now Bradford has decided to enter the discussion without addressing these extremely critical points that cast serious doubts on the traditional view that Daniel was written by a 6th-century B. C. Jewish captive who rose to prominence in the Babylonian court.
I have no more space in this issue to discuss Bradford's
attempts to prove the existence of a "Medo-Persian" empire, whose
combined forces defeated Babylon, so I will have to reply to this part
of his article in the next issue. After that, if he, or Hatcher, wishes
to reply, I will publish it if it contains more than just the citing of
books and articles by writers who think that Daniel was written in the
6th century B. C., that Darius the Mede was an actual historical
person, and that a "Medo-Persian" empire conquered Babylon. Anyone who
has ever researched the book of Daniel knows that biblical
fundamentalists defend all of these views, so we aren't interested in
seeing unexplicated references to what fundamentalist writers think
about these critical points. We want to see their reasons for so
thinking explained and defended with more than just speculation.
