The Skeptical Review Online - Print Edition

Anyone who has ever read much literature of Christian apologists and taken the time to check the sources they quote in support of their claims has surely noticed that they often quote out of context and distort their sources to leave the impression that science and scholarship are on their side. Many of their distortions are so flagrant that they have to be intentional, but in the case of Everette Hatcher's attempt to defend the fundamentalist view of the authorship of Daniel, I doubt if the misrepresentations of his sources were deliberate. I suspect rather that he pieced together his article from fundamentalist works without taking the time to check the accuracy of the quotations cited in them, and so the misrepresentations are not his own but those of the sources that he blindly trusted. At any rate, his article is a hodgepodge of half-truths, misrepresentations, and out-of-context distortions, which I am publishing and taking the time to respond to just to show the tactics that biblicists resort to in order to defend the absurd position that the Bible is completely inerrant.

When I received the article, my first inclination was not to publish it because it is little more than one appeal to authority after the other strung out over two and a half pages. In other words, Hatcher basically argued throughout his article that the 2nd-century B. C. dating of the book of Daniel is wrong and the 6th-century B. C. dating correct, because certain scholars say so. In so doing, he pieced together various quotations, obviously lifted unchecked from fundamentalist sources, and paraded them before us as if quoting a "scholar" necessarily proves anything. I have said many times in TSR and its internet list that anyone committed to a religious position can always find books published by authors who share that belief, so if quoting "scholars" constituted proof of one's position, anyone could prove any belief to be true. A Muslim could quote "scholars" who say that the Qur'an contains prophecies that have been fulfilled, and a Mormon could quote "scholars" who say that the Book of Mormon is historically accurate. There is much more to biblical apologetics than just citing "scholars," but apparently Hatcher does not realize this. If he does, he failed to indicate it in his article.

Along with his array of "scholarly" quotations put together in defense of a 6th-century B. C. authorship of the book of Daniel, Hatcher sent me a packet of letters from Bible professors at various seminaries and fundamentalist colleges, such as Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Dallas Theological Seminary, Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary, Covenant Theological Seminary, Wheaton College, and even a couple of British universities. In other words, Hatcher has sent to me a bundle of letters from professors of Bible and religion who have traditional views of the Bible, and presented them as apparent support for his position. Not surprisingly, these professors all seem to agree with Hatcher's belief that Daniel was written in the 6th-century B. C.

One of them stated that "(t)he discoveries of fragments of Daniel among the Dead Sea Scrolls shows [sic] that it was written earlier than 164 B. C.," but that was all that he said on the subject. He gave no evidence at all to support this assertion. Furthermore, saying that these discoveries show that Daniel was written earlier than 164 B. C. is too imprecise to warrant comment, for if it were written in 165 B. C., that would be earlier than 164 B. C. Referring also to the copy of Daniel found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, another of Hatcher's professors said in awkward syntax that "even the liberals say that this must have had several hundred years before the second century" and that "(i)n that case, it would put it back at least to the fourth or fifth century, if not the sixth." The professor said nothing to explain why the discovery of a copy of Daniel at Qumran would have to mean that it was written "several hundred years before the second century." He simply alleged that this was so and further said, "I think this effectively has nullified all the arguments for the second century writing of Daniel because even the liberals cannot account for this Dead Sea Scrolls copy at the time it appeared and in the form in which it appeared unless it had been in hand for several centuries." Hatcher needs to explain why finding a manuscript from the Essene period at Qumran would have to mean that the original was written "several centuries" earlier than 194 B. C., but neither he nor any of his Bible professors bothered to do that. They simply asserted that it was so.

The letters that Hatcher sent me are too many to review in this article, but I must mention that the word "liberal" was freely used throughout them to label those who date the book of Daniel in the 2nd-century B. C. In the space of only a one-page letter, a professor of New Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian college in St. Louis, used the word three times in referring to those who hold the view of a late authorship. A professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary said of these "liberals" that he "doubt[ed] if any arguments you could offer would persuade adherents of the late date that they are wrong," as if he and his cohorts who claim a 6th-century dating are the epitome of reasonableness in considering the late-authorship view. These professors typically believe that labeling a position with the word "liberal" somehow constitutes refutation, but mere labels don't prove anything.

Hatcher's quoted sources: The appalling thing about the sources that Hatcher quoted in his article is that most of them are from the works of scholars who accept the 2nd-century B. C. authorship of Daniel, but Hatcher has lifted them out of context or distorted them to leave the impression that they think the 2nd-century view is doubtful. Hatcher cited, for example, H. H. Rowley's Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the Book of Daniel, but just a cursory examination of this book will reveal that Rowley rejects the fundamentalist view that Daniel was written by a 6th-century B. C. prophet and accepts a 2nd-century authorship. Even the table of contents makes this obvious, where there are such chapter titles as, "There Is No Reliable Evidence for Any Darius the Mede" and "Darius the Mede is a Conflation of Confused Traditions." The writer of Daniel, purporting to be an official in the royal court of Babylon at the time of its downfall, said in 5:30-31 that Belshazzar was slain and that "Darius the Mede received the kingdom being about sixty-two years old," but historians, knowing that the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon, have seen this statement as a serious flaw in the theory that Daniel was written by a member of the royal court at the time of Babylon's fall to Cyrus. The problem has been complicated by the absence of any reference at all to a Darius the Mede in ancient nonbiblical records. After discussing various critical attempts to defend the obvious belief of the writer of Daniel that Babylon fell to a Median king named Darius, Rowley said this in his concluding chapter:

The Book of Daniel is not a work of the sixth century B. C. The case against the traditional date to which the composition of the book has been assigned rests on a variety of considerations, but the single one we have examined in the first part of our study would alone be sufficient to establish it. For [sic] a sixth-century person, who not only lived through the events of the period, but took a leading part in them, could not have made so gross an error as our author made in introducing Darius the Mede between Belshazzar and Cyrus. Nor could he have supposed that a Median empire stood between the Babylonian and the Persian (University of Wales Press, 1935, p. 175).

After rejecting the 6th-century authorship of Daniel, Rowley went on to state that the book was clearly written in the 2nd century:

As certainly can we say that the book of Daniel is a work of the second century B. C. If the work is loosed from the sixth century by the inaccuracy of its knowledge of that age, it is anchored in the second century by the accuracy of the knowledge of that age which appears in its pages.... So long as the work was believed to be written in the sixth century B. C., the accuracy of its descriptions of the second century but served to establish the wonderful certainty of prophecy. But when the link with the sixth century is broken by the proved historical errors in the part of the book that relates to that age, the whole case is altered. It is impossible to believe that the mind of Daniel was illumined with accurate knowledge of future times, while, at the same time, thoroughly befogged as to the events in which he himself had played no mean part, and we can only find in the limited range of the accurate knowledge the indication of the author's period (Ibid., pp. 175-176).

So obviously Rowley did not believe that the book of Daniel was written by a 6th-century B. C. prophet who personally witnessed many of the events recorded in the book, yet Hatcher has taken Rowley's book and quoted it in a way that left the impression that this biblical scholar saw serious problems in the critical views of those who reject a 6th-century B. C. authorship. The snippet that Hatcher quoted, however, was never intended to leave that impression, so Hatcher apparently puts more value on cherished beliefs than on scholastic honor.

Critics like Arthur Jeffrey have surmised that the author of Daniel incorrectly assumed from certain Old Testament prophecies that the "Medes conquered Babylon before the Persians," but Hatcher said that Isaiah 21:2 "blows this theory out of the water, because it speaks of Elam and Media as the joint-conquerors of Babylon" (p. 2, this issue). For support of this claim, Hatcher lifted a statement from Rowley out of context, which I will examine later, but first I want to point out that Hatcher's reference to Isaiah 21:2 tacitly begs a crucial question. If Hatcher believes in the 6th-century authorship of Daniel, he surely accepts the 8th-century authorship of Isaiah. If so, he will be forced to say that Isaiah 21 was a prophecy of the fall of Babylon that was made two centuries before Babylon was actually conquered. To say, then, that Isaiah 21:2 shows that Elam and Media were "co-conquerors of Babylon" is to assume that this prophecy proved true, but to so reason begs the question of whether predictive prophecy accurately occurred in biblical times. Does Hatcher have any evidence that Elam, with Media, was a "joint-conqueror" of Babylon? If so he needs to present it, because we won't allow him simply to assume that if an Old Testament prophet predicted that Elam and Media would be involved in the downfall of Babylon, it had to have happened as prophesied. The fact is that Elam and Media combined forces in a failed attack on Babylon in 596 B. C. (Eerdmans Bible Dictionary, 1987, p. 317), but this was 57 years before Babylon fell to Cyrus the Great in 539, by which time both Elam and Media had been gobbled up by Persian expansionism. Furthermore, Isaiah 21:2-9 says nothing at all about Persia; it mentions only Elam and Media, so Hatcher needs to prove that Isaiah intended Elam to be understood as Persia. Elam was located east of Mesopotamia in what is now Southwestern Iran, and Media was a confederation of tribes that lived in a mountainous region east of Armenia and northeast of Mesopotamia, an area that is now located in Eastern Turkey and Northern Iran. They were clearly separate territories and nations, but Media gained control of Elam prior to Persia's westward expansion. By the time Babylon fell to the Persians in 539 B. C., Cyrus had absorbed the Median empire, and so by then both Elam and Media were satrapies or provinces in the Persian empire. In view of this, biblicists need to explain why they think that Isaiah figuratively intended for Elam to represent Persia in his prophecy that Elam and Media would jointly conquer Babylon. Since both empires had been absorbed by Persia at the time of Babylon's fall, one could just as logically argue that Isaiah meant for Media to represent Persia or that he meant for both Elam and Media to represent Persia. The fact is that Isaiah named both Elam and Media as co-conquerers of Babylon, but it didn't happen; hence, this is just a simple case of prophecy failure in which no help at all can be found to make the book of Daniel historically accurate.

Of course, Hatcher and his fundamentalist cohorts are desperate to explain why the writer of Daniel made such a grievous mistake as to say that Babylon fell to "Darius the Mede," a person whom history knows nothing about, even though the fall of Babylon to Cyrus the Great is attested to in reliable ancient records; hence, they must grasp at any and all straws in sight to try to salvage their beloved biblical inerrancy doctrine. So they have reached for the failed prophecy in Isaiah 21:2-9 that Elam and Media would jointly conquer Babylon. History records that the Elamite-Median venture against Babylon failed, but inerrantists argue that it must have succeeded because Isaiah said that it would, and Daniel said Babylon fell to Darius the Mede. Hence, they are trying to prove the historical reliability of the book of Daniel by assuming the inerrancy of the book of Isaiah. What can I say except that this is typical of how inerrantist minds think? Why don't they just cut out a step and assume the inerrancy of Daniel and be done with it?

Hatcher even lifted a quotation from H. H. Rowley out of context to make it appear that this scholar, who unequivocally accepts a 2nd-century authorship of Daniel, believed that Isaiah 12:2 supports the view that the Medes and Persians "jointly" conquered Babylon. Below, I will quote a longer passage from Rowley's book than the brief one that Hatcher cited. I will italicize the part that Hatcher quoted so that readers can see the out-of-context distortion that he gave to the quotation. The quotation will be long but necessary to expose the misleading tactics of Bible fundamentalists.

More serious is the styling of Darius a Mede. For both Cyrus and Darius Hystaspis 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. It has been pointed out, and especially by Charles [Critical Commentary on Daniel, pp. 141 ff], that he 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).

So Hatcher's out-of-context quotation not only does not show Rowley admitting anything favorable to the view that Daniel was written in the 6th-century B. C. but, to the contrary, when examined in context, shows that Rowley considered Daniel's reference to the conquest of Babylon by "Darius the Mede" to be a serious historical blunder that could not have been made by someone who was a Babylonian official (as Daniel purportedly was) at the time of the fall. In the paragraph from which Hatcher lifted his quotation, Rowley was merely explaining that the author of Daniel, who actually lived much later than the 6th century, was probably familiar with prophecies by Isaiah and Jeremiah that Babylon would be conquered by the Medes and had incorrectly assumed that the prophecies had been fulfilled as predicted. Furthermore, Rowley's reference to "the writings of deutero-Isaiah" shows that he accepts the critical opinion that additions were made to the book of Isaiah by scribes or editors living in Babylon during the 6th-century captivity and that these unknown redactors, who would have been familiar with the threat that the Medes posed to Babylon, retrojected into Isaiah predictions that Babylon would be overthrown by the Medes. These predictions proved untrue, and by the time Babylon was conquered by Cyrus the Great, Media had been absorbed into the Persian empire. So in order to manufacture scholarly evidence to support the view that Daniel was written in the 6th century B. C., Hatcher has cited a passage from Isaiah and quoted out of context an authority who didn't even believe that the book of Isaiah was written in its entirety by the 8th-century prophet by that name, but this is the kind of extreme that biblicists must resort to in their desperation to defend their inerrancy doctrine.

Hatcher's case is so weak that he has had to resort to claiming that an Aramaic pun in Daniel 5:28 "hints" that the writer knew about "the victory of Persia over Babylon." This is a strange argument indeed, because we have just reviewed Hatcher's effort to show that Daniel was correct in saying that Babylon fell to "Darius the Mede," so which way does Hatcher want it? Does he want us to believe that Daniel knew something that history is silent about and that Babylon really was conquered by the Medes, or does he want us to believe that Daniel knew that the Persians actually overthrew Babylon and implied this via a pun in Daniel 5:28? He can't have it both ways.

In an attempt to give credibility to his pun argument, Hatcher cited Norman W. Porteous as a proponent of the theory that Daniel intended his use of the word peres in 5:28 to be understood as a pun. Porteous, however, is another biblical scholar who is firmly convinced that the book of Daniel was written during the Maccabean era of the 2nd century B. C., yet Hatcher has tried to enlist him as a proponent of the inerrantist view of a 6th-century authorship. Hatcher cited (p. 2, this issue) Porteous's commentary on Daniel from The Old Testament Library (Westminster Press, 1965) in an attempt to make a dubious pun in Daniel 5:28 imply that the writer of Daniel knew that Persia conquered Babylon. In other words, Hatcher's case is so tenuous that he can't produce direct textual evidence that the writer of Daniel knew that Babylon fell to Persia; he has had to resort to claiming that the writer of Daniel "punningly" implied it. He expects us to believe that the writer of Daniel knew that Babylon fell to Persian forces, but he couldn't just come right out and say so. The best he could do was just "hint" at it in a pun.

Daniel 5:28 is in the context of the inscription that was written on the wall by a hand that mysteriously appeared during a "great feast" that Belshazzar had given for a thousand of his lords, during which Belshazzar had committed sacrilege by drinking wine from the golden and silver vessels that Nebuchadnezzar had brought back from the temple in Jerusalem. The hand had written mene, mene, tekel, upharsin, and Belshazzar was troubled to know the meaning of the words. The historicity of this story is unlikely, because the inscription was written in Aramaic, the language that was spoken by Babylonians at this time. Belshazzar, being a Babylonian, would surely have been able to read the words, but according to the story he couldn't, because he sent for "the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and soothsayers" and said to them, "Whoever reads this writing and tells me its interpretation shall be clothed with purple and have a chain of gold around his neck, and he shall be the third ruler in the kingdom" (v:7). His "wise men," however, could not "read the writing or make known to the king its interpretation" (v:8), so we are expected to believe that probably the best educated class of people in Babylon could not read a four-word inscription in their native language. That's a doubtful premise at best. We could accept the claim that they could not interpret the message intended by the words, but to say that they could not "read" the words is a bit too much to believe.

Finally, Daniel came to the rescue (just as he had done when none of the kingdom's wise men could interpret Nebuchadnezzar's dream about the great image in chapter 2) and both read the words and gave Belshazzar an interpretation:

"And this is the inscription that was written: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. This is the interpretation of each word. Mene: God has numbered your kingdom, and finished it; Tekel: You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting; Peres: Your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and Persians (vs:25-28).

The word peres is where Hatcher has found his pun. Well, actually Hatcher didn't find the pun; he was merely parroting what he has read in the works of biblical fundamentalists who were desperate to find something in Daniel to defend the position of a 6th-century authorship. At any rate, one has to wonder why Hatcher and cohorts are so desperate to find a pun in the word peres, since Daniel in his interpretation said that the kingdom of Belshazzar had been divided and given to the Medes and Persians. All the talk about a pun seems like an exercise in redundant futility.

So this brings us back to Hatcher's quotation from Porteous's commentary on Daniel. Porteous himself, as we will soon see, was definitely not a proponent of 6th-century authorship. The six-word "bite" that Hatcher has snipped from Porteous was from the context of a two-page discussion of Daniel 5:24-28 (quoted above) in which Porteous focused mainly on textual variations in different versions of the inscription on the wall. The discussion is too long to quote in its entirety or even to summarize, but Porteous's approach was simply to state what different scholars have thought about and concluded from the variations. All that Porteous did was to note in passing that some have understood the last word in the inscription (peres) to refer "punningly" to "the Aramaic word for `Persian,' and so hinting at the victory of Persia over Babylon" (p. 81). Porteous himself did not say that he accepted this "understanding" of the word. He just noted it and went on to discuss critical theories about the meaning of the inscription. Most of these theories were that "Daniel" really intended the words to be veiled references to the Babylonian kings who had preceded Belshazzar, and anyone can verify this by reading pages 81-82 of Porteous's commentary.

Porteous's actual view was that the book of Daniel was written during the 2nd-century Maccabean conflict and that many of the prophecies were aimed at the despised Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes. As Porteous finished his comments on the inscription left by the mysterious hand, he stated this critical opinion too plainly to misunderstand.

Daniel made the mysterious words immediately relevant to the situation of the king. The author of the book doubtless means to hint that the pride and sacrilegious conduct of Antiochus Epiphanes have invited immediate judgment. And so we press back to the writer's conviction that, in the crisis which faced the loyal and sorely tried Jews of his day, the Judge of all the earth could be counted on to do the right. The traditional materials are freely and imaginatively handled to convey this truth in the most impressive way possible. The masal or parable which he has produced is unforgettable (emphasis added, p. 83).

If this is not enough to convince Hatcher that Porteous was not a biblical critic sympathetic to the view of a 6th-century authorship, perhaps his concluding comments on verses 30 and 31 of Daniel 5 will. This was where Daniel said that Belshazzar was killed "that night," and "Darius the Mede received the kingdom."

A single sentence describes the succession to the Babylonian throne of Darius the Mede. This Darius is almost certainly a figment of the writer's imagination. As we have seen, the prophets had foretold that Babylon would fall to the Medes and so there had to be a Median kingdom between the Babylonia and the Persian and there had to be a Median king to succeed Belshazzar. Every attempt to prove that there actually was such a monarch has failed. Astyages, the last king of the Median Empire, will not fit. He had been conquered by Cyrus in 549 B. C. Nor will Cyaxares II, the supposed uncle of Cyrus, suit any better. He is no more than an invention of Xenophon's. Gobryas, the renegade Babylonian who became a general of Cyrus, may have acted as governor of Babylon but was certainly never king. The successor of the historical Nabonidus was the historical Cyrus and there never was a Darius between them. But there was a Darius, Darius Hystaspis, 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" (emphasis added, pp. 83-84).

If Hatcher had bothered to check his source, he would have seen that Porteous is clearly a proponent of a 2nd-century authorship of Daniel. In the very first paragraph of the introduction to his commentary, Porteous said, "The linguistic evidence and the fact that the visions reveal a vague knowledge of the Babylonian and Persian periods and an increasingly accurate knowledge of the Greek period up to and including the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, with the exception of the closing events of that reign, suggest a date for the book shortly before 164 B. C." (emphasis added). <>Available space will not allow me to discuss all of Hatcher's distorted and misrepresented sources in a single article, and so I will follow this one with at least two more, one to finish analyzing what Hatcher perceives as damaging admissions that "critics" have made "concerning Daniel" and a third one to look more in detail at the textual evidence that points to a 2nd-century B. C. authorship. After I have run my responses, Hatcher may reply to them if he wishes.