The Skeptical Review Online - Print Edition

Biblical fundamentalists claim that the book of Daniel was written in the 6th century B. C. by an important official in the Babylonian empire, but in recent issues of The Skeptical Review, including also this one, we have seen serious reasons to doubt this claim. As the textual evidence has shown, a more likely view is that this book was written in the 2nd century B. C. during the Maccabean era. If, however, it is indeed the case that Daniel was written in the 6th century, there are some convenient coincidences in this book.

"Good History in the Book of Daniel" (pp. 9-11, 16, this issue) described the attempts of Antiochus II Epiphanes to destroy Judaism during his reign. Many of his efforts to stamp out Jewish traditions and religious practices are recorded in the apocryphal books of the Maccabees. According to 1 Maccabees 1:41-61, Antiochus issued a decree ordering subjects throughout his empire to "become one people and abandon their own customs" (v:41). The traditional Jewish sacrifices were forbidden, and pagan altars were built on which "swine and other unclean beasts" were to be sacrificed (v:47). The observance of Jewish dietary laws was forbidden, and Jews were allegedly ordered under penalty of death to eat "unclean" meat, including even pork (2 Macc. 6:7-9, 18-21). In defiance of this decree, "many in Israel found strength to resist, taking a determined stand against the eating of any unclean food" (1 Macc. 1:62). Allegedly, "(t)hey welcomed death and died rather than defile themselves and profane the holy covenant."

Oddly enough, the book of Daniel tells of another group of Jews who risked their lives rather than to defile themselves with unclean food. Daniel and three other Judean captives, Shadrack, Meshach, and Abednego, were selected to be educated in "the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans" (1:4). Their training program included "a portion of the royal rations of food and wine" (v:5), but Daniel "resolved that he would not defile himself with the royal rations" (v:8), and so he prevailed on the king's palace master to allow him and his friends to eat for a period of ten days only food that was clean to them, after which their health would be compared to the others in the training program. The palace master consented, and the young Jewish captives were permitted to eat only clean foods. The results? At the end of 10 days, they "appeared better and fatter than all the young men who had been eating the royal rations" (v:15), and when they were later brought before the king, he found them in learning and wisdom to be "ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom" (vs:18-19). Jews living under the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes would get from this story the obvious message that Yahweh will look after those who faithfully follow his dietary laws, so in view of all the other evidence against the traditional view of Daniel's authorship, it's hard to believe that a book actually written in the 6th century B. C. would have very conveniently contained a story so clearly parallel to a religious dietary crisis that would happen four centuries later.

Antiochus put pagan idols in the temple at Jerusalem and consecrated it to Zeus (2 Macc. 6:1-2). Those who sacrificed in the temple had to do so on altars dedicated to pagan idols, and anyone who disobeyed did so at the risk of death that had been decreed by royal command (1 Macc. 1:47-50). By another convenient coincidence, there is a story in Daniel that 2nd-century B. C. Jews suffering such persecution would have easily related to. Chapter 3 in Daniel tells the story of a great image that Nebuchadnezzar set up in the province of Babylon and decreed that on a signal from cornets, flutes, and other musical instruments, everyone was to fall down and worship the idol. When Daniel's friends Shadrack, Meshach, and Abednego, who also had apparently been appointed to high positions in the province (v:12), refused to obey the king's decree, they were thrown into a fiery furnace that had been heated seven times hotter than normal, but their god enabled them to walk through the fire unharmed. Second Maccabees 7 tells the story of seven brothers who refused to obey the pagan decrees of Antiochus. The king ordered "great pans and cauldrons to be heated," and when the first brother refused to obey the king's decree, he was roasted alive in one of the pans. Then one by one, the other brothers suffered the same fate, while their mother stood by watching and urging them not to relent, promising that the god who had given them life "will in his mercy give you back again breath and life" (v:23). To 2nd-century B. C. Jews who suffered such persecutions as these, the moral in Daniel's story of the fiery furnace would have been obvious: Serve Yahweh faithfully, and he, as the mother assured her sons, will deliver you.

According to Daniel, both Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar desecrated the sacred vessels from the temple in Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar by taking them to Babylon to put in the house of his god (1:2) and Belshazzar by sending for the vessels during the great festival for his lords so that they could drink wine from them while praising their gods of gold, silver, brass, iron, and wood (5:1-4). Like these Babylonian kings of old, Antiochus Epiphanes also profaned the vessels of the temple. He had the "audacity to enter the most holy temple on earth" and lay "his polluted hands on the sacred vessels" and gather up "the votive offerings which other kings had made to enhance the splendor and fame of the shrine" (2 Macc. 5:15-16). The arrogance of Belshazzar in profaning the vessels of the temple was immediately punished, because that very night "Belshazzar the Chaldean king was slain" when the kingdom fell to "Darius the Mede" (5:30-31). The implication of a story like this would have been readily apparent to the writer's 2nd-century audience, which was surely aware of Antiochus's desecration of the sacred vessels in the temple. It was a story intended to assure his readers that Yahweh would eventually make Antiochus pay for his arrogance.

Such convenient coincidences as these in the story of a 6th-century B. C. captive who, choosing to serve Yahweh faithfully, was rewarded with a position of prominence in the kingdom of his captors complements the mountain of other evidence that indicates the author of this book was actually a 2nd-century writer who wanted his contemporaries to believe that a prophet living long ago in another difficult period of Jewish history had foreseen their sufferings and predicted that they would triumph over oppression.