Introduction

Daniel is surely the most peculiar book in the Hebrew Bible. It is also clearly the latest. Whereas the dating of most biblical books is no more than a series of rough approximations, often hotly debated by scholars, it is almost certain that the second half of Daniel was written between 167 and 165 B.C.E. because it refers in detail to the persecutions initiated by Antiochus IV Epiphanes and his suppression of the Temple cult in those years and to no subsequent events. Given this late date, it is not surprising that Daniel more closely resembles the apocalyptic texts of the Apocrypha and of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were written around the same time or a little afterward, and the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, which draws on Daniel, than any similarity to earlier biblical books.

The apocalyptic vision of history has abundant anticipations in the Hebrew Prophets, but it is a similarity with crucial differences. The Prophets, whose usual vehicle of expression was biblical poetry with its system of intensifications from one part of the line to the next and, often, from one line to the next, sometimes conjured up a landscape of catastrophe in which the world would revert to the state of chaos that obtained before creation or, alternatively, imagined a landscape of redemption in which all peoples would come to Mount Zion to imbibe the LORD’s teaching. But these prophecies, however extravagant, were ultimately dystopian or utopian visions of some actual historical future, cast in vivid poetic hyperbole. The writer of Daniel, on the other hand, seems to be pushing toward a notion of an era that will come at the end of familiar historical process, something he thought to be imminent after the intolerable violations by Antiochus IV that his people were then suffering. The prospect of the resurrection of the dead, certainly new to biblical writing in such a literal form, is an intrinsic element in this end-time, when all things would radically change.

In regard to literary form as well, Daniel is quite different from previous biblical literature. There are narrative segments in the first seven chapters but no real characters of the sort we encounter in the earlier biblical books. Daniel and his three friends are little more than exemplary figures of piety, without nuance or psychology, who are moved by the writer through miracle stories that make manifest to all the supreme power of their God. Daniel himself, beyond being the object of miraculous intervention, operates as the interpreter of visionary dreams and, in the last half of the book, as the one to whom vision is vouchsafed. As a high-ranking courtier interpreting the dreams of a king, he is of course modeled on Joseph in Pharaoh’s court, but again this is a similarity with a difference. Pharaoh’s dreams, like Nebuchadnezzar’s here, are a communication from God about what will befall his kingdom, and Joseph then proposes that certain measures can be taken to avert the disastrous consequence of what is about to unfold. In Daniel, no such human intervention is possible because the dreams and the visions are part of an inexorable deterministic system—a hallmark of the apocalyptic view. Daniel seems less an interpreter than a decipherer of divine codes, which sometimes have a numeric aspect, in which the details of God’s plans for humankind are encrypted. It is no wonder that both Christians and Jews used the Book of Daniel as their point of departure for intricate calculations about the end of days. In the Christian canon, Daniel is placed with the Prophets because, from his purported location in the Babylonian Persian period, he prophesies what will happen in future times. The Hebrew Prophets, however, although they evoke future possibilities, are for the most part not strictly predictive, and certainly not in the minutely circumstantial way we find in Daniel. The placement of Daniel in the Jewish canon in Ketuvim, or Miscellaneous Writings, is more in keeping with the anomalous nature of this text.

The other unusual feature of the book is that it is written in two languages. The opening is in Hebrew—the first chapter and the four initial verses of chapter 2. At this point, the text switches to Aramaic, the language in which it continues uninterrupted until the end of chapter 7. The rest of the book is in Hebrew. By this late date, Aramaic had for the most part replaced Hebrew as the Jewish vernacular. It was by then the established language of international diplomacy in the Near East, and the Aramaic used here is the so-called imperial Aramaic, somewhat more formal and different in certain usages from the rabbinic Aramaic that was emerging, in which the Talmud and much of the Midrash would be written over the next few centuries. Aramaic is a Semitic language closely cognate with Hebrew, the distance between the two languages being something like the distance between French and Italian. Grammatical structures are analogous, and many primary terms in the two languages are the same, only slightly different in form. Thus, Hebrew melekh, “king,” is matched by Aramaic malkaʾ; Hebrew leḥem, “bread,” by Aramaic laḥmaʾ. Many other terms are distinctively Aramaic, though, for understandable reasons, hundreds upon hundreds of these words would be absorbed into the evolving rabbinic Hebrew, and some Aramaic loanwords already appear in the poetry of Job and in Esther, though, for a reason I shall explain, hardly at all in the Hebrew of Daniel.

The Hebrew of this book is in fact even stranger than its quasi-narrative form and its apocalyptic character. This Hebrew writer (there might have been more than one) was clearly quite familiar with the Pentateuch and the Prophets, but it is hard to say what else he might have known of earlier Hebrew Scripture. He manifestly sought to make his own Hebrew sound Prophetic (though perhaps “vatic” might be a more appropriate term), and that is probably why, for the most part, he resisted Aramaic usages and other conspicuous features of Late Biblical Hebrew. The impulse to sound Prophetic led to some deliberate obscurity in expression. This obscurity was probably compounded by scrambled scribal transmission at a good many points. But I would like to propose that this author, though he knew earlier Hebrew writings, was fully comfortable in Aramaic and not in Hebrew. Much of what he produced can be fairly characterized as bad Hebrew prose. The syntax is often slack, at points unintelligible; parts of speech are sometimes inappropriate; the idioms not infrequently sound odd or perhaps are simply wrong. The writer overworks certain Hebrew terms, as if he did not have other more apt ones available: the verbs, for example, ʿamad, “stand,” and heḥeziq, “hold” or “make strong,” are awkwardly used over and over, in quick sequence, in a number of different senses, some of them unwarranted by earlier Hebrew.

The Book of Daniel, then, is an imperfect composition. In style, its Hebrew sections are seriously flawed. Its narrative is primarily a vehicle for laying out tales of miraculous aid that demonstrate God’s power, or for setting the circumstances for elaborately coded revelations of the future course of history that require deciphering. In strictly literary terms, it is a book that falls far below what earlier biblical texts, both narrative and Prophetic, would lead us to expect. And yet Daniel is also a book fraught with religious importance for its age and beyond. As the latest text of the Hebrew canon, it is a hinge work between the Hebrew Bible proper and the intertestamental period as well as the New Testament. Earlier Hebrew writers had assumed an essential element of contingency in historical process: human action, for better or for worse, would determine the future course of events. Daniel sees things differently: some people are written in the Book of Life and some are not; a plan dictated from on high is unfolding step by step, replete with precise numerical indications and mystifying symbolic prefigurations. Daniel points the way forward to many aspects of the New Testament, to a series of Jewish false messiahs from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, to the Christian chiliastic sects of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well as earlier, and to much else. Daniel imposes a heavy burden on both Jewish and Christian history that in some ways we may still be carrying. Its strange and enigmatic visions are something with which we continue to grapple.