The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Daniel. Farrar Frederic William

15

      Turning to the Old Testament itself, we have reason for surprise both in its allusions and its silences. One only of the sacred writers refers to Daniel, and that is Ezekiel. In one passage (xxviii. 3) the Prince of Tyrus is apostrophised in the words, "Behold, thou art wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that they can hide from thee." In the other (xiv. 14, 20) the word of the Lord declares to the guilty city, that "though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness"; "they shall deliver neither son nor daughter."16

      The last words may be regarded as a general allusion, and therefore we may pass over the circumstance that Daniel – who was undoubtedly a eunuch in the palace of Babylon, and who is often pointed to as a fulfilment of the stern prophecy of Isaiah to Hezekiah17– could never have had either son or daughter.

      But in other respects the allusion is surprising.

      i. It was very unusual among the Jews to elevate their contemporaries to such a height of exaltation, and it is indeed startling that Ezekiel should thus place his youthful contemporary on such a pinnacle as to unite his name to those of Noah the antediluvian patriarch and the mysterious man of Uz.

      ii. We might, with Theodoret, Jerome, and Kimchi, account for the mention of Daniel's name at all in this connection by the peculiar circumstances of his life;18 but there is little probability in the suggestions of bewildered commentators as to the reason why his name should be placed between those of Noah and Job. It is difficult, with Hävernick, to recognise any climax in the order;19 nor can it be regarded as quite satisfactory to say, with Delitzsch, that the collocation is due to the fact that "as Noah was a righteous man of the old world, and Job of the ideal world, Daniel represented immediately the contemporaneous world."20 If Job was a purely ideal instance of exemplary goodness, why may not Daniel have been the same?

      To some critics the allusion has appeared so strange that they have referred it to an imaginary Daniel who had lived at the Court of Nineveh during the Assyrian exile;21 or to some mythic hero who belonged to ancient days – perhaps, like Melchizedek, a contemporary of the ruin of the cities of the Plain.22 Ewald tries to urge something for the former conjecture; yet neither for it nor for the latter is there any tittle of real evidence.23 This, however, would not be decisive against the hypothesis, since in 1 Kings iv. 31 we have references to men of pre-eminent wisdom respecting whom no breath of tradition has come down to us.24

      iii. But if we accept the Book of Daniel as literal history, the allusion of Ezekiel becomes still more difficult to explain; for Daniel must have been not only a contemporary of the prophet of the Exile, but a very youthful one. We are told – a difficulty to which we shall subsequently allude – that Daniel was taken captive in the third year of Jehoiakim (Dan. i. 1), about the year b. c. 606. Ignatius says that he was twelve years old when he foiled the elders; and the narrative shows that he could not have been much older when taken captive.25 If Ezekiel's prophecy was uttered b. c. 584, Daniel at that time could only have been twenty-two: if it was uttered as late as b. c. 572,26 Daniel would still have been only thirty-four, and therefore little more than a youth in Jewish eyes. It is undoubtedly surprising that among Orientals, who regard age as the chief passport to wisdom, a living youth should be thus canonised between the Patriarch of the Deluge and the Prince of Uz.

      iv. Admitting that this pinnacle of eminence may have been due to the peculiar splendour of Daniel's career, it becomes the less easy to account for the total silence respecting him in the other books of the Old Testament – in the Prophets who were contemporaneous with the Exile and its close, like Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi; and in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which give us the details of the Return. No post-exilic prophets seem to know anything of the Book of Daniel.27 Their expectations of Israel's future are very different from his.28 The silence of Ezra is specially astonishing. It has often been conjectured that it was Daniel who showed to Cyrus the prophecies of Isaiah.29 Certainly it is stated that he held the very highest position in the Court of the Persian King; yet neither does Ezra mention his existence, nor does Nehemiah – himself a high functionary in the Court of Artaxerxes – refer to his illustrious predecessor. Daniel outlived the first return of the exiles under Zerubbabel, and he did not avail himself of this opportunity to revisit the land and desolate sanctuary of his fathers which he loved so well.30 We might have assumed that patriotism so burning as his would not have preferred to stay at Babylon, or at Shushan, when the priests and princes of his people were returning to the Holy City. Others of great age faced the perils of the Restoration; and if he stayed behind to be of greater use to his countrymen, we cannot account for the fact that he is not distantly alluded to in the record which tells how "the chief of the fathers, with all those whose spirit God had raised, rose up to go to build the House of the Lord which is in Jerusalem."31 That the difficulty was felt is shown by the Mohammedan legend that Daniel did return with Ezra,32 and that he received the office of Governor of Syria, from which country he went back to Susa, where his tomb is still yearly visited by crowds of adoring pilgrims.

      v. If we turn to the New Testament, the name of Daniel only occurs in the reference to "the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet."33 The Book of Revelation does not name him, but is profoundly influenced by the Book of Daniel both in its form and in the symbols which it adopts.34

      vi. In the Apocrypha Daniel is passed over in complete silence among the lists of Hebrew heroes enumerated by Jesus the son of Sirach. We are even told that "neither was there a man born like unto Joseph, a leader of his brethren, a stay of the people" (Ecclus. xlix. 15). This is the more singular because not only are the achievements of Daniel under four heathen potentates greater than those of Joseph under one Pharaoh, but also several of the stories of Daniel at once remind us of the story of Joseph, and even appear to have been written with silent reference to the youthful Hebrew and his fortunes as an Egyptian slave who was elevated to be governor of the land of his exile.

      CHAPTER II

       GENERAL SURVEY OF THE BOOK

      1. The Language

      Unable to learn anything further respecting the professed author of the Book of Daniel, we now turn to the Book itself. In this section I shall merely give a general sketch of its main external phenomena, and shall chiefly pass in review those characteristics which, though they have been used as arguments respecting the age in which it originated, are not absolutely irreconcilable with the supposition of any date between the termination of the Exile (b. c. 536) and the death of Antiochus Epiphanes (b. c. 164).

      I. First we notice the fact that there is an interchange of the first and third person. In chapters i. – vi. Daniel is mainly spoken of in the third person: in chapters vii. – xii. he speaks mainly in the first.

      Kranichfeld tries to account for this by the supposition that in chapters i. – vi. we practically have extracts from Daniel's diaries,35 whereas in the remainder of the Book he describes his own visions. The point cannot be much insisted upon, but the mention of his own high praises (e. g., in such passages as vi. 4) is perhaps hardly what we should have expected.

      II. Next we observe that the Book of Daniel, like the Book of Ezra

16

No valid arguments can be adduced in favour of Winckler's suggestion that Ezek. xxviii. 1-10, xiv. 14-20, are late interpolations. In these passages the name is spelt דָּנִּאֵל; not, as in our Book, דָנִיֵאל.

17

Isa. xxxix. 7.

18

See Rosenmüller, Scholia, ad loc.

19

Ezek., p. 207.

20

Herzog, R. E., s. v.

21

Ewald, Proph. d. Alt. Bund., ii. 560; De Wette, Einleit., § 253.

22

So Von Lengerke, Dan., xciii. ff.; Hitzig, Dan., viii.

23

He is followed by Bunsen, Gott in der Gesch., i. 514.

24

Reuss, Heil. Schrift., p. 570.

25

Ignat., Ad Magnes, 3 (Long Revision: see Lightfoot, ii., § ii., p. 749). So too in Ps. Mar. ad Ignat., 3. Lightfoot thinks that this is a transference from Solomon (l. c., p. 727).

26

See Ezek. xxix. 17.

27

See Zech. ii. 6-10; Ezek. xxxvii. 9, etc.

28

See Hag. ii. 6-9, 20-23; Zech. ii. 5-17, iii. 8-10; Mal. iii. 1.

29

Ezra (i. 1) does not mention the striking prophecies of the later Isaiah (xliv. 28, xlv. 1), but refers to Jeremiah only (xxv. 12, xxix. 10).

30

Dan. x. 1-18, vi. 10.

31

Ezra i. 5.

32

D'Herbelot, l. c.

33

Matt. xxiv. 15; Mark xiii. 14. There can be of course no certainty that the "spoken of by Daniel the prophet" is not the comment of the Evangelist.

34

See Elliott, Horæ Apocalypticæ, passim.

35

Kranichfeld, Das Buch Daniel, p. 4.