Rome is not that powerful at that time in Judah (Julius Caesar’s time is the best time IMO), they haven’t conquered Judah yet ( 63BCE is when Pompey capture’s Jerusalem). Since there were 6 copies of Daniel from different timelines, even one dating to 150BC, there is a higher chance it was being copied there, than composed there.ģ.
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They will give you a solid basis for exploring apocalyptic and its implications.Dead Sea scrolls & book of Daniel will be an interesting read :Ģ. I would suggest starting out with the work of Paul Hansen and John Collins and going on from there. There are many good sources on the book of Daniel that discuss this more than I am able in a brief reply. That is not to deny that predictions could have been made, but they were simply not of this type in the biblical world. Since the book of Daniel keeps revising its dates for the end of the tribulation of Antiochus’s reign, and since it gets the details of Antiochus’s death wrong, it is logical that the book was written just before the death of the emperor. There are many examples of this from the ancient world.
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It was unsafe to write material that revealed your disdain for the authorities, so apocalyptic writers set their accounts in the distant past and framed them as predictions.
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Apocalyptic, on the other hand, was written during times of persecution. There are complex historical reasons for this, but suffice it to note that in the Bible prophecy was not primarily predictive. Prophecy makes only very general predictions it is a modern preoccupation to look for detailed prognostications in biblical prophecy. At the same time, the “predictions” of the Seleucid period show accurate knowledge of events, unlike “prophecy” in the Bible. Many, many years ago readers recognized that Daniel makes numerous mistakes about the Babylonian Empire. We have no biblical roadmaps for the end times because the end of the story has not yet been written. Instead of Daniel telling us to hold tight because the end is near, he is found to be encouraging those who were suffering in his own day. After all, doesn’t Amos declare, “Go to Bethel and sin go to Gilgal and sin yet more” (4.4)? Learning to place biblical genres within their proper context makes a world of difference. I used to point out that if the passages intended to be read ironically were understood literally many Bible-quoters would be in trouble. A document like the Bible, which contains several distinct genres, must be handled carefully if it isn’t to be misrepresented. Misunderstanding genre is a large concern among literary scholars. It is in the nature of apocalyptic to present the author as a seer, but the future age is a Zoroastrian contribution that gives books like Daniel and Revelation their edge. Apocalyptic was intended to provide encouragement to those under persecution, not to give them a Google-mapped future. We think nothing of it when an author today sets a story in the past, but somehow this is dirty pool in the composition of an evangelical Bible. On the other hand, Daniel knows the period of the Seleucid Empire (when it was actually written) in relatively precise detail. Long ago biblical scholars noted that although set in the period of the Babylonian Empire, the book of Daniel makes several basic errors about that time period. Nevertheless, the myth of Daniel’s foresight persists. Scholars who’ve studied apocalyptic literature, however, know that such interpretations misrepresent a fascinating genre of ancient writing that says more about its own time than some unforeseen future (our time). Apocalyptically minded literalists use Daniel and Revelation as a two-tiered roadmap to the future, supposing that these books are predictions of the end of time. This is not uncommon, but the issue raised ran counter to what we were covering in class, namely, the book of Daniel.
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Last semester one of my students had an encounter with a literalist.