The Lion's Den

Dan McClellan Because if somebody just says, "Antiochus IV Epiphanes is a bad dude, and let's hope God comes in and saves us," that's not as effective as saying, "I found this text from this ancient prophet, and this ancient prophet says, 'Don't know who this is, but there's a person who's going to be coming who's a really bad dude, and God's going to deliver us.'" Injecting it with that artificial antiquity and this notion of real prophecy provides a lot more power, a lot more authority to the text. Hey, everybody. I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Dan Beecher I don't know if you should call me Dan. Maybe you should call me Belteshazzar.

Dan McClellan Belteshazzar. No, it's got to be Urball.

Dan Beecher What?

Dan McClellan Now, we watched- Yeah ... "Tommy Boy" the other night. I had to show my girls, and so it was...

Dan Beecher Yeah. We're diving into the book after which you and I are both named.

Dan McClellan Our namesake, yes.

Dan Beecher Ostensibly. Daniel is a book in the Bible. I don't know if you guys knew that.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But I assume you did. You're all very smart people.

Dan McClellan And I don't know if, fewer people probably knew that if you look at our old cover image for our podcast- Yeah ... you can see some Hebrew letters in the background. If you look in the upper right, you see the Hebrew Daniel.

Dan Beecher So- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan a little Easter egg there.

Dan Beecher So- Even on our YouTube, if you're watching this on YouTube, there's Hebrew letters sort of swirling around us, and one of them might be that name. I don't know how it's cropped.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But yeah.

Dan McClellan So.

Dan Beecher You chose that image specifically because we were both Daniels, and that's funny and- We thought that would be funny.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So- Because- A little Easter egg for you, everybody.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Because we're 11 years old.

Dan Beecher Might as well be.

Dan McClellan Anyway, yeah.

Dan Beecher So, let's just dive in because- Yeah.

Dan McClellan Let's do it ...

Dan Beecher we got a lot to cover.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Growing up, I'm going to say this, Dan. Say it. Growing up, I obviously felt some sort of connection to this book just because it was my name, and it has one of the cooler stories in the Bible, and that is the lion's den story. Daniel gets thrown into a lion's den. I don't want to bury the lead here. But that's kind of all I remembered from it.

Dan McClellan So- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher when I dove back into it to prep for this segment, for this episode, I was confused. I'm just going to say it. This book is a mess.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher They needed to employ any amount of writing skill or narrative structure or anything. I have a hunch you're going to tell me a lot of interesting stuff about how this book came to be and the fact that this book, if I've learned one thing from doing this show with you for as long as we've been doing this show, it is that there is no way one person wrote this book.

Dan McClellan Yeah. We're going to get into what's going on with some of the literary structure, and yeah, it's going to get weird, as it so frequently does on our show. And I think with texts like Daniel, you have a spectrum of people's awareness of Daniel. On one end, you've got the people who have sat down and read it beginning to end, and those people are messed up in the head- ... because Daniel messes you up in the head. On the other end, you have people who have basically heard stories from it. They're aware of a few different, sometimes proof texts, sometimes specific stories from Daniel. You know Daniel in the lions' den. You know Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from the fiery furnace and from the great poets, the Beastie Boys. And so, there's a lot of just kind of random spotty knowledge about the Book of Daniel in the zeitgeist- Yeah ... and in the air, and that's how I think the majority of people know about Daniel but have never sat down and read it from beginning to end, which is no small feat. That's a tall order to begin with.

Dan Beecher It's not a long book, in biblical standards. By biblical standards, it's what? 12 chapters- 12 chapters ... as opposed to- 12 dense chapters. Dense and also hard to read sometimes.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher You get into a lot of lists- Mm-hmm ... a lot of the time that are repeated. As a guy with ADHD, this book was a killer- ... I got to say.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And repetition was an important part of some of the literary conventions anciently. But I think one of the more interesting things that a lot of people, the people who have come at Daniel academically, or at least from a more concerted devotional perspective, are aware that it's actually written in two different languages. See, Daniel is written in Hebrew from Daniel 1:1 to the first half of Daniel 2:4, and then the second half of Daniel 2:4 is written in Aramaic, and it is Aramaic from there all the way through to Daniel 7 verse 28, or the very end of chapter 7. And then beginning in chapter 8, we revert back to Hebrew- Okay ... all the way through to the end of chapter 12. And so, when you're reading it in the original languages, it's odd. It's a little confusing.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And one of the more confusing things for scholars is that this division is Hebrew, then Aramaic, then back to Hebrew, does not align with- the main division of the book, because we have chapters one through six, which are court tales, where we're telling these stories about Daniel and Daniel's companions and the kings of Babylon, Media, and Persia, and we're going to get to what on earth Media is doing there. And then chapters seven through 12 are basically apocalyptic visions.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And oddly enough, even that division, that simple dividing in half, one through six and seven through 12, doesn't align with how scholars think the text actually came together. And so, I didn't know exactly. We don't have an outline for today's episode. As usual, we're just going to wing it and hopefully things work out. But what do you think- We have great wings.

Dan Beecher There's nothing you can do about it.

Dan McClellan What do you think makes the most sense? Do you want to talk about how the text came together, language, the dating, authorship, all this, and then get into the details? Or do you want to talk about some of the details- Let's sort of walk through the book first- Okay ...

Dan Beecher as you encounter it.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And then maybe you can bring in some understanding about- Okay ... why it is what it is.

Dan McClellan Okay. And this is pretty simple because the chapters are kind of self-contained in a lot of ways.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan You have one story per chapter.

Dan Beecher Yeah. And they don't go in chronological order.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher They bounce around chronologically.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher They don't always agree with each other as to what has happened. It does seem like there's some, "Huh?

Dan McClellan What?

Dan Beecher Uh?"

Dan McClellan Yeah. It's kind of like a sitcom, where it was like everybody was happy, and then the next episode starts with everybody's angry.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So it is a little sitcom-ish in that sense.

Dan Beecher Yeah. These are each very distinct, and they all start sort of in the middle of something, and they end abruptly, and it's crazy. Chapter one sort of introduces Nebuchadnezzar- Mm-hmm ... who is the king of, what's his area called?

Dan McClellan Babylonia?

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan Born in Babylonia, moved to Arizona. Can you- King Nebuchadnezzar.

Dan Beecher By the way, is there a difference between Babylonia and Babylon? What is that?

Dan McClellan Babylon's a city. Babylonia is a term that people used to use to refer to the broader region.

Dan Beecher Ah.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher But- Okay ...

Dan McClellan nobody really says Babylonia much anymore in the scholarship.

Dan Beecher Okay. So what was he the king of then?

Dan McClellan Nebuchadnezzar. He was the king of Babylon.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Nebuchadnezzar was the king of Babylon. And so Daniel starts with the destruction of Jerusalem, the exile, and we have Nebuchadnezzar saying, "Send me people from the royal families, from among the elites. We're going to train them up for three years, and then they're going to be our court officials," and things like that.

Dan Beecher Okay. And then- But wait a minute. He doesn't just say that. He says, "Send me your sexy boys- ... who are super, super smart." He says, "Send me your handsome boys who are without blemish."

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher I mean, it starts out, we launch with a little bit of a questionable- Homoeroticism?

Dan McClellan Yeah, probably. I would say that what's going on here is this idea that, for court officials, you want people who are going to be squeaky clean and who are going to look nice.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So I don't know that it's so much an erotic thing as very similar to, in ancient Israel, you want your sacrifices to be without blemish and to be pretty.

Dan Beecher Oh, okay.

Dan McClellan And so here it's like, if we're going to take these folks and we're going to train them and turn them into our court officials, we need the people who are tall enough, who are slim enough, who look nice enough. So I think that's probably what's going on. Although, at the same time, that kind of homoeroticism was not absent from Babylon.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And you also had eunuchs who were going to be in charge of different kinds of things. So there's a lot we don't know about this- Right ... partly because the text was written in a much later period, and we don't know to what degree they're just kind of making up stuff about two centuries before, and the degree to which they have some kind of access to knowledge that we may not have about what's going on in these courts.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I even had a question. You mentioned eunuchs, and in one version, because this is why this job is hard. But I'm reading in two versions, you know what I mean? Because I'm trying to understand, I'm trying to see differences- Mm-hmm ... as I'm reading. So I think in the NRSV, it says that the palace guy, anyway, the guy in charge of the palace is the one that Daniel is dealing with and blah, blah, blah. I think this is in chapter two. In the King James Version, it says the eunuch master is the one who's doing this. And I was like, "Is Daniel? Are Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego, are they eunuchs? Is that possible?"

Dan McClellan Lots of things are possible. I don't know that that fits any current thinking about Daniel.

Dan Beecher Let me just- Well, I'm starting the thinking now. I do have to say, sorry, I'm bouncing around a lot. I apologize. But also, in chapter one- Mm-hmm ... among the handsome genius boys are Daniel and not Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher But rather- Hananiah Mm-hmm ... Mishael, and Mm-hmm ...

Dan McClellan Azariah.

Dan Beecher Right. And they're all given, all of them, including Daniel, are given other names. Belteshazzar for Daniel, and then Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego for the other guys.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And this book cannot decide what to call anybody. As you go through the book, Daniel bounces- Yeah, it goes back and forth ...

Dan McClellan back and forth.

Dan Beecher Yeah. The other three, they stay Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah for a bit, and then suddenly they flip, and once they flip- Yeah ... they're just Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego for the rest of the thing. It's confusing.

Dan McClellan And this is one of the pieces of data that points in the direction of originally independent stories being brought together and being harmonized.

Dan Beecher Ah.

Dan McClellan And so chapter one is kind of an intro to what's going on, which was probably added a bit later. And what they're doing there is saying, "Oh, by the way-" Mm-hmm ..."these are the same people. They were just like, 'Your name is now this,' and now, so when you see us bouncing back and forth, just keep in mind those are the same people."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And it's a way to, I don't know if there's a name for this kind of activity. It's not poisoning the well. It's kind of sweetening the well.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Yeah. You're kind of leading them into a specific interpretive framework to gloss over the inconsistencies.

Dan Beecher It's dumping a bunch of Kool-Aid into the well.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan I did find this. This is coming from Carol Newsom's 2014 commentary on Daniel. By the way, I would highly recommend, if you want more on Daniel, more than you're going to hear from us today, and a lot less moronic as well. We've got John Collins, his 1993 Hermeneia commentary series commentary on Daniel is one of the best. And then the other one that I would say is one of the best is Carol Newsom's 2014 Old Testament Library commentary on Daniel. But from Newsom's commentary, we've got this statement on Daniel's identity, and this is actually an article written by somebody else, but they say, talking about Daniel's appearance, "In many contexts, his beardless face, handsome visage, and court status suggests his particular identity as a court eunuch. Foreign youths serving in many imperial courts throughout history were not typically allowed to do so unless they had been castrated, and many readers have assumed the same rule held for Daniel." So, I guess there is some thinking in that direction.

Dan Beecher I'm like a Bible scholar, Dan. I don't know if you realize this. So- Just without any of the training ...

Dan McClellan I'm sure there's some folks out there who are thinking right now, "Just get to the damn point." So let's go through the chapters real quick.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Chapter one, we get the introduction of Daniel, his companions. We get the little, "By the way, they changed their names." And then we get the story about the food- Mm ... where they're like, "We're going to give you some of the king's portion," which would've been quite the honor. One, there was not a lot of meat available back then, so meat and the king's wine, and so there's a lot of power and authority associated with this.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "We're going to fill you full of the king's meat and wine, and this will make you powerful." And Daniel says, "No, thank you. We're just going to eat..." We have this word that means seeds.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And it's not clear if it's like we're just going to eat handfuls of seeds, or if we're going to eat stuff grown from seeds, if it's like a vegetarian kind of thing.

Dan Beecher Yeah. NRSV has vegetables.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So it's not exactly clear what's going on there, but the idea seems to be we're going to stay away from these symbols of imperial power, and give us 10 days, we'll do an experiment. We'll show you that we end up being in better shape than the folks who are eating the king's stuff. And there's not really a case to make that, the text says that we don't want to be defiled- Hmm ... but there's no law anywhere in the Hebrew Bible, in any tradition that is known from this period, that prohibits them from, one, eating meat, or two, drinking wine.

Dan Beecher Yeah. It was very confusing to me.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher I was just like, "Why, though?" It never gives us a good why.

Dan McClellan And I think this is probably, we're going to get to it later, but this is coming from a later time period than it is set- Mm ... where we have larger empires trying to impose cultural restrictions on Judaism, and one of the things is dietary- Mm-hmm ... restrictions and identity markers. And so, in my opinion, what's going on here is they're saying, "We're not going to internalize these markers, not only of Babylonian identity, but of Babylonian hegemony." And hegemony means rule by some foreign entity of some kind. Somebody has come in and is ruling over you. And so, in my opinion, this is a rejection of that and saying, "We're going to maintain our own ethnic identity by avoiding the foods that you are providing to us and just eating our own foods," even though there's no actual requirement or expectation that they eat only vegetables and drink only water.

Dan Beecher I think that makes sense. But I am right, I didn't read any explicit reason, right? There's no explicit reason listed in the book about why they don't.

Dan McClellan It just says that they don't want to be defiled.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But there's no explanation of why these foods would defile them, and it doesn't make sense given what we know about Judaism in that time period.

Dan Beecher Well, yeah. The other thing that confuses me about it is that later, Daniel's totally happy to take the robes and the gold and whatever.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Anyway, we'll get to it. We'll get to it.

Dan McClellan And this is why there's an argument ... to be had about whether this book is trying to help people incorporate themselves into the empire. Is this a little more in the style of Esther, where it's like, "We're going to ingratiate ourselves. This is how you do it successfully so that you can work within the empire." Or is this a book saying, "No, we're going to be insular, and we're going to keep ourselves separated from it," because it's not entirely consistent.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, there has been a lot of debate about what the ultimate goal of this book is in that regard.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, that brings us to chapter two, where we have Nebuchadnezzar, who has a bad night one time, a bad trip of some kind, and says to his court magicians and prophets and everybody, "I had a dream. You've got to tell me what the dream was, and then you've got to interpret it for me, or I'm going to kill you."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Which is not something that anyone ever did anciently, but makes for a cool story.

Dan Beecher I guess. It just seems absurd.

Dan McClellan It is a little bit.

Dan Beecher He's like, "You have to interpret my dream, but first you have to tell me what the dream was so that I know that you're legit."

Dan McClellan Yeah. "What am I paying you for if you can't even do this one thing?"

Dan Beecher And so- It reminds me of "The Far Side" comic, where the cops bust in on a fortune teller, and they're like, "Because you didn't know we were coming. That's why you're under arrest."

Dan McClellan And Daniel comes waltzing in and is like, "Yeah, I'll tell you." And this is a dream about this statue, which has a few different parts to it.

Dan Beecher I'm going to pull it up so I can read directly from- I got it, if you want me to.

Dan McClellan You got it? Yeah, go ahead. Read the description.

Dan Beecher "The head of the statue was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its midsection and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay."

Dan McClellan Hmm.

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan And there've been a lot of artistic depictions of this statue.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan But this is kind of the fourfold kingdoms vision, and there have been a lot of different attempts to make sense of this over the years. From the initial publication of this book, within a century of this book having been written, the Romans take over. And so, almost immediately, you have a bunch of people trying to read the Romans into it, which means that you have to reconfigure other things. But basically, this is the kingdom of Babylon, the kingdom of Media, the Median kingdom, the kingdom of Persia, and then the Hellenistic kingdom, beginning with Alexander the Great. And then the toes and the clay at the bottom is representative of what is known as the Diadochi or the Diadochoi, which is the battle of successors after the death of Alexander the Great.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And this is one of the indications of when this book was written, because it goes right up to a period where there's a lot of detail and a lot of accuracy, and then it's like, "And then the end times are going to come," and then everything is no longer accurate. So, if you think at all critically about, "Hmm, who may have been writing this and when?" It's when there's the most detail, when there's the most accuracy, and when they say, "God returns," it's right before that.

Dan Beecher Right. As it turns out, the easiest way to write a prophecy is to write it about the time that you're actually in right now- Right ... and pretend that it was written 100 years ago.

Dan McClellan And this was something that was noticed by non-Christian and non-Jewish authors in the third century CE. There was a pagan writer who was like, "Yeah, I read your book, Daniel, there, and based on a lot of stuff is accurate, a lot of stuff is inaccurate. You get the most detail right around this period in we now refer to as the Maccabean period in biblical studies. And then it suddenly gets totally inaccurate when it talks about God swooping in and saving everybody. So, it seems like it was right there in the middle of the second century that it was written." And you have Christian authors who are like, "No, no, no," getting a little annoyed with this pagan author. But this statue has to be reinterpreted if you want this to be something that goes any further forward in time than Antiochus IV Epiphanes- I mean- ... whom we will talk about later ...

Dan Beecher I feel like it's pretty obvious that the iron is the United States of America. And the clay parts are just the dirty liberals or something.

Dan McClellan And I'm not going to argue with you there. And we'll talk a little bit more about it later, but one of the keys to reinterpreting things, particularly if you want to get the Romans in there, that's what most folks want to do, because that allows them to demonize either the Catholic Church or the Roman Empire or whatever.

Dan Beecher Ah.

Dan McClellan Right. But you have to combine the empire of the Medes and the Persians, and this is problematic for a number of reasons. But the presence of the Medes is problematic in its own right.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, that's chapter two. Chapter three, we've got this commandment. Somebody says, "Hey, we got this statue for you, King, and we're going to say everybody has to worship it or you get thrown in a fire." And Daniel and ye old companions refuse to worship it, and they get thrown in the fire, and they are not harmed. And Nebuchadnezzar famously looks into the fire and says, "I see a fourth like unto the Son of Man," according to the King James Version- ... which is a mistranslation of the Aramaic. Pretty straightforward in Aramaic. It says Bar Elahin, which means not the son of God, but a son- ... of the gods, plural.

Dan Beecher And so- Okay ...

Dan McClellan this is a Babylonian king representing a Babylonian perspective, but we still have this Semitic convention about referring to a member of a certain class by saying a son of that class.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan So, a son of the gods is a god.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan A son of the prophets is a prophet. A son of Adam is a human being. So, it's just saying that looks like a deity in there with them, and that has been reinterpreted as a reference to Jesus by later readers.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Then we get into chapter 4. We have the king, he has a dream about a tree, and Daniel interprets this as a reference to seven years in, basically, self-imposed exile, where the king is going to leave human civilization and go dwell in the desert and- And get hairy ... just tweak out for a while.

Dan Beecher Yeah, get hairy.

Dan McClellan It's the Burning Man.

Dan Beecher Deep grass.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Probably.

Dan McClellan And this is connected with the idea that a king at the end of the Babylonian Empire named Nabonidus actually would go into the Arabian Peninsula and just hang out for years at a time, while his son Belshazzar kind of co-regent in his stead. So, we have this weird reassignment of the things that Belshazzar does. By the way, Belshazzar is the one who's all into dream interpretation and stuff like that. Belshazzar was the hippie, not Nebuchadnezzar.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan But Daniel is reassigning all these things to Nebuchadnezzar.

Dan Beecher Daniel the book, not the character.

Dan McClellan Daniel the book, right.

Dan Beecher Can I also mention one weird thing that happens in chapter 4, which is that suddenly, we get through most of chapter 4, and then in verse 34, Nebuchadnezzar comes back from his exile, and suddenly the rest of the book is in first person by the character of Nebuchadnezzar. So, it's like- ... suddenly it says, "When that period was over, I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven and my reason returned to me." That wasn't how this chapter started.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher It never goes back to that. It's- Yeah ... very weird. Is there a reason for that? That's not a part of a known convention or anything, is it?

Dan McClellan There's some coming in and out of first person, and this is a part of-- The idea is that you're trying to represent-- You remember when "Blair Witch Project" came out, the found footage genre?

Dan Beecher Uh-huh.

Dan McClellan It's like we're going to mix in these different genres to give it a flavor of authenticity.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so, that's why they would say, "And then there was this letter," and it's, "I, the king, write this letter." And it's the same person writing the whole thing, but they're switching voice and everything in order to give it a flavor of authenticity.

Dan Beecher I love the idea of biblical found footage.

Dan McClellan That is a- Yeah. It's really what's going on in a lot of these places where it's like, "And then there was a decree made, and here's the decree."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "We happened to find it." Then we get into chapter 5, and now we've got Belshazzar, who's supposed to be Nebuchadnezzar's son. Belshazzar was not Nebuchadnezzar's son. And then this is funny. I see a lot of videos where people are like, "Critical scholarship is all garbage. They used to think there was never somebody named Belshazzar, and then we found an inscription about Belshazzar." And one, this does not remotely solve the overwhelming majority of the historical and textual problems with the Book of Daniel.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But two, that discovery was made in the 19th century, so when critical scholarship was still in its infancy, trying to learn how to walk.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, it's not the slam dunk that a lot of people think it is.

Dan Beecher But- Also, I love the criticisms of any science or any academic study where they're like, "Aha, you were wrong, and therefore- Yeah ... we should throw it all out the window."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher What are you talking about? Being wrong and then assimilating new ideas and changing and making those adjustments, that's what scholarship's all about.

Dan McClellan Yeah. That's the scientific process. However, when you're coming from a position where it's a zero-sum game, and you're thinking in black-and-white binaries- Right ... of inerrancy and totally worthless, it has to be the one and not the other.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And if you can show error, then that means they obviously belong on the other side of that binary, which means they can be dismissed. Which is, it's kind of a methodological shoehorn that was developed over generations of trying to come up with more and more sophisticated ways to make the apologetic position sound more rational, and two, to reinforce it against rationalism.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, it is both adopting and, at the same time, rejecting a lot of the principles of rationalism to try to reinforce itself. But anyway, I digress. We get into chapter 5, and now we got Belshazzar is the king that we are having to deal with.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And this is where he's like, "Hey, remember all the vessels we took from the temple? Let's bring them out, and let's just play with them for a little bit."

Dan Beecher "Let's play temple, you guys."

Dan McClellan Yeah. "Let's just play." "Let's toss the Jewish not pigskin around in the backyard for a little bit."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then we get the finger of God writing "Mene, mene, tekel, parsin" on the wall, freaking everybody out, really killing the vibe. And then we have to have Daniel come in and interpret what's going on here, and the idea is- And it is just a hand that just appears- Yeah ...

Dan Beecher out of nowhere and just scribbles- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan on the wall.

Dan Beecher Yep. That would be pretty freaky. And those words, are they words that actually mean anything in any language, or were they nonsense words that Daniel, and that's why they needed Daniel to interpret it?

Dan McClellan No. They're words, but they don't make a ton of sense in any kind of context. Mene is a mina, so that's a unit of measurement.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Tekel is a shekel in Aramaic, surprisingly enough. The shin letter, the SH sound, is usually written with a character that indicates T.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Parsin means half mina or mina. So, you've got a mina, a mina, a shekel, and a half mina.

Dan Beecher So, a yard, a yard, a dollar, and a foot and a half.

Dan McClellan Yeah, something like that. It doesn't make a whole ton of sense, which is why they need to bring Daniel in- Right ... to say, "Hey, what's going on here?"

Dan Beecher Because that's a confusing thing for a mystical hand to just throw up on your wall.

Dan McClellan Right. That's not entirely helpful. The law of parsimony doesn't hold here. Yeah, the perspicuity of scripture is a little muddled. And then Daniel says, "Hey, you're a loser. You're screwing around with sacred things like you shouldn't be. And so, your kingdom is going to be taken away, and it's going to be given to the Medes, and then to the Persians."

Dan Beecher And that's what hap- And Daniel does not get murdered for this. No, the king's like- He says the worst thing- Sweet ... in the world.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Doesn't he also say that the king's going to die, that Belshazzar's going to die?

Dan McClellan Yep.

Dan Beecher And that very- And Belshazzar's just like, "Cool, man.

Dan McClellan Thanks.

Dan Beecher Here's the robe I promised you."

Dan McClellan Yeah. You deserve a reward for all this. And then in that very night, the king dies. And then we get somebody who goes by Darius or Darius, if you're nasty, the Mede.

Dan Beecher The Mede.

Dan McClellan And there was no such character or figure- Oh ... in history. Darius or Darius was a Persian. And here's where I'm going to talk briefly about what's going on with the Medes.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan The Median kingdom, if you can call it a kingdom, it was not large, it was not influential, is up in the mountains to the east of Mesopotamia. It's a part of modern-day Iran. And the Medes were not relevant to the Babylonians. The Medes were somebody that the Persians dealt with as the Persians were making their way to go down to take over Babylon. And so, the Medes are only relevant from a Persian perspective, which tells us one thing, that this part of the Book of Daniel is being written through a Persian interpretive lens. In other words, they are trying to represent this history from a Persian point of view, which means this is being written later, Persian period at the earliest, probably even a little later than that. And so, the Medes have no relevance to Babylon or to the Jewish folks who were in Babylon. They only have relevance if you're reconstructing this history from a Persian point of view and doing so inaccurately as well.

Dan Beecher Were there Persian Jews? Is that who we're talking about?

Dan McClellan We're talking about Jewish folks who are a part of the Persian Empire.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Because Persia takes over, conquers Babylon in 539 BCE.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so thus beginneth the Persian period. And so, the Jewish folks who are living in exile are now under a new empire.

Dan Beecher I see.

Dan McClellan And the Persian Empire is a little more accommodating. And so, it seems that this is probably someone educated within the Persian system or something like that.

Dan Beecher So, okay. Sorry, let me just make sure I've got this right. So, the exile is not just Babylonian exile. They remain exiled as the Persians take over.

Dan McClellan Right. And the Persians are the ones who actually allow the folks to return back to the land of Israel. This is Cyrus who does this.

Dan Beecher Cyrus, right.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher Got it.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan All right.

Dan Beecher Pew, pew, pew. I'm getting it. I'm starting to understand.

Dan McClellan Okay. So, in chapter six, we have Darius, the Persian king. It says that the folks are trying to get back at the Jewish people, and they don't know what to do, so they tell the king, "Hey, release this decree. You're not allowed to pray to anybody but the king for 30 days, or you get thrown into where?" The den of lions. The den of lions. You can rent the whole seat, but you'll only need the edge. So, this is the famous story of Daniel being thrown into the lions' den. And again, we have resolution in the end. The king rewards Daniel. Everybody's happy.

Dan Beecher And cue credits.

Dan McClellan And then the next chapter, we're starting with a flashback because- Right ... suddenly we're back to Belshazzar.

Dan Beecher Yeah, it was very confusing.

Dan McClellan But this is...

Dan Beecher Yes.

Dan McClellan Now, chapter seven begins the second half of the book. Remember, we have chapters one through six, which are these court tales.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And they're primarily divided into two different types. We have tales of conflict and tales of contest. And so, the conflict is where you have the locals saying, "We're going to get those Jewish people." And so they're like, "We're going to build a statue, and you have to worship it," or, "We're going to tell the king to make it so you can't pray." And so that's the conflict. And then the contest is, who can answer this grand question about this dream? Who can interpret this? All the locals fail.

Dan Beecher My riddles three.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And Daniel has to show up and show that he can do it. So, this is a stock literary genres from this time period. But that's one through six.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And then seven through 12 Is apocalyptic visions. And we're going to go back to Belshazzar, and we get the famous vision of the son of man who comes to the Ancient of Days. And I think the most fascinating part about this story, apart from the fact that we're using rider of the clouds, storm deity imagery, we've got the son of man coming to the Ancient of Days. Our oldest Greek translation of this passage, there's a mistranslation, because this preposition, coming to the Ancient of Days, in Greek would be eis. But in our earliest Greek version, it's not eis, it's just hos, which is very close, but means as. And so it says, "The son of man comes as the Ancient of Days," which means the son of man is a manifestation of the Ancient of Days or God.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so here is kind of the beginning of this notion that there is some special figure. And remember, son of man is this convention where to refer to a member of the group, you call them a son of that group. So it just means a mortal, a human.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Now it's going to take on titular qualities. It's going to become this special title because there's this son of man who's manifesting the Ancient of Days. And so this is probably related to some of the Enochic literature and other tales about this son of man figure from the apocalypse.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But that's chapter seven.

Dan Beecher And is that sort of the kernel from which the Trinity concept is bubbling up?

Dan McClellan I would argue that it is one bubble coming up to the surface of that later rolling royal of the development of the Trinity.

Dan Beecher We're going to have to talk about the Trinity at some point.

Dan McClellan Yeah. We're going to- We'll definitely do it as a- We'll get to it.

Dan Beecher We'll get to it, guys.

Dan McClellan Yeah. We'll get there. And then we've got this, in chapter eight, another eschatological vision, where we have Persia- That means ends of days, guys.

Dan Beecher That's this.

Dan McClellan End times.

Dan Beecher Yep.

Dan McClellan End times.

Dan Beecher Yep.

Dan McClellan Which are soon.

Dan Beecher Any day now.

Dan McClellan Yeah. If TikTok is to be believed. We have Persia, Media, and Greece. And so now we're actually explicitly naming the country of Greece rather than earlier where we just said, "Yeah, shins of bronze and stuff."

Dan Beecher So- A really powerful country place.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Kingdom.

Dan McClellan And then we get to chapter nine. Now we're going back to Darius, or Darius, and we have this vision of 70 weeks, which is something that many of you may have heard come up on social media within the last several weeks. Because this has to do with the rapture. This has to do with when the end times are coming. So, basically the idea is something's going to happen in 70 weeks of years. And so that's 70 times 7, and that's 490, and then you've got these years. And scholars have, from the moment this was published, people are like, "Ooh, we got to figure out, we got to calculate, we got to- Right ... try and find out what's going on here." And even early Christians were like, "Ooh, it means this, that, and the other. And how is Rome come into play?" And again, it's got to be your bull. And there's not really a good answer except for one. So we start with 70 weeks, and then we're going to have a week of something. And then we're going to have 62 weeks of something, and then we're going to have another week of something. Now, when you try to lay this out end to end, it doesn't make any sense. It seems to be talking about how long the Babylonian exile is going to last, which means it's starting around 605, 604 BCE, which is where Jeremiah says we're going to have 70 years of this. But if you understand this first week to run concurrently with the 62 weeks, which is a logical way to understand what's going on here, 62 weeks of years, that gives us 439-ish years, something like that. But if you do the math and you start at 605, 604 BCE, it brings you to 171, 170 BCE, where it says an anointed one will be killed. And guess what? The high priest, Onias III, was assassinated in 170 BCE. And remember when we think all this is taking place? Right around- Right around this time period.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so here we get this very accurate prophecy, X of N2 prophecy, where if we start when the Babylonian exile traditionally is identified as starting, and we count 62 weeks of years, we get to the assassination of Onias III in 170 BCE.

Dan Beecher I'm still confused on the weeks of years things. Are you saying you just multiply the number by seven- Yes ... and then you call that year?

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So- Like a week is seven, so weeks of years is not a real thing, you guys. I'm just going to point that out.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So then we get into chapter 10, and now we're dealing with Cyrus, the Persian, who is explicitly mentioned in Isaiah 45 as God's anointed, and in the Greek translation, God's Christ. So, this is Cyrus- Wow ...

Dan Beecher the Persian.

Dan McClellan We have this story about the princes of Persia and the prince of Greece, and they're fighting against Michael, who is the archangel, the head prince. And this is a reflection of the early idea that every nation had its own patron deity.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan In this period, in the Hellenistic period, the deities all get squished down, and they're all angels now. And so prince of Persia, prince of Greece, Michael the archangel, these are the guardian angels over the nations. And then for chapter 11, we go back to Darius, and we have this vision of kings of the south and kings of the north. Now, here we're talking about the Diadochi, the successors to Alexander the Great. In the north, we have the Seleucids. In the south, we have the Ptolemies. Egypt has the Ptolemaic rulers. You have the Seleucids in Syria, and they're constantly doing battle where Israel is right in the middle. And so control of Israel is being traded back and forth. Another indication that this is being written around the 170s, 160s BCE. And then chapter 12 is the conclusion of the book, where we have Michael come in and saying, "Great job. We're going to wrap it all up now." And then these two other individuals show up, and the book is drawn to a convenient and perfect close. So that is a short and chaotic run-through of what's going on in the Book of Daniel.

Dan Beecher So we've run through sort of the plot points of Daniel, and along the way, I think we've discussed a lot of the things that we need to know about the book. But man, yeah, so talk us through a little bit more- Make sense of it?

Dan McClellan Yeah. Make it make sense. Make it make sense.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So, when we look at all of these prophecies and what they seem to be aiming at, what we get at is that this text is coming together between 167 and 164 BCE, which is a period of oppression of the Jewish communities on the part of a Seleucid ruler named Antiochus IV Epiphanes. And this is this horn that is talked about. This is the big baddie, the bad guy that's causing all this trouble. And so the scholarly consensus is that it was in this period when this text was written, and we're looking back, and we're setting this in a much earlier time period so that the prophecies in between the setting and the actual composition of the text seem like they're all true. And the point is kind of, particularly of the apocalyptic part, is to kind of fantasize about God stepping in and pulling back the fabric of reality to show who's actually in charge, to show that God is going to deliver Israel, and that there's going to be this triumph over evil. And Antiochus IV Epiphanes is the epitome of that evil.

Dan Beecher And- Is there a sense in which-- Because I know a lot of times when you're under an oppressive ruler, you can't write directly about that oppressive ruler without being murdered or whatever. So is there a sense that they were using this historical time period that was meaningful to them as a sort of analog or as a stand-in for their current situation, so that they could write about it kind of in coded language so that they didn't run afoul of Antiochus?

Dan McClellan Is it Antiochus?

Dan Beecher Am I saying that right?

Dan McClellan Antiochus, yeah. Some people say Antiochus, but that's because they don't know what they're talking about.

Dan Beecher So mean.

Dan McClellan I'm just kidding. I still haven't made a decision about Darius or Darius, so- ... I'm just joking. That's certainly frequently a part of this, but there are a number of different rhetorical purposes that are converging here. One is to try to arrogate more authority to this. Because if somebody just says, "Antiochus IV Epiphanes is a bad dude- ... and let's hope God comes in and saves us," that's not as effective as saying- Right ... "I found this text from this ancient prophet, and this ancient prophet says, 'Don't know who this is, but there's a person who's going to be coming who's a really bad dude, and God's going to deliver us.'" That's a lot more powerful. That's a lot more authoritative. And so kind of injecting it with that artificial antiquity and this notion of real prophecy provides a lot more power, a lot more authority to the text.