Daniel (OTL)

A Commentary

Norman W. Porteous

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 1965
• Print ISBN: 9780664223175
• eBook ISBN: 9781611645811
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Cristianismo

This volume, a part of the Old Testament Library series, explores the book of Daniel.

The Old Testament Library provides fresh and authoritative treatments of important aspects of Old Testament study through commentaries and general surveys. The contributors are scholars of international standing.

I

CHAPTER ONE

1 ¹In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebu chadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it. ²And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God; and he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his god. ³Then the king commanded Ashpenaz, his chief eunuch, to bring some of the people of Israel, both of the royal family and of the nobility, ⁴youths without blemish, handsome and skilful in all wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding learning and competent to serve in the king’s palace, and to teach them the letters and language of the Chaldeans. ⁵The king assigned them a daily portion of the rich food which the king ate, and of the wine which he drank. They were to be educated for three years, and at the end of that time they were to stand before the king. ⁶Among these were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah of the tribe of Judah. ⁷And the chief of the eunuchs gave them names: Daniel he called Belteshazzar, Hananiah he called Shadrach, Mishael he called Meshach, and Azariah he called Abednego.

8 But Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king’s rich food, or with the wine which he drank; therefore he asked the chief of the eunuchs to allow him not to defile himself. ⁹And God gave Daniel favour and compassion in the sight of the chief of the eunuchs; ¹⁰and the chief of the eunuchs said to Daniel, ‘I fear lest my lord the king, who appointed your food and your drink, should see that you were in poorer condition than the youths who are of your own age. So you would endanger my head with the king.’ ¹¹Then Daniel said to the steward* whom the chief of the eunuchs had appointed over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah; ¹²‘Test your servants for ten days; let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. ¹³Then let our appearance and the appearance of the youths who eat the king’s rich food be observed by you, and according to what you see deal with your servants.’ ¹⁴So he hearkened to them in this matter, and tested them for ten days. ¹⁵At the end of ten days it was seen that they were better in appearance and fatter in flesh than all the youths who ate the king’s rich food. ¹⁶So the steward took away their rich food and the wine they were to drink and gave them vegetables.

17 As for these four youths, God gave them learning and skill in all letters and wisdom; and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams. ¹⁸At the end of the time, when the king had commanded that they should be brought in, the chief of the eunuchs brought them in before Nebuchadnezzar. ¹⁹And the king spoke with them, and among them all none was found like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah; therefore they stood before the king. ²⁰And in every matter of wisdom and understanding concerning which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his kingdom. ²¹And Daniel continued until* the first year of King Cyrus.

THE FIRST CHAPTER of the book is introductory to the whole and, in particular, to the stories about Daniel and his companions contained in chapters 2–6. It tells who the hero of the book is and how he came to be in the position of responsibility and trust in which the God of Israel could use him for his high purposes. It makes it clear from the outset, however, that, though God’s servants may indeed be right to give their service to the wider world in which they may find themselves, nevertheless there are limits to their participation in the life of that world which may make it necessary for them to show their loyalty to their faith by a refusal to compromise. The assurance given in this chapter is that God will honour such loyalty.

It may be inferred that the book thus introduced was meant to be relevant to a situation, in which men of Jewish faith were becoming increasingly conscious of the great world which needed their service and promised them scope for their gifts of character and ability, but the claims of which were often difficult to reconcile with those of that unseen environment which their ancestral faith would not allow them to forget. In the story of Daniel it is the fortune of war which brings him to one of the centres of world power, and in that he is typical of the multitude of his compatriots who had to share the experience of exile after their state collapsed before the Babylonian conqueror. But in the centuries that followed, those catastrophic centuries when Babylon was replaced by Persia and Persia by Macedonia and the Hellenic successor states, there were other causes than war that led to the dispersal of the Jews over the face of the earth. The love of adventure, the lure of commercial gain, the desire to share in the life of the wider world were compelling motives which led many a Jew to pass beyond the narrow confines of his homeland. The Book of Daniel had its primary, urgent message for a time of supreme crisis, but it had also a relevance for many times and places which made the demand for loyalty in real but less spectacular ways.

Furthermore it may be said that the book does more than issue a challenge; it reflects the loyalty of men who found themselves acting in a certain way, because, being who they were, there seemed nothing else to do. The stories of the Book of Daniel paint an ideal of steadfastness and courage intended to be a challenge to action; they also indicate to us the presence of men of flesh and blood who in the day of ordeal, or in times of lesser tension, were found faithful and formed links in the great chain of witness.

[1–2] In a book of this kind, in which stories are told primarily for their inspirational value, what concerns us chiefly is the historical reality of the contemporary situation, which the author has in view and in which he and his first readers were involved, rather than the question as to what degree of historicity can be assigned to the dramatis personae who occupy the stage in the literary invention and to the events which are narrated of them. The actors may have their place in history or they may not; what first claims our attention is the relevance of the stories to the day for which they were recorded. Moreover, it is as we ponder that, that this ancient book of witness may come to have something of significance to say to our own day and generation.

It is of no great consequence, therefore, that the very first statement in chapter 1 can be shown to be inaccurate. Indeed it would for our purpose be a waste of time if we were to concern ourselves unduly with the attempts which have been made to prove the contrary. In making the assertion that, in the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, Jerusalem was besieged by Nebuchadnezzar and that Jehoiakim was captured, the author was in all probability not drawing on independent evidence, but was simply combining in a way that seemed satisfactory to himself the statements he found in II Chron. 36.6–7 and in II Kings 24.1ff. Unfortunately Jer. 25.1 (cf. 46.2) makes it clear that Nebuchadnezzar did not become king of Babylon till the fourth year of Jehoiakim, while from Jer. 36.9 it appears that Jehoiakim was still independent a year later and that there was at that time no occupation of Judaean territory by enemy troops. Moreover II Kings 24.1–2 does not imply, as the author of Daniel seems to think, that Jehoiakim’s period of submission to Nebuchadnezzar dated from the beginning of the former’s reign or that the raiding activities referred to amounted to a regular siege. Indeed the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s siege of Jerusalem during Jehoiakim’s reign and his capture of that king seems to be apocryphal and may represent a confused memory of what actually happened to Jehoiakin. Neither in Jeremiah nor in II Kings, which must be regarded as our primary authorities (Jer. 22.18–19 is an instance of unfulfilled prophecy) is there any evidence that Jehoiakim suffered the fate implied in II Chronicles and in Daniel. The ante-dating of the first capture of Jerusalem to the reign of Jehoiakim may possibly have had as its motive the desire to harmonize as nearly as possible the prophecy of Jer. 29.10 (cf. II Chron. 36.21) about a seventy years’ captivity with the date of Cyrus’s capture of Babylon and the consequent release of the Jews. The number seventy was certainly important to the author, because later in his book he was to claim the authority of revelation for his interpretation of seventy years as seventy weeks of years, i.e. as seventy times seven. That all this was in his mind here, however, is mere supposition. All that really matters is that the hero of the book is given a setting in the Babylonian exile, that is to say in a situation of opportunity and testing. The writer is not even concerned with the hope of a return from the exile, because the problem he is actually concerned with is not that of men who were filled with nostalgia for their homeland. The reference to the depositing, presumably in the temple of Marduk, of the sacred vessels taken from the temple at Jerusalem (cf. II Chron. 36.7, 10, 18–19), besides being a possible side allusion to the spoiling of the temple by Antiochus Epiphanes, is intended to clear the way for the incident described in chapter 5.

Nebuchadnezzar (inaccurate spelling of Nebuchadrezzar, Nabūkudurri-usur, which is found in Daniel and in certain other instances of the occurrence of the name in the Old Testament) is correctly represented here as the neo-Babylonian king who captured Jerusalem, though it was actually in the reigns of Jehoiakin and Zedekiah that the successive blows fell. Elsewhere in the Book of Daniel it is thought to be possible that he has attracted to himself traditions or legends which belonged more properly to Nabonidus (Nabunāid), the last king of the neo-Babylonian dynasty. The depositing of the sacred spoils of the temple at Jerusalem in the temple of Marduk was in accordance with custom, since vessels and other furniture looted from captured temples were regarded as retaining their sacred character which must not be violated.

It may not be without significance that Babylonia here is called the land of Shinar, a name associated in Hebrew memory with the kingdom of Nimrod the mighty hunter (Gen. 10.10), and still more with the impious builders of the so-called tower of Babel (Gen. 11.2), and the name of the land to which, in the bizarre vision of Zechariah (Zech. 5.11) Wickedness was to be banished. From the very outset, then, it is hinted that the environment of the Jewish exiles, whose adventures are to be told, contains an element hostile to faith. As the story goes on, it is not surprising to find this hostility concentrated, where one might expect to find it, at the Babylonian court.

[3–5] The land of exile was to be for some of the exiles the land of opportunity. We are told how the Babylonian king set about recruiting for his civil service. The RSV translation represents the more probable view that only two classes of recruits are referred to here, both belonging to the Israelite exiles. The Hebrew, it is true, could also be understood in the sense that there were three classes, viz. Israelites, members of the Babylonian royal family and members of the Babylonian nobility (the word used here is of Persian origin). It is much more likely, however, that the author’s intention is to indicate that, in the selection of candidates from the mass of foreign captives, only young men of high rank were considered. It was only in Jewish court circles and among the Jewish aristocracy that the king would expect to obtain lads with the combination of physical and intellectual qualities that he sought. The three-year period of training to which they were to be subjected corresponds to what is known from Greek sources to have been customary among the Persians. As for the subject-matter of the prescribed education, what was presumably intended by the phrase ‘letters and language of the Chaldaeans’ was either the neo-Babylonian language of the court, or, still more probably, the sacred Sumerian language along with the highly complicated cuneiform script and the sacred myths and rituals and omen texts characteristic of Babylonian religion. It is strange that the author feels no incongruity in this introduction of the Jewish lads to the ambiguous world of heathen thought and practice. He wishes, however, to create the situation where presently Babylonian wisdom will be beaten on its own ground and, perhaps without realizing it, ignores the difficulty which his story involves.

The word ‘Chaldaean’ (taken from the Greek rendering of the Hebrew kaśdīm and corresponding more accurately to the original kaldu) belongs properly to the people which proved such a thorn in the flesh to the Assyrians in the latter part of the eighth century under Merodach-Baladan (Marduk-appal-iddina) and which, in the following century under Nabopolassar (Nabium-apil-uṣur) the father of Nebuchadrezzar, was to join with the Medes in bringing about the fall of Nineveh, and subsequently was to win empire for itself under the neo-Babylonian dynasty. Here and in most other occurrences of the word in the Book of Daniel, as also in Herodotus and later Greek writers, it acquired a secondary meaning, being applied to a particular class of Babylonian sages, practised in astrology and the magical arts. This may have happened because, in later times, when the original Chaldaean element had largely merged in the general population, it was mainly certain priestly circles which continued to claim Chaldaean descent. The use of the word ‘Chaldaean’ in this restricted sense is an undoubted anachronism wherever it has reference to the period when the Chaldaean dynasty was in power. This is one of the indications that the literary form at least of these stories is late.

During the course of training prescribed for them as court pages the candidates were to be pensioners of the royal table and have their rations assigned to them (cf. Jehoiakin—J. B. Pritchard, ANET, p. 308).

[6–16] The stage now being set, the hero of the book and his three companions are introduced, first by their Hebrew names, which, whether the coincidence is accidental or not, all appear in Ezra-Nehemiah, and then by the Babylonian names which they are said to have received from the commander of the eunuchs in whose charge they had been placed. It is true that all four Hebrew names are theophoric, Daniel meaning ‘God has judged’, Hananiah ‘Yahweh has been gracious’, Mishael ‘Who is what God is?’ and Azariah ‘Yahweh has helped’, and that in the names which are substituted there are hints of sinister associations—in the case of Belteshazzar, Balatṣu-uṣur, ‘May he protect his life’, a false etymology (cf. 4.5) connecting the name with Bel, though, of course, Bel may indeed be the suppressed subject of the verb uṣur. There is, however, no explicit suggestion here that for a Jew to accept such a name indicated a tendency on the part of the recipient to apostatize, any more than in the story of Joseph, where there is a similar change of name (see Gen. 41.45) and where the hero actually marries into a priestly family. If the author intends a disapproving allusion to Jason and Menelaus, the contemporary hellenizing high-priests of the Maccabaean period and their like, he does his best to make it as little obvious as possible. If Saul of Tarsus could be proud enough of his Roman citizenship to assume a Roman name, we must accept it as possible that no sinister meaning was normally suspected behind such a change.

The first crisis in the fortunes of Daniel and his companions arose from the circumstance that, as we have seen, they were expected, like all the other candidates in training as court pages, to eat the food and drink the wine from the royal table, which had doubtless been associated in some way with idolatrous worship. The food certainly would not have been prepared in the correct Hebrew fashion and might even have consisted of animals regarded by Hebrew law as unclean.

It is true that scruples such as we are told the Jewish lads felt might have manifested themselves in the days of the Babylonian exile, as they have been felt by the orthodox among the Jews throughout Jewish history. Perhaps the closest parallel to the situation described in the Book of Daniel is to be found in the Book of Tobit which refers to the exile of the northern tribes (1.10, 11): ‘When I was carried away captive to Nineveh, all my brethren and those that were of my kindred did eat the bread of the Gentiles: but I kept myself from eating, because I remembered God with all my soul.’ Compare Judith 12.1–4, Jubilees 22.16 and the interesting account in Josephus, Life 3 (14), where we hear of certain Jewish priests in Rome who avoided defilement with Gentile food by living solely on figs and nuts.

At the same time, it is difficult not to believe that the author of the Book of Daniel put this story in the forefront of his book in view of the fact that loyalty to the food laws had become an issue of life and death for many pious Jews during the struggle with Antiochus Epiphanes. We read in I Macc. 1.62–63: ‘Many in Israel were fully resolved and confirmed in themselves not to eat unclean things. And they chose to die, that t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Introduction
• Commentary