How to Read Daniel

Tremper Longman

• Editorial: IVP Academic
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780830853212
• Categoría: Teologia e religione
• Categoría: Critica e interpretazione biblica

Beyond the familiar lions' den and fiery furnace, much of the book of Daniel seems baffling to modern readers. The first half recounts stories full of ancient Near Eastern protocol and imperial court drama; the second half features apocalyptic visions of monstrous beasts and cosmic conflict. Many Christians misunderstand or simply avoid the book. But failing to read Daniel well means missing a critical part of God's message to us.According to Tremper Longman III, when we read Daniel on its own terms and in its original context, we'll discover that all of the book is easier to understand than we might think. In this volume of the popular How to Read Series, Longman brings his expertise as an Old Testament scholar and teacher to orient readers to a proper engagement with Daniel. He examines the book's genre, structure, historical background, and major theological message before diving deeper into each of the stories and visions.As we learn how to enter the world of Daniel, we find a message not only for his generation but also for ours: even in hostile circumstances, God is in control, and he will have the final victory. Longman draws out this theme of Daniel for the twenty-first century, finding help for faithful living in a toxic culture and hope in a troubled world. How to Read Daniel is the perfect starting point for anyone studying, teaching, or seeking a reliable guide to this ancient book.

PART 1

Reading Daniel in
Its Original Setting

This book, like its predecessors in the How to Read series, is not a commentary. While it includes commentary (see especially part two), the purpose is to orient the reader to a proper reading of the book of Daniel. Thus, we are interested in questions of interpretive method and its application.

Accordingly, part one presents an overview of the book from a literary, historical, and theological perspective. In the three chapters that follow, we examine the genre, structure, style, and language of Daniel (chap. 1) as well as the historical background (chap. 2) and the major theological message of the book (chap. 3).

ONE

Stories and Visions in the Midst of Oppression

Genre, Language, and Structure

The book of Daniel has a most curious structure. The first six chapters tell six different, though related, stories. They present four noble Judean young men, Daniel and his three friends (Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah), as political hostages in a foreign court. The six separate stories, one in each chapter, are each set in either the Babylonian (Dan 1–5) or Persian (Dan 6) courts. The four men are exiles, but they are also trained and take their place in the center of power. These stories, as we will see, conform to ancient Near Eastern protocol but also serve as models for the behavior of God’s people when they find themselves in situations of oppression. We will unpack these matters in later chapters, but for now, notice how these six chapters contrast in style and format with the last six chapters (Dan 7–12).

The opening six stories in many ways are straightforward. We will see that these narratives have relatively simple plots and clearly delineated characters. While interesting and profound, they are not complicated when studied closely in their ancient context. On the contrary, the second half of the book contains symbolic visions that, particularly to a modern audience, are mind-boggling and extremely difficult to understand. Hybrid beasts arise out of a chaotic sea. One like a son of man rides a cloud into the presence of the Ancient of Days. A ram and a goat butt each other. An angel speaks about seventy weeks of years. The final vision presents the future in terms of alternating kings of the North and kings of the South.

Many modern readers find the type of literature found in the last six chapters of the book very difficult to understand beyond the idea that the four visions (Dan 7; 8; 9; 10–12) point to some disaster at the end. Christians who read Daniel 7–12 are reminded of the book of Revelation and often, like Revelation, find the message confusing as well as a bit frightening. Many choose to avoid the book.

Of course, if we avoid the book or misunderstand it, then we will miss a critical part of God’s message to us. And we will see that the book—both parts—is not as difficult to understand as we might think at first glance, provided we read it on its own terms and in the context of its original culture.

GENRE

Court tales (Dan 1–6). We begin with an introduction to the genres of the book. All six stories of these chapters are set in a court foreign to Daniel and his three friends. We learn in the first chapter, which serves as a kind of introduction to the rest of the stories, that Daniel and his three friends were forcibly relocated to Babylon, an empire that had successfully compelled the nation of Judah to assume vassal status in its rapidly expanding empire. As is typical to such scenarios in the ancient Near East, the sovereign nation makes the vassal nation send some people from its noble class to the heart of the empire for training (really indoctrination) and redeployment to serve the interests of the empire. We will say more about these matters below, but this opening explains the reason for the setting of these six chapters. At first, Daniel and his three friends, among the noble class of Judah so deported, find themselves in the Babylonian court of Nebuchadnezzar down through the end of the Babylonian Empire. But then, when the Persians defeat the Babylonians (see chap. 2), they will serve in the Persian court.

We refer to these six chapters as tales, but we do not intend to communicate the idea that they are pure fiction. They are not fairy tales. Many scholars today reject their historical reliability, but many other scholars, myself included, would disagree. We will discuss the historical truthfulness of the book of Daniel later (chap. 2), but for now I simply want to explain that I refer to them as tales, not because I believe they are made-up stories but rather because they have a story-like character.

Hans Frei, a well-respected Yale theologian of a generation ago, famously spoke of the narratives of the Old Testament as “history-like stories.”1 I think he got this exactly reversed, though his quote indicates that he rightly saw that there was a historical character to these narratives that also displayed a literary brilliance. I would capture the same reality by saying that much of the narrative in the Old Testament, including Daniel 1–6, is “story-like history.” And so I think it is fair to use the term “tale” in respect to Daniel 1–6 as long as we realize that such a term does not undermine the historical referentiality of these chapters.

But what kind of tales are they?

Because of their setting, scholarship appropriately calls them “court tales.” But they can be divided into two primary types: tales of “court contest” and tales of “court conflict.”2

A tale of court contest describes a scene in which a superior has a problem that needs to be solved, and he enlists his subordinates to help him resolve the problem, and then the subordinates engage in a type of competition to do so. The party that resolves the issue then receives an appropriate reward. This general plot summary describes Daniel 1, 2, 4, and 5, though we will wait till later chapters to describe how their specific plots fit into this general pattern. We will see how this type of tale highlights the vast superiority of the God of Daniel and his three friends over the false gods of the Babylonians.

The two tales of court conflict that we have in Daniel 3 and 6 achieve the same goal of promoting Yahweh over the false gods of the Babylonians. These chapters display the animosity that the Babylonian wise men had toward the Hebrew youths. By chapter 3, the latter have been promoted due to their success in the court contests (thanks to God). Now envy sets in as their Babylonian peers do their best to sabotage their careers and even their lives. Again, we will describe the specific plots when we come to later chapters, but we will see how God intervenes to preserve the lives and promote the careers of the three friends (Dan 3) and Daniel (Dan 6).

Apocalyptic visions (Dan 7–12). While the first six chapters are court tales, the last six are four visions that are rightly described as apocalyptic. The English term apocalyptic derives from a Greek term (apokalypsis) that appears in the opening verse of the book of Revelation (“the apocalypse of Jesus Christ”). Indeed, the word in Greek is often translated “revelation” and ends up giving the book its name in the English tradition. In many ways, to be discussed later, the book of Daniel is similar (of the same genre) as the book of Revelation, and both can be described as apocalyptic books. But what are the characteristics of apocalyptic literature?

As we mentioned, the Greek term apokalypsis means “revelation,” and we begin there. Apocalyptic is a form of divine revelation given to human beings. But, of course, there is more than one type of revelation in the Bible. The term apocalyptic describes the type of revelation that is found in Daniel and Revelation and some portions of the Old Testament that have some or all of the same characteristics as those two books (Is 24–27; parts of Zechariah) as well as a number of extra-biblical books written in the intertestamental period through the time of the New Testament (1 Enoch, 4 Ezra, and 2 Baruch, for example). What these biblical and extrabiblical books have in common will be described in the following paragraphs.

The revelation of the future that we refer to as apocalyptic has certain features that we might compare and contrast to what might be called classical prophecy, which also contains revelation about the future. While the Bible has many examples of the latter (for instance, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve Minor Prophets), we will illustrate this comparison and contrast it by looking at the differences between Daniel and Jeremiah.

First, we should note that the revelations that God gives Daniel and Jeremiah have different goals, and this difference leads to different tasks for the two men.

God gives Jeremiah a vision of the future in order to encourage the people to whom he is speaking to repent and avoid that future. Jeremiah speaks to the people in his community to tell them that they have sinned by breaking the covenant with God through their idolatry and other behaviors, and so they will be punished according to the curses of the covenant. Among the curses are those that warned about defeat at the hand of an enemy and exile from the land (see, for example, Deut 28:25-29).

Thus, prophets like Jeremiah can be called covenant lawyers. God uses them to accuse the people of violations of the law and to threaten them with punishments drawn from the curses of the covenant unless they repent (see Deut 27 and 28). For this reason, Jeremiah receives God’s revelation, which he shares with the people in the hope that they repent. As it turns out, they don’t repent, and so eventually God tells Jeremiah to change his tune and just announce the coming judgment. The point is that a prophet shares the revelation with the people.

When we turn to Daniel in the apocalyptic portion of the book, the first thing we notice is that God never speaks to Daniel directly. Instead, Daniel has visions or dreams that disturb him. Eventually, an angelic interpreter (when given a name, Gabriel) comes and explains the vision or dream to him. Then, surprisingly at first, we notice that Daniel is never charged to share his revelation with the people. Indeed, at one point he is told to “roll up and seal the words of the scroll until the time of the end” (Dan 12:4).

These differences between Jeremiah and Daniel may be found in the purpose of the revelation given to them. Daniel does not speak to God’s people with the hope of leading them to repent. Daniel’s visions have the purpose of reassuring the people in the midst of their oppression and persecution that God has control of the situation and will ultimately bring judgment on their oppressors.

Thus, while prophets are often the bearers of bad news for the people of God (“you have sinned, and you will be punished unless you repent”), Daniel is the bearer of good news (“though you are living under oppression, know that God is in control and will have the final victory”). The book of Revelation, the other major example of apocalyptic literature in the Bible, has the same dynamic as the book of Daniel.

But there are other features of content and style that differentiate revelation of the future given to prophets like Jeremiah from revelation of the future given to Daniel.

The first has to do with the far-reaching nature of their respective interest in the future. Since prophets are interested in an immediate response of repentance, they typically speak about relatively near-term possibilities. While this does not mean that some of their oracles do not have longer-term ramifications, they usually speak of things that will happen near-term.

For instance, many modern readers of Isaiah 7:14 (“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel”) will see that it has a clear near-term fulfillment. After all, in context Isaiah is speaking to King Ahaz, who is worried about a threat from two kings, Pekah of the Northern Kingdom and Rezin of Aram (Syria). Isaiah is telling him that he should not worry and either cave to their demands or ally himself with Assyria, which he eventually does because God will take care of him. The birth of the child to the virgin (or “young woman”) is a sign that will indicate to Ahaz that God is indeed speaking through Isaiah. Therefore, it is something that will happen relatively soon since by the time this son “will be eating curds and honey when he knows enough to reject the wrong and ...