Abstract
Scholarship on the book of Daniel has undergone a significant shift since the publication of K. Koch’s groundbreaking work, The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic, in 1972. Despite significant achievements in understanding the historical-critical issues of the book, scholarship viewed Daniel’s apocalyptic visions as embarrassing. The renaissance in Daniel studies that began in the 1970s has since produced a robust conversation and newer theory-driven insights around well-established areas of interest. These include Daniel’s textual traditions and compositional history, the function of its genres, the social settings of its writers, and Daniel’s near eastern literary and cultural milieu. New areas of interest identified in the landmark study of J.J. Collins and P.W. Flint (2001; 2002), namely the history of reception and political theologizing, have also gained ground. Daniel’s reversal of fortunes is due to new methodologies as well as a fundamental paradigm shift in interpretation; this change has seen Daniel scholarship move away from the search for Daniel’s historical meaning, narrowly construed, and toward the quest to understand what Daniel does to and for its readers.
Introduction
It is fitting to begin this article by paying homage to the German scholar K. Koch and his book, The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic (1972). I am not the first scholar of Daniel to begin an essay this way (Collins 2005: 155; DiTommaso 2007a: 235). Koch’s book is an important benchmark for the questions it posed at the time, and also for the way in which it captured the dissonantal zeitgeist of apocalyptic studies.
One encounters that dissonance in the opening pages, where Koch makes the somewhat astonishing claim that apocalyptic studies were undergoing a renaissance. His claim was based on developments that he was witnessing among German theologians and New Testament scholars, but the original German title of Koch’s work belied his own enthusiasm about apocalyptic studies (see Collins 2005: 155). Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik can be translated as: ‘At a loss concerning apocalyptic’, a title that conveys confusion. In Daniel studies, the early 1970s seemed more like a dark age than a time of re-birth! Judging from the relatively small volume of published essays and commentaries, there was little positive academic interest in the book. The great biblical theologian, G. von Rad, had dismissed Daniel as being deterministic and bloodless in its presentation of history (von Rad 1965: 2:303-306), and others regarded it as escapist—a negative judgment on its mythic character (Hanson 1971: 58). The book had been a victim of the same embarrassment that Koch ascribed to New Testament scholars who were, he said, desperately trying to save Jesus from apocalyptic. Is it possible to shame a biblical book? If so, Daniel was a case in point.
Nevertheless, Koch’s claim was a harbinger of changing times. By the end of the 1970s, J.J. Collins had published several seminal works on Daniel, including the enormously important Semeia volume, Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre (1979; see also DiTommaso 2007a: 238-39). His work demonstrated a new vitality in Daniel studies that has grown exponentially since that time. Daniel has enjoyed a distinct reversal of fortunes, as indicated by the sheer volume of publications in the last decade alone.
Looking back from the current vantage point, two contradictory phrases occur to me. The first is, ‘We’ve come a long way!’, an expression about the happy distance between the current state of Daniel exegesis and the past. Since Koch’s book, new areas of investigation, driven by theoretical and ideological analyses, have proved to be productive and generative. At the same time, the old adage proves true: ‘The more things change, the more they stay the same’. Even with the influx of new methodologies and perspectives, major areas of investigation in Daniel have remained somewhat consistent, though they have benefited greatly from renewed interest and new insights generated by theory-driven analyses. These areas include the study of Daniel’s Greek textual traditions, the genres of the book and their function, and the quest to discover the book’s near eastern literary influences, among others. Surprisingly, one also finds the resurrection of older interpretive positions in the midst of the new.
In the course of this article my focus will be limited to the key issues of the last twenty years of scholarship. It is not possible in this article to survey the entire course of Daniel study since the publication of Koch’s book, but there is a good Archimedean point to be found in the collection of essays that Collins and Flint published in 2001–2002, The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception. That two-volume study not only captured the state of Daniel studies during a time of tremendous growth, it also succeeded in setting much of the scholarly agenda for the next two decades. One other obvious limitation of this study is that it does not do justice to the range of conservative and traditionalist scholarship on Daniel. As it turns out, scholars of an evangelical orientation and those who never embraced historical-critical and postmodern forms of interpretation have never really experienced the embarrassment that afflicted historical-critical and liberal scholars of Daniel. They continued to explore and publish faithfully on Daniel, but their lines of investigation have only occasionally intersected with those of historical-critical scholars, especially around text criticism and ancient near eastern influences.
Textual Versions and Literary Development
In a 2001 essay, Collins (2001: 3) noted the renewed interest in Daniel’s textual traditions. The trend has only continued since that time, fueled, on the one hand, by the relatively new availability of the texts from Qumran and, on the other hand, by growing interest in the distinctive qualities of Greek Daniel, especially the Old Greek (OG) text.
In addition to containing fragments of texts that are clearly influenced by the book of Daniel, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain several partial copies of the book itself. Eight manuscript fragments, representing nearly every chapter of Hebrew/Aramaic Daniel, offer important clues about the composition and early literary layers of the book. The earliest fragments date to within about fifty years of the book’s completion (Ulrich 1987, 1989). This is a felicitous state of affairs for text critics of Daniel. The fragments corroborate key aspects of the Masoretic Text (MT) of Daniel: these include the shift from Hebrew into Aramaic at 2.4 and from Aramaic back into Hebrew at 8.1. The fragments do not preserve the additional materials found in the Greek versions of Daniel between 3.23 and 24, which may indicate that the OG version and the MT underwent parallel literary development from a no longer extant Vorlage (Ulrich 2002: 582).
One of the non-biblical fragments, 4Q242, The Prayer of Nabonidus, has proved especially important in understanding the development of the tales, especially Daniel 4. From the late 1800s, scholars had suspected that the description of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4 was originally based on the last and relatively minor Neo-Babylonian king, Nabonidus. They had theorized that Nabonidus’ experiences were later transferred to the more famous Babylonian king (Hartman and DiLella 1978; Beaulieu 2009: 275-76). The theory gained further support with the publication of 4Q242, which mentions Nabonidus and an unnamed Jewish seer in a story of healing that is very similar to the story found in Daniel.
It is now clear that there is no direct line of influence between 4Q242 and Daniel 4 (Henze 1999b), but Newsom (2010) argues that the Prayer points to the earliest layers in the development of ch. 4, in which pro-Nabonidus propaganda was blended with a Yahwistic story of healing. Newsom theorizes that originally it may have been designed for Jewish exiles who supported Nabonidus over and against those exiles who supported Cyrus the Great. It was later re-purposed, however, and attached to Nebuchadnezzar as a story of the king’s education in the ways of the Jewish God.
There is now widespread agreement among historical-critical interpreters that the book grew incrementally, a theory that was first proposed in 1889. The book began with the court tales in chs. 2–6 having been composed individually, perhaps as early as the Persian period, and then later collected (Collins 1993: 35; Albertz 2001: 178; Newsom 2014: 8). But scholars are not in agreement about how that process of accretion happened and which version of Daniel, the MT or the OG, emerged first. There are significant differences between the MT and the OG versions of the tales, especially in chs. 4–6, which led Montgomery (1927: 248) to dismiss the OG version as an inferior translation of the MT. More recently, however, scholars view the matter as more complicated than that. The Theodotion translation is much closer to the MT on chs. 4–6 than it is to the OG. What might account for these correspondences and differences? For Albertz (1988; 2001: 180) and Wills (1990: 110) there is good reason to think that the OG represents the older of the textual traditions and that it influenced the MT. Collins (1993: 220-21), Ulrich (2002, 2012), and McLay (2005), however, hold that neither the MT nor the OG were dependent on the other (cf. Young 2016). They argue that the two versions derive from an earlier story and developed in parallel. At the very least, the differences between the MT and the OG of chs. 4–6 indicate that they formed a booklet that circulated on its own in Aramaic and in Greek in the early stages of the book’s formation (Wills 1990: 144-52; Albertz 2001: 179-80; McLay 2005: 318). Eventually, chs. 2–3 were added to the MT in the early Hellenistic period (McLay 2005: 319; Newsom 2014: 10).
The status of ch. 1 in the MT remains a matter of debate. While some view ch. 1 as a late addition to the collection, added with the Hebrew visions (Albertz 2001: 178; Seow 2003: 9); others argue that ch. 1 developed earlier as an introduction to the tales before the Hebrew visions were added (Collins 1993: 36; Newsom 2014: 8-10). The Hebrew of ch. 1 is awkward and contains a number of Aramaisms, suggesting that it was written in Aramaic first and later translated into Hebrew when the Hebrew chapters were added (McLay 2005; Newsom 2014: 8).
In the MT, ch. 7 is another indicator of the book’s incremental development, but scholars cannot agree on the chapter’s precise position in the book’s growth. What is clear is that the chapter marks the point at which the book is divided by language: chs. 2–7 are in Aramaic, while chs. 1, 8–12 are in Hebrew. Chapter 7 also indicates an alternative division of the book by genre. Chapters 1–6 consist of court tales, while chs. 7–12 are apocalypses. The question that divides scholars is whether ch. 7 belongs with the tales or is more closely linked to the visions. R. Albertz (2001: 178) and R. Kratz (2001) argue that the chapter was written at the beginning of the second century to be part of an Aramaic composition consisting of chs. 2–7. In this reconstruction, Daniel 7 is the climactic expression of the chapters’ prevailing interest in divine sovereignty. The view of Collins, however, is that ch. 7 was a Maccabean period composition that depends on the dream of the statue in ch. 2, but has closer affinities to chs. 8–12 (1993: 38). Newsom has recently (2014: 8) argued a middling position in which she agrees with Albertz’s view of the thematic tendencies linking the Aramaic chapters. However, she posits that an earlier Aramaic book of Daniel consisting of chs. 1–6 circulated as an intentionally edited composition before ch. 7 was added as complementary narrative. Somewhat exceptionally, she argues that ch. 7 may be as early as the late fourth century
Despite the evidence offered by the Dead Sea Scrolls and the OG version, there are still those who defend the book’s compositional unity. Among critical-contextual interpreters, H.H. Rowley (1965) was a notable advocate for the book’s unity, dating its writing to the Maccabean era, based on evidence from Dan. 2.43 and chs. 7–8, which probably refer to events taking place between 252
Between Accommodation and Resistance: Genre, Social Setting and Function
Questions concerning the how and when of Daniel’s composition are closely related to questions regarding who, why and for what purpose. The two sets of questions are not easily disentangled. Just as theories of composition have to grapple with the relationship between the two genres and the two languages in the book, so questions of social setting and function must account for these features as well. To this end, Daniel scholarship has employed varying methods of analysis over the past century; literary, sociological and ideological analyses have created a rich conversation about the genre and function of Daniel’s two halves.
Foundational Formulations of the Court Tale Genre
The contemporary generic distinction between the tales (chs. 1–6) and apocalypses (chs. 7–12) began with the dawning of the twentieth century. At that point, scholars such as H. Gunkel (1928) began to recognize the similarities between the tales in Daniel, the Joseph story, and Esther. They argued that they should be viewed against the literary backdrop of other ancient near eastern court stories such as those reported by Herodotus (Collins 1993: 38-39). But the contemporary discussion of the social setting and function of the tales really begins with two influential studies: W. Lee Humphreys’s article, ‘A Lifestyle for the Diaspora’ (1973) and Lawrence Wills’s later monograph, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King (1990).
Humphreys argued that Daniel’s tales served to model an optimistic outlook for Jewish communities in the diaspora, and to encourage diaspora Jews about ‘the possibility of a life, rewarding and creative, in this setting… The heroes are successful and high ranking courtiers at the end of each tale. Such a life is not without pitfalls and dangers, but one can meet these and still remain a loyal Jew and devotee of his deity’ (1973: 221). Humphreys recognized two subgenres present in Daniel 2–6: the conflict tale and the contest tale. The conflict tale tells of the rivalry between the hero and jealous courtiers who seek his downfall. The contest tale shows the hero, who is of a lower status, solve a problem that the higher ranking wisemen cannot. In both plot lines, the hero is successful and wins the reward and recognition of the king, thus buttressing the stated function of the stories.
Wills’s study differs significantly from Humphreys’, yet retains the assessment that the narratives are optimistic in their view of the Jewish courtier’s fortunes in the foreign court. Although the court legends (as he designates them) indicate a setting in which Judaism is an ethnic minority, their function is not ‘to provide a role model for success’ but to ‘affirm the value and identity of the ruled ethnic group’ (1990: 68) who find themselves unexpectedly successful. Even so, the court legend is not a subversive genre. The ascendency of the ruled ethnic group is in keeping with the court legend’s larger concern for justice. The court is the place ‘where all moral conflicts have their just resolution’ (p. 21), not because the king is just, but because the court is subject to the larger supra-human force of retribution.
Join the Resistance! The Court Tales as Oppositional
The optimistic assessment of the court tales articulated by Humphreys and, later, Wills proved influential (see Hartman and DiLella 1978: 34; Collins 1993: 35-52; Lenzi 2009: 334), even if Wills did not persuade scholars to adopt the formal designation of court legends instead of court tales. The influence of Humphreys’ argument, however, began to wane when D. Smith-Christopher (1996, 2001) asserted that the tales are really resistance literature. Using post-colonial analysis, Smith-Christopher (1996) systematically re-read the tales as evidence of the pervasive, threatening and dehumanizing work of empire which Daniel and his friends resist.
The new assessment of the tales made the question of social setting more prominent than it had been before. A common assumption of earlier scholarship was that the tales were authored by a group of scribes who were more or less like the scribes in the tales: well-educated in the arts of divination and living relatively comfortable lives in the foreign court (see Hartman and DiLella 1978: 34). Smith-Christopher, however, pointed to evidence of hardship experienced by the Jewish community under Babylonian, Persian and Hellenistic rule (2001: 274-81). Jewish scribes were probably not among the educated and economic elite, and they were unlikely to have been fully versed in Babylonian divinatory arts. They were most likely to have been bilingual scribes who occupied a lower social class than the diviners (Newsom 2014: 22). Given this historical context, Daniel and his friends have all the marks of a minority group experiencing both the threats and fascinations of ‘forced inter-cultural contact’ (Smith-Christopher 2001: 266).
In the wake of Smith-Christopher’s groundbreaking work, scholars have systematically inventoried the various ways in which the tales oppose empire and nurture resistance. S. Kirkpatrick (2005) uses a social-scientific analysis of the tales as a whole to highlight resistance as a matter of honor and shame. He emphasizes the work of the book in modeling ‘refusal and rejection’ of empire (p. 38). In a similar vein, M. Mills (2006) focuses on Daniel’s personal choice not to defile himself with the king’s rations in ch. 1 as an act of resistance. Through Daniel’s individual successes in his acts of resistance, he wins back communal identity and honor (p. 416). D. Valeta (2005, 2008) highlights the way in which the foreign king is burlesqued throughout chs. 1–6. Using a Bakhtinian approach, he interprets their humorous qualities as ‘carnivalesque’, a bawdy expression of ‘the opposition between the official and popular cultures of a society’ (2005: 313). Valeta’s interest in the comedic aspects of the tales was not entirely new. Some aspects of his argument had already been anticipated by the work of H. Avalos (1991) who had demonstrated that the listing of names and the repetition of those lists throughout the tales was not a mistake, but served the purpose of social critique.
D. Polaski (2004) argues that the theme of writing in Daniel 5 and 6 reveals scribal interests and expresses resistance to foreign rule. The written word, usually a symbol of imperial power, belongs to the God of Daniel and not to Belshazzar or Cyrus in these chapters. Polaski remarks, ‘There is undoubtedly something subversive in these stories. Emperors lose: Belshazzar is killed, the law of Daniel’s god prevails over Darius’s edict. There is thus some justification for Matthias Henze’s claim that the stories “revolve around two forms of authority that in principle are incompatible with each other”’ (pp. 668-69 quoting Henze 2001: 24). His focus on scribal writing as a form of resistance has been complemented and expanded by essays from M. Broida (2012) and M. Segal (2013), both of which focus on the scribal work of reading and interpreting as scribal interests along with writing.
Apocalypse Against Empire
It is something of an irony that most treatments of resistance in Daniel focus on the tales, while relatively few focus on the apocalyptic visions. It makes sense, however, if one considers that an argument for resistance was needed in the case of the tales, which are entertaining and not self-evidently oppositional. The visions are dark in tone and self-evidently opposed to empire and thus argument seems less necessary. Nevertheless, A. Portier-Young’s monograph, Apocalypse Against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (2011), which offers the most thoroughgoing and theoretically sophisticated treatment of resistance in the visions, is not interested in what is obvious, but in what is not readily seen—the actions and events that gave rise to the visions. She also sets out to correct some of the misperceptions about apocalypticism mentioned at the beginning of this article. She says, ‘It is often thought that early apocalyptic literature represents a flight from reality into fantasy, leading to radical detachment from the world or a disavowal of the visible, embodied realm… Nothing could be further from the truth’ (p. xxii). Her study offers extensive theorizing of resistance as a movement that involves both discourse and actions that undermine the coercive and non-coercive elements of hegemony. It is important to note that the definition of resistance is often assumed, but rarely made explicit, in earlier studies on the tales.
The apocalypses, with their use of historical schemas that envision the downfall of gentile kingdoms, comprise the discourse of resistance to Antiochus IV’s use of terror. Indeed, Portier-Young contends that the genre of apocalypse was created as a direct result of Seleucid rule over Judaea in the late third century
Portier-Young’s reconstruction of the authors of the apocalypses and their social setting follows the consensus view. This view holds that the scribal group of the second half of the book identify themselves as maskilim in Dan. 11.32-35. There is widespread agreement that these are scribes who enjoyed a fairly elite position within Judaea, but perhaps marginalized themselves from the center of Seleucid power in Jerusalem in the second century
Resistance readings such as Portier-Young’s have the advantage of allowing scholars to reconcile the book’s dual genres. Earlier scholarship had often noted a stark contrast between the brighter tone of the first half and the dark tone of chs. 7–12, but were at a loss as to how the two halves related to each other. Smith-Christopher, however, argues that the dream visions described in chs. 2 and 4 connect well to the apocalyptic visions of the second half in their shared resistance to empire (1996: 51-66). J.H. Han (2008) goes even further, arguing that Daniel should be read as a composition that was designed to counter the values of Hellenistic paideia. While Hellenistic paideia emphasizes submission to empire, Daniel’s wisdom tales and visions offer an apocalyptic literacy that nurtures resistance. Dualities are part of the book’s apocalyptic paideia. They present ‘a picture of the world in which various sets of two things in life are operative, sometimes in outright conflict and sometimes in tentative harmony’ (pp. 93-94).
The Limits of Resistance
While it is clear that the apocalypses of chs. 8–12 oppose foreign rule, commentators have begun asking to what extent the court tales oppose gentile monarchs? There are hints that the tales are not always oppositional. For example, while Belshazzar loses his life as a consequence of his desecration of the sacred vessels, he is exceptional among the kings in chs. 1–6. It is true that chs. 2–4 and 6 depict the king as unpredictable, rash, and prone to fits of rage, but he is also teachable and recognizes Daniel and the Jewish God at the end of each of those chapters. Scholars committed to resistance readings highlight the clearest elements of opposition to king and empire while downplaying elements of accommodation to gentile rule found throughout the tales and, to some degree, in ch. 7. Daniel and the Jewish courtiers do resist the demands of king and empire by refusing to eat the king’s rations and worship the golden statue. But they also willingly accept Babylonian names and agree to participate in the royal re-education program and service in the court. Theologically, the court tales and ch. 7 explicitly work within the assumption that the Jewish God has delegated power to the foreign king, even if only for a limited time. Newsom (2010) rejects a binary approach to the question and affirms the value of both accommodationist and resistance readings. She writes: the narrative collection performs a vital ideological function that is both accommodationist and resistant. It is resistant insofar as the narratives contest the kings’ understanding of the source of political power, which in the case of the Persian kings was declared to be from Ahura Mazda. But it is accommodationist in that, by narrating stories in which the kings come to recognize that rulership comes from the God of Daniel and his friends, the imperial rule is legitimated for Jews as representing the choice of their own God ‘who gives it to whom he wishes’ (Dan. 4.14) (Newsom 2010: 64).
Resistance readings have not always been successful in distinguishing the dynamics of opposition, accommodation and negotiation that characterize Daniel and his friends in chs. 1–6. Portier-Young critiques Kirkpatrick (2005), for example, for over-emphasizing the significance of refusal in ch. 1 (Portier-Young 2011: 226). Yet there have been important exceptions to this trend. D.N. Fewell argues that Daniel both resists and conforms to demands of empire in Daniel 1, but ultimately hides his opposition to empire (2003: 117-30). In his study of Daniel 2 and Genesis 41, M. Rindge acknowledges varying degrees of assimilation and non-assimilation and argues that Joseph is the model of a courtier who is fully assimilated to gentile society, while Daniel offers a model of ‘moderate resistance’ to imperial power (Rindge 2010: 90-95). Portier-Young also acknowledges that the book involves both opposition and conformity, but argues that its bilingualism is an intentional strategy ‘to move the audience from a posture of partial accommodation and collaboration to one of total rejection of Seleucid hegemony and domination’ (2011: 227; cf. Valeta 2007).
Smith-Christopher and Newsom each emphasize the concept of negotiation to account for the seeming vacillation between accommodation and opposition. Cultural negotiation drives the ethnic minority to make creative use of the traditions and techniques of the empire ‘in order to make space for their own agency’ (Newsom 2014: 16; Smith-Christopher 2001: 268). Hence Daniel and his friends are depicted as excelling in the divinatory arts of the Babylonians, succeeding where the wise men of Babylon cannot. At the same time, the need to secure acquiescence to imperial authority drives the dominant group to co-opt the symbols and artifacts of the dominated group.
The use of the court tale genre itself is part of Judaism’s negotiation with foreign empires. The Jewish scribes who penned the court tales borrowed the genre from Mesopotamian culture, theologized it, and used its features, such as its comic elements, to effectively undermine and diffuse the power of the king (Newsom 2014: 16-17). Nevertheless, the genre itself assumes a fundamentally moral and optimistic view of the world of the court, thus its ability to be resistant is limited (Wills 1990: 21; Newsom 2014: 12-18). It is the dream of Nebuchadnezzar in Dan. 2.31-45, which envisions the end of imperial rule, that upends the delicate negotiation of power relations in the tales. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream creates a far more resistant reality and opens the door to the development of the apocalyptic portion of the book, beginning with Daniel 7 (Newsom 2014: 17-18).
One final observation about resistance readings goes back to the question of textual history and intentions. As Young (2009) has pointed out, many scholars assume the priority of the MT in Daniel’s textual development (so DiTommaso 2005b: 105; Han 2008), even when they take note of the Greek versions (so Polaski 2004). They assume that the Hebrew-Aramaic text in its ‘final form’ reflects the intentions of the scribes who wrote the tales. Yet the OG does not necessarily corroborate those assumptions (Young 2009). Daniel 5, for example, lacks some of the very elements that purportedly indicate resistance to gentile power. The OG version of the tales are, in fact, far more optimistic than the MT, perhaps because the OG took shape in Alexandria (see Albertz 2001: 179-83), where the Jewish community had a different experience of gentile rule than those in the eastern diaspora or in Judaea. Resistance readings must reckon with the reality that the tales could function in different ways depending on their context. To that end, Portier-Young has called for a sustained look at how resistance is reframed for the visions by the more optimistic tales of the OG text (Portier-Young 2012: 2).
Daniel in its Near Eastern Literary and Cultural Context
There is little doubt that Daniel is an international work. Together with its fictive setting in Babylon, the book presents itself as a confluence of cultural artifacts from Mesopotamia, Persia and Judaea. One of the challenges of assessing the cultural and literary background is its complex compositional development. Scholarship still looks to Mesopotamian influences and parallels to understand the book’s imagery despite the fact that the tales probably date to the Persian and Hellenistic periods and the apocalypses are primarily Maccabean (see Paul 2001: 55; Walton 2001: 69; Toorn 2001: 37). But to what extent have Mesopotamian, or other cultural traditions, shaped individual narratives in Daniel if they were not necessarily composed in Babylon during the exile? The hidden echoes of Nabonidus in the tales, among other things, indicate that the continued search for Mesopotamian influences is warranted despite the ways in which the tales get other details of court life wrong (Collins 2001: 6). On the question of the Akkadian and near eastern legacy in Daniel, I will focus specifically on chs. 3 and 7 to illustrate some of the key issues in the ongoing discussion.
The Mesopotamian Background of the Tales: Feel the Burn
Sometimes the smallest details of a text can create the biggest puzzles. This is the case with the fiery furnace in Dan. 3.19-25. The problem has less to do with the fantastical elements of the story: the appearance of a fourth person in the furnace and the courtiers’ miraculous deliverance from the fire are not really problems. The reader expects their deliverance as a vindication of the courtiers’ faithfulness. It is the mundane details that prove most problematic, namely, the origin of this particular method of execution and the design of the furnace assumed by the narrative.
There is a long-standing observation that execution by burning is a rare occurrence in the ancient Near East (see Toorn 2001: 53; Holm 2008: 86). Given the paucity of references, about five in all of the Hebrew Bible (see Beaulieu 2009: 278-79), some scholars account for the punishment as simply a folkloristic exaggeration of an image that may come from a biblical text (Collins 1993: 185-87; Newsom 2014: 106, 111). K. van der Toorn (2001), however, asserts that Mesopotamia does provide the cultural background for the fiery furnace but its contribution is in offering a model of a successful scholar in the court. The Jewish scribes who wrote ch. 3 embellished the model with a story of deliverance. They took the metaphor, ‘the iron blast furnace of Egypt’ (Deut. 4.20), and literalized it for dramatic effect (2001: 53). A similarly literalized metaphor, that of being thrown to the lions, may be evident in Daniel 6 (2001: 46-50).
Other arguments favor a more specific Mesopotamian origin for the imagery (Alexander 1950; Beaulieu 2009; Baukal 2014), despite the few references to execution by fire. There are only about three possible references that match the punishment in the court tale. The most promising parallel may be an eighteenth-century
The scholarly preference for Mesopotamia has recently been challenged by T. Holm (2008), who looks to Egypt for the origin of the furnace motif. She asserts that there are more compelling parallels in Egyptian literature than in Mesopotamian literature. She adduces four separate Egyptian court tales written between the seventh and first centuries
Holm’s discussion of the fiery furnace is important because it invites a new formulation of Daniel’s ancient near eastern cultural influences. Court tales that bear similarities to Daniel, such as Ahiqar (a tale that was written in Aramaic, set in Mesopotamia, and found in Egypt) are part of the ‘growing evidence for an international Aramaic literary continuum in the first millennium B.C.E. that incorporated and bridged cultural traditions from Mesopotamia to Egypt’ (Holm 2008: 101). This Aramaic literary context, rooted in Egypt, has the potential to account not only for the actual Mesopotamian referents in Daniel but also some of the problems of Daniel’s historical references. For example, the maskilim, who wrote the apocalypses and edited the book, may have mistakenly referred to Belshazzar as ‘king’ in Daniel 5 because they were at a geographical remove from Babylon and simply did not have access to correct knowledge (Holm 2013: 476-77).
The Near Eastern Background to Daniel 7?
Like the court tales, Daniel 7 has been the subject of intense scrutiny with respect to its near eastern background. The obviously symbolic nature of the text complicates the search for referents quite significantly. In this respect, a fundamental issue is whether the vision developed through the accretion of home-grown images or through the borrowing of foreign mythic materials (Collins 2001: 7).
The theory of a mythic background to the chapter is widely held, but there is disagreement about the source myth. In his pioneering work, Gunkel (2006: 205-14; orig. 1896) asserted that Daniel 7 depended directly on the mythic pattern found in the Enuma Elish (so also Lambert 2013: 50-133; Gardner 2001; and Lucas 2000). Scholars have also suggested connections to other Mesopotamian texts, such as The Akkadian Vision of the Netherworld (Kvanvig 1988) and the Anzu myth (Walton 2001). None of these proposals has claimed the day.
The most influential theory of mythic origins looks not to Mesopotamia, but to ancient Ugarit. The Canaanite theory of Daniel’s background dates to the 1950s (see Emerton 1958), and Collins remains its most persuasive advocate (1993: 286-94; see also Cross 1973; Day 1985; Mosca 1986; Angel 2006). According to the theory, the depiction of the Ancient of Days and the humanlike-one has been adapted from the depiction of El and Baal in the Ugaritic Baal Cycle. In those materials, El is described as an aged deity with grey hair; he is called the ‘father of years’, not unlike the Ancient of Days who has white hair in Daniel 7. Baal, who is called the rider of the clouds, does battle with the god Yam. His success over Yam earns him dominion and kingship from El, a pattern that seems to be mirrored in the humanlike-one coming with the clouds of heaven to receive dominion from the Ancient of Days. The Canaanite theory views ch. 7 as a Chaoskampf narrative in which God engages in cosmogonic battle with the chaotic forces of the monsters rising up from the sea in order to claim sovereignty, just as Baal does.
Scholars who prefer the home-grown theory are not convinced by the appeal to a foreign mythic pattern. While not denying that Daniel draws on mythic materials, critics of the Canaanite hypothesis point to the problem of transmission, among other things. How would scribes in the Maccabean period, or in the Persian period for that matter, gain access to thirteenth-century texts for which there are no known copies in ancient Judaea (Ferch 1980; Gardner 2001: 245-46)? Moreover, it is not clear that there is, in fact, a battle with the sea in Daniel 7. The sea is acted upon—it does no fighting; and monsters that rise up from the waters are not identical to the sea monsters found elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible or in the Canaanite materials (Davies 1985: 74; Newsom 2014: 218). It may be more accurate to say that ch. 7 uses mythic elements rather than a recognizable mythic pattern. Interestingly, Newsom is willing to consider that the scribes of ch. 7 were adopting the imagery of the monsters from Enuma Elish, but not the mythic pattern as a whole (Newsom 2014: 222). But most of the elements in Daniel 7 are easily found in the biblical materials (Ferch 1980; Kratz 2001: 94-99; Newsom 2014: 218-20). Even the four kingdoms schema, which originated in the eastern diaspora, comes to Daniel 7 via the earlier dream vision of Daniel 2. Indeed, intrabiblical allusion can account for virtually all of the imagery found in the visions (Kratz 2001; Knibb 2001: 17-18), though some elements, like the throne scene, may have been borrowed from non-biblical Judaean sources that also appear in I Enoch (Newsom 2014: 227-28).
To return to the question I posed at the beginning of this section about the near eastern cultural background of the book in light of Daniel’s complex literary development: the tales unquestionably reflect a near eastern formative milieu in their adoption of the Akkadian genre of the court tale and Persian historiographical schemas in the case of Daniel 2; but perhaps some of these influences were mediated by Egypt rather than by Babylon. Historical details of court life are invoked but are exaggerated by the authors; historical events are referenced but in a distorted fashion. All of this suggests that the writers of the tales were at a distance from the Babylonian setting of the stories. With respect to visions, the dominant hypothesis for Daniel 7’s Canaanite background may be losing ground as scholars point to intrabiblical sources for its imagery. At the same time, Daniel 7 utilizes the foreign historiography of the four kingdoms schema, but this schema was most certainly mediated via Daniel 2 (Newsom 2014: 218). One last observation: it is thought that the historical review found in ch. 11 may come from a Ptolemaic royal document (Davies 2001: 257-58; Redditt 1998: 470-73). This detail bolsters the argument that Egypt should become more of a focus in future research on Daniel’s literary influences.
Newer Developments: The History of Reception and Political Theology
In Collins’s 2001 discussion of Daniel trends, he notes the newly developing field of the history of interpretation and calls for further efforts. Indeed, Collins’s own 1993 Hermeneia commentary was innovative in dedicating part of its introduction to the history of Daniel’s influence, particularly in the New Testament. As with so many of the other issues this article has already surveyed, the history of interpretation, or reception as its practitioners frequently call it, has expanded considerably since that time. An important entry in this field of research is L. DiTommaso’s massive volume, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature (2005a). DiTommaso exhaustively catalogs all the post-biblical pseudepigraphical texts related to Daniel from Qumran through the medieval period. The volume of Daniel-influenced texts is so great it leads DiTommaso to conclude that, apart from Adam, there is not another figure from the Hebrew Bible that has enjoyed such an extensive textual after-life (2005a: 308). DiTommaso’s work is primarily descriptive and classificatory; he divides these texts into three formal categories of (1) legenda, (2) apocryphal apocalypses, and (3) prognostica.
More recently, the groundbreaking contribution of B. Breed, which forms a significant part of Newsom’s commentary on Daniel (2014), focuses on discerning trajectories across the texts. Breed sets out to trace Daniel’s ‘liquid legacy’, a reference to a medieval Muslim story about Daniel’s bones being buried in a river bed so that warring communities would not fight for possession of his tomb. The image captures the reality that Daniel’s stories and visions do not have just a single meaning. Daniel’s legacy is more akin to the different kinds of political readings that were surveyed earlier. Daniel has been used by interpreters to critique and oppose empire, but it has also been used to support the claims to ascendancy by religious groups in power. D. Tucker (2012) argues that the conversion of Constantine in 312
As historical-critical scholarship on Daniel was advancing in the 1970s, the call went out that scholarship needed to advance the cause of theological interpretation, which was sorely lacking. P.R. Davies (1985: 18) suggested that this might best happen through a literary approach. Shortly afterward, J. Goldingay (1987) proposed that Daniel be read as a kind of ‘narrative politics’ that embodies political theology by means of literary characterization: Yet the stories offer a narrative politics. The embodiment of such generalizations in a concrete portrayal is more vital than the principles we may extract from it. They invite us to set Daniel’s experience and testimony alongside the stories which emerge from our political experience and to see what happens. They may help us to see what praxis we need to be committed to. The nature of narrative, however, is not to point directly to action but to invite reflection (a characteristic which may in the end make it more powerful because more subliminal). And a major theme of that reflection will likely concern not so much what we may do in politics, but what God may do (p. 115).
The point about narrative’s ability to invite reflection is echoed by Newsom (2012) who emphasizes that Daniel’s dualities may be viewed as a dialogue between differing political theologies—a dialogue in which the reader is invited to participate. Breed’s work in the history of reception demonstrates the various kinds of theologizing and theological praxis that Daniel has provoked among Jews, Christians and Muslims throughout the last two millennia.
Remarkably, it is a kind of theologizing that has been largely absent from western scholarship on Daniel until recently. Breed (2015) suggests that this may be due to the fact that western scholarship has a different set of ‘moral tastebuds’ than those found in Daniel. The stories and visions of Daniel are profoundly concerned with the moral foundations that prioritize concerns about authority and subversion; loyalty and betrayal; liberty and oppression; sanctity and degradation (Breed 2015: 113-25). Breed points to research that shows these priorities are typical of groups and societies who are under threat. Yet much of western Daniel scholarship in the past century has come from individuals and groups who tend to prioritize moral concerns about care and harm; and fairness and cheating (pp. 114-15). The growing interest in political readings in recent decades has finally given scholarship a better purchase on Daniel’s moral theology.
Conclusions
New directions in the study of Daniel since 1972 have moved away from the negative evaluations of apocalyptic literature and now emphasize the constructive work of apocalyptic texts. The embarrassment associated with apocalyptic texts like Daniel has abated considerably as scholars moved away from historicity as the dominant framework for assessing biblical texts and toward socio-political and historical emphases (Davies 2001: 248). One explanation for this reversal of fortunes may be that the book’s profound ambiguities concerning power have found a sympathetic audience among scholars who have been well-schooled in methodologies and theories of power and its use. Literary, ideological, post-structural and post-colonial analytical tools have helped interpreters make better sense of Daniel’s richly symbolic discourse.
Nevertheless, this change involves more than methodology. The interpretation of Daniel has benefited from a fundamental paradigm shift in thinking about exegesis. Breed identifies the nature of this change as a shift from the attempt to discover what Daniel means to the attempt to understand what Daniel’s stories and visions do (in Newsom 2014: 32). Davies and Collins both point out that much of Daniel scholarship in the last century has been overshadowed by the fall-out from the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy with its unrelenting concern for historicity, a concern that made the tales and the visions look inauthentic, fraudulent and embarrassingly non-historical (Davies 2001: 248; Collins 2001: 1). Released from that burden, scholarship is now in a better position to discover what Daniel, in its Hebrew/Aramaic form and in its OG form, can do to and for its readers.