A Biblical Book Against God

Please meet the Book of Daniel. It is the most important book in the Bible. It is the only book in the Bible that mocks divine salvation. And it is the only one that mocks it through a verified prophetic prediction.

Daniel is also the most structurally unusual book in the Hebrew Bible. With only two principal exceptions, the books of the Hebrew Bible are almost entirely written in Hebrew, as one would expect. The two exceptions are the books of Ezra-Nehemiah and Daniel.

Between the two, Daniel is the more remarkable one. Only about an eighth of Ezra-Nehemiah is in Aramaic, where it is limited to certain accounts of official imperial business (Ezra 4:8-6:18; 7:12-26). In stark contrast, about three fifths of Daniel is written in Aramaic, all of it in six continuous chapters, Daniel 2–7.

The Hebrew material of Daniel frames this Aramaic core like two bookends. There are nonetheless three distinct sections of Hebrew, each with a distinct purpose: a court tale at Daniel 1 that historicizes the book, a revised opening to the first Aramaic chapter at Daniel 2:1–4a that historicizes the other court tales, and three Hebrew-language vision memoirs at Daniel 8–12 that focus on the destruction of the Second Temple.

The Aramaic core at Daniel 2–7 is the older material, specifically the material at Daniel 2:4b–7:28. The literary unity of this core is evident from its organization into a thematic chiasm. The judgment of Nebuchadnezzar at Daniel 4 aligns with the judgment of Belshazzar at Daniel 5; the miracle of the fiery furnace at Daniel 3 aligns with the miracle of the lions’ den at Daniel 6; and the end-times prophecy of Daniel 2 aligns with the end-times vision of Daniel 7.

This Aramaic material is also fictional. Though this material incorporates historical empires, places and people into its narrative, none of this narrative is historical, and it does not discuss historical events. Its first five chapters are known as court tales. They are short literary narratives set in the royal court of ancient Babylon that demonstrate the exceptional wisdom, virtue, and loyalty of Daniel and his three companions. In these tales, Daniel and these companions navigate political intrigue, royal demands, and personal danger.

The final chapter of the core is a symbolic vision memoir, the apocalypse of Daniel 7. In this distinct narrative, Daniel receives a supernatural symbolic vision. This vision portrays the salvation of the Jewish people from history itself—a history depicted as a succession of four ritually unclean beasts. Its key element is a dramatic theophany, in which God, ruling from a fiery throne and attended by thousands of angels, inflicts a decisive judgment on an enemy of the Jewish people and establishes a kingdom of God. It is indeed an impressive, moving vision.

The Hebrew material is fundamentally different. It inhabits the same fictional world as the Aramaic tales, with Daniel as its principal character. But the three Hebrew visions at Daniel 8–12 do not concern a fictionalized history. They offer instead an elaborate narrative of symbolic visions and angelic visitors that address the historical context of a single real-life event: the destruction of the Second Temple. And they do so with remarkable detail. Together they form a separate fictional story that nonetheless addresses actual, verifiable history.

The central element of this added tale is the vision of the ram and the goat at Daniel 8:1–12. This vision consists of two acts. The first act depicts Alexander and his conquest of the Achaemenid Empire (Dan 8:3–8). The second act depicts the destruction of the Second Temple by a Western empire that follows the Hellenistic period (Dan 8:9–12). The vision also establishes a key historical event that identifies this kingdom: It somehow emerges from “the first” of four Hellenistic kingdoms, which the visions later identify as Ptolemaic Egypt (Dan 8:9; 11:5). 

The remainder of the Hebrew visions is an extended commentary on this first vision. The first part of this commentary explains the basic elements of the central vision, including the identities of the ram and the goat (Dan 8:15–26). The second part of this commentary, the second Hebrew vision at Daniel 9, then provides a precise date for the destruction of the Second Temple. That date is the post-sabbatical year AM 3830 = 69/70 CE. 

The third part of this commentary, the vision at Daniel 10–12, is the most detailed. It includes an extended historical discourse on the decline and conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt (Dan 11:2–45). This discourse concludes with a clear description of the War of Actium, identifying the empire that destroys the Second Temple as the Roman Empire, and its emergence from Egypt as the Augustan conquest of the kingdom (Dan 11:40–43).

Like the Aramaic material, these visions are a literary unity. A notable element of this unity is an inclusio that brackets the material after the central vision. An inclusio is a literary device that repeats a word, phrase, image, or theme at the beginning and end of a passage, framing the intervening material as a coherent literary unit. In this case, the repeated theme is the unseen resolution to the destruction of the Second Temple, expressed in a vague prophecy regarding a large number of days. The first prophecy is at Daniel 8:13–14:

Then I heard a holy one speaking, and another holy one said to whoever was speaking, “How long is the unceasing vision and the transgression, its desolation of a holy place and trampled ministrants?” Then he said to me, “Until an evening is a morning, there will be two thousand three hundred [days]. Then a holy place will be put right.” (Dan 8:13–14)

The second is at the end of the book:

“But from the time that the unceasing vision is stopped and an abomination is made desolate, there will be one thousand two hundred and ninety days. Blessed is the one who waits for and reaches one thousand three hundred and thirty-five days.” (Dan 12:11–12)

The principal indicator of their literary unity is nonetheless their common theme, the destruction of the Second Temple, a subject that the three visions locate in time and history with progressively greater detail.

The purpose of the Hebrew material is to mock belief in divine salvation. The evidence for this claim runs deep in its text, but it is nonetheless evident on the surface. The symbolic vision of the ram and the goat is a parody of the Aramaic apocalypse at Daniel 7, and Daniel 8 achieves this effect chiefly through symbolic inversion. In Daniel 7, the beasts representing Gentile empires are ritually unclean. In Daniel 8, the “Gentile” beasts are ritually clean. In Daniel 7, the kingdoms are essentially fictionalized. Yet in Daniel 8 all of the horns and beasts correspond to identifiable, historical entities. 

The chief difference nonetheless concerns God. In Daniel 7, God appears in dramatic glory to save the Jewish people from a fictional catastrophe. In Daniel 8, God is entirely absent, and no visible resolution to the historical destruction of the Second Temple occurs. The text literally states that the goat-horn that destroys the temple prospers afterward, a conclusion so shocking that the text itself demands an explanation (Dan 8:12–13). All the reader receives in response is the cryptic number prophecy shown above (Dan 8:13–14). The subtext could not be clearer: God may save Israel in fiction, but not in actual history.

And everything that follows repeats the same message: The Roman Empire will destroy the Second Temple, and God will not respond. And the fact that God has not responded to this day remains clear to everyone who visits the Temple Mount. No restored Temple. No salvation from history. No God.