God Will Not Save You

The first article in this series presents a tale of two biblical visions. The first vision is Daniel 7, an Aramaic-language apocalypse and a key foundation of Christian belief. The second is Daniel 8, a Hebrew-language vision with a less obvious significance.

On the one hand, the two visions are not so different. They both present history itself as a threat to the Jewish people, and they both depict this history as a succession of beasts representing Gentile empires. On the other hand, their portrayals are profoundly different, in two very important respects. 

The first concerns historical reality. In Daniel 7, the history is imagined. In Daniel 8, it is real. 

The second concerns their theological purpose. In Daniel 7, God personally intervenes in the history that threatens the Jewish people. At the critical moment, the moment when their destruction seems both imminent and inevitable, God stops the Gentile empire attacking them, burns it in fire, and elevates His people through the establishment of a divine kingdom, a kingdom of God. In Daniel 8, Rome destroys the Second Temple with no visible divine response. History simply moves on. The obvious effect is parody: Daniel 8 mocks Daniel 7. It mocks its portrayal of divine salvation from history. God may save in fiction, but not in reality.

“But wait!” the mistaken scholar cries out. “Daniel 8 is about Antiochus Epiphanes and his desecration of the Second Temple in the second century BCE, not Rome.” To this you reply what this blog has already established: the language of Daniel 8 does not permit this interpretation. The king in the vision, the one who destroys the Second Temple, is somehow tied to Egypt, not Syria. And the king in the vision does not merely desecrate the temple—he destroys it. “No,” the scholar replies, “You are mistaken. Antiochus has stood as the interpretation of this king since antiquity. Both Josephus and Jerome adopted this view. You cannot be right.” 

How this appeal to authority resolves the question befuddles you. It is an obvious logical fallacy. Yet you decline to press this point, and turn instead to the decisive evidence of Daniel 9, the evidence presented in the second article of this series.

You point out that Daniel 9 explicitly dates the accomplishment of Daniel 8:9-12, the vision of the destruction, to AM 3830 = 69/70 CE. The exact year that Roman armies destroyed Jerusalem and the Second Temple. No other interpretation of the king is therefore possible. The king in Daniel 8:9-12 must signify Rome. “No,” the scholar replies without even addressing the chronological demonstration, “You are simply presenting another ‘one-key’ approach to the interpretation of Daniel. We have dated Daniel through radiocarbon analysis, and its composition dates no later than 160 BCE. You are wrong.”

And there the scholar leaves you, having classified the evidence without responding to it. You have other evidence of course, but the scholar can’t be bothered to listen. You can show that the thematic, literary and historical trajectory of Daniel 11:2-45 also identifies the king as Rome, and clarifies his tie to Egypt as the Augustan conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt. You can show its chiastic structure, and how this organization alone points to Augustus. You can show how the description of the king at Daniel 11:36-39 is a description of Augustus himself. You can even show that Daniel 11:40-43 is a manifest description of the War of Actium. You can, in fact, deploy a massive body of evidence in your favor, collected through more than a decade of research. But the scholar will not hear you. You are nothing. And when you submit papers to their journals in an attempt to present this evidence to the review of appropriate experts, they are always better suited to another publication, or they are not the right “genre.”

And it is not even religious orthodoxy they are defending. It is their institutional authority. Your evidence cannot be right, because it suggests the impossible. The tradition of scholarship they represent cannot have been wrong about Daniel for more than twenty centuries. “The emperor cannot have been naked for that long,” they declare, “without someone noticing. And you have not paid your dues. You do not have a doctorate, and you are not a tenured professor. You lack the privileges to even raise these points.” (Never mind that you do not have a doctorate and are not a tenured professor, precisely because you investigated these matters.) And with that pronouncement, they turn entirely from you. 

And with them go all the sheep who depend on the shared reality their shepherds enforce. The evidence be damned.

And the evidence is not the only victim. You and everyone else are. Especially Israelis.

“How is this possible?” asks a man from Tel Aviv. “You are confused. The black hats of Bnei Brak and Mea Shearim may obsess over Torah, but many Israelis do not. Religion means little to us.”

“Yes,” chimes in an old man from Ginosar. “My father was far from religious when he settled the land. He told me the only real God was Stalin.”

You reply that their non-belief is irrelevant. The essential point is the apparent impossibility of the evidence at hand. A biblical prophecy mocks the divine salvation depicted in another. The same text then underlines its sarcasm with an act that no biblical prophecy, perhaps no human prophecy at all, accomplishes. It specifies the exact year of its accomplishment.

The man from Tel Aviv stops you. “This claim is not new,” he says, “Since the time of Josephus, many people have claimed that Daniel specified the exact time for the accomplishment of his prophecies. You are simply peddling the latest installment in a long tradition of such claims. And still you have not shown its relevance to Israel.”

You rightly object that the man classifies your argument without addressing its substance. You point out that he is dismissing you because others have falsely cried wolf. The conclusion does not follow from the evidence. He attacks your credibility on the basis of their deeds. You ask him to examine the dates and the math, and to point out the error—if he dares. You are prepared to answer his objections. But is he prepared to make any?

But you don’t stop there. You compare him to a certain man. This man is standing in a forest, when another man comes to him. The second man reports the discovery of a plane crash, just beyond a nearby ridge. He invites the first man to investigate the wreckage, but the first declines. “There is no plane crash beyond the ridge,” the first man says, “Everyone knows that plane crashes are highly improbable. We have many safety agencies to ensure this. So you cannot be right.” The second man points to the smoke visible over the ridge, but the first will not even look. Because everyone knows that plane crashes are improbable.

The old man from Ginosar scoffs at your analogy. You reply that perhaps a better comparison involves Pessia Aharonowicz, the Lithuanian Jewish woman who escaped a Nazi massacre in 1941. She returned to Vilna and described the slaughter she had witnessed. When a physician who examined her wounds warned the Jewish community, they dismissed his warnings as panic-mongering. “How could it be that they should simply take Jews and kill them?” 

You then ask him pointedly: “What does the son of a Stalinist have against a verifiable biblical prophecy that mocks the hope of divine salvation?” He has no answer.

The man from Tel Aviv responds. “Because it suggests that something greater than us does exist, even if it is not Hashem. That is why. You are making an extraordinary claim, and the acceptance of extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence.”

“Precisely!” you reply. “And what would you consider extraordinary evidence? Have you examined the chronology? Have you found an error? Or have you decided that sufficient evidence cannot exist before even looking at it?”

“But what is its relevance to Israel?” he asks.

“Everything,” you reply. “Because whatever created the Hebrew visions of Daniel predicted more than the destruction of the Second Temple. It predicted both the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel—as well as the current conflict over the Temple Mount. And its message is clear. God did not save Israel from the destruction of the Second Temple. God did not save Israel from the Holocaust. And God will not save you from this foolish conflict over a mountain that isn’t even divine. The significance and future of Judaism do not dwell with God. That future depends on you. You must act, and you must act now.”