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(331) The Book of Daniel as a Pious Fraud - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN9EzAjHPUk

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(00:00) our topic today is the book of daniel as pious fraud and so that's maybe a little bit of a um provocative title for some people maybe for other people it's like okay that's not that provocative i'm assuming that to begin with this in a way is a follow-up if you were here a couple weeks ago to our lecture that we had on apocalypses and apocalypticism because we were talking then about the genre in general and the apocalyptic mindset and that kind of thing and now what we're looking at is one of the earlier or more influential apocalypses

(00:42) one of the apocalypses that actually made it into the canon of the hebrew bible or the christian old testament the book of daniel okay so we're starting with one of our timelines and this is filled with all kinds of information in detail but we can it's nice to kind of map it all out in order to kind of understand the time frame of this whole topic that we're looking at so we're going here from 600 before the common era or bc bce till um you know in the first century uh ce the common era or the christian era or a.d

(01:21) as we often say so um and what we're looking at then that time period specifically anyway from 586 which is the destruction of the first temple in jerusalem and the end of what's called then the first temple period of judaism so the earliest development of judaism to the period that's called the babylonian captivity which is the few generations that the nobles of jerusalem were spending in exile in the city of babylon in the babylonian empire to the at that point the conquest of the babylonians by the persians and the edict by cyrus

(02:07) that the exiles could go back to jerusalem and rebuild the temple but now have that be instead of a kingdom have it be a much smaller uh poorer province of the persian empire where the persians are really running the show and then through the end of then the persian period when alexander and the macedonians and greeks overthrew the persian empire uh the succession that happens afterwards so this hellenistic period when uh alexander's generals divide his empire and specifically in this area of judea palestine um they are fighting between uh the two

(02:51) generals uh successors ptolemy and seleucus ptolemy who is ruling over egypt and seleucus who is in more or less the bulk heartland of the persian empire but it's syria mesopotamia and iran down through then when so initially that whole original period for judea is that the egyptians who are right next door are in charge but then in the second century bce the king of uh the seleucid king so essentially the king of syria conquers uh the territory from the egyptians and so then the accompanying problems with that that includes

(03:36) the sack of jerusalem in 169 which is going to be very important to this story and then the revolt that happens that leads to an establishment of an independent judean kingdom under sometimes called the maccabees uh the hasmonean dynasty so we can see that here the hasmoneans and then followed by their successes the herodians so herod the great and his successors and meanwhile as the hellenistic world is slowly uh conquered by the romans the romans then assumed control then over the hasmonean the herodian kingdom

(04:14) at the end of that and ultimately in another jewish revolt this time against roman authority the second temple then in the year 70 is destroyed ending the second temple period so hopefully that all is kind of clear so just for the context of the book of daniel the book of daniel is set in the time periods of the babylonian captivity and shortly thereafter so certainly after the persians are take control and then uh however we're going to argue that the earliest components maybe of the texture in the let's say 200's bce and

(04:58) the part that we can definitely date for sure is written around 165 bce and there may be some other parts that were written a little bit later and in any events we will talk about all the rest of how all the different parts are composed does that all make sense is that all clear okay so that's some setting of the stage so let's start out when we're talking about this book of daniel so the book of daniel is the last book to be composed that actually then makes it into the canon of the um of the hebrew bible so uh so

(05:41) there's no other books there that there are books that are scripture like that many people for example the the dead sea scrolls people had more books of scripture as what they considered scripture then made it into the bible and some of those are older than daniel they also had daniel because they thought it was a really cool book and they have eight copies of it uh in qumran in the dead sea scrolls but um they um uh that's the last one to be composed especially in its present format uh to actually make it into the hebrew bible

(06:12) there are some other later texts uh that make it into the the septuagint which is to say the catholic or orthodox christian old testament but the hebrew bible and also the protestant old testament this is the most recent one to be written so there's two different versions of the book as we have it today so we have the version that is in the hebrew bible the hebrew and aramaic version of the text it starts in hebrew it goes to aramaic and then it concludes again in in hebrew in the text as we have it and then we

(06:51) have a longer version of the book that is entirely in greek and that's from the greek version the very early translation called the septuagint that is made in the second and first centuries bce in egypt for greek speaking uh judeans or jews and so this longer version includes all of this part although both the aramaic and the hebrew then are translated to greek and then it includes additional stories that aren't in this text so it's kind of an interesting text we have therefore because we talk a lot about how some of these

(07:28) ancient texts are created and when we have two different versions that also gives us way more clues into how the individual text was formed than we would otherwise have so we have that same thing between the christian new testament with the synoptic gospels mark matthew and luke because we have multiple versions of related texts those three different versions we are able to tell much more clearly how those texts were were composed between each other then we are able to tell for example with the gospel of john which we also assume is a growth out of

(08:09) multiple different versions and authors but we don't have any all we have is the complete completed whole so we can't tell for sure it remains hypothetical right so in this case we can tell a lot more so specifically um what we have here with daniel you know we've talked before about how lots of different texts in the bible do that right so we can see the seams and the different voices that underlie the torah itself which is to say the pentateuch the five books attributed to moses we can see that with books in other

(08:43) lectures we've had on proverbs on job on the epistle second peter and like i say the gospels daniel though is kind of helpful because it's really obvious because we have three different languages here right so we have probably here what is an originally an aramaic book that gets expanded by an author who adds parts in hebrew without translating the aramaic part to hebrew hebrew and aramaic are related languages and so in a lot of cases the scholars who are reading hebrew are able to read hebrew at this time also know aramaic and so they don't have

(09:23) the need then to translate the aramaic into hebrew and so anyway there's aramaic we've been the common tongue that everybody was speaking the hebrew is the more ancient tongue that has died out but is still being used as a religious language because of texts and in any way they're related and then we have finally this greek version that includes parts that we only have the greek for because there are no hebrew or aramaic versions of those stories that are inserted so is that clear so it makes it so that in this particular case

(09:56) we can see this expansion so much more clearly than we can with a lot of other texts so if we go back then to that first text probably that aramaic text this components or these components of the daniel as we have it are written in aramaic which was the state language of the persian empire in mesopotamia and the levant prior to that had been the kind of steak language of the babylonian empire it's initial it's a semitic language like i say it's related to hebrew related to arabic it's all of those languages are

(10:33) interrelated with each other but it's different enough that you know it's its own different language and so um at a certain point um as we see it said hebrew dies out as a regular spoken tongue and everybody in the area ends up speaking aramaic because it's therefore the language the lingua franca as we say um the common tongue like you know english and so if everybody at a certain point um let's say a hundred years from now right now everybody in the netherlands maybe which is a the closest language is related to

(11:04) english right now they're all pretty well bilingual and they all speak english and dutch at some point rather they may all just stop speaking dutch because they're just if english continues to take root and that would just be because it's simply easier to do that right well we maybe hope that won't happen but anyway it's impossible that it would happen that kind of thing happens a lot right certainly um uh egyptian the egyptian language which coptic um when after the arab conquest it's continues both of them together for a whole long

(11:34) time at a certain point coptic dies out and is only a liturgical language or just to say the church language of the uh christians of egypt okay okay so taking this then this original aramaic portion of daniel it's we don't know exactly when it's written but let's it's either let's say the late third or early second century bce it's probably by judean or jewish exiles who are living in the hellenistic cellucid kingdom so um well that's going to require a little explanation you guys may all have all these hellenistic kingdoms all down but we're

(12:11) going to try to go through it a little bit so essentially if we go to that time period that second century bce this is actually a little bit earlier than that in the division of the persian empire and the greek world that occurred after alexander the great's death there emerged then some important kingdoms the seleucid kingdom and the ptolemaic kingdom the seleucid kingdom is kind of the bulk of what had been the persian empire and the ptolemies are off in egypt but they also have a fleet which allows them to control

(12:48) uh and dominate the sea here and so for the period the place uh for example in jerusalem you can see it's on the frontier between these two empires which are constantly fighting with each other to decide who is going to have control or be the dominant player in the post-alexander world and so for uh jews for the judeans part of the situation has been since that first babylonian destruction of jerusalem there have been jewish exile communities in babylon it's that babylonian captivity we're talking about but there also were exiles in egypt

(13:26) right from the earliest time and with the establishment of alexandria the city that alexander founds as the new capital of ptolemaic egypt that becomes a major center for a jewish diaspora community and indeed at a certain point it this in this hellenistic period that is the largest um jewish community that there is so many alexandria is such a huge city and it's has such a big jewish percentage of the population there's many more jews than that are living there than live in jerusalem likewise since babylon and then later

(14:03) salukia these capitals of the celiacide empire are against such big cities and they have such big jewish communities in a way that those are also bigger and more important than the people that are in what's functionally quite a little province that's not very important and so in the cellucid kingdom because there's already this lingua franca of aramaic that continues to be spoken it's impossible to get everybody in that whole area to speak greek whereas the um they don't really care about aramaic and egypt and so

(14:37) there's continue to have coptic the egyptian language but the jews then here more or less all switch to greek so they would be kind of bilingual in terms of knowing aramaic but also there's still a lot of hellenization so there's also knowledge of greek going on in the silicon kingdom but in the ptolemaic kingdom aramaic is died out okay so what are these stories about so we're talking now about this aramaic text which i'm suggesting is probably then from over here so because it's written in aramaic it's probably not coming from egypt so it's

(15:14) either coming from jerusalem or more likely in this case the diaspora so it's probably coming from the folks over here in babylon so it's largely and when we read this portion of the text it's largely exploits of judean nobles that are in the diaspora which is to say in exile so they're not the people that are living in the land and it's specifically set uh in uh babylon so um there's exile judea nobles they're in the courts of the kings of babylon and persia where they become high officials in the governments of

(15:48) those kingdoms they may well originally have been courtly stories and so as opposed to um when you have a you sometimes when we think of the bible we think of them entirely as entirely as being religious stories and so and that's where we think that maybe um it's the authors are prophets and priests but some of the stories are um written to entertain nobles and so then they are interested in the things that nobles are interested in and these are what we call courtly stories uh stories of court and court intrigue and these often are stories that are

(16:24) more interesting to us today than what all the priests are concerned with priests often are concerned with ritually you have to do this and that and there can't be any blemish and you have to you know when you're going to bring the goat to the temple has to be on this day and this and that and all these requirements uh whereas the nobles don't care about that and we rarely do today either you know and so these are the more interesting stories from a narrative standpoint okay so that that's the original part and

(16:53) we'll look at it in a little more detail in the course of this lecture but um we'll now look then there's a the expanded text so somebody took that original text and added hebrew portions of it and so the original aramaic texts were expanded by what we call a redactor which is another way of saying an ancient editor somebody who is not only though editing but also and so they could be deleting but and changing but they're often usually just expanding so a lot of times if a book is really important to an ancient person

(17:29) they'll keep the original book fairly intact in the middle and then they'll continue to add stuff in between in part this is because every single time you have to make a book in the ancient world you have to write it all out by hand anyway and so if you there's a book you love you could for example have written a new beginning to it then you have then you write out a copy of your whole the whole part as it already exists so then you can write a whole new end at the end and that would just be part of the process of more or less

(18:00) copying the book since you have to copy it anyway in order to have a second one right so because however the redactor here composed the text in hebrew and didn't translate that aramaic portion we're just able to see a lot more obviously where the one part starts on the other part ends so if um if we didn't have that you know again the the inclusion of the two parts would remain hypothetical right so where we don't have a um you know seems that are absolutely obvious um like this uh it even if it seems like like with

(18:34) the um documentary hypothesis of the torah or pentateuch that we had a lecture on a couple months ago even where it seems like the the j source has such a strong voice that's entirely different from what the priestly source sounds like and you can almost just even not even knowing any of the hebrew just reading the english once you get the characteristics of the priestly source you can almost always say that's the priestly author nevertheless uh it's entirely hypothetical right because we don't have um we don't it's not like the language

(19:04) changes and it's not like we have a copy that has survived of just the j text all by itself which would show us that for sure that that's the way it was instead we have the mishmash as we have it all together and we have to scholars have to kind of say well this is where the one source ends or not and other scholars can say you guys are crazy it's all one text you know and so anyway in this case uh they can also say that they could say with the author for some reason wrote a whole bunch in hebrew and then wrote a

(19:31) whole bunch in aramaic and then wrote a bunch in hebrew it's the this particular case uh the onus is really on the person making that argument to explain why that happened because it does seem really crazy or weird but you know it's completely that's a theory that a person can make how do you know about the dates how do i know about the dates we're going to talk about the dates so so we i'm actually making here that this redactor is actually working between 167 and before 164 which is um very precise compared to what we were

(20:01) able to do with even the rest of it right so the aramaic test text all we can say is it's sometime before the 167 and probably like within it could be quite quickly within but it could be as much as 50 or 60 years before or something like that so we'll look at the context then of these hebrew editions in order to explain that dates so uh we mentioned that there's those two hellenistic empires that are at war with each other in this century um the celicit empire and the um ptolemies so the silicids and the ptolemies so what ended up happening by

(20:38) this time that original giant territory that the seleucids had they lost a whole bunch of the eastern portion of that so in the first place there is a greco-bactrian kingdom that breaks off in what's now afghanistan and it forms a very strong and kind of crazily way far east uh greek kingdom you know i mean in any way what's now afghanistan and then in kind of the persian homeland a group of uh related iranian peoples nomadic people warriors the parthians are able to uh conquer an area and kind of found what's essentially on a renewed persian empire

(21:20) although it's different because the parthians are aren't really a persian people but they're related people and so it's no longer part of the hellenistic world although it's had a lot of greek influence and so then with that kind of loss of that eastern direction the silly sids although that makes them less powerful it does make them a little more focused and so they're able to focus and bring their attention to bear on the west a lot more and that allows them to conquer palestine judea from the ptolemies so they took that from

(21:54) ptolemaic egypt in 198 bc so the struggle between um now the locals so there's local factions uh judea and factions or jewish factions in terms of ruling jerusalem itself and their factions split generally speaking along the lines of people who are really in favor of hellenization and then people who are in favor of less hellenization although it's generally portrayed as people who are gas helenization but in in actually case both groups are actually you know participating in that hellenic con context so alexander the great conquered this

(22:35) whole area and as a result of that that has changed how everybody's viewing civilization science philosophy all of these kinds of things and um and essentially the question for the people you know jewish people everywhere so whether they're in the diaspora in living in alexandria or baghdad but it's also not baghdad babylon so those cities um you know you know they refound them very close to each other but the different cities are salukia contessaphan babylon and then later baghdad but in any event the uh the question is how

(23:16) far to should we retain our traditional identity as judeans and following our own texts and also jewish law and then how how much should we embrace this cosmopolitan identity of uh hellenism the greeks that everybody all around us has done and so um in the middle of that the one of the factions essentially the um traditionalist faction overthrow a supporter of the governor of um that antiochus has left in jerusalem he gets really angry he's already in a bad mood because he lost this big battle against ptolemy and so on his way home from the war as

(24:03) he has this entire army you know even though they have just lost a big bigger war they were able to occupy jerusalem and sack it uh in punishment for you know having rebellion uh against him at a kind of a critical moment and so anyway as a result of that antiochus iv sides with the kind of very radical hellenizers and actually then takes it way further so what he does then is sac jerusalem he refounds it as a greek city so now it's going to not maintain jewish law or jewish traditions and instead is going to have

(24:39) all of the greek traditions of the gymnasium and all these other kinds of greek institutions and the temple on the temple mount is reconsecrated to zeus and a statue of zeus is set up in it and so that's obviously not what especially traditionalists will have wanted uh antiochus then outlaws traditional jewish rights and practices and so as a result of that it's kind of a very strong uh statement of we are going to hellenize you and we are going to persecute anybody who isn't going to get on board with this uh so that is the immediate context of

(25:22) them the hebrew editions so the desecration of the temple in the year 167 bce is the immediate context the hebrew text very accurately and explicitly predicts all of those actions of antiochus iv all the way up to the year 167 when that desecration happens and so we'll get and we'll see how close it is when it tracks in this lecture but essentially that author predicts that very closely in the pink versions here the pink texts okay then then there are also then like we say the greek additions to the text we can tell this because we have the two

(26:04) versions that have been preserved right so the expanded text was very very popular it found its way to diaspora jewish communities judean communities in alexandria which i mentioned has become the largest community and it's translated into greek as part of that septuagint that very famous early canon where all of the hebrew bible much larger version of text than ultimately make it in their canon of rabbinic judaism are all translated and become part of the septuagint which is just greek for 70.

(26:37) based on the idea that 70 scholars jewish scholars kind of mythically didn't really happen but anyway translated it all and i think really fast maybe 70 days too but anyway that they all mythically translated it and so that it could be put in the library right so the library of alexandria the famous library i think they're all supposed to have gotten it um exactly the same yeah so the comment is is that they each individually do it and then they all train and then when they compare notes it's exactly the same and

(27:09) in fact because of that story being there so that myth is actually written into and there's a book that's um that's part of the software again that describes that story and as a result of that one that influenced um lots of different popular myths about the king james scholars and so um so there's the same that that same story is repeated once you've got a good story it gets repeated into the new context right and so the king james scholars did exactly the same thing according to myth which is to say that um it put them all

(27:41) the king james put them all in different rooms they all translated it all separately or whatever and when they compared the notes that all turn out exactly the same but we know very clearly that that didn't happen because we have actually their notes and we have also the source text that they used and so we're very much more aware of how it worked for the king james translation although we're actually quite aware of the septuagint as well which it happens over the course of centuries it didn't happen just all in 70 days or

(28:07) whatever so it is a it's a very important as a very early text and indeed for all of the jews of the diaspora in the west so from alexandria on westward they are not using hebrew anymore as religious language even they they're reading their scriptures in greek and so um anyway that's up to you again so because the entire version then of the septuagint greek version so if that's all we had you know it's all in greek because they translated the whole thing into greek so it's all there we can though however we can identify

(28:41) um that which part is the added material because we have these parts you know so because we have this is greek and that's green and that's not in the hebrew aramaic version we can tell where those seams are and where those insertions have happened right and so if again we only had that septuagints all greek this this chart down here would be entirely hypothetical right because we wouldn't have those linguistic seams uh it would just be but then so the reason why i want to highlight that is because there's so many times where i'm

(29:11) going to say literary criticism has kind of showed us out of this text that it has these 20 different parts or whatever it is but but it's all just a hypothetical construction based on you know literary analysis in the ca in this case this is one of these many books that we have that are actually showing the value validity of that kind of conjecture and that kind of hypothesis because in this case we actually have the text to prove it so alexandria it's become the capital the ptolemies it's home of the great library

(29:42) and the museum the original museum which is to say uh the temple of learning dedicated to the muses the goddesses of science in the greek pantheon the city became then this leading center of culture in the hellenistic world it's also home to the largest community of judeans of diaspora jews anywhere in the world so the greek version and we'll look at this part first it includes a bunch of unrelated text so unlike um as we'll get back to the the hebrew expansion where it was a very deliberate idea an expansion in editing by one

(30:18) particular author in this case it looks more like they took that original hebrew aramaic daniel and then they took a bunch of other daniel texts that are already exist that maybe they had and they just spliced them all together kind of willy-nilly and uh and and added them into this and so these include the prayer of azariah the song of the three jews the story of susannah and the elders the story of the idol bell and the story of daniel and the dragon and so it's a bunch of different daniel stories that um get thrown in

(30:52) there and there are they many of them may be actually older than some of the rest of daniel so a lot of these may actually go back to before the hebrew versions of the book of daniel in fact and in some cases like the prayer of azariah we don't know it could well be that it's based on a hebrew original we don't have it all we have is the so people make arguments whether um let's say the hebrew isms in in the text are because it's a translation from hebrew or because the greek writer who's jewish is copying the greek that would be

(31:29) you know have hebrew isms because it's how they translated the rest of the canon right so in the same way that you could write um if you were just really versed in the king james bible you could write new scripture in king james the english and you could say and which would also have all of these different kind of hebrewisms because it's how the king james people rendered some of the hebrew for the old testament anyway not the new testament it would still nevertheless be an original english composition even if it

(31:58) includes some of those things right okay so let's look at just a couple of these stories we've talked about some of these before when we've looked at the apocrypha and other lectures but there's a bunch of great stories so one of them is the story of susannah and the elders so in this story two elders from the judean exile community in babylon conspired to have their way with a noble jewish woman named susannah while she is all by herself bathing in a garden so they hide out in the garden knowing that she's going to be there when should they

(32:31) send the servant when she sends her servant away uh you know they come out and and more or less say they want to have their way with her and if they don't because there's two of them they're going to testify against her that that they had caught her with um you know like a young lover who had absconded away and so then she's going to certainly be shamed and maybe put to death based on their testimony however rather than submit to this um proposal the state accomplished she cries out with the idea that she'd prefer to die than to

(33:03) um and even if she's condemned that way and be stoned she'd rather have that than to you know to sin and have her be damned and so daniel so when they're all arrested then this is becomes like a an early kind of daniel as a early private eye they're brought before daniel who is able to ferret out the truth by taking each one of the elders separately and then cross-examining them about their story and when it turns out their details of their stories don't match daniel's able to say oh you guys are making this up you guys are

(33:37) not credible susanna's the one that is telling the truth and so i think they get stoned as opposed to her so fun story um likewise the stories of the idol bell and uh daniel and the dragon so daniel again is a detective here his work um in the case of the idol bell proves to king cyrus that it's actually his own priests that are eating offerings that are left for an idol an idol to the god bell each night and so essentially um the priests have this giant feast and all this wagons of of wine and everything like that that are left every night

(34:16) and the fact it and then they seal the temple up and the next morning all the feasts and all the wine and everything like that's gone and that's proving as far as cyrus is concerned that the bell's a real god because he's drinking all this wine and eating all this food and so daniel leaves flour on the floor uh and so then when all the you know they close it all up and all the priests use the secret entrances to go in and have this whole big feast and then leave uh when they reopen the the uh the temple the next morning

(34:45) uh there's all the priests footprints on on in the in the flower and so that proves they ate it you know and so then daniel's allowed to uh you know chop up the idol and destroy the idol and kill all the priests so anyway yes another fun story shaheen um a lot of these stories seem to have a very major misunderstanding of how pagan worship works and how pagans that's right yeah yeah so so this is a this is a polemic so the the story of the idol bell yeah it's gotten cold uh the story of the idol bell is a polemic written by

(35:27) um written specifically by jews but in second people in second temple judaism who are um uh opposed to having statues in worship right so there is always the um the feeling that uh so there's different religions that are more or less iconoclastic and so iconoclastic meaning not wanting images in worship so people are concerned have been concerned a lot of times that if you have an image then you'll worship the image and you'll be fixated on that uh and that would be true whether it's an icon if it's just to say a painting whether

(36:05) it is a statue and so in some cases um uh the i uh iconoclasm can get quite strong so in judaism you're not at a certain point not even allowed to say the name of god anymore and so you have to you can spell out the four letters but it's not to be pronounced and so when you get to that place in the torah scroll you say lord instead of saying the name and otherwise also not to be pictured or anything like that it's also very strong in islam where you are not to you can say the name of god but you can't say or you can say god as the god you know

(36:39) being that word for god but you uh can't picture right and so um eastern orthodoxy had a whole war over this called the iconic last war they settled on they would keep the icons which is to say the paintings but they got rid of all the statues and then um western christians latin christians were like what are you people talking about we're keeping our statues you know and so anyway but then the protestants got rid of them right so anyway so it's it's a at a certain point the protestants in the reformation um uh all across england and in germany

(37:14) they they they defaced all the statues and things like that they got rid of all the statues and they um took all the frescoes and they whitewashed it and so the churches you know had to um you know be if you go to some protestant churches it's a white pole barn right because you can't have uh you can't have it again so so it depends so it is a it's a it's a concern anyway so this idea of it is though in a polemic is that people for example that hindus who use statues in their worship of the divine so the different um

(37:50) divinities that are understood to depending on how anyway the hindu theology is very diverse but in any event there's a sense that people who are not who go to a hindu temple and if you are maybe muslim or if you are christian you think that people are worshiping the statue because the statue is being clothed and bathed is having food left there and that kind of thing but this is not the idea of it so despite the fact that the text here makes that case instead it's simply understood that maybe the god spark or favor

(38:26) is essentially being focused in here but it is not that the statue is the god so similarly so that's the idol bell the great fun story another one is uh that's next to it uh in the story of daniel and the dragon so the babylonians have a dragon so who knew there's actual dragon in the bible right now so anyway uh and so they worship the dragon as a living god but daniel just proves it's just a dumb animal and so because essentially he feeds the dragon all these cakes that he's had a secret recipe uh and so when the

(39:04) dragon eats all these cakes then the dra the cakes explode and burst the poor creatures belly open and so poor creature dies but proves that it wasn't god right because how could you trick god so it's not as fun as story because now there's now the dragons are extinct they got one left in game of thrones so okay so here's them just to like we've gone through kind of in more detail the um the greek editions in addition to that there's um a text called the prayer of azariah and the song of the three hebrews and so

(39:40) um that is essentially poems that are talking about the fiery furnace story and we'll talk about that um so essentially in the version that we have that includes the septuagint so we have two versions one that has the greek parts and one that doesn't have the greek parts but they're otherwise the same except generally speaking except for the additions so as we have it i'm not numbering those because i'm using the chapter numbers from the from the ones that don't have the greek right so that's the protestant and uh this is the protestant

(40:14) chapter numbers so essentially chapter one is the introduction that's in hebrew chapter two is nebuchadnezzar's dream of the five kingdoms with the statue of the five that that represents the five kingdoms the next is chapter three is the story of the fiery furnace so both of those are in aramaic part of that aramaic text then there is those those hymns of psalms that are in greek we don't have if they were in hebrew originals we don't have them related to the story of the fiery furnace which is why they're stuck

(40:46) in the greek version after that story next um this back into the aramaic text it's the story of nebuchadnezzar's madness then belshazzar's feast then this famous story of daniel and the lion's den again part of the aramaic text then the vision of the beasts that come from the sea in aramaic and then the text switches to hebrew and we have a vision of the ram and heb hegoat then we have a 70 weeks prophecy which is a um re-uh interpretation or a change of i have a prophecy that didn't come true from jeremiah and so it's recalculating that and then

(41:33) a list of revelations that are brought by the angel gabriel again in hebrew and then we have that susanna and the elders story in greek and then the idol bell and the dragon stories in greek and so that's how it would exist if you were reading it in for example the orthodox or catholic bibles can we get the microphone to yvonne what does the what do the asterisks indicate oh it means it's written in that language so i i should have probably just put those in italics instead i put an asterisk and this thing that but it should

(42:11) essentially just be intro written in hebrew in other words so so clear so that's kind of a map of what the text looked like we've already looked at the greek parts now i want to look at that earliest portion the aramaic section of the book um the aramaic sections of the book of daniel so these are daniel's interpretation of nebuchadnezzar's dream of the statue which the interpretation is of uh that it represents five successive kingdoms next nebuchadnezzar tosses shadrach meshach and abednego into the fiery furnace

(42:51) next nebuchadnezzar's madness is foretold in a dream that's interpreted by daniel then he does go mad next balthazar's as the next king of babylon's feast daniel interprets uh writing on the wall which again is going to be about a succession of kingdoms next daniel interprets balthazar's dream of four beasts that rise up from the ocean and finally actually these are backwards so that should actually those lines are wrong the next one is actually daniel and the lion's den and then the last one is that that dream

(43:28) of the four beasts those two lines are going to the wrong to the wrong uh things but the otherwise is right and the reason why um uh those are numbered lettered here instead of of numbered is that scholars have i detected that in this text all by itself there is the hebrew form of chiasmus which is um to say i mean that's actually greeks did it too but it's in it's a form where you essentially uh start with one kind of component that's fairly similar you go to another one you get to the kind of the heart of the

(44:02) matter and then you go back the way you came so a b c c b a and they you know and so it can in the shortest chiasmus you can just go a b b a but they can get much more elaborate and so the idea here is that on the book ends here there are um dreams that are interpreted visions of a succession of kingdoms the five kingdoms of the four beasts um the the b components are the firing furnace and getting tossed into the fiery furnace getting tossed into the lion's den so those are kind of comparable to each other and then in the middle

(44:34) um are you know nebuchadnezzar anyway the writing on the wall and dream interpretation in the middle right okay so just to look at some of those this includes some of the most famous stories and imagery out of the book so a lot of this you'll be familiar with so um the lion's den daniel and the lion's den that's probably the most most famous story here and so daniel in the story is essentially promoted i'm sorry appointed as prime minister by a character called darius the mede uh in the story and it's not he doesn't

(45:11) get called prime minister but essentially uh the median empire as described here is ruled by say trippies like the later persian empire and of which there are three um the central court uh points three presidents of the state traps and because daniel is the most effective of all of those three presidents they just make him be president of all the state traps all by himself and this as you might imagine makes all the other say traps and all the other courtiers very jealous because now suddenly all of this power is

(45:42) concentrated in this one guy's hands and so they want to get rid of him but the problem is that he's uncorruptable and he doesn't do anything wrong and he's you know perfectly honest in all his dealings and all this sort of thing and so the only way they're going to be able to get this to work is through trickery and so they convince uh darius to issue an edict that forbids everybody from praying to any god other than darius himself for the next 30 days and if you break the edict that's punishable by lion's den

(46:14) so you get thrown into into the lion's den and so what ends up happening even though daniel is aware of that decree nevertheless he is very devoted to the worship of the god of israel and so he continues to pray in private he's you know spied they know that he's going to do this so he's spied upon he's caught he's denounced by uh the other courtiers and so then darius who was really upset that he's been tricked in this way but he's nevertheless made a decree and he has to fulfill it uh in order to show that he's

(46:46) uh you know good of as good as his word uh reluctantly throws daniel into the lion's den as a punishment for him breaking the edict but god sends an angel and the angel shuts all the lion's mouths and so therefore daniel is able to survive even though these poor hungry lions would really like to eat some daniel but aren't able to so then the next morning uh when when they throw open the doors and uh daniel uh has survived um darius rejoices he's very very happy and then the result of the story is that then darius has a degree that allows

(47:24) the judeans to have all of their own unique practices so there's a an issue of toleration for their particular religion and practices that results from this sort of lion's den trickery on the part of the courtiers so then another one so the fiery furnace that's maybe another one that people are aware of it's um there's a great song that goes shadrach meshach abednego and the fiery furnace were tossed so i didn't remember their names that way but anyway so these guys um again nebuchadnezzar of babylon he's got himself this huge gold idol

(48:01) but three of his officials who are judean exiles they all refuse to worship the idol so they're not gonna and everybody has to that's part of the getting the degree or the rules and so as a result of their obstinance and refusal to just do the um what they're supposed to do anyway in terms of you know the state religion here they are cast into a fiery furnace to test whether their god you know is truly god and the furnace is so hot that everybody even comes close like the guards and stuff like that all burn and everything like that but then

(48:32) these guys um are go in there and when people are seeing from afar they see that there's actually four beings together so just the three of them and then another angel from god who is preserving them right and so again they survive miraculously and as a result of this amazing feat we again have uh uh the king issue with edict that allows for jews to have their own practices this one actually comes earlier i i used the other one was in the medes right darius the mede this is the babylonian king nebuchadnezzar and i

(49:09) just did the other one i did them in this reverse order because this one's less famous than the lion's den right okay so also in the aramaic texts uh are some famous visions so one of them is this vision of a statue representing five kingdoms um this maybe an artisan is famous to us anymore as it once was but this was something that um really uh captivated the imagination for a long time because more or less what's happened here is that you're they're outlining essentially periods of history and so throughout time people have reinterpreted what each

(49:46) one of the different kingdoms are to update it to their own time period right but anyway so nebuchadnezzar has a vision there's a statue that has a head of gold breast and arms of silver belly and thighs of bronze legs of iron and feet made of mixed iron and clay he wants an interpretation but he distrusts all his soothsayers and so he won't even tell anybody in his court what the vision even was so he says i have a dream and i want you to all to interpret it and all the sausages are like that's not how it works you have to tell us the

(50:18) dream he's like no you had to tell me what my dream was first and then tell me the interpretation and so they can't do that and they they say that nobody can do that well turns out somebody can do that and that somebody is daniel and so daniel with god's help is able to relate the dream and its interpretation so he says what the king saw and then he says what the interpretation is and so the interpretation is daniel says that there will be a succession of these four original kingdoms um gold silver bronze and iron and they'll be followed

(50:51) by one of iron mixed with clay and then there's a after that statue part the last last part of the dream is that a hand i'm sorry a stone that is carved out of a mountain without hands rolls forth and it smashes the statue and so that's anyway all of the last kingdoms in other words that kingdom of iron mixed with clay will fall because it will be struck by this stone and so the interpretation that's actually included in the text so it's explicit here is that the first kingdom is nebuchadnezzar's own kingdom so that head that gold head

(51:30) uh is babylon right so that's and then and then it also explicitly says then that that stone that smashes all the other kingdoms is in fact god's what we now would call millennial kingdom but what they don't have that word yet so anyway god's future kingdom this kingdom of uh where god will impose on the earth and we will no longer be living in this uh era when evil reigns but instead uh it will be a period of you know the peaceable kingdom and justice and so that will destroy the all the kingdoms of the world and so although that's endlessly been

(52:07) reinterpreted as i mentioned so people have wanted to say what each one of those kingdoms between so those two are explicit the millennial kingdom and the babylon but what's in between right and so although it's been interpreted over and over again that the text makes the identity quite obvious and so gold is babylon silver is the medes bronze is the persians iron is alexander and then the iron mixed with clay represents the hellenistic kingdom so those kingdoms of the ptolemies the cellucids and there and so forth

(52:40) so um then another one of the visions is the vision of the four beasts so daniel and this is again from the aramaic text daniel daniel similarly interprets a dream of king belshazzar in which four beasts arise from the sea and these are a lion with eagle's wings a bear with three tusks a leopard with four heads and wings and a beast with iron teeth and ten horns so again although the in the imagery here um the imagery here ends up being very specific in order so that you can have the um it's not explicitly made we can tell

(53:18) exactly what he's referring to in terms of the succession which is the succession of kingdoms from um nebuchadnezzar from the babylonians to god's millennial kingdom after the beasts are overthrown so there's another theme that's told more even more explicitly in that handwriting on the wall story that we still use as a you know a as a phrase i can read the writing on the wall right and so or the writings on the wall uh you know this is uh what happens in this particular uh thing so balthazar who's again the king of babylon after nebuchadnezzar in

(53:54) the story a hand appears that everyone sees the hand and it writes on the wall and it writes mene mene teco perez and people wonder what does that mean you know what is that supposed to be for and so daniel interprets it quote um as god has numbered your days that's the uh the many many you have been weighed in the scales and found wanting and finally uh perez here your kingdom is divided and it's given to the medes and the persians so what's happening here is that the king of babylon is being told quite explicitly the writing is on

(54:28) the wall the babylonian kingdom is is through and now uh the medes and the persians are going to take over uh your kingdom so pretty much you can kind of see a theme you know through the aramaic text which is essentially getting from babylon which is when the story is set all the way through the succession of kingdoms till you get to the cellucid and ptolemaic period which uh is viewed as obviously less stable and less good than even what was in back what we'll say a golden age like the age of uh where the golden head the age with

(55:04) the silver age the bronze age and now an iron age of alexander himself and now iron mixed with mud iron and clay you know that's what we're reduced to now in this era which is to say the era at the time of the author so how can we tell that as always that happens whenever anybody is writing and this is quite true now although people are so much more aware of history that you can do a a much better job nevertheless continually happens with still modern forgeries that are continue to be cranked out at a at a very rapid rate

(55:45) as people always want to forge stuff and they always want to that uh that these almost inevitably or always inevitably include i mean you're better off the shorter you make the thing but the longer you make it um the more likely and the more certainly you're going to include anachronisms and certainly even even if a person is a amazingly gifted historian now people still make monaco's without it without anyway and these guys back then are not amazingly gifted historians they are writing without probably any historical training

(56:19) in some cases in this this case after history has been invented but not something that they're focused on so just even hearing you know we're kind of hearing all these different characters you know we were talking about balthazar and cyrus and darius and the mead and nebuchadnezzar so it's in a way the stories have all these kind of strange settings that should already kind of be kind of clear it's a little confused in terms of that actual history in terms of the past of when the setting for the daniel story actually is

(56:54) so the way it's described in the book of daniel as we have it and especially as also in the aramaic version at its heart there's essentially the power of succession here comes from nebuchadnezzar i was going to say who is later described as the guy who actually is the conqueror of jerusalem although that's also an anachronism uh um but what we have here is nebuchadnezzar the babylonian it goes then from his when he goes mad in the story it goes from his son to his son balthazar who is then when he reads the writing on

(57:30) the wall is overthrown by a character called darius the mede who is then followed by cyrus the persian and so that's the succession of the different kings of babylon as we have it in the story but in actual history balthazar who is not actually king he's regent in the very last year of the babylonian kingdom 539 he is actually the son of nabanitus uh who is actually four kings then from nebuchadnezzar so he's not nebuchadnezzar's son so that's an anachronism or an error babylon then is not conquered by some character known as

(58:08) darius the mede there is no such person as darius the mede but it was actually conquered by cyrus the second cyrus the great the persian uh in 539 uh himself and so then uh darius where they get this name uh darius the great is actually a persian and he began begins to rule in 522 eight years after cyrus's death not before so as you can kind of see the author here um isn't particularly familiar with the events of the extreme past which is to say the babylonian captivity and that early persian period and in fact has made

(58:47) fairly serious errors in setting the stories so um then because of that the core version of the text the core version as we saw is the author's prediction of the succession of kingdoms and that leads up to what we can assume then is his own day which is to say the divided um successors of alexander so um why why do they want to do that so you know the idea of it always the pious pretense for essentially doing something that is deceitful pretending that it's actually a story that is taking place or that your author

(59:30) that is taking place at the time of daniel if daniel were a historic person said at the same time of as nebuchadnezzar or something like that as opposed to writing it in your own time is because the authors actual past so everything that takes place between nebuchadnezzar and when the author is the real author is actually alive all of the predictions in between lend to the prophet's credibility right because that all those visions you know with the the statue it's been right up till now so the fact is we've already occurred what you can when

(1:00:06) people are reading this text now they already can look back and they say well wait a second that's right that's what way back when when daniel was seeing this now in our day there was that babylonian kingdom then the medes then the persians then alexander and his successors and now you know we're in this place uh where we're we're having this horrible time with the mixed kingdoms of med and clay the cellucids and the ptolemies and so having having gone with you that far and gained that kind of credibility in terms of your prediction

(1:00:36) the next part of the vision the idea that there's going to be a rock you know carved without hands that smashes the whole thing which means that god's millennial kingdom is about to be formed so that this world of injustice is going to go away and we're going to instead live in a renewed paradise that becomes more credible because you can look back and say well he got the last 400 years right or 300 years right so that's much more likely to be our immediate future as people were seeing that so so the idea is is that the author

(1:01:09) here of the aramaic daniel is quite convinced that the end is nigh so it is about to be that end that change is about to happen but in order to in order to make that message and sell that message essentially he wrote that into the story setting his story uh way back in the past and this is not the um only one of these as we saw two weeks ago with our apocalypses uh an apocalypticism lecture there's actually we've surviving dozens and dozens of these apocalypses from the second temple period which all do the same kind of

(1:01:45) thing it'll be like set with the character of enoch who is a anti-diluvian somebody who is supposedly living before the flood who has a vision and predicts everything all the way up until the time period when the author of enoch was alive which is to say the second temple period and then predicts the upcoming apocalypse the end of the world and the future establishment of the paradisical kingdom so they all kind of do that right and so it's a big genre of which we're familiar more familiar with daniel because it's made it into the text

(1:02:20) and things like the statue the phrase the writing on the wall the lion's den the fiery furnace these have become for us um much more known images as a result of that than the other lost apocalypses or the ones that didn't make it into the canon okay so i just want to read a little bit of it to kind of show that so predicting the future past events so and in those days i'm sorry in the days of those kings which is to say the hellenistic rulers that mixed mixed clay and iron age god the god of heaven will set up a kingdom

(1:02:57) that shall never be destroyed nor shall this kingdom be left to another people it shall crush all these kingdoms and bring them to an end and it shall stand forever just as the stone that you saw was cut from the mountain not by hands and that it crushed the iron the bronze the clay the silver and the gold the great god has informed the king through this vision nebuchadnezzar has informed nebuchadnezzar what shall be hereafter so you've gotten to see the future in your vision the dream is certain the interpretation

(1:03:25) is trustworthy so because we've seen um in that dream all of the history of the pets preceding 300 years as from the perspective of the author and the author's immediate audience the next thing that's about to happen this millennial kingdom uh is quite assured right so the dream is certain the interpretation is quite trustworthy as far as the book is sure as us okay so um the hebrew editions as we saw then taking from that that original text that text very much appealed to some author who decided to expand it and do a

recalculation so contrary to that original author's prediction 

(1:04:03) recalculation so contrary to that original author's prediction god's kingdom was not established in that time period so it wasn't going to happen immediately but it doesn't happen but that doesn't mean that people throw away the text you know so they they're like well they dust it off think about this here they get out their calculator abacus or whatever and they say wait a second this whole thing where jeremiah said that it was going to take place in 70 years i bet that means 70 weeks of years which is to say 70 times 7. now it

(1:04:40) doesn't say that in jeremiah but it sure makes sense now that i've added it into my calculator because now it's going to really work out and so that's the kind of thing that happens right so um this additional author who we're going to call in this anyway the hebrew redactor we don't have a name for whoever this would be believed that these predicted events were occurring right before their eyes in 167 and so in other words they've read this thing they're believing all they didn't happen when the aramaic text predicted it would but now that 167 has

(1:05:12) occurred we've talked a little bit about it we're going to talk a little bit more when we have this period of time when the temple is being sacked etc etc the person's reading this and like this was actually about now and so like i say they do the calculations they realize it is all happening right now and so then they correct the text or they expand the text in order to convince everybody their theory is correct and so when we see the expansion here um we have that core part that we already saw from the uh the five kingdom stream to the

(1:05:44) beast's dream and the lion's den and the and the fiery furnace and etc that's in the middle there the aramaic text and now we have an introduction to the whole thing that's written in hebrew which includes more anachronisms but in any event so just kind of setting the stage and then we have more visions which is to say there's a vision of a ram and a hego that is written in hebrew there is the 70 weeks prophecy which is going to include all of this hebrew writer's math that's going to assure everybody in his immediate

(1:06:16) vicinity that this time period this date that they are existing in right now is critically important and the whole thing is going to wrap up in three years and then finally um we have more revelations from an angel uh to round out the hebrew additional text so the edit added one chapter 1 8 9 10 and 11 and 12.

(1:06:40) so the ram and goat vision so essentially the hebrew author adds a vision that balthazar has of a ram with two horns who's defeated by a goat with a great horn the great horn uh falls off and then is replaced by four or breaks and it's replaced by four lesser horns and then more horns until finally there's just this one little horn that is ends up being a really terrible horn so and so uh that last horn is going to desecrate the temple we find out and will cause all sacrifice and everything like that to cease for 2000 evenings and mornings

(1:07:17) actually that's 2300 for 2300 evenings and mornings and so there is a it's kind of the imagery is less going to be less remote for us but even if that wasn't explicit enough for you the angel spells it out for you so that you get the interpretation right in the uh the hebrew additional text here so the angel gabriel explains that the ram you saw with two horns that represents the medes and the persians right and they're defeated then by the greek horn right the greek animal which is to say the male goat which is the kingdom of greece the king

(1:07:53) of greece that first horn you know that smashed everything that's alexander that's not explicit but anyway it's what's explicit is that it's me the medes and persians and greeks but this is going to be pretty obvious that the the big horn is alexander that breaks into four horns which is therefore his generals the successors the hellenistic kingdoms and then finally um that one last little horn is going to be antiochus as we'll see so the four horns the four hellenistic horns are the main four kingdoms into which alexander's

(1:08:25) empire is split the kingdoms of seleucus ptolemy uh lysimicus and cassander so we haven't mentioned those other two because they're not as important to the particular story but it is making it in terms of the vision it makes um you know essentially the greek a beast that represents greece that has one big horn that splits into four horns it's very explicit what's going on you know alexander and the four generals uh are those and then the ongoing succession of horns that lead to that little horn that uh that stops um all sacrifices in the

(1:08:57) temple well that happens so again we have antiochus iv of seleucia that was that character we had at the beginning who we said had this fight with one of the ptolemies on his way back he gets really mad at uh at uh the rebels from his cause essentially in jerusalem and he uh desecrates the temple he stops sacrificing happening there he puts a statue of zeus there and he forbids jewish practice right so the little horn from the male goat the hellenistic kingdoms that desecrates the temple is clearly antiochus iv

(1:09:30) who desecrates that temple in 167 and that's how we're getting to elizabeth's point before how we're getting that date so specifically however this is where things go off the rails you know as far as the predictions of the authors take place which is why we can also say with fairly much with a surety that it's written just a little bit after that time period so it's right after or right then right when uh that desecration happens that inspires um this hebrew writer to dust off that aramaic text update it for the now so that people can

(1:10:07) understand that this thing that just happened means that we're about the world's going to end and he says it very quite explicitly so here's the kind of explicit timeline that comes in this this calculation that's coming from that that 70 years prophecy of jeremiah that now has been miraculously expanded to 70 weeks of years even though that doesn't exist in jeremiah's text so in his visions of 70 weeks of years which is to say seven year periods so there's seven days into a week and this is a week of years so seven

(1:10:43) year periods the angel gabriel announces a very explicit timeline for the end times so he says again set back in daniel's time 70 weeks 490 years are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish the transgression to put an end to sin to atone for iniquity to bring in everlasting righteousness to seal both vision and profit and to anoint a most holy place you got 490 years from daniel and that's the end of the world that's it that's all you guys got 70 weeks of years so for the first 62 weeks it jerusalem shall be built again with

(1:11:24) streets and moat but it'll be a troubled time after 62 weeks that 434 years an anointed prince in this case uh the high priest so they don't have secular princes they have the anointed princes the messiah is here that their ruling or whatever are the high priests in this case the explanation here is that it's almost surely onais iii who is killed by the celiacid governor um in the year 171 bce so an anointed prince will be removed and no one will take his part so just a few years before the author's time hear that they're writing and the troops

(1:12:03) of an invading prince who is to come out i mean who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary 167 right so that's the one time when antiguas does that he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week which is remember that's seven years right so one week of years seven and that should have another bracket at the end of seven years and for half of the week three and a half years he shall make sacrifice and offering cease and in their place shall be an abomination that desolates and so essentially what he's counting down from here is

(1:12:42) he's saying from 171 bc when ananias iii is assassinated there's only seven years left to the end of the world and three and a half years in what's going to happen is that all sacrifice is going to cease because this invading prince is going to set up an abomination that desolates which is to say the statue of zeus in the temple and so that's going to make it so the temple's desecrated and that's all going to cease and so that has already happened for anybody who is alive for him in one i'm sorry in the year 167 because they see

(1:13:16) that happened in 171 and now it's already to 167 and so what does that mean three and a half years to doomsday guys that's all we got left so um this is following randall helm's reading of daniels in other words his reconstruction of this redactor's math this hebrew redactor then feels like he's living in the world's final seven year period so it's last week of years that began then with this assassination of the high priest and by the time he's writing the text it's at least already half gone and so his expectation was that the

(1:13:51) world would end half a week after 167 bce in other words in the year 164 and then there's all kinds of additional things that are going to happen one of the things is daniel has promised that he'll be resurrected at that moment so there'll be resurrection and then again all of the kingdoms of the world will be destroyed and god's kingdom will roll forth and fill the entire earth and now we'll be in this kind of peaceable kingdom uh that will be just and good thereafter right okay that point all the predictions fail

(1:14:23) right so in the lead up until everything that is predicted from daniel's time up until the time of the hebrew redactor all of those track really really good i mean it's quite anachronistic back in daniel's time but as it gets closer and closer to the redactors time it becomes extremely precise to within three and a half years uh in terms of the chronology here but what ends up happening is uh after just three years the temple is as opposed to three and a half which is pretty close anyway the temple um uh is restored

(1:14:55) but that restoration um doesn't uh take isn't in other words doesn't take place because of the end of history and there's no resurrections or anything else uh instead of the apocalypse the temples rededicated uh in 165 bc uh and so we instead of the apocalypse we get hanukkah right uh and so there's that um story of that uh miracle in terms of the rededication that that the author's not aware of so that doesn't make it into daniel so even though um you know he's quite aware of antiochus's desecration there's no awareness of the

(1:15:28) re-consecration and so as a result we can tell us before that happens uh and indeed because of this calculus since he's expecting the world to end right after that or half a year later that's also uh anyway a way to track exactly when it's written so in the course of this then jerusalem then becomes the capital of the hasmonean or maccabee kingdom which then kind of emerges out of this rebellion and revolts can we get um shaheen i'm sorry could i have the microphone to june um just sorry and uh what's the story of

(1:16:10) hanukkah so the story of hanukkah is was they're trying to after this desecration uh as they're trying to uh rededicate the temple they have insufficient oil in order to um cause you know they need to do perform the rituals in order to reconsecrate and so lacking sufficient oil that's still able to last for all of the the knights right and so this is the one um major uh jewish rabbinic jewish holiday that uh isn't actually from it isn't part of the um the hebrew bible right and so the the story is actually recounted in the uh the

(1:16:50) books of maccabees which are in the catholic and orthodox bible but are not in the hebrew the jewish or protestant canons but anyway people get the story by reading it as a history rudy do you wanna comment oh no okay yes thanks okay so as we saw in our um lecture on apocalypm apocalypticism you know the failure of apocalyptic prophecy even if you explicitly give out dates and a lot of times like with daniel it's it's pretty clear but it's not you know it doesn't exactly it's not totally explicit about everything you know so

(1:17:26) some of it is explicit but not all of it so it rarely though results in the rejection of the prophecy so people are committed they're in for a dime they're in for a dollar um rather than admit that they were wrong and move on with their life they tend to become more committed and they just go back to the abacus right and they just figured out wait a second i thought it was 70 weeks of years but it actually you know is every day is like a thousand years to the lord and so now we're talking about the year you know 2000 and

(1:17:55) you know uh 21 you know so okay so calculating recalculating recalculating so although then that calculations then of the original authors of daniel failed both the uh original aramaic author and then the more explicit calculation of the hebrew redactor failed their visions and these imagery of it continued very much to inspire and so uh frankly empire after empire has seen themselves as the you know the successors so it didn't take very long before people now started to see um the iron kingdom is rome you know or something like that as

(1:18:37) opposed to alexander right and so it essentially gets uh reinterpreted as time goes on uh depending on as you know updated to where we are in the present so when the romans destroyed the temple uh the second temple in the year 70 a.d of the common era the author of the gospel of mark for example dusted off the book of daniel and said whoa wait a second this is all occurring now everything that was talking about here you know about this now less remembered uh crisis that was happening uh oh you know over two centuries ago um

(1:19:15) that's not what we were talking about what daniel was talking about here it was talking about my time when the romans were coming and destroyed the temple right and so um that's also true then for john the revelator who also updates daniel's visions of beasts and things like that and bring them down more or less to the present so that vision as updated by mark and revelation and ice continues in daniel continue then to inform the apocalyptic imagination today as we saw in our lecture on apocalypses and apocalypticism

(1:19:46) but then i'm going to argue that perhaps instead of focusing on the math and continuing to try to um make sense of this um failed prophecy and bad math and try to end this literal reading of a destruction time and signs of the end i think everybody's effort would be much better spent if we focused not on the time frame or the destruction part but instead we thought about the vision of what's supposed to come after which is to say building a world of justice and peace and hopefully also respect for the environment all these

(1:20:27) kind of things in order to then build you know for ourselves that envisioned peaceable future and so that's the book of daniel let's buy us fred did that all make sense or are there questions or comments or come on yeah to the north of uh seleucia there were a number of small kingdoms varying from bithynia to galatia to media atropani what what does media atrophene mean so what does media atropan i mean so we mean a uh median kingdom that is has its capital atropani and so essentially what those are is that in addition to the great empires

(1:21:22) that emerge that at a certain point when those empires are ceased to exercise authority over the individual con constituent parts those map makers start to decide are functionally independent and so um one of the things about how the persian empire even functioned i mean alluded to a little bit in daniel is the sense that there is a um imperial military slash uh class persian class that is you know in charge and but then what they actually are doing is they are ruling over um relatively autonomous uh little kingdoms which where they have a

(1:22:04) persian authority that's called a say trap and so there might be the say trap of lydia which is that which was founded on the old lydian kingdom in anatoly or what's now turkey and so then that lydian say trap is a persian appointed official and so they have to pass on the taxes to the centralized state they have to send troops or whatever else that they're required to give but otherwise they might be conducting everything in lydian law pretty much as it always had been and so at a certain point when under those kind of circumstances when

(1:22:37) the central authority weakens then the little say trippy is suddenly a kingdom again because it just is functioning where the local appointed official instead of getting a new appointed official a new say trap maybe it becomes the guy's son and so once that happens a couple times you know it doesn't take too long before that sun is a king right and so uh and that's certainly also happening um in the jewish revolt so um it's more explicitly a revolt where they have an armed revolution but essentially the central what happened is

(1:23:08) fairly light um imperial oversight is uh replaced with kind of warfare and then finally no control at all so then the uh the syrian kingdom can no longer exercise any authority over the maccabees the hasmoneans and the herodians until the romans get into the eastern mediterranean and kind of reimpose their authority over all the hellenistic world and at that point the hasmoneans and then their successors herod and herod's descendants aren't their own masters so herod is very very rich but he gets to be king because

(1:23:42) at a certain point he runs to rome and he is able to lobby and which is a bribe you know enough senators that they they kind of make a snap judgment and surprise he's now king and everybody back in in judea is like what where did that come from why this guy's not a maccabee he's married to one of the princesses but he shouldn't be you know why did that happen but it's because they don't they can't make their own decisions anymore rome is in charge at that point so thanks yeah we know about the dead sea scrolls what is the origin of the books

(1:24:20) that has you've been interpreting here where do they come from other than the dead sea scrolls oh so so other than the dead sea scrolls although there we do have the earliest manuscripts that are preserved are from the dead sea scrolls right because the because everything else that we have is the manuscript tradition and so um from ancient times which is to say uh the time of they were writing the dead sea scrolls and also simultaneously in egypt uh when they translated into greek those ancient texts uh other than the ones that get put in

(1:24:56) the jars and buried in the dead sea those of all the originals have all are all gone but they're copied again and again and again by uh in the west by monks and nuns and who are making continual copies of for example the septuagint the greek version and then in terms of the um the hebrew version those are copied by the rabbis and so and the scribes and so those could continue down to the present day and so there's a living manuscript tradition that took us all the way to the modern times uh and then and then the printing press

(1:25:30) and so then uh and then subsequently um when we have done our checking uh you know so we check the uh literary criticism the lower criticism the textual criticism of all the changes and corrections and errors that creeped in it turns out that the um both groups were really quite good at not making mistakes so even though you might think that all the time that you're that the text will be quite corrupted by the time you get to the end of the middle ages in point of fact the rabbis had a pretty good technique for not screwing up and

(1:26:02) uh between all of the texts that were occurred in the west there's the each individual text might be have a lot of errors in it but in general we've preserved the text pretty good although like you say with the with the rediscovery of the dead sea scrolls we're getting manuscripts that are in some cases you know whatever hundreds of years older than our earliest earliest manuscript and so in that case the tux we're really talking about here is all daniel and so since it's part of the canon it survives in thousands of manuscripts

(1:26:32) and the dead sea the qumran people had eight copies of it although none of them is complete i think and so i think the dead sea scrolls includes daniel uh but different components of it but they don't have the whole thing but if we as we look at it i think as with most other texts of the hebrew bible the preserve preserve text is quite good and they had that unfortunate little fire at alexandria library yes well so the one of the stories of the alexandrian library is that it always burned and so we actually had um we actually

(1:27:06) have like multiple different accounts of people burning down the library of alexandria so it happens with caesar it happens uh you know in the when the muslims take over there's all kinds of different times when it's destroyed the christians maybe you know but in point of fact um manuscripts have to be copied in order to survive and so some libraries were we're often burning and we obviously anything that we lost is very sad but in a way everything anything that anybody didn't bury if they had just if those librarians in

(1:27:38) alexandria had just been you know every 10 years just taking a big jar filling it all up with manuscripts walking out into the desert you know outside of where there's any um waterfall anything like that and burying it you know we would be a lot better off today than them saving all the ones they didn't bury because eventually those are all lost what assuming we found well eventually we'll find them i wish they did it with a lot more of them we found the one we found the nagamati ones we found the dead scroll ones

(1:28:04) there's a bunch of other ones that have survived too in egypt egypt is fantastic for preserving um uh all this literature because of there's no air air moisture and so one of the other things that we have is almost all of our provincial records from the um roman empire you know like anything that was happening in in germania superior or britannia that's all being written on papyrus as well exported from egypt but that's all destroyed you know all of those provincial records have all you know molded away and are gone but

(1:28:35) all the records that were off in egypt are not all of them a bunch of them got put into big piles and thrown into um just refuse piles and things like that and those got buried and then now we have those and so almost all of our um just let's say not important provincial minutcha that now is very important for us because it lets us understand how the roman administration worked but it only allows us unfortunately to see how it worked in kind of a unique province of egypt but anyway egypt is wonderful for that so yes it's uh yeah

(1:29:08) in jewish prayer books uh some of the prayers are in aramaic but they're written in hebrew script hebrew letters how did that happen so in fact you have it the opposite so there some of them are in aramaic written in aramaic script and some of them are in hebrew written in aramaic script so the script that we have that we think of now as being the hebrew alphabet you might think of we might think of our own letters as being english letters but in fact all of our english letters are roman letters right and so that's

(1:29:37) actually the roman alphabet likewise there was in the first temple period before the original destruction of the original jerusalem temple there was an archaic hebrew alphabet that was separate from the aramaic alphabet in other words they both are from a related language phoenician which is probably where it's first written or the first alphabet or the other kind of those languages that evolves into different variations though uh one of which is aramaic and the aramaic alphabet is the one that then replaces the hebrew alphabet for

(1:30:12) the writing of hebrew and so now because they're again they're related languages they're both using that aramaic alphabet then that further evolved into arabic so arabic is a related script that is again based on the aramaic i think so oh yeah next yeah i sang in church choirs for years and heard many sermons almost all of them i have forgotten but i remember for some reason a preacher talking about the story of the three boys in the fiery furnace in the book of daniel yes pointed out number one there weren't boys

(1:30:52) right they were grown men they were high officials that's right number two their names were not shadrach meshach and abednego those would have been their uh babylonian names but their real names would have been hebrew names and the third thing he said was that you got to remember if you're in trouble an angel is probably not going to come and rescue you yeah well um important important sermon information actually you know so yeah yvonne has a company well actually one of the jewish ideas is that that uh miracles do happen but don't live your

(1:31:37) life uh waiting for them yeah that's true well that's also good advice right uh how is daniel treated in the uh catholic protestant and orthodox biblical traditions how in what versions does it survive and maybe even in the ethiopian to complicate the whole matter yeah so in the in the catholic i'm sorry yeah the catholic orthodox and ethiopian versions um it is derived from the septuagint which includes then this larger greek tradition right so it includes the stories of of the idol bell and the dragon the story of susanna

(1:32:20) and also these prayers of the three jews the three hebrews and of the of azariah and that's actually where we get the hebrew names uh for shadrach meshach and abednego which i don't actually know but anyway those are those aren't in the those are not in the um hebrew texts but they're in that additional greek text and so that's how it survived in that tradition in the um in the rabbinic tradition and then the protestant tradition so the rabbinic tradition you have the um the hebrew and aramaic version only you don't have the greek

(1:32:53) editions those are discarded so the rabbis after like i say what i think you know and reading some into their motivations i think that they um rightly for that from their perspective saw this emergence of um greek christianity as you know as a catastrophe to you know how they understood their religion and so the fact that uh there's all of these you know um people who are now you know they're coming from a religion that is originally founded by jews but now includes all these non-jews and it and includes very rapidly all of these

(1:33:29) um greek ideas that um that has diverged a lot the rabbis rolled that back a bit got rid of a lot of the streak stuff that they'd been flirting with including the septuagint and for example when we talked about we had a lecture before on philo of alexandria a very important hellenistic jewish thinker from alexandria that's preserved by the christians the jews don't preserve that textually so um the bab the babylonian talmud is um privileged and uh and then the idea to go back and use the texts in hebrew and then then having the the

(1:34:08) talmud and everything is composed in aramaic so that the hebrew and aramaic become the focus for rabbinic judaism which is the successor to second temple judaism and then um and then finally for protestants protestants um looked at you know they went and see us they were interested in language they wanted to translate into their own languages but they didn't want to translate from greek when they knew it was a hebrew original so they went to visited the synagogues they got hebrew text they translated for example

(1:34:38) directly from hebrew into english or german or that kind of thing but they realized wait a second this book of daniel's different you know and so and so they took those additional greek sections out and they preserved them in what protestants call the apocrypha and so each of those is a separate book of the apocrypha so the hymn of uh of assan whatever i can't remember azariah and the and the song of the three hebrews the uh story of susannah and the idol bell and the dragon are three separate books in the apocrypha

(1:35:11) the questions or comments well thank you guys i think this was a lot of fun [Music] you