Sermon
History, Apocalypse, and Purpose
Projects/Theology/Daniel/1 - Dan Intro — History, Apocalypse, and Purpose.md
Introduction to the Book of Daniel: History, Apocalypse, and Purpose
Source: Christian Virtual Fellowship — Book of Daniel series (taught by Dustin Smith)
1. Why Daniel Is Different — One of Two Apocalyptic Books
Out of the Bible’s 66 books, only two are classified as apocalyptic: Daniel and Revelation. Apocalypse means “to unveil or to reveal” — it is not a synonym for “the end of the world.” Anyone who worked through the teacher’s earlier series on Revelation should expect Daniel to feel familiar, even though Daniel (12 chapters) is much shorter than Revelation (22 chapters).
The speaker frames his whole approach up front, in contrast to how Daniel is usually taught:
“That particular approach to the book of Daniel doesn’t really give meaningful direction and application to the lives of its readers… I want to start with the text, not start with my own ideology, start with my own theology, or start with my own view of the future.”
The stated method for the series: ask what type of literature a book is and when it was written, determine what it meant in its original setting, and only then ask what it means for readers today. Skipping those steps is what produces the date-setting and speculative reading that has dogged Daniel’s interpretive history.
The opening image referenced in the lecture is Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast — the painting behind the idiom “the writing is on the wall,” which comes from the mysterious hand that writes “Mene mene tekel upharsin” on the palace wall in Daniel 5. Rembrandt, not knowing Hebrew well, wrote the Aramaic words in vertical columns rather than horizontal lines — a small but telling reminder of how easily this book gets handled by people unfamiliar with its actual language and context.
2. Structure: Court Tales and Visions
Daniel splits cleanly into two halves with two very different literary forms:
| Section | Chapters | Form | Closest Biblical Parallel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Court tales | 1–6 | Narratives about a faithful Jew navigating a pagan royal court | The Joseph narrative in Genesis — faithfulness to God amid pagan power, resulting in exaltation |
| Symbolic visions | 7–12 | Visions whose meaning is mediated and explained by heavenly angels | Not found in Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel; anticipates the angelic mediation used throughout Revelation |
Each chapter of Daniel functions as its own self-contained story — you can read chapter 1, then jump to chapter 7, then back to chapter 4, and each stands on its own. The chapters are not arranged in strict chronological order; according to the teacher, that ordering is deliberate and will be explained later in the series.
3. A Book Written in Two Languages
Daniel is written partly in Hebrew and partly in Aramaic, and the split does not line up neatly with the court-tales/visions structure:
| Passage | Language |
|---|---|
| Daniel 1:1 – 2:4a | Hebrew |
| Daniel 2:4b – 7:28 | Aramaic |
| Daniel 8:1 – 12:13 | Hebrew |
If the language division matched the literary division (Hebrew for the court tales, Aramaic for the visions, or vice versa), it would be easy to explain. Instead, the Aramaic section runs from the middle of chapter 2 through the end of chapter 7 — crossing straight through the boundary between court tales and visions. Scholars have noted this oddity for over 2,000 years without a fully satisfying explanation. The best working theory offered here: the book’s contents were collected over time from different settings before reaching their final form, which also explains why the individual chapters read as self-contained units rather than one continuous narrative.
4. The Greek Additions to Daniel
The book’s contents kept growing after the original Hebrew/Aramaic composition. The Greek translation of Daniel contains three additional sections not present in the Hebrew/Aramaic text:
| Addition | Length | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Prologue | 64 verses | Added before the Hebrew/Aramaic content begins |
| Extension of chapter 3 | Verses 24–90 | Inserted into the fiery furnace narrative |
| Epilogue | 42 verses | Added after chapter 12 |
These additions appear in Bibles that include the Apocrypha (e.g., the New American Standard with Apocrypha) but not in standard Protestant Bibles. The speaker is careful to clarify: Protestant Bibles are not missing or omitting original material — the Hebrew/Aramaic 12-chapter book is complete as it stands. The Greek expansions were added later, on top of the original, showing that the Daniel traditions continued to be popular and continued to grow for generations.
5. Daniel’s Place in the Jewish Canon: Writings, Not Prophets
A crucial and often-overlooked detail: Daniel was not classified among the “major prophets” in the Jewish canon. The Jewish Bible organizes its books into three sections:
| Section | Contents |
|---|---|
| The Law (Torah) | Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy |
| The Prophets | Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Book of the Twelve (minor prophets) |
| The Writings | Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, Chronicles |
Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel are called “major” prophets purely because of their length (66, 52, and 48 chapters respectively) — not their importance. Daniel, at 12 chapters, is shorter than even the minor prophet Hosea. But length isn’t the point here: the Jews who compiled their own canon deliberately did not group Daniel with the prophetic books at all. It was placed with the Writings instead. Protestant Bibles later moved Daniel into the “major prophets” section, but that is not how the book was originally categorized — a signal that it should be read on its own terms rather than assumed to work exactly like Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel.
6. Chapter-by-Chapter Summary
The lecture works through each chapter in one or two sentences to surface the book’s practical message before diving into background issues:
| Ch. | Summary |
|---|---|
| 1 | Daniel and his three friends are exiled to Babylon; rather than abandon their Jewish identity, they remain faithful and are promoted and blessed by God. |
| 2 | God gives Daniel the wisdom to interpret Nebuchadnezzar’s dream after all the king’s pagan advisers fail. |
| 3 | God protects the three Jewish boys in the fiery furnace after they refuse to worship an idol rather than compromise their monotheism. |
| 4 | Nebuchadnezzar’s arrogance is punished by God — a warning against pride, mirroring the earlier pattern of the humble being exalted. |
| 5 | Belshazzar’s arrogance — profaning the sacred vessels taken from the Jerusalem temple — is punished by God (“the writing on the wall”). |
| 6 | God protects Daniel in the lion’s den after Daniel disobeys a law forbidding prayer to anyone but King Darius. |
| 7 | Visions begin. An angel explains a vision of terrible beasts persecuting God’s people; one persecutor profanes the law of Moses, but God ultimately vindicates the faithful. |
| 8 | Another vision of nations persecuting God’s people; the final persecutor, who disrupts temple worship, will be broken by God. Gabriel’s first named appearance in Scripture. |
| 9 | Daniel’s prayer of repentance on behalf of unfaithful Israel — called the most beautiful prayer of repentance in the Bible. Gabriel reappears and reinterprets a passage from Jeremiah, revealing that God will destroy a coming temple-desecrator. |
| 10 | An angel explains his delay: he was fighting the angel representing Persia and needed the angel Michael’s help before he could come. Implies angels represent nations/communities (compare Revelation’s angels of the seven churches). |
| 11 | A detailed vision tracing the history of empires from the 6th to the 2nd century BC, culminating in an evil figure who desecrates the Jerusalem temple and persecutes God’s people. |
| 12 | Daniel receives the promise of bodily resurrection — the first fully explicit statement of resurrection doctrine in Scripture — as hope for those martyred by history’s persecutors. |
The recurring pattern: faithfulness under pressure from a pagan or hostile culture, followed by God’s vindication — sometimes in this life (Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego), and, when rescue doesn’t come in this life, through resurrection (ch. 12).
“Be faithful to God even if you’re in an unknown context and culture when the culture is telling you that you shouldn’t be faithful to God… And if you are killed for doing what is right, God will raise you from the dead. If that’s not practical Christian application, I don’t know what is.”
7. Who Is Daniel? The Ezekiel Puzzle
Is the Daniel of the book named elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible? Ezekiel — a fellow 6th-century prophet of the Babylonian exile — mentions a “Daniel” three times (Ezekiel 14:14, 14:20, 28:3), grouping him with Noah and Job as an ancient, righteous figure with a wife and children, and later calling him proverbially wise.
The problem: this figure doesn’t match the Daniel of the book of Daniel, who has no recorded wife or children. The explanation lies in the Hebrew text itself, via a Ketib/Qere pair (the same phenomenon behind the divine name Yahweh, where the Ketib — “what is written” — differs from the Qere — “what is [traditionally] said”):
- The word actually written (Ketib) in Ezekiel 14 and 28 lacks the “y”-sounding consonant that the name “Daniel” requires.
- The word tradition tells readers to say (Qere) matches the spelling of “Daniel” as it appears in the book of Daniel — but that is not what the Hebrew text originally has.
The name actually written in Ezekiel is closer to Danel — the name of the righteous hero of an ancient Canaanite epic, The Tale of Aqhat (c. 1350 BC), found in the Ancient Near Eastern Texts (ANET) collection. In that epic, Danel is a righteous ruler who shows hospitality, cares for widows and orphans, and prays to Baal for a son (Aqhat). This figure fits Ezekiel’s description — an ancient, married, family-having sage grouped with Noah and Job — far better than the Daniel of the biblical book does.
“Ezekiel is not telling us about the figure in the book of Daniel. It doesn’t fit that. He doesn’t have the same name… Ezekiel’s telling us about this different figure. That’s all that fits the description much more carefully.”
English translations obscure this by rendering both names as “Daniel,” but the underlying Hebrew text distinguishes them.
8. When Was Daniel Written? The Case for the 2nd Century BC
The book’s narrative setting is the 6th century BC, during the Babylonian exile and its transition into Medo-Persian rule. But the consensus of scholarship — which the teacher states he is fully convinced of — is that Daniel reached its final written form in the 2nd century BC, during the Greek period, amid the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes. On this reading, the author uses the 6th-century story of faithfulness under Babylon to encourage 2nd-century readers to remain faithful under Greek persecution. This is not a unique literary move — Esther is set in the 5th-century Persian period but was likely composed in the 4th–3rd century Greek period.
The evidence offered for a 2nd-century final composition:
| # | Evidence |
|---|---|
| 1 | Every vision in chapters 7–12 moves through a sequence of kingdoms but consistently culminates in, and disproportionately emphasizes, the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes — over half the visionary content focuses on the Greek kingdom. |
| 2 | The Hebrew of Daniel (its style, Aramaicisms, and loanwords) resembles the Hebrew found in the Dead Sea Scrolls far more closely than the Hebrew of 6th-century prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel. |
| 3 | Daniel’s prayer in chapter 9 quotes and reinterprets a prophecy from Jeremiah, meaning the book of Jeremiah must already have circulated in the form Daniel is responding to. |
| 4 | Events from the 3rd–2nd centuries are described in precise detail, while 6th-century events and figures are comparatively vague — consistent with an author writing close to the later period and further removed from the earlier one. |
| 5 | The book is written almost entirely in the third person (a narrator describing Daniel), comparable to Matthew narrating Jesus’s words in the Gospel of Matthew — this does not make Daniel the author any more than it makes Jesus the author of Matthew. |
| 6 | No copies of Daniel exist earlier than the late 2nd/early 1st century BC; all Dead Sea Scrolls copies date to 100 BC or later. |
| 7 | The earliest quotations of Daniel appear in 1 and 2 Maccabees, both dealing directly with the Maccabean crisis. |
“If this is truly the case, then the author of the book of Daniel is using the story of the Jews remaining faithful to God in the Babylonian period in order to encourage the readers in the Greek period to show similar acts of faithfulness.”
9. Apocalyptic vs. Classical Prophetic Literature
Why treat Daniel (and Revelation) as a distinct genre from Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel?
| Feature | Classical Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel) | Apocalyptic Works (Daniel, Revelation) |
|---|---|---|
| Source of message | “The word of Yahweh came to me” (8x in Isaiah, 52x in Jeremiah, 60x in Ezekiel) | This phrase never occurs — zero times in Daniel |
| Mode of revelation | Direct prophetic speech | Visions and dreams requiring a heavenly angel physically present to interpret them |
| Literary form | Heavy use of poetry | Signs, visions, animals, colors, and symbolic numbers |
| Canonical placement (Jewish) | Grouped with “the Prophets” | Grouped with “the Writings” |
“The biggest difference between major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and Daniel and Revelation, is that Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel are prophets — they speak forward the oracle of God because the word of God comes to them. Daniel and Revelation, they get dreams and visions that they can’t explain by themselves. They need an angel to come and reveal that to them.”
10. The Purpose of Biblical Apocalyptic
The stated goal of apocalyptic literature — true of both Daniel and Revelation — is:
“To encourage its readers to maintain their faithfulness to God rather than compromising their faith or resulting to violence against those who are persecuting them.”
This makes the most sense if Daniel’s original readers were living through the Maccabean crisis of the 2nd century. The book does contain genuine prophetic oracles and does speak of the kingdom of God and resurrection — but always in service of encouraging faithfulness, never as an end in itself. As the teacher puts it plainly: “The purpose of Daniel is to encourage faithfulness… not to predict the future.”
11. Three Approaches to Interpreting Daniel
| Approach | Description |
|---|---|
| 1. Predictive | Focuses on foretelling future events — using Daniel to build timelines, set dates, and predict the return of Jesus. |
| 2. Skeptical | Held mostly by non-believers who use unverifiable details in Daniel as a weapon to undermine the faith of others. |
| 3. Contextual-applicational (the approach taken in this series) | Seeks what Daniel meant to its original audience and what course of action it summoned from them, then applies that message to readers today. |
The teacher notes he was raised assuming option 1 was the only legitimate reading and that option 2 was simply “bad,” without ever being introduced to option 3 — until encountering it in scholarship, where he found it to be the mainstream view, with option 2 held only by the most skeptical and option 1 by “the most radical of Christians.”
12. When Prophecy Experts Get It Wrong — Three Case Studies
Three historical examples illustrate the dangers of the predictive approach:
| Figure | Era | Text Misused | Method | Prediction | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| William Miller | 1840s | Daniel 8:14 (“2,300 evenings and mornings”) | Read “evenings and mornings” as years; added 2,300 years to 457 BC (his assumed date of the command to rebuild the temple) | Jesus returns in 1843, revised to 1844 | Wrong both times. Followers quit jobs and left families. Accidentally launched the Adventist movement (Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and groups that became Christadelphians / the Church of God General Conference). |
| Charles Taze Russell | Early 1900s | Daniel 4:16 (“let seven years pass over him,” re: Nebuchadnezzar) | Assumed a symbolic “biblical year” = 360 days (based on Revelation’s 30-day months); 7 × 360 = 2,520 years, added to a miscalculated fall of Jerusalem (607 BC instead of the actual 587 BC) | Jesus returns / sets up the millennial kingdom in 1914 | Wrong. Russell died in 1916; followers refused to admit error and claimed Jesus returned invisibly in 1914 — a position still held by Jehovah’s Witnesses today. |
| Harold Camping | 2011 | Genesis 7:4 (“seven days… I will send rain”) + 2 Peter 3:8 (“a day is as a thousand years”) | Applied the day-year theory: dated the flood to 4990 BC, multiplied 7 days × 1,000 years = 7,000 years, added to 4990 BC | The Rapture would occur May 21, 2011 (revised to October 21, 2011 after failure) | Wrong both times. Camping had already been wrong once before, predicting the end of the world in 1994. His ministry spent over $100 million advertising the predictions; people gave away possessions and savings, and some lives were reportedly ruined. |
The teacher’s own conclusion, stated directly to his audience:
“If you’re expecting me to teach you the book of Daniel to where I’m going to be the expert that’s going to tell you what all these prophecies mean so that we can predict when Jesus is going to come back — I’m sorry, I don’t have that insight. I don’t think that’s what Daniel is trying to do.”
13. A Case Study in Misreading — The Statue of Daniel 2
As a live example of interpretive bias, the teacher points to the common popular reading of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue vision (Daniel 2, paired with the four-beast vision of Daniel 7). The standard popular chart identifies the four kingdoms as Babylon, then Media and Persia collapsed together as one kingdom, then Greece, then Rome — specifically so that the final kingdom can be Rome (fitting a Protestant assumption that Rome/the Roman Catholic Church is “the bad guy”). But Media and Persia were two distinct kingdoms; artificially merging them is required only to make Rome fit as the fourth kingdom. Read as four genuinely successive kingdoms — Babylon, Media, Persia, Greece — the vision’s climax lands on Greece, which fits naturally with a book written to encourage Jews persecuted by the Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes during the Maccabean crisis.
14. Practical Application — Daniel 1
To close, the teacher reads the dietary test from Daniel 1: Daniel and his three friends request to eat vegetables and drink water rather than the king’s food and wine, are tested for ten days, and end up healthier and wiser than those who ate the king’s provisions. The moral, applicable “no matter when you are” — 6th century, 2nd century, 1st century, or today:
“Be faithful to God, don’t compromise, don’t do what everyone else is doing. God will take care of you, God will bless you, and God’s going to reward you.”
Summary
| What This Series’ Approach to Daniel Is | What It Is Not |
|---|---|
| Reading Daniel in its 6th-century narrative setting and 2nd-century Maccabean writing context | Treating Daniel as a coded timeline for calculating the date of Jesus’s return |
| Recognizing Daniel as apocalyptic literature — visions mediated by angels | Reading Daniel as identical in form to Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel |
| Asking what the book meant to its original persecuted audience, then applying that faithfully today | Forcing the text to answer questions it was never written to address |
| Grounded in the book’s actual language, canon placement, and manuscript history | A weapon for either date-setting speculation or skeptical dismissal |
| An encouragement toward faithfulness, non-compromise, and hope in resurrection | A prediction machine for world events |
“The application of not compromising with the culture and doing what God says is right, even if you suffer the consequences, under the hope that God is going to vindicate you, take care of you, and even raise you from the dead if you’re martyred — that is extremely applicable, especially today.”