BOOK OF DANIEL IS A FRAUD
I Don't Know About the Rest Yet.
It looks like the Book of Daniel is a fraud, as the following excerpts from an online article show. The authors of the Book of Daniel didn’t know history very well and they only knew the current history of c. 164 BC fairly well. So they pretended to be making prophecies hundreds of years in the future, when in reality they were describing events of their recent past. I don’t think fraud should be considered God’s Word. Also, I don’t consider the Bible to be God’s Word, but possibly the word of Angels of God.
https://ministry-to-children.com/daniel-lions-den-cartoon/
How We Know Daniel Is a Forgery
https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/18242
BY RICHARD CARRIER ON MAY 9, 2021
Even the historicity of Daniel the man is dubious. Unlike other prophets, he has no patronymic, profession, or place of origin, and he first appears in historical records when “Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, by the Kebar River in the land of the Babylonians” lists him with the legendary Noah and Job (Ez. 14:13-14, 14:19-20), treating him as what we would normally identify as a mythical hero, among the “three” heroes of yore possessed of a legendary righteousness and wisdom (Ez. 28:2-3). Noah and Job are notably non-Israelites, and Ezekiel is writing to a non-Israelite audience; odds are, he understood this Daniel therefore to be another non-Israelite hero, hence why he puts these three together like this. None of these three men are likely historical. Ezekiel appears to cite them as such (they seem to come from “mythic time,” not real historical time; they are men “of yore”). And though Daniel was a common Israelite name, in this context the name and identity sounds suspiciously a lot like Danel, a mythical Ugaritic hero; and we know a lot of Jewish mythology is adapted from Ugaritic and similar surrounding cultures. The two names even mean the same thing (Daniel, “God Is My Judge” in Hebrew; Danel, “God Is My Judge” in Ugaritic), and are linked to the same God (Danel’s god El was known as “Father of Years”; Daniel 7:9-10 refers to Daniel’s God as “Ancient of Days,” possibly indicating lore about the Ugaritic Danel may even have been used to construct the text of Daniel), and this name relates directly to the mythical hero’s role (Danel was a judge of renowned god-endorsed wisdom; and the Daniel depicted in the book of Daniel is portrayed as a wise and righteous judge), a common red flag for mythical persons. The conclusion therefore wins on balance of probability that when Ezekiel wrote, he was lumping the Ugaritic Danel in with the other non-Israelite heroes of Noah and Job (who also had counterparts in foreign cultures, e.g. Zisudra and Jobab; likewise Noah is, like Danel, a suspiciously apposite name). There is no mention here of this Daniel being a Jewish prophet; nor of being either Jewish or a prophet; much less of having written a book of his name; or even existing in any recognizable era.
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Historical Problems. Daniel itself purports to be a 6th century B.C. record made by an actual Daniel, a Jewish prophet in exile, of events around and after 600 B.C. It even purports to contain epistles and decrees written by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar himself (Daniel 4:1-18 and 4:34-37) and the fictional Babylonian king “Darius the Mede” (Daniel 6:6-12 and 6:25-28), which are ridiculously ahistorical fabrications self-evidently in service of Jewish propaganda, matching no actual evidence from the period. These epistles and decrees simply don’t exist in Babylonian or Persian records, nor do any records of any kind support any of the events peculiarly related in the book of Daniel. More importantly, were any of this true, Daniel could not make fundamental historical errors about that very time and place. Yet the book we have, does. In fact, whoever wrote it, knew the actual history of the period very poorly.
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Historical Context. Daniel 11:1-4 is not so accurate, but Daniel 11:5-39 is spot on, and that chapter gets progressively more detailed and precise as it follows history along from the Persian to the Alexandrian and then the Seleucid eras, until it spends the most verses, and with the most verifiable detail, on the ten year reign of Antiochus, all the way up to just before his death (and the Jewish recapture of Jerusalem) in 164, during the Maccabean Revolt. As Seow observes, therefore, “the interests” of the “author and probably its audience are focused on that decade.” So the book of Daniel is really about that period of history, and was written for Jewish readers going through that decade. It was thus clearly written as an inspirational tract for the people fighting for the Jewish rebellion under the Maccabees; it was probably passed off as a forgotten book “serendipitously rediscovered” at just the right moment when increased resolve was needed to finally vanquish the enemy Antiochus (the convenient “discovery” of long lost books was a known way to pass off forgeries promoting going political movements; one can suspect it for Deuteronomy, the Linen Rolls and Sibylline Oracles, and the original Ascension of Isaiah).
So when we notice Daniel then starts to get history totally wrong (Daniel 11:40-45), incorrectly “predicting” a war between the Ptolemies and Seleucids that never came to pass, and that Antiochus would conquer most of North Africa (he didn’t capture even a single province there, due to the unforeseen intervention of the Romans), and die in Palestine (he was nowhere near), we can directly tell when the book was written: sometime in or shortly before 165. Because any earlier and its inaccuracies would start sooner, and any later and it wouldn’t have circulated successfully so as to gain a strong position as scripture, since its predictions would have been too rapidly falsified; instead it clearly gained such fanatical support that even when its prophecies eventually did fail, people’s faith in it was strong enough to motivate them to do what they did with all beloved but failed prophecies: try to reinterpret them as referring to yet a further distant time (exactly as Daniel 9 does with a failed prophecy of Jeremiah). And notably, it is precisely the effort to do that that caused Christianity.
It is generally agreed by mainstream experts now that the “Messiah” who is “predicted” to be killed (Daniel 9:25-26) was actually meant to be the “rightful” high priest Onias III, illegitimately deposed and replaced by Antiochus but revered as something of a saint at the time (e.g. 2 Maccabees 3-4), who then was assassinated while in exile in Syria before Daniel was written (making this a classic, and indeed altogether typical, example of “prophecy” being written after the fact and then purported to have been written before the fact, a common device in prophecy as a literary genre). That this makes the strange math in Daniel 9 work perfectly only confirms this conclusion. Since Daniel was actually written centuries after the restoration of the Jewish Temple under Cyrus, 59 years after its sack (by Babylonians in 598, who were overthrown by Cyrus in 539), and thus the prophecy of Jeremiah that this would not happen for seventy years was proved false, that “seventy” year timetable had to be “reinterpreted” so Jeremiah could be rescued from the charge of being a false prophet. Accomplishing this by reimagining Jeremiah as “actually” referring to the Maccabean revolt was then propagandistically exactly what its authors needed. So they did some weird math to make it come out that way.
After Daniel’s prophesied end of the world did not come, later interpreters re-thought his math to guess at different intended years (again to rescue another now beloved prophet from the charge of being false)—and one of those formulations was adopted by the Christians to justify their declaration that the end had begun with their “Anointed One’s” death in the 30s A.D. But in the originally intended formulation, the angel Gabriel had come to Daniel to answer his plea to explain how the prophecy could have failed by now explaining Jeremiah did not mean “years” but “weeks of years,” i.e. 70 periods of 7 years (or 490 years in all, which is tantalizingly exactly “ten jubilees”), and that these will not be sequential as expected, but partly concurrent (after Daniel’s prophesy failed, this detail was abandoned and the years reimagined as sequential again). Because Gabriel says, “From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes [the word “ruler” here is actually “leader, noble, prince,” even “chief officer,” hence “Chief Anointed,” thus in standard-cryptic-prophesy-speak alluding to the High Priest, Chief Officer of the Temple; a High Priest was then often referred to as the Anointed], there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens’,” meaning two overlapping periods: one of 49 years and one of 434 plus 7 years (those extra seven years follow Onias), thus completing a “total” of 490 years.
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Apologetics. ... When we attend to the actual evidence we have and to what’s the most probable, we see there is no evidence attesting to there being a Book of Daniel, or any specific stories in it, in any source prior to the Maccabean era. Red flag. The earliest reference to Daniel as a person, in Ezekiel, appears to imagine him as a foreign wise man in distant mythic time, not as a Jewish prophet, much less of the Persian court; and makes no mention of his writing books, much less of his being Ezekiel’s contemporary. Red flag. Daniel makes too many mistakes that are impossible for an eyewitness and leading Babylonian and Persian official as its author is portrayed to be. Red flag. Daniel only produces detailed and correct historical data for the last ten years of King Antiochus. Red flag. It then gets completely incorrect everything that happened just before and after his death. Red flag. These coincidences are absurdly improbable on any other theory than that Daniel was written shortly before 164 B.C. as propaganda promoting an ongoing war and cultural program. And exactly in line with that conclusion, and thus supporting it as evidence, the content of Daniel thoroughly supports the political and cultural interests of the Maccabees at exactly that time. There is no evidence for any other conclusion.
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Josephus the Fabricator. Historians today are deeply skeptical of Josephus’s histories. For example, his accounts of Masada and Gamala are doubted, because they suspiciously both sound exactly alike: both famous “patriotic mass suicides,” both attested to by “two women,” in each case conveniently escaping to recount the tale. Many other examples can be adduced; modern historians are very distrustful of Josephus....
Ockham’s Razor is a tool of every science, history no exception. Such as when Josephus claims Cyrus the Great freed the Jews because he read the book of Isaiah (Josephus is unaware that Isaiah is actually the work of several authors, and the material he has in mind was written after Cyrus freed the Jews, in fact in response to it). Cyrus the Great himself says he did it as an empire-wide diplomacy campaign to gain the loyalty of disparate nations under his rule. And that’s the simplest explanation: it is what he says, it is entirely plausible in context, it is a known tactic of imperial powers, and it requires no additional “epicycles” or “angels pushing the planets” to explain the observed facts, such as his implausibly even reading Isaiah, much less being inspired by it to a radical decision regarding the imperial governance of a single minor province. That is wildly far-fetched and sounds like a made-up story, a product of Jewish propaganda. And all the evidence indicates that’s just what it is.