Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Biblical Criticism

  • Dating the Book of Daniel

    Note: This is a small excursus in my series giving an overview of Biblical criticism. In this entry I want to apply some of the material I discussed about authorship and dating to the book of Daniel. Next, I will write an additional entry on methods of textual criticism in general, and then I will continue my overview of the method by working through the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:1-9/Mark 4:1-9/Luke 8:4-8) applying the methodologies I’ve been discussing. Then I’ll discuss the individual methodologies in a bit more detail, and then look at Isaiah 24-27 as a block to discuss how they are applied.

    In this entry I’m going to focus on the arguments as presented by Alexander Di Lella in the Anchor Bible volume The Book of Daniel. I intend to return to the book of Daniel a number of times as I discuss Biblical criticism and other issues of Biblical interpretation, and I expect to discuss dating further as well, but Di Lella makes an essentially conservative argument for the late dating of the book of Daniel. He is also a bit more respectful of arguments for an early date than are many critical scholars, though he does reject an early date unequivocally.

    If you are unacquainted with general issues of dating in Daniel, please read my entry Determining Date and Authorship, in which I discuss the basics of how a Biblical book would be dated, and also make reference specifically to the book of Daniel. There are two major views on dating Daniel, and several compromises between these views. First, there is the view that the book contains narrative history in its stories, and that it should be dated according to its internal chronology. This has generally been the conservative view of this book. This puts it in the 6th century BCE, and therefore sees the prophetic passages as definite and quite accurate predictions of the future. The second major view, which now has the overwhelming support of the scholarly community other than conservatives (and some conservatives as well) is that the book was written during or just before the time of Antiochus Epiphanes (175-164 BCE), king of Seleucia, and that the majority of the prophecy in it is retrospective rather than predictive. Depending on the details of dating and authorship in this second view, some of the final elements of each prophecy may be predictive in nature.

    Though I don’t intend to present my own views on Daniel at any length in this entry as I’m interested in methodology here, I will note that I would reject the idea that one can a priori reject the early date because such a date would involve predictive prophecy. Indeed Di Lella does not argue that the predictive element makes the early date impossible, though some scholars would. Norman Porteous, for example, in the Old Testament Library commentary Daniel, pages 169-170 comments on the point at which the book turns to genuine prophecy (in his view Daniel 11:21-45), in which he sees an inaccurate prediction of the death of Antiochus Epiphanes. Thus, the majority of the apparent predictions in the book, in his view, are accurate, but once we arrive at genuine prediction, it is inaccurate.

    Di Lella, on the other hand, makes the following statement: “. . . it should be emphasized that in no way at all does the argument presented above [which I will discuss below-HN] impugn or even call into question the sacredness, authority, and inerrancy of the Book of Daniel which are accepted here without question as truths of the Christian faith” (p. 54). Since I do not accept the doctrine of inerrancy, I have a hard time judging this, but this is the first commentary on Daniel that I have read that both affirms inerrancy and also a late date.

    Let me summarize the basic arguments, and then look at how they can be evaluated. Let me repeat that I’m not trying to present my own view on dating the book of Daniel, but rather a general set of arguments (using Di Lella in the Anchor Bible [AB] as model), and how they might be evaluated. I will present my own set of arguments in a future entry.

    1. Language – AB suggests imperial Aramaic, 700-200 BCE, and more specifically later than the Aramaic of the Elephantine Papyri (late 5th century BCE).

    2. Internal chronology – AB rejects the internal chronology of the book on the grounds that there are extensive historical errors that make it difficult to take seriously. The errors include the date of Daniel’s exile, which does not fit any known siege of Jerusalem, and actually comes a year before Nebuchadnezzar’s accession, the presence of the Median empire in the sequence of four empires in the book’s prophecies, the madness of Nebuchadnezzar for seven years (Daniel 4) for which there is no space available in the known history of Nebuchadnezzar. Di Lella would reject moving this to Nabonidus, who is known historically to have suffered a period of madness on the fascinating grounds of inerrancy; such a correction would save the outline of the story, but not the precise setting. Darius the Mede is not identifiable as an historical character, and thus the chronology related to his reign must also be rejected, along with the entire Median kingdom. It is precisely because of these historical errors that Di Lella rejects the sixth century dating. They convince him that the genre is not history, but rather edifying stories accompanied by apocalyptic.

    3. Externally, Daniel is quoted by I Maccabees (c. 100 BCE), but is not mentioned in the section of Ben Sira, on praise of the fathers (44:1-50:21) in which he mentions Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the minor prophets as a group, but not Daniel. This seems to comfortably bracket the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175-164).

    4. Given the interpretation AB espouses of the apocalyptic portions of the book, the predictions lead nicely into the time of Antiochus and end there.

    Now this short entry is getting rather long, but I do need to comment on some of the arguments.

    1. The language is an interesting argument, and in fact it first caught my attention as an argument in favor of an earlier date. Porteous (p. 13) describes the Aramaic as “late” and states it is not earlier than the 3rd century. (His copyright date is 1965.) The AB volume copyright date is 1978. Why is this significant? Because much evidence has been discovered since then, including the Genesis Apocryphon discovered amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls. Desmond Ford summarizes the linguistic evidence in his commentary (Daniel), pp. 31-33. That dating evidence is clearly in view in the AB comments on the language, which are much less precise, as they should be. (One of his major citations is Gleason Archer, in a book I do not have. I have it on request from interlibrary loan and will likely comment further once I have it in hand.)

    2. Internation chronology is much harder to deal with. I’m simply going to comment here that your understanding of the internal chronology is heavily dependent on your understanding of the prophecies of the book as a whole. For example, until I read Porteous’s commentary when I was in graduate school (1980), I was unacquainted with the view that the Median Empire formed part of the sequence of Daniel 2 & 7. Now that may be mostly an indication of my own ignorance, but it does show that one can’t assume that interpretation, and then use it for dating, without providing support. The AB does, indeed, provide support for that view, but before you accept the argument in terms of dating, make certain that you accept the arguments that underlie that point. In addition, note that a number of solutions to historical difficulties in Daniel are apparently excluded by Di Lella’s belief in inerrancy. For example, I’ve already noted the possibility of moving Daniel 4 to Nabonidus rather than Nebuchadnezzar. Is that a valid approach? That is another topic. Here I’m simply noting that it is a possibility that’s excluded.

    3. One should be concerned about the possibility of an argument from silence. But Di Lella is not guilty of such an argument here. That Ben Sira does not mention Daniel in his list is significant, in that it indicates that it may be possible that Ben Sira did not know of Daniel. If Ben Sira mentioned Daniel, of course, we could be certain that the book was extant at that time. As it is, the more convinced you are that Ben Sira was trying to be exhaustive in his list, the more likely you are to accept that passage as evidence that Ben Sira did not, in fact, know about Daniel. It cannot, however, prove it. Note that this does put some tension on the language evidence. The latest date for the language is suggested at 200 BCE, while Ben Sira wrote around 180 BCE. One option is to suppose that the author intentionally used archaic language.

    4. This point is contingent on interpretation. There will be some circularity here, as the interpretation also depends on the dating to a significant extent. The question will be how does it all fit together best?

    Again, let me remind you that I’m just outlining some material here. I will be more forthcoming about my own views in a later entry.

  • Determining Date and Authorship

    This is a continuation of my series on Biblical criticism that started with my post Overview of Biblical Criticism – I. You might think I would now continue with Overview II, but I’m not nearly that consistent. My next post will continue that line, but first I want to look at some caveats, and a couple of the most basic issues in examining an ancient document.

    One of the major difficulties that I see with Biblical scholarship in general and Biblical criticism in general is simply that conclusions are often presented very confidently without an adequate presentation of the facts and reasoning that produced that conclusion. This is overwhelmingly true in material written for popular use.

    I’m writing this series to try to help improve on this situation. While I cannot provide a graduate education in Biblical studies or Biblical criticism in a few blog entries, I believe I can point out some key elements of how conclusions are reached in those areas so that lay persons can judge what they read more effectively.

    Cautions:

    First, some general considerations.

    1. Don’t read just one introduction to a Bible book or one article on a topic. While some writers are quite good at summarizing all views and providing the arguments and evidence for them, those writers are rarely the ones who write for a popular audience, and if they do, time and space constraints make it difficult for them to truly cover the evidence.

    2. Choose your sources carefully. Make sure that you have material both that presents the argument from the point of view of your faith community, if any, and also something that argues a view that is substantially different.

    3. Don’t mistake confidence for accuracy. There’s the old story about the minister who wrote in the margin of his sermon notes, “Point weak, shout louder.” That’s true of scholars sometimes as well. I recall a book by a well-known Biblical critic of the 20th century. As I was reading the first couple of chapters about 60 or so years after he had written them, I noted that there was a great deal there that I would disagree with, that there was hardly anything there I would regard as “proven,” and that much of the material had not stood the test of time in scholarly consensus. At the start of the next chapter he said, “All of this is the assured result of scientific study.” (I paraphrase.) Beware of that attitude!

    Date and Authorship:

    No matter where we go with Biblical criticism, from studying whole sections of the Bible involving multiple books (such as Samuel/Kings, Chronicles/Ezra/Nehemiah) down to individual pericopae (such as a single parable), the question of who wrote it and when will come up. (We will also want to ask what it was written for, and to whom, but that goes beyond the scope of this post.) Any student of the Bible will encounter this type of question, as it is included in most introductions to Biblical books in study Bibles. But if you look at a variety of study Bibles you will find significant disagreements on these questions.

    How can one determine the date and authorship of a book? We generally divide the evidence into two categories, external and internal.

    External evidence includes a number of elements.

    1. References by other authors
      If another author makes reference to a work, that work must obviously have been written before the reference. In addition, in some cases the author may simply state when he believes the document was written. One must, of course, determine the reliability of the person making the reference. A good example of this is when Eusebius quotes Papias (c. 140 CE) regarding the authorship of the gospel of Mark. External references also apply to authorship.
    2. Manuscripts of the text
      Again obviously the document must have been written earlier than the earliest known manuscript of this. You may laugh at having this mentioned as a specific point, but the discovery of a tiny fragment of the gospel of John from about 125 CE forced many scholars to rethink their dating of the gospel into the mid to late 2nd century.
    3. Quotations of the text
      Clearly, the book must have been written before it can be quoted. This is not always a simple as it might seem, because in many cases there is a valid question as to who is quoting whom, and therefore is the later author. Ancient authors did not always specify the name of a person they were quoting, and also sometimes quoted very loosely or simply made allusion to a passage.
    4. Inclusions in collections
      Again, it’s clear that a book can’t be part of a collection before it’s actually available. This issue comes up in dating books of the Hebrew Bible, because it appears that in the Hebrew book order, the books were accepted as canonical in three portions–Torah, Prophets, and Writings. For Christian interpreters, this applies particularly to the book of Daniel, which is grouped with the major prophets in our English Bibles, alongside Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, but is included in the Writings in the Hebrew Bible. The Writings tend to contain later material. (More on Daniel below.)

    Internal evidence:

    1. Statements in the book itself
      When the book of Isaiah begins, “The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz which he saw in the which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah,” we get a pretty straightforward piece of evidence for authorship and date. Though there is some disagreement about the precise dates of the reigns of those kings, that variation is hardly significant to the issue at hand. (But see below.)
    2. Chronological statements in the book
      Here I’m talking about statements that go beyond the general prologue I quoted above. For example, Isaiah 6 begins, “In the year that King Uzziah died . . .” Daniel gives precise chronological information, though in his case the dating is nonetheless controversial.
    3. Allusions and references to events and persons
      In the case of Isaiah, this is one of the key issues that has produced the 2nd Isaiah theory. Between chapters 44 and 48, reference is made to the Persian King Cyrus, who was certainly not a contemporary of the kings listed earlier. Was Isaiah in fact prophesying the work of Cyrus that much in advance, or was part of the book written later. (I’ll be talking a bit more about this in an introduction to Isaiah I’m preparing to place on my Energion.com web site. I’ll make a short blog post when that introduction is completed.) Such references can be obscure in themselves, such as the reference to Darius in Daniel 6. Who is this guy?
    4. Language used
      This is tricky, because a document can be written in archaic language, but especially when it concerns technical terms, it can be helpful. Jacob Milgrom, in his 3 volume Anchor Bible Commentary on Leviticus, surveys technical terms from the temple and tabernacle in late Jewish literature, in Ezekiel, and in the Pentateuch, and shows that the priestly source for the Pentateuch must be dated before Ezekiel. Since Ezekiel’s date is fairly well established, that pushes the date back considerably from what critical scholars have been saying.
    5. Interests and priorities
      This is more general, but one can expect a writer who is very interested in war to have written in either a time of war or when war was threatened. If the writer talks about a time of peace and complacency, he may be writing in an era when those were problems. This is very general, but if you have other indicators, it can help make the result more precise.

    In determining authorship, in addition to these items, one must consider the style of writing. This is a process of comparing material that is known to be by the author in question with items that are in dispute. One must be very careful of such arguments, however, because they often depend on assumptions about the topic and surrounding history. For example, in arguing that Jesus did not make certain statements about the end of the world, some scholars depend on the assumption that he must be either a wisdom teacher or an eschatalogical preacher, but not both. That assumption may or may not be valid, but it is often made implicitly and accepted without due consideration. In arguing that the pastoral epistles must be written by a disciple of Paul and attributed to him, scholars work with an assumption of how the church developed (things in the pastoral epistles reflect a more developed church structure than existed in the time of Paul), and also an assumption of how much Paul’s own interests can changes as circumstances develop. Again, these may be valid assumptions, but they need to be considered and accepted or rejected consciously.

    These are just the bare basics, but I will touch on many of these topics more as I continue this series on Biblical criticism.

  • Biblical Criticism Overview – I

    One great divide in Christian Bible study is between those who accept and use the methods of Biblical criticism and those who don’t. Generally, those who don’t regard Biblical criticism as a means to destroy the authority of the Bible and certainly as something that a believer can’t use. Since I am a believer, and I use the methods of Biblical criticism, I often find it necessary to describe and defend them.

    One difficulty is simply that most information on Biblical criticism is either so brief that lay persons cannot get a clear idea of what Biblical criticism actually is, or is extremely complex and written for scholars. Previously, I wrote a pamphlet that I could use as a handout, titled Understanding Biblical Criticism. Though I have been able to use it as a handout to good effect, it also falls into the category of “too brief.” (One can also find good articles on Biblical criticism in better Bible dictionaries.) I’m working on a series of additional pamphlets on various of the specific tools of Biblical criticism, such as form criticism, redaction criticism, literary criticism, and so forth. As I prepare to do that, I have been thinking a bit more about the justification for use of the critical methodologies.

    What are the assumptions necessary for use of the historical-critical method? Some believe that use of these methods must be be based on purely naturalistic assumptions, in particular, that one must assume that there is no supernatural element in the Bible. This is commonly stated as a belief that predictive prophecy is not possible, that miracles do not occur, and that the Biblical writers do not have any special information from a supernatural source. Since I do accept predictive prophecy (though in a much more restrictive sense than some), and accept that miracles occur, and do believe that the Biblical writers could receive divine revelation, and nonetheless use the methods of Biblical criticism, I obviously don’t think those are necessary assumptions.

    What is necessary is to assume a human element to inspiration, and I think the presence of such a human element is clear in the writings themselves. Moses is told to have things recorded by human agency (Exodus 17:14), the writer of Kings refers to his sources for information (1 Kings 11:42). The gospels show considerable verbal parallels, that are too close for just oral transmission, but nonetheless are not identical, and thus show the results of human editing. I think those who believe in verbal dictation have failed to explain these types of characteristics of the text. (I discuss views of inspiration further in my essay Inspiration, Biblical Authority, and Inerrancy.) I don’t see any assumptions required in the use of the methods of Biblical criticism other than that one must accept that there are, in fact, strong human elements in the text. I’ll discuss the specific elements necessary as I discuss various specific methods of Biblical criticism over the next few weeks. It’s my plan to present each of the major tools of Biblical criticism in practical terms to help Biblical exegetes better understand commentaries and other works that are based on the results of those methods.

    It’s important to be cautious in reading works of Biblical criticism. First, I recommend never reading just one. Any single Biblical critic (or any other student for that matter) can usually be very convincing when one reads only his arguments in favor. (Some of the best Bible commentators make an excellent presentation of opposing viewpoints.) Second, consider the basic methodology in determining what to accept and what to reject. Often conclusions are presented without an adequate description of the specific methods involved. Don’t be intimidated by the statement that certain conclusions are the assured results of scientific study, and that a rejection of them would be unscientific. Too many people accept the results of Biblical criticism without actually understanding the process by which those results were derived.

    The bottom line here is to read works of Biblical criticism critically. In order to do that you have to understand how the results are produced.

    In my next entry on this topic (not necessarily my next entry) I will outline the tools of Biblical criticism that I will be discussing.