Book of Daniel

The Book of Daniel sits at the hinge between the biblical prophets' this-worldly hopes and the full-blown apocalyptic literature of the turn of the era. Written in the second century BCE during the persecution of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, though set in the Babylonian court centuries earlier, it introduced into Jewish thought two ideas that would reshape the West: the resurrection of the dead and a final, universal judgment.

The frame

Daniel is in two parts. The first is a series of court tales (Daniel and his friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the furnace, Daniel in the lions' den) demonstrating that the God of Israel governs the destinies of empires. The second is a series of apocalyptic visions: the four beasts from the sea (representing successive empires), the "Ancient of Days" and the "one like a son of man" coming on the clouds, the ram and the goat, and the prophecy of the "seventy weeks."

The son of man and the end

In Daniel 7, the four beasts are four kings, and then "one like a son of man" comes with the clouds of heaven and is given "dominion and glory and a kingdom." Most scholars read this "son of man" collectively, as a symbol of the "holy ones of the Most High" (the persecuted faithful) receiving the kingdom. But the image became one Jesus would later apply to himself, and it fed directly into the Christian expectation of a returning human-like figure. The phrase is the single most important bridge between Jewish apocalyptic and the New Testament.

Resurrection and judgment

Daniel 12 is the watershed. It speaks of "a time of anguish such as has never occurred" and then: "many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt." This is the earliest clear statement in Jewish scripture of a bodily resurrection and individual judgment, not just of nations but of persons. The book also introduces the "abomination of desolation" and the "appointed time of the end," language the Antichrist tradition and Revelation would later develop.

Why it matters

Daniel matters because it is where eschatology becomes cosmic and personal at once. Before it, the Hebrew prophets spoke of the restoration of a people; Daniel speaks of the resurrection of individuals and the end of the present world order. Under the pressure of persecution, a national hope was transmuted into a universal expectation, and the genre of apocalypse, the "unveiling" of the end, was born. Every later end-of-the-world narrative in the Abrahamic faiths descends from this text. The land where the Day of the Lord was first spoken is described under Israel.