I. Authorship. 1. There is no good reason to doubt that the Book of Daniel was written by the person whose name it bears. 2. Ezekiel, the contemporary of Daniel, bears testimony to him by comparing him in righteousness with Job and Noah, and in wisdom with the Prince of Tyre. Ezekiel 14:19-20 and 28:3. 3. Unmistakable are the evidences within the book that Daniel was its author. See Chapter 7:8; 8:2; 9:2. 4. The Savior set his seal upon the book and its authorship in Matthew 24:15. II. Language. 1. The language used is Hebrew and Chaldaic. Chaldaic was a dialect of Aramaic. That portion found in Chapters 2:4 to the end of Chapter 7 is in Chaldaic. The rest of the book is in Hebrew. 2. The reason for the use of two languages lies probably in the fact that Daniel desired to give the Babylonians the history of their nation and succeeding empires in their own language, whilst the history of God's prophetic movements he states in the tongue of the Hebrew. III. Jewish attitude toward the Book. 1. Jewish rabbis have little use for the Book. They give it no place among their prophets, the reason assigned being that Daniel did not prophesy to Israel and, contrary to the lives of their prophets, who lived in the mortification of the flesh, he enjoyed the greatest luxury. 2. The true reason probably is that Daniel locates the nations of the world in the point of time, and shows the Jews to be without excuse in their rejection of Christ. 1. Historical. Chapters 1-6. These chapters contain no prophecies by Daniel. The Prophet is presented as the divinely chosen interpreter of dreams and events revealed unto others, the meaning of which was hidden in mystery. 2. Prophetical. Chapters 7-12. In this division we have recorded the revelations made by God to the prophet. Vision succeeds vision and world history as represented by "The Times of the Gentiles" is unfolded. The reader is conducted through the changing order of human governments until Gentile rule ends. |