Daniel 11:45, When was the book of Daniel written?

Posted on Monday, August 15, 2011 in Bible Commentary | 3 comments

He will pitch his royal tents between the seas at the beautiful holy mountain. Yet he will come to his end, and no one will help him.

//Daniel, the central character of the book named after him in the Bible, was brought to Babylon about 587 B.C., when King Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah. Daniel’s claim to fame comes from a series of visions and prophecies, many of which were fulfilled in the second century B.C., and many of which never did come true, so many Christians continue to look forward to their fulfillment today.

As Daniel’s dreams unfold, the story he prophesies becomes clear, and historians have traced an accurate line of political events up to the reign of Greek ruler Antiochus Epiphanes from these prophesies. Daniel promised four kingdoms, stemming from a vision of four colorful beasts, and the fourth beast appears to be the Greek empire inaugurated by Alexander the Great. This final beast sported an arrogant little horn, surely representative of Antiochus, who persecuted the Jews for three and a half years. When the author of Daniel writes in chapter 12, From the time that the daily sacrifice is abolished and the abomination that causes desolation is set up, there will be 1,290 days (three and a half years), he refers to a pagan statue of Zeus erected beside the sacred altar of the Temple.

Scholars are nearly unanimous in dating the book of Daniel to around the year 165 B.C., rather than the 6th century B.C. in which its main character lived. Why? Partly because that’s when the “prophecies” begin to fail. Today’s verse promises that Antiochus will die in battle somewhere between the Mediterranean and Jerusalem. But Antiochus died in the year 164 B.C., far to the east, in Persia.