Daniel 5:2; Nebuchadnezzar or Nabonidus?

Posted on Wednesday, August 17, 2011 in Bible Commentary | 0 comments

While Belshazzar was drinking his wine, he gave orders to bring in the gold and silver goblets that Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken from the temple in Jerusalem.

//Much of the book of Daniel concerns King Nebuchadnezzar and his son Belshazzar. However, Daniel has confused the order of the kings of Babylon. Multiple contemporary records attest to the following succession: 1) Nebuchadnezzar, 2. Awel-Marduk, 3. Neriglissar, 4. Nabonidus (who contested the rule of Labashi-Marduk and wrestled the kingship away from him), and finally, 5. Belshazzar, son of Nabonidus, (who was actually never king, but only a crown prince). Thus, in a well-known Biblical error, Daniel confuses Nebuchadnezzar with Nabonidus.

These center chapters of the book of Daniel are written in Aramaic, rather than Hebrew, and thus Daniel is generally recognized as the last book of the Old Testament written. This jibes nicely with my post two days ago, when I suggested that Daniel was written in the year 165 B.C. So, if written four centuries after the period it describes, would an error like this be a surprise?

There is another possibility. Some continue to believe that the book of Daniel was first written earlier, in Hebrew, presumably in the 6yh century B.C., when Daniel supposedly lived in Babylon. These Bible scholars blame the error surrounding Nabonidus on the misunderstanding of a later translator, who incorrectly added to the text.