For two years now, The Skeptical Review has been focused on the book of Daniel. The article on pages 2-4 of this issue is a continuation of Everette Hatcher's attempt to prove that this book was written in the 6th century B. C. That position is crucial to the biblical inerrancy doctrine, because the first-person narrative in many sections amounts to a claim that the book was written by its namesake, who was an important official in the 6th-century Babylonian and Persian royal courts. If, however, the evidence points to a later dating of the authorship, that would directly affect the claim that this book is one of 65 other inerrant books in the Bible. A book whose author claimed to live at a specific point in time cannot be inerrant if in actuality the author lived at a later time.
If by chance biblicists could establish with certitude that Daniel was indeed written in the 6th-century B. C., that would by no means prove the inerrancy of the book, because it would be entirely possible for it to contain errors regardless of when it was written. Some probable errors unrelated to the dating of the book have already been identified. Daniel 1:1 claims that Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem in the third year of king Jehoiakim of Judah, but, as previously noted (TSR, November/ December 2000, pp. 6-7), this date is hard to reconcile with both biblical and nonbiblical records. In 9:1, "Darius the Mede" was called the "son of Ahasuerus," but the Persian king Ahasuerus didn't live until almost a half century later. How could Darius the Mede have been the son of a man who had not even been born yet? In this case, Hatcher and his inerrantist cohorts can't even quibble that son meant only descendant here, because descendants are obviously born after those from whom they descended.
Other problems unrelated to its date of authorship have been identified in the book of Daniel. In chapter one, Daniel and his three friends (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego) were selected from the royal captives of Judah to be educated in the literature and language of the Chaldeans (v:4). The training involved exposure to foods that were forbidden by Jewish law, and so Daniel prevailed on the palace guard to let him and his friends abstain from the nonkosher foods and eat only vegetables for a ten-day period, after which their "appearance" would be examined. The guard granted the request and after the ten-day period, he found them to be "better and fatter" than the other young men who had been eating the forbidden diet, so Daniel and his friends were allowed to continue in their abstinence from the prescribed foods (vs:8-16). At the end of the three-year training period, the young men of Judah were presented to the king, and when Nebuchadnezzar talked with them, he found Daniel and his friends to be "ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom" (vs:17-21). How the king was able to determine that they were ten times better and not just seven or eight or even fourteen or fifteen times better than all of the magicians and enchanters in the kingdom is anyone's guess, but maybe the writer intended this as just a hyperbolic manner of speaking. We will grant this as a possibility.
What isn't so easy to understand, however, is the chronology that follows in chapter two. Daniel and his friends underwent a three-year training period in chapter one, after which they were presented to the king, who found them to be ten times better than the magicians and enchanters. Since 1:1-3 claims that the "royal seed" of Israel (among whom were Daniel and his friends) were taken captive in the third year of Jehoiakim, which would have been the first year of Nebuchadnezzar, the training period for these young Judean captives could not have been completed until some time after the third year of Nebuchadnezzar. Chapter two, however, begins by dating Nebuchadnezzar's famous dream in the second year of his reign (2:1).When none of the wise men in the kingdom could interpret the dream, the king ordered their execution, and Daniel and his friends were sought to be executed with the wise men (2:13). But why would these four have been singled out for execution? This was only the second year of Nebuchadnezzar's reign, but it wasn't until the completion of three years of training, which began in Nebuchadnezzar's first year, that he questioned Daniel and friends and found them to be wise men. Yet for some reason they were targeted for execution a year before they were known to be wise men.
As the story was told, Daniel prevented the massacre by prevailing on Nebuchadnezzar to give him a crack at explaining the dream (2: 16). Daniel gave such an impressive interpretation that Nebuchadnezzar ordered oblations to be offered in Daniel's honor (v:46), gave him great gifts, made him ruler over all the province of Babylon, and made him chief governor of all the wise men (v:48), after which Daniel requested that his friends (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego) be put over all the affairs of the province of Babylon (v:49). This story ends with the claim that "Daniel remained at the king's court."
Another chronological problem should now be apparent even to Hatcher. If the events as told in chapter two are inerrantly true, then Nebuchadnezzar would certainly have known Daniel and his friends very well by the second year of his reign, yet chapter one, verses 17-20, indicate that Daniel and his friends were presented to Nebuchadnezzar at the end of the three-year period (the days the king had appointed), at which time the king talked with them and found that of all the young men who had gone through the period of training, none of them compared to Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. We can only wonder why the king didn't already know this, because a year earlier, he had had the experience in chapter two with these young men that so impressed him that he had offered oblations to Daniel and put them over the affairs of the province of Babylon. Daniel was "put in the king's court" at that time (2:49), so there wouldn't have been anything special about the claim in 1:19, which says that after Daniel and his friends were found to be far superior to all the magicians and enchanters in the kingdom, "they were stationed in the king's court." Their promotions must have been anticlimactic, because by that time, they had already been in the king's court for a year.
To say the least, there is something not quite consistent in
these two stories, but not to worry. No doubt Hatcher or Hutchinson or
some other inerrantist will have an explanation for it.