Daniel the Interpreter
THE BOOK OF DANIEL AND EZRA 9 AND NEHEMIAH 8–9
Daniel’s Prayer by Sir Edward J. Poynter.
THE PERSIAN EMPIRE. ESTHER. EZRA AND THE TORAH. THE RISE OF THE INTERPRETER. DANIEL AND THE FOUR KINGDOMS. THE NAHUM PESHER. TORAH IS WISDOM.
As we have seen, Cyrus, king of the Medes and the Persians, toppled the Babylonian Empire, and all that was Babylon’s became his. Part of this treasure was the territory beyond the Euphrates, including Yehud (Judah), the small but important stretch of land located between Egypt and the coastland north of it and, to the east, Persia itself.1 In 538, Cyrus issued a decree allowing the Judean exiles still in Babylon to return to their home. That year some of them did; others returned in a second wave, in 520 BCE.2 (Still others stayed in Babylon and established a Jewish community there, one that continued to exist under a succession of different caliphates and empires and states until 1951.) Thus, from the late sixth century BCE until Alexander’s conquest of the ancient Near East two centuries later, Judah and the Jews were ruled by the Persian Empire. This was a significant time for the Hebrew Bible and for Judaism—a period when numerous biblical books were being edited and put into their final form, and when several of the most characteristic features of later Judaism were first taking shape.
As rulers, the Persians adopted a rather laissez-faire attitude toward their subject peoples. Their sprawling empire—stretching from Egypt and Turkey eastward to the borders of India—preserved the basic administrative framework set up by the Babylonians, and life went on pretty much as before. By the testimony of the book of Ecclesiastes, it was a government bureaucracy in which bribing judges and corrupt officials was the order of the day: “Don’t be surprised when you see it,” Kohelet says of the perversion of justice, “for one money-taker watches over another, with the higher-ups over them” (Eccles. 5:7).3
As far as the people of Yehud were concerned, the central Persian government was powerful but distant. The book of Esther contains a somewhat farcical, but probably not entirely fanciful, depiction of one Persian emperor, Ahasuerus (probably Xerxes I, 486–465 BCE). Ahasuerus is a pompous windbag, whose main concern in life is the endless stream of all-night drunken revels that he enjoys in the company of various members of his immense harem. When the DTs get so bad that he cannot fall asleep (Esth. 6:1), he has his servants read to him from the official records of his own court, since affairs of state are so boring that, even in his infirm condition, their recitation has at least the potential to put him back to sleep. Surrounded by scheming courtiers and officials cleverer (or at least more sober) than himself, Ahasuerus is easily manipulated and careens from one extreme to the next. In fact, it is thanks to this quality that Esther, hero of the book, is able to save the Jewish community from certain destruction at the hands of the archvillain Haman.
Besides books like Ecclesiastes and Esther, the Bible contains a number of works that belong to, and reflect on, the Persian period. Among the historical books are Ezra and Nehemiah (Chronicles, though it deals with earlier times, is also to be located in this period). A number of prophetic books were probably put into final form in this period, but two already mentioned, Haggai and Zechariah, are specifically connected to events that took place and figures who lived under Persian rule not long after the time of the return from exile. Although it lacks such a specific connection to the Persian period, Malachi probably belongs chronologically with these two.118 There exists as well a body of Persian royal archives and other texts that can aid in reconstructing the history of the period. Nevertheless, the Persian period remains somewhat cloudier than earlier ages, and scholars still debate a number of basic issues. Part of the problem is that the sources contradict one another; several scholars have suggested that the biblical record is overlaid with ideological fabrications.
At the head of the second wave of returning exiles, in 520 BCE, was Zerubbabel, whom the new king, Darius, had chosen to be governor. Along with him was Jeshua, the high priest (Ezra 2:2; 3:2; etc.; Neh. 7:7). Zerubbabel may have been a descendant of David and a member of the royal family. If so, some of the Judean exiles probably hoped that he would eventually become a true king—that the Persian yoke would be shaken off and that Judah would become an independent power once again. But that did not happen, and Zerubbabel disappears mysteriously from the pages of history.4
Those who had come back with Zerubbabel did not find their homeland empty. A number of Judeans had never been deported by the Babylonians (they were probably mostly farmers from the countryside); in addition, Edomites and other foreigners had subsequently encroached onto Judah’s territory and settled down. These “natives” may not have been particularly delighted by the arrival of the returning exiles—and vice versa, particularly since some of the returnees had their own, quite idealistic views about how things should work in their restored homeland. (Nor were the returnees all of one mind.) Their disagreements and struggles are reflected in the last parts of the book or Isaiah as well as in Haggai and Zechariah. Plans to rebuild the temple and refortify Jerusalem were eventually carried out, but not as quickly as people had hoped, nor to everyone’s satisfaction (Ezra 3:12–13).
At some later point (probably toward the middle of the fifth century BCE, although here the historical record is particularly confusing), Nehemiah, an advisor of the Persian king, seems to have been dispatched to Judah as governor, and at roughly the same time another figure, Ezra, arrived; he was a priest and a sage learned “in the commandments of the LORD and His laws for Israel” (Ezra 7:11).5 Ezra, in particular, is presented as a significant religious figure. It was he who denounced his fellow Jews for having taken foreign wives (Ezra 9). In fact, he relates, he is so upset at the idea that
When I heard this, I tore my clothes and my cloak and pulled out the hair of my head and beard, and sat dismayed . . . At the evening sacrifice I got up from my fasting, with my clothes and my cloak torn, and I fell on my knees, spread out my hands to the LORD my God, and said, “O my God, I am too ashamed and embarrassed to lift my face to You, my God, for our iniquities have risen higher than our heads, and our guilt has mounted up to the heavens . . . For we have forsaken Your commandments, which You commanded by Your servants the prophets, saying, ‘The land that you are entering to possess is a land unclean with the pollutions of the peoples of the lands, with their abominations. They have filled it from end to end with their uncleanness. Therefore do not give your daughters to their sons, neither take their daughters for your sons, and never seek their peace or prosperity, so that you may be strong and eat the good of the land and leave it for an inheritance to your children forever.’”
One interesting thing about this passage is that the biblical quote at the end is a phony. The “prophets” never said this. The quote is actually a loose rewording of two parts of the Pentateuch, Lev. 18:24–30 and Deut. 7:3–4. It seems unlikely that Ezra (if these are his actual words) or some later editor could not have quoted the passages exactly. Apparently, however, exact quotation and attribution were simply not that important at this point—a religious leader like Ezra felt free to rework the inspired words of Scripture, just as the editors and interpolators of various prophetic books had. (Another matter of interest: scholars note that this conflation of a passage attributed to P with one from Deuteronomy may indicate that the completed Pentateuch was now the authoritative source, God’s Torah.)
The Great Public Reading
The book of Nehemiah records another important event, a great public reading of the Torah, “the book of the law of Moses” (Neh. 8:1). The people tell Ezra to bring the book to a public square:
Accordingly, the priest Ezra brought the Torah before the assembly . . . He read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the Torah. And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people; and when he opened it, all the people stood up. Then Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. Then they bowed their heads and worshiped the LORD with their faces to the ground. Also Jeshua, Bani, Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai, Hodiah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, the Levites, helped the people to understand the law, while the people remained in their places. So they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.
Scholars are not sure about the historicity of this passage, or even if it reflects attitudes in the time of Ezra himself or in some slightly later period. But it is certainly significant in any case for what it says about Scripture. The public reading is said to take place at the people’s initiative, and they stand patiently—not just community leaders, but men and women and older children—for something like five or six hours to hear God’s words. For such an account to be plausible, Scripture must have already acquired a central place in people’s consciousness, and a central role in their lives. Interesting too is the fact that Ezra’s listeners don’t just listen to the words: the Levites are there to help them “understand the law,” explaining what the words mean and “giving the sense” (perhaps, as one tradition has it, restating the text for them in Aramaic). The Age of Interpretation is here.
The same trend is reflected as well in the great public prayer that Ezra prays in the next chapter. Standing before the people, he says:
“You are the LORD, You alone; You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, and all their host [= the stars], the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. To all of them You give life, and the host of heaven worships You.
“You are the LORD, the God who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans and gave him the name Abraham; and You found his heart faithful before You, and made with him a covenant to give to his descendants the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Jebusite, and the Girgashite; and You fulfilled Your promise, for You are righteous.
“And You saw the oppression of our ancestors in Egypt and heard their cry at the Red Sea. You performed signs and wonders against Pharaoh and all his servants and all the people of his land, for You knew that they acted insolently against our ancestors. You made a name for Yourself, which remains to this day. And You divided the sea before them, so that they passed through the sea on dry land, but You threw their pursuers into the depths, like a stone into mighty waters. Moreover, You led them by day with a pillar of cloud, and by night with a pillar of fire, to give them light on the way in which they should go. You also came down upon Mount Sinai, and spoke with them from heaven, and gave them right ordinances and true laws, good statutes and commandments, and You made known Your holy sabbath to them and gave them commandments and statutes and a law through Your servant Moses. For their hunger You gave them bread from heaven, and for their thirst You brought water for them out of the rock, and You told them to go in to possess the land that You swore to give them . . . Forty years You sustained them in the wilderness so that they lacked nothing; their clothes did not wear out and their feet did not swell . . . You multiplied their descendants like the stars of heaven, and brought them into the land that You had told their ancestors to enter and possess.
Again, scholars are not sure when precisely this passage was written, but the view of Scripture it represents is quite striking. Scripture is not essentially a recitation of past events, but one long series of lessons.6 Each episode that Ezra evokes he sums up in a few words, and each one of them demonstrates some important truth. Thus, the account of the creation in Genesis 1 shows that “You are the LORD, You alone,” since no other deity was involved. The stars, deemed in other religions to be the heavenly embodiment of various gods, bow down and worship You. As for Abraham, “You found his heart faithful before You” and therefore made a covenant with him, giving him the land of Canaan—faithfulness is indeed rewarded. What’s more, “You fulfilled Your promise,” because that is what You are like, “You are righteous.” Scripture, in other words, is primarily a form of theological education.
Readers familiar with the Pentateuch will recognize that this passage is sown through and through with little snippets and quotes from it: “brought [him] out of Ur of the Chaldeans,” “the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Jebusite,” “saw the oppression of [our ancestors] in Egypt and heard their cry,” “like a stone into mighty waters,” and many, many more—every sentence contains at least one quote, usually several. At the same time, however, the passage contains a good bit of what one might identify as ancient biblical interpretation. For example, the passage says that God “chose” Abraham and then took him out of Ur—as if his leaving was a result of that choice. But that is not what Genesis says. In Genesis Abraham leaves Ur because his father, Terah, “takes” him out (Gen. 11:31). It is only in the light of Gen. 15:7 (perhaps combined with Josh. 24:2–3) that one might conclude that Abraham’s departure was the result of his prior “choice” by God. Sometimes, this passage does not so much interpret difficulties as merely acknowledge them. Thus, an apparent conflict in the biblical account of the Sinai revelation—Exod. 19:20 asserts that God actually descended onto Mount Sinai to speak with Moses, while elsewhere it is asserted that God spoke “from heaven” (Exod. 20:21; Deut. 4:36)7—is here resolved, at least in some fashion, by asserting that both things were simultaneously true: “You also came down upon Mount Sinai, and spoke with them from heaven.” At other times, one half of the contradiction is simply silenced. Thus: was manna a good thing to eat, a marvelous “bread from heaven” (Exod. 16:4), or was it “this miserable food” (Num. 21:5)? There is not a hint of the latter here: “Forty years you sustained them in the wilderness so that they lacked nothing” (see Deut. 2:7).
In short, we are now in the world of Scripture. The writings of the past are full of lessons for the present, and actual interpreters—the Levites mentioned in Nehemiah 8 or Ezra himself here in Nehemiah 9—will tell you what the lessons are and what Scripture really means for you to think and do.
The Greeks Arrive
The Persians were eventually kicked out of Judah, but not by the Jews. Alexander of Macedonia, Greece’s greatest military genius, managed to conquer most of the world known to him before his death in June of 323 BCE, just short of his thirty-third birthday. The vast territory he subdued stretched all the way from the Mediterranean to India. The land of Judah was thus still part of a huge empire, but this time it was one that spoke Greek and understood the world through Greek ideas.
After Alexander’s death, his generals fell to feuding and eventually divided up the conquered lands among themselves. The Hellenistic rulers of Egypt, known as the Ptolemies (after the name of one of Alexander’s generals and the founder of their dynasty, Ptolemaios), held sway over Judah for about a century, until 201 BCE, when they were ousted by the Seleucids, descended from another of Alexander’s generals, Seleucus. The Seleucids ruled Syria and the lands to its east, and like the Ptolemies, they were thoroughly Greek in outlook and ideas.
Hellenistic rule saw the semiautonomous Greek city, or polis, with its standard institutions, as the ideal administrative unit. Each polis had an ekklesia or assembly of its citizens, which would meet from time to time; day-to-day affairs were entrusted to a city council. Theaters were an important feature of city life, providing not only entertainment but instruction in Greek culture. Similarly, the gymnasium, although its main function was providing a place for male athletes to train and work out, was also an instrument of culture; in it, young men might meet and discuss things, undergo some military training, and be further steeped in Greek literature and mythology. Both theaters and gymnasia were connected as well with Greek gods and goddesses, and the Greek cities of course also featured temples, which were attended as part of one’s civic duties.
Many Jews no doubt welcomed the establishment of Hellenistic rule within their own borders and yearned to establish such cities in their own land. Greek culture seemed as pervasive and inevitable then as American culture seems today (and, perhaps, Chinese tomorrow). A few may denounce America as the Great Satan, but nowadays a surprisingly large part of the world’s population nevertheless listens to the Great Satan’s music, quaffs its noxious soft drinks, thrills to the pregnancies and extramarital affairs of its movie stars, and signals approval or assent by grunting the word “okay” in various odd accents. In the Hellenized eastern Mediterranean, Greek civilization was similarly pervasive—and it was good. The polis might, in some ways, be described as democratic, and it was in any case a relatively benign form of government. The Greeks themselves were far from jingoistic xenophobes; if you learned the Greek language and had a decent acquaintance with Homer and the classics, the whole world was open to you—it did not matter where you were from or whether or not you were of Greek descent. And Greek learning was extraordinarily impressive: in philosophy, mathematics, history, musical theory, rhetoric, and other domains, it really had no rival.
Nevertheless, some Judeans did not welcome the idea of full-scale Hellenization. As we have observed, sacred Scripture had, since the return from Babylonian exile, come to play an increasingly important part in people’s lives. Why should Jews study Homer when they had the Torah? And, in view of the Torah’s insistent propagandizing against worshiping “other gods” and its denunciation of making idols and statues, what was one to think of the Greek polis and temple and gymnasium? The last, in particular, offended religious sensibilities, since the male athletes were completely naked (gumnos in Greek); not only did such public nudity run counter to traditional Jewish modesty, but Jews who wished to join the gymnasium’s adepts were sometimes ridiculed because their bodies had been mutilated by the strange practice of circumcision.
Judean society was thus divided, and the division became sharper after the Seleucids took over from the Ptolemies. For a time the country struggled on tolerably well, but when Antiochus IV ascended the Seleucid throne in 175 BCE, open conflict soon broke out. According to the account in 2 Maccabees, Jason became high priest in Jerusalem and set about turning the city into a bastion of Hellenism, seeking to establish a gymnasium in its midst and in other ways to make it fit the Greek model. It was not long before Antiochus joined in this effort, and a period of outright persecution of Judaism ensued. Copies of the Torah were confiscated and burned, people were forbidden to circumcise their sons, traditional worship was outlawed, and worst of all, an altar to Olympian Zeus was set up right in the Jerusalem temple.
The Book of Daniel
It is against this background, scholars say, that the biblical book of Daniel must be read. It is probably the latest book in the Hebrew Bible.119 Although it is set in Babylon four centuries earlier, its last six chapters (7–12) seem to reflect directly the period of religious persecution under Antiochus IV. (The first six chapters are actually a collection of separate courtier tales about Daniel and his friends. Scholars believe that these tales must have circulated independently for a time, until an unknown Jewish author got the idea of making their hero, Daniel, the first-person narrator of a series of visions—the ones that make up chapters 7–12. This author therefore decided to append those visions to the existing Daniel tales to make one big book of Daniel.)8
The courtier tales begin with Daniel and his friends being inducted into Nebuchadnezzar’s court. Though young, they are wise; indeed, the king finds them “ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom” (1:20). When the king has a dream that troubles him, he turns first to his own court sages, but none of them can be of help—so he summons Daniel. This is somewhat reminiscent of the story of Joseph, where Pharaoh had a troubling dream and none of his advisors could explain it until Joseph was called in. In this story, however, there is a significant difference. Nebuchadnezzar refuses to tell his wise men the nature of his dream—part of their job is to guess what he has dreamt, and only after that to interpret it. In other words, interpretation is not just figuring things out—it requires some kind of divine help for the interpreter to even know what he is supposed to interpret.
Daniel gets that help. God reveals the content of the king’s dream to him in a night vision. The king, he learns, dreamt of a great statue made of metal. The head was made out of gold, the chest and arms of silver, the midsection and thighs of bronze, and its legs of iron. The feet, however, were a mixture of iron and clay. (This is where the expression “feet of clay” comes from.) Daniel goes to court and tells the king his dream and then offers his interpretation: the golden head represents the king himself and his own kingdom. After him will rise another kingdom, inferior to his but still good—that is the silver—and after that another kingdom, represented by the bronze, “which shall rule over the whole earth” (Dan. 2:39). Then will come a fourth kingdom, “strong as iron; just as iron crushes and smashes everything, so it shall crush and shatter all these” (2:40). But it will not hold; the feet alloyed with clay will cause it to collapse, after which “the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed” (2:44).9
The Writing on the Wall
A similar episode occurs in chapter 5. In the midst of a court party, the king and his guests are shocked to see a human hand appear and start writing on the wall of the palace. Enchanters and wise men are called in, but no one can even read the script that the hand used to write its message. At last, Daniel is called in, and he deciphers the message and explains it (Dan. 5:25). The words written are mene, mene, teqel and parsin. In Aramaic, these were the common terms for different weights: a tekel was one sixtieth of a mene, and parsin were twin spheres, each of which was half a tekel. But in the handwriting on the wall, these words are all intended as puns. Mene can also be a verb, “count,” and tekel “weigh,” while parsin suggests the Aramaic word for “split” or “break apart,” peras. The message to the king is thus: “God has counted the days of your kingdom . . . you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting—your kingdom will be split apart and given to the Medes and the Persians” (5:26–28). So indeed it turns out: the king is killed that very night and his kingdom is given to “Darius the Mede.”10
Chapters 7–12, as noted, were written in the time of Antiochus IV and reflect on the religious persecutions he introduced—but there are nevertheless continuities between these later chapters and the earlier ones. Chapter 7, for example, takes up again the four-kingdoms motif seen in chapter 2. Here, Daniel sees four beasts rising out of the sea—once again, the four kingdoms. But his attention soon focuses on the fourth, which “had great iron teeth and was devouring, breaking in pieces, and stamping what was left with its feet” (Dan. 7:7). The beast has ten horns, but as Daniel watches, an eleventh horn appears. Only later does the “Ancient of Days” (God) explain the meaning of this vision to Daniel. The fourth beast represents the empire of Alexander the Great, and the ten horns are ten Hellenistic kings who will arise from it. The eleventh horn is different from the others, however—it represents Antiochus:
He will speak words against the Most High and will grind down the Most High’s holy ones [that is, the Jews] and seek to change the law’s sacred festivals. They will be given into his power for one time, two times, and half a time. But then sentence will be passed and his domination will be taken away, to be consumed and totally destroyed. Sovereignty and dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven will be given to the people of the holy ones of the Most High. Their kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom, and all [other] authorities shall serve and obey them.
In other words, Antiochus will eventually be overthrown, and the Jews will once again gain sovereignty over their own land.
The Messiness of History
That is, in fact, what happened: a group of Jewish rebels, led by a family of rural priests—Mattathias and his five sons—fomented a full-scale guerrilla war against Antiochus and his forces. When Mattathias died, his son Judah took over; Judah’s nickname was “makkabi” (meaning uncertain), so the guerrilla war came to be known as the “revolt of the Maccabees.” The revolt started in 167 BCE, and within three years the rebels were in control of Jerusalem. They purified and rededicated the Jerusalem temple, in commemoration of which the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah was established. Soon, the Syrian troops of Antiochus were driven out of Judah entirely and a new period of Jewish independence ensued.
No clear cultural divide separates the time of the Maccabees (when the last words of the Jewish Bible were being penned in what might therefore be called, from a Jewish standpoint, the “end of the biblical period”)120 from the periods that preceded or followed them. The Maccabean rebels may have burned with anti-Hellenizing fervor, but those of their descendants who succeeded them on the throne—referred to as the “Hasmoneans,” after Mattathias’s family’s traditional last name, Hasmon—soon turned out to be as Hellenizing as the people they overthrew. The Hasmoneans were priests and thus controlled the temple, the central institution from which Judea was governed. But soon they proclaimed themselves actual kings, arousing the wrath of their political opponents. Power seesawed back and forth in a series of coups and countercoups. Judaism continued its path as before, but it was now clearly divided into different schools and warring factions, Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and others. Soon, the growing Roman influence in the area turned the rulers of Judea into virtual puppets, and Roman rule became an established fact by the first century BCE.
This was just the latest installment in a series of puzzling events. Indeed, for Jews living throughout most of the postexilic period, history in general no longer seemed to make much sense.
Earlier, it had—at least according to what Scripture recounted. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had founded the nation. Israel was enslaved in Egypt for a time, but then—as He had announced to Abraham—God freed the people from slavery and gave them the land of Canaan. Soon David arose to rule them, and a brief golden age ensued. The northerners broke away and sinned, and as a consequence were conquered by the Assyrians. When the Kingdom of Judah also fell into sin, it too was conquered, but God quickly showed that the Babylonians were only the “stick of His wrath”—He made sure that they too were conquered in short order. Then the Persians let the Jews return to their homeland. Up until that point, the course of events had a definite logic to it.
But how was one to make sense of what followed? The Persians continued to rule Judah. No new David arose (as some had hoped), and the long-lost northern tribes did not return. The Persians were then succeeded by the Greeks, the Greeks by the Hasmoneans, the Hasmoneans by the Romans—what was going on? Had not the Jews already paid for their sins through the Babylonian exile? By all rights God ought to have restored them to their former glory just as soon as they returned to their homeland. Instead came a succession of foreign rulers who were neither awful nor great—and this, from a religious standpoint, was probably the worst of all possible worlds. The Jews were not being rewarded or punished, but seemed to be in some indeterminate state.11
Apocalyptic Writings
That is why, scholars say, the book of Daniel exhibits such interest in the great patterns of history—the succession of four empires represented by the four metals or four beasts. Describing everything that had happened since the Babylonian exile as part of some larger picture was a way of asserting that God had not lost control of history. He was still manipulating events—you just had to see the forest instead of the trees in order to make sense of it. And of course, included in the great plan was Israel’s eventual triumph: the multi-metalled statue would collapse right on schedule, the eleventh horn of the fourth beast would be overthrown, and Israel would have dominion.
In this respect, Daniel is not alone. A whole body of literature grew up at this time among the Jews, known as apocalyptic writings. The book of Daniel is the only exemplar of this literary genre to be included in the Jewish Bible, but there were plenty of others written in the same period—the first and second books of Enoch, the fourth book of Ezra, the second and third books of Baruch, and many others. The New Testament book of Revelation is another example of this genre. Apocalyptic literature typically presents a visionary (sometimes a figure from the biblical past like Enoch or Ezra) who is given a glimpse of divine secrets—not only the great patterns of history, but sometimes also the way the world works, the location of the Garden of Eden, how the righteous are rewarded and the wicked punished, and so forth. Apocalypses also often disclose details about the great and imminent conclusion to which Israel’s history is headed—the “end-time,” sometimes know to scholars by the Greek word eschaton (the “last” or “ultimate”).
Apocalyptic writings are in some sense a continuation of late biblical prophecy, but scholars also point out its affinities with wisdom writing.12 It is certainly striking that the anonymous writers of apocalypses often choose not a prophet but an ancient sage or other worthy as the alleged author of their work: Enoch (described as the “scribe/sage of heaven”), Ezra, or Baruch (both sages). Like earlier wisdom writings, apocalyptic texts hold that there is a great, divine plan governing all of reality, a plan whose rules were established long ago.13 And like wisdom writings, they hold that wisdom is basically hidden and requires deep contemplation in order to be revealed. Daniel and his fellow visionaries are thus interpreters. They interpret both dreams and texts (using, surprisingly, the same techniques for both).14 Indeed, the book of Daniel refers often to books and writing, continuing the trend observed earlier in Zechariah. “The books were opened,” Daniel says in one of his visions (Dan. 7:10), and the angel Michael tells him, “But you, Daniel, keep the words secret and the book sealed” (12:4).
Royal sages were always interpreters—witness Joseph in Genesis. But in apocalyptic writings, the sage’s job is quite impossible without divine help. The common element joining chapters 2 and 5 of Daniel is that in both cases the sage must first provide the text itself—tell the king what he dreamt, decipher the undecipherable writing on the wall—before he can begin to say what the text means. This is no ordinary sort of interpretation. The whole mentality of this period is that something is happening, but it is not seen by the naked eye. Eloquent indeed are Daniel’s words of thanks to God after He has revealed to him the king’s dream:
“Blessed be the name of God from age to age, for wisdom and might are His.
He changes times and seasons, deposes kings and sets up kings;
He gives wisdom to the wise, and knowledge to those who have understanding.
He reveals deep and hidden things; He knows what is in the darkness, and light dwells with Him.”
The great patterns of history are like the weather: God changes kings the way He replaces spring with summer and summer with fall. But what is really going on is not visible to all, precisely because the patterns are so big. It is only to the wise and “those who have understanding” that He reveals “deep and hidden things.”
Hidden Interpretations
By the time the book of Daniel was being written, biblical interpretation had been around for a long while. The book of Chronicles, a subtle reinterpretation of the books of Samuel and Kings,15 dates back to the beginning of the postexilic period; still earlier, scholars say, are the interpretation and reworkings of biblical laws, the glosses and interpolations of prophetic collections, and related phenomena. What was changing now, however, was the character of interpretation. In part because of the apocalyptic mentality, interpreting the Bible was becoming—especially in some circles—a matter of seeking out the hidden messages that God had intended for the sage to unravel. Thus, at one point the book of Daniel itself interprets earlier Scripture, namely, Jeremiah’s prophecy that in “seventy years” after the Babylonian conquest, God would restore the Jewish people to their land and give them a “future with hope” (Jer. 25:11–12; 29:11–14):
I, Daniel, considered in the [sacred] writings the number of years that—according to the word of the LORD that had come to the prophet Jeremiah—were to last for the devastation of Jerusalem, [namely,] seventy years. Then I turned my face to the Lord God, to seek an answer by prayer and supplication with fasting and sackcloth and ashes. I prayed to the LORD my God and made confession . . .
While I was praying, the angel Gabriel, whom I had seen before in a vision, came to me in swift flight at the time of the evening sacrifice. He came and said to me, “Daniel, I have now come out to give you wisdom and understanding . . . Seventy groups of seven years have been decreed for your people and your holy city in order to obliterate the transgression and wipe out the sin and atone for the iniquity—to bring in eternal righteousness and seal the prophet and his vision and anoint the Holy of Holies.”
Jeremiah had plainly said that things would go back to the way they were in seventy years. But what he really meant, according to Daniel, was seventy groups of seven years apiece, in other words, 490 years. That would put the real fulfillment of Jeremiah’s words sometime in the future (from the standpoint of Daniel’s real author)—and it would explain, therefore, why Israel had not yet been restored to its full independent glory, why Babylonians had been succeeded by Persians and Persians by Hellenizing Ptolemies and Seleucids.16
But if Jeremiah meant to say 490 years, why didn’t he just say that? This is not a question Daniel addresses—probably, it did not even occur to him. Scripture just was cryptic; this assumption was already well established. In keeping with it (and not long after Daniel), a member of the Dead Sea Scrolls community explained a certain passage from the seventh-century BCE prophet Nahum as referring to events in the interpeter’s own time, five hundred years after Nahum:
“Where the lion goes, and the lion’s cubs, with no one to disturb them” [Nah. 2:11]. This refers to Demetrius, the Greek king, who wished to enter Jerusalem on the advice of “smooth-tongued interpreters.” But he could not do so, for God did not give Jerusalem into the hands of the Greek kings, from the time of Antiochus on—until there arose the rulers of the Kittiyim [the Romans].
4Q169 frag. 3
According to this interpreter, the “lion” mentioned in chapter 2 of Nahum was “Demetrius the Greek king,” apparently Demetrius III Eukairos (who ruled 95–88 BCE), the Hellenizing king of Seleucid Syria. Demetrius did seek to enter Jerusalem and conquer it, but he failed. The author of this text asserts that this attempted invasion took place at the advice of the “smooth-tongued interpreters” (doreshei 
alaqot). This is an allusion to one of the religious rivals of the Dead Sea Scrolls Jews, the Pharisees. They were famous as interpreters of biblical law (doreshei halakhot)—the author is punning on this name by calling them “smooth-tongued.”17
As for the Kittiyim, the name of this people, found several times in the Bible (Gen. 10:4; Num. 24:24; Isa. 23:1, etc.) was often used in the Dead Sea Scrolls to refer to the Romans (the same interpretation is found in later Jewish writings as well).18 Thus, the author of this text is saying, the prophet Nahum predicted the attempted invasion of Jerusalem by Demetrius, but he also said that this invader and his allies would be frustrated as earlier invaders were, since God had decreed that Jerusalem would not fall into the hands of the “Greek” (Seleucid) kings but would remain undisturbed (“with no one to disturb them”). With the arrival of the “Kittiyim,” however, all that would change.
How could this interpreter believe that Nahum was predicting things half a millennium into the future? Wasn’t Nahum really talking about the events of his own day? No one can say for sure, but our interpreter probably would have answered such questions by saying that Nahum and his times were not necessarily relevant. Nahum’s words were part of Scripture, and everyone knew that Scripture often contains hidden messages—hidden even from the prophet himself. After all, God gave Scripture to Israel to guide it in every generation, including the interpreter’s. So why not?
The Predominance of Legal Interpretation
Not all interpretation in this period was concentrated on finding hints in Scripture of the Seleucids or the Romans. Those “smooth-tongued interpreters,” the Pharisees, concerned themselves a great deal with the application and interpretation of biblical laws—as did, for that matter, the Dead Sea Scrolls community, the Sadducees, and Jesus. Indeed, understanding and explaining biblical laws was a concern that united all Jews in this period (though they disagreed, sometimes violently, in their conclusions). Perhaps one of the most striking testimonies to the enduring interest in this activity is Psalm 119, in which the Psalmist endlessly—for 176 verses—professes his allegiance to God’s “statutes,” “laws,” “commandments,” and so forth and seeks divine help (like Daniel) in understanding and interpreting them. Yet the most revealing verse in this psalm is not one of those requests for insight, but an offhand observation:
Your laws have been songs for me in my dwelling-place.
Sitting about his house, this Psalmist says, what he hums to himself is not popular music or even the hymns and praises of God found in Scripture, but the laws of Exodus and Deuteronomy! This is to say how much biblical laws were on everybody’s mind.
Despite this and a great deal of other biblical and extrabiblical evidence, many scholars have, for one reason or another, understated the importance of biblical law in surveying the whole of Scripture, as if it were a necessary but minor feature. That certainly was not the view in late biblical times, and the evidence of Scripture itself, from the Ten Commandments through the laws of the Covenant Code and Leviticus and Deuteronomy, suggests that the Bible’s laws had not just recently come into focus. They had been a central concern from well before the Babylonian exile. One would have to be (to use an old word) purblind to miss this crucial point. And so, as biblical interpretation came to the fore as a major preoccupation, it is no wonder that legal interpretation was a large part of the whole.
The author of Jubilees, a contemporary of the author of Daniel, was a close interpreter of the stories of Genesis—but many of his interpretations of stories were aimed specifically at finding hints in them about the laws found later in the Bible. As noted, the Dead Sea Scrolls community was also interested in—one might say, without much exaggeration, obsessed with—the close interpretation of biblical laws, although this aspect of their writings has only recently begun to be explored.19 One hardly would have expected Philo, the philosophical allegorist, or Josephus, whose stated goal was simply to set forth his people’s history, to go on for pages and pages about biblical law, but both of them do. Neither even needed to make explicit the point that the Torah’s laws were an overwhelmingly important part of Scripture.
I do not wish to overstate the case; there was a great deal more to ancient interpretation than the understanding and application of biblical laws. Ben Sira might serve as a model of the well-rounded interpreter. He certainly had a profound interest in the Bible’s stories; in fact, the last six chapters of his book are a review of biblical heroes, each of whose narratives, he believed, carried a simple, easily summarized message:
Abraham was the great father of a multitude of nations, and his glory was unblemished.
He kept the Most High’s commandment, and made a covenant with Him;
He cut His covenant into his flesh, and when he was tested was found faithful.
Therefore He swore by oath to bless the nations with his seed.
Along with this, though, Ben Sira was also an interpreter of biblical laws—he discourses at length about the commandment to honor one’s parents, for example, as well as on the “law of reproof” (Lev. 10:17)—since
A wise man understands a commandment, and His Torah is reliable as prophecy.
Along with these expected interests, however, his book also includes—rather uncharacteristically—an apocalyptic glimpse of the future (36:1–22). In short, for him and his contemporaries, Scripture contained everything—it was nothing less than all of divine wisdom in book form. In a famous passage, he recounts how Wisdom, a female figure, is commanded by God to leave her post next to Him in highest heaven and pitch her tent amidst one people on earth, Israel. Ben Sira then explains who this female figure really is:
All this is the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the law that Moses commanded us as an inheritance for the congregations of Jacob.
Sir. 24:23
And so we have come full circle. The last of the Hebrew Bible’s canonical books is about an ancient interpreter, Daniel. Ben Sira and the author of Jubilees were his close contemporaries (though you probably would not have found all three at the same lunch counter); their generation was followed by another, with its own interpreters, who passed on and expanded the interpretations they had received. Soon, these interpretations acquired canonical status: what the text meant is what the interpreters of old had always said it meant. Interpretations continued to multiply and solidify over the next three centuries, until the broad outlines of the Interpreted Bible were well established. It was this Interpreted Bible that both Judaism and Christianity gave to their followers, and it was to remain, quite simply, the Bible for centuries and centuries afterward. Only with the rise of modern scholarship did this Interpreted Bible begin to come apart, undone by the very different set of assumptions that scholars brought to the task of reading Scripture.