Farrell Till's response to Everette Hatcher III on the Book of Daniel covers most of the problems I see with Everette's comments. I offer some complementary remarks, and in a later article point out problems in literature related to Daniel that will help illustrate the problems with that book.
Up until the 19th century C.E., no one was allowed to challenge openly the accuracy of the Bible, outside of brief periods of liberalism such as the Enlightenment. The idea that Daniel was a historically accurate account of events in 6th-century B.C.E. Babylon was not only taught in schools but was backed up by the force of law. In the later 19th century, that situation changed. Freedom of the press prevailed, and a few brave scholars took on the established church by challenging the accuracy of the biblical texts. They were assisted by archaeological discoveries of libraries of ancient literature.
After several decades of debate, the evidence had persuaded a majority of historians that Daniel was not accurate about the fall of Babylon and that its so-called prophecies best matched events leading up to the 2nd-century Seleucid-Judean war, better known as the Maccabean War. No discoveries or scholarship since the late 19th century have changed that new, majority consensus. Daniel is not on the radar screen of modern Assyriology. The evidence led to this change, not any new beliefs or philosophies. In particular, several texts contemporary to the 6th B.C.E. trashed all claims to historical accuracy for Daniel. These include the Cyrus Cylinder, The Babylonian Chronicle, The Dream Text of Nabonidus, and the Persian Verse Account. As historians repeatedly warn, these accounts are not objective. They were propaganda to varying degrees, but they were written by and for people who lived just before, during, or immediately after the conquest of Babylon. With cautious reading of their characterization of people and events, their information will be the most trustworthy available. The people and places they name are going to be real. That's why scholars rely upon them. Sources from later periods have identifiable problems that make them less reliable than the contemporary accounts.
Historian T. Cuyler Young, Jr., also suggests that Second Isaiah reflects the "tone, if not some of its actual words," of Persian propaganda in such passages as Isaiah 45:1-3 and 45:13 (The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. IV, Part 1, Chapter 1, Second Edition 1988, 1992 reprint, p. 37). My Oxford Annotated Bible notes that Cyrus is called a "messiah" in 45:1, the only reference to a non-Israelite messiah in the Jewish Scriptures, emphasizing Cyrus's importance to the Israelites. Second Isaiah doesn't mention "Darius the Mede." By contrast, no texts of Daniel are contemporary with the events surrounding the fall of Babylon. All we really have are copies of copies of copies of copies, etc., of an anonymous, undated text.
The Cambridge Ancient History also has a discussion of the sources of history of that period in chapter 3a, written by Amelie Kuhrt. He mentions the sources above and material from the ancient writer Berossus partially preserved by Josephus in the 1st century C.E. and Bishop Eusebius in the 2nd-3rd century C.E., both of whom had propaganda concerns in their selections. By also compressing Berossus's writings, they created even more distortions. In The Antiquities of the Jews (10:11), Josephus repeats the stories about Daniel, including the story of the insanity of Nebuchadnezzar (the biblical, not scholars' spelling) but with some significant divergences. Josephus says that Nebuchadnezzar was followed not by Belshazzar but by Evil-merodach ("his son"), then Neglissar, then Labosordacus--for a total period of nearly 59 years--and finally by Belshazzar, who Josephus says was also called Nabonidus. Josephus also identifies Darius the Mede and Cyrus, as the conquerors of Babylon. He says Darius was the son of Astyages, a king of the Medes. Josephus apparently used another source besides Daniel and combined the two, both expanding and contradicting parts of Daniel.
Herodotus's The Persian Wars contains another account of Babylon's fall. He credits Cyrus, who he claims was the grandson of Astyages by his daughter and a Persian prince, with capturing Babylon but makes no mention of "Darius the Mede." Herodotus gives a detailed account of how Astyages, warned by a prophecy, tried to have the infant Cyrus murdered but was tricked, so that Cyrus grew to manhood and later rebelled against his grandfather. No historian believes the infant-in-danger story, found in many accounts about great heroes (Herakles, Perseus, Oedipus, Sargon I, Moses, and Jesus, for examples). Herodotus also thought Nabonidus was the son of Nebuchadrezzar. In Book 1:188, Herodotus calls the last king of Babylon Labynetus, and says he was the son of a Queen Nitocris (not known from any records). Historians say that Herodotus's chronology elsewhere would make Nabonidus the son of Nebuchadrezzar, also referred to in Book 1:74 as King Labynetus. Herodotus gathered his material on a brief visit to the city before 425 B.C.E. Herodotus' story has other problems, and appears to be based on a distorted oral version of the real events of Babylon's fall.
Little more than a century after the conquest of Babylon, the story already was becoming confused. Modern historians' version of these events are based upon the 6th-century B.C.E. sources: Nebuchadrezzar was followed by Amel-Marduk, Neriglissar, Labashi-Marduk and Nabonidus. Amel-Marduk, Neriglissar and Labashi-Marduk ruled for a total of only about seven years, not 59. Belshazzar was the son of Nabonidus and was never the king. The story of the insanity of Nebuchadrezzar was probably adapted erroneously from accounts of the strange actions of Nabonidus. And as Till pointed out, no ruler named Darius the Mede was involved in the conquest of Babylon. A Persian general named Ugbaru led the troops who first entered the city. Nabonidus was captured soon after and was either executed or given a minor official post. The accounts conflict. The records make no mention of Belshazzar in connection with the city's occupation.
The ruler of the Persians and the Medes was Cyrus II the Great. He was the son of Cambyses, grandson of Cyrus I, according to Cyrus's own account. He defeated the last king of the Medes, Istuwigu (his Babylonian Chronicle name), called Astyages in later texts. The defeat is recorded both by the Chronicle and by The Dream Text of Nabonidus, attributed to that king. Neither text claims any family relationship between Cyrus and Astyages. Amelie Kuhrt warns against other sources, such as Xenophon's Cyropaedia, as suspect. Finally, Kuhrt describes the Persian Verse Account, a poem attacking Nabonidus and praising Cyrus. It "lampoons Nabonidus's oppressive rule and lampoons his pretensions to wisdom to the point of making him appear a crazed despot" (Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. IV, p. 123). Kuhrt adds, "It is possible that the first part of the poem had already been composed in Nabonidus's reign to express popular discontent and was later manipulated for their own purposes by the Persians." The Babylonian Chronicle also mentions eccentric behavior by Nabonidus. So we have two contemporary texts that claim strange behavior by Nabonidus, plus the later Qumran text that Everette mentions that attributes a period of insanity to Nabonidus. Additionally, no contemporary sources give any hints that Nebuchadrezzar was insane. Set against this is the claim in Daniel, repeated in The Antiquities of the Jews, that Nebuchadnezzar was insane; Nabonidus's eccentricity is never mentioned.
The errors of both Daniel and Antiquities raise very serious doubts about their credibility. The fact that the origin of Daniel is unknown and that Antiquities was written 600 years later and is based partially on Daniel, while contradicting it upon the city's last monarchs, makes them worthless for purposes of historical scholarship. The lions just took big bites out of Daniel. Biblical literalists have tried to argue that Belshazzar could be called the king of Babylon because he ruled during the 10-year period that Nabonidus had abandoned the city and performed some royal functions, but the contemporary texts say the Babylonians were angry because their New Year Festival was not performed during that 10-year period. Only the king could perform it. Since Belshazzar didn't do it, he could not have been the king, only the crown prince. The failure of the Book of Daniel even to mention Nabonidus points to its author's having a corrupt source of history. That Antiquities knows the name of Nabonidus but confuses him with Belshazzar shows how corrupt the historical accounts of the 6th century B.C.E. had become by Josephus's time. Daniel resembles The Persian Wars and Antiquities in this respect, not the 6th-century accounts. The lions just ripped off Daniel's legs.
The supernatural miracle stories in Daniel are another huge problem. Believers cannot assert the reality of magic for one incident, such as the three men who survived inside a blazing furnace, according to Daniel, without asserting the reality of all stories of magic. The Bible then becomes simply a companion book to The Iliad, The Odyssey, Gilgamesh,The Enuma Elish, The Book of the Coming Forth by Day, The Popul Vuh, The Eddas, The Thousand and One Tales From the Arabian Nights, etc. If a believer insists that one set of magic stories is true, such as those in the Bible, and denies the reality of all other such stories, what objective basis is available for such discrimination? Christian fundamentalists have never offered any support for their claims, other than to say they believe them because they believe them, but the same argument comes from all other religions in support of their magic stories. Devout ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Aztecs, etc. were just as certain of the existence of their gods and miracles as any Christian fundamentalist is certain of the Bible today. Belief alone can never be proof.
This type of sectarianism is intellectually corrupt. It's similar to the totally subjective beliefs of Jews, Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox Catholics, and Protestants as to which books are "canonical." Why should one book from Jewish/Christian history be accepted into a canon and another one rejected as "apocryphal"? Why is the book of Daniel canonical, while Bel and the Dragon and Susanna--other sets of stories about Daniel--are "apocryphal" to Protestants but found in the Roman Catholic, Greek, and Slavonic Bibles. The Hebrew scriptures don't contain the Apocrypha, but all of them (except 2 Esdras) are in the Greek Septuagint version.
The obvious fact is that defenders of one set of miracle traditions or one set of canonical books are merely repeating what they were taught as children and have never been able to escape, even when the evidence is against those teachings or when they encounter an alternate set of traditions. When various groups of Christians and Jews can't even agree on something as fundamental as just which stories are genuinely "holy" or "inspired" by the god that they all claim to worship, why should anyone believe those fantastic stories or the bibliolaters' claims for any of them? The book of Daniel has been weighed in the balance and found wanting. The lions just severed Daniel's jugular vein, and he has bled to death.
Scholars can piece together part of the origin of Daniel. First, Dan'el was a folk-figure in Bronze Age Canaanite literature (see endnote). Ezekiel mentions a Daniel in Ezekiel 14:14 as someone so righteous that he, with Job and Noah, other Bronze Age figures, were the only ones who would survive if Yahweh were to destroy a faithless land. Ezekiel 28:3 refers to Daniel as a figure of wisdom. Ezekiel lived several decades before the Persians captured Babylon, so his Daniel, a figure of the past to him, cannot be the Daniel of the book of Daniel, who lived there during and after the city's fall.
Comments by three modern historians are relevant here: Gosta Ohlstrom offers a simple explanation for why the seeming (or literal) madness of Nabonidus was transferred to Nebuchadrezzar: "In later traditions, Nebuchadrezzar has also been seen as an `evil' king. It seems that the tradition about the `evil' king Nabu-na'id (Nabonidus) `became caught and confused in a web of hatred against Nebuchadrezzar' in later Jewish traditions, because he devastated and destroyed Jerusalem and Judah." He partly quotes and endorses another scholar's conclusions here (The History of Ancient Palestine, 1993, Sheffield Academic Press, p. 811).
Robin Lane Fox suggests the stories in Daniel "are only a selection from a wider group of Daniel tales: we also find him in the story of Susanna and the Elders (now in the Apocrypha of English Bibles), and in Bel and the Dragon, and no doubt we could have found him in many more. Probably, some of these stories had led an earlier, separate life: twice they call Daniel by the second name of Belteshazzar, a Babylonian name which perhaps was the name of the stories' original hero" (The Unauthorized Version, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991, p. 332).
Finally, John J. Collins points out that Jewish "pseudepigrapha" began in the 3rd century B.C.E. with apocalyptic writings attributed to "Enoch," a grandson of Adam and Eve via their son Seth, i.e., someone who lived before the Genesis flood (Gen. 4:26). The writings of Enoch are blatant fiction, written by an anonymous Jewish writer who used an ancient figure to present his own ideas. A number of other pseudepigrapha followed, attributing various writings to Moses, Ezra and Baruch. If Daniel was written in the 2nd century B.C.E., then it follows this tradition. Collins says, "Since Daniel resembles the books of Enoch, Ezra, etc. in so many respects, our initial assumption must be that Daniel is, like them, pseudepigraphic. Nothing in the Book of Daniel requires us to abandon that assumption. The visions of Daniel, like those of Enoch, can be quite satisfactorily explained as constructs of the Hellenistic age, which are ascribed to an ancient figure to add to their authority" (The Book of Daniel, First Maccabees, Second Maccabees, Michael Glazier, Inc., 1981, pp. 12-13). So there's no need to jump through elaborate series of hoops to find punning hints in the text that the author knew the real story and concealed it, or to justify ignoring the 17-year reign of King Nabonidus while calling crown prince Belshazzar the king, or to verify the fantasies about the disembodied hand, the lions den and the furnace, or to explain away the discrepancies between Daniel and the 6th-century texts. Story-telling and propaganda-- human traits that have been around for millennia--explain the problems quite well.
So Persian and Jewish propaganda merged to invent the madness of Nebuchadrezzar. Distorted versions of Babylon's last days were floating around. Folk stories from the Babylonian and Persian periods were rewritten to incorporate the legendary Semitic figure of Daniel, and in the 2nd century, a Jewish propagandist syncretized and expanded this material to give credibility to his "prophecies" of Jewish victory over the Seleucid Empire, intended to hearten a desperate people. As ancient literature, it's fascinating. As a historically valid account of Babylon's fall, much less the "inspired word of god," worthy of incorporation in a "holy" book, it's pathetic. It's time to let the vultures eat what the lions left.
Endnote: The figure of "Dan'el the Rapha-man" appears in the Canaanite poem, "The Tale of Aqhat." One scholar has offered the intriguing suggestion that "Rapha-man" may refer to the legendary giant race of the Middle East referred to in Hebrew scriptures as the "Rephaim" (Gen. 14:5; Deut. 2:11). Like the Anakim, they are usually reckoned as Rephaim, though the Moabites called them Emim (Deut. 2:20-21). The gigantic King Og of Bashan (Deut. 3:11) was the last of the Rephaim, who were also called the Anakim (Num 13:22, 33; Deut. 1:28) and the "Nephilim" (Gen. 6:4), all of them the children of the mating of the "sons of god" and mortal women in Genesis (The Ancient Near East, Vol. 1, edited by James B. Pritchard, translation by H.L. Ginsberg, p. 118). These gigantic great-great-grandchildren of god should have been destroyed in the great flood, yet they reappear to fight the Israelites in the time of David (1 Chr. 20), who killed the chief giant, Goliath of Gath (1 Sam. 17:50-51); a separate story claims an Israelite soldier named Elhannon killed Goliath of Gath (2 Sam. 21:19)--yet another little contradiction in the Bible, and one more proof of its basis in multiple, nondivine sources.
(William Sierichs, Jr., 316 Apartment Court Drive, Apt. 44, Baton Rouge, LA 70806)
EDITOR'S NOTE: At least one historian (George Roux, Ancient
Iraq, Pelican Books, 1966, p. 352) has claimed that Belshazzar died
in a battle with the Persians at a place called Opis before Babylon
fell. Roux, who didn't cite his source of information, may have
inferred the death of Belshazzar from the fact that he disappeared from
Babylonian records after the battle of Opis. However, if Roux is
correct, Belshazzar could not have been in Babylon on the night of its
fall. If Roux was not correct, his conclusion would at least underscore
the problems that historians confront in trying to put together
accurate accounts of what happened thousands of years ago. One would
think that the problems are sufficiently complex that biblicists would
be a bit more reluctant to declare the Bible inerrant in all historical
details, especially when some of those details obviously conflict with
the extrabiblical records that have survived from that era, but
biblicists as a whole are famous for their determination to defend the
Bible on faith rather than evidence.
