Most of the final section of Hatcher's latest article on the authorship of Daniel was about the linguistic "evidence" that he has raved about throughout this debate. I will be addressing all of his points on this issue, but I recommend that readers go now to the first page of the "Mailbag" column to read Hatcher's reply to my inquiry into his qualifications to discuss Aramaic and Hebrew with any degree of competence. His letter shows exactly what I predicted in my reply to the second part of his article: he admits that he has never studied either Hebrew or Aramaic. He downplayed the importance of linguistic credentials by saying that he can read and that what he has read in the writings of "conservative scholars " has answered the linguistic arguments of liberal scholars to his "satisfaction."
In his letter, Hatcher mentioned Bruce Wildish, whose reply to Hatcher was published in the issue before this one, so I sent his letter to Wildish and asked for his comments. Wildish's letter appears immediately after Hatcher's and completely discredits his claim that conservative (read inerrantist) writers have satisfactorily answered the linguistic arguments of scholars who contend that the Hebrew and Aramaic in Daniel indicate an authorship later than the 6th century BC. I'll be saying more about this later, but before going to the linguistic issue, I will first comment on old assertions that Hatcher has recycled.
A combined Median and Persian empire is pictured in Daniel: Hatcher cited six passages in defense of this claim, all of which have already been answered, but since he has recycled them, I'll answer them again.
Daniel 5:26-28 This is the interpretation of the matter: MENE, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; TEKEL, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; PERES, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.
Those who have followed this debate from its beginning will recall that this is the text that Hatcher used to argue that the word peres, which meant "divided" was a pun on the word Persian, which showed that Daniel was aware that the Persians were the actual conquerors of Babylon. I answered this quibble in the March/April 1998 issue (p. 8), so we have come this far only to have Hatcher return to his tactic of quibbling about puns and nuances that can be seen only by an inerrantist trying to find evidence where there is none. This is just another example of what Wildish and I have both pointed out to Hatcher. His way of finding "evidence" in alleged puns and nuances reduces his god, who he thinks "inspired" the writer of Daniel, to such incompetence that he could not direct "Daniel" to use language that would communicate clear ideas. That hardly helps Hatcher's attempt to prove the divine origin of this book.
Hatcher merely cited these verses in Daniel; he didn't attempt to show why they depict a "combined Median and Persian empire," so he may have meant that Daniel's reference to the giving of Belshazzar's kingdom to the Medes and Persians was what made this text proof that a combined Median/ Persian empire existed at this time. If that was his intention, Hatcher is again unable to see that he is hurting his own cause, because if historical records show that there was no "Medo-Persian" empireand they doHatcher has merely uncovered another example of errancy in the book of Daniel, because the writer (according to Hatcher) meant in this passage that there was a combined Median/Persian empire at this time, when in reality there wasn't. Cyrus captured Media in 550 BC, eleven years before the fall of Babylon, and annexed Median territory. The Median kingdom then ceased to exist, so there was no "Medo-Persian" empire when Cyrus defeated Babylon in 539 BC.
At any rate, I have already shown that the reference to the dividing of Babylon between the Medes and the Persians was probably a historical mistake made by a writer whose knowledge of 6th-century BC history was deficient. Readers may consult the March/ April 1999 issue, page 8, for a more complete discussion of a point that I am now going to summarize. When countries form alliances against a common enemy, a victory over the enemy will usually result in a division of the conquered territory between the victors. As is evident from the visions of Daniel in chapters 7 and 8, the writer thought that Media and Persia were still separate kingdoms at this time, so incorrectly thinking this, the writer very likely thought that Babylon fell to allied forces of Media and Persia, just as Assyria had fallen to the allied forces of Babylon and Media in 612 BC. Babylon and Media then divided Assyrian territory between themselves, but they did not become a Medo-Babylonian empire. They remained separate, so the statement in Daniel 5:28 could easily have reflected the writer's mistaken impression that Media and Persia combined forces to defeat Babylon, after which they divided Babylonian territory between themselves. Indeed, this meaning is all but directly stated in 5:28, because Daniel didn't just say that Belshazzar's kingdom was given to the Medes and the Persians; he said that it was divided and given to the Medes and the Persians. If Belshazzar's kingdom was conquered by a united "Medo-Persian" empire, why did Daniel say that it would be divided and given to the Medes and Persians? If Babylonia were indeed conquered and absorbed by just a single "combined" empire, there would have been no dividing involved. The territory of Babylonia would simply have been given to the Medes and the Persians, who were united in just one empire. Hatcher's own proof text has backfired in his face.
Daniel 6:8 So the presidents and satraps conspired and came to the king and said to him, "O King Darius, live forever!"Verse 12 Then they approached the king and said concerning the interdict, "O king! Did you not sign an interdict, that anyone who prays to anyone, divine or human, within thirty days except to you, O king, shall be thrown into a den of lions?" The king answered, "The thing stands fast, according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which cannot be revoked."
Verse 15 Then the conspirators came to the king and said to him, "Know, O king, that it is a law of the Medes and Persians that no interdict or ordinance that the king establishes can be changed."
There is certainly no need to suppose that the references to the laws of the Medes and Persians in Daniel show that the writer thought that a "combined Median and Persian empire" existed at this time, especially not when the visions of Daniel show that the writer understood that Media and Persia were separate kingdoms. When one country is subservient to another or absorbed by another, it isn't at all unusual for a cultural interchange to take place. Our language, religions, and laws, for example, have their roots in English culture. They did not originate with us. We borrowed them. Prior to his conquest of Media, Cyrus was a vassal of the Median king Astyages, but in 550 BC, Cyrus rebelled and conquered Media, eleven years before the conquest of Babylon, so there had been plenty of time for cultural exchanges to have had influences on the legal systems of both kingdoms. It is hard to imagine that all of the territory of Media could have been annexed by Cyrus without some Median influences on Persian law. Besides this, we must remember that in Daniel we have a document written by someone whose understanding of 6th-century BC history was at best fuzzy in Median and Persian affairs, so who can really know what he may have meant by expressions like this?
I noted in the January/February issue that the writer's claim that the laws of the Medes and Persians could not be changed lacks any substantive support in historical records. Having now obtained Collins’ commentary, which Hatcher thinks is the standard by which all commentaries should be judged, I have learned that Hatcher's supporting evidence of this point was stretched a bit. He sees an indication of 6th-century BC authorship in the fact that the writer of Daniel "knew" that the laws of the Medes and Persians could not be changed, and he cited the case of Diodorus of Sicily, who reported "the case of a man put to death under Darius III (336-330) even though he was known to be perfectly innocent." Hatcher claimed that "(Darius III) immediately repented and blamed himself for having committed such a great error, but it was impossible to have undone what had been done by royal authority."
In reading Collins’ commentary, I noticed that he mentioned this same source, which some traditionalists have cited as proof that Median/Persian laws were immutable, but Collins doubted the accuracy of the claim. He quoted Herodotus who reported the verdict of a royal judge who had said in ruling on a case involving Cambyses’ desire to marry his sister, "(T)he king of the Persians might do whatever he wishes" (3.31). Collins then stated his belief that the claim of immutable Median/Persian laws has no historical basis.
Two factors may have contributed to the belief that Persian laws were immutable: one is the obvious insistence that no subordinate officer could change what was decreed by the king and marked by his seal; the other is that the laws were to be preserved (in some cases by public inscription) so that they should not "pass away"that is, be lost or go out of effect. In the latter case the issue is duration rather than irreversibility. The manner in which the king is entrapped in Daniel 6 in any case requires a degree of gullibility on the part of the king that is historically implausible but not inappropriate to the genre (Collins, p. 268).
To say the least, Hatcher's discussion of this point was somewhat one-sided. so it could very well be that Hatcher was trying to build an argument on a historical inaccuracy in the book.
Daniel 8:3 I looked up and saw a ram standing beside the river. It had two horns. Both horns were long, but one was longer than the other, and the longer one came up second....Verse 20 As for the ram that you saw with the two horns, these are the kings of Media and Persia.
Hatcher has returned to his argument that the ram symbolized a Medo-Persian empire, but I guess he didn't notice that the text does not say that the ram was the kings of Media and Persia. It said that these were the kings of Media and Persia. The pronoun is plural, so its antecedent could not be the singular noun ram. The pronoun must therefore have referred to the horns on the ram. The horns were the kings of Media and Persia. As noted earlier, Persian kings were once vassals of Media, but the vassal king Cyrus rebelled, conquered Media, and annexed its territory. Historically, the territory occupied by Media and Persia had shifted back and forth between the two powers, so there was a commonality to the territory that had been shared by these two nations that would have made it appropriate to represent it with a singular symbol (a ram), but there is no historical support for the fundamentalist claim that the second kingdom in Nebuchadnezzar's dream (2:36-45) was a combined "Median and Persian" empire. This is a spin put on the text so that fundamentalists can make Daniel's interpretation of the dream fit their desired prophetic mold.
In "What Medo-Persian Empire?" ( TSR, March/April 2000, pp. 2-4, 11), I discussed this point in detail in replying to Michael Bradford, who had taken the same position on the meaning of the ram in Daniel's vision . I'm not going to rehash here all of the reasons why this interpretation of the ram just won't work, but I will restate just one rebuttal point. Anyone who examines Daniel's interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream and his visions in chapters 7 and 8 will see that the first of the four kingdoms was directly identified as Babylon (2:37-38), and later the fourth one was identified as the Grecian kingdom (8:21). That being the case, if the ram was a "combined Median-Persian" empire, which followed Nebuchadnezzar's kingdom (2:39), then what was the kingdom that came between the Medo-Persian one and the Grecian empire?
I'll just copy below what I said on this point in the above mentioned reply to Bradford.
I concur with Bradford in his association of the four kingdoms in Daniel's vision with the four kingdoms in Nebuchadnezzar's dream, so all we need to do now is to determine the names of these kingdoms. In his interpretation of the dream, Daniel said that Nebuchadnezzar was the head of gold (2:38), so the first kingdom in the dream and the first kingdom in Daniel's vision were the Babylonian empire. All we need to do now is make a reasonable interpretation of what the second, third, and fourth kingdoms were.The key to determining this lies in the visions of the ram and the male goat in chapter 8. The voice of "the holy one" who interpreted this dream said, as already noted, that the horns on the ram were the kings of Media and Persia (v:20) and that the male goat was the kingdom of Greece, whose notable horn was its first king (v:21). Since no other visions concerning great "kingdoms" were seen after the vision of the male goat, this gives a good reason to interpret the goat as the fourth kingdom in both Nebuchadnezzar's dream and Daniel's chapter-seven vision. The fourth kingdom, then, was the kingdom of Greece. If the first kingdom was the Babylonian Empire and the fourth the Grecian Empire, the second and third kingdoms were surely the Median Empire and the Persian Empire, seen by Daniel as separate kingdoms rather than one "Medo-Persian" empire. If this is not the case and the second empire was, as Bradford and Hatcher have claimed, a combined "Medo-Persian" empire, then we have a missing kingdom. The Babylonian was the first, the Grecian the fourth, and the Medo- Persian the second, so what happened to the missing empire (p. 11)?
Neither Bradford nor Hatcher has answered this question, yet in concluding the section of his article where he recycled his claim that Daniel "pictured" a combined Median and Persian empire, Hatcher had the audacity to say, "All of these arguments were developed in my earlier articles, and Till has refuted none of them." In the first, place, Hatcher has really developed no arguments on this or any other issue. He has relied mainly on just quoting what "conservative scholars" think, but that matter aside, it just isn't true that I have answered none of his assertions about a combined Medo-Persian empire. In the preceding paragraphs of this article, I have rehashed my replies to Hatcher's "combined empire" claim, which I first published in the March/April 1999 issue of TSR, and immediately above, I quoted at length from the March/April 2000 issue in which I showed solid textual reasons why the proof texts that Hatcher keeps referring to cannot be seen as evidence that Daniel "pictured" a combined Medo-Persian empire. I also replied to this claim in the May/June 1998 issue (pp. 2-3, 16), so from my perspective, Hatcher is the one who isn't answering arguments. Perhaps he should read his opponents’ articles a bit more carefully.
Daniel 11:40-45 does not refer to any events in the Greek period. I'm not going to republish or even rehash "Good History in the Book of Daniel," which appeared in the September/October 1998 issue of TSR, because there is a limit to how many times I should be expected to repeat rebuttal arguments that Hatcher ignores. In that article, I analyzed in detail sections of Daniel chapters 8 and 11 to show the almost uncanny familiarity that the author had with events that happened during the Grecian era until he reached his own time period. At that point, his knowledge of history wasn't at all accurate, because he was no longer writing after-the-fact prophecy.
I don't recall ever seeing any attempt from Hatcher to reply to this article, which filled over three pages back when the text was published in 10-point rather than 12-point print. Daniel 11:40-45 didn't accurately "predict" any events in the Grecian period for reasons mentioned above, i.e., the author was no longer writing after the fact, but chapter 11 up to verse 40 clearly did accurately portray events in the Grecian period, and I discussed this in detail in "Good History in the Book of Daniel." The best explanation for the prophetic inaccuracies in verses 40-45, after a long string of successes, is that the author reached his own time period and no longer had the advantage of writing after the fact. He had to guess, and he guessed wrong.
Hatcher, of course, is aware of this critical view of the book, because he quoted where Samuel Driver said exactly that: "And while down to the period of Antiochus’ persecution the actual events are described with surprising distinctness, after this point the distinctness ceases; the closing events of Antiochus’ own life are, to all appearance, not described as they actually occurred.... (T)he inexactness respecting the closing events of Antiochus’ life renders it almost certain that these were still in the future when the author wrote" (Driver, p. 66 of the introduction).
Now here is a perfectly sensible explanation for why at 11:40 the uncanny "prophetic" accuracy of the writer suddenly did a complete about-face and got nothing right, but Hatcher rejects this explanation for a fundamentalist one that I am sure explains the problem entirely to his "satisfaction." Heor rather the "conservative scholars" with whom he is so enamoredpostulated a "prophetic gap" of at least 2,100 years, and probably more, which began at verse 40. Until this point, everything being "prophesied" in chapter 11 was "fulfilled" with amazing accuracy, but then suddenly the writer stopped right in the middle of the persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes and took a giant leap of thousands of years into the future. Who can believe it? Well, Everette Hatcher can, because there is nothing too absurd for a biblicist to believe when he is bent on defending his cherished inerrancy doctrine.
What this dispensationalist view requires one to believe is that the "prophet" Daniel was predicting events that would happen during the persecutions of Antiochus, but then suddenly in the middle of these persecutions, the writer left all of those conflicts unresolved and took a long leap into the distant future to prophesy the coming of an "antichrist." In other words, all of the references to the "king of the south" and "the king of the north," which until this point had been references to the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kings respectively, took on entirely different meanings, with no transitional signals of the change in meaning or time gap indicated. In one verse, the writer was referring to kings of the Grecian period, and then in the next he was referring to kings in the distant future when the "antichrist" would come. Never mind that the text in Daniel doesn't use the word antichrist anywhere or that the antichrist was a concept completely foreign to readers of that time. Hatcher has a pet belief to defend, so if "(m)any conservative scholars consider [11:45] to refer to the anti-Christ," that's good enough to his "satisfaction."
Hatcher's only attempt to defend the bizarre vie that a prophet would stop suddenly in the midst of a string of prophecies, leave a period of great tribulation and persecution unresolved, and jump centuries into the future was his claim that such a jump was made in a Messianic prophecy in Isaiah.
Isaiah 61:1-3 The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because Yahweh has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zionto give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit. They will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of Yahweh, to display his glory.
First of all, this is a "Messianic prophecy"only because New Testament writers in their desperate attempts to find prophecy fulfillment in every piddling event in the life of Jesus arbitrary declared that it was (Matt. 12:15-21; Luke 4:18-19), and Hatcher has uncritically accepted it. After all, if a New Testament writer said that such and such an event fulfilled prophecy, what can a biblical inerrantist do but blindly accept it?
If, however, Hatcher would bother to examine the context of these verses in Isaiah 61, he should see that this statement was made in a larger context where Isaiah was prophesying that the Israelites who had been taken into Assyrian captivity would be brought back home. In the passages I have cited below, the italicized expressions will point out Isaiah's theme that the captives would be returned.
Isaiah 49:5 And now Yahweh says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him, for I am honored in the sight of Yahweh, and my God has become my strength; he says, "It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth."Isaiah 51:11 So the ransomed of Yahweh shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
Isaiah 51:14 The oppressed [captive exiles, KJV & others] shall speedily be released; they shall not die and go down to the Pit, nor shall they lack bread.
Isaiah 52: 3-4 For thus says Yahweh: You were sold for nothing, and you shall be redeemed without money. For thus says the Lord GOD: Long ago, my people went down into Egypt to reside there as aliens; the Assyrian, too, has oppressed them without cause.
Isaiah 60:4 (Y)our sons shall come from far away, and your daughters shall be carried on their nurses’ arms.
There are many other verses that I could quote from this context to show that Isaiah was rather ecstatically predicting a return of the Israelites who had been dispersed by the Assyrians. (Notice in 52:4, quoted above, the reference to the Assyrians, who had oppressed the "Lord's people" without a cause.) The return of the captives scattered by the Assyrians never happened, and to this day they are referred to as the "lost tribes of Israel." Rather than the proof text that Hatcher is looking for, this passage in Isaiah is just another example of many failed biblical prophecies, so it is hardly the kind of passage that Hatcher should be quoting in support of his position on the dating of Daniel.
In the broader context of this passage, Isaiah made several first-personal references to himself as the instrument or messenger that Yahweh had chosen to "bring Jacob back to him" and to "raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel" (49:5, quoted above). In 51:11, he said, "I, I am he who comforts you," and then asked, "Why then are you afraid of a mere mortal who must die, a human being who fades like grass?"
In other words, the first-person references in this broader context were to Isaiah himself, who thought that he had been selected to proclaim the good news of the regathering of the captives and thereby comfort them in their afflictions, so the passage in Isaiah 61:1-3 was not a "prophecy" of a future Messiah who would come "to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners" but to Isaiah, who saw himself as a divine messenger selected for the purpose of doing all these things to his own generation. Hatcher, then, is trying to support an argument for the 6th-century BC authorship of Daniel by distorting a passage in Isaiah to make it parallel to his distortion of Daniel 11:40-45. Isaiah 61:1-3 had reference to contemporary matters and not to something in the remote future.
For the sake of argument, let's just assume that Isaiah 61:1-3 was indeed a "Messianic prophecy" that meant exactly what Hatcher is claiming, i.e., a three-verse prophecy of events that would be widely separated in time. How would that in any way prove that up to verse 40 in Daniel 11, the prophet was prophesying events that would happen in the Hellenistic era but then suddenly, he injected a "prophetic gap"and jumped forward at least 21 centuries? Isaiah 61 is an entirely different text from Daniel 11, and the meanings of both must be determined from the linguistic context of each and not from what religious fundamentalists would like for them to mean.
By now, we are all familiar with Hatcher's resort to this kind of "proof." Unable to find any textual evidence in Daniel 5 that the words father and son were used in any sense but their strictest meanings, Hatcher retreated to passages completely unrelated to Daniel and argued that because father and son were used in their secondary senses in these places, they were also used in those senses in Daniel 5. Such a position is literarily absurd, because the meanings of words must be determined by the contexts in which they appear and not by how they may have been used in other contexts.
In the same way, Hatcher is now arguing that because he has found a prophecy in Isaiah that may have intended a long "time gap" between successive verses, it must therefore be true that "Daniel" intended a long gap between verses in 11:39-40. Up through verse 39, the "king of the north" and the "king of the south" were the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kings respectively, but then at verse 40, these kings suddenly became kings who would live in the distant future, and we can know that this is what "Daniel" meant because Isaiah may have intended a long time gap like this in his "prophecy" in 61:1-3. If Hatcher would consult a basis textbook in logic, I think he would profit from reading what it says about the non sequitur fallacy.
The dilemma facing critics: Hatcher thinks that unless critics accept the "prophetic time gap" that he sees in 11:39-40, then they will face a "dilemma," because they will have to explain why a "forger in 165 BC [would] be foolish enough to give specific details about the death of Antiochus and leave himself open to be proved to be a writer of fraud." Hatcher thinks that a real forger, upon reaching his own time period, would have "slip[ped] into a vague prediction that would not be falsifiable," and since the writer of Daniel didn't do this, Hatcher sees the exactness of his language at this point as evidence that he had, unannounced, taken the long leap forward that dispensationalists have imagined in order to make Daniel's prophecies fit their desired prophetic mold.
As a critic of biblical inerrancy, I can only wish that "dilemmas" were always as easy to escape from as this one is. The "dilemma" that Hatcher sees here is based on the premise that the author of Daniel knew that the document he was writing was destined to become the religious icon that it is today, but there is nothing that even suggests that he thought this. His intention was to encourage the people of his time through a period of persecution, and if he could accomplish that, why would he have been concerned about what people living many centuries after the crisis might think? Indeed, the "slip" into vagueness that Hatcher thinks a real forger would have made at this point would have been self-defeating, because readers of that time would have had reason to wonder why prophecies that had so far been very specific about the tyrant whom they all despised would suddenly become so vague that they had no way of knowing what the final outcome of the tribulations would be, so the continuance of his specific prophecies at this point was entirely consistent with the author's probable motive for writing the book. If the Jews had triumphed over the persecutions of Antiochus, who would have cared about the incorrectness of a few prophecies about the fate of their persecutor?
The end times: Hatcher needs to look very carefully at what was said about the "time of the end" in the early part of Daniel's visions. References to the "end of days" had begun as far back as Daniel's dream interpretations in chapter 2.
Daniel 2:27-28 Daniel answered the king, "No wise men, enchanters, magicians, or diviners can show to the king the mystery that the king is asking, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries, and he has disclosed to King Nebuchadnezzar what will happen at the end of days."
"Daniel" said this prior to explaining to Nebuchadnezzar that the four metals, which were in the image the king had seen in his dream, represented four kingdoms that would begin with Nebuchadnezzar's and end with the third one that would follow his. In previous articles, I have shownand Michael Bradford seems to agree that the last of these four kingdoms was the Grecian empire. That being the case, it would follow that if Nebuchadnezzar's dream had been intended by the "God in heaven" to show Nebuchadnezzar "what will happen at the end of days," then the writer of this book thought that the end of days would come during the time of the fourth or Grecian kingdom.
The visions of Daniel in chapters 7 and 8 support this conclusion.
Daniel 8:17-19 So he [Gabriel] came near where I stood; and when he came, I became frightened and fell prostrate. But he said to me, "Understand, O mortal, that the vision is for the time of the end." As he was speaking to me, I fell into a trance, face to the ground; then he touched me and set me on my feet. He said, "Listen, and I will tell you what will take place later in the period of wrath; for it refers to the appointed time of the end."
A voice that spoke when Gabriel appeared to Daniel in this vision had said, "Gabriel, help this man understand the vision" (v:16), so unless the voice was referring to the vision of the ram and male goat that Daniel had just seen in the earlier part of this chapter, the command for Gabriel to help Daniel understand the vision makes no sense. That Gabriel proceeded immediately to explain to Daniel what the ram's horns and the male goat symbolized but made no references to any other visions shows rather conclusively that this was indeed the vision that the "voice" had sent Gabriel to explain. We have already noted what the symbols of the horns and the goat meant, but another look at Gabriel's explanation will help us determine what the "end of days" was referring to.
Daniel 8:20-21 As for the ram that you saw with the two horns, these are the kings of Media and Persia. The male goat is the king of Greece, and the great horn between its eyes is the first king.
This interpretation of the symbols followed immediately on the heels of Gabriel's statement, quoted in column one, that the vision he had been sent to explain to Daniel was about "what shall be in the latter time of the indignation " (ASV), for "it refers to the appointed time of the end"(v:19). That's clear enough that even Hatcher should understand it. The vision of the ram's horns and the male goat referred to the time of the end, and the goat symbolized the empire of the king of Greece. Hence, the writer of Daniel, in typical apocalyptic fashion, thought that the time of the end was imminent and would happen at a time that he believed was the final days of the Grecian empire.
In 11:35, the writer made another reference to the time of the end on the heels of verses 28-34, which described ["prophesied"] events that people living in the time of Antiochus would have easily recognized. In his letter on page 12 of this issue, Hatcher said that he considered the commentary of John J. Collins to be the standard by which all commentaries should be judged, so if Hatcher will consult this standard that he admires so much, he will see that Collins clearly understood 11:28-34 to be references to events in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes. The usage of "the time of the end" in this context and in the interpretation of the symbols in Daniel's visions (chapters 7-8) is very strong textual evidence that "the time of the end" to the writer was a period coming at the end of the Grecian empire and not an era in the distant future. A "prophetic time gap" between 11:39 and 11:40 exists only in the imagination of inerrantists who have a cherished dispensationalist belief to advocate. The end did not come, and the "God of heaven" did not "set up a kingdom " (2:44) within the time frame indicated by the most likely meaning of Daniel's prophetic language, so biblicists have had to go back to the drawing board and reinterpret the texts in order to salvage the book from obvious prophecy failure. Hatcher's "prophetic gap " in 11:39-40 is just one of those salvage efforts. Ten thousand years from now, the Everette Hatchers of that time could be arguing that Daniel's prophecy of "the last days" didn't fail; the "prophetic gap" just hasn't yet been spanned. That's the kind of nonsense that biblicists must resort to in order to find inerrancy in the Bible.
The linguistic "evidence": Hatcher began this section of his article with a quotation from Dr. Stephen Miller, who said that "the linguistic evidence does not necessitate a late date for the composition of the Book of Daniel and in a number of cases rather supports an early date," but Miller, as I pointed out in my reply to Hatcher in the previous issue, is a professor at Mid-America Theological Seminary, whose mission statement declares a belief that "the Bible is the verbally inspired Word of God, wholly without error as originally given by God," so we could hardly expect Miller to say that anything in Daniel supports a late date for the composition of this book. In accordance with what I quoted earlier from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Miller is a hired attorney, who cannot take any position on Daniel or any other book in the Bible that would suggest that it is not the "inspired, inerrant word of God." When a so-called scholar is forced to defend a position like this, intellectual objectivity is hardly possible, so as far as I'm concerned, Miller's opinion really doesn't carry much weight.
At any rate, Hatcher, in typical fashion failed to give a single bit of "linguistic evidence" on which Miller based this assertion, so there is really nothing for me to reply to here. I will simply refer readers to the letters from Hatcher and Bruce Wildish on page 12 of this issue and echo what Wildish said about Hatcher's claim that "conservative scholars" had answered to his "satisfaction" all of the linguistic arguments of the "liberals." In the same context, Hatcher had said that he considered John J. Collins’ commentary on Daniel to be "the standard to judge all other critical commentaries by." Wildish wondered how Hatcher could say this and still believe that conservative scholars had answered all liberal linguistic arguments to his satisfaction, because Collins believes in the 2nd-century authorship of Daniel and thinks that this dating finds some linguistic support in the book. In his reply to Hatcher's letter (p. 12), Wildish summarized Collins’ conclusions on the linguistic evidence. I have obtained a copy of Collins’ commentary and have found Wildish's summation to be accurate.
Hatcher himself devoted two thirds of a column in this issue (p. 3) to Samuel Driver's view that "(t)he Persian words [in Daniel] presuppose a period after the Persian Empire had been well established " and "the Greek words demand, the Hebrew supports, and the Aramaic permits a date after the conquest of Palestine by Alexander the Great," but then almost immediately afterwards, he quoted a statement published six years ago in *The Skeptical Review,* which based the 2nd-century dating of Daniel on the linguistic conclusions of biblical scholars and challenged me to "come forth with the specific names of those scholars" to whom I was referring. Well, duh, what's wrong with the specific names of such scholars that Hatcher himself has quoted and cited? What's wrong with John J. Collins and Samuel Driver? What's wrong with H. H. Rowley and Norman Porteous? What's wrong with Walter Baumgartner and Joseph Fitzmeyer? Throughout this debate, Hatcher has tried to impress us with an array of references to scholars who reject the 6th-century view of authorship. Having dropped such names, he has to know that there are many scholars who think that the 2nd-century view is supported by linguistic evidence, so is he playing some kind of game here? Did he seriously think that I would be unable to "come forth" with the names of scholars who think that the Aramaic and Hebrew of Daniel indicate a late date of authorship?
At one point, Hatcher said, "Maybe Till has read pages 27-32 in Stephen Miller's commentary, and he is uncomfortable with what he discovered concerning the linguistic evidence" (p. 3). In fact, I have not read Miller's commentary. Reading all biblical commentaries would be an impossible task, so when I look for scholarly opinions on biblical matters, I usually go to those who are not, in Emerson's words, "retained attorney[s]," whose employment at fundamentalist colleges and universities will not permit them to speak contrary to the mission statements of those institutions, where the Bible is declared to be the inspired, inerrant word of God. I know that I will get more objective opinions from scholars like Driver, Rowley, Porteous, or Collins, who had no commitments to dogmas that would prevent them from reaching conclusions demanded by the evidence.
Hatcher's last "scholar": In concluding his article, Hatcher outdid himself in his quest for "scholarly " proof of a 6th-century BC dating of Daniel. After dropping names like William Shea, Wayne Brindle, and Stephen Millerall of whom turned out to be Bible instructors at fundamentalist colleges committed to propagating biblical inerrancyhe threw at us a long quotation from Gleason Archer, who would make the above mentioned "scholars" look downright liberal. For those who may not know, Gleason Archer is the author of Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, which is probably the reference work most often quoted in defense of biblical inerrancy. This is a 463-page work that undertakes to "explain" biblical discrepancies and contradictions. Over two thousand scriptures that Archer "explained" are indexed in this book, and in none of them did Archer find a discrepancy. Space will not allow me to quote some examples of the far-fetched scenarios that Archer resorted to in order to find "consistency" in all of the "alleged" discrepancies that he addressed, but not once did Archer say, "Yep, this appears to be a discrepancy that can't be explained." He always had an explanation. Getting an objective opinion on the gun-control issue from Charlton Heston would be far more likely than getting an objective opinion from Gleason Archer on biblical inerrancy, yet Hatcher chose Archer as his final "scholar" to quote.
The lengthy quotation from Archer claimed that the Aramaic in the Genesis Apocryphon found in Cave 1 at Qumran, which has been dated to the 3rd century BC, has a linguistic style that is "considerably later" than the Aramaic chapters in Daniel. Archer went on to give several examples of specific word forms in the Genesis Apocryphon that were different from the ones in Daniel. Like Hatcher, I had to read Archer's arguments from the disadvantaged position of one who has never studied Aramaic, but his arguments appeared to be somewhat like someone comparing two documents in English, one of which used such word forms as thou, thee, and thy, whereas the other one used you, you, and your. Since you, you, and your are obviously later linguistic developments than thou, thee, and thy, one would be inclined to date the former before the latter.
Hatcher has said that he considers John J. Collins’ commentary on Daniel to be the standard by which all other commentaries should be judged, so I don't understand why Hatcher rejects what Collins has said about the Aramaic in the Genesis Apocryphon. As Wildish pointed out in his letter on page 12 of this issue, the so-called "official Aramaic" of Daniel, although used in the Babylonian era, was "common in both administrative and nonadministrative contexts from, give or take, about 700 BCE to 200 BCE." Collins confirmed this on page 14 of his commentary and cited, among others, Joseph Fitzmeyer as an authority in agreement with this conclusion. Wildish discussed this point in detail in his letter, so there is no need for further comment here.
I will, however, direct one of Hatcher's points back at him. Concerning the vagueness in Daniel's prophecies that began at 11:40, Hatcher asked why "a forger in 165 B. C. [would] be foolish enough to give specific details about the death of Antiochus and leave himself open to be proved to be a writer of fraud," so I will ask him why a forger in 165 BC, trying to present himself as a 6th-century prophet would have been foolish enough to use Aramaic word forms that he knew were in current use rather than the forms that had been used earlier. My point here should be obvious to Hatcher. If I tried today to forge a document to make it appear that it had been written in the 1600s, I certainly wouldn't be foolish enough to use modern pronoun forms like you, your, and yours instead of thou, thee, thy, and thine, which were in use in the 17th century, and I would be careful to use verb forms like sayest , saith, hast, haveth, etc. instead of their modern equivalents.
In other words, usage of the vocabulary of a particular period does not constitute evidence that a document was written when those words were commonly used, because a knowledgeable forger could have deliberately used them to give credibility to the document. The opposite, however, would not be true. If I, for example, should try to forge a document purported to date from the 17th century, usage of words like *television, airplane, internet,* and such like would be a dead giveaway that at least the sections containing such words were not written when claimed. This is a simple matter of what Bruce Wildish claimed in his article: "(A)ny text that speaks clearly of events now known to have happened cannot have been written any earlier than the events to which it refers" (January/February 2000, p. 2). The same principle applies to linguistics. A text could not have been written before the time that the words it used existed. The commentary by Collins that Hatcher holds in such high esteem contains a section (pp. 20-23) where Collins discussed this very point. He referred to Driver, who had identified "a list of upwards of thirty expressions, some found otherwise only in post-Biblical Hebrew, or in Aramaic, others common to the Hebrew of Daniel and that of Chronicles and other late writings, but occurring never, or (in the case of one or two) very rarely, in the later literature" (p. 20 emphasis added). Collins’ discussion of evidence of late authorship in the Hebrew of Daniel is too extensive to summarize here, but he identified "Aramaisms," preferences in vocabulary, syntactical and grammatical features, late verbal forms, and late idioms, which give support to the widely held scholarly view that Daniel was written after the 6th century BC and most likely in the 2nd century. Hatcher wanted to discuss the linguistic evidence, so now it has been discussed. If Hatcher really wants to see linguistic evidence of late authorship, I would recommend that he read again the commentary that he thinks is the standard by which all commentaries should be judged.
If I were in his position, however, I would give up trying to prove 6th-century authorship of Daniel by "linguistic evidence," because he just doesn't have the expertise necessary to make such judgments. All he can do in linguistic matters is rely on what biblical "scholars" say, and if he is going to do that, I have to wonder why he rejects the consensus of the majority. I recommend that he take another look at the scholar who he thinks has set the standard by which all biblical commentaries should be judge.
Conclusion: I have now devoted four consecutive issues to Hatcher's crusade to discredit mainstream biblical scholarship in the dating of the book of Daniel. This has been in addition to several earlier issues in which I published his materials on this subject. I have given him publishing space that cost hundreds of dollars, and through it all, he has done little more than quote fundamentalist writers, while only rarely including any supporting arguments that these authors may have used. In so doing, he has used a debating tactic known as "stacking," which is widely used by biblical fundamentalists. Stacking consists of stringing together assertion after assertion without even trying to prove them with supporting evidence, and this is usually done either to leave the impression that the evidence for one's position is overwhelming or to enter into the debate more material than the debater's opponent will have time or space to answer. Hatcher's stacking may have been motivated by both, but if these were his intentions, I think I can say that I have thwarted them by taking as much space as necessary to answer him point by point. However, I don't intend to continue catering to his desire to bombard TSR readers with unsupported assertions published by biblical fundamentalists. If he wishes to continue the debate, he will have to stop stacking his articles with endless lists of "scholars" who think this or that, and limit each article to just a few points, which he then supports with logical arguments rather than what certain biblical fundamentalists think. He will also have to make serious attempts to answer my rebuttals.
If he isn't willing to follow these reasonable guidelines, the
debate is over, because I will not devote any more space to just the
rehashing of fundamentalist claims that he doesn't support and whose
rebuttals he ignores. Nothing will be accomplished by just letting him
recycle unsupported assertions that have been repeatedly answered.
