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'Slowly the Bible of the race is writ,

Each age, each kindred adds a verse to it.

While swings the sea, while mists the mountains shroud, While thunder's surges burst on cliffs of cloud,

Still at the prophets' feet the nations sit.'

LOWELL.

To vindicate

The honour of Thy Name, and lift elate
The glorious standard of Thy truth sublime,
The prophets' lips were purged in former time.'

MORINE.

'The prophecy of Micah produced a great impression on his contemporaries, for he spoke to the masses of the people as one of themselves.' ROBERTSON SMITH.

"The Minor Prophets are like an annulet of pearls strung on the thread of the Canon.'

HERDER.

'Malachi-Seal of the prophets, last of the Heaven-burdened, Heaven-directed line, foretelling glories now long ages passed.'

258758

COSTER.

Introduction

DANIEL

THE story, as well as in some ways the character, of Daniel bears a striking resemblance to that of Joseph. Taken as a captive, when a youth, into the centre of a mighty alien civilisation, living in the midst of subtle temptations, each of them passed, in young manhood, to the rank of prime minister of a great empire, and by the same means, the reading of dreams troubling the king, where in one case the very dream itself was forgotten.

Daniel appears to have been of noble, and perhaps of royal birth, and was taken when a youth in the deportation to Babylon in the third year of Jehoiakim. After a three years' training, the God-given opportunity came in the dream of the great image which none could declare to Nebuchadnezzar. As the result of this, Daniel became the viceroy in the province of Babylon, and his friends, Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, held office under him. How it came about that these three only, and not Daniel, incurred the peril of the fiery furnace does not appear. We next meet Daniel explaining Nebuchadnezzar's second dream, after which a blank of many years ensues, till he is brought forth from retirement to read the mysterious writing on the wall at Belshazzar's feast, and to be declared third ruler in the kingdom by a king who was slain that very night. Still, Daniel's fame survived the fall of the Babylonian Empire, and, under

'Darius the Mede,' he was appointed the first of the three presidents. Yet here the jealousy of his heathen colleagues sought to achieve his ruin; but God, mighty to save, 'stopped the mouths of lions,' as He had 'quenched the violence of fire.’ With the statement that Daniel survived and prospered into the reign of Cyrus the Persian, his personal history ends. The remainder of the book consists of visions granted to him in the reign of Belshazzar, 'Darius the Mede,' and Cyrus.

The Book of Daniel, apart from the historical element which it contains, is unique in the O.T. In it prophecy gives place to apocalypse, the first example of a kind of literature which afterwards became common. The influence of the apocalypse of Daniel on early Christian thought was immense, as well as on Jewish apocalypses. Our Lord gives an emphatic recognition to the book, and it is impossible to enter properly into the study of the Revelation of St. John, unless the imagery of Daniel be compared with it at every stage. The seer, alike in Babylon and in Patmos, projects himself into the future and looks back from the last days. Amid the symbolic imagery of Daniel's visions, the thought of the nation widens into that of the world, and, as has been well said, we enter for the first time upon the philosophy of history. God chooses His instruments with perfect wisdom: with the widening purpose Daniel was to fulfil, we can see how not merely character and intellectual power, but political experience and training in the wisdom of the Chaldeans, were forces relevant to the work.

It may be well to fix the position by a few dates. We may assume that Daniel was deported to Babylon in 606 B.C., that he saw Babylon fall in 538 B.C., and survived, for how long does not appear, the assumption of empire by Cyrus. The latest

note of him is in x. I. The Book of Daniel, it will be noticed, speaks of Daniel in the third person in chaps. i.-vii. (save in vii. 28), and during the remainder consistently in the first person. It is bilingual, i. 1-ii. 4a being in Hebrew, thence to vii. 28 in Chaldee' or Aramaic, and thence to the end in Hebrew. Why there is this interchange of the sacred tongue and the vernacular does not clearly appear, but it is possible that the solution may be found in the way in which the book has come into its present form. While we believe that the history and the prophecies of Daniel are genuine products of the sixth century B.C., we do not feel it necessary to suppose that we now have the book just as it left Daniel's hands. The well-known statement of the Talmud makes 'Daniel,' with other books, to have been written by 'the men of the Great Synagogue.' This, of course, simply refers to their editorial action, and internal evidence is in favour of such a view. Thus we may, if we wish, suppose that various records in the two languages, from the hand of Daniel, were combined and shaped. Indeed it is conceivable that the editors may have amplified the narrative here and there for the sake of clearness, while the visions possessed a sacredness which a man might not presume to touch.

On the view we have here taken, the Book of Daniel is, save for editorial revision of the narrative, a work of the sixth century B.C. A view, however, taken by many modern critics is that it is a work of the Maccabean age, due to perhaps 165 B.C. We can only indicate in a very general way the lines of attack and defence. The real objection lies deep. The book contains the record of miracles, perhaps as wondrous as any in Scripture; it contains a body of predictions, which, if the book is what it

that the whole colouring of the book is Babylonian, and we can hardly conceive that the necessary knowledge would be current in Palestine in the Maccabean age. Many points still remain doubtful, but much has been cleared up by the help of the Inscriptions. Thus it was not till 1854 that we knew more of Belshazzar than was told in the Book of Daniel.

With regard to the interpretation of the prophecies of Daniel, we are faced by the widest diversities of view, and to enter into these in detail is impossible. On one point there has been an approximation to unanimity, that of the Four Kingdoms. Tradition has long explained these of the Babylonian, MedoPersian, Greek (i.e., the empire of Alexander and his successors), and Roman. The twelve-winged eagle of 2 Esdras xii., which seems to stand for the Fourth Beast of Daniel, can hardly be identified with aught but Rome. Yet there is a grave diffi culty. Four empires are to have their day before the coming of Messiah-to pass away before that coming. But the power of Rome was dominant for some centuries after our Lord's birth. Again, the early Church looked for a speedy return of Christ to judge the world, so that the end of Roman power and the end of the present dispensation were to be one, and no idea was present to them of a long-surviving Roman empire or of the centuries of conflict among the nations after its fall. In O.T. prophecies generally, we hold the belief in a nearer and a remoter fulfilment. We do not narrow the concluding chapters of Isaiah to the declaration of the return from Babylon, but believe that it points on to the triumph over mightier foes than Babylon and by a mightier Deliverer than Cyrus. Why not so in Daniel? Why should not the prophecies describing the conflicts between the Church and the nations before the First