Aubrey E. Buster and John H. Walton, The Book of Daniel Chapters 1–6, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2025)
This work, which is the first of two, covers Buster’s and Walton’s introduction to Daniel and their comments on Daniel 1–6. Later this year, Eerdmans will release the second part, which covers their comments on Daniel 7–12.
Daniel Chapters 1–6 contains a lengthy introduction to Daniel (1–162), comments on Daniel 1:1–6:28 (163–774), an index of authors (775–88), an index of subjects (789–806), and an index of ancient sources, including the Bible (807–35).
The introduction is divided into thirteen sections with some initial introductory comments. In the latter, Buster and Walton inform the reader of their twofold framework for interpreting Daniel: their commitment to Scripture’s authority and the historical-critical method. Therefore, they conclude, “the strongest interpretation [of Daniel] is not the one that is most bound to tradition (whether ancient or modern), but the one that accounts for the most evidence in the strongest way possible” (2).
Buster and Walton begin by discussing the text of Daniel (“The Text of Daniel,” 3–21) in its various witnesses—the Masoretic text (the Leningrad Codex), the Greek Old Testament versions (the Old Greek and Theodotion), and evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls—as well as the languages in which Daniel was composed (Hebrew in Daniel 1:1–2:4a; 8:1–12:13 and Aramaic in Daniel 2:4b–7:28) and other languages that influenced its composition, Akkadian, Persian, Greek, and Egyptian (3–21).
In the introduction’s second section (“Additions to Daniel,” 21–24), Buster and Walton address three additions to the Hebrew/Aramaic text found in the Old Greek and Theodotion textual traditions: the prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Jews, the story of Susanna, and the story of Bel and the Dragon.
The third section (“Composition of Daniel,” 25–47) examines how Daniel was composed. Buster and Walton note that external evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls (4QDanc) and 1 Maccabees (1:61) evince that the work was completed by the end of the second century BC. From internal evidence, they propose that Daniel was composed gradually over a process of many years, beginning in the sixth century BC with the court tales (Daniel 1–6) and continuing through the Persian and Hellenistic periods (Daniel 7–12). Therefore, they offer the following model of composition:
- Daniel, a historical personage, is exiled to Babylon where he served in the Neo-Babylonian and Persian governments.
- Stories of his exploits and achievements began to be told among Jews (Daniel 1–6), thereby retaining authentic details of the time and place in which they occurred.
- In the retelling of these stories, story tellers reshaped them.
- Next, Daniel 7 was composed in Aramaic in the late fourth-to-early third century BC.
- Because Daniel 2:4b–7:28 is a coherent literary unit with the same language (Aramaic) and material (the four-kingdom scheme in Daniel 2 and 7, the miraculous deliverances in Daniel 3–6, and the critique of kings in Daniel 4–5), a version of Daniel with chapters 1–7 may have circulated at this time.
- Daniel 8–12 was composed in Hebrew during Antiochus IV Epiphanes’s reign.
- Finally, Daniel 7–12 was placed in Daniel’s mouth (45–46).
To this end, Buster and Walton conclude, “The book of Daniel is a result of a process that began in the Neo-Babylonian period among the Babylonian diaspora and that continued over four hundred years as storytellers, scribal scholars, and the ‘wise’ . . . reflected on and developed their understanding of exile and Israel’s future in light of the prophets” (47).
Because of their view on the authorship of Daniel, at length they discuss pseudonymity and pseudepigraphy—essentially a writing attributed (falsely by modern standards) to an ancient personage—in the ancient Near East and the Hellenistic world and devote several pages to placing these phenomena in their ancient contexts. They propose that by ancient standards “we must acknowledge the possibility that the attribution to Daniel is not a claim of authorial identification but of rhetorical attribution. If this is the case, the attribution to Daniel functions similarly to the attribution of other vision texts to well-known past figures in contemporary Jewish literature: to highlight the divine source of revelation, to construct analogies between past and present crises in Israel’s communal life, to connect later texts to already existing traditions, and to reinvigorate past texts in a program of progressive revelation” (emphasis theirs, 55).
In the fourth section (“History of the Implied Setting of the Book: The Sixth Century BCE,” 55–70), Buster and Walton describe the history of the ancient Near East as it relates to the Babylonian backdrop of the book, the court tales, and examine some historical difficulties that one encounters such as the dating of the reigns of Jehoiakim and Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel says that Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem “in the third year of the kingdom of Jehoiakim, king of Judah” (Daniel 1:1), but Jeremiah relates that Nebuchadnezzar came to power in Babylon during “the fourth year of Jehoiakim, son of Josiah, king of Judah” (Jeremiah 25:1). Concerning this issue, Buster and Walton conclude, “it might be better to consider the statement of Dan 1:1 as using conflation or, more specifically, [the ancient Near Eastern literary device of] telescoping,” which means that the verse refers to two separate events that have been conflated (62–63).
The fifth section (“History of the Implied Audience,” 70–84) describes the history of Palestine from the beginning of the Hellenistic period to the mid-second century BC, the period the implied audience of Daniel 7–12 covers: “Regardless of one’s conclusion regarding composition, however, the implied audience of the visions is situated in the Hellenistic period” (71). Therefore, this part examines the rise of Alexander the Great, the division of his kingdom among his generals, the Seleucid rule of Palestine, the rise of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and the program of the Hellenization of Judaism by some prominent mid-second century BC Jews in Jerusalem.
In the sixth and seventh sections (“Issues of the Cultural Background,” 84–92; “Hellenistic Polytheism, Religious Assimilation, and Tolerance,” 92–102), Buster and Walton discuss various cultural aspects, in particular what we would call religion, that were operative in the time periods that encompass Daniel’s background: Assyrio-Babylonian paganism, Zoroastrianism, Persian Zoroastrian dualism, Persian religious policy, Hellenistic paganism, its (in)tolerance of other cultic systems, Greek civic religion, and divine honors for humans.
The eighth part (“Genre of Daniel,” 102–32) explores the classification of Daniel (he is not a prophet, but a seer), the literary genre of the court tales, and Daniel as an apocalyptic work. In the latter section of this part, Buster and Walton delve into the genre of apocalyptic, its various backgrounds, its use in the Old Testament, how apocalyptic works differ from prophetic works, and some aspects of apocalyptic.
In the ninth portion (“Historical Accuracy and the Book of Daniel,” 132–47), Buster and Walton discuss the ways in which Daniel accurately reflects the historical reality over the years in which it was composed: “The [authors of the work] are not fabricating events or people, but they are engaged in selecting, shaping, and focusing the narrative using the rhetorical devices available to them as common in the genre and time that they are writing” (132). Consequently, one has to understand that Daniel telescopes—or compresses events on a timeline—events, rhetorically attributes words to the historical sixth century BC man Daniel, recontextualizes early material to address later events (such as the recontextualization of the four kingdom scheme in Daniel 2 in Daniel 7), conflates and thus attributes actions that one historical figure accomplishes to another, and describes past events through the prism of a future foretelling of them (vacticinium ex eventu).
The tenth part (“Structure of the Book,” 148–54) describes the overall structure of Daniel—which places chapter 7 at the pivotal point—and is unified by the figure of Daniel and his friends. In the eleventh portion (“Intertextuality in Daniel,” 154–58), Buster and Walton note that Daniel refers implicitly and explicitly to other parts of Sacred Scripture by adopting the genre of court tales such as found in the story of Joseph in Egypt (Genesis 39–50), by allusions to Ezekiel and God’s heavenly throne, and by referencing other Old Testament books: Jeremiah 25; 29 in Daniel 9. The twelfth part (“Canonicity,” 158–59) probes the place of Daniel in the canon. Buster and Walton point out that portions of all twelve chapters are present among the Dead Sea Scrolls and that the work appears to have been deemed “trustworthy and authoritative” by the mid-second century BC. Therefore, “as long as there has been a canon, it appears that Daniel has been in it” (159). The real question, however, is not whether the work is canonical, but which one is canonical, as the Roman Catholic and Orthodox canons follow the Greek versions containing extra stories not found in the Hebrew/Aramaic text of Daniel, the version that Jews and Protestants have canonized. In the final section (“Theology,” 159–62), Buster and Walton explore some theological aspects of Daniel such as God’s presence with his people even as they are scattered among the Gentiles and his presence and activity throughout Israel’s history, which will culminate in establishment of God’s kingdom in the future.
The rest of this volume contains a detailed, nuanced, contextualized, philological, and comprehensive engagement with the text(s) of Daniel. Buster and Walton pepper their work with excurses that allow the reader to go deeper into various aspects that are tangential, yet important, to the overall message of Daniel. For me, the great strengths of this volume are its interaction with primary ancient Near Eastern and Classical sources as well as the gamut of scholarship on Daniel, from those who hold to a sixth century BC dating of the book to those who place its composition in the mid-second century BC.
In short, this is a book that any exegete of Daniel, even one who not agree with their conclusions about authorship and composition as well as their exegesis of the text, will want in his or her library. Therefore, I highly recommend you picking up your own copy from Eerdmans forthwith.
I am grateful to Eerdmans for the gratis copy of this work, which in no way affected my review of it.
