Theological Bites
After 12 years of sharing and teaching the word of God to various audiences, I have understood the importance and magic of repetition. I keep saying the same things I have said in the past if am to or about to introduce something new. We are human beings and one of our weaknesses is forgetfulness. Esther (my love) always fights me on the issue of forgetfulness and am sure it is not me alone who is that forgetful. I choose, therefore, to always remind ourselves what I have always said.
Book Genre
To many, the book of Daniel is placed and categorized under the prophets. Daniel is understood to be one of the major (size) Prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. Whoever believes this is justified because the book has those predictive parts and since sometimes prophecy was circumstantially predictive, then those areas in which are predictions we can conclude that it is prophetic. To the Hebrews (first recipients of the canon) however, it is not the case. In the original Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) is comprised of the Torah (first five books of Moses), Nevi’im (Prophets) and Ketuv’im (Writings). Together they are known as the T’N’K or Tanakh.
In our Bibles mostly patterned and translated from the Septuagint/LXX (Old Testament Greek Translation) the book of Daniel is placed between Ezekiel and the Minor Prophets but in the Hebrew Bible, it is placed among the Kethubim between Esther and Ezra-Nehemiah. The place of each book in the Hebrew Bible is significant for it communicates not a chronology, alphabetical order, and neither size but its genre. To the Hebrews therefore, Daniel was not a prophet but a Hebrew wise man (Daniel 1:20; Ezekiel 28:3). While it is true that it (Daniel) is wisdom literature, the content of the book and its time in the history of Israel indicates that the book is a development in the philosophical world view of the Hebrew sages (wisdom).
Old Testament Theological Development
While Daniel is a wisdom book like Proverbs, Psalms, Song of Songs, etc., it is not structured as those other books but rather patterned after existing events of its time in anticipation of a futuristic development of the present ones. This conclusion is reached upon based on the historical occurrence of two major events in the theological history of the Jews. These are what I call:
(1) – the Gentile Inclusion (Yahweh Universalism) and
(2) – the Gentile Captors (Exile)
The theology of the Jews faced a shift in its exclusivity-reality (Yahweh as a tribal god) and that shift is first exhibited and signaled in the story of Ruth the Moabite, a foreign woman who enters the sacred community of Israel and becomes great-grandmother to none other than King David.
This inclusion of foreign blood (Ruth – Mathew 1:5) in the Lineage of royal blood like that of David who shares the bloodline with the anticipated messiah explains the presence of sinful blood (Rahab-Mathew 1:5) in the queue of sacred blood. This event of Gentile inclusion in the royal genealogy revolutionalized the Jewish theological beliefs on the mindset of Yahweh to the gentiles in contrast to what they really believed it was (Ezra 9-10; Ezekiel 1-3). This gentile inclusion theology is scattered through the Old Testament wisdom books and majorly in the prophets (Isaiah 56:3-7; Isaiah 60:1-3; Jeremiah 16:19-21; Zechariah 2:11; Malachi 1:11; Romans 15:9-12= Psalm 18:49, Deuteronomy 32:43, Psalm 117:1, and Isaiah 11:10).
The second event that shapes the Genre of the book of Daniel is the exile. For the Jews to be under the captivity of the Gentiles (unclean) with their exclusive theological mindset, it affected how they thought about God and how they communicated his oracles. Whenever a conservative Jew was under captivity and received a revelation from Yahweh, it was packaged not merely in visions and dreams but also encoded. The prophet in Israel communicated directly by saying ‘the Lord said as he lives there will be no rain for three years’ (1Kings 17:1-2) but when the prophet in Exile wanted to communicate the departure of the glory of God he said, ‘and I saw the four living creature deserting the temple’ (Ezekiel 10:1-19; 4:6-8).
This encrypted kind of communication was intended that the listening gentile community could not perceive the oracles of God since they did not deserve anything good from Yahweh but judgment. The Jews spoke in such a manner only when they were in gentile land and especially under oppression just as they were in exile. This period sees the rise of what we know today as apocalyptic literature. In the Old Testament, the apocalypse can be traced in works like Zechariah, Joel, and Daniel while in the New Testament it is in the book of Revelation.
Though Zechariah and Joel are post-exilic, they are recorded during a period of persecution in the 2nd c. BCE. While the book of Ezekiel contains such a style like that, which appears in the book of Daniel and that of Revelation it is not apocalyptic in genre as that of Daniel and Revelation is because it is a message directly to Israelites and not nations as the two are. The book of Daniel contains many features and themes of apocalyptic literature, including an eschatology according to which God dramatically intervenes in human history, destroying the wicked (understood as other nations) and saving the righteous (understood as Israel).
Conclusion
To consider Daniel as an Old Testament prophet equal to Elijah or Nathan is to miss the message the book communicates altogether. We must understand that the genre of a Bible book is of great importance in how the reader perceives the message. While there are prophetic tendencies (predictive and warnings), the genre of the book is wisdom literature and apocalyptic in nature. Just as there are apocalyptic portions in Ezekiel but it’s still a prophetic book. There are prophetic portions in the book of Daniel but it’s still an apocalypse. Next, we will further this discussion by looking at other aspects of this literature.
God bless you, I invoke TRUTH, WISDOM, and FAITH (2Tim 2:7)
Priest M.I.T WHITE (+256-775-822833 for further inquiries)
iTiS Well of Worship Fellowship (John 4:24)
QUESTIONING TO BELIEVE, BELIEVING TO QUESTION
iTiS Well of Worship Fellowship (John 4:24) 