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 long ago rebuilt, it could not come into the mind of any Jew to put into the mouth of the exiled prophet Daniel a penitential prayer for the restoration of the holy city, and to represent Gabriel as having brought to him the prophecy that the seventy years of the desolation of Jerusalem prophesied of by Jeremiah were not yet fulfilled, but should only be fulfilled after the lapse of seventy year-weeks, in contradiction to the testimony of Ezra, or, according to modern critics, of the author of the books of Chronicles and of Ezra, living at the end of the Persian era, that God, in order to fulfil His word spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, had in the first year of Cyrus stirred up the spirit of Cyrus the king of Persian to send forth an edict throughout his whole kingdom, which directed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and commanded them to rebuild the temple (2Ch 36:22., Ezr 1:1-4). 3. If now, in conclusion, we take into consideration the religious spirit of this book, we find that the opponents of its genuineness display no special gift of διάκρισις πνευμάτων when they place the book of Daniel in the same category with the Sybilline Oracles, the fourth book of Ezra (= 2 Esdras), the book of Enoch, the Ascentio Jesajae, and other pseudepigraphical products of apocryphal literature, and represent the narrative of the events of Daniel's life and his visions as a literary production after the manner of Deuteronomy and the book of Koheleth (Ecclesiastes), which a Maccabean Jew has chosen, in order to gain for the wholesome truths which he wished to represent to his contemporaries the wished-for acceptance (Bleek, p. 593f.). For this purpose, he must in the historical narratives, “by adducing the example of Daniel and his companions on the one side, and of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar on the other, exhort his fellow-countrymen to imitate the former in the inflexible stedfastness of their faith, in their open, fearless confession of the God of their fathers, and show them how this only true, all-powerful God will know in His own time to humble those who, like Antiochus Epiphanes, raised themselves against Him in presumptuous pride and sought to turn away His people from His service, and, on the other hand, to make His faithful worshippers in the end victorious” (Bleek, p. 601). Hence the tendency is conspicuous, “that the author in his descriptions in Daniel 3 and 6 almost always, in whole and in part, has kept before his eye the relations of his time (the land of Judea being then under the oppression of Antiochus Epiphanes) and the surrounding circumstances; and these he brings before his readers in a veiled, yet by them easily recognisable, manner” (p.