Page:06.CBOT.KD.PropheticalBooks.B.vol.6.LesserProphets.djvu/69

 kings were indeed heathen, who, according to the common opinion of all heathens, held their national gods to be greater and more powerful than the gods of the nations subdued by them, among whom they also placed the God of Israel; but they that heard of the wonders of His divine omnipotence, they gave honour to the God of Israel as the God of heaven and of earth, partly by express confession of Him, and partly, at least as Belshazzar did, by honouring the true worshippers of this God. Antiochus Epiphanes, on the contrary, persisted in his almost mad rage against the worship of God as practised by the Jews till he was swept away by the divine judgment. If the pretended pseudo-Daniel, therefore, had directed his view to Antiochus Epiphanes in the setting forth of such narratives, we could only imagine the purpose to have been that he might lead this fierce enemy of his people to acknowledge and worship the true God. But with such a supposition not only does the sentiment of the Jews, as it is brought to light in the books of the Maccabees, stand in opposition, but it is also contradicted by the prophecies of this book, which threaten the daring and deceitful king, who would take away the daily sacrifice and lay waste the sanctuary, with destruction without the hand of man, without giving any room for the thought of the possibility of a change of mind, or of his conversion. The author of these prophecies cannot therefore have followed, in the historical narratives of his book, the tendency imputed to him by modern critics. On the whole, an entire misapprehension of the spirit which pervades the historical parts of the book of Daniel lies at the foundation of the supposition of such a tendency. The narratives regarding Nebuchadnezzar, his dream, the consecration of the golden statue, and his conduct after his recovery from his madness, as well as those regarding Darius, Daniel 6, could not be invented, at least could not be invented by a Maccabean Jew, because in the pre-exilian history there are altogether wanting types corresponding to the psychological delineation of these characters. It is true that a Pharaoh raised Joseph, who interpreted his dream, to be the chief ruler in his kingdom, but it does not come into his mind to give honour to the God who revealed in the dream what would befall his kingdom (Gen 41). For the other narratives of this book there are wanting in the Old Testament incidents with which they could be connected; and the resemblance between the life-experience of Joseph and that of Daniel extends only to these general matters, that both received from God the gift of interpreting