Book of Daniel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: The Book of Daniel is a book of the Bible which contains an "account of the activities and visions of Daniel, a noble Jew exiled at Babylon."[1] In the Hebrew Bible it is found in the Ketuvim (writings), while in Christian Bibles it is grouped with the Major Prophets.
The Jewish and Protestant versions of Daniel (the Greek and Catholic version contains additional material) divide into two parts, a set of tales in chapters 1–6 in which Daniel and his companions demonstrate the superiority of their God, and the series of visions making up chapters 7–12.[3][4] Traditionally ascribed to Daniel himself, modern scholarly consensus considers the book pseudonymous, the stories of the first half legendary in origin, and the visions of the second the product of anonymous authors in the Maccabean period (2nd century BCE).[4] Its exclusion from the Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve) was probably because it appeared after the canon for those books had closed, and the dominant view among scholars is that Daniel is not in any case a prophetic book but an apocalypse.[5] The Greek and Catholic versions of Daniel include three books that seem to have been written later than the original: The Song of the Three Holy Children, The History of Susanna, and The History of the Destruction of Bel and the Dragon.
The book's message is that just as the God of Israel saved Daniel and his friends from their enemies, so he would save all of Israel in their present oppression.[7] Its influence has resonated through later ages, from the Dead Sea Scrolls community and the authors of the gospels and Revelation, the various movements from the 2nd century to the Protestant Reformation, and modern millennialist movements, on whom it continues to have a profound influence.
Daniel remains one of the most influential apocalypses in modern America, along with Ezekiel and Revelation. For modern popularizers elaborating a traditional Christian interpretive framework, Daniel is a prophet who foretells the first coming of Jesus and a series of events that still lie in the future, when a ten-nation confederation (symbolized by the ten toes of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar's dream), ruled by the Antichrist (the "little horn"), will be destroyed by Jesus (the "rock not made by human hands") as he returns (the Second Coming to rule the final and eternal kingdom.
Daniel belongs not only to the religious tradition but also to the Western secular heritage. Philosophers (Spinoza), psychologists (Carl Jung) and the physicist Isaac Newton all paid special attention to the book; it has inspired musicians from Medieval liturgical drama to the 20th century compositions of Darius Milhaud, and artists including Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Delacroix have drawn upon its imagery.
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