When was Daniel written?

What the book is doing

Daniel runs from 605 BCE (Dan 1:1, the third year of Jehoiakim) to about 536 BCE (Dan 10:1, the third year of Cyrus). The first half is court stories. Daniel and his three friends survive the politics of Babylon and Persia under Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, and Darius the Mede. The second half is visions. Daniel sees four of them under those same kings, each more cosmic and more specific than the last.

Chapter 11 is where the dating question lives. Starting in verse 2, an angel tells Daniel what is coming. Persia's last kings. A Greek king who will rise (Alexander). His kingdom breaking into four (the Diadochi). A long back-and-forth between the king of the north and the king of the south, which corresponds detail-by-detail to the Seleucid and Ptolemaic wars of the third and second centuries BCE. The chapter climaxes with a king who 'sets up the abomination that makes desolate' (11:31), language 1 Maccabees uses for what Antiochus IV did to the Jerusalem Temple in 167 BCE.

Then at verse 36, something changes. The chapter keeps narrating, but the details no longer match what is known about Antiochus IV's actual last years. He does not invade Egypt one more time. He does not die between the Mediterranean and Mount Zion. Whatever the verses are describing, they do not line up with the historical Antiochus IV's death at Tabae in Persia in 164 BCE. That seam, exactly where the predictive accuracy breaks, is what the whole debate turns on.

The timeline that frames the debate

Why verse 36 is the hinge

Daniel 11 reads like a roll call of Seleucid history. From verse 2 through verse 35, the details are checkable against 1 and 2 Maccabees, against Polybius, against Diodorus and Appian. The right battles are in the right order. The right kings make the right marriages and break the right treaties. The right Temple is desecrated in the right year. If you put the chapter next to the historical record from 333 BCE through 167 BCE, the match is striking.

Then verse 36 arrives, and the match comes apart. The chapter keeps describing the same king. He exalts himself above every god. He invades the south one more time. He plants his royal tent 'between the seas and the glorious holy mountain' and meets his end there. None of that is what Antiochus IV actually did. By 168 BCE, Rome had ended his Egyptian ambitions. His final campaign went eastward into Persia, not southward into Egypt. He died at Tabae in Persia in late 164 BCE, of illness, far from Jerusalem.

How the sixth-century reading answers verse 36

Defenders of the sixth-century date have answered the seam in three overlapping ways, all of which trace back to Jerome's response to Porphyry. The simplest is that the chapter does describe Antiochus IV all the way through, and the apparent discrepancies in verses 36-45 are typological rather than literal. The 'tabernacles between the seas and the glorious holy mountain' is the kind of figurative geography that the prophets use elsewhere (compare Isa 14:13 or Ezek 38:6), not a battlefield report.

The second move is genre-internal. Verse 36 opens with the phrase 'at the time of the end' (Hebrew be-ʿet qets). Jerome and later defenders argue this is the chapter's textual marker for a shift inside the prophecy itself, from the near prediction of Antiochus IV to a longer-range eschatological prediction about a final figure who will resemble Antiochus but is not him. On this reading, verse 36 is not a seam between authentic history and speculation. It is the seam between near and far horizons inside the same predictive vision. The chapter is doing what Isaiah 7 does when Isaiah's near sign (the birth of Maher-shalal-hash-baz) gives way to a far horizon (Immanuel).

The third move is the eschatological-pivot reading proper, sometimes called the antichrist reading. The figure in verses 36-45 is a future king modeled on Antiochus IV but distinct from him, who will appear at the end of the age. This is how the early church read the chapter when it tied Dan 11:36 to 2 Thessalonians 2 ('the man of lawlessness') and Revelation 13. Calvin held a softer version of this. Modern defenders like Young and Miller make the move more cautiously, often leaving it open whether verses 36-45 describe Antiochus typologically or a future Antiochus-like figure.

Critics of these moves argue that the chapter gives no textual signal of a horizon shift, and that 'at the time of the end' is a stock apocalyptic phrase that appears elsewhere in Daniel (8:17, 19; 12:4, 9) without marking pivots. They argue that if the chapter intended a typological or eschatological jump at verse 36, the writer would have flagged it more clearly than with a single connective phrase that appears throughout the book. The sixth-century reading answers that prophetic and apocalyptic literature regularly compresses horizons this way, and the critic's expectation of a clean marker is anachronistic.

Porphyry: this debate is older than the New Testament canon

The earliest explicit argument for a second-century date does not come from a modern critic. It comes from a Neoplatonist philosopher named Porphyry of Tyre, writing in the 270s CE. Porphyry's fifteen-book work Against the Christians was ordered burned by Theodosius II in 448 CE. What we have of his Daniel argument survives because Jerome quoted him while writing against him.

That is the argument, basically intact. Porphyry says the chapter narrates the past with the accuracy of history and loses its precision exactly where Antiochus IV's actual fate diverged from what the text predicts. Jerome's response, set out across his commentary, is the package of moves described in the previous section: the discrepancies at 11:36-45 either describe Antiochus's death in typological geography, or jump ahead to a future eschatological figure.

What the manuscripts can and cannot decide

The manuscript evidence draws a hard ceiling. The book existed in something close to its current form by the late second century BCE, because that is when 4QDan-c (4Q114) was copied. Eight Daniel manuscripts have surfaced from the Qumran caves in total, more than any prophetic book except Isaiah and Psalms. That popularity is one reason a Maccabean date is uncomfortable. A book written in the 160s would need to be circulating as authoritative scripture by the 150s. Possible, but it leaves a narrow window.

The Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242) is the most discussed of the wider-tradition texts. It tells a first-person story in which Nabonidus, not Nebuchadnezzar, is afflicted with a disease for seven years and is eventually cured by a Jewish exorcist. The parallel to Daniel 4, which puts the same kind of story on Nebuchadnezzar, is hard to miss. Critics argue this is evidence that the canonical book of Daniel reshaped an older Nabonidus story and shifted it to the more famous king. Defenders of the canonical text argue 4Q242 is the dependent retelling, not the source.

There is one more textual wrinkle that matters for Daniel 11 specifically. The Old Greek (OG) and Theodotion (Th) versions diverge meaningfully through chapter 11. The OG paraphrases more freely and reorders some of the events. Theodotion is closer to the Masoretic Aramaic and Hebrew. For the dating question, this matters because the OG, which is the earlier translation, already treats the chapter as describing the second-century events with similar precision. The translator did not soften the seam at verse 36.

Court tales and visions: one book or two compositional layers?

Most modern critical commentary treats Daniel as having two compositional layers, not one. The court tales in chapters 1-6 read like a self-contained collection of stories about a wise Jewish courtier surviving foreign rule, in the same tradition as Joseph in Genesis 39-50 and Esther in the Persian court. The visions in chapters 7-12 are apocalyptic in form and tightly focused on the Antiochene crisis.

This matters because the two layers point to different settings. The court tales fit a wide range of dates from the Persian period through the early Hellenistic period and contain little that requires a Maccabean composition. The visions are where the second-century evidence is concentrated. Collins, Hartman and Di Lella, Newsom, and Lacocque all argue the most defensible reading is that the court tales pre-date the visions by some span, and that an editor in the 160s gathered the older tales and added the vision sequence, giving the whole work the unity of the Daniel character. This is a softer version of the Maccabean reading. It does not require that anything in chapters 1-6 was written during the crisis.

Sixth-century defenders generally reject the two-layer reading, arguing that the linguistic and stylistic links between the tales and the visions (the bilingual structure, the recurring vocabulary, the visions in the tales themselves at chapters 2 and 4) point to a unified composition. The two-layer reading and the unified-composition reading are distinct from the dating debate but tend to track with it.

Why the book is in two languages

Daniel is the only biblical book that switches languages mid-chapter. The opening (1:1 through the first sentence of 2:4) is Hebrew. Then the text switches to Aramaic for almost six chapters (2:4 through the end of chapter 7), and switches back to Hebrew for the rest. Nobody is sure why. The switch happens partway through a sentence, and it does not follow the seam between court tales and visions cleanly.

What we can say is that the language gives both sides ammunition. The Aramaic looks early in some features and late in others. Same with the Hebrew. The dating debate plays out in linguistics the same way it does in chapter 11.

Apocalyptic as a genre

The genre context is the move that does the most work in modern critical readings, and the one most often skipped in popular treatments. Daniel 7-12 is not the only second-temple text written as a vision attributed to an ancient seer that 'predicts' events the actual author already knew. The technical name for the move is ex eventu prophecy, prediction after the fact. It is a known literary convention, not a deception. Three of the closest comparisons are 1 Enoch (especially the Animal Apocalypse at 1 Enoch 85-90), 4 Ezra (composed after 70 CE but set in the Persian period), and 2 Baruch (also after 70 CE, set after the Babylonian destruction).

The Animal Apocalypse is the parallel most often cited. It is a vision in which the history of Israel is told through animal symbols, the predictions track accurately up through the Maccabean revolt, and then the accuracy breaks at the very point where the actual author was writing. Critical readings argue the pattern is the same as Daniel 11 and that the genre identification is decisive. The genre exists, the seam appears in other texts, and there is no need to make Daniel a unique case.

Sixth-century defenders push back on several fronts. The argument from parallel assumes 1 Enoch is the proper genre cohort for Daniel, and the dating of 1 Enoch's own sections (especially the Book of Dreams that contains the Animal Apocalypse) is itself contested. The 'identical seam' claim cuts both ways. If two texts share the same structure, that is also what one would expect if both contain genuine prediction of the same period, given that both circulate inside the same Second Temple Jewish tradition. And genuine predictive prophecy is an unambiguous biblical category. Isaiah 44:28 names Cyrus by name a century and a half before he took Babylon. Micah 5:2 names Bethlehem as the birthplace of the future ruler. The New Testament treats both as straightforward predictions, and traditional readers of Daniel hold that chapter 11 belongs in the same category.

The argument turns on which category Daniel falls into, and that decision rides on the rest of the evidence (the Qumran reception, the 11:36 seam, the linguistic features, the NT testimony), not on the genre label alone. Both sides agree on the genre comparators. They disagree on whether the comparators are decisive.

What this means for the New Testament

If Daniel is sixth-century, the New Testament's use of the book is straightforward. Jesus refers to 'the prophet Daniel' (Matt 24:15) and reads the Olivet Discourse as picking up Daniel's prediction of the abomination of desolation. Mark 13:14, the parallel passage, makes the same move. The title 'Son of Man' (Greek ho huios tou anthrōpou) that Jesus uses for himself in all four Gospels is drawn from Daniel 7:13. On a sixth-century reading, Jesus is quoting a 580-year-old prophetic vision and applying it to himself and to events of his own time.

If Daniel is Maccabean, the New Testament's use of the book gets more complicated, but it does not disappear. Jesus is then quoting a roughly 200-year-old apocalyptic text that was already received as scripture in his time (the Qumran community held eight copies of it). The 'Son of Man' figure becomes a literary character in an apocalyptic vision that Jesus applies to himself, drawing on language that had circulated in Jewish apocalyptic for two centuries (the 'Son of God' text at 4Q246 uses parallel phrasing in a related context). The Maccabean reading does not make the NT use of Daniel illegitimate. It changes the literary and historical pedigree of the language Jesus uses.

Different Christian traditions handle this differently. The classic Catholic and Protestant evangelical position holds that sixth-century Daniel is the natural reading of the New Testament's testimony. The modern Catholic critical position (Hartman/Di Lella in the Anchor Bible volume, sponsored by the Catholic Biblical Association) holds that the Maccabean date is compatible with inspiration, on the grounds that the inspiration of a text does not require its surface attribution to be historically accurate. Many mainline Protestant traditions hold a similar position. The pseudonymity of apocalyptic texts is treated as a genre feature, not a moral failing of the author.

What's actually at stake

The dating debate gets framed sometimes as a referendum on inerrancy, or on whether prophecy is possible. That framing makes the conversation worse than it has to be. Both readings have been held by people who affirm divine providence and the possibility of genuine prediction. Jerome accepted both. He also accepted that if Porphyry were right, the church would still be fine.

What is actually at stake is the genre. The sixth-century reading treats Daniel as predictive prophecy in the manner of Isaiah and Jeremiah. A seer foretelling events centuries ahead. The second-century reading treats it as apocalyptic literature in the manner of 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra, and 2 Baruch. A genre in which pseudonymous attribution to an ancient figure is a known convention, and where the 'predictions' are a literary form for theological commentary on the author's present crisis. The genre question is the one that decides how to read chapter 11, and whether the desolation of 167 BCE is one fulfillment among many or the primary referent of the whole vision sequence.

Reading Daniel with the question open

Most readers will not resolve a debate that has run from Porphyry to the present. The more accessible move is to read Daniel knowing the question is open. The court tales are wisdom literature about faithfulness under foreign rule. That meaning does not change with the dating. The visions are a theological response to imperial violence, encoded in the language of cosmic conflict. That meaning does not change either. What changes is the texture. Either Daniel 11 is a sixth-century seer watching four centuries unfold, or a second-century writer using apocalyptic form to give shape to a crisis he was actually living through. Either way, the chapter is doing something almost no other text in the Bible does.