Periphrases for God, like "the Ancient of Days," become normal in Talmudic literature.
VI. Again, the doctrine of the Messiah, like these other doctrines, is, as Professor Driver says, "taught with greater distinctness and in a more developed form than elsewhere in the Old Testament, and with features approximating to, though not identical with, those met with in the earlier parts of the Book of Enoch (b.c. 100). In one or two instances these developments may have been partially moulded by foreign influences.[150] They undoubtedly mark a later phase of revelation than that which is set before us in other books of the Old Testament. And the conclusion indicated by these special features in the Book is confirmed by the general atmosphere which we breathe throughout it. The atmosphere and tone are not those of any other writings belonging to the Jews of the Exile; it is rather that of the Maccabean Chasidîm." How far the Messianic Bar Enosh (vii. 13) is meant to be a person will be considered in the comment on that passage.
We shall see in later pages that the supreme value and importance of the Book of Daniel, rightly understood, consists in this—that "it is the first attempt at a Philosophy, or rather at a Theology of History."[151] Its main object was to teach the crushed and afflicted to place unshaken confidence in God.
[CHAPTER VI]
PECULIARITIES OF THE APOCALYPTIC AND PROPHETIC SECTION OF THE BOOK
If we have found much to lead us to serious doubts as to the authenticity and genuineness—i.e., as to the literal historicity and the real author—of the Book of Daniel in its historic section, we shall find still more in the prophetic section. If the phenomena already passed in review are more than enough to indicate the impossibility that the Book could have been written by the historic Daniel, the phenomena now to be considered are such as have sufficed to convince the immense majority of learned critics that, in its present form, the Book did not appear before the days of Antiochus Epiphanes.[152] The probable date is b.c. 164. As in the Book of Enoch xc. 15, 16, it contains history written under the form of prophecy.
Leaving minuter examination to later chapters of commentary, we will now take a brief survey of this unique apocalypse.
I. As regards the style and method the only distant approach to it in the rest of the Old Testament is in a few visions of Ezekiel and Zechariah, which differ greatly from the clear, and so to speak classic, style of the older prophets. But in Daniel we find visions far more enigmatical, and far less full of passion and poetry. Indeed, as regards style and intellectual force, the splendid historic scenes of chaps. i.-vi. far surpass the visions of vii.-xii., some of which have been described as "composite logographs," in which the ideas are forcibly juxtaposed without care for any coherence in the symbols—as, for instance, when a horn speaks and has eyes.[153]