When Was the Book of Daniel Written?

Question 1145.

The dating of Daniel is, more than almost any other Old Testament question, a straightforward test case for whether you believe God can tell the future. Conservative scholarship places the book in the sixth century BC, written substantially by Daniel himself during and shortly after the Babylonian exile, exactly as the book claims for itself. Critical scholarship places it in the second century BC, around 165 BC, written by an unknown author using “Daniel” as a literary pseudonym to encourage Jews suffering under the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes. I hold to the earlier date, and I want to explain why the later date requires more explaining away of evidence than the traditional position ever has.

The stakes here are not subtle. Daniel chapter 11 predicts, with startling precision, the rise and fall of the Persian and Greek empires down to specific battles and marriages. If Daniel was written after those events, chapter 11 is history dressed up as prophecy. If it was written before them, chapter 11 is one of the most remarkable pieces of predictive prophecy in the entire Bible.

Why the Second Century Date Was Proposed

The late dating of Daniel goes back to the pagan philosopher Porphyry in the third century AD, who noticed the precision of Daniel 11’s description of the wars between the Ptolemies and Seleucids and concluded, correctly by his own antisupernatural premise, that no one could predict such detail in advance. His solution was to argue the book was written after the events it describes, during the Maccabean crisis, and that conclusion has been substantially adopted by critical Old Testament scholarship ever since, dressed up with linguistic and historical arguments that came later to support a dating decision that predictive prophecy itself first motivated.

Later scholars added supporting arguments from language, Daniel’s use of Persian and Greek loanwords, and from history, the difficulty identifying “Darius the Mede” in extrabiblical records, and from genre, the book’s apocalyptic style supposedly belonging to a later period of Jewish literature. Each of these deserves a fair answer rather than a wave of the hand, but the underlying motivation for the whole enterprise remains what it was in Porphyry’s day, a conviction that precise predictive prophecy of this kind simply cannot happen, so the text must be moved to a point after the predicted events to remove the miracle.

The Language Argument Reconsidered

Daniel contains a number of Persian loanwords and a small number of Greek words, which critics argued would only make sense if the book were written after Greek influence had spread through the Near East following Alexander’s conquests. But the Persian words in Daniel are exactly the sort of administrative and technical terms a senior official in the Persian imperial court, which Daniel became under both Babylonian and Persian rule, would naturally use and absorb into his own writing. The handful of Greek words are limited almost entirely to musical instrument names in chapter 3, and Greek mercenaries, traders, and musicians were present in the Near East well before Alexander, with Greek pottery and artefacts turning up in Mesopotamian excavations from centuries earlier. A few Greek instrument names in a court scene no more require a second century date than the presence of French culinary terms in an eighteenth century English cookbook requires that cookbook to have been written in France.

More tellingly, the Hebrew and Aramaic of Daniel match Imperial Aramaic and pre exilic Hebrew far better than they match the Hebrew and Aramaic known from documents securely dated to the second century BC. Linguistically, Daniel reads like a sixth century document, not a second century one, which is precisely the opposite of what the late dating theory needs to be true.

Darius the Mede and Historical Confirmation

Critics have long pointed to “Darius the Mede,” who appears in Daniel 5 and 6 ruling Babylon after its fall, as a historical error, since no ruler by that exact name and title appears in the surviving Persian king lists at that point. Conservative scholars have proposed several credible identifications, most persuasively that Darius the Mede is a throne name or title for Gubaru, also known as Ugbaru or Gobryas, the governor Cyrus placed over Babylon immediately after its conquest, functioning as a sub king under Cyrus’s authority exactly as Daniel 9:1 describes him, made king over the realm of the Chaldeans rather than emperor of the whole Persian domain. This is not special pleading invented to rescue the text. Ancient records regularly show governors and sub kings using throne names distinct from their birth names, and the broader pattern of Babylonian and Persian administration Daniel describes, down to specific details of court protocol and legal procedure, has been repeatedly confirmed rather than contradicted by archaeological discovery since the nineteenth century.

The Precision of Daniel 11 and What It Requires

Daniel 11 traces the conflict between “the king of the south,” the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, and “the king of the north,” the Seleucid dynasty in Syria, through a sequence of marriages, wars, betrayals, and territorial shifts that match the historical record with genuine precision down to roughly verse 35. If this chapter was written in 165 BC, it is simply detailed history written after the fact and presented as if it were prediction, which would make the book, on its own explicit claims in chapters 8 to 12 to be genuine prophetic vision given to Daniel, a deliberate deception rather than an inspired document. That is a serious charge to bring against a book Jesus Himself treated as authentic Scripture.

Archaeological Confirmation of Daniel’s Setting

The dating of Daniel gains further support from archaeological discoveries that have repeatedly vindicated details critics once dismissed as historical error. The Nabonidus Cylinder and related Babylonian texts confirm that Nabonidus, not Nebuchadnezzar, spent long periods away from Babylon and left his son Belshazzar functioning as co regent, which explains why Daniel 5 has Belshazzar offering Daniel only the position of “third ruler in the kingdom” rather than second, since Belshazzar himself was not the supreme monarch but a regent under his absent father. Nineteenth century critics who dated Daniel late had no access to this cuvette and assumed Belshazzar was a pure invention, since no king by that name appeared in the classical historians’ king lists. Discovery after discovery has instead confirmed the fine grain accuracy of Daniel’s Babylonian court details, exactly the kind of accuracy an eyewitness author possesses and a second century writer working from limited later sources would struggle to reproduce.

Similarly, Daniel’s detailed knowledge of Babylonian and Persian administrative practice, court protocol, and specific official titles matches what cuneiform records from those periods actually show, rather than reflecting the political situation of the much later Seleucid era the critical dating requires. A second century Jewish author living under Greek rule composing Daniel from imagination would have had every incentive, and no obvious means, to reconstruct sixth century Babylonian court life with this degree of accuracy. The far simpler explanation, consistent with the dating of Daniel that conservative scholarship has always held, is that the author lived through the events he describes.

What the Fragments at Qumran Confirm

Eight fragmentary manuscripts of Daniel were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, some dated as early as the late second century BC, remarkably close to the very date critical scholarship proposes for the book’s composition. That timing leaves an extraordinarily narrow window for a newly written second century document to be composed, copied, circulated widely enough to reach the Qumran community, and accepted as authoritative Scripture, all within a matter of decades. The dating of Daniel to the sixth century removes that difficulty entirely, giving the book nearly four centuries to circulate, be recognised, and be copied before Qumran’s earliest fragments were produced, which fits the manuscript evidence far more comfortably than the compressed timeline the late date requires.

What Jesus Said About Daniel

Matthew 24:15 has Jesus refer directly to “the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel,” treating Daniel not only as a real historical figure but as a genuine prophet whose predictions, including material from the very chapters critics date late, remained unfulfilled and still future from Jesus’ own first century vantage point. If Daniel were a second century pseudonymous work written after Antiochus Epiphanes had already desecrated the temple, Jesus’ own application of Daniel’s prophecy to a still future desolation makes very little sense, since the events Daniel described would already have happened two centuries earlier under Antiochus and would carry no forward looking force for Jesus’ own audience.

Jesus’ handling of Daniel only makes coherent sense if He regarded the book as genuine sixth century prophecy with a fulfilment still ahead in His own generation and, on a full dispensational reading, still partially ahead of us even now. I take my cue from Him rather than from Porphyry.

Why the Dating of Daniel Matters

The dating of Daniel is ultimately a question about whether God can and does announce the future through His prophets with specific, verifiable content, or whether every apparently fulfilled prediction in Scripture needs to be quietly redated after the fact to protect a prior commitment to a closed universe. I hold the sixth century date because the linguistic evidence supports it, because the historical details Daniel records have repeatedly been vindicated rather than falsified by archaeology, and above all because Jesus treated Daniel as a genuine prophet with prediction still outstanding in His own day. A book that can name empires, kings, and battles centuries in advance is not a problem to be explained away. It is exactly what we should expect Scripture to be able to do if it really is breathed out by the God who sees the end from the beginning.

This connects closely to what I have written on Isaiah authorship, since the same antisupernatural premise drives both late dating theories, and to Daniel’s seventy weeks prophecy, which depends entirely on Daniel being a genuine sixth century document rather than a second century retelling of already completed history.

The Dating of Daniel and the Shape of the Book Itself

The internal structure of Daniel also supports the earlier dating rather than the later one. The book is written in two languages, Hebrew for chapters 1 and 8 to 12, and Aramaic for chapters 2 to 7, a bilingual structure that makes far more sense for a sixth century court official moving between a Jewish and an imperial Aramaic speaking context than for a second century author with no obvious occasion to switch languages mid book. The Aramaic sections, moreover, address the nations broadly, while the Hebrew sections focus more narrowly on Israel’s own future, a literary structure that fits a real court setting where Daniel served pagan kings while also receiving visions specifically concerning his own people. The dating of Daniel to the sixth century explains this bilingual structure naturally. The second century theory has to treat it as a stylistic choice with no clear historical motivation.

The book’s own self presentation also weighs heavily here. Daniel 7:1, 8:1, 9:1, and 10:1 all date the visions that follow to specific years within named Babylonian and Persian reigns, exactly the kind of precise dating formula ancient Near Eastern scribes used for genuine, contemporaneous records rather than retrospective fiction. A second century author writing pseudonymously as “Daniel” while dating his visions to the reigns of Belshazzar, Darius, and Cyrus was either remarkably careful with historical detail he had no easy access to verify, or he was, more plausibly, an actual eyewitness recording what he actually experienced under those very reigns. The dating of Daniel that treats these formulas as literal, accurate dates rather than a literary device requires far less special pleading than the alternative.

I would add that chazah, the Hebrew word for prophetic vision used throughout Daniel, describes exactly the kind of direct, revelatory seeing the book repeatedly claims for itself, in contrast to the deliberate literary device of pseudonymous prediction after the fact that the late dating theory requires the book actually to be. Taking Daniel’s own claims about itself seriously, rather than assuming in advance that they must be a literary fiction, is simply consistent, ordinary historical method applied honestly rather than selectively.

I recognise that the dating of Daniel is a technical question most believers will never study in detail themselves, and that is entirely reasonable given the demands of ordinary life. But it is worth knowing that a confident, well credentialed academic consensus exists on the later dating of Daniel largely because of a shared antisupernatural starting point among many of its proponents, not because the manuscript, linguistic, and historical evidence actually favours it once that starting point is set aside. The dating of Daniel to the sixth century remains, in my judgement, the reading that takes the book’s own claims, the New Testament’s own use of it, and the accumulating archaeological record most seriously, rather than the reading built to accommodate a prior decision about what God can and cannot do.

I would rather stand with Jesus, the apostles, and two and a half thousand years of Jewish and Christian testimony on the dating of Daniel than with a theory whose foundational premise rules out the very kind of God the book itself describes.

That is where my own confidence rests, and I commend it to you as well.

So, now what?

When someone tells you Daniel was written after the fact because the predictions are too accurate to be real, notice that the objection is not actually about the evidence, it is about what kind of God they are willing to allow into the conversation before the evidence gets a hearing. I read Daniel as exactly what it presents itself to be, a sixth century exile’s record of visions God gave him about empires still to rise and fall, and I find far more coherence, and far more reason for confidence, in that reading than in a theory built to rescue Scripture from its own most obvious claim about itself. If God really can announce the future centuries in advance, what does that tell you about how much of the rest of Daniel, including the parts still unfulfilled, deserves your attention right now?

“He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what is in the darkness, and the light dwells with him.”

That confidence in a God who reveals deep and hidden things, in His own timing and by His own means, is worth carrying with you well beyond this one question. Daniel 2:22 (ESV)

For Further Study

Readers wanting a fuller defence of the sixth century dating of Daniel should consult John Walvoord’s commentary on Daniel, which remains one of the most thorough conservative treatments available, alongside J. Dwight Pentecost’s writing on the book’s prophetic structure. Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology addresses the theological stakes of predictive prophecy directly, and Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s material on Israelology situates Daniel’s visions within the wider framework of Israel’s prophetic future. Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology likewise treats the reliability of Daniel’s historical claims as part of a coherent doctrine of Scripture.