The Hellenistic World and Rome
Daniel: Narrative Structure
It was a pseudo-prophecy, however, and Daniel does preserve for us a unique
representation, written in the mid-Hellenistic period, of how Jewish piety
and religious knowledge had been deployed under a series of foreign em-
pires, Babylonian, Persian, and Macedonian, over a period of four hundred
years. The following tabulation makes no attempt to go into interpretative
details, but is concerned to do two things: to make clear the literary struc-
ture of the work, which means primarily the relationship between ‘‘authorial
voice’’ (first person and third person), narrative, and interpretation; and to
set out summarily the real identities and dates of the rulers to whom the
work refers.^27
It will be seen that in form and character the work divides into four dis-
tinct sections. In section (), covering chapters –, a series of narratives, in
the third person, with no identified narrator, and designed to demonstrate
the operation of Jewish piety, are interspersed with dreams and portents ex-
ternal to Daniel, which are then provided with interpretations by him. In
section (), covering chapters –—or perhaps better chapters –, with
chapters – forming a sort of transition to ()—Daniel himself has very
detailed prophetic dreams, occasionally described in the third person (:;
:), but related by him in the first person, whose interpretation, in even
greater detail, is supplied first by an anonymous figure to whom he turns
(:), and then by Gabriel (:). Chapters – move on to prayers by
Daniel and to exchanges between Gabriel and Daniel, both related by Daniel
in the first person. Section () covers :–, and contains a continuous series
of historical prophecies addressed to Daniel by an angelic being who is not
specifically named (:: W‘TH ’MT ’GYD LK /καὶνῦνἀλήθειανἀναγγελῶ
σοι[Theodotion]—‘‘and now I will declare to you the truth’’). The literary
structure of this section is quite different, in that there is no division between
the material and its interpretation. The narrative, interspersed with inter-
pretation and comment by the same speaker, covers nearly four centuries,
from the beginning of the Achaemenid period to the middle of the reign of
Antiochus Epiphanes.
Lat. LXXVA, ; the relevant passage is reproduced and translated in Stern,GreekandLatin
AuthorsII, no. A.
. For these identifications, and the historical framework in general, see Amélie Kuhrt,
The Ancient Near East, c. –..I–II (). Volume II covers, among other things,
the Neo-Assyrian Empire (chap. ), Babylonia, ca. – (chap. ), and the Achaemenid
Empire (chap. ).