Koyaanisqatsi

Pardon me, but it's late. Are you kidding? I can't tell.

If you're not, then wouldn't the Young's interpretation be more accurate? That Danial, being vainglorious, was commenting on how Jeremiah was wrong (and therefore not the prophet that Daniel tacitly claims to be)?

Gabriel comes to Daniel. Gabriel. To Daniel. Not a "messenger of God" went to Daniel or a "boy in white robs appeared" before Daniel, but Gabriel himself comes to Daniel.

To a Jewish cult member at that time, that's like saying, "Jesus went to Jerusalem" to any member of a red state.

And he says to Daniel (and I paraphrase), "You are the shit. You are the greatest of the great, in a humble way. And God knows that and you can advertise that and you can tell everyone that God told me to tell you--from God's breath through my mouth to your ears--that the seventy years is bullshit. You're in the shit right fucking now mate. Yeah, that's right. Right fucking now. And you know this is true because you are great and wonderful and God thinks you're just really, really keen.

"So here's a little secret. From the going forth of your prayer...you've got seventy weeks not seventy fucking years!"

If Gabriel wasn't there to contradict Jeremiah, then why was he there and what's so fucking special about Daniel?

God sent Gabriel to Daniel at that moment to tell him, "Hey, man, relax. It's not seventy years of desolation. It's actually seventy times seven years of desolation. Yeah man, don't suplicate yourself and pray so strenuously, because it's actually going to be much, much worse than what fuckin' Jeremiah thought. The hack! No, no, no, man, it's going to be seventy times worse than what Jeremiah ever envisioned as a result of divine intervention. God just sent me here to tell you that. So....you know....relax. You've got time."

No. Daniel (whoever the hell he or it or whatever resulted in the book of Daniel was) was proclaiming that he was a better prophet and more loved by God than Jeremiah was. Why? Because he prayed. He suplicated himself over the seventy years of contemplated desolation and he knew (or so the hubris of the author's myth states) that the seventy years was already upon them. Where Jeremiah ended (on that note, at least) Daniel would begin and up the fuckin' ante.

Gabriel tells him that. Special inside knowledge. Why? Because he's God's favorite.

The time is now and you've got weeks, not years, because the clock is fucking ticking and you had better be the celebrated champion of your poeple now, because in a few weeks the Messiah will come (the Leader) and he is going to kick everybody's fucking ass and all those who don't do as he says (through Jehovah) will be murdered. And lest you don't think it's true, not only will the Messiah help you get everything together, but he will also stop your ability to achieve automatic salvation through sacrificing your best breeding stock and your best grain. And then once he's shut off that metaphorical pipeline, he'll kill you. Drowned. And thousands of your brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, hell the whole damn ashram unless you rally people to your fucking cause and tell them that the desolation is now and the judgement is nie and everyone look at me! My name's Daniel! ME! ME! God told me an even more horrific story. Well, not God directly, of course, but Gabriel came unto me... (insert audience "awe" reaction).

The time-honored traditions will be over soon enough, so, I, Gabriel, give you, Daniel, the most cherished of God's love that he sent me to give you this special knowledge, I, Gabriel tell you that you are special and so deserve to know that the shit is hitting the fan in a matter of weeks (a matter of "sevens," if you will) and not a matter of years like the other idiots think. Geez!

It's a call to action and to glory and a self-aggrandizing story told by an egomaniacal cult icon-wannabe, either concocted out of whole cloth or transliterated into one via a nomadic, sand-clogged, da-daistic game of "Telephone."

Why else would a messenger so prevalent appear before Daniel if not to say, "Because you're special, you should know, everyone is fucked and I mean now so...get going....scat.....ya' hear? And don't you tell anyone!"?

Or I can trust that the translators of Young's (and others) know what the fuck they're talking about and deliberately used our word "weeks" to properly denote the contextual timeframe the writer(s) of Daniel stipulated.

:huh:

You know? Or not. Hey, why not? It's all a crapshoot; no translators of any of the Bibles ever knew anything about the languages they were translating, right?

Hell, it's just a book. Why be literal? You miss the whole poetry of Gabriel appearing before Daniel and saying, "Hey man, don't sweat. There's at least another four hundred years of this shit before the Messiah comes and murders all the unholy in order to clear the rampart for Jehovah..."

There is?

"Yeah. Sure. That's why I'm scaring the living shit out of you now in this vision so that a couple of hundred years from now you'll know what the past couple of hundred years was all about. And then you'll be murdered by your Leader. Unless you're righteous. But you'll be dead before then, so, gotta' go! Bye."

But wait...How does that help me or my people? Hello? Gabriel? If Jeremiah saw seventy years of desolation and I see desolation now and pray to avert it and the answer to my prayer is fucking Gabriel telling me that the desolations aren't over, we've all got another fucking four hundred and ninety years of desolation, but not to worry, because after some four hundred and thirty-odd years Jehovah's Messiah will have stopped our ability to redeem ourselves just prior to murdering every one of our distant descendants.....

Well, you can see the pickle that would put Daniel in, prophet-wise, don't you think?

"Jeremiah was wrong! The end of days is not upon you, but upon you! For another four hundred years....so.....um......boy, just you wait and see....when your children's children's dead children have grown up and died, then, boy! Then everyone will be killed. By god's messenger. The "Leader." Four hundred years from now. So. Boy. Yeah. Stupid Jeremiah, right?"

....But Gabriel told me that.....

Sorry spin. Can't be spun. It's, at best, an ignored cult member's pathetic, poorly written yearn for the ancient equivalent of fifteen hectars of fame.

And he got it.

Or so the idiot who wrote Mark thought...

spin

It's true. Another linguistic argument out the window.

I don't think it changes much. You can see the notion of weeks of years in Ex 23:10-11 parallelled with days in 12-13; and in Lev 25:8. The book of Jubilees, written in the 2nd c. BCE is structured on weeks of years (fragments were found near Qumran and they mention the weeks of years). Given that the weeks in Daniel give no indication of weeks of days but are read in the context of years -- seventy of them --, there is no reason to believe that we are dealing with anything other than weeks of years, which is certainly not a strange notion in Hebrew.

Daniel, an official in Babylon at the time of Darius the Mede -- the author is establishing a supposed timeframe of the exile --, finds the Jeremiah prophecy about the 70 years and wants to understand its relation to the time Daniel finds himself in (and the reader wants to understand its relation to the time s/he is in). The passage is about making the Jeremiah prophecy relevant to the time of the reader. If it were 70 weeks of days, it would have been long ago finished and no longer of consequence to the reader. The prophecy is saying to the reader, look Daniel has prophecied everything correctly and now you in the last week of his prophecy will see the end, when the desolator gets what he deserves. If you all want to muse about a 70 weeks of days, then you'll need to consider why you think the text was written (what the point of Daniel giving it is) and who for.

I have put forward the notion at length that the visions in the second part of Daniel from ch.7 onward involves four closely related visions which ultimately deal with exactly the same set of events. I have seen no-one contemplate that notion, despite the evidence I have posted here. It makes little sense treating each of them separately if they are all related. It's a bit like reading the gospels separately and thinking that they referred to different figures.


spin

Wallener

Wait a minute. According to tradition, where did Daniel die?

spin

Beats me. Which tradition?


spin

Anat

IIRC there is a Muslim tradition that Daniel was buried in Nebi Daniel, not far from Bethlehem. So?

Wallener

The Muslim tradition I am aware of has Daniel buried in Shush, now part of Iran. The tomb has even appeared on Iranian currency. The Jewish tradition I am aware of has him buried near Kirkuk, now part of Iraq. Neither place is anywhere near Bethlehem or any other Palestinian town.

Wallener

Is there any validity to/evidence for this paragraph?

Anat

I won't be surprised if some characters have more than one traditional burial place. There are many sheikh tombs that at some point got reassigned to some biblical figure or other.

unknown4

Is that something from a website or a book? I'd like a link if it's a website. Thanks.

Wallener

The usual search engines will bring up lots of hits "antiochus death rumor".

http://www.epicurus.net/en/history.html

About halfway down:

The usual suspect sources place the rumor in 169 BCE (coinciding with Roman events). IIRC, the supposedly dead man flattened Jerusalem in 168 BCE, which I suspect would have rather definitively put an end to the rumor.

Normally I couldn't care less about this - the Daniel prophesy is already busted because the first event (doesn't) happen at 7 weeks, not at the 69 weeks of Jim et al - but now I'm curious how a book with either (pick one) false authorship or non-Palestinine origins survived Jamnia.

ETA: Koy has a point about the pointlessness of a "prophecy" extending out hundreds of years in motivating people to change now. Seven sevens is only 49 years, and brings the "annointed" events into something resembling a relavent time scale.