spin

If one wonders why a person gets irate....

bfniii WTF does Dan 2:4 say?? You didn't even look. Typical. In part:

"The Chaldeans said to the king (in Aramaic):"

The text claims to be reporting what was said to the king, ie in Persian Chancelry Aramaic. That is the standard to judge by. That is the standard that is not met. We only get a hotchpotch euphemistically called biblical Aramaic.

You have shown yourself to be clueless in the area, as well as uninterested even in attempting to understand the problem.

You've failed on this effort, bfniii. And there's no point in going on, because you'd have a long learning curve before you and I'm not up to suffering that.


With a metaquestion, you are not dealing with the problem yet again. But then you've shown that you know nothing about the linguistics so let's not bother.

When you are dealing with a subject, you need to show that you underestand what is involved, otherwise there is no point talking to you about it. You have shown that you don't understand.

Referencing other people's work only has value when you can understand what they are saying and know the importance of it.

What has this got to do with the linguistic features of the text? Can you even answer that, bfniii?

Should we be impressed that you have learnt how to use an online bible dictionary? OK, I'm impressed.

From the references I glean from this article it was written relatively early in the 20th c. and is not a particularly up to date source. The use of the term "assouan papyri" is not found in works that deal with Aramaic analysis. In fact Aswan is where Elephantine was. The Persians had a Jewish garrison on the island of Elephantine.

Unfortunately, as we have a precedent for the good treatment of deported peoples within the Babylonian empire, and a specific instance in history where the event intimated by Daniel can be found, one has to do a lot better than waffle the situation away. We can place such a situation in the time of Antiochus IV but not in that of Nebuchadrezzar, who was religiously a very devout king, given his inscriptions.

Waffling...

There were three kings called Darius. Your proffered translation is simpky false. The word is not Aramaic, but Persian. Yet still you continue. Impressive, yes.

Let's have the ancient source for this conjecture. Your imagination or some internet source?

Inventive...


So??

Ha, ha, ha. He was called son of the king, yet that doesn't preclude that people called him king while Nabonidus was still king and the same epigraphy indicates this. That's an accusation of doublethink on your part, even when you've got nothing (yet again) to back up your conjecture.

Disinterested? How would you know?

Belshazzar, the son of Nabonidus can't be of the male line from Nebuchadrezzar. The claim that Belshazzar was the son of Nebuchadrezzar is specifically such a claim.

Herodotus is confused. Babylon wasn't his cup of tea. He hasn't even heard of Nebuchadrezzar. His Persian sources didn't supply him that.

No, he doesn't. He has Nitocris as the mother of a younger Labynetos, a name that isn't related to anything in the Babylonian onomasticon.

I'll let you live with that.

So that seems toi ndicate that you can contribute nothing here on the subject.

Only the king could perform the New Year ceremony, which was not performed while Nabonidus was in Teima. Belshazzar wasn't able to perform it because he wasn't king.

Diehard. Belshazzar was never king. All the evidence pointys to this fact. There was no reason for Nabonidus to demote his son. He was after all the son of the king and that's all he is called in the epigraphy. You cannot show your claims and ignore the evidence that shows the real situation regarding Belshazzar.

This is a meaningless response, stimulated by nothing I said and based on no evidence. Impressive.

This is getting embarrassing. I've just shown you that mentioning names is not a tangible indication because anyone can do it whether they were from the period or not, so you repeat that it is something tangible.

Let me repeat, as you seem to be hard of reading:
No, you need to consider what Daniel tells happened after Onias was dethroned and later murdered. in each of the different visions that deal with it. We are covering events from the time of Antiochus IV which include the overthrow of Onias III, the persecution of the Jerusalemites, the pollution of the temple, the stoppage of sacrifices, and various other events to be found in the history of the time.

As I indicated the 490 year calendar doesn't favour your insistence on 33ad as you put it, so the traditional doesn't cover any of the facts. The dispensational... you wanna make the case??

Actually, I was talking about why modern commentators don't do justice to Daniel. You did not respond to my statement but to something else, something which I had already indicated response to.

Let's face it your hokey transliterations and appalling knowledge of original language indications derive from somewhere and that somewhere exactly matches the information provided by Strong's Concordance Numbers. You are without a doubt using that information, whether you know it or not.

Let's just give the examples you've already given:

"Dar@yavesh" from my Strongs in software -- #1868 Dar@yavesh
"N@buwkadnetstsar" from my Strongs in software -- #5020 N@buwkadnetstsar

Strong's Numbers are ubiquitous on the internet, so, if you are not directly using Strong's literature, when you do your research at the site you usually use, look more closely and you'll find the Strong's association.

The plain fact is, that you have neither looked at any scholarly material on Daniel, nor are you interested in anything other than your religiously motivated presuppositions. You therefore have no idea whether the position I have touted is superior or not.

I know that it deals with much more of the information and has far fewer assumptions than the confusion you are peddling.

The traditional view doesn't have a clue about why the little horn supplanted three others in chapter 7. History explains it.

The traditional view doesn't explain why the fourth, the unnamed, creature is an elephant. Philology and history can.

The traditional view doesn't know that all four visions in Dan 7-11 are dealing with exactly the same material.

The traditional view cannot tell you who each of the kings of the north and the kings of the south are. History can.

The traditional view cannot explain what the ships of the kittim are doing in Dan 11:30 and what they represent. History can.

I don't expect you to take any notice of history. You aren't interested in history. You are merely apologizing for Daniel. As such I can't expect you to be critical, only to throw up ridiculous claims in defence of something you are prevented from understanding, because of your prior commitments.


spin

bfniii

right according to what?

bfniii

this is merely an argument from silence. the accounts give no contradictory information to daniel nor do you show how they must have mentioned belshazzar if he did exist.

spin

According to what the original name was in transliteration.


spin

spin

No, it's an argument about interest and importance, ie what is of interest and importance both to Cyrus and to the Babylonian writer of the chronicle.

Point missed. Nabonidus was where the interest lay, as he was king of Babylon. They show no interest in Belshazzar, the son of the king, because he was relatively inconsequential, not being king. No-one is disputing about his existence, but about the apparently erroneous claims in Daniel that Belshazzar was king -- if one insists on reading Daniel as history.

But, if one insists, read the text (5:30-6:1):

That very night Belshazzar, king of the Chaldeans, was slain, 31 and Darius the Mede took over the kingdom, at the age of sixty-two.

It pleased Darius to appoint 120 satraps to rule throughout the kingdom, with three administrators over them, one of whom was Daniel.

Plainly, this "Darius" is presented in Daniel as king who could "appoint 120 satraps to rule throughout the kingdom" and plainly this Darius was neither called "Darius" (yes, a name despite your butchery), nor was he a king, being Cyrus's governor (ie satrap) of Gutium, Ugbaru.

6:7
So the administrators and the satraps went as a group to the king and said: "O King Darius, live forever!

Ugbaru, I mean "Darius", is being called "King Darius" by all the realm's administration according to Daniel. Where is the real king, Cyrus? Perhaps he's taken a leaf out of Nabonidus's book and hiked off to Teima, so that you can claim that Ugbaru could act as king of the entire realm. Maybe the satrapy which included Babylon had its internal satraps, sort of like Russian dolls.

Here's what you've been doing:

1. inventing paternal connections through hypothesized female connections,
2. making kings, people who weren't kings (both Belshazzar and Ugbaru); and
3. dabbling in linguistic error to redefine the name Darius.

I do appreciate the contortions you are prepared to go through in your misguided defence of a non-historical text.

You are blissfully unaware of any scholarship on the book of Daniel and rely on internet pages that are almost as blissfully unaware, going on the bibliography one finds on the website you cited as something of value.

So why do you feel driven to go out of your way to come here to a non-christian site in order to supply plainly silly apologetics for the book of Daniel, as though it should be read as history??


spin

Toto

Some previous threads on Daniel

Daniel in early canons?

Daniel, Date Problems and assession year issues

Dating the Book of Daniel

Daniel 9:24-27 (Jim Larmore debate)

Accuracy of Daniel and Revelation (Jim Larmore)

Authenticity of the Book of Daniel

Dating the Book of Daniel

gregor

Can FEMA spare a few members for a search crew to find the 'guts' of bfniii's argument? It appears to have been completely gutted.

Sven

Umm, even the people participating in the original thread failed to find the "guts" of his argument. You decide why this could be the case...

Aspirin99

Something else that I recently found interesting regarding this topic is the sudden growth of the personal Angel in the 2nd century BCE.

As canonical writings go, Daniel introduced us to the concept of the archangels Gabriel and Michael. The thing that is new (angel-wise) is that he gave them names. Until Daniel, they are nameless creatures who did the bidding of God. Actually, until the 2nd century (I think), the idea of a personal angel with a name is not found in Jewish writings.

It turns out, that the 2nd century BCE was a bonanza of angelic inclusion in religious writing. It was a time of angelic evolution. In Christian lore, there are 3 archangels: Gabriel, Michael (from Daniel) and Raphael (from Tobit). Then, we have some other angels in Christian lore who were also given personal names. All of these are contained in the Book of Enoc.

Both Tobit and Enoc were written early in the 2nd century BCE!

Daniel and Tobit are the source for the names of the 3 archangels. Here's another strange similarity- They were both found in cave 4 at Qumran together. Tobit, like Daniel, was written in a strange mix of Aramaic and Hebrew.

I've recently purchased the book "Biblical Interpretation at Qumran" by Matthias Henze. It supposed to deal with the mystical topics in the other non-canonical books found at Qumran. I haven't read it yet (just got it). Topics like angels, the Son of Man, etc. This places Daniel's subject matter in the heart of the ideas of the 2nd century BCE.

pharoah

Is there are any reference at all in Babylonian history to any of the fantastic events portrayed in the first 5 chapters of Daniel? Is there any reference to Daniel or his friends, who were supposedly highly placed in the Babylonian bureaucracy? If not, this would seem to me to be a pretty strong argument against the historicity and early dating of Daniel.