DANIEL, BOOK OF. This important and in I many respects remarkable book, takes its name not , mly from the principal person in it, but also and :hiefly from him as its real author ; there being no doubt whatever that, as the hook itself testifies, it was composed by Daniel (comp. vii. 1, 28; viii. 2; ix. 2). It occupies, however, but a third rank in the Hebrew canon ; not among the Prophets, but in the Hagiographa, owing, as we think, to the correct view of the composers of the canon, that Daniel did not exercise his prophetic office in the more restricted and proper sense of the term `pro phecy;' but stood to the theocracy in a different relation from those real prophets whose calling and profession consisted exclusively in declaring the messages they received, and in the communion which they held with God. These latter are termed, in the ancient Hebrew idiom, ryt..vm, prophets, in contradistinction to pstn, seers, who, though they were equally favoured with divine revela tions, were nevertheless not prophets by profession, a calling that claimed the entire service of a man's whole life. [CANON.] The book of Daniel divides itself into two parts, historical (ch. i.-vi.) and prophetic (ch. vii.-xii.), ar ranged respectively in chronological order. Its object is by no means to give a summary historical account of the period of the exile or of the life of Daniel himself; since it contains only a few isolated points both as to historical facts and prophetic revelations. But the plan or tendency which so consistently runs through the whole book, is of a far different character; it is to shew the extraordi nary and wonderful means which the Lord made use of, in a period of the deepest misery, when the theocracy seemed dissolved and fast approaching its extinction, to afford assistance to his people, prov ing to them that he had not entirely forsaken them, and making them sensible of the fact, that His merciful presence still continued to dwell with them, even without the Temple and beyond the Land of Promise. In this way alone was it pos sible to render the time of punishment also a period of rich blessing. The manifestations of the Lord
to that effect consisted, among others, of the won ders recorded in this book, and the glorious pro phecies of the seer. The book thus sets forth a series of miraculous tokens, by which God pro claimed amidst the heathen world, and in a period of abject degradation, that Israel was still his people, the nation of his covenant, still marching steadily onward to the goal marked out for them by the Lord.
The wonders related in Daniel (ch. i.-vi.) are thus mostly of a peculiar, prominent, and striking character, and resemble in many respects those per formed of old time in Egypt. Their divine ten dency was, on the one hand, to lead the heathen power, which proudly fancied itself to be the con queror of the theocracy, to the acknowledgment that there was an essential difference between the world and the kingdom of God; and, on the other, to impress degenerate and callous Israel with the full conviction, that the power of God was still the same as it was of old in Egypt.
Neither do the prophecies contained in the book (ch. vii.-xii.) bear a less peculiar and striking cha racter. We cannot, indeed, fail to discover in the writer, to a very great extent, a person of vast in formation, and well-versed in the management of political affairs, these prophecies having for their object—more than any other in the O. T.—the political vicissitudes of the empires of the world. Nor are we less reminded of Daniel's domicile in Chaldica, by the colouring imparted to his visions, by their symbols, and more especially by those drawn from beasts (Dan. vii. 8), the grotesque manner in which the figures are put together, and the colossal majesty imprinted on those sketches. All these peculiarities belong to the individuality of the prophet himself, which is conspicuous even in the accounts he gives of the revelations imparted to him, though that individuality is then greatly modified by the sanctified, exalted, and glorified state of his mind.