Click to join the conversation with over 500,000 Pentecostal believers and scholars
Click to get our FREE MOBILE APP and stay connected
| PentecostalTheology.com
According to what is known as the Maccabean Hypothesis, the Hebrew half of the book of Daniel, chapters 7-12, was written during the Maccabean Revolt around 165 BCE as a propaganda technique to encourage the Jewish population to remain faithful to the Torah in spite of the persecution at the time. For more info on the Maccabean Hypothesis see The Book of Daniel and the "Maccabean Thesis".
The theory is that the first half of Daniel chapters 1-6, written mostly in Aramaic, already existed and was compiled a few hundred years earlier. Thus, the supposed author of the second half was basically adding onto an existing character: the Daniel of Babylon.
I’m curious to understand how such a piece of writing could have got accepted and later canonised by the mainstream Jewish community. Considering it was written to stir up encouragement for the Jews at the time and not the future, I’m presuming the author was expecting a relatively speedy acceptance as being authentic. I then thus presume such a person must have been a person of considerable authority within the Jewish community. How did this pseudepigrapha get accepted?
