Daniel 11 Is Exact Until 167 BCE, Then Wrong

The book of Daniel is set in Babylon in the sixth century before the common era. Its eleventh chapter describes, in the future tense, nearly four hundred years of wars between a king of the north and a king of the south. Detail is the argument. Marriages, betrayals, a tax collector, a fleet turning an invader back from Egypt: the chapter is offered as a record written before the events, and its precision is cited as the proof.

Precision of that kind is real, and it is the part that needs explaining.

Consider what foreknowledge would look like on the page. A writer who saw four centuries ahead would have no reason to see them unevenly. Near and far would be equally clear, or the near would be sharper, since it sat closer. A writer's own century would be the firmest ground in the book.

It runs the other way. Daniel is weakest in the sixth century. Belshazzar is called king and the son of Nebuchadnezzar, and the Babylonian records make him neither, a regent and the son of Nabonidus. Babylon falls to Darius the Mede, a ruler no other source has heard of. The chapter then sharpens as it moves forward, and by the reign of Antiochus IV it can be laid beside the Greek historians line for line, down to the desecration of the Jerusalem temple in 167 BCE.

Then it predicts how he ends. A further conquest of Egypt, with Libya and Cush falling in behind, and a death in camp between the sea and the holy mountain. Antiochus did not invade Egypt again. He died in Persia in 164 BCE, on a campaign in the east.

Porphyry made the observation in the third century, and it survives because Jerome quoted it at length in order to answer it.

Jerome supplied the standard reply. The last verses are said to leave Antiochus behind and describe a figure at the end of history, so they have not failed, they have not happened yet. Notice where that reading places the change of subject. It falls at the verse where the match with the record gives out, and nothing in the passage marks it. The same king of the north goes on fighting the same king of the south. The break was located by checking the text against history, which is the method the reply was written to resist.

None of this bears on what the book meant to the people it was written for, who were living under the persecution it describes. Writing recent history as ancient prediction was a recognised form, and it has other surviving examples. What the pattern rules out is narrower. The chapter cannot be entered as evidence of foreknowledge, because the only portion that was future to its author is the portion that did not occur.

There is a test in this, and it works on any prophecy with enough detail to check. Mark the last statement that matches the record and the first that does not. If a text is vague about the era it claims to come from, exact about a later one, and wrong after a particular year, that year is when it was written.