Today, I am reading and commenting on  Daniel 7-8.

I have a Youtube video of me reading the Scripture passage and my comments. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts.

Also, here is the link for my Patreon page

The first thing I thought about when I read this was that I did not realize Susa (mentioned as where Daniel was in verse two of chapter eight) was associated with the Babylonian Empire.  I have always associated Susa with the Persian Empire.  So, I looked it up and it turns out that Susa originated as the capital of Elam.  Which means that Susa was indeed an important city under the Babylonian Empire.  While I am writing about historical facts in the Book of Daniel, I want to touch on Belshazzar.  In the nineteenth century historians thought that the references to Belshazzar as king of Babylon indicated that the Book of Daniel could not have been written by someone who knew anything about Babylon, since the records we had said that Nabonidus was the last king of Babylon, and that there was no historical record of a Belshazzar in Babylon.  However, in the middle of the nineteenth century records were found that indicated that Nabonidus had a son named Belshazzar, and since then we have found records that indicate that Belshazzar served as co-ruler with his father.  Further, archeologists now believe that Nabonidus became king after a coup, but that he never wanted to be king.  The evidence suggests that he was made a figurehead by the coup plotters, chief of whom was his son, Belshazzar.  Which means that a government bureaucrat, such as the Book of Daniel portrays Daniel as being , would have viewed Belshazzar as the real king.  When I began reading the Book of Daniel this year I was inclined to think of it as an apocalyptic metaphor and not about actual historical persons.  As I wrote the above I came to realize that those scholars who deny the historicity of this book generally start from the assumption that there cannot be predictive prophecy.  They use as evidence persons and events in the book for which archeologists have been unable to find evidence and use that to conclude they never existed and that therefore the writer of Daniel must have made them up.  I currently am inclined to believe that these events happened, with varying degrees of hyperbole added by the writer to increase the drama of the story (for example, the image which Nebuchadnezzar erected in chapter three may not have been that tall, and may not have been made primarily of gold).

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.