00:00:00.000My thought was to start somewhere else today.
00:00:06.060So in last week's session, we read the first three chapters of Revelation.
00:00:13.860These are basically John's letters to these other churches in Asia.
00:00:19.720And I hope we can get through a lot more.
00:00:24.220I thought it would be useful to go to Daniel for a couple of reasons.
00:00:36.680Showing that this type of writing is definitely present in the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, I think, is one good thing to nail down.
00:00:48.420Also, and more importantly, Daniel, particularly the seventh book of Daniel, Daniel's Visions of the Four Kingdoms, this is a classic sort of like early version prototype experiment to what will be put forward in the book of Revelation later.
00:01:08.740uh thirdly it also gives you an idea of how these function books like the book of revelation
00:01:17.340function within history and how understanding just a little bit of context really opens up
00:01:27.020quite a bit uh as we mentioned before we we sort of are taking the we're adopting a thesis that
00:01:35.740this book of revelation is sort of like the turner diaries of the ancient world it is meant to be
00:01:44.940bloody and extreme it is directed at particular enemies and we can later on maybe not even today
00:01:52.620but later on we'll discuss who those enemies might be um and it's it's an incitement it's a piece of
00:01:59.600incitement literature in effect. And I think Daniel really opens up a lot if we just look
00:02:09.340at this one passage from Daniel. It's quite famous. Now, just a little bit of context on Daniel. So
00:02:16.600Daniel is, it's very interesting because it's a quite late addition to the Hebrew Bible. It was
00:02:25.520written in the uh 160s uh bc so it's a relatively recent book but it's not set in the 160s it's set
00:02:37.160in the 6th century actually and it in fact is a uh narrative of daniel's time in captivity this
00:02:46.940is the time of the babylonian captivity so the first temple has been destroyed by babylon
00:02:52.300And certain select Jews are kept in the Babylonian kingdom, and Daniel, a little bit like Joseph, works as a dream interpreter and does some other things.
00:03:06.800And also fascinating that this is one of these books that's written in multiple languages.
00:03:16.960The middle portions, including this dream that we're going to read, is not written in Hebrew.
00:03:22.040It's written in Aramaic, and that can even give you a sense of the timing of these things, because Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Near East in the 160s, much like Greek, Koine Greek was the lingua franca.
00:03:44.380When the Gospels were written, you have a recourse to Aramaic as a way of reaching the most people.
00:03:52.560The fact that there is this language change within this book of the Hebrew Bible is fascinating in many ways,
00:04:22.780This comes way after Cyrus the Great liberated the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, rebuilt
00:04:32.680the temple, the second temple, sent them back to Jerusalem, and so on. And what they're dealing0.69
00:04:39.580with is the Seleucid Empire, which is a Greek empire, ultimately derived from Alexander's
00:04:50.520conquest, his conquest of the known world at the time. This was sort of the eastern part.
00:04:56.240And Antiochus IV is the leader of this sort of declining empire, and maybe due to its decline, he is a man who's engaging in serious persecution of the existing territories.0.61
00:05:16.660So he is the villain who's persecuting Judaism and in some ways trying to destroy Judaism.
00:05:26.980In fact, he is banning circumcision, forcing Jews to eat pork and so on.0.67
00:05:35.900So you have this Greek, Gentile, Arian, let's say, leader overtly oppressing the Jews.
00:05:44.900And one of the aspects of Daniel, Daniel is literature, but literature is a weapon, is to look back in history and imagine a scenario that is in parallel but very different.
00:06:01.340So imagining a scenario of being captive in some sort of Gentile or even Aryan empire and kind of how you navigate the court and talk to the king and do certain things and so on and so forth.
00:06:16.200They're in a bit of a different situation.0.89
00:08:34.660Yeah. Oh, sorry. Oh, sorry. I was going to speak up. The reason they're not written, by the way, is because the people that we know as like rabbinic Jews and things like that, they had this allergic reaction to Greek and keeping documents and writing in Greek.
00:08:48.500So there was a long period of time where they basically refused to preserve anything written in Greek. And what ends up happening is entire ideologies and strains of Judaism get wiped out because of this.0.61
00:08:58.560so like you know we talk about philo and how philo is he has a lot of the same uh ideas as
00:09:03.760christianity and he's kind of like this he's like miss mixing uh platonism and alexandrian
00:09:08.760judaism together and things like that i think he sits at like the tail end of a long tradition
00:09:13.420of what could be called like hellenized judaism basically right where they're mixing a lot of
00:09:18.760whatever's popular in the hellenized world at that time with judaism and the reason that we
00:09:22.660don't have any of those you know preserved like maccabees and things like that anything that's
00:09:26.420written in Greek is because as a reaction against that group, that's the rabbinic Judaism that we
00:09:31.740have, right? So just like by definition of who they are and their identity, that's why we don't
00:09:36.100have those things. Yes. And Maccabees was written largely in Greek. Yeah. Let's begin with Daniel.
00:09:45.520It's interesting also because you have just a clear vision of a Christ-like figure. Now,
00:09:53.760is it jesus you know of course the christians would say yes yes is what he's talking about but