More arguments about biblical prophecy begin in Daniel than in any other book. It is also the book where the evidence is richest, the dating question sharpest, and the external record most awkward for every position, including the sceptical one.
What the book is
Twelve chapters set at the Babylonian and Persian courts, following a Judaean exile named Daniel and his companions. The first half is narrative: the trial of the diet, the statue of four metals, the fiery furnace, the madness of Nebuchadnezzar, the writing on the wall, the lions’ den. The second half is first-person apocalyptic vision: four beasts, a ram and a goat, the seventy weeks, and a long final revelation about wars between northern and southern kingdoms.
How it is put together
Daniel is written in two languages. Chapter 1 through 2:4a is Hebrew; from 2:4b to the end of chapter 7 it is Aramaic; chapters 8 to 12 return to Hebrew. The language boundary does not fall where the genre boundary falls — chapter 7 is a vision written in Aramaic, sitting on the far side of the narrative section — and any account of how the book came together has to explain that crossing.
The Greek textual tradition contains three passages absent from the Hebrew and Aramaic: the Prayer of Azariah with the Song of the Three, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles print them; Protestant Bibles do not. Their existence is itself evidence that the book circulated in more than one shape.
In the Hebrew Bible, Daniel is placed among the Writings, not among the Prophets. Christian Bibles move it to sit with Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The placement is not a small detail: the Writings are generally the latest section of the canon to close, and the position preserves an early judgement about what kind of book this was.
The dating question
This is the whole argument, and it is worth stating both cases plainly.
The traditional position takes the book at its narrative setting: a sixth-century work by a Judaean exile at the Babylonian court, whose visions are predictive. On this reading the detailed correspondence between chapter 11 and the wars of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms is exactly what it appears to be.
The critical consensus, which has held in university scholarship since the nineteenth century, dates the book’s final form to the 160s BCE, during the persecution under Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The central argument is not a general objection to prediction but a specific pattern: chapter 11 tracks Hellenistic dynastic history in remarkable detail up to a point in the reign of Antiochus IV, and then describes his death in terms that do not match how he actually died. Accuracy that stops at a particular moment is the standard signature used to date apocalyptic literature, and it is applied to non-biblical apocalypses in exactly the same way.
Supporting arguments on the critical side include the placement among the Writings, features of the Aramaic dialect, and the presence of Greek loanwords among the musical instruments in chapter 3. Each of these has been contested in detail, and the contest is a real one rather than a formality.
Manuscript evidence sets a hard outer limit. Fragments of Daniel were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the earliest copied within a few decades of the 160s BCE. That is early enough to make the second-century dating tight — a book cannot be composed and reach Qumran in copies overnight — and it rules out any suggestion of a much later composition.
Where the external record touches it
Two points are usually raised, and they pull in opposite directions.
Belshazzar, who holds the feast in chapter 5, was unknown outside the Bible until cuneiform documents from the reign of Nabonidus were read in the nineteenth century. Those texts show him as Nabonidus’s son, exercising royal authority in Babylon while his father was absent for an extended period at Teima in Arabia. That is a genuine confirmation of a name and a role that no medieval or classical source preserved, and it is the strongest external card the book holds. The same texts also complicate chapter 5, which calls Belshazzar the son of Nebuchadnezzar and describes him as king.
“Darius the Mede”, who receives the kingdom at the end of chapter 5 and reigns in chapter 6, has no counterpart in any external record. The Babylonian and Persian documents give the succession to Cyrus directly. Various identifications have been proposed; none has secured general agreement, and the honest description of the situation is that a figure central to two chapters is unattested.
Where to start
Read chapter 5, then chapter 11, then chapter 5 again. The first reading shows you the book at its most historically anchored; the second shows you the passage the dating argument turns on; the third tends to change what you noticed the first time.
The quiz on Daniel covers the contents at three levels, with the passage behind every answer. For the method, prophecy after the event sets out why the pattern in chapter 11 is treated as a dating signal rather than an accusation.