Two dates are proposed for the book of Daniel, four centuries apart, and almost everything anyone believes about biblical prophecy depends on which one is right. This is a study of the arguments, not a verdict on the book.
A topic study on this site is not a dossier. It does not grade a claim on the five-point scale, because the question here is not “did this event happen” but “when was this text composed”, and that question is settled by a different kind of argument. What this page does is set out both cases at their strongest, identify where the evidence is external and where it is internal, and mark the points where an honest reader is entitled to remain unpersuaded.
The two positions
The sixth-century position. The book was composed, substantially in the form we have it, by a Judaean at the Babylonian and early Persian courts in the sixth century BCE, as it presents itself. Its visions are predictive. The detail of chapter 11 is what predictive prophecy looks like when it is granted.
The second-century position. The book reached its final form during the persecution of Judaeans under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, around 167 to 164 BCE. Older court legends were incorporated; the visions were composed in the crisis and set in the past. This has been the consensus position in university scholarship since the nineteenth century, and it is the position taught in the standard critical introductions.
It is worth saying plainly that the second-century position was first argued in antiquity, by the third-century philosopher Porphyry, whose treatise against the Christians survives only in the quotations of those refuting it. Jerome preserves the argument while rejecting it. So the disagreement is not a modern intrusion on an untroubled tradition; it is nearly as old as the Christian reading of the book.
The argument from chapter 11
This is the load-bearing argument on the critical side and it deserves to be stated precisely, because it is usually stated badly.
Chapter 11 gives an extended account of conflict between a “king of the north” and a “king of the south”, which maps in considerable detail onto the wars between the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms across the third and second centuries BCE — marriages, campaigns, betrayals, a specific humiliation of a northern king by Roman envoys, and the desecration of the Jerusalem temple. The correspondence is close enough that commentators of every persuasion identify the referents.
The detail then stops corresponding. The chapter’s account of the king’s final campaign and death does not match how Antiochus IV actually died. The critical argument is about the location of that break: accuracy up to a point followed by divergence is the standard indicator used to date apocalyptic texts, and it is applied to non-biblical apocalypses — several of which are securely datable on other grounds — with the same logic and the same results.
The counter-argument does not deny the pattern. It argues that the break falls elsewhere, that the closing section refers to a figure beyond Antiochus, and that the standard method assumes what it sets out to prove — that prediction of this kind cannot occur. Both halves of that reply are serious. The second in particular is a genuine methodological point: the dating rule does presuppose a naturalistic frame, and a reader who does not share that frame is not being irrational in declining the inference.
The arguments from language and placement
Three supporting arguments are usually offered, and their weight is often overstated in both directions.
The Aramaic. Daniel 2:4b to 7:28 is in Aramaic. Attempts to date the book by the dialect have run in both directions over the last century, and the discovery of Aramaic texts at Qumran complicated rather than settled the picture. The honest summary is that the Aramaic is compatible with a range of dates and does not decide the question on its own.
The Greek words. Three musical instruments in chapter 3 carry Greek names. This was once treated as decisive for a Hellenistic date; it is now generally regarded as weaker, since Greek trade goods and Greek words reached the Near East well before Alexander. It remains a small consideration rather than nothing.
The canonical placement. In the Hebrew Bible, Daniel sits among the Writings, not the Prophets. If the book had been circulating as a prophetic work since the sixth century, its exclusion from the prophetic collection requires explanation. Counter-arguments exist — the shape of the Hebrew canon is itself debated, and the categories may reflect function rather than date — but the placement is a real datum on the critical side.
Where the external record actually bites
Two external facts constrain the argument, and they cut in opposite directions.
Belshazzar. The figure who holds the feast in chapter 5 is absent from the Greek and Roman historians and from the whole subsequent tradition, and was unknown until Babylonian cuneiform documents were read in the nineteenth century. Those documents show a real man of that name, son of the last Babylonian king Nabonidus, exercising authority in Babylon during his father’s long absence. A second-century author inventing a Babylonian court scene had no source that could have supplied that name. This is the strongest single point in favour of the book preserving genuine sixth-century material, and it is not adequately answered by observing that chapter 5 also gets his paternity wrong.
Darius the Mede. The figure who receives the kingdom in chapter 6 has no counterpart anywhere in the Babylonian, Persian, Greek or Roman record. The documents give the succession in Babylon to Cyrus. Proposed identifications — with a general, a governor, or Cyrus himself under another title — have each been argued and none has secured agreement. A named king ruling a named empire who left no trace is a serious problem for the sixth-century reading, and describing him as merely “not yet attested” understates it: this is a period for which we have administrative documents dated by regnal year.
The primary document for the transition itself is Cyrus’s own inscription describing his entry into Babylon, which is attached to this page as a source record. It should be read for what it says rather than for what it is usually said to say.
The outer limit
Fragments of Daniel were among the manuscripts found at Qumran, the earliest of them copied within a few decades of the 160s BCE. This is a constraint on both positions. It rules out any dating later than the second century, and it makes the second-century case tight: a book composed in a crisis has to be written, accepted, copied and carried to a community in the wilderness very quickly. Defenders of the critical position accept this and regard the interval as sufficient; it is a real cost of the position rather than an objection that has been refuted.
What this study concludes
That the question is genuinely disputed, that the disputants are not divided into the informed and the credulous, and that a reader is entitled to weigh the Belshazzar evidence and the chapter 11 pattern differently from the way any given specialist weighs them.
What a reader is not entitled to do is cite one of these facts and suppress the other. Any treatment of Daniel that celebrates Belshazzar without mentioning Darius the Mede, or dismisses the book on chapter 11 without accounting for Belshazzar, is selecting evidence. Both are common. Neither is scholarship.
Related: the book overview of Daniel, the method note on prophecy after the event, and the quiz on Daniel.