It was a great question from someone on Facebook.
In my book, Losers Like Us, I illustrated how – excluding Jesus – everyone in the Bible had faults and sins just like ours, and therefore they were all losers like us.
Then came that Facebook question: What about Daniel? Was he an exception?
I had to think about that one.
The book of Daniel is set during Israel’s captivity in Babylon (in the 500s BC)—yet it mentions elements of Greek culture which did not exist at that time, and it is written partly in Hebrew and partly in Aramaic (a later language). For these and other reasons, many scholars believe that someone else wrote Daniel’s story long after his death, just as Moses wrote the patriarchs’ stories long after their deaths. Also, some scholars believe Daniel was not a real person and the book of Daniel is just an allegory which was written to encourage the Jews, perhaps during the oppressive reign of Antiochus Epiphanes IV (about 165 BC).
