Difficulty in Chapter 14

Introduction

Now there is a difficulty in this chapter that we need to address. I'm betting it's one that no one in the audience has ever heard before, but this is the kind of thing you'll run into in Israelite Religion in graduate school or in Daniel class or something like that. And that is, the reference to Daniel in this section of Ezekiel 14 is actually a difficulty. Think about it. This is Ezekiel living during the sixth century B.C. He's taken in the second wave of captivity. Daniel was taken in the first wave. So Ezekiel and Daniel are contemporaries. When this is happening in real time (when Ezekiel is preaching) he's preaching to a limited audience— people who are within earshot. So how would those people know that Daniel (the biblical Daniel) is this great example of faith? The book of Daniel, as far as we know, doesn't exist. It was written at the same time, or we guess that because they're living at the same time. And Daniel, of course, is in Nebuchadnezzar's court. He's not out there by the River Chebar wandering around with the exiles and doing servile work. How do they even know about him? The fact that the books aren't written yet... How can Daniel be a reference point here?

And you could ask the same question of Noah. If Genesis 1 through 11 hadn't been written yet—if that's going to be during the exile or a little bit after—do you have the same difficulty there? Job? A lot of evangelicals assume that Job is the earliest book of the Bible. I don't believe that, and most Old Testament scholars don't believe it, either. None of the arguments for Job's earliness is really a good argument. You can turn them around and argue for lateness, as well, or an exilic situation. For instance, "Oh, there's no reference to the Law of Moses, so the Law didn't exist yet, so Job was written before the Torah." Well, maybe the Law isn't written yet because Job isn't an Israelite. Did you realize that? Job isn't an Israelite. And maybe it's because the people for whom the story was intended don't have the Torah, they don't have the tabernacle, they don't have the temple, they don't have the priesthood because Job isn't an Israelite. I don't want to lapse off into the dating of Job here. A lot of the Hebrew of Job is actually late in terms of the grammar. For the sake of our discussion here, that might present a problem, too. It just depends on when the book was written.

So we've got a difficulty here. You could argue that Noah and Job were likely known to the exiles through tradition. You have the Flood tradition. That's going to be something that was widespread in the Ancient Near East from great antiquity. You could have the Israelite take on this be part of oral tradition. The character Noah would be part of oral tradition before it gets written down. That's certainly workable, certainly possible. You could argue the same for Job because the theme of the righteous sufferer was well-known in the Ancient Near East. Egypt has this material. Mesopotamia has this kind of material—the person who's blameless before the gods and then the gods or the council says, "They're only this way because of this, that, and the other thing." And the whole question of why the righteous suffer, which is a big theme in Job. You have this familiar material so it's very possible that the Israelites could have had this story circulating in their consciousness through oral tradition before Job gets written. Or Job could have been written. We just don't know.

Daniel is the Issue

So Noah and Job aren't really at the heart of the difficulty here. The real heart of the difficulty is Daniel. If this is Ezekiel's contemporary (and by biblical chronology, we know he is), how would the exiles know him as this exemplary figure when the events of his life were still playing out? That's the issue. Now there are a couple of proposals here. One is, people could say that this part of Ezekiel was written after the exile (post-exilic), and that would have given the book of Daniel time to have been written, and whoever is putting this together could have included these names in chapter 14 under inspiration, and there you go. Problem solved. People are going to know who Daniel is because by this time, the book would have existed. You don't have to be living where the king lives to know who this guy is, and so on and so forth, and that's the way that it would make sense. Okay, that's one possibility

Post-Exilic Editing

The second is we have a postexilic editing of this portion to include Daniel. So one is a composition argument and the other is an editing argument. Kind of six of one and half dozen of another. Both of those work the same way.

Dan’ell

The third proposal (and this is the one you'll get if you're in graduate school sitting in an Israelite Religion class or a Daniel class, or even an Ezekiel class, for that matter) is that this Daniel is not the biblical Daniel. Rather, this is Dan’ell, who was a well-known (at least to the people of Canaan) literary figure from Ugaritic material. Now, just a little statement by Block here:

The tale of Aqhat tells the story of a legendary King Dan’el (dnil), characterized as “upright, sitting before the gate, beneath a mighty tree on the threshing floor, judging the cause of the widow, adjudicating the case of the fatherless.”

In other words, this is a good guy. He's an upright person. And this was a wellknown figure because of the Ugaritic material. You say, "What's the evidence for that?" Here's the evidence. I'll give you three lines of evidence for it and then we'll talk about whether this makes sense or not.

The big one, the one that draws attention a lot is the spelling (believe it or not) of the name Daniel. Hopefully even if you don't know Hebrew you'll be able to follow this. “Daniel” in Ezekiel in this chapter is spelled "dnal" (daleth, nun, aleph, lamedh). Four consonants. Literally, if you took the vowels out, it would be dan'el, just like the Ugaritic guy. In the book of Daniel (believe it or not), the name "Daniel" is not spelled that way. It's spelled with FIVE consonants instead of four: daleth, nun, yodh, aleph, lamedh—daniyel. For those who know Hebrew, the "dah-nee-el," you have the hireq yodh in there—the long "i" with the yodh. So "Daniel" in Ezekiel is not spelled the way "Daniel" in the book of Daniel is. They are different spellings. And since the one in Ezekiel corresponds to four consonants ("Dan'el"), scholars have noticed this. You would think, if the guy in the book of Daniel is the reference point here, that Ezekiel would spell it the same way. But he doesn't. The scribes—or whoever put the book of Ezekiel together—they do not spell it the way it's spelled in the book of Daniel. So when scholars notice this and then they think about the chronology here, it's like, "Boy, that's interesting. We wouldn't expect that!"

Here's the second line of argumentation. Ezekiel apparently does know of the Ugaritic Dan'el. That's a good assumption to make because Ezekiel mentions Dan'el and he uses a lot of Ugaritic material in Ezekiel 28. Ezekiel 28 is a diatribe against the king of Tyre. Remember the king of Tyre is going to be the one who exalts himself above the highest of the gods and says "I sit in the seat of the gods" and refers to himself with the Semitic El word and all this stuff. If you've read Unseen Realm you're going to be basically familiar with the use of the Ugaritic material and "the divine rebel" in Ezekiel 28. Well, in that chapter we read this in verse 3:

Ezekiel 28:3 ESV

you are indeed wiser than Daniel; no secret is hidden from you;

So scholars will say, "Look, the same four-consonant Dan'el spelling there is in Ezekiel 28, and Ezekiel 28 is full of Ugaritic stuff. So it's probably a good assumption that Ezekiel—the writer, the person, the prophet, or one of his followers who may have helped put the book together after Ezekiel was gone— that they knew this material and this is the guy they're referring to: Dan'el, not the biblical Daniel

Or…not Israelites

according to the biblical record. Of course, Noah is living before there was an Israel so he's not an Israelite. And Job, again, is not cast as an Israelite in the book of Job. So the use of Dan'el, a Canaanite guy, wouldn't be so bizarre as it seems. So those are the three lines of evidence for saying this isn't the biblical Daniel. It's this guy from Canaanite Ugaritic literature. This upright guy. And again, scholars are gravitating to that view because of those three things and because of the apparent chronological disconnect—because Ezekiel and Daniel are contemporaries. Again, if Ezekiel is preaching about the biblical Daniel, how do the exiles know that that's a godly guy if they'd never met him (because he's over there in the king's palace somewhere) and they don't know anything that's going on? And the events of the biblical Daniel's life are playing out at the same time. So how does that make sense? So this is why scholars go there.

Some Issues

Now here are the problems. There are problems with this idea. One is that it's true (and Block points this out) that the fuller form of “Daniel” with the extra consonant does show up Mesopotamian literature, specifically 18th century B.C. Mari Letters. So the fuller spelling was known, which leads some people to think it doesn't make any difference if the fuller spelling (five consonants) or the lesser (four consonant) spelling is used. They could have been interchangeable. That's possible.

Number two problem is that Dan'el of the Ugaritic literature was a pagan. (laughs) He was Ugaritic. He was a Canaanite guy. So he actually worships a god other than Yahweh. Yahweh isn't in the Ugaritic material. So Dan'el of the Akaat poem was a pagan. He worships a foreign god and the whole story is much more at home with the Canaanites and the pagans than the kind of people Ezekiel is targeting or naming or describing as loyal, faithful followers of Yahweh of Israel. He's not a Yahwist. In DDD (Dictionary of Deities and Demons), they have an entry on Daniel (Dan'el) and it goes like this. I'm going to read this to you so you get a fuller picture of Dan'el. He's not just a good guy who judges the widow and the fatherless and all this stuff. He's not just this upright guy who can be trusted to judge faithfully. DDD says:

There we find a king named Daniel (dnʾil) who is initially childless. He supplicates the gods and is given a son Aqhat. The divine craftsman, Kothar-wa-Khasis gives Aqhat a present of a bow. The goddess →Anat takes a fancy to the bow and offers Aqhat silver and gold in exchange for it. Aqhat declines. Anat then offers to make him immortal, but Aqhat refuses to believe her, since old age and death are the lot of humanity. Anat then plots vengeance against him, and kills him by sending her attendant Yatpan in the form of a vulture to strike him down. The bow, however, is broken and falls into the sea. Messengers from Baal relate to Dan'el and his daughter late-born Pughat what has happened. Dan'el beseeches Baal to break the wings of vultures, so that he can rip them open and see if Aqhat’s flesh and bones are in them. Eventually he retrieves his son for burial, and laments him for seven years. . . .

So on the one hand, the Dan'el figure of Ugaritic literature is an upright guy, according to the Canaanites—and according to just being a good guy. He's not a wicked cheat and an unjust judge and all that sort of stuff. But he's clearly a pagan. He might be exceptionally wise and exceptionally good in the way he does his job in leadership, but he is a pagan. So if we assume that Ezekiel knows the literature, Ezekiel knows he's a pagan. So why would he include a pagan in this list with Noah and Job?

So how do we get out of this?

What's the way out of this? I would think, if you're listening to this you're thinking, "We've got to veer to one of the two. What we're reading here in Ezekiel postdates the story of Daniel." Well, okay, you can argue that, and that will resolve the problem. That will resolve the tension and the Israelites would have known who Daniel was, and the reference to Daniel here with Noah and Job would make sense. But then you have the problem of determining when Daniel was written. If any of you have ever studied Daniel with any amount of seriousness, you know there's a huge debate over whether Daniel was written in the 6th century B.C. or the 2nd century B.C. or some combination thereof. You've got issues with the late authorship of Daniel there, as well. This is one of the reasons... it's a reason you wouldn't think of, because usually people who would resist the late authorship of Daniel do so because of prophecy. “Well, you can't have Daniel being written after the fact so that the stuff he says is prophecy about the Babylonians being defeated by the Medes and the Persians and then the Greeks and then the Romans... you can't have that being after the fact because then it isn't predictive prophecy anymore.” It's prophecy after the fact, which is a Second Temple genre of literature (that much is true) but it really looks like then you can't take the content of Daniel as predictive prophecy. It's a bit of an overstatement because there's still prophecy going on that post-dates any of the four kingdoms, but we get the point here. There's a big disconnect there if you take the late view of Daniel. This Daniel problem in another book—in Ezekiel—is another reason that a lot of scholars feel we need to defend the earlier authorship of Daniel, sometime in the 6th century. Not just to, again, avoid the problem of prophecy after the fact but also to make sense of Ezekiel's own reference to Daniel as a godly character (because they were contemporaries in the biblical chronology).

So we'll leave it there. I don't want to rabbit trail any further. If we were doing a podcast series on the book of Daniel, for instance, I would just tell you (and I can tell you in summary) that there is no slam-dunk linguistic argument that requires a late date for Daniel. There are linguistic arguments that can support such a claim, but there's no smoking gun—"this has to be late because of this feature of the language, the grammar, that I hear." Basically, the linguistic stuff is kind of a stalemate when it comes to the dating of the book of Daniel. And I know evangelicals who take the late date and still believe in predictive prophecy. They just say you have to find it elsewhere, you don't have it here, you've got prophecy after the fact as a genre, and away we go. So don't equate this in your head that if you take a late view of the authorship of Daniel you're somehow an unbeliever and a liberal and all that kind of stuff. You wouldn't be. I can introduce you to evangelicals who take the late date for reasons they think require them to do that. But I think the honest statement is that the linguistic evidence for dating Daniel late is a stalemate. There's nothing that compels it. But since that evidence does exist, people who are liberals (we'll set the evangelicals aside for the moment)... people who don't have any sort of confessional commitment, they'll take the data that does support the late date and they'll say, "Hey, we don't believe in this predictive prophecy stuff anyway, so there you go. We're going to argue it's late." Plus the whole apocalyptic genre is a big deal, and Daniel fits better in that period than somewhere else. Of course, that ignores works like Kvanvig, who traces the apocalyptic thinking and material in Daniel like the "son of man" all the way back to Mesopotamia. Again, there is nothing that compels a late date for Daniel. The key word there is compels.

So if you're comfortable with the early date, then what you have to argue here to straighten out this problem in Ezekiel 14 is that we have an authorship of Daniel sometime in the 6th century and it would have pre-dated this section of Ezekiel that mentions Daniel. Because we need Daniel as a book and as a person to have some history before people who read Ezekiel would understand the reference to him along with Noah and Job, as being a truly godly example. That's the way you have to approach it.

Ezekiel 14:21–23 ESV

“For thus says the Lord God: How much more when I send upon Jerusalem my four disastrous acts of judgment, sword, famine, wild beasts, and pestilence, to cut off from it man and beast! But behold, some survivors will be left in it, sons and daughters who will be brought out; behold, when they come out to you, and you see their ways and their deeds, you will be consoled for the disaster that I have brought upon Jerusalem, for all that I have brought upon it. They will console you, when you see their ways and their deeds, and you shall know that I have not done without cause all that I have done in it, declares the Lord God.”

We'll stop there. Basically, God is saying through Ezekiel, "Look, when Jerusalem meets its end and we get another wave of exiles in here (and the righteous are going to be among them), they'll tell you that what Ezekiel said was true. That God punished Jerusalem, Jerusalem did fall, the temple did fall, and the reason was the idolatry that was going on in God's own house and in God's own place. God was justified in doing this because we violated the covenant, but we're here. God spared us. We were faithful to him and he spared us. We're here now in exile." But then they would be a sign of the fact that God is still being merciful, God is going to preserve a remnant, and the remnant will be brought back to the land, as Ezekiel has alluded to before.

So then the preaching point is really going to be, "Those of you who are here in Babylon, are you going to get rid of the idols in your own heart or not? Are you going to be part of the remnant or not? Because if you don't, you're going to die here. You will perish. You will not see the land again. You're done. This is your destiny right here." So we're starting to get a little bit of a glimpse that Jerusalem's destruction is looming here. This isn't the first one, but it is a bit more pronounced in context, and Ezekiel is a little more blunt. "Yeah, it's going to happen. But when you see people who survive out of it, you're going to know that it was just fine. And these people are going to be a consolation." Because if what Ezekiel said about the doom of Jerusalem is true and came to pass, what he's also said about God's intent to preserve a remnant—that's true, too. Ezekiel wasn't lying there. Just like he wasn't lying with the doom, he's not lying with the good part—the blessing part, the consolation part.

Quickly through 15

So chapter 15 lowers the boom, trying to disabuse the people who are hearing this of any notion that God is going to look upon them favorably. Back to Leviticus 26:40, "Though you escape from the fire, fire will still consume them." Leviticus 26:40 basically says, "Even if you escape, you've acted faithlessly. You've committed treachery." The verse says:

But if they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their fathers in their treachery that they committed against me, and also in walking contrary to me…

Then I'll reconsider! But Ezekiel's whole point is, "You haven't done that.” Back to chapter 14, “Your idolatry is in your heart. You are still acting faithlessly. You are still committing spiritual treachery. You're living Leviticus 26." In Leviticus 26, God said, "The goal is that you will be my people and I will be your God. If you do these things and you repent, then I'll remember the covenant and bring you back. But if you don't, there's nothing to bring back. It's over. You're finished." So God wants to promise a return to the people Ezekiel is ministering to. That's what Ezekiel is for. He's supposed to say these things. His message is, again, that Jerusalem and the temple are finished. They're history. It's over. BUT, those who do repent—those who realize the justification (why this is happening)—they will be among the spared and they will come back. If you don't, you're either going to die in Jerusalem or you're going to die in Babylon. That's it. That's the story.

Now what's really interesting about this… and we'll wrap up with this because I don't want to belabor it again. We've mentioned this in previous episodes. All this Leviticus 26 stuff about "here's what's going to happen," did happen. Both kingdoms were destroyed. One was scattered to the wind and the other was sent to Babylon in the exile and brought back. But yet, when Paul quotes Leviticus 26 about "I will be your God and you will be my people," where does he quote it? He quotes it in 2 Corinthians 6. Corinthians—they are Gentiles. He's writing to the Gentiles, to a Gentile church. This thing where circumcision doesn't matter. It's the circumcision-neutral thing we call “the Church,” the people of God in the New Testament context. That's where Paul decides to quote the promise, the hope, of Leviticus 26. Paul could have said, "Oh, well this already happened. That's when Judah returned from Babylon." He doesn't do that. He doesn't deny the event occurred—of course he knows his Old Testament history; he knows that the people were brought back. But now he casts Gentiles with Jews. He casts the Church in the same light as the elect people of God (the people who had access to the truth, who had a covenantal relationship with the true God). He takes all that stuff and applies it to the Church. Circumcision doesn't matter. That doesn't mean Paul denies certain things about ethnic Israel. What it does mean is that he affirms that the way God looks at believing Gentiles is to look at them as though they are the seed of Abraham, and that is precisely what he calls them in Galatians 3 (again, through the hand of Paul). If you are Christ's, you are Abraham's seed—an heir according to the promise. It couldn't be any clearer.

So this, again, is a factor in how we think about "return" language from the Old Testament, and that relates to how we think about eschatology. It relates to how we think about the Church (the people of God)—all these big-picture things. It refers back to "already, not yet" sort of paradigm—that the kingdom is not just for the Jew. These promises are no longer tied to an ethnic group, a people. They don't exclude that people, but they include the Gentile. It's important to notice how these passages are used and repurposed and quoted in the New Testament, since it touches here in Ezekiel 15 and Ezekiel 14—this whole message about what God intends to do in the wake of the impending doom here. We need to have this fresh in our minds as people living long after these events, and people living after the cross. How are we to think about these things?

So we can get a good message from the two chapters—a practical message about "where is our loyalty?" Where is it? And about how we can't assume God is going to bless US if we have idolatry in our heart just because we're part of a group, we're part of a family that has faithful people in it. God is not going to pass over our unfaithfulness (in other words, our unbelief), the fact that we are aligned with some other god or no god at all. God is not going to overlook that because of what someone else believes—because of someone else's faith. It's a good lesson, but also how we should look at ourselves as the Church in our day and age in light of all this.

Block, Daniel I. The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 1 24. Vol. 31. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1997.

Heimpel, Wolfgang. Letters to the king of Mari: a new translation, with historical introduction, notes, and commentary. Penn State Press, 2003.

Van der Toorn, Karel, Bob Becking, and Pieter Willem van der Horst, eds. Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1999.