Below is a transcript of a talk that William H Shea, renowned Theologian and Archaeologist gave at a camp meeting on Prophet Daniel: Studies into Book of Daniel Chapter 1.
Professor Shea is well known among Christian scholars for his archaeological works. He is an expert on the prophecies of Daniel and I know you will discover gems in the book of Daniel chapters 1 and 2 in the talk that follows.
Welcome to our series of studies in Daniel. I should make a brief follow up comment about retirement you know the Adventists version of retirement is twice the work and half the pay. That’s why we’re here at Camp meeting. Well, the Book of Daniel is a very important book for us, isn’t it?
It’s probably fair to say there wouldn’t be an Adventist church if there was no Book of Daniel. You remember William Miller our forefather preached many many many in the thousands of prophetic sermons but the heart of his prophetic sermons was Daniel 8:14. I believe that what it says on his tombstone in upstate New York is “though the vision tarry wait for it”. So we’re here waiting. But as the signs of the world develop we probably won’t have very much longer to wait we’ll we.
Introduction to the Book of Daniel
Well, the Book of Daniel is an unusual prophetic book half of it is history and half of it is prophecy. Most of the prophetic books of the Old Testament are not that way. If you look at Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel it’s almost all prophecy. Very little biographical material or historical material about the Prophet himself. And Daniel is divided half in half.
Now you don’t have to be a good historian to be an Adventist but it helps. And so we’re going to spend today and tomorrow on the historical chapters. And then Wednesday Thursday Friday on the prophetic chapters. So we want to due service to the historical chapters of the book which are very interesting and we can learn lessons from the life of Daniel and lessons from the prophecies of Daniel.
I want to start with a proverb and a story and the proverb is, some of the greatest archaeological discoveries are made in the basements of museums. And the story is the story back of this book which is basically the Near Eastern background of the Book of Daniel. And it goes like this. There was a man named L. W. King working in the British Museum before World War One And he published a book and the title of the book was Chronicles of the early Chaldean kings. And he had tablets in the British Museum, cuneiform tablets, clay tablets with writing on them lined up on his desk. But he died in the year 1914 and those tablets sat there for fifty years collecting dust.
And in 1956, the man who wrote this book, and his name is Donald J. Wiseman, was walking by and he saw this stack of tablets on Professor King’s desk and he said to himself I wonder what Professor King was studying. And he sat down and he started to study that new line up of tablets and what he found was a remarkable discovery. It was the cuneiform records, the tablets from the first thirteen years of King Nebuchadnezzar. King Nebuchadnezzar that we have in the Book of Daniel. And so the title is Chronicles of the Chaldean Kings. You remember Nebuchadnezzar is a Chaldean and he calls in the Chaldeans to interpret his dream and so on and so forth.
Now I met Professor Wiseman. He came to Philadelphia to teach a number of years ago and I went down to meet him. I was living in Boston at the time and it’s interesting to note that he was a devout Christian. He was a member of the Plymouth Brethren Church some of you may have heard of the Plymouth Brethren They arose about the time that Adventism arose in the 1820s. And he told me this: He said I think that God led me to those tablets.
Now I’m not going to cover the whole book with you but I want to read one entry because it affected Daniel. You see these are year by year entries. The scribes in the palace in Babylon would compile the events on tablets and then after the year was over they would make a summary which would just cover a few lines on a major tablet. So two of these major tablets cover those first thirteen years of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar.
And I want to read you the entry for the year 605. “In the twenty first year the king of Babylon stayed in his own land”. That’s Nebuchadnezzar’s father. His name was Nabopolassar. His name isn’t given here. “Nebuchadnezzar his elder son the Crown Prince mustered the Babylonian army to command of the troops. He marched to Carchemish which is on the banks of the Euphrates and crossed the river to go against the Egyptian army which lay in Carchemish. They fought with each other and the Egyptian army withdrew before him. He accomplished their defeat and nonexistence”. I like that phrase because of what follows. “As for the rest of the Egyptian army..” He just said he accomplished their non-existence but some of them got away. “…which had escaped from the defeat so quickly that no weapon reached them in the district of Hermas”, that is southern Syria, “the Babylonian troops overtook them defeated them so that not a single man escaped to his country. At that time, Nebuchadnezzar conquered the whole area of Hatti country”. Hatti country is an old name for Syria and Palestine because it used to belong to the Hittites that lived in Asia Minor in Turkey.
Now this was the turning event of the year 605 and it’s also recorded in Jeremiah Chapter forty-six with the prophecy against Pharaoh that his army would be defeated by Babylon. What does that have to do with Daniel? It had everything to do with Daniel. You see up until this battle Judea belonged to Egypt. Judah was under the control of the Egyptian pharaohs and in fact, his name was Pharaoh Necho. You may or may remember that when he was going up to one of these battles he stopped to battle against good King Josiah and killed him. So Egypt was in control of Judea until the year 605.
Daniel Chapter 1 Commentary
As a result of this battle. Everything that belonged to Egypt down to the border of Egypt itself now belonged to Babylon. And so that brings us to the Book of Daniel and what happened as a consequence. In Daniel chapter one verse one it says that Nebuchadnezzar came up against Jerusalem and besieged it. “In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it”.
Now unfortunately for Judah Jehoiakim was one of the bad kings. You know you go back to the time of Samuel when the people pled for a King “give us a king that he may fight our battles for us”. And so they got a king but when you get a king you are locked into the rule of genetic roulette. You see in the period of the judges the Spirit of God chose the leader. The Spirit of the Lord came upon Gideon; the Spirit of the Lord came upon Jephthah. Spirit of the Lord came upon the other judges. God chose the ruler. God chose the leader.
But when you have a king the kingship becomes hereditary and you get whatever you get with the oldest son. And sometimes they were good. Occasionally you got a good king that way. Good King Josiah is one of them we mentioned. Good King Hezekiah. But more often than not you got bad kings and Jehoiakim was one of the bad kings.
And he was the one who was always putting Jeremiah, the prophet in prison. And he was the one when they sent the scroll from Jeremiah, the prophet, the inspired prophet of God; they sent the scroll to him and they read it to him and as they read it to him he took a knife to it and threw it in the fire piece by piece by piece. That’s what he thought of the inspired prophet of God.
And so as a consequence what happens here, “The Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand along with some of the vessels of the house of God”. So Judah is conquered, Jerusalem is conquered and Jehoiakim, this bad king, has to pay. And what does he pay? With the gold out of the temple.
It’s interesting to follow all those vessels from the temple because they make a link between the old temple, the first temple and the Second Temple. Because here those vessels are taken away and put in the temple of the House of Nebuchadnezzar’s God. And in the time of Cyrus, Cyrus takes those vessels out of the house of God in Babylon and sends them back to be put in the rebuilt temple. So the link between the old temple and the new temple was the vessels that belonged to the temple that were taken as tribute.
But he took something else he took hostages and he took young men. And it’s interesting to notice the qualifications for these young men. And we read them in Daniel chapter one verse four. He wanted youth in whom was no defect was found, the physically sound. Those who were good looking. All right. Physical beauty, showing intelligence in every branch of wisdom, and endowed with understanding and discerning knowledge. Four different characteristics have to do with their mental abilities not just their physical abilities.
Now this was a common practice in the ancient world. The Egyptians did it. The Babylonians did it the Syrians did it. They would take these promising young men take them back to the major capital, Memphis in Egypt or Nineveh in Assyria or Babylon for the Babylonians and they would educate them. And they were supposed to learn respect for the great power that they studied under there. And occasionally what would happen when a governor of a province would die they would take a young man who had been trained and sent him back to be governor of the province where he came from.
So this is this is standard practice here and they take use of teenagers now. Just two weeks ago we had a graduation over in the other side of this building and most of the young people of the graduating class would have been seventeen or eighteen maybe a little younger. And so you can think of plucking one of those graduates and making him walk four hundred to six hundred miles on foot as a prisoner with no sign of any intervention of God. No voice of God speaking to him and everything looks dreary and you’re wrenched out of your own home setting. What are you going to do? What would you do?
Well, we know what Daniel did because that’s why we have a book in the Bible. Because like Joseph he determined in his heart that he would be faithful and true to the God whom he served even though he’s just a teenager. And so even though there was a hidden God. And God was behind the curtains at this time, Daniel and his friends still determined they will serve their God and that’s what we have in the story in the historical chapters of The Book of Daniel. We have the way their experience worked out.
Well, they get to Babylon and they’re put in school. So now they finished high school and they got to go to college. They have to go to Babylonia uni and the first problem they run into is they don’t like the food. Have you ever heard that from students before. My oldest daughter spent two years at Andrews and two years at Michigan State University.
And one time when I was visiting there in Lansing I went to a museum on campus and in the museum there was the story of how the student newspaper started. The year with 1880 and the student newspaper at Michigan State University started because the students wanted to complain about how bad the food was. So there’s nothing new under the sun and the food in the cafeterias are still bad every place except here.
But there was something else wrong with the food. And so Daniel and his friends ask their overseer look we don’t want to be defiled by the king’s food we don’t want any offense but we don’t want to eat that stuff. There are probably simple reasons for that. We have tablets which tell about the rations of food supplies for the Babylonian army and it included pork. So there were unclean meats being served. Then it’s possible that they were offered to idols and this probably had something also to do with the highly spicy foods that they served.
And so there were several reasons why the Israelite young man had objections to the diet. But you know you don’t want to bring bad news to the king because you know what happens to the messenger who brings bad news to the king. The messenger server suffers as a consequence. So the overseer protests and says “well look I’ll be in trouble if I don’t serve you the king’s food at the king’s table here. So Daniel proposes a test and he says give us what we want to eat for just ten days .
And it says based on my translation, the new NSV, that I am reading from, it says that “give us vegetables and water to drink for ten days as a test”. The actual literal word behind the word vegetables is seed food, that is to say food grown from seeds. So it’s obviously a vegetarian diet maybe even a vegan diet. Now you might say well ten days? what can you accomplish in ten days? Well you can accomplish a lot in ten days. You can, on that diet, lower your cholesterol fifty points.
And so grudgingly the overseer permits them to take the test and they come up physically better and so they pass the test. And so he permits them to continue on that diet for the three years that they were studying at the Babylonian University. And at the end of the three years they have to have an oral examination. And it’s interesting the way it puts it here that God gave them. You know what the king was looking for in the qualifications. It says God gave them, verse seventeen, “as for these youths God gave them knowledge and intelligence in every branch of literature and wisdom. Daniel even understood all kinds of vision and dreams. So what the king was looking for God gave them.
It’s interesting to see how certain experiences occur where God seems to intervene on behalf of faithful students. Ben Carson the neurosurgeon, the Adventist neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins tells the story about when he went to the Massachusetts General Hospital for an interview for residency position. And as he sat in the room waiting to go in for the oral examination before a board of doctors he said to him self well what shall I review. I think I’ll look at the hormones of the pituitary gland. And he walked in to the examination and one of the first questions asked him by one of the surgeons who was on the board there said, “Please review the hormones of the pituitary gland for us”.
I had the same experience at the University of Michigan. I was living in Berrien springs at the time and it’s a three-hour drive. I was writing my comprehensive examinations for the doctor’s degree and one of them was on ancient history and so on. So I arrived a little early. I was sitting in my car and said well so what shall I study.
There was a kingdom of people in the Bible and they’re known as Hurrians. Maybe you’ve heard of the Hurrians. And their kingdom on the upper Euphrates was known as the Kingdom of the Mitanni. And so I just happen to flip open the book to the kingdom of the Mitanni. I reviewed the kings and what they did there in about the fifteenth century B.C. shortly before the time of Moses. So I walked into the examination and you have three hours to write on five questions and one of the five questions was discuss the Mitanni Kingdom.
But I had an even better shot at it. My wife and I also have medical licenses and we worked for four years on the island of Trinidad in the West Indies. And so while there, to get there, to get a license to practice medicine there we had to take examinations in Canada because Canada and Trinidad were former colonies. So we had to have a British medical license.
Now I again it was the same sort of situation you have a written or oral or written and oral for the examination in surgery. I walked in and I must preface this by saying I was wearing a bow tie. I always used to wear bow ties when I taught at the seminary and it was a bow tie which I had bought on Vancouver Island when my wife and I were on our honeymoon and it was a Scotch plaid . And my first question on surgery was where did you get that bow tie? Because the bow tie was in the plaid of the Macbeth Tarzan and Dr Macbeth was one of the three surgeons that I had to be examined by. Needless to say I came through that exam with flying colors.
Well sometimes God can do unusual things for you. And he did unusual things for Daniel and his three friends. And I want you to notice as we review this chapter I want you to notice three places in the text where it says God gave. Daniel 1 verse 2 “the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand”. That is into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar. And you might say that’s not a very good thing but here’s a wicked king who deserve this fate but the innocents among the nobles of Judea didn’t deserve that fate. So what are you going to make out of it.
All right the second place. Daniel 1 verse 9. “Now God gave Daniel favor and compassion in the sight of the commander of the officials”. So you see the first one is negative. Second one is positive and the third one is very positive. And that’s Daniel 1 verse 17. “As for these four youths God gave them knowledge and intelligence” and so forth. So you may not have been the brightest student but James says “whoever lacks wisdom let him ask of God who giveth freely”. And so he gave wisdom and intelligence and even a knowledge of dreams to Daniel and his friends.
So we have God gave; God gave; God gave. But if you think about Daniel trudging across the desert. A hostage, a captive swept away from his own land never to see it again. You might say the logical question that he would ask and I’m sure they probably did, where is God in all this? But you see when God inspires Daniel to write up the record of his experience he pulls the curtain back and shows that he was right there behind the curtains all the time.
And it may be that way with you in your life and your experiences things happen to you and you say why me why this. But one day God will pull back the curtain and he will show you that his purposes and his plans were not thwarted by what the devil to bring into your life.
Ellen White says in the book Desire of Ages about John the Baptist as he languished in prison. And remember here is the man whom Jesus said among men and women there is not a greater than John the Baptist. And how did he die? By having his head chopped off. But Ellen White says of him as he languished in that prison that If God could have pulled back the curtain and showed and shown him the purpose that he was accomplishing for God. He would not have chosen to have anything different in his life than it was. So the bad times may come.
God doesn’t call you just to be rice Christians. He calls you to stand for him regardless of the circumstances. Good bad or indifferent. And Daniel and his friends did that and that’s the lesson we can gather from chapter one. And they did that even though they could not see God behind the purposes of the time they couldn’t see what God was accomplishing in the fall of Judah. They couldn’t see what God was accomplishing in their captivity but God had a purpose.
You know we think of this time and we call it the Babylonian exile. This was just the beginning. Nebuchadnezzar came back two more times to Judah. Daniel went with the first wave of exiles. Seven years later Ezekiel went with the second wave of exiles . And with the third wave the whole city and country were demolished and the rest of the population were sent into captivity. And you might say well where was God in all that.
The interesting fact is that the single largest portion of the Bible was written at that time. Now add it up. We have three prophets in three different locations. We have Daniel in the court of Babylon, twelve chapters. We have Jeremiah in Jerusalem fifty-two chapters. And we have Ezekiel with the captives in Babylon forty-eight chapters. Forty-eight, fifty-two that’s a hundred chapters of the Bible right there. And Daniel makes one hundred twelve. Was God quiet, was God silent at this time?Absolutely not.
A hundred and twelve chapters of the Bible came out of that experience. So you see if God had been silent and never spoken, the people in Babylon, the exiles, the hostages, the captives, they might have said there isn’t any God he didn’t guide or direct. He has no hand in human affairs. But God sends His prophets to three different critical locations to show that he was right there. And he knew it all and he showed it all and he told them why it all happened and where it was going after that. The restoration prophecies in Ezekiel; the restoration prophecies in Jeremiah; and the apocalyptic prophecies in Daniel that go on beyond that.
What Did Daniel and Friends Study? : Daniel Chapter 1
Well Daniel and his friends are in Babylon there studying at Babylon Uni. And we have a good idea of what they studied. They obviously studied Aramaic. They spoke Hebrew of course, Aramaic is very close to Hebrew. It’s about the difference between Spanish and Italian. So it was easy to learn Aramaic and they studied mathematics. We have a lot of mathematical tablets from Babylon.
And they studied astronomy and probably if they had to study astrology, they probably didn’t take it very seriously but they could study the astronomical basis.
And they studied the Babylonian language which was also a Semitic language but a little more distant than Aramaic.
And they studied the Babylonian writing system and that was not easy. You see God gave the Jews and the Phoenicians and the people who lived in the West an alphabet. You don’t realize how fortunate you are to write with an alphabet. The alphabet for the Babylonians was six hundred and twenty five cuneiform signs.
And in order to write that stuff you had to learn all six hundred twenty five of those signs so that the kings of Babylon and Assyria could not read and write. There was one Assyrian king who learned how to read and write and he bragged about it in his tablets. So reading and writing in Babylon because of the cumbersome writing system was the province of the scribes the technocrats.
But in Judea the common person could read and write because you have a simple alphabet of twenty two letters. You see their alphabet was even shorter than ours. We have twenty six letters they had twenty two. And that makes it easy because in an hour you can learn all those twenty two letters.
And we have a case in the book of Judges where Jephthah is chasing the Ammonites and he stops at a village and asks a young man “who are the Elders of this town that wouldn’t help me?”. And the young man writes down the names of the elders. He can write. If you stopped at a town in Babylon they couldn’t write it, couldn’t have done it. You’d have to hunt down the scribes in the city. So God gave a gift to the people of God with their writing system.
You know there’s been a few great inventions that have pushed along the Word of God such as the invention of the alphabet in the time and place where Moses lived out in Sinai. That’s the beginning of the alphabet and then Gutenberg comes along with movable print movable type so that the Bible instead of being hand-copied you could print.
It is said that in 1450 approximately the time when Gutenberg invented movable print there were one hundred thousand books in Europe and by the end of that century the fifteenth century there were a million. Because of the printing and the most common one of all was the Bible. And so it’s the democratization of the Word of God to be able to spread it so that everybody can read it.
And William Tyndale stands before Bishop Tunstal in England and says, “If God gives me life before long I’ll have the man behind the plow will know more about the Word of God than you do because of the spread and translation and spread of the Word of God.
Click here for Daniel 2 commentary.
Related:
Prophecies of Daniel 11: Daniel Sees The End of The World Coming
Prophecy of Daniel 12 Interpretation:Time of Trouble
I hope that you have enjoyed this bible study, Prophet Daniel: Studies Into Book of Daniel Chapter 1 by William H Shea. Please share it with all your friends and family. May God bless you all.
