Stroll through Scripture for Sunday August 4, 2024

Based on Daniel 2:24–49

Let me start by saying that I’m excited to take the next month and focus our attention on the book of Daniel. In seminary, I took a class that focused on this book of the Hebrew Scriptures and it was one of my favorite classes. The book of Daniel offers a wealth of richness and symbolism, written in an important time period in history.

Before we get into the selected passage of Scripture for Sunday, let me offer a few broad insights about Daniel. How we read Daniel matters. There are some who read the book as telling the story of a historical figure Daniel as events occurred. When we do that, we are ignoring the context in which the book was written and gets its significance and meaning. That would be like reading the Declaration of Independence now without any understanding of what was going on in the nation when it was written.

Daniel is the only book of the Hebrew Scriptures that we can narrow down when it was written to a very precise time period — 167–164 BCE. The context of the time was that Antiochus IV Epiphanes was the emperor of the Seleucid empire, which controlled the area where Israel is now. The emperor offered sacrifice to Zeus in the Hebrew Temple, desecrating the Temple. As a result, there was an uprising that threw off the Seleucids, and a cleansing of the Temple (which is the story of the origins of Chanukah). It leads to the Israel’s approximate 100-year reign of independence before the being occupied again.