“In the end, the wind takes everything, doesn’t it? And why not? Why other? If the sweetness of our lives did not depart, there would be no sweetness at all.” – Stephen King, The Wind Through the Keyhole.
- Back in February (I’m way behind on my reading/listening/watching) James McGrath posted about an article by Candida Moss on the fame of John the Baptist.
- It’s not in my library yet but I came across a new volume that could be useful for NT background: The World of the New Testament: Encountering Texts in Context from Fortress Press. If you have this volume, let me know what you think of it.
- If you need reading recommendations, Jordan Jones has a few covering the Pentateuch, biblical Hebrew, and more!
- Paul Davidson posted a piece on the dating of the book of Daniel that is adapted to a video he produced on the same subject a couple of years ago.
- Steve Wiggins talks reading through 1 Kings through the lens of Game of Thrones.
- Nathan Houston talks with Shirley Paulson about Jesus’s two dads.
- Jason Staples talks about typological readings of the Joseph narrative in Genesis and the connection to Jesus.
- 30 books away from my annual goal!
The Amateur Exegete 
Yes, Paul Davidson’s overview of the dating of Daniel is superb. One passage in particular caught my attention:
There’s also the fact that the character Daniel is not mentioned by any external text until 1 Maccabees 1:60, dated to about 100 BCE. Ben Sira’s summary of Jewish history, written around 200 BCE, fails to mention Daniel.
Agreed. The silence about Daniel outside the Book of Daniel is awfully conspicuous. The traditional story tells us Daniel was promoted to be the Judahite governor (!) of the central province of Babylon, and served as a chief advisor and operations officer under the decades-long line of kings from Nebuchadnezzar the Great to Cyrus the (Also) Great. Yet none of the books in the Hebrew Bible that cover the exilic period (aside from Daniel itself)–II Kings, II Chronicles, Ezra-Nehemiah, etc.–reflect any memory of a guy named Daniel, or even an unnamed righteous Judahite seer, rising to a position of historic prominence under Chaldean and Persian kings.
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Thanks for the new round-up.
I couldn’t agree with Lex’s comment above more. (And if according to the Book of Daniel, he was a prominent royal consultant for dreams and visions of various Babylonian and Persian rulers over at least six decades, why should he be absent from extra-biblical records, given the amount of opportunities for his name to be recorded by some else? That’s also not to mention that Daniel was a foreigner, which would have probably drawn quite a bit of attention from other courtiers.)
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