As South East England is at a virtual standstill with snow, I find my mind straying back to last week when I was in Roca Baton in Florida to present a paper the the North America conference of the Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism on Apologetics. My paper dealt with the use of Daniel 2:44 in sharing the gospel with Jewish people. This is the paper I presented.
Whatever happened to Daniel 2:44?
The title of this
paper is a challenge that was put to me by a Hasidic friend, Eliyohu, ten years
ago. Eliyohu and I had corresponded and met occasionally over a period of fifteen
years during which time Eliyohu made a profession of faith in Yeshua and was
even baptized in the River Jordan. However, due to the combined influences of
traditional Judaism and some Jehovah’s Witness friends, and in spite of
acknowledging that the Tanakh [Old Testament] and the Brit Hadashah [New
Testament] taught the deity of the Messiah, Eliyohu refused to accept that
Yeshua was God. He apostatized, converted to Hasidism, married a religious woman
and moved to the Yonkers district of New York.
In the fall of 2003, Eliyohu
was in the UK for a brief visit and as we walked among the herds of deer in the
beautiful landscape of Knole Park in Sevenoaks, we argued (in the proper sense
of the word) about a number of issues. Eliyohu was extolling the writings of Maimonides,
and I expressed surprise that religious Jews revere him since the Rambam was a
thorough-going rationalist. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, he put to me the
question, ‘If Jesus is the Messiah, what happened to Daniel 2:44?’
The New JPS
Translation* of the Tanakh translates the verse: ‘And in the time of those
kings, the God of heaven will establish a Kingdom that shall never be
destroyed, a kingdom that shall not be transferred to another people. It will
crush and wipe out all those kingdoms, but shall itself last forever…’
The question relating
to Dan. 2:44 is at least as old as Isaac Troki, who writes in Hizuk Emunah: ‘At the time of the king
Messiah, there is to be only one kingdom and one king, namely, the true king
Messiah. But the other empires and their rulers shall cease at that period, as
we read in Daniel ii. 44… Whereas, we now actually see that many empires,
different in their laws and habits, are still in existence; and that in each
empire a different king is ruling; consequently the Messiah is not yet come.’
Troki expands the reference to ‘those kings’ in Daniel 2:44 to include all
empires, not just the four empires symbolised by Nebuchadnezzar’s statue, and
concludes that because many kingdoms still exist, the kingdom of heaven has not
been established.’
As an Orthodox Jew, Eliyohu believes the
indestructible kingdom of Dan. 2:44 will be established by the Messiah.
Therefore, if Jesus is the Messiah, the kingdom of heaven should long since
have been established. Since, according to Eliyohu, Jesus failed to fulfil that
essential task, he could not be the Messiah. End of argument!
The question of Dan.
2:44 had never been put to me before and it is a verse I had never considered
as a proof text for the Messiahship of Jesus. The verse does not appear to be
dealt with in great detail Messianic apologists and few commentaries deal with.
But since that discussion ten years ago, I have come to see that the verse forms
a compelling argument for the Messiahship of Yeshua.
The power of prophecy
In The Messianic Hope, Michael Rydelnik
warns of a trend among evangelicals towards playing down the issue of direct
Messianic prophecy in the Tanakh and of thinking not in terms of prediction but
of promises, principles and types. For Rydelnik, however, ‘The best way of
understanding the Bible as a whole is to see the Old Testament as predicting
the coming of the Messiah and the New Testament revealing him to be Jesus of
Nazareth.’
Those of us engaged in
witness to Jewish people know the value of Rydelnik’s traditional and
time-honoured stance. To jettison the concept of Messianic prophecy in the
Tanakh in favour of what might appear a more sophisticated and nuanced approach
to biblical interpretation would be to abandon what has been one of the most
powerful weapons in our spiritual arsenal for ‘the tearing down of strongholds’
(2 Cor. 10:4, King James Version). Religious Jews certainly see the Tanakh as a
book about Messiah, as the Talmud testifies: ‘R. Hiyya b. Abba said in R.
Johanan’s name: All the prophets prophesied [all the good things] only in
respect of the Messianic era’ (Sanhedrin 99a).
Traditional Judaism
accepts the existence of Messianic prediction in the Torah, the Prophets and
the Writings and, on its own terms, the Tanakh is clearly a prophetic book. In Is.
41:21-23, God throws out a challenge to the idols of the nations:
Submit your case, says the LORD; Offer your pleas, says
the King of Jacob. Let them approach and tell us what will happen. Tell us what
has occurred, and we will take note of it; or announce to us what will occur,
that we may know the outcome, Foretell what is yet to happen, that we may know
that you are gods! Do anything, good or bad, that we may be awed and see.
If the gods of the nations have any reality, says
the LORD through his prophet Isaiah, let
them prove it by revealing the future. The challenge thrown down by Israel’s
God to the gods of the nations was a challenge he himself could accept. Just as
Elijah’s challenge to the prophets of Baal to call down fire from heaven was a
test only an omnipotent deity could successfully pass, the ability to
accurately foretell the future is the mark of the all-powerful, all-wise,
all-knowing God. In Isaiah 46:9-10, Adonai declares:
Bear in mind what happened of old; for I am God,
and there is none else, I am divine and there is none like Me. I foretell the
end from the beginning, and from the start, things that had not occurred. I say:
My plan shall be fulfilled; I will do all I have purposed. I summoned that
swooping bird from the East, from a distant land, the man for My purpose. I
have spoken, so I will bring it to pass; I have designed it, so I will complete
it.
For the purpose of
this paper, and to raise the issue from the realm of the purely theoretical, I
propose dealing first with how I responded to Eliyohu’s challenge at the time
and, secondly, the way my thinking on the verse has developed since.
My initial response to Eliyohu was that if Daniel’s
prophecy concerning the indestructible kingdom of heaven was not fulfilled at
its pre-ordained time, Daniel was a false prophet because according to Dt.
18:22, ‘If the prophet speaks in the name of the LORD and the oracle does not come true, that oracle
was not spoken by the LORD; the
prophet has uttered it presumptuously.’
Eliyohu emphatically denied that Daniel was a false
prophet even though, according to his understanding, the everlasting kingdom of
2:44 had failed to materialize. Seeing he was overlooking the implication of
the words, ‘in the time of those kings,’
I asked who the four kings, in whose days the kingdom would be established, were.
Eliyohu didn’t know.
The Kingdom and the kingdoms
Daniel was written in the sixth century BC, at
the time of the Babylonian captivity, and is a remarkable example of prophecy
according to the parameters established in Dt. 18 and Is. 41 and 46. In chapter
2, Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had a dream, the meaning of which was
revealed by God to Daniel. In the dream, the king had seen a colossal statue
with a head of gold, breast and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze and
legs of iron. According to Daniel’s interpretation of the king’s dream, the
various metals symbolized successive kingdoms that would rule over the Jewish
people, beginning with Babylon the head. With few exceptions, biblical scholars
agree that the following kingdoms were Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome.
The revelation of the establishment of the
kingdom of heaven becomes the major motif throughout the rest of Daniel, particularly
in the second half of the book. Following the fall of Babylon, the Jews came
under the dominion of three further powers and the prophecy is clear: the kingdom
of heaven was to be established within a divinely-ordained time period.
After his return to the States, Eliyohu emailed to say
he had done some research into Daniel 2:44 and had been informed that Rashi,
whom he considered to be ‘the best commentator around,’ said the kings of Dan.
2:44 were actually King Messiah!
What Rashi in fact said was quite the opposite of what
Eliyohu claimed. In his Commentary, on 2:37 Rashi wrote, ‘Every mention of ‘king’
in Daniel refers to an earthly king, except this one [King of kings], which he
said in reference to the Holy One, blessed be He, and this is what it means:
The King of kings, Who is the God of heaven.’
Leaving aside Rashi’s assertion that the title ‘king
of kings’ is not a reference to Nebuchadnezzar, he and the ‘Sages of blessed
memory’ (see Shevu’oth 35b) were agreed that every other king in Daniel is an
earthly king. Therefore, apart from the fact that the reference in 2:44 is to four kings, Rashi and the Sages agree
that the kings are ‘earthly’ kings, not the Messiah. On verse 44, Rashi
comments that the phrase ‘in the days of these kings’ is a reference to ‘when the kingdom of Rome is still in
existence’! On the clause, ‘the God Of heaven will set up a kingdom,’ Rashi
says this is ‘The kingdom of the Holy One, blessed be He, which will never be
destroyed, is the kingdom of the Messiah. it will crumble and destroy It will
crumble and destroy all these kingdoms.’
Rashi, who according to Eliyohu is ‘the best
commentator around,’ states that the indestructible kingdom of Messiah had to
be established in the days of the Roman Empire. Thus, Daniel 2 lays a
foundation for understanding Daniel 9:
Know therefore
and understand that from the going out of the word to restore and build
Jerusalem to the coming of an anointed one, a prince, there shall be seven
weeks. Then for sixty-two weeks it shall be built again with squares and moat,
but in a troubled time. And after the sixty-two weeks, an anointed one shall be
cut off and shall have nothing. And the people of the prince who is to come
shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. Its end shall come with a flood, and
to the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed’ (Dan 9:25f, English
Standard Version).
In the second half of his book, Daniel experiences a
vision in which he sees the four kingdoms of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream from a
different perspective. In chapter 2, the Babylonian king sees his kingdom and
the kingdoms that succeed Babylon in terms of declining magnificence and glory.
In chapter 7 Daniel sees the same kingdoms as ravenous monsters preying on God’s
people, and in the chapters that follow we have the equivalent of the director’s
commentary on the vision: The world is in chaos; there are monsters on the
loose; but the kingdom of God is coming and when it does God’s people will be
delivered. The kingdom is not imminent but it will come: ‘Seventy weeks are
decreed about your people and your holy city, to finish the transgression, to
put an end to sin, and to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting
righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place’
(Dan 9:24). The ‘seventy weeks’ of Dan. 9:24 is a clarification of ‘in the days
of those kings’ in 2:44. The more precise ‘seventy weeks’ sharpens up the more
general ‘in the days of those kings’.
Messianic expectation in the Second Temple period
In the Tanakh, the nearest thing we have to a
systematic revelation of the Messiah is the book of Daniel and yet when we open
the pages of the New Testament, in the Gospels we are confronted with intense Messianic
expectation: ‘The people were in expectation, and all were questioning in their
hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah’ (Lk. 3:15).
Even among the Samaritans, who accepted only the
authority of the five books of Moses, there was an expectation of the coming of
Messiah: ‘The woman said to him, ‘I know that Messiah is coming (he who is
called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things’’ (Jn. 4:25).
It is also apparent from the four Gospels that first
century Jews were anything but vague in their thinking about the coming Messiah.
They believed, for example, that the Messiah would be a descendant of David
(Mt. 22:42 ), that he would be born in David’s ancestral town of Bethlehem, (Mt.
2:4ff; Jn. 7:42), that he would be a prophet (Jn. 1:25; 4:25, 29), that he
would work miracles (Mt. 11:4; Mk. 15:32; Jn. 7:31) and that he would be the Son of God (Mt. 16:16; Mk. 14:61;
Jn. 1:49).
What was the cause of the Messianic speculation in the
period of the Second Temple? Although Daniel’s prophecy of the kingdom of God
must have stimulated the faith of many in Israel, in the period immediately
following the prophecy and even after the return of the exiles there appears to
have been no anticipation of the imminent appearance of the Messiah. The post-exilic
prophets Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi lived under the rule of the
Persians – the second of Daniel’s four kingdoms – and were occupied primarily with
spurring on the people to rebuild the temple. In the inter-Testamental period, after
the Maccabees defeated the successor of Alexander the Greek, no one hailed
Judah the Maccabee as the Messiah. A century after Judah, however, we know from
the Gospels and Josephus that Messianic fervour was riding high.
In Acts 5:36f, the great Rabbi Gamliel reminded the
Sanhedrin that two would-be Messiahs had already made their appearance: ‘Some
time ago Theudas appeared, claiming to be somebody, and about four hundred men
rallied to him. He was killed, all his followers were dispersed, and it all
came to nothing. After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the
census and led a band of people in revolt. He too was killed, and all his
followers were scattered’ (Acts 5:36f).
I once attended a lecture in London by the Jewish
scholar Hyam Maccabee. Although Maccabee, rejects the New Testament he stated
to his largely Jewish audience that Gamliel’s address in Acts 5 is ‘authentic’
because in rabbinic tradition Gamliel is held in high esteem for his
moderation: ‘Since Gamaliel the Elder died, reverence for the law has ceased
and purity and moderation are vanished’ (Sotah
49a).
Similarly, but in greater detail, Josephus records:
Now it came to
pass, while Fadus was procurator of Judea, that a certain magician, whose name
was Theudas, persuaded a great part of the people to take their effects with
them, and follow him to the river Jordan; for he told them he was a prophet,
and that he would, by his own command, divide the river, and afford them an
easy passage over it; and many were deluded by his words. However, Fadus did
not permit them to make any advantage of his wild attempt, but sent a troop of
horsemen out against them; who, falling upon them unexpectedly, slew many of
them and took many of them alive. They also took Theudas alive, and cut off his
head, and carried it to Jerusalem… besides this, the sons of Judas of Galilee
were now slain; I mean of that Judas who caused the people to revolt, when
Cyrenius came to take an account of the estates of the Jews… (Antiquities of
the Jews, XX, iv,1,2).
Is Daniel among the prophets?
It is significant that in the Jewish division of the
books of the Bible, Daniel is not included in the Prophets nor is the book
included in the annual cycle of synagogue readings. Instead, Daniel is found in
the third division of the Hebrew Bible known as the Ketuvim, the ‘Writings,’
which includes Psalms, Ecclesiastes and the two books of Chronicles.
Nevertheless, in spite of Daniel’s exclusion from the prophetic section of the
Jewish Bible and from the synagogue readings, a rabbinic ruling reveals that
Daniel is indeed a prophetic book and that his book reveals the time of the
coming of Messiah. The Talmudic tractate Megillah informs us that ‘the Targum
of the Prophets was composed by Jonathan ben Uzziel under the guidance of the
prophets Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi and that ben Uzziel sought to reveal the
inner meaning of the Ketuvim, the section of the Bible that includes the
book of Daniel. However, says Megillah 3a, a Bath Kol forbade ben Uzziel
to reveal the inner meaning of the Ketuvim because in it ‘the date of the
Messiah is foretold’!
We possess a Targum on every book of the Ketuvim
except the book of Daniel because, says the Talmud, in that book is contained
the date of the Messiah. Josephus strengthens the theory that Daniel is the
book in which the date of Messiah is contained when he says, ‘We believe that
Daniel conversed with God; for he did not only prophesy of future events, as
did the other prophets, but also determined the
time of their accomplishment’ (Antiquities, Book 10, ch 11, v7).
The Dead Sea Scrolls reveal that the Essene Community
at Qumran understood Daniel 9 to contain a revelation of the time of the coming
of Messiah. Scroll 11Q13, The Coming of Melchizedek, says:
This visitation
is the Day of Salvation that He has decreed through Isaiah the prophet
concerning all the captives, inasmuch as Scripture says, ‘How beautiful upon
the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings
good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion ‘Your [God] reigns’’ (Isa.
52:7)… ‘The messenger’ is the Anointed of the spirit, of whom Daniel spoke, ‘After
the sixty-two weeks, an Anointed one shall be cut off’ (Dan. 9:26). (The
Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, Michael Wise, Martin Abegg Jr &
Edward Cook, p 457)
Lawrence M Wills, in The Jewish Study Bible, observes that ‘Daniel was evidently
considered a prophet at Qumran and elsewhere in early Judaism (Josephus, Antiquities 10:266-68), but because
prefigurations of Christ and Christian resurrection were seen in Daniel by the
early Church, the rabbinic tradition hesitated to embrace the visions of
Daniel.’
The heightened Messianic fervour among Second Temple
Jews confirms that the Jews of that period understood they were living in the
time of Daniel’s fourth kingdom and therefore were expecting the Messianic
Kingdom to break into world history.
Guess who's coming to Seder
I want to suggest that this Messianic expectation may shed
light on the origin of the mysterious ritual that takes place early in the
Passover Seder, the breaking of the afikomen. In A Popular Dictionary
of Judaism, Lydia and Dan
Cohn-Sherbok define afikomen as a ‘Hebrew’ word meaning ‘dessert’! In
fact afikomen is Greek not Hebrew and some believe the term derives
from the Greek word for ‘dessert,’ epikomoi.
Others suggest it comes from epi komon, a call for after dinner
entertainment, while others think it derives from epikomion, a ‘festival
song’.
All these theories, however, are almost certainly
incorrect. In 1925, the German scholar Robert Eisler proposed that the afikomen
was part of the Passover observed by Jews at the time of Jesus and that the
broken matzah represented the Messiah. Confirmation for Eisler’s theory came to
light in the 1930s when a Greek copy of Peri Pascha (‘On the
Passover’), written by Melito, the second-century bishop of Sardis, was
discovered. The biblical scholar Frank Moore Cross described Peri Pascha
as ‘nothing less than a Christian Passover Haggadah’ and in it Melito twice
refers to Jesus as the ‘one who is coming (afikomen) out of heaven to
the earth’!
Nevertheless, Eisler’s thesis was opposed by both
Jewish and Christian scholars and was largely forgotten until 1966 when David
Daube, a Jewish scholar at Oxford University, revived it and produced further
documentation to support Eisler’s theory. Daube argued that the term afikomen
was derived from the Greek verb afikomenos meaning ‘the Coming One’ or ‘He
who has come’ and that the ‘Coming One’ was none other than the Messiah.
In a lecture entitled ‘He that Cometh’ given at St Paul’s
Cathedral under the auspices of the London Diocesan Council for
Christian-Jewish Understanding, Daube set forth a case that the unleavened
bread Jesus gave to his disciples at the Last Supper was the afikomen.
When Jesus announced, ‘This is my body,’ said Daube, he was making use of an
existing prophetic tradition to reveal himself as the Messiah. According to
Daube, the messianic symbolism was eventually lost, deliberately distorted or
possibly suppressed by rabbinic authorities, giving rise to the later
interpretations of the word as a ‘dessert’ or an ‘after-dinner entertainment’. Perhaps
official Judaism abandoned the existing customs surrounding the middle matzah
precisely because the disciples of Yeshua adopted them. Also, as the Church
became increasingly Gentile and lost sight of its Jewish roots, the Passover
elements of the Lord’s Supper probably became submerged beneath heated
discussions about transubstantiation, the ‘Real Presence’ and the efficacy of
the sacrament.
To this day, Passover is linked in Jewish thinking to
the coming of the Messiah, and at every Passover Seder a place is set at table
for Elijah, the forerunner of Messiah. If Eisler and Daube were correct in
believing that the afikomen ritual
existed in some form at the time of Yeshua, it would make eminent sense to
suppose that it was introduced to the Passover Seder by the rabbis after Rome,
the fourth and final beast of Dan. 7, began to rule the land of Israel.
Josephus records that at Passover in the first century, anti-Roman feeling ran
higher than usual among the people of Jerusalem and the pilgrims who were there
for the festival, therefore the Roman governor always had a full contingent of
soldiers present to quell any riots. With the great groundswell of Messianic
hope, this would surely be the time for the rabbis to introduce a further
messianic element – the afikomen –
into the Passover, thus reinforcing in the hearts of the people the conviction that
the Messiah was ‘coming’ (c.f. Lk. 2:25 and 24:21).
A watertight case?
As I indicated at the beginning of this paper, Dan.
2:44 is a very powerful proof text for Jesus being the Messiah. When the
implications of the verse are presented to a pious Jew who believes in the
divine inspiration of the Tanakh, it leaves him with little room for manoeuvre
(although, as my colleague Richard Gibson was quick to point out, there is always room to manoeuvre if a person is
fast enough!).
The verse clearly reveals that the Messianic Kingdom was
to be established no later than the time of the Roman occupation of Israel, a
view endorsed by Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, no less. If Daniel was a true prophet
according to the definition of Dt. 18:18ff, the eternal kingdom of heaven must
be here now. The fact that the empires of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome
no longer exist is further proof that the Messianic Kingdom has come. If it has
not, Daniel was a false prophet and his book should be expunged from the Jewish
canon of Scripture.
Anti-missionary Moshe Shulman attempts to avoid the
point by interpreting the two legs of Nebuchadnezzar’s as ‘a clear reference to
the Eastern and Western Empires,’ of Rome. He then argues that it was ‘during
the time of these kings the kingdom would arise. So it clearly does not apply
to Rome of the time of Jesus.’
Assuming for the sake of argument that the two legs of
the image in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream were indeed the eastern and western empires
established by Diocletian in 285, the kingdom of heaven would have had to be
established in that period and the Roman empire brought to an end. Shulman does
not comment on the fact that less than thirty years after the empire was
divided, in 313 the Edict of Milam would grant Christians freedom of worship
and the Christian faith would become the official religion of the empire. If
the kingdom of heaven was not established while the empire of Rome was still in
existence, then according to Dt. 18, Daniel was a false prophet.
It should not be overlooked that according to Dan.
2:34-35, the stone ‘hewn without hands’ that struck the statue ‘became a great
mountain and filled the earth’. No time scale is given for the transition from
stone to mountain. This fits well with Isaiah’s prophecy of the Prince of Peace
whose government and peace increases without end (Is.9:6)
The question is then bound to arise: ‘If the kingdom
is already here, where is it?’ That question serves only to vindicate Yeshua’s solemn
statement to Nicodemus that to ‘see the kingdom of God,’ one ‘must be born
again’ (Jn. 3:3). Only those ‘born of water and the Spirit’ can ‘enter’ the
Kingdom (Jn. 3:5 c.f. Ezek. 36:25ff) and only those in the Kingdom can ‘see’ it
(Jn. 3:3).
If Yeshua was not the Messiah, who established the
kingdom of heaven in the time of the fourth kingdom? Someone must have established
the kingdom in the time of the Roman empire. If it wasn’t Yeshua, who was is
it?
Here, it seems to me, is a dilemma on a par with C. S.
Lewis’s famous ‘Liar, Lunatic or Lord?’ argument. The verse Eliyohu considered
to be a watertight case against the messiahship of Yeshua actually constitutes
a very case for Paul’s contention that evidence that ‘when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of
woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law’ (Gal.
4:4,5).
Sources:
Adele Berlin and Marc
Zvi Brettler (Editors). The Jewish Study
Bible (Oxford University Press, 2004)
Philip Blackman. Mishnayoth
(Judaica Press, 1963)
Deborah Bleicher Carmichael. ‘David
Daube on the Eucharist and the Passover Seder,’ in New Testament Backgrounds
(Sheffield, 1997)
Lydia and Dan Cohn-Sherbok. A
Popular Dictionary of Judaism (Curzon, 1995)
The Complete Tanakh with Rashi (CD-Rom. The
Judaica Press, 1998)
Herbert Danby. The Mishnah
(Oxford University Press, 1980)
David Daube. He That Cometh
(London: Diocesan Council, 1966)
Ronald L. Eisenberg. The JPS
Guide to Jewish Traditions (Jewish Publication Society, 2004)
Encyclopaedia Judaica (Keter Publishing House, 1972)
Richard Harvey. Mapping Messianic
Jewish Theology: A Constructive Approach (Paternoster, 2009)
Melito of Sardis. ‘On
Pascha’ in On Pascha and Fragments,
translated and edited by Stuart George Hall, Clarendon Press, 1979)
Michael Rydelnik. The Messianic Hope: Is the Old Testament
really Messianic? (B&H Publishing Group, 2010)
Moshe Shulman, Judaism Answers
(http://judaismsanswer.com/DrBrown-Dan%209-4.19.htm)
The Soncino Talmud (Soncino Press, no date)
Tanakh-The Holy Scriptures. The New JPS Translation
According to the Traditional Hebrew Text (The
Jewish Publication Society, 1988). Unless otherwise stated, all Old Testament
references are from this version.
Isaac Troki, Faith Strengthened (Ktav Publishing
House, 1970)
William Whiston (translator). The
Works of Flavius Josephus (Milner and Company, no date)
Geoffrey Wigoder (Editor-in-Chief) The
New Encyclopedia of Judaism (New York University Press, 2002)
Michael Wise, Martin Abegg Jr,
Edward Cook. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation (Harper Collins,
1996)
Edward J Young, A Commentary on Daniel (Banner of Truth Trust, 1972)
