One Reason Daniel Should Be Dated Early by slaveofone
- Daniel exhibits properties characteristic of a text from an oral culture prior to Hellenism’s emergence in Palestine (pre-300 B.C.).
The texts of oral cultures had particular styles inherent to them which differs from the style of texts arising out of a book-based culture initiated by Hellenism. One oral style of narrative texts is the concatenation of various short, textual episodes that are virtually independent of each other instead of a long story that moves linearly through time and would require a kind of sustained attention difficult to achieve with a hearing audience as opposed to a reading one.
The patriarchal stories in Genesis, just as the Epic of Gilgamesh in Babylonian literature, consist of a string of episodes owing their unity to the principal protagonists of the various stories. . . .
additive rather than subordinative.Karel Van Der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible, pp.14-15
So Genesis and Gilgamesh are given as examples of narrative texts from an oral culture. Just like these, the narrative text that we call Daniel is episodic and additive instead of subordinative, consisting of various short stories strung together which have little relation to the others other than their characters or subject-matter. This becomes even more apparent when one looks at the Greek version of Daniel, which includes several more short stories (Bel and the Dragon and Susanna) that are also complete in and of themselves and which no one would even know were missing if they heard or read Daniel without them.
We can contrast a narrative text like Maccabees, which is the product of Hellenistic book culture and often believed to have been composed at about the same time as Daniel, with the narrative text of Daniel to see their differences. Maccabees follows the exploits and experiences of certain characters linearly through time and contains basic plot and subplot structure throughout (like, for instance, the defilement of the temple, the rising up of a leader against the perpetrators of this defilement, and the eventual restoration of the temple from its defilers and defilement). The same cannot be said of Daniel, which at best is structured not according to plotline in the stories or even according to its characters (sometimes the text focuses on people like Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah and has nothing at all to do with Daniel or vice versa), but according to other criteria such as story type (for instance, court stories are gathered together in chs. 1-6 and revelatory stories are gathered together in chs. 7-12) or thematic relation and/or relation in terms of physical existence around other stories on a scroll (just as the second story among the court stories—ch. 2—focuses on a series of four kingdoms with a final that will not pass away, so the second story of the revelatory stories—ch. 7—focuses on a series of four kingdoms with a final that will not pass away).
Daniel’s textual style just doesn’t fit into Hellenistic Palestine book culture (like Maccabees, around which Daniel’s composition is often linked) and therefore argues for its composition prior to that cultural milieu (pre-300 B.C.).