Mark's Gospel as sequel: Understanding the backstory, part VI (Daniel)
To fully understand Mark’s “sequel” to the Scriptures
of Israel, we need to look at 7 previous “episodes”, 7 OT characters who shed
light on what Mark is saying about John the Baptist and Jesus in chapter 1. The sixth character from the “original story”
is Daniel.
As the story
is told in the book that bears his name, Daniel was a member of the Jerusalem
aristocracy and was part of the first wave of Babylonian deportations in 605
B.C., the fourth year of the reign of King Jehoiakim of Judah (cf. Dn. 1.1-6);
further deportations would follow in 598 and finally in 587, when Jerusalem was
sacked and the exile would begin for the majority of the Jerusalemite
population. As we saw last time, the prophet
Jeremiah had foretold the disaster of 587 for 40 years and had declared that
the subjects of the Kingdom of Judah would remain in exile for 70 years (cf.
Jer. 25.11-12; 29.10). In 539 B.C., the
Babylonian empire fell to the Persians, and Cyrus the Great issued an edict
allowing all Jewish captives who desired to do so to return to their homeland
and rebuild the Jerusalem Temple (Ezra 1.1-2; 2 Chr. 36.22-23). A small minority of the Jewish exiles
accepted the challenge and returned to the ruins of Jerusalem to rebuild first
the Temple, and then the City of David (cf. books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai,
Zechariah). The second Temple was
completed around the year 515 (and would later be expanded by Herod the Great
in the first century B.C.).
However,
though a remnant of exiles had returned to the Promised Land and a new Temple
had been constructed, things were far from ideal – Judah remained an
insignificant province in the Persian empire, whose territory consisted of a
fraction of that of the United Kingdom during the reigns of David and Solomon. Indeed, in Nehemiah’s words, the people of
God remained “slaves in their own land” (cf. Neh. 9.36). Zedekiah, the one on the throne of Judah when
Jerusalem had been destroyed in 587, had been the last “son of David” to rule
over the people of God. What had
happened to Yahweh’s plan to save/rule over the world through his chosen
people? When would the “kingdom of God”
become a reality? (cf. Dn. 2, 7).
Surely, Jeremiah had said that the exile would last 70 years, but many
more years had come and gone, and there was still no evidence to support the
claim that Yahweh was King of Israel and the nations (cf. Pss. 47; 93-99).
Though the plot
of the book of Daniel is set in the late 7th – mid 6th-century
B.C., in all probability, the actual historical setting of the book is the 2nd
century B.C., at the time of the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid kingdom of
Syria (one of the Hellenic kingdoms formed after the death of Alexander the Great
and the division of his empire amongst four of his generals). During the time of Seleucid hegemony over
Judah, the Jews faced a campaign of attempted forced cultural assimilation, and
were forbidden to observe those customs that differentiated them from the
surrounding Hellenic culture, i.e., the kosher laws, the rite of male circumcision
as well as the Sabbath (cf. 1-2 Maccabees).
The circumstances of the Seleucid persecution are reflected in the book
of Daniel, as Daniel and his friends resist the pressures to assimilate to
Babylonian customs such as eating food from the king’s table and worshipping
pagan statues (cf. Dn. 1, 3). Other
links between the book of Daniel and the situation of Jews in 2nd-century
Palestine include the “abomination of desolation” (cf. Dn. 9.27; 11.31;
12.11). At the height of the persecution
campaign, the Seleucid King Antiochus IV set up a statue of Zeus in the
Jerusalem Temple and sacrificed a pig on the altar.
In Daniel
chapter 9, we have a story of Daniel reading the passage from the book of
Jeremiah where Jeremiah had predicted that the exile in Babylon would last 70
years (Dn. 9.1-2). After reading this
passage, Daniel offers a long prayer of repentance to Yahweh on behalf of the
Jews, as he seeks to discern why the “exilic situation” (no Davidic king, subjugation
to pagan empires, etc.) has continued, not for a mere 70 years, but – by the time
of the Maccabean revolt – for four centuries (also the length of time that the
Israelites had been slaves in Egypt). After
Daniel offers his prayer, an angelic messenger is sent to him to tell him that
the “exile” will actually last for 70 “weeks of years”, i.e., 490 years (70x7;
cf. Dn. 9.20-27). The book of Daniel,
along with the circumstances which gave rise to it (Seleucid persecution,
Maccabean Revolt) all reflect the yearning for the situation of “exile” to end
and for the kingdom of Yahweh to displace all pagan empires (cf. Dn. 2). The book of Daniel continued to be a
favourite text among the Jews at the time of Jesus, as the air was abuzz with
speculation as to when the kingdom would arrive. Indeed, Jewish revolts often coincided with
calculations/speculations as to when the prophecies concerning the kingdom of
God would be fulfilled. In the year AD 6,
Judas of Galilee led a revolt against the Romans and founded the Zealot
movement, inspired by the actions of Phinehas, the grandson of Aaron (cf.
Numbers 25.7-11) and Mattathias, the father of Judas Maccabeus, who had led the
revolt against the Seleucids in 167 B.C.
It is extremely important to remember that for most of Jesus’
contemporaries, the “coming of the kingdom of God” meant that those faithful to
Yahweh should rise up against their pagan oppressors and thus facilitate God’s
victory over his (and Israel’s) enemies.
This sense of expectation is reflected in the opening chapter of Mark’s
Gospel, though, as we shall see, Jesus’ vision of the kingdom was quite
different…
Comments
Post a Comment