How to Read Daniel

Readers approach the book of Daniel in variegated ways. Some read Daniel simplistically as little more than a group of children’s stories (e.g., Daniel and the lion’s den). Others approach the book speculatively, focusing on the apocalyptic parts and interpreting them as pieces in an enormously complicated jigsaw puzzle to be put together to construct events of the end times. Scholarly interpreters construct dense and arcane arguments concerning the exact interpretation of various texts in Daniel; over whether the stories are history or fiction and whether the prophecies are genuine or after the fact. A reader new to the book and the various controversies around it might well be bewildered when encountering these many, often contradictory approaches. The present work by well-known Old Testament scholar Tremper Longman III aims to remedy this situation by writing an accessible introduction to the book of Daniel for adult laypersons and beginning readers of...