The Bifurcation of the Interpretive Tradition

Ancient and modern readers have offered two basic interpretations of the “[One like a] Son of Man” () in Dan 7:13. One line of interpretation holds that the One like a Son of Man is a symbol of a collective, namely, the faithful Israelites at the time of the Maccabean revolt.Footnote ¹ The other basic line of interpretation sees the One like a Son of Man as a divine figure of one sort or another, a second God, a son of God, or an archangel.Footnote ² The reason for this double interpretation is not hard to find; the text itself, I suggest, is split and doubled on itself. I propose (with other interpreters and scholars) that the vision itself seems almost ineluctably to require that we understand a divine figure. The gloss on the vision in the end of the chapter, or pesher (to which I will return below), on the other hand, seems equally as strongly to interpret the One like a Son of Man as a collective earthly figure, Israel or the righteous of Israel.Footnote ³ The text is thus, in a profound sense, divided against itself. In general, I would suggest as a matter of method and even of theoretical principle that almost always when a commentatorial tradition is as split as this is, we should seek for tension within the text itself, such that both interpretations can be said to be supported by the text.Footnote ⁴

The intertextuality of the text, its heteroglossia, precludes any possibility of textual unity. As I shall argue, the text is made of the interweaving of two earlier, independent apocalyptic visions and then the provision of an interpretation, a pesher, for the newly rewoven cloth. Rather than seeing levels within the text as authentic and inauthentic, I regard the text of the chapter as the work of its author, the author of Daniel (note that I do not distinguish between authors and redactors), who, nevertheless, as all authors at some level and authors of antiquity more openly than moderns, built the text out of existing literary materials and shaped them to his or her own design and designs. To put this another way, I would suggest that the question of unity or disunity in the text is misplaced. The text is a unity; it has been produced by an author, but it has not been made up out of whole cloth by him or her. As such it incorporates other texts and traditions. Texts are felt or patchwork more than they are warp and weft.

In the pesher on the vision, it would certainly seem as if the interpreter takes the One like a Son of Man to be Israel, “the saints of the Most High.” The crucial portion of the text in Daniel 7 reads thus:

There follows further explanation of the fourth beast and its horns and its fate, and its defeat of the holy ones:

The text then goes back to explain once again the fourth beast as a terrible kingdom with ten kings—and an eleventh king worse than any of them who will set aside three previous kings and try to wear down (; v. 25) the holy ones of the Most High. He will force them to change their law and their appointed times (Sabbaths and festivals), and he will be permitted to do so for a time, and for two times, and a half a time, until:

“The people of the holy ones” cannot be other than Israel or its faithful martyrs. I conclude then that from the viewpoint of method two entirely separate issues must not be conflated. The first is the meaning of the One like a Son of Man as interpreted in the pesher and as its meaning is constructed in the quilted apocalypse that joins the two originally separate apocalypses that I shall presently identify. The second is the possible other meanings the figure has when taken out of this context. These meanings can be earlier or later or even synchronic ones, made available via the workings of intertextuality, this intertextuality being signposted in the very roughness of the sewn seams—what Michael Riffaterre refers to as “ungrammaticality”—of the existing text.Footnote ⁷ It is confusion of these two moments that has led to much of the ink being spilled in vain in the interpretation of this chapter.

The Two Apocalypses of Daniel 7

Let us first take a look at the text as we have it in front of us. The text begins with Daniel's vision of the four beasts in 7:2–8:

The first beast is like a lion with eagle wings. Its wings are plucked and it is then made to stand on two feet like a human being and given a human heart. The second beast is like a bear with three fangs (or ribs) between its teeth; it is enjoined to devour much flesh. The third beast is like a leopard with four bird wings and four heads and it is given dominion (or a tongue: in the MT, but the Greek presupposes ). The fourth beast is the most terrifying of all, possessing ten horns; it eats with iron teeth and then crushes and tramples what is left. An eleventh horn emerges, three of the former horns are uprooted, and, “Behold, there were eyes like human eyes in that horn and a mouth speaking great things” (v. 8).Footnote ⁸

We then find the following sequence:

Now, on the one hand, it has to be observed that a very skillful hand has put this text together, so skillful that biblical scholar Ziony Zevit refers to the “essential unity” of the chapter as “obvious.”Footnote ¹⁰ There remain, however, two abrupt changes of scene in these two verses, one that jumps from the description of the speaking horn to the tribunal and then after another two verses one that jumps back even more abruptly to the speaking horn. At least one plausible philological/literary scenario would have it that indeed verses 11–12 originally followed verse 8 (in some pre-text to Daniel 7), which then would have read very smoothly:

While it is the case, as Collins points out,Footnote ¹² that this is a somewhat truncated ending for the vision, it remains compelling to see this as the natural continuation from verse 8, just as, I shall propose, the natural continuation of verses 9–10 is verses 13–14.Footnote ¹³

Looking now at my second hypothesized source text, we will find an even smoother ride. Attaching verses 9–10 to verses 13–14, we now have:

This reconstructed text provides a coherent whole (save only for the lack of a direct sequel for the court scene, but this is no smoother in the current arrangement). Without seeing the appearance of the One like a Son of Man as a direct continuation of the appearance of the Ancient of Days, it is impossible to explain why there is more than one throne (a point of which the rabbis of the midrash were well aware).Footnote ¹⁵ Second, the fact that the One like a Son of Man approaches the Ancient of Days also suggests that verse 13 is the natural continuation of verse 10. Thirdly, the text as we have it does not provide a smooth narrative, for after the books are opened, there is no judgment scene condemning the beast to the fire. He is merely thrown in.Footnote ¹⁶

Next, verses 9–10 and verses 13–14 are in a poetic style marked by their rhythm, elevated diction, and parallelism, while the narrative of the four beasts and its sequel in verses 11–12 are clearly prose.Footnote ¹⁷ Let me flesh out this claim, for which the original text will be helpful:

A fresh rendering may help to bear out the claim of the distinction (which does seem to be accepted on virtually all sides)Footnote ¹⁹ between the prose and the poetry in this Daniel 7 passage:

The most prominent poetic sign in the italicized verses is the use of synonymous parallelism, that which can fairly be said to be the form of biblical poetry—whether Hebrew or AramaicFootnote ²⁰—and a legacy, of course, from earlier Semitic poetries. Moreover, as shown by Stanislav Segert, these verses also exhibit a rhythmic structure typical of biblical poetry.Footnote ²¹ According to Segert's summary, there are myriad poetic features precisely in the italicized verses above and none whatever in the interposing verses.Footnote ²² The case for the distinction should be considered closed, and the implications for my present argument seem clear as well. This strongly supports the view that two originally separate texts, one prose and one poetry, have been felted together by the author of Daniel 7.

Finally, in addition to the narrative infelicities observed when the text is read as is, there is a further ungrammaticality in the literary logic if we consider the One like a Son of Man to be the fifth beast, Israel, and not a divinity. The vision of the four beasts is clearly a symbolic or even allegorical vision; the beasts represent something else, kings or kingdoms, but the Ancient of Days is not an allegorical symbol of any kind—he is undoubtedly God. One would expect that his compatriot, the One like a Son of Man who actually approaches him, would also not be an allegory, but a real persona, also an actual divine entity and not a symbol of something else. In the present form of the text, constituted as it is with that second figure acting as the counterpart of the animals and the symbol of Israel, we find an allegorical symbol, a vision like one of the four beasts, interacting with a real character, God, the Ancient of Days. This is clearly a sign of a literary mismatch,Footnote ²³ because in the vision of the two thrones and the One like a Son of Man approaching the Ancient of Days, the One like a Son of Man is clearly a member of the heavenly court. I thus believe that Delcor is correct in insisting that “le fils d’Homme est ici un symbole, comme les quatre bêtes, et non un membre de la cour céleste à quelque titre que ce soit. Il s'identifie avec une réalité terrestre au même titre que les quatre bêtes,”Footnote ²⁴ but only on condition that it be understood that it is to the work of the author of the pesher, seemingly the actual author of Daniel 7 itself, to which the statement applies. And this author has created the mismatch. In the final text, we end up with God speaking with a symbol for Israel and not with a member of the celestial court. Either “the one like a son of man” [sic] is a mere symbol of some other entity (Israel, as the pesher would have it) or he is an actual member of the heavenly court and thus not a symbol.Footnote ²⁵ As the text is constituted before us, this is a fatal contradiction in meaning. Finally, a further disjunction is implied in the fact that for the beasts, Daniel says simply that he saw such and such a beast, while here he sees an entity “like a human being.” If this were an allegorical picture as the other four are, then why not “I saw a human being”? It follows that Daniel in the original apocalypse saw a real divine entity in the form of a human being and not a picture of a human being standing for something else. I am convinced, therefore, that despite the Ugaritic battle between the sea and the rider on the clouds, pointed to especially by Collins as a decisive blow against the theory of two conjoined apocalypses, Footnote ²⁶ Martin Noth, who made the proposal of two interwoven sources already in 1926, was essentially on target.

Collins himself remarks that “Daniel 7 is not simply a reproduction of an older source, Canaanite or other.”Footnote ²⁷ Given this correct observation, the argument that there could not be two apocalyptic sources for Daniel 7 owing to the alleged presence of both motifs in Ugaritic myth becomes much weaker. It should be emphasized, moreover, that there is not a clear sequence in the Ugaritic epics between Baal's defeat of Yam and his investiture by El as subordinate deity. In KTU 1.2 IV 32–34, it is Ashtart and Kothar wa-Hasis, Baal's allies (and not El), who declare Baal king of the gods after his defeat of Yam.Footnote ²⁸ Baal's recognition by El as his legitimate subordinate comes somewhat later in the myth when El permits Baal to build a palace of his own. Mark Smith refers to this acquisition of his own palace as “a highly protracted process.”Footnote ²⁹ Moreover, as Collins himself informs us, the Ugaritic texts that seem most clearly to refer to Baal's appointment by El are not in the Baal Epic at all but in other Ugaritic texts and fragments.Footnote ³⁰ In fact, in my reconstruction of two apocalypses, I think I can descry the outlines at least of a syncresis between two separate mythic motifs in Daniel, Baal's defeat of Yam and Baal's investiture by El as king of the gods and El's virtual successor. Note that both of them would result in the triumph of the junior god, thus explaining their having been conjoined by the author of Daniel as well. In Exodus 15, for example, we see both the defeat by Y’ of the Sea and his triumphant reign thematized, but this is not the same thing as investiture of the younger god by the elder one. Nonetheless, the compatibility of the two narratives enabled, on my hypothesis, their conflation in Daniel 7.Footnote ³¹ I should note that I do not offer these considerations in support of my analysis of Daniel 7 as the conflation of two apocalypses but rather to raise significant doubt that the Ugaritic evidence militates against it. Whatever the original mythic origins of the two apocalypses in Ugarit or Israel, it seems clear that the author of Daniel had before him two texts in two literary forms, a myth that had been transformed already into a prose political allegory (the four beasts) and a poetic fragment of myth that the author of Daniel sought (largely but not entirely successfully) to so transform through his own literary and then interpretive art.

Further evidence that the one with the appearance of a Son of Man is an actual divine figure in at least some of the sources of Daniel can be adduced as well. The one with rather remarkable resemblance to a man is mentioned three more times in Daniel—in 8:15, 10:16, and 10:18—although not under the name of One like a Son of Man, but rather, in Hebrew diction (8:15 only, “like the appearance of a man”). In the first of these verses, we find the One who appears as a man commanding the angel Gabriel: “And it came to pass, when I, even I, Daniel, had seen the vision, and sought for the meaning, then, behold, there stood before me as the appearance of a man. And I heard a man's voice … which said, ‘Gabriel, make this man to understand the vision.’” Once again, we can see that the One like a Son of Man or “with the appearance of a human” is not a mere symbolic or allegorical figure but a divine entity. In addition, the fact that this figure has the authority to command an angel such as Gabriel seems to indicate that he has indeed already received his dominion.Footnote ³² An allegorical symbol in a vision can hardly be such an active agent. Indeed, it is the son-of-man-like figure who explains the vision.

The thesis of an originally independent throne vision with two divine figures can also be supported thematically.Footnote ³³ Autopsy of the vision itself argues for the interpretation of the One like a Son of Man as being a holy and heavenly being. In the prophetic book closest to Daniel in spirit and tone, the book of Ezekiel, God is referred to as having human form more than once: at 1:26 an appearance like a human being (), which is almost word for word our expression in Daniel's Hebrew diction, and again at Ezek 8:2, where the expression is “an appearance like a man” ( reading for MT with Greek and other witnesses), which may, according to some commentators, refer to a separate heavenly being. Furthermore, clouds, as well as riding on or with clouds, are a common concomitant of biblical theophanies.Footnote ³⁴ J. A. Emerton made the point even more decisively: “The act of coming with clouds suggests a theophany of Yahwe himself. If Dan. vii.13 does not refer to a divine being, then it is the only exception out of about seventy passages in the OT.”Footnote ³⁵ I want to bring Emerton's point out more explicitly than Emerton did and remark that since every other such incident in the Tanakh refers to an appearance of God, we should read this one too as the revelation of God, a second God, as it were, and not an angel. This is not a human being (or primordial Anthropos)Footnote ³⁶ but one who looks like a human being, an explicitly anthropomorphic divine figure as in Ezekiel. The implication is, of course, that there are two such divine figures in heaven, an old God, the Ancient of Days, and a young God,Footnote ³⁷ the One like a Son of Man.

Comparing the following description of a basic structure in the Canaanite pantheon, the relation of El to Baal, as described by Frank Cross, will help to corroborate the deep connection between this pattern and the most ancient wellsprings of Israel's Canaanite cult:

The homology between this and our Ancient of Days and One like a Son of Man is striking. This unreconstructed relic of Israel's religious past (if not her present as well) was no doubt disturbing to at least some Jews in antiquity, including, I suppose, the author of Daniel, who forced it to be a representation not of a divinity but of the people of Israel. Other Jews adopted wholeheartedly, or simply inherited, the doubleness of Israel's God, the old Ancient of Days, and the young Rider on the Clouds with the appearance of a human being. The two-throne apocalypse in Daniel calls up a very ancient strand in Israel's religion, one in which, it would seem, the El-like sky-God of justice and the younger Rider on the Clouds, storm- God of war, have not really been fully and successfully merged.

What Did the Author Do?

The redactional work that joined together the apocalypse of the four beasts and the apocalypse of the two thrones is of an ideological piece with the work of the author of Daniel in adding his pesher.Footnote ³⁹ According to my hypothesis, the author of Daniel felted these two visions together in order to make possible the demythologizing and historicizing interpretation (pesher) of the newly compounded apocalypse that we find in verses 15–29, while at the same time providing hooks backward to chapter 2 and forward to chapter 8. This felting provides a much more harmonious text, although not, of course, one entirely without discordant notes as well. By splicing the apocalypse of the two thrones into the apocalypse of the four beasts, the author revised completely (but not completely successfully) the theology of the throne vision of two divine figures and turned them into one divine figure and one symbol of a human group, the righteous Jews.

To the question of why the author included the throne vision at all only to reduce its theological significance, I would answer that in order to provide a fire to which the fourth beast could be consigned, the author of Daniel inserted the first verses of the throne apocalypse before finishing the narrative of the four beasts, since these verses of the throne apocalypse provide two elements that he wished for, a judgment (books were opened) and a punishment (the river of fire). Continuing the throne apocalypse after the intruded verses that signal the end of the beast apocalypse enabled the author to reinterpret the One like a Son of Man as well, such that he now is not the counterpart of the Ancient of Days but rather of the beasts, especially the fourth beast. The particle kě (“like”) in the case of the One like a Son of Man is quite different in usage than the same particle with respect to the beasts. In the former case it means a real divine entity that has the form of a human being, while in the latter cases it means a vision that appears like a bear, leopard, etc. The morphological coincidence of kě being used in two senses enabled the relatively seamless quilting of the two pieces even though they were semantically very different in the original source texts.Footnote ⁴⁰

This set up the combined text as a new apocalypse which enabled a reinterpretation of the One like a Son of Man. Having separated him from his natural place on the second throne as a heavenly being alongside the Ancient of Days, he is brought down to earth, and like the four beasts, read as a human political entity, Israel. Thus the four beasts, whatever they were in the source myth (which is beyond the scope of the present argument), become now the empires of Babylonia, the Medes, Persia, and the most terrible fourth one of Alexander and his descendants, which will, in the end, be defeated by the One like a Son of Man—namely the people of the holy ones on high, faithful Israel—at the successful end of the war against Antiochus. The author of Daniel has made this so by his weaving of a single apocalypse out of two mythic texts, namely, by his transformation of what is essentially a mythical representation into a historical one.Footnote ⁴¹ The very disjunct that I noted before between the Ancient of Days as a real presence and the One like a Son of Man as a symbol is precisely what the author of Daniel desired to achieve in his search for a perfectly “monotheistic” representation. As in any author, but perhaps in his case more than many, the workings of intertextuality have left their mark on the surface of the text, and it is this roughness of the surface that allows multiple interpretations both in traditional reading and in modern scholarly investigation alike.

As Carsten Colpe has put it, “[T]he differences between figure and interpretation suggest fragmentation and an alien tradition.”Footnote ⁴² The “alien” tradition is, however, a tradition from within Israel that has been alienated by the author of Daniel, more like the “alien word” of Bakhtin than like the “alien” of heresiological purity- seeking. The pesher in verses 16–18 makes this, I think, crystal clear:

As Hartman and Di Lella point out, “Moreover,Footnote ⁴³ the Jews on hearing or reading the apocalypse would surely have been baffled by verses 21–22, ‘that horn [= Antiochus IV] waged war against [the angels] and was prevailing against them until the Ancient One arrived’; and by vs. 25, ‘He [Antiochus] will utter words against the Most High, and [the angels] he will devastate, planning to change the feast days and the law; they will be handed over to him for a year, two years, and half a year.’”Footnote ⁴⁴ If we substitute “Israel” in each bracketed instance of the “angels,” the text would be crystal clear to them and to us: “Antiochus did fight against the Jews because of their adherence to the Mosaic Law, and he did abolish the celebration of the Jewish feast days, and the Jews were in his control for some three years (1 Macc 1:41–63; 4:26–66). Thus ‘the holy ones of the Most High’ must refer to the faithful men, women, and children who were being persecuted by the Seleucid tyrant.”Footnote ⁴⁵ I thus conclude with Hartman and Di Lella that in Daniel 7 as we have it before us “‘the one in human likeness’ must be a unireferential symbol of only ‘the holy ones of the most high,’ i.e., the historically recognizable Jews who suffered and died rather than apostatize.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The author of Daniel has made the One like a Son of Man the analogue of the great stone of Daniel 2 which comes and crushes the four kingdoms symbolized by the four metals in the great statue. Hartman and Di Lella are correct in thus interpreting the book of Daniel, but not so in ignoring the incongruity, the lack of fit, of this view with the older apocalypse embedded in the text itself.

The analysis I offer here thus enables both traditional views about the One like a Son of Man to stand: on the one hand, the clearly correct view that the One like a Son of Man as he appears in the vision itself is a divine redeemer figure, and, on the other hand, the equally clearly correct view that the author of the book of Daniel has dethroned and demythologized this figure and turned him into a symbol for the faithful, holy, people of Israel. I believe that I have accomplished three things in the analysis so far. First, I hope I have shown that chapter 7 of Daniel is essentially the work of a single author (with the possible exception of the account of the eleventh horn, which conceivably is the work of a secondary hand) who has shaped traditional mythical materials by combining them into a demythologized historical apocalypse. His work in producing the pesher on this newly produced (by him) apocalypse is consistent with the semantic effect of combining the two pre-existing texts into one and supports it. Second, I hope to have shown how we might now study the pre-existing text itself as diachronic religious evidence, notwithstanding the very effort of the author of Daniel to demythologize it, to dethrone the young God with the appearance of a Son of Man and turn him into a mere symbol of the people of Israel. Third, we can now see more clearly how synchronically the text makes itself available to be read in the fashion that it was in the Similitudes of Enoch and the Gospels as producing a second divine figure, the Son of Man, in heaven together with the Ancient of Days. Diachronic production of the text out of its sources produces intertextuality on the synchronic surface. Source criticism is about the history of the text. Intertextuality is about the text as a synchronic structure. This is a point frequently glossed over in biblical-studies usage of the term intertextuality as if it simply were a fancy word for source criticism.

An analogy might help. In Rome, one wanders upon the surface of the ground, but everywhere there are fragments of older strata of the city woven into the fabric of the modern city. When I taught there recently, the office I had at the Gregorian University was in a building, one wall of which was from the time of the Empire, one wall medieval, and two walls from the eighteenth century. Phenomena such as this occur all over the Eternal City. One can discern the lineaments of an older city, of older cities, right on the surface; one does not need to be an archaeologist to see it. The diachronic situation of having been built in several periods is replicated in the synchronic appearance of the building and the city. This is how I conceive of the biblical text; older religious materials, and indeed, texts, have been woven into the fabric of the current text, but in their own right and in the very marks of the weaving, and one does not have to be a philologist to perceive this. Not only we modern scholars but earlier readers of many generations could discern the older forms, and for many Jews, these were very appealing. Just as the builders of the medieval building in Rome incorporated a still-standing Roman wall into their building, and then the modern builders incorporated that Roman wall and the still sound medieval wall into theirs, new religious texts and concepts could be produced out of old ones, sometimes coming very close to those most ancient strata of all.Footnote ⁴⁷ Thus the later Jewish religious notion of a dual (or binitarian) Godhead reproduces (but not uncannily) one of the most ancient strata of biblical (or even pre-biblical) myth in Israel. The point of this analogy, which may well seem commonplace to biblical scholars, is to emphasize the diachronic matter of sources and the synchronic matter of interpretations at one and the same time. It is no accident that Freud chose Rome as his analogue for the unconscious and not Jerusalem, for example. It is precisely the ways that Rome wears its history on its surface that present it for these hermeneutical moments. The analysis presented in this paper enables us to go both backward and forward in time, back to the most ancient sources of Israelite cult and forward to its manifestations in the forms of Judaism found in Enoch and the Gospels.

Israel's Second God: Interpreting the Two-Throne Apocalypse

Concluding, then, that the pesher written by the author of Daniel asserts that the One like a Son of Man is a representation of the holy ones of Israel during the Maccabean revolt, one can nevertheless inquire separately into the meaning of the figure in the vision text, notwithstanding its present context, which is what I shall propose to do next. For all his success in reweaving, the author of Daniel has still left indices of the patchwork on the surface of the text, making the “older” or “more original” meaning of the throne apocalypse and the figure of the One like a Son of Man available for interpretation as a divine figure.

For the rest of this paper, I want to concentrate on interpreting the hypothesized pre-text, the apocalypse of the two thrones. Taking the two-throne vision out of the context of Daniel 7 as a whole, we find several crucial elements: 1) there are two thrones;Footnote ⁴⁸ 2) there are two divine figures, one apparently old and one apparently young; 3) the young figure is to be the redeemer and eternal ruler of the world. It would certainly not be wrong to suggest, I think, that even if the actual notion of messiah is not yet present here, the notion of a divinely appointed divine king over earth is, and that this has great potential for understanding the development of the messiah notion in later Judaism (including Christianity).

The second-God redeemer figure thus comes, in my view (a view that is, of course, not new but very controversial), out of the earlier history of Israel's religion. Goldingay writes:

The One like a Son of Man, Goldingay's “humanlike figure,” is thus, as he argues, clearly a divine figure, who, as messiah, necessarily will have both a human and a divine pole. I want to sharpen Goldingay's point further. We cannot see this coming with the clouds of heaven as a “gift” to a human, for then he would not be One like a Son of Man, but simply a son of man. In the simile lies the divinity; the deuteros theos is in the detail. Rather than, however, seeing the divinity of the redeemer king as a novel idea, I would suggest that it is, in fact, one of the oldest of the elements of this vision and one that would have a very lively future life. As Carsten Colpe has written with characteristic clarity of argument: “The figure of the Son of Man undoubtedly attracted to itself the attributes of Yahweh, e.g., riding on the clouds…. Such traits could be transferred to an eschatological Son of Man only if He was a heavenly being and not a mere earthly messiah.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Where I part company with Colpe is in his statement that these traits “point directly to an origin of the concept outside the tradition of Israel.” There is very little warrant for this statement, if any; there is no reason to consider this concept as anything but a part of the inheritance of ancient Israel together with the other Canaanite tribes and groups.Footnote ⁵¹

Following the argument made originally by Emerton, Collins has helpfully summed up the main points of comparison with Canaanite (Ugaritic) representations. As he argues, “What is important is the pattern of relationships,”Footnote ⁵² namely, the fact that in Daniel there are two godlike figures, one old and one young; the younger one comes riding on the clouds, and he receives everlasting dominion.Footnote ⁵³ Colpe has noted that “the mythographical similarity between the relation of the Ancient of Days and Son of Man on the one side and that of El and Baal on the other … fits into the broader conclusion that older material lives on in the tradition of Israel and Judah.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Those interpretations—and they are legion—that take even the most compelling parallel between the narrative in Daniel and the narrative of El and Baal from Ugarit as evidence of actual literary influence are thus, in my humble view, mistaken. Finally, and continuing this line of thought, it is a mistake to think of Israelite cult as ever being a uniform and fixed thing; it is not that there was a cult of El and Y’ that was later replaced by a cult of Y’ alone, but rather that different strands of Canaanite cult, broader strands such as the El cult and more narrowly focused ones such as the Y’ cult, became related and conflated in different ways at different times and places.Footnote ⁵⁵

It is, therefore, counterintuitive for me to imagine a religious scenario in which Y’ was broadly understood as a God subordinate to El until the Deuteronomic reforms, as held by Otto Eissfeldt, except for the very earliest stages of the cult of Israel.Footnote ⁵⁶ There are, to be sure, in accordance with the notion expressed in the last paragraph, some remarkable texts in the Hebrew Bible that do seem to represent survivals of this very archaic stage. The clearest example of a biblical text in which Y’ is a son or subordinate of El is Deut 32:8–9:

As given, the verse certainly seems to indicate that Y’ is one of the sons of Elyon or El, the one of the sons who has been afforded Israel as his particular lot and inheritance. The translation of verse 8 follows the Septuagint and other ancient witnesses including two Qumran MSS, while the Masoretic Text has undermined the explosive potential of this verse by emending “sons of El” to read “children of Israel,” which makes little sense.Footnote ⁵⁷ Apart from this and some other possible cognate texts in the Bible,Footnote ⁵⁸ we find only Y’ as the supreme God of Israel.

As Mowinckel already realized and Cross ratified, Baal as intermediary between humans and El parallels the functions of the Angel of the Lord in the biblical texts.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is no wonder, then, that this Angel is conflated and ambiguously identified with Y’ himself in many biblical texts, and no “outside” influence whatever need be posited. For the merging of El and Y’, nothing could be more eloquent than Exod 6:3: “And I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but my name, Y’, I did not make known to them.” The ancient southern theophanies of Y’, especially at Sinai and the Sea, are (as shown by Cross) too Baal-like for us to see Baal as a later incursion (dressed up as Y’, as it were) into the divine economy of Israel. My best guess on this is that El was the general Canaanite high divinity while Y’ was the Baal-like divinity of a small group of southern Canaanites, the Hebrews, with El a very distant absence for these Hebrews. When the groups merged and emerged as Israel,Footnote ⁶⁰Y’, the Israelite version of Baal, became assimilated to El as the high God and their attributes largely merged into one doubled God, with El receiving his warlike, storm-god characteristics from Y’.Footnote ⁶¹ Thus, to restate the point, the ancient El and Y’—a southern Hebrew equivalent in function (within the paradigm of relations between El and a young warrior-god) to the northern BaalFootnote ⁶²—merged at some point in Israelite-Canaanite history and apparently quite early.Footnote ⁶³ I would suggest—and any such suggestion must, of course, remain hypothetical—that this merger was not by any means a perfect union. El and Y’ had very different and in some ways antithetical functions, and this dysfunctionality, I propose, left a residue in which some of the characteristics of the young divinity always had the potential to split off again in a hypostasis (or even separate god) of their own.Footnote ⁶⁴ This tension and resultant splitting manifests itself in the traditions behind the Daniel 7 theophany, where we see a new young one, nameless, it would seem,Footnote ⁶⁵ at least until he comes to be called Jesus—or Enoch.Footnote ⁶⁶ As a much later rabbinic poetic text would have it, Y’ is: “ancient on the day of judgment and a youth on the day of battle.”

This event, if indeed there ever was one like it, must have happened very early on, as it is constitutive of Israel itself.Footnote ⁶⁷ This “merger,” if you will, leaves its marks right on the surface of the text, where the El-Y’ combination can still be detected in the tensions and doublings of the biblical text, available to be resurrected, as it were, by astute readers of a certain cast of religious mind as a second, young God, or as a part of God, or divine person within God (and all of these options have been adopted by perfectly “orthodox,” non-Christian Jewish theologians as well as by ChristiansFootnote ⁶⁸).

Some of the ancient (and modern) readers noting one stratum and ideological line in the text protest that that is the valid one, while others claim the opposite. We find in Aphrahat, the Iranian Father of the Church, the following attack on an interpretation (presumably Jewish) that makes the One like a Son of Man out to be the people of Israel:Footnote ⁶⁹ “Have the children of Israel received the kingdom of the Most High? God forbid. Or has that people come on the clouds of heaven?” (Demonstration 5.21). While the first point is, of course, merely polemical (as the “God forbid” makes clear), the second is exegetical and to the point.Footnote ⁷⁰ On the other hand, the Jews could clearly have retorted: “Is a divine redeemer subject to oppression by a Seleucid king who forces him (the divine redeemer) to abandon his holy days and his law for three and a half years? The Son of Man must be the children of Israel!” Our job as scholars is to take neither of these two positions but to note the surface remains in the text that give rise to such a bifurcated interpretive tradition in which everyone is right.

The difference between traditional and modern readings of the text is that we try to see both sides of this unresolved tension in the text and thus make sense of both faces of Janus. Traditional readers did not look at the text and find a patchwork of different texts from different periods; they fixed on one or another of the meaning-strands and said: this is what the text means. In other words, I am suggesting that the reading of the two-throne apocalypse as signaling a double divinity and a transfer of sovereignty from an older to a younger God is a distinct synchronic hermeneutic option. Many Jews in antiquity, including Jesus and his community, as well as the new communities that he has engendered, insisted that the Son of Man is a name for the divine-human redeemer.Footnote ⁷¹ Other Jews, then, and most Jews since late antiquity, insisted no: the One like a Son of Man is Israel, and there is no figure called “the Son of Man.” The unresolved tension in Daniel 7 is what gives rise to the legitimately two-faced interpretive tradition about the meaning of the chapter and especially the crucial term, so fateful for the history of religion, “the Son of Man.”

The pesher insists that the One like a Son of Man is a collective, not an individual and certainly not a divine individual but the saints of the Most High. These saints, for the pesher, are almost doubtlessly the Maccabean heroes who redeemed the temple after a time, two times, and a half time (three and a half years, the actual historical time of the temple's desecration), and to whom dominion has been given. The author of Daniel, in writing this pesher into the text, has accomplished two purposes for his own time: he has discredited the appearance of a second divine figure in the text (or at least, he thinks he has), and he has inscribed his own heroes, the Maccabees, who will issue in the Hasmonean dynasty as the legitimate, heroic, angelic, and divinely ordained rulers of Israel. Note 7:22: “until the Ancient of Days came and provided the holy ones of the Most High and the time arrived and the holy ones held the kingdom.” After these holy ones suffer for three and one-half years under the dominion of the arrogant Seleucid, then:

Voilà: demythologization, historicization, and Maccabean propaganda, all in one fell swoop. It should further be at least adumbrated that such “reforming” movements leading, inter alia, to absolute centralization of the cult as well as suppression of widespread religious tendencies are usually the province of dominant classes with highly hierarchical structures, the Josianic and Maccabean reforms both being examples of this phenomenon in Israel.Footnote ⁷²

On my reading, the young God in the original mythic text in Daniel is the figure who will redeem Israel and the world and not an exalted Davidic king.Footnote ⁷³ There is, as I have argued, nothing in this vision that suggests or even allows seeing the One like a Son of Man as an actual human being. Setting aside the pesher and just looking at the original vision, we do find already, however, that this divine figure, whether messiah or not, will be given “the dominion, the glory, the kingdom and all of the peoples, nations, and languages will worship him, and his dominion will be eternal dominion which will not pass and his kingdom which will not be destroyed” (v. 14). This mythic pattern of second God as redeemer will be crucial, of course, in interpreting the Gospels and the pattern of religion proclaimed there. We will have to try to understand better the relationship of this divine redeemer to the human redeemer, the Davidic messiah.

Without subscribing to views that too specifically identify the second God with Baal or Y’ or even Marduk, I would assert that the general outlines of a myth of a young God subordinated to an old God are enacted in the sources of the throne vision of Daniel 7, however much the author of Daniel seeks to suppress this myth. In place of notions of El and Y’ as the two Gods of Israel, I would suggest that the pattern of an older God and a younger one, a God of wise judgment and a God of war and punishment, have been transferred from older forms of Israelite-Canaanite religion to new forms in which the older God, whose supremacy is not in question, is now entirely named by the Tetragrammaton, while the functions of the younger God have been, in part, taken by supreme angels or other sorts of divine beings, redeemer figures—at least in the “official” religion of the biblical text. There is not the slightest reason, however, to imagine that the bulk of the “people of the land” had ever accepted this form of official monotheism.

Once Y’ absorbs El, the younger God has no name of his own but presumably is identified at different times with the archangels or other versions of the Great Angel, Michael, as well as with Enoch, Christ, and later on as well. Some of his ancient guises, especially “the Little Yahu, Yahoel” (!), indicate his ancient (extra-biblical) identity as Y’.Footnote ⁷⁴ It is the power of that myth itself on its own that explains the continuing life of Jewish binitarianism into Christian Judaism and that is vitally present in non-Christian Judaism as well. There are thus two legacies left us by Daniel 7: it is the ultimate source of “Son of Man” terminology for a heavenly redeemer figure and it is also the best evidence we have for the continuation of a very ancient binitarian (or even ditheistic) Israelite theology deep into the Second Temple period. Although these are separate in Daniel (since there is there no figure called the Son of Man), it is the not-entirely-successful suppression of this myth in Daniel—and thus its strong association with the “One like a Son of Man”—that will explain the later development of the Son of Man as a title in both the Similitudes of Enoch, as well as in the Gospels. While all this is, as I have said, of little significance for the interpretation of the Book of Daniel, for which it is clear that the One like a Son of Man is Israel, or more precisely the Maccabean martyrs, the intertextuality of it all is of the utmost importance for the history of Israel's religion.

The bottom line, I think, is that when interpreting the book qua book, we must take it on the terms of its final redaction, but that does not prevent us from paying attention—indeed for a historical perspective, it is necessary to pay attention—to other meanings that various components of the text might have had on their own.Footnote ⁷⁵ Better put, perhaps, we must pay attention to the way that these various components do not quite fit together, for it is the cracks and seams that enable the productivity of the text in its future incarnations. The recognition of the separateness of the vision of the two thrones from its context allows us to look both at the possible history of such a religious vision and at its possible consequences for an understanding of later movements within the religion. It thus has a diachronic dimension, but it also has a synchronic dimension, in that it explains why later interpretive-religious strands within the religion have read the text as they have. Part of the reason for the conflict and debate among scholars is that while seeming to answer the same question, in truth, they have been asking (and thus answering) very different questions. One question is the meaning of the phrase One like a Son of Man and its usage within chapter 7 of Daniel; quite another question would be what other meanings the text might have both before its incorporation in the book of Daniel and in its afterlife.Footnote ⁷⁶ I would take it as a bit of very precious evidence—all the more so as it is against the grain of biblical theology itself—for the continued vitality of worship of an old and a young God in Israel. This argument follows the form of the Collinses’ own in another closely related context: “The fact that the dominant attitude in biblical tradition insists on a sharp distinction between divinity and humanity, and is sharply critical of kingship makes the preservation of the royal psalms all the more remarkable. It requires that we take them seriously as a witness to preexilic religion, before it was chastened by the harsh historical experiences that led to the demise of the monarchy.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Ditto, I would say, for Daniel and the tradition of the Rider on the Clouds as a second divine figure (or perhaps it would be more precise to say, given my considerations above, for the Ancient of Days as a second divine figure).

The historical ties of that pattern of religion to later forms of Judaism, including both rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, are thus clarified if my reconstruction bears weight. Where John Collins seems to consider the pattern of religion enshrined in the throne vision as a frozen relic from Israel's past (or even a foreign past),Footnote ⁷⁸ I would see it as very much a living part of Israel's religion both before and long after, explaining both the form of Judaism we call Christianity and also much in non-Christian later Judaism as well.Footnote ⁷⁹