The Reception of the Book of Daniel Before the Common Era

 

The goal of my project is to investigate the various ways the Book of Daniel is recalled and reinterpreted in a selection of Early Jewish texts. I will focus specifically on the earliest Rezeptionsgeschichte of the Book of Daniel, i.e., Jewish writings from the second and first centuries B.C.E. These include 1 Enoch, the Book of Giants, the Gabriel Vision, numerous texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and several Jewish works in Greek. By analyzing how these diverse texts appropriate the Danielic material, we can assess the various ways that Jewish communities of the Greco-Roman period processed collective memory and reinterpreted the present through the lens of the past.