EZEKIEL 14:14, 20

Q: The commentary in The Daily Bible refers to Noah, Daniel and Job as the “righteous remnant” symbolizing other righteous citizens who remain. Chronologically speaking, the events of the Book of Daniel appear to be happening concurrently with the events in Ezekiel. However, Daniel is already regarded highly on the same plateau as Noah and Job. Does this reference to Daniel help scholars date the Book of Ezekiel? Does it present a problem implying the book may have been written much later than one might be led to believe? It seems as though the “word of the Lord,” which includes a reference to Daniel, is coming to Ezekiel before Daniel has accomplished many of the things which would elevate his status to that of Noah and Job?

The rough chronology of events is as follows:

605 BC Daniel exiled to Babylon

605-603 BC Events described in Dan. 1-2

Before 562 BC Events described in Dan. 3-4

597 BC Ezekiel exiled to Babylon

593 BC First call of Ezekiel

Thus, Ezekiel would have been in Babylon and presumably known of the events in Daniel's early career as described in Daniel 1-2 (and perhaps chapters 3-4 also) before proclaiming the prophecies of Ezekiel 1-24, which relate to events before the fall of Jerusalem.

However, some scholars feel that Ezekiel 1-24 was supposedly written at too early a date for Daniel to have yet gained much of a reputation. To these critics it can be suggested that the scribes who later compiled all of Ezekiel's oral prophecies into a book (or Ezekiel himself at a later date) added Daniel's name to the list of righteous men to give a later audience a more contemporary example of righteousness. There is no textual evidence for such a supposition, but it remains a possibility.

There is another option, however. First, note the strange order of names in these two similar passages. Daniel is clearly out of chronological order; we would expect his name to be given last in the list, not in the middle. Another fact to point out is that the early Hebrew texts did not indicate vowels in any way; they were added at a much later date as an aid to pronunciation. The name was actually written as dn'l, rather than dny'l, as is usual for Daniel.

At this point, we can ask whether there are any other famous righteous men with the consonants “dn'l” living in the early patriarchal times. And the answer is “Yes, there are several.”

(1) Jewish tradition lists a Dan'el who is the grandfather of Methuselah on his mother's side.

(2) Ezekiel 28:3 compares the wisdom of the King of Tyre with that of an otherwise unknown personage named Dan'el.

(3) 14th-12^th Cent. B.C. Ugaritic tablets talk about a legendary king named Dan'el “upright, sitting before the gate, beneath a mighty tree on the threshing floor, judging the cause of the widow, adjudicating the cast of the fatherless.” (Daniel L. Block, The Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 1-24, p. 448)

For those concerned that Ezekiel would include a non-Jew in his list of righteous men, keep in mind that Noah was not a Jew, and Job came from Uz in northern Arabia, even though both of them worshiped Yahweh. Using three examples of righteous non-Israelites fits well in the immediate context (see verse 12) which deals with the situation within a sinful land (not Jerusalem, which will be dealt with a few verses later). (Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1-20, p. 257-261)