DANIEL'S AGE AND CHARACTER.
AFTER this, on the twenty-fourth day of that month, he saw the vision concerning the succession of the kings of Persia, the empire of the Macedonians and the conquests of the Romans, of which the last three chapters of his prophecies contain an account. And, by what is written in the conclusion of the last of them, he seems to have died soon after; and his great age makes it not likely that he could have survived much longer. For the third of Cyrus being the seventy-third year of his captivity, if he were eighteen years old at his carrying to Babylon (as I have shown before, is the least that can be supposed), he must have been in the ninety-first year of his age at this time; which was a length of years given to few in those days. He was a very extraordinary person, both in wisdom and piety, and was favored of God and honored of men beyond any that had lived in his time. His prophecies concerning the coming of the Messiah, and other great events of after-times, are the clearest and fullest of all that we have in the holy Scriptures, insomuch that Porphyry, in his objections against them, saith, “They must have been written after the facts were done;” for it seems they rather appeared to him to be a narration of matters before transacted than a prediction of things to come; so great an agreement was there between the facts, when accomplished, and the prophecies which foretold them. But, notwithstanding all this, the Jews do not reckon him to be a prophet, and therefore place his prophecies only among the Hagiographa: and they serve the Psalms of David after the same rate. The reason which they give for it in respect of both is, that they lived not the prophetic manner of life, but the courtly; David in his own palace as king of Israel, and Daniel in the palace of the king of Babylon, as one of his chief counselors and ministers in the government of that empire. And, in respect of Daniel, they further add that, although he had divine revelations delivered unto him, yet it was not in the prophetic way, but by dreams and visions of the night, which they reckon to be the most imperfect manner of revelation and below the prophetic. But Josephus, who was one of the most ancient writers of that nation, reckons him among the greatest of the prophets, and says further of him that he had familiar converse with God, and did not only foretell future events as other prophets did, but also determined the time when they should come to pass; and that whereas other prophets only foretold evil things and thereby drew on themselves the ill-will both of princes and people, Daniel was a prophet of good things to come, and by the good report which his predictions carried with them on this account, reconciled to himself the good-will of all men. And the event of such of them as were accomplished, procured to the rest a thorough belief of their truth, and a general opinion that they came from God. But what makes most for this point with us against all that contradict it, our Saviour, Christ, acknowledgeth Daniel to be a prophet; for he so styles him in the gospel: and this is a sufficient decision of this matter.—Prideaux's Connection, vol. 1, p. 162.