1 For literature supporting this view, see John J. Collins, “The Son of Man and the Saints of the Most High in the Book of Daniel,” JBL 93 (1974) 50–66, at 50 n. 2.

2 John A. Emerton, “The Origin of the Son of Man Imagery,” JTS 9 (1958) 225–42.

3 Interpreters who do not make the move of recognizing the quilting or felting of the text are, I think, constrained to force either the vision or its interpretation to mean something other than they “naturally” mean, taken at face value. The best attempt to harmonize the two is to be found, I think, in an article by John J. Collins (“Son of Man,” 55–58). Arguing from the fit of the prose account of the war of Israel and Antiochus that is found at the end of the book of Daniel, namely, chs. 10–12, to the visionary account given in ch. 7, he suggests that the war on earth was considered as paralleled by a war in heaven. He further supports this position by adducing other parallels from the Bible. He thus suggests that the One like a Son of Man is both an angel (in his view Michael) and a representation of the people of Israel through their guardian at one and the same time. The theophanic elements of the vision would now be preserved as being the province of this High Angel. This is owing, in his view, to the statement in Daniel 12 that the just of Israel will join the angelic band at the end of days: “the people shares in the kingdom of the angels, and so the interpretation of 7:27 is merely a spelling out of the human dimension of the more complete reality mentioned in the vision in vs. 22 and in the interpretation in vs. 18” (ibid., 62). The “people of the holy ones” in 7:27 are so called because their king, as it were, is the angel Michael, and because they themselves are or will be angelic: “If the term ‘holy ones’ in the Book of Daniel contains any reference to the Jewish people, and I believe that at least the phrase ‘people of the holy ones’ refers to them, it is only in virtue of their association with the ‘holy ones,’ the angelic host led by Michael, which fights for Israel in heaven” (ibid., 63). Collins's interpretation cannot be proven wrong, and it leads to an entirely different assessment of the chapter and its meanings. To my taste, it leads, however, to a reading too complicated by half: “Accordingly it seems most likely that the figure of the one like the son of man represents the archangel, Michael, who receives the kingdom on behalf of his host of holy ones, but also on behalf of his people Israel” (ibid., 64). It is the awkwardness of that near afterthought, “but also,” that points to the difficulty of Collins's attempt to have his cake and eat it too, so to speak. See a similar objection in Louis Francis Hartman and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Book of Daniel (trans. Louis Francis Hartman; AB 23; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978) 91. Furthermore, his reading leaves untouched the difficulty of the mismatch between the Ancient of Days as a divinity and the Son of Man as a symbol, produced out of the conflation of the two source texts. Precisely concealed in that awkward syntax is, in my view, the awkwardness of the chapter itself as produced by its conflation of two texts and two sets of meanings.

4 I am virtually certain that other readers of the piece will easily think of comparable examples.

5 All translations of Daniel are taken from John J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel (ed. Frank Moore Cross; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) unless otherwise noted.

6 There seems to be a corruption here in the text. Hartman and Di Lella give: “But when the court sits in judgment, its dominion [the dominion of the eleventh horn] will be taken away, by final and utter destruction,” assuming a very plausible haplography. This interpretation is supported as well by the midrash on Daniel 7 in Rev 13:6–7.

7 Michael Riffaterre, Text Production (trans. Terese Lyons; New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

8 Without pretending to have any interpretation of this vision in mind, I would observe a few points. Each of the beasts has a numbered set of some anatomical feature that does not belong to it by nature. Each of the beasts is, at least arguably, afforded a human organ in the course of the vision, but this can be seen only if we engage in some necessary emendation. There is at least one piece of credible evidence that the text has been corrupted. As pointed out by H. L. Ginsberg more than a half-century ago (Studies in Daniel [Texts and Studies of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America 14; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1948]), the two visions of the eagle and the bear have somehow become conflated or reversed, for it is surely the bear that is made to stand on his hind-legs like a human and not the eagle. If we emend the text accordingly, we will discover that the eagle is given a human heart, the bear is made to stand like a human, the leopard has a human tongue (following the Greek), and the fourth beast has eyes like human eyes and a mouth that speaks. The three fangs, moreover, will appear in the mouth of the lion-eagle who is enjoined to devour much. There is, accordingly, a structural unity to the vision of the four beasts as I have just reconstructed it, following Ginsberg, who has recently been supported by Hartman and Di Lella, who transfer the human heart from the lion-eagle to the bear, thus partly spoiling the plan (Book of Daniel, 209). Although other commentators from Collins to Goldingay have rejected this emendation, I would argue that the present literary considerations support it. See too Ziony Zevit, “The Structure and Individual Elements of Daniel 7,” ZAW 80 (1968) 385–86, at 387, who summarily dismisses Ginsberg's suggestions. I am convinced, however, by Ginsberg's argument (although this will not affect my thesis in the present paper at all). Giving each of the beasts something human explains their capacity to rule at all. They are beasts who can imitate a man sufficiently to have authority. This interpretation, dependent as it is on an emendation, is, of course, highly speculative. I offer it in memory of my lamented teacher.

9 Translation following Collins, Daniel, 274–75, but I have restored the emendation.

10 Zevit himself provides the following précis of the plot: “Section two (v. 7–12) begins with a detailed description of the fourth beast and then concentrates on a description of the eleventh horn before which three others are uprooted and which has eyes and a mouth speaking ‘big things.’ There follows a change of scene to the tribunal, where the throne [sic], judge and attendants are cursorily described, an abrupt change back to the horn talking, and finally, one last scene in which the fourth beast is destroyed, its body burnt, while the first three, stripped of power, have their lives spared for a period of time. The third and final section of the visions consists of one scene in which one ‘like a son of man’ comes up to the ‘ancient of days’ and is presented to him.” Zevit, “Structure,” 388 [emphasis added]. Zevit's account alone, I think, accurate and precise as it is in its description of abruptness and truncatedness, would suggest, in contrast to his own expressed view, a text that is not of one piece. Of course, the definition or understanding of unity and disunity has to be made precise. To be sure, “all of the images in the visions are explained in the interpretations,” (ibid., 389) and in that sense the chapter is, as I too would claim, unified, but the unification is achieved by the author's manipulation and incorporation of pre-existing sources (as clearly attested by the literary considerations I shall offer). While Zevit has recognized the use of pre-existing sources in the construction of the pericope, nothing in his discussion indicates an appreciation of the synchronic effects of weaving such disparate sources together.

11 Translation following Collins, Daniel, 274, but I have restored the emendation.

12 Ibid., 280.

13 Martin Noth, “Zur Komposition des Buches Daniel,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 98/99 (1926) 143–63, at 145, 159. Noth deletes v. 8 too (or rather considers it “sekondär”) and takes 11b as the sequel to 7. If we, as do many scholars, follow the Septuagint and treat 11a as a doublet of some kind (perhaps even a very significant doublet), then “I watched until the beast was slain” makes a much more graceful sequel to v. 8. (In fact, it is possible that 11a was constructed by an unskilled revisor concerned for the lack of fit between 10 and 11b.) Or, if we follow Noth, once v. 8 was added, then 11a was added to provide a (very awkward) continuity. In any case, this revision would have been quite late, as no Greek text of Daniel reflects it.

14 Translated as in Collins, Daniel, 275; cf. the treatment in Matthew Black, “The Throne-Theophany, Prophetic Commission, and the ‘Son of Man’,” in Jews, Greeks, and Christians: Religious Cultures in Late Antiquity; Essays in Honor of W. D. Davies (ed. Robert G. Hamerton-Kelley and Robin Scroggs; Leiden: Brill, 1976) 57–73, at 60.

15 Interpreters who do not make this connection of the One like a Son of Man as the occupant of the second throne are forced into very weak and forced explanations of the plural “thrones” here: e.g., John Goldingay, Daniel (WBC 30; Dallas, Tex.: Word, 1989) 165.

16 Collins, Daniel, 303.

17 Noth, “Zur Komposition,” 145; 148–49; Goldingay, Daniel, 147. Noth himself regards v. 14 as the secondary addition of the author of Daniel, a point of which I am less convinced. V. 14 seems to me both necessary and smooth as an original part of the throne vision; indeed, it is in some sense the very point of it. It is, moreover, presupposed by v. 18 and not only by the more elaborate (and perhaps later) version of the pesher.

18 Note the alliteration of the repeated n-sounds in the beginning of several words in this verse, for which see Stanislav Segert, “Aramaic Poetry in the Old Testament: Daniel 2–7,” Archiv Orientální 70 (2002) 75.

19 It should be noted that BHS sets precisely these verses as poetry and not as prose, while the entire surrounding context is set as prose. According to Segert (“Aramaic Poetry,” 66–67), this judgment was made by Walter Baumgarten already in 1937.

20 Ibid., 68.

21 Ibid., 73. Note that Segert does not use his analysis to further an argument for sources in the text.

22 Ibid., 79.

23 Collins, Daniel, 305. Collins sees this point clearly but nonetheless does not concede that this mismatch is conducive to a two-source hypothesis.

24 Mathias Delcor, Le livre de Daniel (Sources Bibliques; Paris: Gabalda, 1971) 155.

25 As he is clearly understood in Mark 13:27 as well (personal communication, Richard Hays).

26 John J. Collins, “The Danielic Son of Man,” in idem, The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1995) 173–94, at 176.

27 Collins, Daniel, 289.

28 Mark S. Smith, ed., The Ugaritic Baal Cycle (VTSup 55; Leiden: Brill, 1994) 324, 358–59.

29 Ibid., 296.

30 Collins, Daniel, 287.

31 Even with Exodus 15, however, it should be mentioned that Y’ does not kill and defeat the Sea but rather subordinates him to the purposes of Y’, as the midrash understood well. (I am grateful to Daniel Fisher for helpful conversations on this matter.) See, too, John Day, God's Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea: Echoes of a Canaanite Myth in the Old Testament (University of Cambridge Oriental Publications 35; Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 165.

32 The point has been made well by Paul Escobar, “The Disciples, the Pharisees, and the Multitudes: The Various Audiences of the Son of Man,” unpublished paper (Berkeley, Calif., 2009).

33 See too A. Feuillet, “Le fils de l'homme de Daniel et la tradition biblique,” RB 60 (1953) 187–89. See, too, Black, “Throne,” 61, who concludes properly from Feuillet: “This, in effect, means that Dan. 7 knows of two divinities, the Head of Days and the Son of Man.” One of the earliest readers of Daniel 7, the author of the Similitudes of Enoch, certainly reads the two-throne apocalypse independently of the “beasts from the sea” pericope, suggesting either that he saw the exegetical point offered here, or, even more intriguingly, that he was not reading Daniel 7 but rather a source text for Daniel 7. See too Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins, King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008) 73.

34 Hartman and Di Lella, Book of Daniel, 101 list Exod 13:21; 19:16; 20:21; Deut 5:22; 1 Kgs 8:10; Sir 45:4.

35 Emerton, “Origin,” 231–32.

36 As remarked already, with his usual good judgment, by Erik Sjöberg, Der Menschensohn im ethiopischen Henochbuch (Lund: Gleerup, 1946) 193. Mowinckel, somewhat surprisingly, still adopts the Religionsgeschichte perspective by which the “Son of Man” is the name for the primordial man, whom the so-called gnostics would call Anthropos, and Daniel's “One like a Son of Man” is a secondary defanging of the concept! (Sigmund Olaf Plytt Mowinckel, He That Cometh: The Messiah Concept in the Old Testament and Later Judaism [trans. G. W. Anderson; Oxford: Blackwell, 1956] 372–73).

37 For a study of the ubiquity of this pattern, see Moshe Idel, Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism (Kogod Library of Judaic Studies; London: Continuum, 2007).

38 Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973) 43.

39 This work of his is thus consistent with the work of the Deuteronomists and Prophets, who, according to Adela Yarbro Collins and John Collins, “criticized and qualified” the divinizing royal ideology of ancient Israel (King and Messiah, xi).

40 For the disjunct in the use of kě in the present text between the animals and the One like a Son of Man, see Goldingay (Daniel, 168), who, nonetheless, comes to quite different conclusions from mine.

41 In this sense I both agree and disagree with Hartman and Di Lella: “Since there is sufficient consensus that ‘one in human likeness’ (7:13), is a symbol of ‘the holy ones of the Most High,’ the understanding of this much disputed person will not be influenced in any appreciable way by one's hypothesis that there may be two hands at work in the chapter” (Book of Daniel, 85). They are, of course, just right vis-à-vis the interpretation of the book of Daniel, but if my hypothesis of a prior composition incorporated into the book were deemed acceptable, another meaning of the One like a Son of Man may be descried before the text, as it were. This point obviates objections to the notion of the imagery as drawn from Israelite-Canaanite myth, such as the one offered by Zevit, who states: “Writing against the pagan abominations of Antiochus Epiphanes, it is most doubtful that he would have used any imagery that smacked of paganism as a vehicle for the message so clearly set forth in this chapter. If any images were adopted from the non-Jewish world, they must have been neutral ones” (“Structure,” 391). This objection is obviated, however, if instead of thinking of adoption we think rather of suppression, and if instead of thinking of non-Jewish—as if “Jewish” comprised a certain kind of severe orthodox monotheism—we think rather of traditional material that is being “neutralized” by its demythologization. We have met the “pagan” and he is us, to misquote Pogo. Notwithstanding the comment of an anonymous reader of this paper, I fail to see how Daniel 8 and 11 damage my thesis in any way. Whatever the precise meaning of the attack by the goat on the heavenly host in 8:10 (and in its parallel in ch. 11), it certainly does not seem to imply a second God but only the arrogance of the emperor, for which compare the arrogance of the king of Babylon (as in Isa 14:12–15) who thinks he can attack the host of heaven itself. The demythologization of the apocalypse is, moreover, carried out even further in the angelic explanation in ch. 8 (see vv. 24b–25: “he will destroy powerful people and his plotting will be directed against holy ones, and deceit will prosper in his hand. He will grow great in his own mind”), just as in ch. 7.

42 Carsten Colpe, “Ho Huios Tou Anthrōpou,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (vol. 8; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1972) 8:406.

43 I do not accept their argument to which this is a “moreover”: namely, that were the holy ones angels, the book would not comfort those for whom it is intended—that is, the “disenfranchised Jews who were being hounded by Antiochus IV” (Hartman and Di Lella, Book of Daniel, 91), a perfect example of begging the question.

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., 95.

46 Ibid., 92. This could make Daniel the earliest text, I believe, in which “holy ones” is used to mean “martyrs,” a most frequent usage in later Hebrew, of course.

47 I first developed this notion of older forms of Israelite religion as present on the surface of the biblical text in “The Sea Resists: Midrash and the (Psycho)Dynamics of Intertextuality,” Poetics Today 10 (1989) 661–77, later incorporated into Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). I am grateful to my colleague Ronald Hendel for reminding me of these publications and rescuing me from some potentially very embarrassing formulations.

48 After the rabbis, I have found that only Mowinckel (He That Cometh, 352) emphasizes this point sufficiently, but, of course, since the literature is massive, I have almost certainly missed others.

49 Goldingay, Daniel, 170.

50 Colpe, “Ho Huios,” 406.

51 See the statement of Smith: “The biblical evidence pertaining to the asherah does not sustain a historical dichotomy between ‘normative Yahwism’ over and against ‘Canaanite religion’ or a ‘popular religion’ tainted by Canaanite influence.” Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (2d ed.; The Biblical Resource Series; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002) 110.

52 Collins, Daniel, 291.

53 I have modified Collins's original list of such patterns in two ways. I have dropped the comparison with the sea, since I believe that the sea vision and the Son of Man vision were once two separate elements, and I have emphasized the differential ages of the two divine figures, which seems to me crucial for understanding the pattern of relationships here.

54 Colpe, “Ho Huios,” 419.

55 Smith, Early History of God, 7–8.

56 Otto Eissfeldt, “El and Yahweh,” JSS 1 (1956) 25–37.

57 Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy (JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996) 302; Mark S. Smith, God in Translation: Cross-Cultural Recognition of Deities in the Biblical World (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008) 193–216. Smith has a long and detailed discussion on the Deut 32:8 issue.

58 Another text that possibly exhibits a fragment of a survival of this very ancient Israelite religious notion of a council of El of which Y’ is a member is Psalm 82, although the interpretation of this psalm is obscure. For an excellent (save only a certain apologetic Tendenz) discussion of these two texts, see Michael S. Heiser, “Deuteronomy 32:8 and the Sons of God,” Bibliotheca Sacra 158 (2001) 52–74, and see other earlier literature cited there. Y’ is not mentioned in the psalm at all, as we have it according to the Masoretic Text, but there are important witnesses that read Y’ for Elohim. Pace ibid., n. 36, this variation makes an enormous difference in interpreting the psalm, to the point where one might suggest that the reading Elohim represents another masoretic attempt to reduce the theologically explosive potential of the text. If I am not mistaken, other references to the Divine Council in the Hebrew Bible have Y’ at its head, thus representing precisely the merger of Y’ into El that I posit in this article.

59 Cross, Canaanite Myth, 180.

60 Ronald Hendel, Remembering Abraham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 57–75.

61 Cross, Canaanite Myth, 58. See also David Biale, “The God with Breasts: El Shaddai in the Bible,” History of Religions 21 (1982) 240–56 and Smith, Early History of God, 184.

62 This explanation of Baal and Y’ as rivals for the young God spot might be taken to explain better the extreme rivalry between them manifested in the Bible.

63 Smith, Early History of God, 32–33. Cross, in contrast, argues that Y’ was originally a cultic name for El used in the south and this usage eventually split off from, and then ousted, El (Canaanite Myth, 71). This seems to me to leave somewhat unclear the Baal-like characteristics of Y’, as these have been described by Cross himself in the passage cited immediately above. Cross's comments (ibid., 75) on two strands in “Israel's primitive religion” do not quite answer this question. In a later chapter of his book, Cross treats the close affinities between Baal and Y’, which are so close, indeed, that as my teacher H. L. Ginsberg realized already in the thirties of the last century, an entire Baal hymn has been lifted intact and adapted for Y’ in Psalm 29. As Cross emphasizes, this could hardly have been done if the imagery were not appropriate already for Y’ (ibid., 156). Cross therefore writes, “The language of theophany in early Israel was primarily language drawn from the theophany of Ba‘l” (ibid., 157), a formulation that I would slightly modify to read: the language of the theophany of Y’ in ancient Israel was parallel (even nearly identical) to the language of Baal's theophanies among northern Canaanites. Cross, of course, recognizes the merger here but it is less clear why El/Y’ should have absorbed Baal's characteristics that seemingly did not exist before in Israel's religion. As Cross's reconstruction seems not to recognize Y’ as a variant of Baal, where would he come from? This difficulty is obviated if we assume an ancient cult of El as the universal old God of all of the Canaanites and Baal and Y’ as variant forms and names of the young God, with Y’ merged into El in the later forms of official biblical religion. Of course, I do not imagine for one moment that Y’ did not further appropriate characteristics of Baal as he moved northward and became more of a rain- and storm-god in addition to the mountain- and volcano-god that he had been in his putative original southern home. See also Peter Hayman, “Monotheism—A Misused Word in Jewish Studies?” JJS 42 (1991) 5.

64 A similar explanation, mutatis mutandis, might help to understand the place of and her connections with Asherah, on which see Smith, Early History of God, 133, and sources cited there.

65 It is here that I part company most decisively with Eissfeldt, “El and Yahweh” and Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel's Second God (London: SPCK, 1992).

66 Another possible hypothesis would be that these traditions are a direct continuation of such survivals as Deut 32:8. I find this less plausible than my explanation offered in the body of the text, but it would be hard to prove. In any case, what is clear enough in Daniel and presumably in whatever traditions lie behind it is that the Ancient of Days is Y’ and not an Elyon separate from and superior to Y’.

67 Cross, Canaanite Myth, 186.

68 Daniel Abrams, “The Boundaries of Divine Ontology: The Inclusion and Exclusion of in the Godhead,” HTR 87 (1994) 291–321.

69 Thus predating by centuries Ibn Ezra's collective interpretation, pace Collins, Daniel, 87, who writes that that 12th-century rabbi was the first to interpret it thus.

70 Pace Collins, 308 n. 271, who believes that it is a mere reductio ad absurdum. I would also surmise that there had been a Jewish interpretation prior to Aphrahat that saw the Son of Man as a representation of the collective, Israel.

71 In another article (Daniel Boyarin, “How Enoch Can Teach Us about Jesus,” Early Christianity 2 [2011] 51–76), I have tried to show that the Parables of Enoch demonstrate another independent Jewish group's reading of Daniel in a way that is similar (but different, too) to that of the Jewish groups involved with Jesus.

72 I am grateful to Daniel Fisher for reminding me of this point.

73 Pace Barker, Great Angel, 40. I thus agree with Emerton's conclusion that “the language used of the Son of man suggests Yahwe, not the Davidic king” (“Origin,” 231).

74 “Yahoel” appears in the Apocalypse of Abraham (70–150 C.E.), but then as late as 3 Enoch (4th–5th c. C.E.) we find “Yahoel Yah” and “Yahoel” explicitly given as names for (Andrei Orlov, “Praxis of the Voice: The Divine Name Traditions in the Apocalypse of Abraham,” JBL 127 [2008] 53–70 and Philip S. Alexander, “The Historical Setting of the Hebrew Book of Enoch,” JJS 28 [1977] 163–64). See also in this context Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa, “Form[s] of God: Some Notes on Metatron and Christ; For Shlomo Pines,” HTR 763 (1983) 269–88. As Alexander points out in his article, these very names are predicated in other contemporary texts of God himself. The lines between exalted “angels” and gods get harder and harder to draw and see. Cf. Emerton, “Origin,” 242: “At some stage, the old myth was reinterpreted in terms of the supremacy of Yahwe, who had been identified with both Elyon and Baal. Then the Son of man was degraded to the status of an angel, even though he retained the imagery which was so closely attached to him in tradition. This would help to explain the attribution of an exalted status to such beings as Michael and Metatron in later Judaism.”

75 This is the precise contrary of the position taken by Mowinckel, He That Cometh, 353, who argues that the “Son of Man” was a pre-existing messianic title derived from the primordial man (Anthropos) concept that was transformed by the author of Daniel into a figure for the people of Israel. See also ibid., 420–37.

76 The failure to make this distinction leads scholars as distinguished as Black (“Throne,” 61–62) into confusion, as it has led many others (on both sides of the hermeneutical divide), many of them mentioned by Black.

77 Collins and Collins, King and Messiah, 24.

78 “It has been argued that motifs should not be ‘torn out of their living contexts’ but ‘should be considered against the totality of the phenomenological conception of the works in which such correspondences occur.’ Such demands are justified when the intention is to compare the ‘pattern of religion’ in a myth and a biblical text, but this has never been the issue in the discussion of Daniel 7” (Collins, Daniel, 281).

79 See Daniel Boyarin, “Beyond Judaisms: and the Divine Polymorphy of Ancient Judaism,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Periods 41 (2010) 323–65.