Discourse Theme and the Narratives of Daniel

By Les P. Bruce

[Les P. Bruce is Associate Professor of Linguistics, Graduate Institute for Applied Linguistics, Duncanville, Texas.]

The Old Testament book traditionally attributed to the prophet Daniel has been the subject of considerable debate. One issue is the unity of the text. Having surveyed the various positions of scholars for and against the unity of the text, Rowley argued for the unity of Daniel.[1] Those scholars who argue against the book’s unity differ in detail as to where to divide the book and which words and sentences to ascribe to editors.

The obvious differences in the text have given rise to these divisive theories. The first six chapters are narrative in genre; the last six are reports and interpretations of visions. Daniel 2:4b–7:28 is composed in Aramaic; the other portions are in Hebrew. Much of the discussion has centered on chapters 2 and 7 because of the similar prophetic interpretation of the two different visions and because of the transitional nature of chapter. Chapter 7 is composed in Aramaic like most of the narrative section, but is not itself narrative; instead it is of the same genre as the latter part of the discourse. The language and genre differences in the text are notable, but they do not coincide with a clear point of division.

The purpose of this study is to present current linguistic perspectives on discourse cohesion and theme as it relates to biblical exegesis. Specifically the study presents a procedure for identifying the theme of a discourse, applying it to the Book of Daniel, thereby addressing the question of the unity of the text. This article examines the narrative episodes of Daniel from the point of view of the discourse structure of the book as a whole. The historical sections and their relationship to the theme of the book as a whole indicate that they are included in the discourse in order to illustrate the main point that the author wanted to impress on his readers. The narratives in Daniel support his theme by relating six events that share similar dynamics and conclusions. The conclusions provide concrete examples of what is propositionally stated as a significant theme in the discourse, that is, only God is truly sovereign and He will establish His eternal kingdom. When the narrative section is seen in the light of this theme, the narratives form a naturally coherent part of the whole discourse.

Theme

This section discusses the linguistic notion of discourse theme, also referred to as discourse topic,[2] and various approaches to identifying the theme in a discourse.

Brown and Yule describe the discourse topic as “the central organizing principle for a lot of discourse.”[3] For them discourse topic is a semantic notion, “what the message is about,” an idea or concept in the mind of the author. Speakers may state their theme in a proposition, but narrative texts do not tend to mark themes by sentence-level grammatical properties. The implication of the semantic approach in contrast to other approaches to theme is that, like other functional notions, discourse topic is difficult to define without recourse to subjective criteria.[4] Most text linguists agree that narrative discourses of natural language are mostly defined by semantic or pragmatic notions. Defining a discourse theme is inevitably subjective, but yet the notion of discourse theme has been demonstrated to be psychologically real.[5]

Discourse theme is a central organizing principle, that is, it has to do with discourse coherence. A true discourse is a group of sentences that form a coherent unit. Thus it is more than simply a series of grammatical sentences. The organization of a coherent discourse is characterized by a sequence of sentences “produced by an individual in accordance with the Cooperative Principle,[6] and that as a consequence, each sentence is intended to say something necessary, true, and relevant to accomplishing some objective in which … the text producer and the intended audience are mutually interested.”[7] Part of being a cooperative interlocutor involves assuming that text producers are purposeful in their communication. That obliges the hearer to search for the relevance of everything the author says to the general purpose or purposes of the author. Discourse theme is a statement of the author’s purpose or what that purpose is about. Theme can be defined as “the underlying thought that brings the greatest coherence to the discourse.” The theme clarifies to the greatest degree how the parts of the discourse are relevant to the whole.

How then can one identify “what the discourse is about”? The process of communication is as much a problem-solving process as it is a decoding process. Some of the meaning of a communication can be encoded in linguistic forms and those speakers in the community who share the same associations of forms with meanings will share a common understanding of their meanings. Many aspects of an intended message, however, are left implicit by the author. This requires the application of common-sense, pragmatic processes in order to decipher the intended messages of the author.[8] The inferences that a reader makes about how the parts of a discourse are relevant to each other can lead the reader to discover the author’s underlying goal or theme for the text. Those inferences that produce the most coherent discourse for the least cognitive effort are the most likely to reveal the author’s theme. Conversely once a reader has identified the author’s theme it should enable the reader to understand better the relevance of each of the parts of the discourse. This procedure for judging the coherence of a text may be called coherence evaluation.

This study of discourse theme is relevant to the field of literary criticism in an important way. Theme is the central organizing feature of narrative discourse, as was mentioned. Therefore if a common theme can be postulated which reveals how the parts of the text are relevant to each other, that is one piece of evidence for the unity of the text as a single, coherent discourse. It would not be unwarranted to use this as a procedure for testing a discourse. It is expected that readers will assume the unity of a text and seek to discover the theme that best achieves its coherence. As Green points out, natural human communication depends on the dynamic interaction of speaker and addressee, which is founded on certain assumptions.[9] Any hearer of a text will make certain judgments about the beliefs and intentions of the speaker. The hearer must determine if the speaker is joking, speaking sarcastically, or intending to be taken literally in what he says. Since interlocutors assume that speakers speak with a purpose in mind and that addressees will make the expected assumptions and inferences to determine the speaker’s intended communication, the hearer must do that interpretive work.

A literary critic considers many factors when deciding the unity of a text. One should first assume that the author of a text has a coherent purpose and then try to infer what that is before concluding that there was more than one author. If a reasonable theme can be discovered that provides coherence for the text, then that theme should be counted as evidence for the unity of the text. This evidence in itself does not prove a single author of a text, of course. An editor or secondary author could add a section to a discourse in order to illustrate or clarify what he believes to be the goal or theme of the first author. The literary critic must decide, however, if such a hypothesis would be an unnecessary complication of the reconstruction of a text or not.

The theme of Daniel’s discourse can be determined by inferences about the relevance of the narrative episodes to each other and to the discourse as a whole. That is done in the section about the narratives. The theme deduced from those inferences is reinforced explicitly by several paraphrases in the text. Two statements in chapters 2 and 7 might express the theme of Daniel: “The God of heaven will set up a kingdom which will never be destroyed, and that kingdom will not be left for another people … it will itself endure forever” (2:44). “I kept looking … and behold … One like a Son of Man was coming…. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which will not pass away, and His kingdom is one which will not be destroyed” (7:13–14).

These statements relevant to the culmination of earthly kingdoms are part of the conceptual link between two major sections of the book. Coherence in a text can be strengthened by conceptual statements like these, by lexical concordance, other types of referencing, and other structural and pragmatic devices. If the analyst concludes on some other basis that two sections of a text are not coherently connected, then he will be inclined to interpret cohesive features like these as glosses inserted by a later author. In the present study this very concept represented in two major sections of the text is identified as the unifying theme of the discourse.

Structure of Daniel

The first six chapters of the book form the historical section. Chapters 5 and 6, later events in the life of Daniel, are taken out of chronological order and placed with the other narratives. All the narratives are grouped together because they form a section based on literary genre, having a mutually reinforcing theme.

Chapters 7–12 form the prophetic section of the book. The discussion of the historical narratives demonstrates how these two major sections relate to each other in the discourse as a whole.

Aramaic is the language used by the author for most of the narrative section. The first episode (chap. 1) is written in Hebrew, as is the first part of the second episode up through 2:4a, “Then the Chaldeans spoke to the king in Aramaic.” Aramaic is also the language of chapter 7, the first chapter of the apocalyptic section. The remainder (chaps. 8–12) is written in Hebrew.

Any explanation of why the author used both languages is speculative. One view is that this resulted from a copyist putting together two extant portions of two original manuscripts, one in Aramaic and one in Hebrew. Collins refers to some “modern” scholars who “hold that the entire book was composed in Aramaic at different times, and that chs. 8–12 were translated for reasons of nationalistic fervor (Ginsberg, Hatman and DiLella).”[10] Others, including Collins, surmise that an older collection of Aramaic stories was expanded by the apocalyptic visions written in Hebrew. In that case the first section (1:1–2:4b) was translated into Hebrew, and the first apocalyptic vision was composed or translated into Aramaic as a means to tie the two sections together into a single discourse.

It is interesting that 2:4b is a logical place to switch from Hebrew to Aramaic, which the writer did while quoting what was said in Aramaic. That is not sufficient reason, however, for the author to continue writing in Aramaic after the conclusion of his direct quotations in 2:11. Yet, Walvoord writes, it is not unusual for a Hebrew author to use Aramaic for a portion of his memoirs, since Aramaic was the language of wider communication throughout Mesopotamia at the time of the captivity of Judah.[11] He analyzed the structure of the book by language. (1) Introduction, chapter 1 (in Hebrew); (2) The times of the Gentiles, chapters 2–7 (in Aramaic); (3) Israel in relation to the Gentiles, chapters 8–12 (in Hebrew). The narratives and chapter 7 pertain to Gentile nations, and thus the language of wider communication was used for those portions.

The Narrative Passages in Daniel

The purpose of the narrative section of the discourse can be detected by mapping out the informational structure of each narrative. This procedure is independent of the language of composition, whether Hebrew or Aramaic. The historical episodes are relevant to each other for they illustrate the same implicit conclusions by referring to events that have the same kinds of participants and share similar outcomes. By the pragmatic[12] principle of relevance these narratives form a coherent section in the discourse.

Participants include the monarch, God’s servants, and God. In most events (a) the sovereignty of earthly monarchs is undermined in some way, (b) God’s servants are honored, and (c) God is praised and acknowledged as sovereign above all kings and gods.

Episode 1

This scene portrays the graduate training in Babylonian literature undertaken by Daniel and his friends. The first narrative gives the historical setting for the discourse and is to that extent an introduction. It is more than a setting, however, because two of the three common outcomes of the narratives are present in this first episode.

The king: His orders were not followed, and his judgment was disproved. God’s servants: They were the best in their class, physically and intellectually (1:15, 19–20). 

God: He was mentioned as being at work behind the scenes (v. 17), but was not explicitly praised.

Episode 2

This episode involves the king’s challenge to his magician-counselors to tell him his dream about the statue and then to interpret its reference.

The king: His decree to kill the counselors was averted. God’s servants: they were honored (2:46) and promoted (vv. 48–49). God: He was praised. “‘Surely your God is a God of gods and a Lord of kings” (v. 47).

Episode 3

This episode relates the events surrounding the statue of Nebuchadnezzar and the fiery furnace.

The king: His order of execution was frustrated (3:28). God’s servants: They were promoted (v. 30). God: He was exalted. “Any people, nation, or tongue that speaks anything offensive against the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego shall be torn limb from limb, and their houses reduced to a rubbish heap, inasmuch as there is no other god who is able to deliver in this way” (3:29).

Episode 4

This episode relates the events surrounding the king’s vision of a tree.

The king: His boastful pride was humbled (4:30). God’s servants: They were not obviously promoted in this episode as they were in the other narratives, although Daniel was recognized as having ability far superior to other royal counselors (vv. 8–9, 18). God: He was honored and praised by the king (vv. 3, 34–35, 37).

Only in this episode was the king honored when he received his kingdom back again; Daniel or his friends were not honored. Only in this case did the king recognize God’s greatness personally rather than as a God of foreigners. “Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise, exalt and honor the King of heaven” (v. 37). This time he acknowledged God for Himself.

One could propose, motivated by symmetry, that the king himself was the exalted servant of God in this episode. The fact that the structure of this episode does not exactly match the other episodes in not having the servants of God publicly promoted at the end may be because these episodes are historical events. They are not fictional stories included to teach a principle;[13] they are historical events selected by the author to illustrate a principle. The author selected from historical events to teach something thereby. The poet might structure the same events in symmetrical ways to add to the impact of what he wanted to convey. This story is apparently not the work of a poet.

Episode 5

In this episode Belshazzar was confronted with the handwriting on the wall.

The king: He was killed (5:30). God’s servants: Daniel was promoted and honored (v. 29). God: He was proclaimed to be in sovereign control. “The God in whose hand are your life-breath and your ways, you have not glorified” (v. 23).

Episode 6

In this episode Daniel was placed in the lion’s den.

The king: Darius was rendered helpless through his own pride. His officials’ scheme was frustrated, and they were executed. God’s servants: Daniel prospered (6:28). God: He was exalted. “I make a decree that in all the dominion of my kingdom men are to fear and tremble before the God of Daniel, for He is the living God and enduring forever, and His kingdom is one which will not be destroyed, and His dominion will be forever” (v. 26).

The six episodes are related to each other, and they are relevant to the spectacular and terrifying visions in the remainder of the discourse by the three conclusions they illustrate. (1) Earthly monarchs are not absolutely sovereign. (2) God’s servants are to be honored. (3) God is sovereign above kings and gods.

The Theme of a Unified Daniel

It is one thing to see how these episodes are related. But how are they relevant to the prophetic sections of the book? The reiterated point of the historical episodes relates to the terrifying visions of the earthly kingdoms in an important way. Daniel’s overall purpose, obviously reflecting God’s purpose in giving him these revelations, was to strengthen the faith of the people of God against the prospects of future events.[14] The claim here is that even the apocalyptic section is not primarily given to predict the future, to tell people which future kingdoms would emerge. Instead this section was given to encourage God’s people to live within terrifying earthly kingdoms by remaining confident that only God’s kingdom will last forever, for only He is truly sovereign.

The prophecies are warnings, then, of circumstances to come. The historical episodes support the thesis that whereas earthly kings are temporarily sovereign, God is supremely so and His kingdom will never end. This theme is stated explicitly in the prophetic section. “To Him was given dominion, glory and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations and men of every language might serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which will not pass away, and His kingdom is one which will not be destroyed” (7:14).

The passage continues with the explanation of the four major kingdoms. Verse 18 then includes the place of the saints in God’s future kingdom. “But the saints of the Highest One will receive the kingdom and possess the kingdom forever, for all ages to come.”

The place of the saints in God’s everlasting kingdom is also supported by the historical episodes. The saints will be promoted to positions of responsibility within His kingdom. The servants of God, participants in the narratives in chapters 1–6, illustrate that principle. The elevation of the servants of God as a principle, however, can easily be misapplied if taken out of the context of the whole discourse. While Daniel recorded five examples of God’s servants being honored and promoted, he did not intend to imply that all believers should expect to be honored and promoted as Daniel and his friends were. If the historical episodes formed a separate discourse, one might be inclined to consider such an implication. Taken within the theme of Daniel as a whole, however, it is clear that all the Lord’s saints will receive honor and authority in His everlasting kingdom. Believers can live with the conviction that they are part of a greater kingdom in which they have rights and responsibilities. Believers in various political regimes may face persecution and hardship or even martyrdom.

Alternatives Considered

The number of potential themes for a discourse is extensive. Therefore an evaluation of competing themes cannot be exhaustive nor can it comprise a proof. It may be of value, however, to test other themes that come to mind from reading the text.

Rowley

Rowley proposed that the historical narratives in Daniel point to the setting of the Maccabean age to which the latter half of the book is assigned.[15] The relevance of these narratives to each other in this view is that they all refer to a Jewish perspective of life during the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes. Rowley claims that chapter 1 relates to “the time of the Maccabean crisis when Antiochus sought to compel the Jews to eat swine’s flesh that had been sacrificed to idols.”[16] Chapter 2, which parallels the same climax of history stated in chapter 7, relates to the hope of the imminent establishment of the everlasting kingdom of righteousness in the Maccabean days. Chapter 3, Rowley says, relates to the act of Antiochus Epiphanes turning the temple into a heathen shrine by setting up an idol or idols to be worshiped.

Chapter 4 “might well be understood in that day as a reference to Antiochus,” with “a promise of humiliation at the hands of God.”[17] Chapter 5 relates to the act of Antiochus, who supposedly removed the sacred vessels of the temple with his own hands. Chapter 6 relates to a group of traitorous Jews who played up to King Antiochus in order to secure their own advancement. They encouraged the king in his attacks on the liberties of the loyal Jews; there is a veiled warning here to those traitors that their schemes would backfire and God would take vengeance on them.

Rowley’s suggestion provides a perspective of unity to the narratives. He sees all but one of the narratives as references to Antiochus. The second narrative, Rowley surmises, is of a broader nature, reflecting the anticipation of a messianic kingdom during the time of the Maccabees. This narrative is not seen as closely related to the others because it does not reflect on Antiochus.

Scholars agree that chapters 8–11 refer to the empires of Persia and Greece in relation to Israel. Antiochus Epiphanes figures significantly in those prophecies. Thus to relate the historical narratives to life under the rule of Antiochus Epiphanes is one way to understand the major sections of the text in a unified way.

However, Rowley’s interpretation misses the structural parallels within the narratives themselves. That structure was discussed earlier in the section about the narratives in Daniel. Rowley’s explanation of a second-century author writing about the trying times in which he was living suggests that references to Antiochus would necessarily be veiled. Such an author might not state his theme explicitly. The theme suggested in this study—only God is truly sovereign and He will establish an eternal kingdom—is indicated both explicitly and indirectly in several places in the text. It is not a requirement that the theme be explicit in a discourse, but an author may choose to be less subtle and more perspicuous or emphatic by stating his or her theme explicitly. Taking that possibility into consideration, the theme chosen here fits well with a statement that can be recognized in at least six places in Daniel (2:44; 4:2–3; 5:21; 6:26; 7:14, 27), a statement that meets the qualifications of a discourse theme. That is, the theme is that concept that gives the greatest coherence to the text for the least cognitive effort.

Baldwin

Baldwin argues for the unity of Daniel’s discourse, proposing that the unifying theme is “the cost but final vindication of witness in a hostile society.”[18] The development of this theme is partly seen in the “progressive parallelism” in the structure of the text. This structure is outlined by Hendriksen.[19] This analysis points to the parallelism between chapters 2, 7–9, and 11, where the same period of history was reviewed through different symbols. Baldwin recognizes the author’s intentional selectivity of the narrative episodes that are related by the proposed theme.

Baldwin’s theme obviously reflects the content of the narrative episodes. It would also explain the author’s use of the narratives to prepare readers for the detailed descriptions of the political regimes to follow. In these respects Baldwin’s analysis is similar to the conclusions of this present study. The choice of theme in this study is preferred, however, as it is based more on structural parallels in the narrative episodes themselves. The present analysis, motivated by the discourse structure, is less subjective.

Lenglet

Lenglet suggested a chiasmic structure for chapters 2–7.[20] As discussed by Baldwin,[21] chapters 2 and 7 present four kingdoms; chapters 3 and 6 are narratives that “demonstrate God’s power to deliver His servants”; chapters 4 and 5 are narratives that present God’s judgment on proud rulers. For Lenglet the two middle chapters (4–5) present the main point of the author’s message, at least in the Aramaic section: God’s judgment on proud rulers.

Lenglet’s analysis is desirable for its treatment of the Aramaic section as a unit. The proposed themes of each parallel passage are specific to those sections. In that way he avoids exceptions that the present study has to admit, namely, for chapter 4. However, the price he pays for his precision is a more segmented system without a more general theme. He misses seeing the greater unity of the whole discourse. In his view chapters 2–7, written in the language of wider communication, are for world leaders. The Hebrew portions, which address the bearing of world powers on Jewish life and the end times, are a message for Jewish audiences.

Conclusion

The subjective process of choosing between competing themes cannot be done in isolation. The interpretation of theme depends on assumptions that derive from the highest levels of theology and interpretations of the smallest parts of the text. It is necessarily an iterative process with one’s conceptualization of the theme informing the interpretations of the parts, and the interpretations of the parts modifying one’s concept of the theme until one arrives at the theme or several themes that provide the greatest coherence for the discourse with the least complexity.

The theme proposed in this study—that only God is truly sovereign and that He will establish an eternal kingdom—provides coherence for the entire Book of Daniel.[22] The theme is evident, being stated explicitly or indirectly at least six times in the text. The theme may be naturally inferred by assuming that the narrative episodes are relevant to the rest of the discourse. The inference required to deduce the theme is supported by the repeated common patterns of participants and conclusions in each narrative. Earthly monarchs are not absolutely sovereign, God’s servants are to be honored, and God is sovereign above kings and gods. The parallel information of the narratives reduces the element of subjectivity in determining the theme.

Notes

1. H. H. Rowley, “The Unity of the Book of Daniel,” Hebrew Union College Annual 23 (1951): 233-72.
2. Talmy Givon, ed., Topic Continuity in Discourse: A Quantitative Cross-Language Study (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1983), 8.
3. Gillian Brown and George Yule, Discourse Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 73.
4. See Maria Angeles Gomez-Gonzalez, The Theme-Topic Interface (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001), chap. 2.
5. See George Green, Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding, 2d ed. (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996), 105–9, for an analysis of two texts that demonstrate a significant difference in coherence, even though they have comparable grammatical features that would be expected to provide textual coherence. The difference turns out to be that the coherent text is organized around a clear theme.
6. Paul H. Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” in P. Cole and J. L. Morgan, eds., Speech Acts, vol. 3 of Syntax and Semantics (New York: Academic, 1975), 3:41–58.
7. Green, Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding, 106.
8. Since this is a study of the theme of a discourse rather than a study of the philosophy of language, the claims about language and interpretation will not be addressed here. Attempts to apply decoding procedures to the understanding of connected text, that is, discourses, have led to notions of background scripts or schemas of culturally known behavior patterns, knowledge that an interpreter must bring to bear on natural text material in order to be able to interpret the text. Looking at texts from a truth-conditional perspective has proven inadequate for the understanding of natural language texts. Relevance theory, expounded by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (Relevance: Communication and Cognition [Oxford: Blackwell, 1986]) and others, has documented the necessity for addressees to apply problem-solving processes such as making judgments of the relevance of sentences and paragraphs to each other in order to understand the total, intended message of the author. Narrative texts seem to leave the theme implicit more than other discourse genre. Narratives often require the hearer to infer the theme as well as the relevance of sentences and paragraphs to each other. On the other hand expository and hortatory discourses more often state explicitly the purpose of the author.
9. Green, Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding, 2–5, 97–98.
10. John J. Collins, Daniel: With an Introduction to Apocalyptic Literature, Forms of Old Testament Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 29.
11. John F. Walvoord, Daniel: The Key to Prophetic Revelation (Chicago: Moody, 1971). This conservative position was also argued in Albert Barnes, Notes on the Old Testament, Daniel, 2 vols. (reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker, 1950).
12. Pragmatics is the study of those aspects of communication that are not conventionally associated with linguistic symbols. These aspects of meaning and communication require reasoning and common sense on the part of the interpreter. This aspect of communication acknowledges linguistic symbols which by their operations in communication depend on taking notice of how they are used in context to be able to decipher what they refer to (e.g., indexical symbols like pronouns.) It recognizes understanding of messages that are not explicitly encoded in linguistic symbols. Pragmatics deals with the assumptions and inferences everyone makes when interpreting a linguistic utterance. Listeners make assumptions and inferences about the speaker’s beliefs, assumptions, intentions, plans for communicating, and actions in the communication mode.
13. Stories that are too symmetrical are immediately suspected of being nonhistorical teaching devices, although they are not necessarily so.
14. Jesus expressed this type of purpose for the prophecies He gave His disciples in the Upper Room Discourse (John 16:1–4).
15. Rowley, “The Unity of the Book of Daniel,” 233–72.
16. Ibid., 268.
17. Ibid., 269.
18. Joyce Baldwin, Daniel: An Introduction and Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1978), 63.
19. Hendriksen, More Than Conquerors (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1962), 34–36.
20. Ad. Lenglet, “La structure littéraire de Daniel 2–7, ” Biblica 53 (1972): 169-90.
21. Baldwin, Daniel: An Introduction and Commentary, 60.
22. The apocryphal stories of Susanna, Daniel and the priests of Bel, and Daniel killing the dragon, do not coherently fit into the discourse as a whole on the basis of the proposed theme in this study.