Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [204]
All this would be conventional except for one thing: there are two different manifestations of God, one old (“the ancient of days”) and the other young (“the Son of Man”). God appearing in two different forms at once is very puzzling, a description that clearly innovates on the notion that God can appear in whatever form He wants. Behind this passage is originally a Canaanite mythologem describing ’El’s enthronement of his son Ba’al, but no one knows how it could become a proper Jewish vision.24 An obvious explanation for such an innovation is that someone was remembering an actual dream. In any event, revelatory authority was being claimed for the vision.
The Daniel passage is based upon the Ezekiel passage (Ezek 37) but no one would say that it is simple exegesis. Unlike Ezekiel, the prophet stayed on earth in his bed but he was transported to heaven at the same time as he translated the Ezekiel passage into his personal experience. Somehow the experience of the later prophet, writing under the pseudonym of Daniel, was translated and conditioned by the writings of Ezekiel. At the same time the prophet incorporates all kinds of new experience, including the Canaanite mythological image, into his scene. No obvious exegetical conventions are mentioned in the text. It is simply narrated as a story. If this was not a vision then it ought to be.
It cannot be merely exegesis of the Ezekiel passage because there is no attention at all to explaining the earlier text. Instead it is as if the previous descriptions of the heavenly throne room were experienced by the narrator. There is much manifestly new material in it, unique in the Biblical canon. In fact, in such a traditional culture no one could make up such a heretical scene as two divinities who are one without relying on some divine sanction. Novelistic imagination could not have done the trick for the ancients. So a narrative of real experience seems obvious. The big question is: “What kind of experience is it?”
The text tells us that it is a “dream vision.” And it has all the qualities of a dream vision experienced after meditating and studying the earlier texts. At the same time it follows its own dreamlike plot and logic. It seems very much like what it is supposed to be-a dream. The hypothesis that we have a transcript of the dream-vision, with the attendant caveat that all language implies interpretation, is the best explanation for the event. We have no way of knowing how many changes may have entered the text before it is witnessed in the archeological record. But from early texts that we do have, we know that Biblical texts, thought to contain the word of God, was transcribed very conservatively.
We have already seen an important and interesting case in which the seer’s vision was actually composed of a conflation of several different previous visions-that is the vision of Daniel 12. In previous chapters we have seen how Daniel 12:1-3 is actually a kind of inspired commentary on Isaiah 66, illumined by the visionary combination of images in Ezekiel 37 and Isaiah 26. When we discussed these passages earlier, it was clear that these were not exegeses but new revelatory interpretations of the Isaiah 66 passage. We may never know precisely which situations produced it. The adept whose vision we have in Daniel 12 was certainly reading Isaiah quite carefully before the dream. There is no doubt that it was a RISC. Daniel 7:9-14 is equally based on very similar images, combined with the passages above.
Many, many other religious texts in Scripture fit the same RISC pattern. Christopher Rowland describes the way apocalyptic material relates to its Biblical past.25 He notes, for instance in 4 Ezra 12:11, that the man (vir perfectus) who rises from the sea is an allusion to Daniel 7 and, most especially, to verse 13, which