Good point. I don’t know that many people are really even using a Honey browser, but for those who want to know what we are talking about, here is a brief:

Why Creators’ Pushback against Honey Is About More Than Skimmed Affiliate Revenue

Note that chapter actually quotes numerous actual historians (some of renown) exhibiting exactly that brain defect. Thus, the chapter was necessary.

I agree it’s tedious that we have to argue it, but we nevertheless have to argue it. Because that’s how biblical historians are behaving, and their false statements and disinformation need to be corrected.

But I would add that the effort to correct them also shores up exactly what methodology we need to prove Jesus existed, which historians have abandoned because Jesus can’t be defended with real evidence that way. So even those who know what is in there already still benefit from going over it: it then becomes even more clear what we are supposed to have but don’t, and thus what it actually takes to establish confidence in someone’s historicity.

Perhaps Daniel 11:5-39 is “spot on,” but it is not spot on if the king of the north spoken of in Daniel 11:36-45 is Antiochus IV.

The article you are commenting on thus says:

So when we notice Daniel then starts to get history totally wrong (Daniel 11:40-45), incorrectly “predicting” a war between the Ptolemies and Seleucids that never came to pass, and that Antiochus would conquer most of North Africa (he didn’t capture even a single province there, due to the unforeseen intervention of the Romans), and die in Palestine (he was nowhere near), we can directly tell when the book was written: sometime in or shortly before 165.

Instead you say this:

The king of the north in Daniel 11:36-45 is Tigranes II of Armenia…

That literally makes no sense.

Tigranes never invaded Egypt, much less Libya! And he never pitched his tent in the Sinai (11:45). Alexander Jannaeus held him short. The Hasmonean dynasty was never conquered by Armenians and no ancient source mentions their even being subject to them.

He also wasn’t even alive at the time.

…and this passage consists of text that was interpolated in 69 BCE.

Sigh. Look, making shit up is not doing history.

I’m really tired of shit like this. Please go away.

I recently presented my theory to Dr. Collins on History Valley that Tigranes II is the one called “the king of the north” in Daniel 11:36-45, and the one called “Gog” in Ezekiel 38 and 39 (See “Daniel’s Prophecy Failed! | Dr. John J. Collins.” YouTube, uploaded by History Valley, August 26, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/live/VJYL9340CLc?si=RUphOkHLH6FrOKrC&t=2145). Collins did not want to take the time to figure out why I believe that the king of the north is Tigranes, but he said that if I can make a case for it, I should make it somewhere, so I made a case for it in the comments section of the video. I asked DeepSeek and ChatGPT to analyze the argument that I made in the comments section and these AI platforms gave me very favorable analyses of my theory.

I did a rough reconstruction of the original version of the book of Daniel that was written during the Maccabean Revolt in the 160s BCE. The original version was much shorter than the Hebrew/Aramaic and Greek versions of Daniel that we have today. The author predicted that Judas Maccabaeus, whom he believed was anointed with the spirit of Yahweh, would defeat Antiochus and that the resurrection of the dead would take place shortly thereafter. Most of the book of Daniel was written after the Hasmonean kingdom was established.

Benjamin Waters argues that Daniel 11:36-45 is an interpolation (Benjamin Victor Waters, “The Two Eschatological Perspectives of the Book of Daniel” in Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament, 2016, Vol. 30, No. 1, 94-95, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09018328.2016.1122292). He believes that the king of the north in Daniel 11:36-45 is Antiochus IV and that canonical version of Daniel was completed around the time of Antiochus’s death, so I do not entirely agree with his reasoning, but I do agree with his judgment that Daniel 12:1a more naturally follows Daniel 11:35 than Daniel 11:45. The redactor who wrote most of the book of Daniel split the prophecy of the seventy sevens into two parts (Daniel 9:24-27 and Daniel 12:1-3) and modified the text of the second part to refer to the angel Michael instead of Judas Maccabaeus. Daniel 11:21-32 is about Antiochus IV. When Daniel 11:21-35 and Daniel 12:1-13 are read consecutively without Daniel 11:36-45, a time of distress in which Michael will save the people of God and the resurrection of the dead can be interpreted as being prophesied to take place after the time of Antiochus at some point in the future.

As I noted, I think he is mostly guilty of badly wording things, and then I try to think of what he might have meant to say instead (to steel man his argument). His reply mostly consists of running with those steel mans (fixing his language to be more clear as stated). Which is progress. But then his argument falls to my subsequent analysis of those steel mans. So I need not respond further. He simply ignores my actual refutations and picks on the trivia (of my pointing out his poor wording). So one can already refute his new reply with my original comment.

There are also a few occasions where he fails even to steel man (he keeps conflating “infinitely likelier” with infinite rather than diminishing gains in probability, which I think is confusing probability with odds, as I explained; or “you should think the number of people that exists is the most that there could be,” which is a non sequitur, as I explained). I suspect this is just more poor wording, and he really means what I propose as the steelman of these points instead, which again I already addressed in my comment, and he makes no reply to in his.

And sometimes he just gets wrong what I said (e.g. he mistakes what I meant by my remark about multiverse theory, as already explained in the other thread here).

In the end, all his handwaving doesn’t change the fact that there is no reason to believe there should be endless people on atheism; atheism predicts there should be pretty much the number we observe (owing to rareness of biogenesis, evolutionary and terrestrial timelines, and planetary carrying capacity, the observed number of people is pretty much in line with prediction) whereas theism predicts there should be many more (every planet should be inhabited; we observe they are not, which falsifies rather than argues for theism).

His giant wordwall never addresses this, my actual point. And generating giant wordwalls to avoid ever addressing a point in an effort to claim to have addressed the point is not the sign of sound reasoner.

And he promises more. So keep me apprised of those as they come.

Comments are always welcome when relevant. And yours is relevant here.

On the use of the article, see first comment thread above.

On the grammar, see Galatians 1:19, Ancient Grammar, and How to Evaluate Expert Testimony.

Another that has come to my attention is Brant Pitre, professor of Scripture at the Augustine Institute with a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Notre Dame and specializing in ancient Judaism, who finds the dying messiah element to be obvious already in Daniel 9 exclaiming that “it is inexplicable” why anyone disagrees with this observation: Brant James Pitre, Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of the Exile: Restoration Eschatology and the Origin of the Atonement (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 402.