NOTES for Dan 9:18

It is now impossible to know where the author of the Book of Daniel got the prayer for deliverance that he placed in the mouth of his hero. Most plausibly, it really goes back to the end of the exilic period, to the time of the preaching of Isaiah of Babylon, which began with the proclamation of the imminent collapse of the Babylonian empire and the liberation of the people of God. The tone of the prayer is clearly penitential: here we hear a sober and self-critical spiritual assessment of the entire pre-exilic period as an age of universal apostasy and violation of the commandments given by God. But there is also hope for forgiveness, hope born of the words of the pre-exilic prophets who promised that the captivity would not last forever, that the time would come when the people of God would repent of their sins and turn to God, becoming the people of God not only in name but in essence, turning into a community of the faithful to whom the land promised by God to Abraham could at last be entrusted without fear.

Yet this hope is no longer connected with any special rights or merits before God, as often happened in pre-exilic times, nor even with the idea that God might somehow be persuaded to close His eyes to the sins committed by the people. The issue is only God's plans, witness and anti-witness, the fact that the house of God lying in ruins makes the surrounding nations think that God's plan has failed and the history of His people has ended forever. It was no longer possible to count on righteousness; there remained only hope in God's condescension, His mercy, that God, fulfilling His design for the world, for His people, and for salvation, would still not neglect those with whom He had spent so much time trying to make them a perfect instrument for carrying out His plans.

Now only one path remained for the people: the path of complete surrender to God's will, the path of the community of the faithful, for whom any attempt to turn aside from the path is equivalent to historical destruction, disappearance, assimilation. For historical experiments like those made in the pre-exilic age, attempts to arrange one's historical destiny without God and live like everyone else, there was no longer any strength of soul or body, nor any historical time. History was already entering the home stretch: according to the prophets' witness, the next great event in the history of the people was to be the coming of the Messiah and the advent of the messianic Kingdom.