The Book of Daniel

Written in Hebrew and Aramaic, the Book of Daniel is a book in both the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the Christian Old Testament. The book is set during the Babylonian Captivity, a period when Jews were deported and exiled to Babylon. The book revolves around the figure of Daniel, an Israelite who becomes an adviser to Nebuchadnezzar II, the ruler of Babylon from 605 BC - 562 BC.

The book has two distinct parts: a series of narratives and four apocalyptic visions. Three of the narratives involve Daniel, who is depicted as having a gift for interpreting the meaning of dreams and divine omens. Two other narratives feature Israelites who have been condemned for their piety being miraculously saved from execution. In the second part of the book, the author depicts Daniel as revealing and partially interpreting a set of visions which are described in the first person.

The dating and authorship of Daniel has been a matter of great debate among Jews and Christians. The traditional view holds that the work was written by a prophet named Daniel who lived during the sixth century BC, whereas most modern Biblical scholars maintain that the book was written or redacted in the mid-second century BC and that most of the predictions of the book refer to events that had already occurred.

A third viewpoint, based on comparison of the Hebrew and Aramaic found in Daniel to that found in more firmly dated texts, places the final editorial work in the fourth century BC.

William H. Shea Ph.D. (Archeology) in "The Prophecy of Daniel 9:24-27", shows that the book of Daniel was composed as a double chiasm, a literary structure of Hebrew poetry. Parts labeled A, A', A" and A"' are parallel, dealing with a similar theme — Kingdom Prophecies. Parts B, B', B" and B"' are parallel sections that come under the topic of trials of "God's people." The parallel C, C', C" and C"' concern the dealings of kings. It is claimed, although not proven, that the design of the literary structure itself focuses attention on the lone topic (D) — "an anointed (one)" which is translated in some common versions of the Bible as "the Anointed One" or "the Messiah."

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Daniel's 70 weeks by Chuck Missler

Abrahamic religion

In the study of comparative religion, an Abrahamic religion is any of those religions deriving from a common ancient Semitic tradition and traced by their adherents to Abraham (Hebrew: אברהם 'Abraham "Father/Leader of many", previously אברם 'Abram see Gen 17:5, Arabic ابراهيم), a patriarch whose life is narrated in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, and as a prophet in the Qur'an.

This forms a large group of related, largely monotheistic religions, generally held to include Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Bahá’í Faith (based upon Islam), and comprises about half of the world's religious adherents.

According to the Jewish tradition, Abraham was the first person to reject idolatry, hence he symbolically appears as the founder of monotheistic religions. In that sense, Abrahamic religion could be simply equated with monotheistic religion, but not all monotheistic religions are Abrahamic. In Islam he is considered as the first monotheist and is often refered to as Ibrahim al-Hanif or Abraham the Monotheist. The term, desert monotheism, is sometimes used for a similar purpose of comparison in historical contexts, but not for modern faiths.

All the Abrahamic religions are derived to some extent from Judaism as practiced in ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah prior to the Babylonian Exile, at the beginning of the 1st millennium BCE. Many believe that Judaism in Biblical Israel was renovated and reformed to some extent in the 6th century BCE by Ezra and other priests returning to Israel from the exile. Samaritanism separated from Judaism in the next few centuries.

Christianity originated in Judea, at the end of the 1st century, as a radically reformed branch of Judaism; it spread to ancient Greece and Rome, and from there to most of Europe, Asia, the Americas, and many other parts of the world. Over the centuries, Christianity split into many separate churches and denominations. A major split in the 5th century separated various Oriental Churches from the Catholic church centered in Rome. Other major splits were the East-West Schism in the 11th century, separating the Roman Catholic Church from the Eastern Orthodox Churches; and the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, that gave birth to hundreds of independent Protestant denominations.

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Cantillation

The ritual chanting of readings from the bible in synagogue services.

The chants are rendered in accordance with the special signs or marks printed in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible (or Tanakh) to complement the letters and vowel points. These marks are known in English as accents and in Hebrew as טעמי המקרא ta`amei ha-mikra or just טעמים te`amim. (Some of these signs were also sometimes used in medieval manuscripts of the Mishnah.) The musical motifs associated with the signs are known in Hebrew as niggun and in Yiddish as טראָפ trop: the equivalent word trope is sometimes used in English with the same meaning.

A primary purpose of the cantillation signs is to guide he chanting of the sacred texts during public worship. Very roughly speaking, each word of text has a cantillation mark at its primary accent and associated with that mark is a musical phrase that tells how to sing that word. The reality is more complex, with some words having two or no marks and the musical meaning of some marks dependent upon context. There are different sets of musical phrases associated with different sections of the Bible. The music varies with different Jewish traditions and individual cantorial styles.

The cantillation signs also provide information on the syntactical structure of the text and some say they are a commentary on the text itself, highlighting important ideas musically. The tropes are not random strings but follow a set and describable grammar. The very word ta'am means "taste" or "sense", the point being that the pauses and intonation denoted by the accents (with or without formal musical rendition) bring out the sense of the passage.

There are two systems of cantillation marks in the Tanakh. One is used in the twenty-one prose books, while the other appears in the three poetical books of Psalms, Proverbs and Job.


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Job

Job (Hebrew ⁠אִיּוֹב⁠, Iyowb, "hated"), is a character in the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible. In brief, the book begins with an introduction to Job's character — he is described as a rich, blessed man who fears God and lives righteously. Satan, however, challenges Job's integrity, and so God gives Job into Satan's hand, ending in tragedy for Job: the loss of his children, wealth, and physical soundness. The main portion of the text consists of the discourse of Job and his three friends concerning why Job was so punished, ending in God answering Job. Job is also a prophet in Islam.

In the Hebrew Bible
Job had Seven sons and three daughters and

He possessed 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, and 500 female donkeys, and very many servants, so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the east. (Job 1:3)

His sons took turns entertaining each other with feasts; each time they completed a cycle of feast days, Job sent to them and purified them, offering burn-offerings for each one in case any of them had cursed God in their hearts. He was "blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil. His good character is discussed in depth later in the book. (Job 1:1;4,5)


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Feasts and Festivals

A Jewish holiday or festival is a day or series of days observed by Jews as a holy or secular commemoration of an important event in Jewish history. In Hebrew, Jewish holidays and festivals, depending on their nature, may be called yom tov ("good day") (Yiddish: yontif) or chag ("festival") or ta'anit ("fast").

The origins of various Jewish holidays generally can be found in Biblical mitzvot (commandments), rabbinical mandate, and modern Israeli history.

Yom Kippur — Day of Atonement

• Erev Yom Kippur — 9 Tishrei
• Yom Kippur (יום כיפור‎) — 10 Tishrei

(Leviticus 23:27)²⁷ "The tenth day of this seventh month is the Day of Atonement. Hold a sacred assembly and deny yourselves, and present an offering made to the LORD by fire.

(Leviticus 16:29)
²⁹ "This is to be a lasting ordinance for you: On the tenth day of the seventh month you must deny yourselves and not do any work—whether native-born or an alien living among you-

(Numbers 29:7)⁷" 'On the tenth day of this seventh month hold a sacred assembly. You must deny yourselves and do no work.

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The Serpent

Serpent is a word of Latin origin (serpens, serpentis) which is ultimately derived from the Sanskrit term serp, that is normally substituted for "snake" in a specifically mythic or religious context, in order to distinguish such creatures from the field of biology.

Hebrew Bible

In the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) of Judaism, the speaking Serpent (nachash) in the Garden of Eden brought forbidden knowledge, but was not identified with Satan in the Book of Genesis. Nor is there any indication there in Genesis that the Serpent was a deity in his own right, aside from the fact that the Pentateuch is not teeming with talking animals.

¹"Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God has made," (Genesis 3:1)

Moses lifts up the brass snake, curing the Isrealites from Snake Bites. Hezekiah called the snake Nehushtan though he was cursed for his role in the Garden, this was not the end of the Serpent, who continued to be venerated in the folk religion of Judah and was tolerated by official religion until the in time of king Hezekiah. The Book of Numbers provides an origin for an archaic bronze serpent associated with Moses, with the following narrative:

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