Commetary on Daniel

About this book

The most important single work produced by the Church Fathers on any of the prophetic writings of the Old Testament, commenting upon the original Hebrew text, and showing a complete mastery of all the literature of the Church on the subjects touched upon to the time of composition, is without question St. Jerome's Commentary on the Book of Daniel. In Origen's work on Daniel much of the exegesis is spoiled by the author's allegorical principles of hermeneutics, and the later commentary by Chrysostom is more in the nature of a series of homilies than an attempt to wrestle with the problems of Daniel's prophecies. For over eleven hundred years after its publication, all who wrote on Daniel showed themselves more indebted to this work by Jerome than to any other commentary on the Old Testament Scriptures produced in the period of the Church Fathers. It is strange that though we have some sixteen thousand pages in the Ante-Nicene, Nicene, and Post-Nicene Fathers, in the three major series of translations of patristic literature issued by Scribners some years ago, the Commentary on Daniel was passed by, as it was in the earlier series of translations undertaken by leaders of the Oxford Movement in the middle of the nineteenth century. The fifth volume of the Ante-Nicene Fathers includes fragments from the commentary on Daniel by Hippolytus, written about A.D. 230 and these fragments contain very important material, especially on the last of the seventy weeks, Antichrist, and the author's amazing identification of the toes of clay and iron of Daniel 2:43 with democracies; yet, the work is quite inferior in learning and insight to that of Jerome.