SOURCE: Rowley, H. H. “The Unity of the Book of Daniel.” In The Servant of the Lord and Other Essays on the Old Testament, pp. 249-80. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965.

In the following essay (originally delivered as a lecture in 1950), a seminal work of scholarship on The Book of Daniel, Rowley restates the argument for the unity of the book, exploring the weaknesses of the opposing view and focusing his discussion on the canonical parts of the text.

With imposing unanimity critical scholars seem to be moving away from the once common belief in the unity of the book of Daniel. There are still conservative scholars who maintain the unity of the book and ascribe the whole to a sixth-century author,¹ but of critical scholars who have dealt with the book in recent years few have defended its unity.² It is true that the unanimity with which the unity...