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Bill Cooper (1947-2021) was a prolific writer and speaker, with a gift of cutting through the fog of biblical criticism to defend the infallible, plenary, verbal inspiration of Scripture, the six-day creation, and the Masoretic Hebrew and Received Greek texts. He was a council member of the Creation Science Movement and the Tyndale Society and an adjunct professor for the Institute for Creation Research’s Master Faculty. His most popular book is After the Flood which gives evidence for the historicity of Genesis 10 based on ancient, little known British and European genealogies. He published a series of books entitled “The Authenticity,” which included The Authenticity of the Book of Genesis, Joshua, Judges, Esther, Daniel, Jonah, the Gospels, Acts, the Epistles, and Revelation. In The Forging of Codex Sinaiticus, Cooper gave evidence to support his thesis that Sinaiticus is a forgery.
Cooper was a careful researcher, an independent thinker, and a brave defender of God’s eternal truth. He accomplished this in spite of suffering serious illnesses, including leukemia, the last two decades of his life. We can’t agree with all of his conclusions; at times he seems to be dogmatic when the evidence isn’t absolute; there are a few occasions when he might have been led astray by Jewish mysticism; but everything we have read from his pen is well worth considering.
If you want to be encouraged in your faith in the divine inspiration of Scripture, read Bill Cooper.
Ten of Cooper’s books are available in print from Gullion’s Christian Supply (King and Statesville, NC)
www.gullions.com/contact-us
www.4gospel.com/bill-cooper/
All of Cooper’s books are available in Kindle format from Amazon.
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In his official capacities, Daniel would have been known under his new name in its uncorrupted form, Belshazzar, and that is how we find him referred to in the official records. Which means, of course, that in the course of time there came to be two men in Babylon who went by the name of Belshazzar. Daniel was one, and the other was the grandson of Nebuchadnezzar who was later to be made regent under his father Nabonidus (Nabu-na’idu). The royal Belshazzar wasn’t even born or thought of when Daniel began his captivity, so there was no awkwardness in Daniel bearing the same name as a royal heir. That heir did not yet exist.
But do the Babylonian records themselves really speak of two Belshazzars? They certainly do, and they also differentiate between the two so that their readers would know which of them was being referred to.
The records concerning Daniel are as follows: The first inscription to consider is that known as YBC 3765, a clay tablet held in the Yale Babylonian Collection, and whose text was published by Dougherty in 1929.1 The second inscription is numbered 135, and is held at the Archaeological Museum of Florence. This was published by Oberhuber in 1960.2 Both tablets refer to Daniel under his given name, Belshazzar.
The Yale inscription (YBC 3765) says this: “(As to) one mina (and) seventeen shekels of silver, which are in one shekel pieces, belonging to Belshazzar (Bel-sar-usur), the chief officer of the king (amelshaqu sharri), (charged) against Rimut, the son of Enlil-kidinnu....”3
The important thing to notice here is the title which accompanies the name of this Belshazzar. It is that of shaqu sharri, the chief officer of the king. That is not a title that was ever held by Belshazzar the royal prince. Moreover, the Belshazzar in this inscription is not identified by a patronym as a Babylonian noble or prince would have been. The name of Rimut has a patronym, “....the son of Enlil-kidinnu...”, and Nergal-dannu who appears later in the inscription, also has a patronym, “...the son of Mukin-zer...”, but not Belshazzar. Had this Belshazzar been synonymous with the royal prince Belshazzar, who was a grandson of Nebuchadnezzar, he would certainly have been identified by his royal patronym. But not this Belshazzar who only has his job-title recorded. This Belshazzar is our Daniel.
We see exactly the same thing in the second tablet, 135. There this Belshazzar is also recorded without a patronym, and with the same title as in the Yale inscription, shaqu sharri, chief officer of the king. The king in question is Amel-Marduk, whose name appears in the Bible as Evil-Merodach, and the tablet is dated to the middle of 560 BC. Amel-Marduk was the son of Nebuchadnezzar, and we shall be meeting him again. He was assassinated by his brother-in-law, Neriglissar, and it is in the year of Neriglissar’s usurpation (560 BC) that Daniel drops out of the Babylonian picture, only to re-emerge 21 years later during the regency of his namesake, Belshazzar the prince. Daniel had continued under Amel-Marduk in the same office which he had held under Amel-Marduk’s father, Nebuchadnezzar, but was probably of little worth in Neriglissar’s eyes who would anyway have wanted his own men in high office.
But how did the Babylonian inscriptions refer to Belshazzar, the prince regent, so that he may be distinguished from the previous and non-royal Belshazzar who was Daniel? Amongst the tablets recovered from the Temple Archive of Erech, there is one inscription (Tablet 322) which records a tithe to the Temple which was once paid by the royal prince Belshazzar, and the tablet refers to him as Bel-sar-usur mar sharri, Belshazzar, the crown prince.4 There is a world of difference between such a royal patronym and the job-title of chief officer, a post which the royal Belshazzar never held. We meet the royal Belshazzar in other inscriptions of the time, in which he is always identified by his patronym, mar sharri – the crown prince.
...
There are other inscriptions which include Belshazzar’s royal patronym, but the point of it all is this: the Babylonian records themselves betray the presence in Babylon of two individuals who were, for a little while at least, contemporary with one another, and who both bore the name of Belshazzar. One was a prince regent, the son of Nabonidus (Nabu-na’idu), and the other was Daniel.
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