On Animals, Autonomy, and Apocalypticism in Daniel

Abstract

Abstract Daniel is a book concerned about living in and under imperial rule, whether it be following Daniel’s exploits in court tales or envisioning the end of empire in dreams. At the same time, Daniel is also about bodies—human and animal, divine and earthly, real and imagined. The variety of bodies mirrors what Cary Wolfe dubs a “species grid” (Wolfe and Elmer, 2003), which categorizes bodies from the fully realized subject of the “humanized human” to the “animalized human” and the “humanized animal” and, finally, the objectified “animalized animal.” This article uses and adapts this grid to chart the power of animals, humans, and the divine in Daniel. The result is that we can see more clearly how Daniel transitioned from an earlier Deuteronomistic theology that understood humans as the cause of divine reward and punishment to an apocalyptic worldview that removed power from human hands entirely.