Daniel
Belshazzar and the Nabonidus Cylinder: A Crown Prince Named in Clay
For over two thousand years, Belshazzar was known only from the book of Daniel, and critics cited the silence as evidence he never existed. In 1854 a Nabonidus foundation cylinder from Ur named him 'Belshazzar, my eldest son'; a separately recovered Babylonian chronicle showed him governing the capital for years while his father, King Nabonidus, lived at a distant oasis. Two independent Babylonian records confirm the very man, and the very role, Daniel 5 places on the throne the night Babylon fell.
553 BC – 539 BC
Nebuchadnezzar the Builder of Babylon
Stamped bricks, the East India House Inscription, and the excavated Ishtar Gate independently confirm that Nebuchadnezzar II existed, ruled, and rebuilt Babylon on a colossal scale — and that his court spoke of his achievements in exactly the first-person, self-glorifying register Daniel 4:30 puts in his mouth: 'Is not this the great Babylon, which I have built... by the strength of my power?'
605 BC – 562 BC
One Like a Son of Man
Daniel sees 'one like a son of man' come on the clouds of heaven to the Ancient of Days and receive an everlasting kingdom (Daniel 7:13-14). Composed by the second century BC at the latest, the vision predates Christ by roughly two centuries and is fixed in the Qumran manuscript record. Jesus applied it to himself at his trial, fusing it with Psalm 110:1 before the Sanhedrin (Mark 14:62).
165 BC – AD 33
The Seventy Weeks of Daniel
Daniel 9:24-27 foretells that an 'anointed one, a prince' — rendered 'Christ the prince' in the Douay-Rheims — will be 'cut off,' after which 'a people with their leader' will 'destroy the city and the sanctuary.' The Church has read this since antiquity as Jesus, put to death under Pontius Pilate, followed by Rome's destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. The text itself predates both events by centuries, attested by Qumran manuscripts and confirmed even under the latest mainstream critical dating of the book.
538 BC – AD 70