Daniel's dating is one of the most confidently argued questions in Hebrew Bible scholarship, resting on a pattern critical scholars find hard to explain any other way: the book's later visions describe the political history of the centuries after the Babylonian exile in extraordinary, verifiable detail up through the persecution of the Jewish community by the Greek Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the 160s BCE, including his desecration of the Jerusalem Temple, and then turn suddenly vague and historically inaccurate about what happens immediately afterward, a shift scholars read as the point where genuine prophecy after the fact, vaticinium ex eventu, gives way to the author's own unfulfilled expectation of an imminent divine intervention that, from later hindsight, did not occur as predicted. This dating places the book's final composition squarely within the Maccabean revolt the book's later visions appear to address directly, offering encouragement to Jews facing religious persecution by casting their own crisis inside a much older, revered exilic hero's visionary framework.
The book's placement differs meaningfully between traditions: the Hebrew canon places Daniel among the Ketuvim rather than with the Nevi'im's other prophets, reflecting Jewish tradition's distinction between prophecy proper and this kind of visionary, apocalyptic writing, while Christian tradition groups it with Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel among the Major Prophets, a difference in canonical shelving that reflects two traditions' different judgments about the book's genre.