J. Vernon McGee's commentary on Daniel is pretty much still cheating. I have gone through stretches where I have read McGee every day. His plain-spoken style and opinionated observations, originally developed for the Through the Bible radio program, certainly translate well to print. I've been consulting him as I've been reading through the overwhelming and mysterious details of the prophecies in Daniel. While I am always mindful that he's coming from a specific perspective which includes a sort of Left Behind eschatology about which I am agnostic at this point, Daniel himself identifies the weird animals he sees with various existing nations of his day, so it's not some kind of weird mythology to say the winged lion is Babylon. What McGee adds, and I'm sure the other commentators would do the same, is the historic information about how the activities of the empires moving across the Middle East correlated with Daniel's vision.
Hard Sayings of the Bible, available as software here, was recommended to me by a fellow member of my church. It is really long and not something you read straight through. I've referred to it as I've been reading the visions of Daniel and that tough stretch in Romans where Paul is talking about God's continuing relationship with the Jews in the midst of the welcoming of the Gentiles.... well, if you want 1000 words about whether Daniel's prophecy of the 70 weeks depicts one Messiah or two, this is your resource. If you don't really want answers to questions you didn't even have, maybe this is one you don't need.
I was surprised to find Karen Armstrong's In the Beginning in our church library, even though I'm the one who catalogued it. Faithful readers may remember that I tried and failed to read another of Armstrong's books earlier in this project. (She's really more of a Buddhist than a Christian, in my opinion, and I find the Buddhist approach to self-improvement very depressing). I thought I would try again when the subject was more theological, and this time I was not disappointed. Although Armstrong makes a lot of assertions with no attribution-- not unlike J. Vernon McGee, I guess-- her perspective has just the right amount of distance from mine. I can learn from her even when I don't agree with her, and that's the heart of this whole project: to learn about topics I never thought I cared about, to hear voices I would never seek out otherwise.
(And, by the way, to discover that someone, somewhere, has used a child's set of zoo animals and some hot glue to make models of Daniel's prophetic beasts!)
