When Prophecy Was Rewritten: The Two Daniels and the Lost Word of God

Few realize that the Book of Daniel exists in several competing Greek versions, the Old Greek, Theodotion’s revision, and two separate stories, Susanna and Bel and the Dragon, that were later attached to it. As Emanuel Tov notes, these additions did not stem from a lost “Hebrew Daniel,” but from later Greek expansions that re-imagined the prophet’s story, altered its order, and merged foreign legends into Scripture itself. The very existence of multiple Daniels, one ending with lions, another with a dragon, exposes how the biblical canon was never fixed but fluid, reshaped by translators and theologians who re-wrote revelation to fit their doctrine.

The Qur’an unveils this forgotten history when it says: “They write the Scripture with their own hands and then say, ‘This is from God’” (Q 2:79). The two Daniels, Old Greek and Theodotion do not merely differ in language; they reveal two theologies battling for authority. Between the fractured Greek manuscripts and the Masoretic text lies a silent admission: divine words were edited, expanded, and rearranged by men. The Qur’an does not introduce a new message,

it restores the original one.