The Book of Daniel is the source of some of the Old Testament’s most lasting prophetic visions: A statue with a head made of gold, breast and arms made of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of iron mixed with clay that is toppled by a stone cut without hands. A vision of successive beasts that appear from the sea. The vision of one like a “son of man” appearing in the clouds. The book’s protagonist Daniel, a Jewish noble living in exile at the royal court at Babylon in the 6th century bce, interprets the visions to predict the future. These predictions are uncannily accurate up until the year 167 bce, when they suddenly become wildly inaccurate. As scholars have now show, this is because the text was not written by Daniel or anyone who knew him, but by an apocalyptic prophet writing between 167 and 164 bce, whose accurate “predictions” recount events of the past and whose proved a complete failure at predicting the actual future. John Hamer of Toronto Centre Place will look at the Book of Daniel as a textbook example of what happens in religion when prophecy fails.