hoj,
Let's get back to basics.
As is pointed out, understand the immediate textual context as well as the context of the events (history, political, religious, etc.) that caused a passage to be written. "A text without a context is a pretext" otherwise its tail can be twisted any way you want.
These writers wanted to affect the beliefs and practices of their own immediate community; call it propaganda if you wish.
Remember also that only urban people (including scribes and possibly priests) could read and write, so we only know things from their point of view. Their opponents, the agrarian rural populace, was illiterate, so their views were not collected when the Scriptures were written. So we have a record from only one point of view.
None of these people was writing to you. Since they were writing to their own immediate audience, you need to climb into their culture, into their way of thinking.
Basically, the bulk of the OT writing was done over a relatively short period, say from Judah's Kings Hezekiah and Josiah down through the Exile, after which they were worked on and collated, likely by Ezra.
The book of Daniel is unrelated, so it does not bear on Isaiah (not even on the latter part of Isaiah that was written during the Babylonian Captivity). The book of Daniel was written some 400 years after the Babylonian Captivity. These 2nd century Jewish writers collected a raft of stories that they cobbled together into a book about an early (probably mythical) hero and thus produced stories designed to meet their immediate local need. In this instance, the Jewish people were being persecuted mercilessly and the stories of Daniel in a den of lions was a good parable for their contemporary situation (164 BCE). The book of Daniel needs to be read with these thoughts in mind.
For this reason, the writers of Daniel were not concerned at applying technical precision to history. Their histories were "written" for theological purposes ("historiography"). Thus the writers of Daniel made big mistakes; the original material that the writers of Daniel drew from had correctly linked with the history that said Nabonidus went mad; the writers of Daniel changed that to Nebuchadrezzar. The writers of Daniel said Jeremiah wrote of 70 years of desolations of the temple, where he said nothing of the sort. Daniel's authors got mixed up between Darius and Cyrus.
Another thing you could research is the evolutopn of Yahwistic monotheism. At what point in their history did the urban people accept a monotheist YHWH (while the rural populace maintained YHWH along with other deities, including his wife)?
Sorry to diverge well away from your issue, but I wanted to unblock the thinking. The Bible does not so much explain archaeology, rather it is itself an item of archaeology, a piece that reveals the culture of the community that created it.
Doug
