So, how is it that a senior prophet like Ezekiel would make reference to Daniel, comparing him to the giants of Hebrew legend ? Noah and Job? If anything, Daniel would be merely a child at this time. He could not possibly have achieved that kind of status and reputation for wisdom. In fact, he may not even have been born yet. Clearly, the character of Daniel had already achieved legendary status, long before the events of his supposed lifetime. In all likelihood, a second century B.C. writer attributed his work to the name ?Daniel? to increase its stature.
This is because Ezekiel was not referring to the "Daniel" of the Book of Daniel. It is not even spelled the same; Ezekiel consistently spells it Dan-'el (Ez. 14:14, 19; 28:3), not Dani-'el. There are other indications that Daniel is not meant, other than the chronological problem you mentioned. Aside from the three being righteous men, what do they have in common to be mentioned together in the same breath as "these three men"? Well, vs. 16 mentions them in connection with saving "sons and daughters". Noah saved his sons and daughters through his faith and integrity, and Job as well tried to save his "sons and daughters" (Jb. 1:18) and in the end through his integrity was rewarded with "sons and daughters". But Daniel is the odd one out since nothing in the Book of Daniel talks about him having children, much less trying to save his children's lives. The reference of "Danel" in Ez. 28:3 is even more incongruous with the prophet Daniel. Here Yahweh says to the king of Tyre: "Though you are a man and not a god, you consider yourself the equal of God. You are wiser now than Danel; there is no sage as wise as you." It would be absolutely incredible for Ittobaal II, king of Tyre, to know anything about some obscure exile in Babylon, and Ezekiel presents Danel as a wise sage from of old, and nothing in the Book of Daniel makes Daniel out to be such a lengendary wise sage. Obviously Ezekiel's Danel is not the prophet Daniel.
So what's going on here? Who was Danel? Danel was a mythical king in the Canaanite Aqhat legend, a man of Hernomi, with a splendorous palace, and whose wisdom as judge was as legendary as Solomon's. In the Ugaritic Aqhat tale, Danel "judges the case of the widow, and helps the fatherless to his right." This perfectly explains Ez. 28:3 -- the story of Danel was certainly known to the king of Tyre, who shared the same Canaanite/Phoenician folklore as the Israelites. The story of Danel with respect to his children was also very reminiscent to that of Job. Danel and his wife had no son for a long time, which made them sad, and Danel decided in desperation to storm heaven with supplication and sacrifice in the temple until Baal was moved to mercy. According to the story, "He has no son like his brethren, nor a root like his kin." In response, El promised to grant Danel a son and the king returned home rejoicing, and lavishly fed the guardian goddesses of the newborn. Danel's son Aqhat was born, and all was good. The craftsman-god bequeathed a special gift to Aqhat, a bow made in his heavenly workshop, and Aqhat was thankful for being so blessed. However the bow brought only trouble to the boy. It aroused the envy of the war goddess Anat who resolved to obtain the bow at any price. She offered precious ore to buy it but Aqhat refused. She offered Aqhat immortality, but he still refused. He would not part with his weapon, the grant of a god to his father. Offended by such pride by a mortal, Anat threatened to humble him on his "path of pride and presumption" and made a protest to El and the other gods, threatening to redden El's beard with blood. Anat unleashed her henchmen like eagles and when they reached the city of Abilim, they fatally struck the lad and Aqhat was dead, "his soul went out like a wind, his spirit like smoke." Bereaved of his only son, rent with grief and rage, Danel cursed the land by drought for seven years: "Let there be no dew, nor rain! No surging of the two deeps, nor the goodness of Baal's voice." He next curses the cities around his slain son and says: "If the murderer of Aqhat be in your midst, may Baal strike you with blindness, from now and forevermore." It turns out that the assassin was there in the company of Danel's daughter who realizes suddenly who he really is, and she smites him who smote her brother. Once the remains of Aqhat are buried, Anat feels remorse and weeps for him and sets about bringing him back to life, perhaps also calmed by El by giving her her own bow, and in the end Danel is comforted when his son Aqhat is returned to him.
If we then go back to Ez. 14:16, we immediately see a striking resemblance to the above legend: "they would not be able to save either son or daughter; they alone would be saved, and the country would become a desert." Indeed, had Anat not been moved to pity by Danel's love and Aqhat not been saved, Danel's curse would have indeed turned the country into a desert. Ezekiel's prophecy in ch. 14 predicted total catastrophe for Jerusalem and Judea from the Babylonians, threatening the youth with wholesale slaughter. What Ezekiel was saying was this: Were Noah now in the land, he could save no one but himself, Danel could not redeem Aqhat, nor would Job's piety help his children. As it turned out, Ezekiel's prophecy did not come true and he had to correct himself in vs. 22, a postscript candidly conceding that his threat did not come to pass.
The tale of Danel and Aqhat was not only mentioned in Ezekiel. There are echoes of it in 1 Enoch, written around 100 BC. 1 Enoch 6:7 and 69:2 names Dan'el as one of the fallen angels. In 1 Enoch 13:9 the defiled angels gather in a place between Lebanon and Senir called Abilene, which is reminiscent of the city of Abilim where Aqhat was slain. It is here that the angels were "weeping with their eyes covered". This seems to be a memory of Danel's weeping for Aqhat in Abilim. This geographical area in Phoenicia and Syria was also the same locale the Danel legend is set in. Moreover, the fallen angels conspire on Mt. Hermon, or rather Hermonium, which recalls the apellation of Danel as "the man of Hernomi (hrnmy)". According to 1 Enoch 6:5-6: "They all swore together and bound one another by the curse. And they were altogether two hundred and they descended into Ardos which is the summit of Hermon. And they called the mount Armon, for they swore and bound one another by a curse." This is a play on Hebrew herem "curse" and Hermon. But even more interesting is what this curse was: it is preserved in a fragment of 1 Enoch in the Book of Noah which declares that "cold shall not depart for ever, nor snow nor hoar-frost, and dew shall not descend on it except it descend on it for a curse." This is strikingly similar to Danel's curse on the land. It is also interesting that in 1 Enoch 8:1-3, the fallen angel Azazel "taught men to take swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and make them known to them the metals and the art of working them." This appears to be another motif from the Danel legend, of the metal-working god giving Aqhat a divine bow.
Another distant memory of the Danel legend also appears in the Book of Jubilees (second cent. BC), which makes Danel the father-in-law of Enoch: "Enoch was the first among men that are born on earth who learnt writing and knowledge and wisdom and who wrote down the signs of heaven according to the order of their months in a book, that men might know the seasons of the years according to the order of their separate months....And in the twelfth jubilee, in the seventh week thereof, he took to himself a wife, and her name was Edna, the daughter of Danel, the daughter of his father's brother, and in the sixth year in this week she bare him a son and he called his name Methuselah. And he was moreover with the angels of God these six jubilees of years, and they showed him everything which is on earth and in the heavens, the rule of the sun, and he wrote down everything." (Jubilees 4:17-21) This tradition is certainly related to that in 1 Enoch, where Edna is mentioned as Enoch's wife (1 Enoch 85:3). In the Aqhat legend, Danel's daughter is named Peget, and she is repeatedly lauded as "knowing the course of the stars". This is quite similar to Enoch's knowledge of "the signs of heaven" and "the rule of the sun", and it is possible that Peget's initiation into the mysteries of heaven is the key that explains why Danel appear so frequently in the Enoch legend. As for Danel being a fallen angel, the Book of Jubilees also provides a clue. According to Jubilees 4:15, the angels, named the Watchers, came to earth not because of sin but were sent by God "to instruct the children of men to do judgment and uprightness." This tradition is independent of the motive given in 1 Enoch (e.g. sexual attraction with the daughters of men), and Danel, being the supreme judge and whose name means "God's judge," fits the role of the fallen angels in Jubilees exceptionally well. But there is an even more intriguing reason, suggested by the Danel Epic itself. In the ancient Canaanite text, the hero is repeatedly called "Danel the Rapha-man", and in Ugaritic and biblical lore, the Rephaim were the dead aboriginal inhabitants of the land, of unusually tall stature....giants, in other words (cf. Deut. 2:11, 20; 3:11-14, re the giant Og, the last of the Rephaim). If Danel was still remembered as a giant in postexilic times, his connection with the giants born of the fallen angels, and as an angel himself, would be quite natural in the postexilic interpretation of Gen. 5-6, which viewed gigantism as the unnatural result of angel incarnation and angel interbreeding with humans.
So even very late in Jewish tradition, distant echoes of the pre-Israelite Danel legend remained in contemporary literature.
Leolaia