Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/841

DANIEL 805 extended to the book of Daniel (see the Septuagint version of it), it is quite possible, as M. Lenormant suggests, that the original Hebrew of Dan. ii. 46-vii 28 was lost, and its place supplied by the Aramaic translation. There is an exact parallel (not mentioned by M. Lenormant) in Jer. x. 11, which appears only to exist in an Aramaic version. The remaining linguistic evidence is supplied by certain Persian and Greek words in the book of Daniel. This will retain its importance, even if we adopt M. Lenormant s theory of a substituted Aramaic translation, for a translator writing in a kindred dialect, would be tolerably precise in reproducing technical terms, at any rate, would not succeed in expunging all traces of the original. (1) The book contains (see Mr Fuller s second excursus) at least nine words which are referred, in most cases with certainty, to a Persian origin. It must be remembered that no Persian words occur in Daniel s supposed contemporary Ezekiel, nor even in Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. There are some, it is true, in Ezra and in Esther, but those books were written long after the beginning of the Persian rule. (2) The three Greek words in Daniel admitted by Delitzsch are all names of musical instruments KiOapis, parrjfnov, O-V/A^ODVUX. The reproduction is (philologically) so exact that they rr>ust have been taken from the lips of a Greek, and this, according to M. Lenormant s presentation of the facts, was impossible before the age of the Seleucidse, since the commercial intercourse between Greece and Babylonia was not " considerable nor consecutive enough " to admit of it at an earlier period. The third class of facts to be reckoned with are the in ternal difficulties in the admission of the authorship of Daniel. Putting aside those which raise questions of the ology, we may mention the two following as specimens : (a) In ii. 25 Arioch speaks of Daniel as merely " one of the captives of Judah," and as personally unknown to the king. This seems inconsistent with chap, i and conse quently unlikely to have been written by Daniel, (b) No subsequent mention is made of the offices to which Daniel and his three friends, according to ii. 48, were promoted, not even in the narrative in chap. iii. The former of these seems the more important. An exact parallel occurs in 1 Sam. xvii. 55-6, where Saul professes himself entirely un acquainted with David, and this after the latter had been constantly playing the harp before him (chap. xvi. 23). Now, critics of such opposite opinions as Thenius and Nagelsbach agree that the solution of the difficulty in 1 Sam. is the reference of the respective passages to different documents. It has been urged, therefore, that the same theory will at once account for the inconsistencies in Daniel, and that the narratives at any rate were most likely written at different times, possibly by different authors, and certainly not by Daniel himself (as Mr Russell Martineau has cogently shown). These various narratives would natu rally be connected by an editor, and to this editor we may be indebted for the second of the " undesigned coincidences " referred to above as confirming the supposition of a mistake as to the date and the acts of Darius the Mede ; for the name of Cyrus only occurs in three passages (i. 21 ; vi. 28 ; x. 1), and may have been inserted by the editor (who knew that Cyrus, not Darius, conquered Babylon) with the object of bringing the book into some what closer accordance with profane history. It is gratify ing to state that the fundamental principle of this theory has been conceded by such orthodox writers as Mr Fuller and M. Lenormant. " In its present form," says the former, " the book possesses peculiarities of an internal character which seem to suggest a certain extraneous aid perfectly compatible with the recognition of its unity and authority " (Speaker s Commentary, vi. 229). M. Leuoruiant s view has already been mentioned ; we need only add that he puts down all the errors of the narrative chapters in Daniel to the copyists or translators, and that he finds a truthfulness of Babylonian colouring piercing through the injuries of time, which can only be accounted for by ascribing the original work to the prophet Daniel. Colder and more critical students will naturally go further. They will not perhaps deny the unity of authorship. The inconsistencies of the narratives are at most a proof of their separate origin; and the 12th chapter of Enoch (an apocalyptic work like Daniel) supplies a parallel which has been hitherto overlooked to the transition from the third person to the first in Dan. vii. 1, 28. There is, further, a general similarity of style between the Hebrew and the Aramaic portions, and (especially) a marked parallelism of contents between chaps, vii. and ii., which is not favourable to a diversity of authorship, But there is a growing feeling that the narratives in the book before us could not have been the work of a resident in Babylon. There may, it is allowed, be an element of historical tradition in them ; but, if so, we have not at present the means of detecting it. The narratives, however, have quite sufficient merit regarded from the point of view of edification. If we only place ourselves in the position of the later Jews, we shall perhaps faintly realize the stirring effect they must have produced. We shall then no longer be surprized at the improbability of many of the details, which lias given rise to so much unnecessary ridicule. Admiration will be our only feeling, when we consider the author s comparative success in reproducing a distant past. It is possible, no doubt, that he derived some part of these narratives from Jewish or Babylonian popular stories, for we find a Daniel already celebrated for his wisdom in Ezekiel (xxviii. 3, cf. xiv. 14, 20), and the Babylonian Abydenus has a legend distantly resembling Dan. iv. But even if we admit this conjecture, the historical setting, the moral purpose, and the skill in presentation are all his own, and reflect dimly as it may be the spirit and the power of the writers of the Pentateuchal histories. We may now proceed to the next stage in the argument, and inquire which is the earliest period to which the narratives of Daniel can apply 1 The third chapter of the book suggests an answer. There (see ver. 5) we meet with a Greek musical instrument called symphonia (probably a kind of bag-pipe ; A. V., wrongly " dulcimer "), which, as we learn from Polybius (Athen., x. 52), was a special favourite of Antiochus Epiphanes, king of Syria, the notorious persecutor of the Jews. If, therefore, the period of this king (175-164 B.C.) suits the remainder of the work, the clue to the book of Daniel has been found. One reserve must, however, be made. If any historical evidence should be forthcoming in favour of M. Lenormant s view stated above, if, in a word, an earlier recension of the book of Daniel should be discovered, it will become necessary to revise or abandon the foregoing argument. The difficulty of the second part of Daniel (vii.-xii.) is greatly increased by the necessity of making some assump tions with a view to its interpretation. Those of one class of critics are based upon a tradition, reaching back as far as the Christian era (see Josephus, Antiq., x. 11, 7), that the statements of the book of Daniel are literally true ; those of another class upon the theory, resulting from the study of the undisputed prophecies on the one hand and of the apocalyptic literature on the other, that the prominence of minute circumstantial prediction, and the absence of a moral, hortatory element, are the distinguishing marks of an artificial, apocalyptic imitation of prophecy. (See APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE.) The latter class of critics hold that the " analogy of prophecy " is an exegetical argument equal in importance to that of the " analogy of

faith " in dogmatics. The only attempt to mediate bet7/eeu