(iv. 1-3, 34-37; vi. 25—27: cf. ii. 47, iii. 29). On these and some other similar considerations our knowledge is hardly such as to give us an objective criterion for estimating their cogency. The circumstances alleged will appear improbable, or not improbable, according as the critic, upon independent grounds, has satisfied himself that the Book is the work of a later author, or written by Daniel himself. It might be hazardous to use the statements in question in proof of the late date of the Book; though, if its late date were established on other grounds, it is certainly true that they would be more naturally explained as due to the manner in which the past was viewed by a writer living at some distance from it, than as statements of actual fact authenticated by a contemporary.

Of the arguments that have been here stated, while 8 is doubtful, and 9 should be used with reserve, the rest all possess weight,—particularly 4, 5, and 6. They do not, however, except 2 (which, standing alone, it would be hazardous to press), shew positively that the Book is a work of the second cent. B.C.; but they point with some cogency to the conclusion that it reflects the traditions, and historical impressions, of an age considerably later than that of Daniel himself.

ii. The evidence of the language of Daniel must next be considered.

(1) The number of Persian words in the Book, especially in the Aramaic part, is remarkable.

nobles (i. 3 ;

13, 15, 16, law (ii. 9,

The number is at least 15, if not more: viz.1 D' also Est. i. 3, vi. 6), a choice food, delicacy (i. 5, 8, xi. 26), NTIN certain (ii. 5, 8), D77 limb (ii. 5, iii. 29), ♬ 13, 15, vi. 5, 8, 12, 15, vii. 25; also Ezr. viii. 36, and often in Est.), 1 secret (ii. 18, 19, 27, 28, 29, 30, 47, iv. 9), JDTTON satrap (iii. 2, 3, 27, vi. 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7; also Ezr. viii. 36, Est. iii. 12, viii. 9, ix. 3), 778 counsel-giver (iii. 2, 3), ♫ law-bearer, justice (iii. 2, 3), ↑↑ kind (iii. 5, 7, 10, 15; also 2 Ch. xvi. 14, Ps. cxliv. 13, Ecclus. xxxvii. 28, xlix. 8 [Heb.]), DIN message, order, decree (properly something going [i.e. sent] to), even in the weakened sense of word, or thing (iii. 16,

1 For further particulars on most of the following words, see the note on the first occurrence of each.

iv. 17; also Ezr. iv. 17, v. 7, II, vi. 11, Est. i. 20, Eccl. viii. 11), 77 minister (iii. 24, 27, iv. 36, vi. 7), 7D president (vi. 2, 3, 4, 6, 7), receptacle, sheath (vii. 15-if the reading be correct; also I Ch. xxi. 27); 17 palace, throne-room (xi. 45); probably also nata present (ii. 6, v. 17), a mantle (iii. 21, 27), and necklace (v. 7, 16, 29). 】 (iii. 2, 3), and N'EN (iii. 2, 3), are both uncertain.

These words are not Assyrian or Babylonian (as peḥāh, ii. 8, and sāgān, iii. 2, for example, are): they are distinctively Persian1. Some of them describe offices or institutions, and are not found elsewhere in the O. T., or occur only in Ezra, Esther, and other late parts of the O. T., written after the establishment of the Persian rule: the mention of 'satraps' under Nebuchadnezzar (iii. 2, 3, 27) is alone a remarkable anachronism. Others (as those for law, limb, secret, kind, word) are used exactly as in the later Aramaic, and are of a kind that would not be borrowed by one people from another unless intercourse between them had subsisted for a considerable time. That words such as these should be found in books written after the Persian empire was organised, and when Persian influences prevailed, is not more than would be expected; Persian words (both some of those noted here, and also others) occur in Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and the Chronicles2, and many were permanently naturalised in Aramaic (both Syriac and the Aramaic of the Targums); but that they should be used as a matter of course by Daniel under the Babylonian supremacy, or in the description of Babylonian institutions before the conquest of Cyrus, is in the last degree improbable. The argument is confirmed by the testimony of the Inscriptions. The numerous contract-tablets which have come down to us from the age of Nebuchadnezzar and his successors, and which represent the every-day language of commercial life, shew no traces of Persian influence; and if the language of Babylonia

1 The attempt made in the Speaker's Commentary to shew some of these words to be Semitic, is a resort of desperation.

2 These books, it will be recollected, contain nothing earlier than C. 450 B.C. (the reign of Artaxerxes); and they are mostly considerably later.

was uninfluenced by Persia, that of Israel would be far less likely to be so influenced1.

(2) Not only, however, does Daniel contain Persian words, it contains at least three Greek words: D'p kitharos, iii. 5, 7, 10, 15=kíðapis; 1” psantērīn, iii. 5, 7 (1)da), 10, 15: Vaλrýpov2; I sümpōnyah, iii. 5, 15 (A.V. dulcimer) = σvμpwvía3. Whatever might conceivably be the case with κίθαρις, it is incredible that ψαλτήριον and συμφωνία can have reached Babylon c. 550 B.C. Anyone who has studied Greek history knows what the condition of the Greek world was in the sixth century B.C., and is aware that the arts and inventions of civilised life streamed then into Greece from the East, not from Greece eastwards4. Still, if the instruments named were of a primitive kind, such as the ki@apis (in Homer), it is just possible-though, in view of the fact that the Semitic languages have their own name for the 'lyre,' by no means probable— that it might be an exception to the rule, and that the Babylonians might have been indebted for their knowledge of it to the Greeks; so that, had Dл'p stood alone, it could not, perhaps, have been pressed. But no such exception can be made in the case of ψαλτήριον and συμφωνία, both derived forms, the former found first in Aristotle, the latter first in

1 Cf. Sayce, Monuments, p. 493 f. 2 With - for Lov, as in

= σvvédpiov, TDD = μvoτýplov, &c.; and with ♬ and interchanging, as in pn' and PD (TITTÁKLOV), and other words.

8 Cf. D in the sense of double flute in the Mishna. The form ' in iii. 10 is remarkably illustrated by DD=σúμowvo, in the sense agreed, in the great bilingual inscription from Palmyra of A.D. 137 (see Lidzbarski, Handbuch der Nord-Semitischen Epigraphik, pp. 330, 467 1. 46, 468 11. 14, 45). It is difficult to understand why Behrmann (pp. ix-x) should have recourse to a non-existent σipwvia.

+ Cf. Sayce in the Contemporary Review, Dec. 1878, p. 60 ff. Such facts as that a Mytilenaean, the brother of the poet Alcaeus, fought in the ranks of the Babylonians, c. 600 B.C. (Strabo, XIII. ii. 3), or that Psammitichus (B.C. 664-610) introduced Greek settlers and mercenaries into Egypt, are altogether insufficient to make it probable that Greek words could have found their way to Babylon in the sixth cent. B.C.: cf. Whitehouse in the Expos. Times, 1894, March, p. 284 ff., July, p. 474 f.

Plato, and in the sense of concerted music (or, perhaps, of a specific musical instrument) first in Polybius1. These words, it may be confidently affirmed, could not have been used in the Book of Daniel unless it had been written after the dissemination of Greek influences in Asia through the conquests of Alexander the Great (cf. pp. xxxiii ff.).

(3) The Aramaic of Daniel (which is all but identical with that of Ezra) is a Western Aramaic dialect, of the type spoken in and about Palestine3. It is nearly allied to the Aramaic of the Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan; and still more so to the Aramaic dialects spoken E. and S.E. of Palestine, in Palmyra and Nabataea, and known from inscriptions dating from the 3rd cent. B.C. to the 2nd cent. A.D. In some respects it is of an earlier type than the Aramaic of Onkelos and Jonathan; and this fact was formerly supposed to be a ground for the antiquity of the Book. But the argument is not conclusive. For (1) the differences are not considerable1, and

1 And, singularly enough, in his account of the festivities in which Antiochus Epiphanes indulged (xxvi. 10.5; xxxi. 4.8); see p. 39 n. In Plato and Aristotle ovμpwvía means only harmony.

2 The Speaker's Commentary makes the vain endeavour to prove these three words to be Semitic !

3 Nöldeke in the Encyclopaedia Britannica9, xxi. 647b÷648a (=Die Semitischen Sprachen, 1899, pp. 35, 37); Kautzsch, Gramm. des Bibl.-Aram. §§ 1, 2, 6. The idea that the Jews forgot their Hebrew in Babylonia, and spoke in 'Chaldee' when they returned to Palestine, is unfounded. Haggai and Zechariah and other post-exilic writers use Hebrew: Aramaic is exceptional. Hebrew was still normally spoken c. 430 B.C. in Jerusalem (Neh. xiii. 24). The Hebrews, after the Captivity, acquired gradually the use of Aramaic from their neighbours in and about Palestine. See, for example, Wright, Compar. Gramm. of the Semitic Languages (1890), p. 16: 'Now do not for a moment suppose that the Jews lost the use of Hebrew in the Babylonian Captivity, and brought back with them into Palestine this so-called Chaldee. The Aramean dialect, which gradually got the upper hand since 4-5 cent. B.C., did not come that long journey across the Syrian desert; it was there, on the spot; and it ended by taking possession of the field, side by side with the kindred dialect of the Samaritans.' The term 'Chaldee' for the Aramaic of either the Bible or the Targums is a misnomer (due originally to a misunderstanding of Dan. ii. 4), the use of which is only a source of confusion. The proper term for the Aramaic of Ezra and Daniel is 'Biblical Aramaic.'

They are carefully collected (on the basis, largely, of M'Gill's

DANIEL

e

largely orthographical: the Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan did not probably receive their present form before the 4th cent. A.D.1 and we are not in a position to affirm that the transition from the Aramaic of Daniel and Ezra to that of the Targums must have required eight or nine centuries, and could not have been accomplished in four or five; (2) recently discovered inscriptions have shewn that many of the forms in which it differs from the Aramaic of the Targums were in use in neighbouring countries, especially in Palmyra and Nabataea, down to the 1st cent. A.D.2

A particularly clear indication that the Aramaic of Daniel was not that spoken in Babylon in the 5th cent. B.C. is afforded by the fact that in the numerous, if brief, Aramaic inscriptions from Nineveh and Babylon which we possess, dating from c. 725 B.C. to the 5th cent., the relative is regularly ", not, as uniformly in Dan. (and Ezra), " (see the Corpus Inscr. Sem II. i. Nos. 1, 2, 3 XPX " III 'three m'nas of the country' [Jer. x. 11; L.O.T.6 p. 255], 4, 5, 17, 28, 30, &c., esp. No. 65, B.C. 504, Nos. 69–71, B.C. 418, 407, 408, all contract-tablets from Babylon)3.

(4) The Hebrew of Daniel is also that of a much later age than the sixth cent. B.C. The type of Hebrew which it mostly resembles is not that of Ezekiel, or of Isaiah xl.-lxvi., or even

investigations) by Dr Pusey, Daniel, ed. 2, pp. 45 ff., 602 ff. (an interesting lexical point is that the vocabulary agrees sometimes with Syriac against the Targums). But when all are told, the differences are far outweighed by the resemblances; so that relatively they cannot be termed important or considerable. (The amount of difference is much exaggerated in the Speaker's Commentary, p. 228. The statement in the text agrees with the judgment of Nöldeke, .c. p. 648 b.) 1 Deutsch in Smith's D. B. iii. 1644, 1652; cf. Dalman, Gramm. des Füd.-Pal. Aramäisch, pp. 9, 11 (5th cent. A.D.). See particulars in the writer's Introduction, p. 472 f. (ed. 6 or 7, p. 504). Numerous specimens of the inscriptions there referred to may be seen in Lidzbarski's excellent Handbuch, quoted above, pp. 447, 450 (No. C), 451-5, 457-481.

3 Cf. and N, for the demonstr. pron., in the Inscriptions from Zinjirli, Cilicia, Têma, and Egypt, not, as in Ezr., Dan., Palmyrene, and Nabataean, 77. NT (Lidzbarski, p. 264; S. A. Cook, Glossary of Aramaic Inscriptions, 1898, pp. 46, 49).