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iv. 17; also Ezr. iv. 17, v. 7, II, vi. 11, Est. i. 20, Eccl. viii. 11),

7),

minister (iii. 24, 27, iv. 36, vi. 7), 7 president (vi. 2, 3, 4, 6, receptacle, sheath (vii. 15—if the reading be correct; also I Ch. xxi. 27); 17 palace, throne-room (xi. 45); probably also present (ii. 6, v. 17), a mantle (iii. 21, 27), and

necklace (v. 7,

16, 29). 7 (iii. 2, 3), and §'♫♫ (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; } psantērīn, iii. 5, 7 (1D)DD), 10, 15= VaλTýρiov2; I sümpōnyah, iii. 5, 15 (A.V. dulcimer) = συμφωνία. 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 eastwards. Still, if the instruments named were of a primitive kind, such as the kioapis (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 Dp 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 tov, as in 77D = σvvédpiov, D = Motýlov, &c.; and with ♬ and interchanging, as in p♫♪ and PU (TITTάkiov), and other words.

3 Cf. ' in the sense of double flute in the Mishna. The form ' in iii. 10 is remarkably illustrated by =σúμpwvo, 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 σipúvia.

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 Polybius'. 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.)2.

(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 Palestine". 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.'

4 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. I, 2, 3 NPN " III 'three m'nas of the country' [Jer. x. 11; L.0.T.o 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, l.c. p. 648 b.)

1 Deutsch in Smith's D. B. iii. 1644, 1652; cf. Dalman, Gramm. des Jüd.-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, 7. NT (Lidzbarski, p. 264; S. A. Cook, Glossary of Aramaic Inscriptions, 1898, pp. 46, 49).

of Haggai and Zechariah, but that of Esther, Ecclesiastes (to a certain extent), and especially the Chronicles (c. B.C. 300). The Hebrew of the three last-named books differs in a marked degree from that of all earlier writers, even including those who lived in the early post-exilic period. In vocabulary many new words appear, often of Aramaic origin, occasionally Persian, and frequently such as continued in use afterwards in the 'New Hebrew' of the Mishna (200 A.D.), &c.; old words also are sometimes used with new meanings or applications. In syntax, the ease and grace and fluency of the earlier writers (down to at least Zech. xii.—xiv.) have passed away; the style is often laboured and inelegant; and new and uncouth constructions make their appearance. The beginnings of these peculiarities are observable in the 'memoirs' of Ezra and Nehemiah (i.e. the parts of Ezra and Neh. which are the work of these reformers themselves)1; but they become much more numerous afterwards. The three books mentioned above do not, however, exhibit them in equal proportions: Ecclesiastes has the most striking Mishnic idioms: the Chronicler3 has many peculiarities of his own, and may be said to shew the greatest uncouthness of style; but they agree in the possession of many common (or similar) features, which differentiate them from all previous Hebrew writers (including Zech., Hagg., Mal.), and which recur in them with decidedly greater frequency and prominence than in the memoirs of Ezra and Neh. And the Hebrew of Daniel is of the type just characterised: in all distinctive features it resembles, not the Hebrew of Ezekiel, or even of Haggai and Zechariah, but that of the age subsequent to Nehemiah.

In the writer's Introduction p. 474 f. (506 f.) will be found a list of upwards of thirty expressions, some found otherwise only in postBiblical Hebrew, or in Aramaic, others common to the Hebrew of Daniel and that of Chronicles and other late writings, but occurring never, or (in the case of one or two) very rarely, in the earlier literature. For instances of sentences constructed in the later, uncouth style, see 1 See the writer's Introduction, p. 511 ff. (ed. 6 or 7, p. 544 ff.). 2 Ibid. p. 444 ff. (474 f.).

3 Ibid. p. 502 ff. (535 ff.).

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