Nofes on the Aratuaic Fart of Daniel. 279 



the eye of the copyist strayed to the XID S3X2 ii"* the next following 

 line. ' 



In regard to the grammatical form of the three words of the enigma, 

 there has been no agreement among scholars, nor any plausible explanation. 

 Behrmann [Daniel, 1894) and Kamphausen (1896), like many of the 

 older exegetes, hold that ^pT\ and D*lS are passive participles " in 

 meaning, though not in form," (!^ the last syllable having been conformed 

 to that of X5I2- On the contrary, if this had been intended, we should 

 have had rather D'n£ hpT\ ^JD- Margoliouth (article " Daniel " in 

 Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible) believes that the three words are 

 verbs. This is even worse than the other explanation. Peters (Journal 

 of Biblical Literature, 1896'; suggests that the words were left unpointed 

 and unpronounced, both in vs. 25 and in the following verses where 

 they are repeated. But the tradition is very ancient, and perfectly uniform, 

 that they were vocalized. The old Greek version, Josephus, Theodotion, 

 and the Latin of Jerome all attest precisely the pronunciation given in 

 our Aramaic text. ' And it seems to me certain that the author of the 

 stories himself, in his mental picture of the scene, thought of the words 

 as pronounced in just this way, tvlien Daniel read them, and gave their 

 interpretation to those who were present. What the narrator thought 

 in regard to the form of the ivriting on the voall is of course another 

 matter. He may have thought of it as in characters quite unknown— 

 until then — -to human beings ; or as in some occult signs which could 

 be known only to the most learned of men, such as Daniel was. The 

 narrative says plainly that the wise men of Babylon were not even able 

 to read the writing, to say nothing of interpreting it. If it had been 

 in unpointed Aramaic letters, they would have read it at once— why 

 not ? Were they not in the habit of reading unpointed texts : But the 

 question of the characters is not a matter of consequence, for it does 

 not affect the story. The question of the pronunciation, on the other 

 hand, is important, as I believe. Some of the mystifying character of 

 the divine utterance lay in just this particular. It was not simply a 

 question of reading strange writing ; the words themselves, when they 

 were read, presented something of a puzzle. The author of the story 

 did not wish the interpretation of the mystical writing to be too obvious, 



^ Here, again, it may be that the wish to preserve everything, in this most 

 important passage, led the massoretes to adopt this inferior reading from 

 some manuscript. 



' The vowel in the first syllable of the Greek or Latin transliteration is 

 determined here in each case by the original nature of the reduced vowel, 

 as usual, the three words being treated as substantives (of course !). 



