Notes on the Aramaic Part of Daniel. 243 



for the interpreter. There is no other Hebrew prose style in the Old 

 Testament so difficult as that of these chapters.' 



The fact should also be noticed, in this connection, that the Persian 

 words (and others probabh' supposed by the author to be Persian) which 

 are introduced by the writer of the Daniel stories into ever)- part of 

 his composition, in order to give it local color, are entirely wanting in 

 chaps. 7—12. In the first part, such words are found in ever^' chapter, 

 including chap. 1 ; but in the second part the writer does not use this 

 device at all, not even in chap. 1, though he had abundant opportunity 

 to do so if he had wished. 



StiU more striking, and in fact quite decisive by itself, is the contra- 

 diction in chronolog\' existing between the two parts of the book. The 

 writer of chaps. 1—6 tells us that his Daniel was carried away from 

 Jenisalem, together with other young men of the nobles of Israel, in the 

 third year of Jehoiakim, i. e. in 606 B.C. (1 : 1 ff.j. And after telling 

 the story of his special training in Babylon, and the great reputation 

 which he and his three companions achieved, he adds (vs. 21) : "And 

 Daniel continued {^i^''^'^ ^H^"]) even unto the frst year of king Cyrus." 

 As the best commentators have seen and said, there is only one legit- 

 imate way of understanding this sentence, namely, that Daniel lived 

 to see the accession of Cyrus, and died in the first year of his reign, 

 i. e. in 538 B.C. He would then have been eighty years of age, if we 

 suppose him to have been only twelve years old at the time when he 

 was carried away from Jerusalem ; but it seems plain from 1 : 4 f., 2 : ], 48, 

 that the narrator thought of him as quite a little older than this. Then 

 follow, in chronological order, the stories of Daniel and his companions 

 under the successive kings who ruled over Babylonia. First came 

 Nebuchadnezzar, chaps. 2—4 : then Belshazzar, chap. 5 ; then came 

 Darius, the one king who, according to the Jewish belief, ruled over 



1 This does not mean at all that the author of this apocalypse wrote " the 

 Hebrew of his time," as it has been customary to say. Hebrew was still 

 the learned language, in the Maccabean period, and was written with 

 perfect ease by the well educated men of the nation, and in every variety of 

 style. Some wrote with classical elegance, like the authors of Zech. 9—14 

 and (apparently) i Maccabees. Others, while using a large number of the 

 Aramaisms and neo-Hebraic words and constructions which are more or less 

 prominent in all the writings of the Greek period, nevertheless wrote in an 

 easy and transparent idiom which causes trouble for no one but the purist. 

 Such are Esther, Eobeleth, ard Judith (tbe style of which may, indeed 

 have been classical as well as transparent). Even such books as Jonah 

 and Ruth might well, so far as their language is concerned, have been written 

 in the second century B.C. And such men as the author of Chronicles-Ezra- 

 Nehemiah and the apocalyptist of Dan. 7—12, who, by the way, diflFer from 



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