Notes on the Aramaic Part of Daniel. 251 



After the union had once been effected, in this manner, it was not 

 at all easy to break it. Even if the attempt had been made to maintain 

 the authority of the old Aramaic Daniel of our first six chapters, the 

 claim could at once have been made on the other hand — and it would 

 have been made successfully — that the original Daniel had twice that 

 extent, as proved by its Hebrew beginning and by the Aramaic seventh 

 chapter. And so in modern times, in spite of all the plain evidence of 

 dual authorship in the book, scholars have felt compelled to maintain 

 its unity simply because the alternation of the two languages defeats 

 every ordinary attempt at analysis ; and the idea that an ancient Hebrew 

 redactor might have exercised some ingenuity has not been seriously 

 considered. The composition of Daniel is ver}' much like that of 

 Zechariah. There, also, a series of striking pictures, connected with a 

 Hebrew prophet and dealing more or less with prophetic visions, was 

 taken as the basis to which to attach a series of predictions composed 

 in the Greek period. In that instance, the addition of the later writing, 

 effected by some editorial hand, was presumably more difficult, since 

 the older book had been much longer in circulation. The composite 

 character of Zechariah is now quite generally recognized ; but the 

 evidence of composition there is hardly stronger than in the case of 

 Daniel, and is certainly not as many-sided. 



The Aramaic of the book of Daniel is the Palestinian dialect of the 

 second and third centuries B.C. The discovery of the Jewish Aramaic 

 papyri of Assuan and Elephantine has at last enabled us to declare 

 with certainty what hitherto had only seemed probable. The language 

 of the Aramaic passages in Ezra, which were all composed in the third 

 centur}', is identical with that of Daniel. For a more extended statement 

 of some of the peculiarities of the dialect at this stage of its development, 

 I would refer to my article in the American Journal of Semitic 

 Languages, April, 1908, pp. 232—23 7 ; reprinted in my forthcoming 

 Ezra Studies, pp. 161—166. 



The text of our massoretic recension of Daniel has suffered consider- 

 ably from carelessness in transmission. In a large number of places, 

 some of which will be noticed below, words or phrases necessary to 

 the sense have been dropped out by accident, so that it is certain that 

 the book passed through the hand of at least one copyist who trans- 

 cribed hastily and without collating his copy after it was made. On the 



KS'^Si tr^imm D^p [Knbxl "|3D^t?^ ; "^°<i ™ay God give thee compassion 

 before Darius the king." The idiom is also found (though rarely) in Hebrew 

 however, and it can therefore not be allowed much weight. 



