SOME LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE REGARDING ITS DATE. 211 



As the last date which Daniel the Prophet mentions in the 

 tenth chapter of his Book is the third year of Cyrus, 535 B.C., 

 the interval between the composition of the Book, if ended then 

 (and it may not have been composed for some years later, if 

 we for the moment presume it to be genuine) and the writing of 

 the earliest of the Assouan-Elephantine Aramaic documents 

 would be very short, not more than forty-one years, if 

 P. 13489 be the oldest in the collection, and only fifty- 

 three years if P. 13493 occupy that position. We must 

 now enquire whether the language of the Book shows any 

 reason to suppose that, instead of being by that short period 

 of years earlier than the recently discovered documents, the 

 Book is really more recent. Dr. Driver's attempt to prove this by 

 the evidence of two Greek words in Daniel seems to me to have 

 failed, since these Egyptian-Aramaic papyri contain at least 

 three, and are certainly not compositions of the post-Alexander 

 period. As these documents extend over the greater part of a 

 century, deal with a considerable variety of subjects, from the 

 destruction of a Jewish temple and the request for permission to 

 rebuild it, to legal documents, agreements and correspondence, we 

 ought to be able in some degree to estimate the amount of change 

 in the Aramaic language which took place during the fifth century 

 B.C. We may also learn to what extent the language was being 

 affected by Persian influences, whether the grammar agrees at 

 all closely with that of the Aramaic of Daniel, and whether the 

 amount of Persian in Daniel is or is not in excess of that found in 

 these Aramaic papyri, which, if the Higher Critics are right, must 

 have been written a long time, possibly several centuries, before 

 the Book of Daniel. If, on the other hand, the traditional view 

 of the date of the Book is correct, it was composed such a short 

 period before these documents in Egyptian Aramaic that the 

 resemblance between them should be great. The Aramaic of 

 Ezra should also be taken into consideration, since, if genuine, 

 some chapters belong to the period during which the Assouan- 

 Elephantine papyri were drawn up. It is evident that we have 

 a mass of information at our disposal which should yield important 

 results when carefully studied. 



Dr. Driver calls attention to the number of Persian words used 

 in Daniel — especially in the Aramaic part of the Book. These he 

 estimates at fifteen, though he is of opinion that there are two more 

 (" Daniel," pp. Ivi and Ivii). There is not the slightest doubt that 

 all these seventeen words are Old Persian, as I now proceed to show. 



p 2 



