SOME LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE REGARDING ITS DATE. 



219 



Nehemiah are drawn) " are brought into connexion with the names 

 of Persian kings, and assuming that this is correctly done, the 

 dates of the kings in question will, of course, be the approximate 

 dates of those parts of the book. So that the earliest portion 

 will belong to the time of Cyrus, about 537, while the latest 

 parts of the sources, the memoirs of Nehemiah, cannot have been 

 written later than the end of the reign of Artaxerxes, about 424 " 

 (Op. cit., p. 325). He proceeds, however, to assert that the book 

 " in its present form belongs to the Greek age, in all probability 

 later than 300 B.C." He affirms this, however, not on philological 

 but on historical grounds, because Josephus mentions a High 

 Priest Jaddua as living in the reign of Alexander the Great 

 (Anfiq. XI, vii, 2 ; viii, 7). We have nothing to do at present 

 with this latter point, but only with the admission that at least 

 part of the Aramaic is possibly of as early a date as 537 B.C. 

 This is earlier than we should venture to claim for the Aramaic of 

 Daniel, earlier than any of our Assouan-Elephantine papyri. 

 If we accept Dr. Oesterley's statement as meaning this, then there 

 is fhilologically no reason for denying that the Booh of Daniel may he 

 genuine. At anv rate the Egvptian Aramaic papyri bring us back 

 to 494 B.C. (P. 13489), or at least to 482 B.C. (Pp. 13475 and 13493), 

 and down to about B.C. 400, as has already been pointed out. 



Now those parts of the Aramaic sections in Ezra which are 

 generally admitted to be genuine and long anterior to Alexander's 

 time (332 B.C.), to say nothing of the date commonly accepted 

 by the Higher Critics for the composition of Daniel (c. 167-5 B.C.), 

 contain rather more Persian words, comparatively speaking, than 

 does Daniel — certainly not less. So do the papyri. If Daniel 

 had been composed in Alexandrian times in Palestine, we should 

 have expected it, in consequence of the long continued influence 

 of the Persian language, to have contained a larger Persian 

 element by far than either the Aramaic of Ezra or that of the 

 Egyptian papyri. Or, if not, it would certainly have absorbed 

 into its vocabulary a considerable proportion of Greek terms. 

 In nearly two centuries of Greek influence, it might at least 

 have acquired more than two solitary Greek musical terms. But, 

 if the critics are right, its rate of progress in Greek was remarkably 

 slow. Not only Macaulay's but even our own schoolboys could 

 beat it. Of course, our critical friends may reply that the pious 

 forger of the book was clever enough to guard against any exten- 

 sive use of Gr^ek vocables, lest he should thereby be detected. 

 What a strange thing it is, then, to find him so much off his guard. 



