Whether it goes back to the 2nd cent. B.C. is more uncertain.
5. That such is the case is the opinion of Herz- feld {Ges. d. Volk. Isr. 1863, vol. ii. p. 73), who dates it before the Maccabiean wars, on the ground that after that date, when the books of Ezr and Neh had become canonical (Ryle, Cam. Bible, Ezr. and Neh. Ixv), a translator would not have been bold enough to excerpt and rearrange materials from those books.
6. This view is also supported by Lupton, who has an ingenious theory as to the occasion when the book was written. He regards it as edited at the time (B.C. 170) when Onias, having fled from the persecution in Pal. under Antiochus Epiphanes,
Petitioned for leave from Ptolemy Philometor to uUd a temple for the Alexandrian Jews at Heliopolis on the site of a ruined Egyp. temple of Bubastis. At that time 'a work which described the rebuilding of the temple, and the beneficence of foreign kings to the work, and which also introduced the story of Josiah, slain in an invasion of Syria by the Egyptians, would have a special interest.' The account of the building of the Egyp. temple {^ixotov ti^ 4v 'l6po(ro\i5/toi5, fUKpbrcpov S^ Kal irepixpirepoi') is given in Jos. Ant. XIII. iii. 1 ; the reader is referred to the interesting remarks of Lupton {Speaker's Comm., Apoc. vol. i. 11-14). This is, of course, no more than conjectural, and it is unsafe to base any argument upon it ; if the theory about the relation to the LXX Dn be correct, the date given is rather too early. The limits within which the book may be placed may be taken to be B.C. 170-100. Most editors, how- ever, assign it to the Ist cent. B.C. (De Wette, Ewaid, Fritzsche).
As to the place where the compiler lived, the character of the translation seems to show that it was written for Alexandrian Jews rather than for natives of Palestine, for whom the original Hebrew of the Chronicler would suffice. One sfight allusion in 4^^ to ' sailing upon the sea and upon the rivers ' for the purpose of ' robbing and stealing ' is thought to point to Egypt. Certain small peculi- arities of the language also indicate Alexandria as the place of writing : ol 0iXoi toC ^aaMais (8-') takes the place of Es B ol ffVfj.8ov\oi {ol vpCrroi <p[\oi were tne third in the scale of courtiers at tlie Alexandrian court) : in 2'* &v ipalfriral aoi is inserted. The phrase Mr <paiirqTa.i (' if it seem good ') occurs in Aristeas (in Merx' Archiv, i. 1870, p. 19), and repeatedly in Egyptian papyri.
Fritzsche, on the otlier liand, concludes that the writer was a Palestinian from his knowledge of sites in Jerusalem, referring to 5'" e/s t4 dpixupov ToC Tpuyrov vvKCtvoi toD Trp6s r% dvaroX^ ( = E8 B eis 'lepoucroXii^). Cf. also 9** ^jri t4 fvpvx<^pop toO irpAs
AMSr* (Dn 8>», Es SfX); ««^<« = 'to bum" (Dn 8»8, Es «»') ; A VwDi (Dn 4" 6», E8 IM) ; fji^„i,r,i (Dn 6', Es 3« only) ; Dn 61, Es 31 ; use of imimif (8u» 61», Es 8"). The parallels are chiefly in the first six chapters of Dn.
&vaTo\&.s Upou TrvXajvos (=:Neh 8* tit r6 rXdrof ri (^irpocrdev ttvXtjs toO ifdaros).
MSS AND Text.— Es A exists in two out of the three oldest MSS of the LXX, viz. Cod. Vaticanus (B) and Cod. Alexandrinus (A). It is not found in either of the portions of the Sinaitic MS (k) discovered by Tischendorf (Cod. Friderico- Augustanus and Cod. Sinaiticus Petropolitanus) j but this is perhaps due only to the fact that that MS is incomplete, and, except for some few frag- ments of the Pent, and a portion of 1 Ch, contains in its present form no part of the OT earlier than Es B 9, after wliich it is fairly complete. There has been a curious error in connexion with the Esdras books ; 13 chapters of 1 Ch having been apparently inserted in the middle of Es B. Cod. Sin. -Pet. contains one leaf with 1 Ch gs7_ii22 . Qoi_ F.-A. has four more leaves headed Es B, but in reality containing 1 Ch 11*'-19"; but in the fourth column of the verso of the fourth leaf we suddenly pass in the middle of a line with no break from Cn (/coi ivoKi/iriiriv aurbv) to Es B 9^ {kI 6 Si rj^iMV Kal (kK^v^v i(f> ijfiais Aeos). A note at the bottom of that leaf in a later hand calls attention to the seven superfluous leaves that are ' not of Esdras ' {rd t^Xos tQv iirTo. <pvk\uv tS ireptdffCiv If ^Tj tvTtjjv Tov iabpa). Of these seven leaves we now possess five ; and reckoning back we find that the divergence must have begun about 1 Ch &" (list of the sons of Aaron). This error, whereby fragments of 1 Ch have been inter- polated into the middle of Es B, is probably due to ' a mistake in binding in the copy from which the MS was transcribed ' (Westcott, Bible in the Church, p. 307, Append. B) ; a less probable explanation is given by Lupton (Introd. p. 1). The presence of the title Es B is not sufficient by itself to prove, as Lupton supposes, that Ee A ever stood in Cod. k ; since the same MS con- tains only the first and fourth books of Maccabees with the headings iuikk. a, /uikk. S', and the two intervening books certainly never found a place in the MS.