The Pulpit Commentary — Daniel — Section 16

eatisfoctorily. The next two oBBeB occur only in eh. xi. There remain only two ea.see, i•9i;,, "continual," for the daily sacrifice, and ii-t;, used for the Nile in most cases in the rest of Scripture, but for" 11 river" in general in eh. xii. 5, 6, 7. As to the first of these, it occurs in eh. viii. 11 and 13, and the versions indicate II great confusion in the text at these points. As for the last instance, the passage Professor Bevan 'lUotcs from Isaiah (xxxiil. 21) disproves hie contention. "The glorious Lord will be to us a. place of broad rivers and streams" can have no reference to the Nile or Egypt. As little can bis reference to Job (xxviii. 10) apply to the Nile (Revised Version)," He cutteth out channels among the rocks." It would be somewhat violent to describe the small channels cut by the miner as "Niles." The whole elaborate list of proofs of the relatively recent date of the Hebrew or Daniel has failed when carefully looked at, and the cases in point are reduced to two. The argument from the unlikeness of the language of Daniel to that of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, even though that unlikeness were greater than it is, would be unsafe. The language of Spenser's ' Faery Queene ' is greatly more archaic than that of Shakespeare's 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' yet these two works were published nearly contempor1111eouely.1 Along with a number of absurdly incorrect and rasli statements, Dean Farrar is safe in saying, "Nothing certain can be inferred from the philological examination of the Hebrew" of Daniel. He is also safe in saying, "On this part of the subject there has been a great deal of rash, incompetent assertio11." This is an admission that the case bas broken down. (2) .Aramaic. The Aramaic portion of Daniel begins with the fourth verse of the second chapter, and continues to the end of the seventh. The dialect of Aramaic, in which this portion has come down to us, is what used to be called Chaldee. It is closely akin to the dialect in which the Targums were written, and is also very like that in which the paraphrase of the Samaritan Pentateuch has been preserved. Although no books have been preserved to us from any date approximately as old as the date ascribed to Daniel by tradition, or even as old as the late date ascribed to the book by critics, we still have a very considerable mass of inscriptions, which enable us in some way to estimate the character and history of the language. These inscriptions are spread over a very wide area-the banks of the Tigris on the east, the slopes of the Taurus Mountains on the north, and Egypt on the south. The stretch of time repre- sented is al.so very great. The earliest inscriptions of any length we have date back to the reign of Tiglath-pileser, about B.o. 750, and in its Eastern form it is still a living - tongue among the Nestorians. The question as to the Aramaic of Daniel is complicated by the action of copyists in changing, by insensible degrees, the language of a document. Any one copyist might make but little alteration, but generations of them would necessarily make much change. And as the tendency was always to make alterations in one direction, in course of time the difference between the original text and that of some centuries later would of necessity be very considerable. We must glance at the history of the Aramaic tongue among the Jews. The medium of ordinary business alike in Nineveh and Babylon was Aramaic, and this is proved by the fa.et that on the back of clay tablets which contain deeds of sale, the docquet- which gives a summary of the contents-is in Aramaic. The Jews were resident there for approximately fifty years, among a people who spoke a language differing but slightly from their own. They could learn Aramaic with as great ease and rapidity as Italians pick up French. At the same time, in the bosom of their families, the 1 The fourth, fifth, and sixth books of the ' Fue1·y Queene' were published probably a year or so before the 'Midsummer Night's Drealll.' Xll INTRODUCTION TO