The Pulpit Commentary — Daniel — Section 33

of Ambakoum (Habakkuk), son of Jesus of the tribe of Levi." Thie would seem to indicate that these additions were not in the Tetmpla. but were placed there by the copyist, The esme phenomenon is presented in Bugati's edition of • Paulus Tellensie.' 'l'he Song of the Three Holy Children is on a different footing, Be lt ie, or they are (for there are two distinct oompoeitions united in it), translations from Hebrew or Aramaio. If, notwithstanding this, these additions were found only in the Septuagint Version, something might still be 88.i.d for attributing these addition& to it alone, but they are found in Theodotion and the Pesbitta Be much as in the Septuagint. They are not transferred from the Septuagint to Theodotion, for they occupy a different position, in regard to the canonioal Daniel in Thoodotion, from that they occupy in the Septuagint, and the text of the additions is different. It seems in the highest degree gratuit.oue t.o assert that the Septuagint Version le the eourco, Further, such a .change u "Abieedri " instead of "Asbpenaz" is not t.o be explained on the above hypothesis. But further, two reasons are assigned for this falsification -the author desired t-0 make better Greek than what would result from a literal version, and to support the courage of bis oompatriots in their struggle against Epiphanes yet more than the canonical text did. Neither of these aims is at all ohvioUB when one goes over the whole of the Septuagint and compares it with the :MIIBIIOretic text. If the reader oompares the fifth chapter of Daniel in the Septuagint Version with that in the Massoretic text, he will find the Septuagint is much the shorter; and further, while the additional -sections in the Massoretic text have all the look of rhetorical amplifications, the omissions cannot be explained as the result of any bias on the part of the translator. In some cases the amplification is on the side of the Septnagint, though not so generally. There are, however, cases of "doublets" -where two d.ifi'erent versions of the same Hebrew passage are placed together; these may at times seem amplifications, but in almost all cases they betray their real origin, In some cases the Septuagint gives a slavishly accurate rendering of the Massoretio Hebrew, and the next verse, it may be, is very wide of the Hebrew; in such cases the natural dednction ie that the Hebrew from which the Septuagint was translated was not the Maseoretic. In not a few cases the di1ference may be explained by the likeneee of letters, especially in the script of Egypt, about B.c. 120. Near the beginning of the tint century B.c. the square character was introduced, but the di1ferences can be more easily explained by the earlier letters. ,., It seems to us impossible to resist the conclusion that the Septuagint Version repre- sents a tat very different from that of the Massoretes, The frequency with which the difference.a may he explained from resemblances in the older mode of writing indi- cates that this translation was made at latest one hundred years B.O. The frequent occurrence of those double renderings referred to above .indicates that the manUBcript which Origen embodied in his 'l'etrapla had been copied from one which bad been gone over either by a acholar, who supplied in the margin the renderings of the Hebrew which he thought preferable, or by one who had the loan of another ver- sion of Daniel, and transferred the renderings of this other version to the margin of his own copy when they seemed to him striking. The former supposition appears to us to he the simplest explanation of the phenomena. We need not stay to give instances of those differences to which we have referred, as we shall notice them as they occur in the text. We may say the same thing in regard to the "doublets" of which we spoke above. While we have said above that the mode of writing indicates that this translation had been made at least a century before our era, the prologue to Siracides renders it certain that at the latest by B.o. 132 it was established in u~e amoog the Gret:k-speaking population of Egypt.  TlIJ<j TIOOK OF DANIEL. xxxix