easily fit into this idea. We he.ve e.n account of the hero's thl'<'e friends being cast into the fiery fum11ce becsuse they will not be guilty of idol-worship; but we he.ve no explRnRtion given us why De.niel we.s not beside bis three friends, To mention no more, every pious Jew of the time of the Macce.bees would regard the return of the capti vcs to their own le.nd e.s the greatest event of the reign of Cyrus. De.niel la represented neither e.e urging on Cyrus the advisability of permitting the Jews to return, nor of aiding them in avnjling themselves of this permission when gre.utcd. Far lelll! is Daniel himself represented as returning. The story of an ideal Jew in the court of Cyrus would not have omitted some reference to this great event, or fe.iled to exhibit the relation hie hero bore to it. We ho.ve fW'ther seen this story cannot have been written to suit the meaning of the name, or t.o the chare.cter ascribed t.o the historic Daniel in Ezekiel. .As little can the incidents here be modelled on those in the life of Joseph. We a.re thus obliged to decide Daniel not to be an historical religious novel. If not a novel, it would seem necessary to hold that it must be true, If we now consider the date ascribed to this book by the critice.l school, we think their case has broken down here too. H we take the argument from language, we find tha.t the Hebrew of the Book of Daniel, when compared with that of Siracides, is much older. We know that Ecclesiasticus we.s written at le.test a dozen years ee.rlier than the critical date of Daniel. We have seen that the words whose presence is regarded as proof of the recency of Daniel are either not recent or have no right to be in the text. We thus see that the critical case, so far as the argument from the Hebrew is concerned, bas failed. .As to the Aramaic, which is asserted to be recent and Western, whereas it should be ancient and Eastern, the probative force of the instances brought forward is weakened by the evidences of a process of modernization and Occidente.li- zation having gone on. On the other hand, there seem to be survivals in the Masso- retie of an earlier text, which had not the recent or Western characteristics we now find in it. The alleged presence of Greek words has not been proved, Hence we may claim that the linguistic case against Daniel has not been made good. When we turn from interne.l to exterual evidence, the case for the relative antiquity of Daniel seems strong. The foW' horns of Zcchariah and the prayer of Nehemiah would be acknowledged as due to the influence of Daniel, were none of the books involved Biblical The middle portion of Enoch would not be placed later than B.O, 210, were it not needful to do eo to avoid proving Daniel early. If the Book of Baruch is to be dated, with Ewald, in the Persian period, then Daniel mnst be as early, as Baruch is clearly borrowed from it. We may neglect the reference to the horns in the Sibylline Oracles. The weight of evidence seems to us strong in favour of an early date. Any fair estimate of the fact that Daniel is in the canon, we have seen, points also to the early date of Daniel. On the criterion laid down by Josephus, the Book of Daniel must have been believed, by those who fixed the canon, to have been written before the days of .Arta.xerxes Longi.manU& Nothing antagonistic to Daniel's claims can be deduced from the place it occupies in the canon. It is incumbent on critics-- if they maintain that, while Daniel was a recent book, it was yet imagined to be ancient when the canon was formed-to show how that took place. If they could point to any tradition in First Macca.bees, or even Second Maccabees, valueless as it is, or Josephus, though he is late, that the Book of Daniel bad been discovered in the recesses of the temple, or in some cave beyond Jordan, then its reception into the canon would be explicable. The First Book of Macca.bees was written about half e. century aft.er the heat of the Maccabean struggle. Daniel was so well known that the author felt it no anachronism to tell, as probably he. bad been told, that Mattathias THE BOOK OF DANIEL. xlvil
referred to the inoidente in the Book of Daniel on hie deathbed. Had there been any story of the discovery of the Book of Daniel, the dying scene of Mattathiae would have boon differently recorded. A case for the origin of D,1nial being, at all events, earlier than the Maccabean period, might be made out, as shown above, from the mistakes of the Septuagint, as they are seen to be due to a mode of writing that cee.sed about that period. The alleged contradictions of history in Daniel have all been shown to be due either to mistakes in regard to the meaning of Daniel or to the facts of history. We therefore claim that the attempted disproof of the authenticity of Daniel has completely failed.
NoTE ON THE RECENTLY DlsOOVEBED FRAGMENT OB' EcOLEBIASTICUB.