Scripture, are reduced to two. 'fhe Hebrew portion of Daniel is considera.bly longer than this fragment, yet it has fewer unexampled words. He mentions other t'Vo words as common to this fragment and the later parts of the Old Testament. Only ono of these occurs in Daniel, and it also occurs in Ezekiel. If Canon Driver bar\ extended over this fragment the line that some critics have extended over Da.niel, he should have found severe.I more, e.g. :iipJI in the singular; it appears only in the plural in the Bible, Canon Driver says, speaking of the nine Oxford leaves, that " the waw • conversive' occurs several times." He does not notify his reo.ders of the fact that the tDaw "conversive" is the regular usage in Daniel, save in eh. xi., which is spurious. Ho says there are no new Hebrew idioms. Against this Professor Margoliouth has shown several distinct Aramaisms, e.g. 1~m•n, "bee.sis of teeth." Aramaisms have a very different meaning as evidence of age in Ben Sira from what they ought to have in Daniel. By hypothesis Daniel was a man to whom Aramaic was the every-day speech, but Siracides was resident in Jerusalem. Any person situated as Daniel was -living among foreigners, and using commonly their tongue, especially if that tongue WBS cognate to his own-would almost of necessity introduce foreign words into his own language when he used it. Siracides was not in these circumstances. Greek had probably, to a large extent, dispossessed Aramaic a.~ a business language. Hebrew had become a sacred literary tongue, and in that case the Aramaisms in it had already got embedded the~e before the advent of the Greek supremacy, Canon Driver adverts to the fa.et that the longer form of the relative is used in the Oxford leaves ; in the quotations it is always the short form that appears. Canon Driver does not, however, notify his readers that the short form of the relative neve-r appears in Daniel. One point which Canon Driver minimizes is the fact that in the fragment we have evidence that the distinction between D and ill had been lost by the time Ben Sira was writing- & distinction maintained in full force in Daniel. I do not feel myself competent to give a judgment on the metrical question which has been introduced into this discussion by Professor Margoliouth. My acquaintance with Arabic versification is too rudimentary. While Dr. Driver is quite sure that this fragment confirms Professor Noldeke's condemnation of Professor Margoliouth's theory, in the Expositor for August 1896 Professor Margoliouth maintains th11t this fragment confirms his theory. To one with only a superficial knowledge of his metrical scheme, he seems to make out a very fair case. He says, " A great many verses suit the metrical scheme exactly," some of those cases being instances where the versions could not have helped the student to make the discovery. Ile admits that in many cases the lines do not suit, but these he maintains with great show of reason- arguing from the versions-are corrupt. There are others where he admits that neither the text of the fragment nor that of the versions gives a metrical line, but in these cases he maintains both a.re corrupt. Thus, even in the light of this new fragment of the text of Ben Sira, I do not feel compelled to alter my former decision. SAFED, p ALEBTINE, .Auguat, 1896,
DANIEL. THE 'BOOK OF DANIEL.
EXPOSITION.