Of Courtiers and Kings: The Biblical Daniel Narratives and Ancient Story-Collections 9781575068695

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Of Courtiers and Kings

A ncient

E xplo rations in N ear E astern C ivilizations Series Editors

Grant Frame

Brent A. Strawn

Niek Veldhuis

University of Pennsylvania

Emory University

University of California, Berkeley

1. Of Courtiers and Kings: The Biblical Daniel Narratives and Ancient StoryCollections, by Tawny L. Holm 2. The Sacrificial Economy: Assessors, Contractors, and Thieves in the Management of Sacrifical Sheep at the Eanna Temple of Uruk (ca. 625–520 b.c.), by Michael Kozuh

Of Courtiers and Kings The Biblical Daniel Narratives and Ancient Story-Collections

by

Tawny L. H olm

Winona Lake, Indiana E isenbrauns 2013

© 2013 by Eisenbrauns Inc. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America www.eisenbrauns.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Holm, Tawny, 1966Of courtiers and kings : the biblical Daniel narratives and ancient storycollections / by Tawny L. Holm.     pages  cm. — (Explorations in ancient Near Eastern civilizations ; 1) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 978-1-57506-260-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1.  Bible. O.T. Daniel—Criticism, interpretation, etc.  I.  Title. BS1555.52.H65 2013 224′.506—dc23 2013001283

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.♾™

Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  ix Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  xi Chapter 1.  Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1 Chapter 2.  The Story-Collection Genre: Survey and Prospect . . . . . . . .   9 2.1.  Defining the Genre  11 2.2.  Basic Characteristics of the Story-Collection  14 2.2.1.  Complex and Compound Nature  14 2.2.2.  Structure: Diversity and Coherence  17 2.2.3.  Function: Instruction vs. Entertainment  23 2.2.4.  Orality and Literariness: The Interaction between Oral Performance and Written Composition  25 2.2.5.  Popular Nature  29 2.3.  Literary Processes: Composition and Textual History  30 2.3.1.  Selection of Material  30 2.3.2.  Sources and Analogues  31 2.3.3.  Duplicate stories  37 2.3.4. Open-endedness  40 2.3.5.  Non-fixity or Indeterminacy of Text  41 2.4.  Prospect for Daniel  44

Chapter 3.  The Story-Collection and Related Material in Antiquity . . . . 45 3.1.  Greece and Rome  46 3.1.1. Greece  46 3.1.1.1.  The Fables and Life of Aesop  47 3.1.1.2.  The Aetia of Callimachus  53 3.1.2. Rome  55 3.1.3.  Summary of Classical Story-Collections  58 3.2.  India and Persia  60 3.3.  The Near East and Egypt  64 3.3.1.  The Ancient Near East  69 3.3.1.1.  Hurrian-Hittite Fable Collection  70 3.3.1.2. Mesopotamia  73 3.3.1.3.  Northwest Semitic  76 3.3.2. Egypt  92

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Contents 3.3.2.1.  Use of the Frame Narrative  92 3.3.2.2.  Egyptian Magicians: Priestly Sages and Court Scholars  98 Excursus: Egyptian ḥry-tp/tb, Hebrew-Aramaic *ḥarṭōm, and Akkadian ḫarṭibi  104 3.3.2.3.  Egyptian Story-Collections  114 3.3.2.4.  Egyptian Court Tales and Cycles of Court Tales  134 3.3.2.5.  Conclusions about Egyptian Story-Collections and Court Tales  180 3.4. Summary  182

Chapter 4.  The Book of Daniel in Light of the Story-Collection Genre . . 184 4.1.  The Story-Collection Definition and Daniel 1–6  186 4.1.1.  Basic characteristics of the story-collection  192 4.1.1.1.  Genre: Daniel 1–6 and the Court Tale  192 Excursus: The Genre of the Additional Stories in Greek  202 4.1.1.2.  Transformation of Genre: The Relationship of the Stories to Each Other and to the Visions  205 4.1.2.  Function: Instruction vs. Entertainment in Daniel  208 4.1.3.  Orality vs. Literariness  210 4.1.4.  The Popular Nature of the Book  213 4.1.5.  The Structure of Daniel  218 4.2.  Literary Processes: The Book of Daniel as Multiple Collections  220 4.2.1.  Non-fixity of Text: Text-critical Problems  220 4.2.2.  Translations or Multiple Literary Editions?  225 4.2.3.  Daniel Stages and Collections  241 4.2.3.1.  Independent Stories and Selection of Material: The Hero Belteshazzar/Daniel  243 4.2.3.2.  The Abbreviated Story-Collection (MT Chs. 4–6): The Wise Courtier and the Hubris of Kings  251 4.2.3.3.  The Longer Story-Collection, MT Dan (1)2–6: More Courtiers, More Nebuchadnezzar, and More Foretelling 271 4.2.3.4.  An Aramaic Collection? The Story-Collection Plus Vision (MT Chs. 1–7)  280 4.2.3.5.  The Masoretic Collection of Stories and Visions (MT Chs. 1–12)  282 4.2.3.6.  The Greek Collections: Two More Stories and More Poetry 285 4.2.4.  Arrangement of the Individual Collections in Their Final Forms  300

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4.2.4.1.  The Masoretic Text (MT): Daniel, the Mantic Courtier 301 4.2.4.2.  Theodotion (Th): A Daniel Vita  308 4.2.4.3.  Old Greek (OG): Successful Jewish Men and Women of Virtue  312 4.2.5.  Duplicate or Variant Stories in the Same Collection  315 4.2.5.1.  Daniel 3 Prose Addition  316 4.2.5.2.  The OG Preface to Dan 5  320 4.2.5.3.  The OG and Th Variants of Daniel in the Lions’ Pit  325 4.2.6. Open-endedness  328 4.3. Summary  329

Chapter 5.  The Book of Daniel in Light of Ancient Near Eastern Story-Collections and Related Material . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 5.1.  Sources and Analogues to the Daniel Legenda  332 5.1.1.  The Pool of Daniel Traditions in the Second Temple Period (The Daniel Cycle)  332 5.1.1.1.  Daniel and Qumran  333 5.1.1.2.  Daniel Traditions in Josephus  363 5.1.1.3.  The Vita Danielis (Life of Daniel) in the Lives of the Prophets, as Well as Traditions in Josippon and the Chronicle of Jerahmeel  368 5.1.1.4.  Conclusions about the Pool of Second Temple Daniel Literature  375 5.1.2.  The Ancient Near Eastern “Court Tale” Genre  377 5.1.2.1.  Court Conflicts and Contests  379 5.1.2.2.  Marvelous Deeds and Dream Interpretation  381 5.1.2.3.  Books and Deciphering Secret Texts  383 5.1.2.4.  Nationalism and the Ethnic Minority  385 5.1.2.5.  The Intersection of Court Tales and Prophecy  386 5.2.  Sources and Analogues to Daniel Structure  414 5.3.  Sources and Analogues to Specific Daniel Stories  420 5.3.1.  Arrival at Court: Daniel 1  420 5.3.2.  Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream of the Great Statue: Daniel 2  424 5.3.3.  The Three Friends in the Fiery Furnace: Daniel 3  436 5.3.4.  Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream of the Great Tree: Daniel 4  448 5.3.5.  The Writing on the Wall and the Fall of Babylon: Daniel 5  460 5.3.6.  Daniel in the Lions’ Pit: Daniel 6  463 5.3.7.  Susanna and Bel and the Serpent  468 5.4.  New Insights on the Composition of the Book of Daniel  472 5.4.1.  Interrelationships of Hellenistic Literatures  472

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Contents 5.4.2.  The Provenance of the Daniel Stories: Eastern or Western Diaspora?  476 5.5. Summary  478

Chapter 6.  Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 480 6.1.  Daniel Set Against a Story-Collection Typology  480 6.2.  Daniel Set Against the Background of Ancient Near Eastern Story-Collections and Related Material  485 6.3.  Stages of the Book of Daniel  488

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 492 Indexes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 558 Index of Authors  558 Index of Scripture  571 Index of Subjects  573

Preface The research that led to this book was begun in the 1990s during my graduate studies at The Johns Hopkins University under the late Delbert R. Hillers. I owe a great deal to Del’s thoughtful advice, and it is with heartfelt gratitude and affection that I remember him as an exacting teacher of Hebrew Bible and Northwest Semitic languages, as well as a most supportive mentor. In addition, his personal enthusiasm for medieval European literature, especially Boccaccio’s Decameron, made the subject of story-collection a shared joy. I would like to express my appreciation to Richard Jasnow and P. Kyle McCarter for reading early versions of this manuscript. Richard’s guidance in Demotic matters has been particularly illuminating. Moreover, I must thank David Lorton and Donald Redford for their insights on various Egyptological topics. I am also indebted to R. Glenn Wooden, Michael Weigl, and Jan-Wim Wesselius for corresponding with me and sending me some of their (at the time) unpublished contributions on Aramaic and Daniel. To Kim Ryholt I owe a special debt of gratitude for sharing information about the contents of unpublished Demotic manuscripts that he had identified at the Carsten Niebuhr Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Finally, I am deeply grateful to the late Ray Westbrook for his kindness as well as his wise advice on Assyriological and biblical issues. As is usual, however, the responsibility for any ideas expressed in this project remains my own. All translations in this book are my own unless otherwise noted. Ancient names with a commonly accepted English form are usually given in that standardized fashion (e.g., Assurbanipal); but those that are rare in English appear here in a more proper transcription or normalization. Furthermore, note that the titles of some primary sources are not standardized in the secondary literature; for example, both the Chronicles of Jereahmeel and the Chronicle of Jerahmeel correspond to the same work (Divrey ha-Yamim le-Yeraḥmeʾel). Various stages of this manuscript were completed with the financial and other assistance of the Department of Religious Studies, the Research Institute, and the Stapleton Library at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and I thank them for their support. I must also thank Jim Eisenbraun for the great care and attention to detail invested in the production of this book, as well as the editors of EANEC for accepting it into their series. ix

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This monograph was submitted in July, 2011, and the bibliography generally reflects this cut-off date. Thus, some items appeared too late to be taken into account or could only be briefly mentioned in footnotes. The most important of these later publications include: Michael Chyutin, Tendentious Hagiographies: Jewish Propagandist Fiction bce (Library of Second Temple Studies 77; London: T. & T. Clark, 2011); Matthew Neujahr, Predicting the Past in the Ancient Near East: Mantic Historiograpy in Ancient Mesopotamia, Judah, and the Mediterranean World (Brown Judaic Studies 354; Providence, RI: Brown University, 2012); Emanual Tov’s third edition of Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012); and Eugene Ulrich, “The Parallel Editions of the Old Greek and Masoretic Text of Daniel 5,” in Eric F. Mason et al., eds., A Teacher for All Generations: Essays in Honor of James C. VanderKam (2 vols.; JSJSup 153; Leiden: Brill, 2012), 1.201–10. Finally, I wish to express my great love and appreciation to my family, especially my husband, Gonzalo Rubio, who makes life together perpetually interesting and entertaining. I have never met anyone else who has something really new to say every day. This monograph is dedicated to my parents, Larry and Lee Holm, for their unconditional love and support. My father has always been my favorite sage and storyteller, while my mother’s calm courage and her absolute enjoyment of life despite serious illness continue to be an inspiration. My mother passed away in 1998, and she is sorely missed.

Abbreviations ABD AcOr AEF AHw AfO AKPAW ANE ANET AOF AOAT AOS AOTAT ARW ASAE ASTI AT ATTM ATU

BA BASOR BASP BDB

David Noel Freedman, ed., The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 6 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1992 Acta Orientalia Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 1: The Old and Middle Kingdoms; vol. 2: The New Kingdom, vol. 3: The Late Period. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973, 1976, 1980. W. von Soden, Akkadisches Handwörterbuch. 3 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1956–1981. Archiv für Orientforschung Abhandlungen der Koniglichen Preussischen Academic der Wissenschaften zu Berlin Ancient Near East(ern) James B. Pritchard, ed. The Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament. 3rd ed. with supplement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Altorientalische Forschung Alter Orient und Altes Testament American Oriental Society/American Oriental Series Hugo Gressmann. Altorientalische Texte zum Alten Testament. 2nd ed. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1926. Archiv für Religionswissenschaft Annales du Service des Antiquités de l’Égypte Annual of the Swedish Theological Institute Altes Testament Klaus Beyer, Die aramäischen Texte vom Toten Meer, 2 vols. and Ergänzungsband. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984–2004. Aarne-Thompson-Uther; Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography Based on the System of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson (3 vols.; Folklore Fellows Communications 133; Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia/Academia scientiarum fennica, 2004). Biblical Archaeologist Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists Francis Brown et al., The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon: With an Appendix Containing the Biblical Aramaic: Coded with the Numering System from Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996.

xi

xii

Abbreviations

BdÉ Bibliothèque d’étude BEAT Beiträge zur Erforschung des alten Testaments und des antiken Judentums BETL BETL BiOr Bibliotheca Orientalis BIFAO Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale BIOSCS Bulletin of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies BIS Biblical Interpretation Series BKAT Biblischer Kommentar: Altes Testament BN Biblische Notizen BZ Biblische Zeitschrift BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft BZNW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft CAD Chicago Assyrian Dictionary CANE Jack Sasson, ed. Civilizations of the Ancient Near East. 4 vols. New York: Scribners, 1995. CAT M. Dietrich, O. Loretz, and J. Sanmartín. The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places. ALASP 8. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1995. CBQ Catholic Biblical Quarterly CBQMS Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series CdÉ Chronique d’Égypte CIS Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum CNI The Carsten Niebuhr Institute of Ancient Near Eastern Studies COS W.W. Hallo and K. L. Younger, eds. The Context of Scripture: Canonical Compositions, Monumental Inscriptions and Archival Documents from the Biblical World. 3 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1996. CRAIBL Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres (Paris) CRIPEL Cahiers de Recherches de l’Institut de Papyrologie et d’Egyptologie de Lille DJD Discoveries in the Judaean Desert DJDJ Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan DownR Downside Review DSD Dead Sea Discoveries DSSR Donald W. Parry and Emanuel Tov, eds. The Dead Sea Scrolls Reader. 6 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2005. DSSU Robert H. Eisenman and Michael Wise. The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered: The First Complete Translation and Interpretation of 50 Key Documents withheld for over 50 Years. New York: Penguin, 1993. EETS O.S. Early English Text Society, Original Series ErIsr Eretz Israel ETR Études Théologiques et Religieuses EVO Egitto e Vicino Oriente FOTL Forms of Old Testament Literature FRLANT Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments GM Göttinger Miszellen HdO Handbook of Oriental Studies/Handbuch der Orientalistik HDR Harvard Dissertations in Religion

Abbreviations

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HOS Harvard Oriental Series HSM Harvard Semitic Monographs HTR Harvard Theological Review HUCA Hebrew Union College Annual IB Interpreter’s Bible ICC International Critical Commentary IDB Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible IDBSup Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible Supplementary Volume IDSk In die Skriflig IEJ Israel Exploration Journal Int Interpretation IOSCS The International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies JA Journal asiatique JANES Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Society JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society JBL Journal of Biblical Literature JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies JEA Journal of Egyptian Archaeology JEOL Jaarbericht “Ex oriente lux” JESHO Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient JJP The Journal of Juristic Papyrology JBQ Jewish Bible Quarterly JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies JJS Journal of Jewish Studies JNSL Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages JQR Jewish Quarterly Review JSHRZ Jüdische Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit JSJ Journal for the Study of Judaism JSJSup Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism JSNTSup Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplements JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament JSOTSup Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series JSJ Journal for the Study of Judaism JSPSup Journal for the Study of Pseudepigrapha Supplements JTS Journal of Theological Studies KBo Keilschrifttexte aus Boghazköi Koehler-Baumgartner  Ludwig Koehler, Walter Baumgartner, M. E. J. Richardson, and Johann Jakob Stamm. The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. Translated and edited under the supervision of M. E. J. Richardson. 5 vols. Leiden: Brill, 1994–2000. KRI K. A. Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions, Historical and Biographical. I–VII (Oxford, 1969–90) LÄ W. Helck et al., eds. Lexikon der Ägyptologie. 7 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1972–92. LAE William K. Simpson, ed. The Literature of Ancient Egypt. 3rd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

xiv

Abbreviations

LXX Septuagint MÄS Münchner Ägyptologische Studien ms 88 Codex Chisianus or the Chigi manuscript MDOG Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft MPER Mitteilungen aus der Papyrussammlung der Oesterreichischen Nationalbibliotek Erzherzog Rainer MT Masoretic Text NETS Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright, eds., A New English Translation of the Septuagint and the Other Greek Translations Traditionally Included Under that Title. Oxford: IOSCS, 2007. Nights Alf laylah wa-laylah or A Thousand Nights and a Night (= The Arabian Nights) NGTT Nederuits Gereformeerde Teologiese Tydskrif n.s. new series OBO Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis OG Old Greek OIP Oriental Institute Publications OLA Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta OLZ Orientalistische Literaturzeitung OMRO Leiden. Rijksmuseum van Oudheden. Oudheidkundige mededeelingen. Or Orientalia OTL Old Testament Library Pap967 Papyrus 967 PSBA Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology PTA Papyrologische Texte und Abhandlungen QuadStor Quaderni di storia RA Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale RB Revue Biblique RE Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft (1893– ) RGG Kurt Galling, ed. Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. 3rd ed. 7 vols. Tübingen: Mohr, 1957–65. 4th ed. Edited by Hans Dieter Betz et al. 9 vols. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998–2007. RdÉ Revue d’Égyptologie RSR Recherches de Science Religieuse SAA State Archives of Assyria SAAS State Archives of Assyria Studies SAK Studien zur altägyptischen Kultur SAOC Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization SB Sources bibliques SBAW Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-philologische und historische Klasse SBB Stuttgarter Biblische Beiträge SBL Society of Biblical Literature SBLSP Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers SBLDS Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series

Abbreviations

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SBLMS Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series SBLWAW Society of Biblical Literature Writings from the Ancient World SBM Stuttgarter biblische Monographien SBS Stuttgarter Bibelstudien SBT Studies in Biblical Theology series SJSJ Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism StBoT Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten Syh Syrohexapla SPB Studia postbiblica SR Sciences Religieuses/Studies in Religion STDJ Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah SVTP Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha TAD Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni. Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt. Newly Copied, Edited and Translated into English. 4 vols. (A–D). Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1986, 1989, 1993, 1999. TAPA Transactions (and Proceedings) of the American Philological Association TDOT G. Johannes Botterweck and Helmer Ringgren, eds. Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. 14 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974–. TUAT Otto Kaiser, ed. Texte aus der Umwelt des Alten Testaments. 3 vols. and 1 Ergänzungslieferung. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1981–2001. Th Theodotion ThR Theologische Rundschau ThSTk Theologische Studien und Kritiken UF Ugarit-Forschungen VA Varia Aegyptiaca VT Vetus Testamentum VTSup Vetus Testamentum Supplements WMANT Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament WdO Die Welt des Orients ZA Zeitschrift der Assyriologie ZÄS Zeitschrift für Ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde ZAW Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft ZPE Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik

C

h a p t e r

O

n e

Introduction The Book of Daniel is logically divided into ten sections [including both stories and visions]. . . . This book is unique among all the books of the Bible, Old and New Testament, in that each of these sections forms a distinct unit separable from the rest. Any one of the ten sections could have existed independently of any of the others and would have been virtually as intelligible, or unintelligible, as it now stands in the Book of Daniel. Or put differently, any one or more of the sections could have been lost, and the remaining sections would not have suffered in any significant way at all. Superficially, the book seems to be a collection of once isolated mini-works brought together by some unknown editor or redactor who despite his work as compiler could hardly claim the title of author of the whole book. . . . Yet there are certain features in the book that seem to point to one author or at most two for the whole work. 1 Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel

Alexander Di Lella’s introduction to the Anchor Bible commentary on the Book of Daniel notes the uniquely episodic nature of the biblical book, whose ten discrete units seem to have once been “isolated mini-works” later collected together. The six stories about Daniel in chs. 1–6 and the four visions of Daniel in chs. 7–12 superficially appear to be independent compositions assembled by a compiler; yet at the same time, the disparate parts viewed together still have a certain homogeneity that implies an author at work. This feature of Daniel so well-articulated by Di Lella has otherwise often escaped serious attention. Many scholars simply refer to the Book of Daniel as a “collection” or to the stories of chs. 1–6 as an Erzählsammlung (story-collection); however, these seem to be mere terms of convenience without reference to any concrete genre or typology. 2 This is in spite of the influence of Hermann Gunkel, 1. From Di Lella’s introduction in L. F. Hartman and A. A. Di Lella, The Book of Daniel (Anchor Bible 23; New York: Doubleday, 1978), 9; the note in brackets is mine. 2.  See, for example: John J. Collins, Daniel (Hermeneia; Augsburg: Fortress, 1993), 24– 38; idem, Daniel: With an Introduction to Apocalyptic Literature (FOTL 20; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 33; Reinhard Gregor Kratz, Translatio imperii: Untersuchungen zu den aramäischen Danielerzählungen und ihrem theologiegeschichtlichen Umfeld (WMANT 63; Neukirchen-Vluyn:

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2

Chapter One

Walter Baumgartner, and others more recently who have considered the Story of Aḥiqar and the biblical narratives of Esther, Joseph, 1 Esdras 3, and Daniel to be “court tales,” or “tales of the successful courtier,” and compared them to similar tales in Herodotus and Alf laylah wa-laylah (A Thousand Nights and a Night, or the Arabian Nights). 3 Indeed, in recent years, the most common genre designation for the Daniel stories has been Near Eastern “court tale,” but few have dwelt long on the fact that the genre regularly appears in collected form, as in Alf laylah wa-laylah. 4 The stories of Susanna and Aḥiqar even appear in some versions of Alf laylah wa-laylah, indicating the susceptibility of court tales like these to be mixed and matched in collections. 5 Neukirchener, 1991), 5; idem, “Reich Gottes und Gesetz im Danielbuch und im werdenden Judentum,” in A. S. van der Woude, ed., The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1993); idem, “The Visions of Daniel,” in John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint, eds., The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception (VTSup 83; Leiden: Brill, 2001), 93; and R. G. Albertz, “Bekehrung von oben als ‘messianische Programm’: Die Sonderüberlieferung der Septuaginta in Dan 4–6,” in H. Graf Reventlow, ed., Theologische Probleme der Septuaginta und der Hellenistischen Hermeneutik (Veröffentlichungen der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft für Theologie 11; Munich: Kaiser & Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1997), 48; Matthias Henze, “The Narrative Frame of Daniel: A Literary Assessment,” JSJ 32 (2001), 5–24, esp. 6–7. 3. Hermann Gunkel, “Esther,” in RGG (2nd ed.; Tübingen: Mohr, 1928), 378–79; Walter Baumgartner, Das Buch Daniel (Giessen: Töpelmann, 1926), 9; idem, “Ein Vierteljahrhundert Danielforschung,” ThR n.s. 11 (1939), 131; idem, Zum Alten Testament und seiner Umwelt: Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Leiden: Brill, 1959), 52, 57. See also G. Huet, “Daniel et Susanne: Note de littérature comparée,” RHR 65 (1912), 277–84; Curt Kuhl, Die drei Männer im Feuer (BZAW 55; Giessen: Töpelmann, 1930), 58; Bernhard Heller, “Die Susannaerzählung: Ein Märchen,” ZAW 13 (1936), 281–87; Elias Bickerman, Four Strange Books of the Bible: Jonah / Daniel / Koheleth / Esther (New York: Schocken, 1967), 97; H.-P. Müller, “Märchen, Legende und Enderwartung,” VT 26 (1976), 338–50; Carey A. Moore, Daniel, Esther and Jeremiah: The Additions (AB 44; New York: Doubleday, 1977), 88–89; W. Sibley Towner, Daniel (Interpretation; Atlanta: John Knox, 1984), 1, 22. 4.  W. Lee Humphreys and others began to formalize the study of Daniel’s stories as “court tales”; Humphreys, “A Life-Style for Diaspora: A Study of the Tales of Esther and Daniel,” JBL 92 (1973), 211–23. See also John J. Collins, “The Court-Tales in Daniel and the Development of Apocalyptic,” JBL 94 (1975), 218–34; Susan Niditch and Robert Doran, “The Success Story of the Wise Courtier: A Formal Approach,” JBL 96 (1977), 179–93; and Collins, Daniel, 38–52. Based on Humphreys’ work, Dan 3 and 6 are usually described as court conflict tales, while Dan 2, 4, and 5 are said to be court contests. The most exhaustive study of the “court tale” genre in the ancient Near East remains Lawrence M. Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King: Ancient Jewish Court Legends (HDR 26; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990). 5. E. Littmann, Die Erzählungen aus den 1001 Nächten (new impression; Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1981), vol. 3, 508–9. See also: Baumgartner, Zum Alten Testament und seiner Umwelt: Ausgewählte Aufsätze, 52, 57; John Strugnell, “Problems in the Development of the Aḥîqar Tale,” in Frank Moore Cross Volume (Er-Isr 26; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1996), 204–11; H. Engel, Susanna-Erzählung (OBO 61; Freiburg: Universitätsverlag Freiburg/Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985), 35; Klaus Koenen, “Von der todesmutigen Susanna zum begabten Daniel: Zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der Susanna-Erzählung,” TZ 54 (1998), 1–11, esp. p. 5.

Introduction

3

This monograph aims to situate the book of Daniel against the background of story-collections, an ancient genre that first appeared in Egypt in the mid-second millennium b.c.e. with the Tales from King Cheops’ Court in Papyrus Westcar. It seeks to compare Daniel 1–6, first, to an explicit definition of the story-collection and, second, to specific bodies of story-collections and other related material in the ancient Near East and its environs, with special attention given to Egyptian court tales, a large corpus mostly neglected by previous biblical scholars. In so doing, it brings both a new approach and new evidence to the field of Daniel studies, which has received constant, if not renewed, interest, especially with regard to text- and literary-critical matters, within recent years. 6 In the 1980s, scholars of fourteenth-century European literature began to define explicitly and spell out the characteristics of a “story-collection” genre, having in view certain works of Boccaccio in Italy (the Ameto and the Decameron) and Gower and Chaucer in England (the Confessio amantis and the Canterbury Tales, respectively). 7 These mature forms of the genre relied on twelfth- and thirteenth-century European collections and on eastern forms of the genre that arrived through Spain. Helen Cooper, in her Structure of the Canterbury Tales, devised a working definition of the genre that has since become classic: A story-collection is a collection of separable tales compiled and written, or more probably re-written, essentially by a single author; and it circulates in a recognisably coherent form. It is different, therefore, from an anthology or a manuscript miscellany, or from a collection of separate works by a single man, where the different items do not necessarily belong together; and it is different from works such as interlaced romances, where there may be a number of stories but they are not at all easily extractable. The stories must be essential to the 6.  In addition to a number of commentaries, topical studies, and dissertations, there have been some major collected volumes on Daniel, especially in the last two decades. See, for instance: A. S. van der Woude, The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings (Leuven: BETL 106; Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 1993); and John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint, eds., The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception (2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 2001); Katharina Bracht and David S. du Toit, eds., Die Geschichte der Daniel-Auslegung in Jundentum, Christentum und Islam: Studien zur Kommentierung des Danielbuches in Literatur und Kunst (BZAW 371; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007). 7. Helen Cooper, The Structure of the Canterbury Tales (London: Duckworth, 1983; Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984); ead., The Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). See also Cooper’s later work: “Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Reviewing the Work,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 19 (1997), 183–210, esp. 185–91; and “The Frame,” in Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, eds., Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Chaucer Studies 28; Cambridge: Brewer, 2002), 1.1–22. For more on story-collection typology, see K. S. Gittes, Framing the Canterbury Tales: Chaucer and the Medieval Frame Narrative Tradition (Contributions to the Study of World Literature, 14; New York: Greenwood, 1991); and Anthony Davenport, Medieval Narrative: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 238–50.

4

Chapter One work, not incidental, and so a sermon with a generous use of story exempla is not in itself a story-collection.” 8

Since it turns out that the antecedents and earliest forms of the genre are to be found in the literatures of the ancient Near East, classical Greece and Rome, Persia, and India (e.g., Egypt’s Tales from King Cheops’ Court and the Stories of Petese, Aesop’s Fables, the Aetia of Callimachus, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Pañ­ catantra, the Book of Sindibad), a restudy of certain biblical materials with the story-collection genre in mind seems fruitful. Daniel 1–6 is recognizably a good candidate for this attempt, since, with an eye to Cooper’s definition and to Di Lella’s insights on Daniel’s structure, one readily observes that Daniel contains clearly separable episodes that one may suppose were selected out of earlier materials and then put together and written or rewritten to form a coherent whole. The majority consensus among Daniel scholars is that this collection of distinct court stories, Dan 1–6, was written down in the early Hellenistic period and circulated together some time before they were attached to the first-person visions in chs. 7–12, which date to the Maccabean period. 9 Daniel is also particularly suitable for our approach because, in contrast to much of the other literature of the Hebrew Bible, it is datable. The book was composed in response to the persecution of the Jews under the Seleucid king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, in 168–164 b.c.e. 10 Daniel thus falls within the Hellenistic period, when documentation in the Near East is relatively abundant. In addition, one of the aspects of Daniel that puzzled Di Lella—the fact that the book superficially seems like the work of a compiler yet at the same time seems to have an overall uniformity imposed by an author—can be explained with reference to the story-collection genre. Compilers of story-collections are also authors, in that they rarely simply collect stories without writing or rewriting them to their satisfaction and purpose and with a new context in mind. When Daniel is set against an explicit definition of the story-collection, it affects our conception of text-critical aspects, the history of composition, and the overall nature of the book. The divergent texts (Masoretic Text [MT], Theodotion Greek [Th], and Old Greek [OG]) of the narrative parts of Daniel may need to be described in part as variant editions, or tellings, of common core material, rather than as translations of older written texts with clearly demonstrable genealogies or relationships. The history of composition and development of these stories and their texts can be illuminated by comparison with that of the 8.  Cooper, The Structure of the Canterbury Tales, 9. 9.  For proponents of this commonly-held view, see, among others: James A. Montgomery, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1927), 96; H. L. Ginsberg, Studies in Daniel (Texts and Studies of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America 14; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1948), 27; Reinhard Gregor Kratz, Translatio imperii, 77–160; Collins, Daniel, 24–38. 10.  Collins, Daniel, 60.

Introduction

5

mature forms of the story-collection genre, demonstrating the basic principles at work in the selection and editing of stories to make a coherent collection. Just as with the fourteenth-century European story-collections, these issues remain complex by reason of the popular character of story-collections, their closeness to orality, their non-fixity of form, and open-endedness. In addition, the structure and arrangement of the book in each of the biblical editions can helpfully be analyzed in terms of the story-collection genre. 11 As Lorenzo DiTommaso states, in his study of the later legenda, apocalyptic, and prognostica collections of Daniel material from late antiquity and the Middle Ages, “Daniel simply represents one stage—albeit the most important stage—of an ongoing and frequently overlapping dynamic process wherein the story of Daniel was told and, in the telling, employed as a vehicle to relate various messages.” 12 The “story of Daniel” never existed as an ideal form; even MT Dan 1–6 “was itself the precipitate result of a long history of redaction” stemming from older Daniel traditions and a cycle of texts from the Hellenistic period. 13 Furthermore, the collecting of separate genres often results in a transformation of genre; for Daniel, this supports the view that what the stories mean individually and what they mean together or with the visions changes dramatically. The entertaining stories of Jewish courtiers outwitting their rivals, set in the courts of capricious yet mostly benign Near Eastern monarchs, gain the more somber and defiant tone of apocalyptic literature when read as the foundation and legitimation of chs. 7–12, which contain Daniel’s visions of an imminent end-of-days in which all earthly kingdoms, especially that of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, would be destroyed. When Daniel is set against the context of story-collections and related material from the surrounding ancient Near Eastern and neighboring literatures, some of the literary traditions and literary processes from which the Daniel stories arose may be clarified. Greek, Roman, Persian, and Indian examples of the story-collection genre range from extremely self-conscious and poetic works, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses or the Pañcatantra, to looser prose collections such as Aesop’s Fables, which was later attached to the Life of Aesop. These story-collections demonstrate many of the same features as the mature European examples, such as open-endedness or a lack of closure with regard to the precise number of stories (most story-collections leave room for additional tales). As for ancient Near Eastern literature, it often utilized the “frame narrative,” a common element in 11.  With regard to the Greek editions of Daniel, Marti J. Steussy is one of the few who have done a systematic study of what the order of the stories means for understanding them; Steussy, Gardens in Babylon: Narrative and Faith in the Greek Legends of Daniel (SBL Dissertation Series 141; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1993). 12.  Italics his. Lorenzo DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature (SVTP 20; Leiden: Brill, 2005), 49. 13. Ibid.

6

Chapter One

story-collections worldwide, in order to box stories, proverbs, pseudo-prophecies, and other genres. This literature also includes some story-collections, at least one from the Hurrian-Hittite realm, and at least three if not more from Egypt, including the oldest known story-collection of all, the Egyptian Tales from King Cheops’ Court in Papyrus Westcar (dated to the mid-second millennium b.c.e.). In addition, it is especially from Egypt in the first millennium b.c.e. that a large number of court tales appear, many featuring high religious and court officials, some of whose characters, plots, and themes also occur in the story-collections. These Egyptian court tales and cycles have rarely been included in discussions about biblical and ancient Near Eastern court tales, even though they share certain themes and motifs, especially with Daniel—for instance, court conflicts and contests; marvelous deeds and riddle solving on behalf of the king; the rescue or saving of the king by a wise courtier; the forecasting of the future; dreams and interpretation of dreams; or even the sentence of execution by fire in a furnace for courtiers who have disobeyed or betrayed a king. Some of these texts from Egypt are fairly well-known—for example, the Ptolemaic-Roman Setne Khamwas story cycle—and others either are not well known or are more recently published, such as the Ḥor bar Punesh/Pawenesh texts in both Aramaic and Demotic from the fifth century b.c.e., the Late Egyptian Merire and Sisobek story in Papyrus Vandier from the late sixth or early fifth century b.c.e., or Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh, written in Demotic, on the verso of Papyrus Demotic Saqqāra 2, from the fourth or third century b.c.e. 14 Furthermore, the divergent traditions of Daniel are exemplified in the Greek biblical editions, which add two stories and an extra poetic section to the older Semitic core of six narratives, as well as in the Daniel traditions in Qumran literature and Josephus. In fact, Qumran and Josephus testify to a large cycle of stories and apocalyptic traditions centering around the figure Daniel, from which the authors of the older Semitic and later Greek editions drew, and give us the template for the literary processes behind the composition of Daniel. Finally, this study suggests a new understanding of the international flavor of Aramaic literature of the first millennium b.c.e., as evidenced by the Aramaic 14. I already proposed specific suggestions for connections between the Daniel biblical and parabiblical narratives and the Egyptian magician stories with apocalyptic features in 1996 (A Biblical Story-Collection: Daniel 1–6, Ph.D. dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 1996), but see also Bezalel Porten, “The Prophecy of Ḥor bar Punesh and the Demise of Righteousness: An Aramaic Papyrus in the British Library,” in F. Hoffmann and H. J. Thissen, eds., Res severa verum gaudium: Festschrift für Karl-Theodor Zauzich zum 65. Geburtstag am 8. Juni 2004 (Studia Demotica 6. Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 427–66, pls. 35–36; Holm, “Daniel 1–6: A Biblical Story-Collection,” in Jo-Ann A. Brant, Charles W. Hedrick, and Chris Shea, eds., Ancient Fiction: The Matrix of Early Christianity and Jewish Narrative (Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series 32; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), 149–66; and ead., “The Fiery Furnace in Ancient Near Eastern Court Tales: Daniel 3 and Egyptian Parallels,” JAOS 128 (2008), 81–100.

Introduction

7

literary corpus in Egypt, where Arameans and Aramaic-speaking Jews brought literary traditions and motifs from their original homes in Syria-Palestine and Mesopotamia and mingled them with native Egyptian elements. This constituted a rich literature that transcended and bridged different cultural traditions in various languages, in a cross-pollination of genres and motifs. The resulting Aramaic literature both reshaped the preexisting Syro-Mesopotamian traditions and enriched the local Egyptian realm. The court tales of Daniel and those from Qumran must take their place within this broad international milieu. Such relationships do not necessarily fit into the narrow boundaries of intertextuality but rather suggest the existence of common structural models of narrative and motifs, which shaped independent processes of textualization in these different literary traditions. An experiment with the possibilities and limitations of this approach has obvious implications for other parts of canonical literature as well. It is encouraging to note that Hermann Gunkel placed an emphasis on the collection of stories in his understanding of the Pentateuchal sources (J, E, and P: Yahwist, Elohist and Priestly material). In “Die Sagen der Genesis” (“The Stories of Genesis”), Gunkel’s introduction to his Genesis commentary, he discussed the story of Jacob and Esau specifically in terms of a “frame narrative” and refers explicitly to The Nights, the Decameron, and the Märchen of Wilhelm Hauff. 15 Gunkel’s basic insights concerning the sources as collections have had great impact on subsequent research on the Pentateuch as well as other parts of the Bible; however, his understanding of the story-collection genre did not utilize an adequately explicit typology such as is provided in recent studies of the genre. This monograph takes the following design. Chapter 2 offers a survey of the story-collection genre and its basic characteristics. Special attention must be paid to the story-collection in the period of its most mature form—that is, the story-collection of the fourteenth-century in Europe and its direct antecedents. Chapter 3 turns to the story-collection in the ancient world—that is, the storycollection as it appears in Classical, ancient Near Eastern, and Indian and Persian literature. This section will also include the overlooked Egyptian court tales that share themes with the stories in Daniel. Chapter 4 will then set the Book of Daniel against the typology of the story-collection genre; in so doing, it will make explicit reference to the analysis presented in chapter 2. The complex problems of Daniel—such as the problem of composition history, textual history, its bilingual text (even multilingual, considering the Greek), and the basic difficulties of assigning a genre—are reviewed with an eye to discovering the relevance and limits for applying the story-collection definition. Chapter 5 examines how knowledge 15. Hermann Gunkel, The Stories of Genesis (3rd ed.; transl. John J. Scullion, ed. William R. Scott (Vallejo, CA: BIBAL, 1994), 58. The first edition of Gunkel’s Genesis appeared in 1901, the third in 1910; cited here is the translated third edition.

8

Chapter One

of ancient Near Eastern story-collections and related material, explored already in chapter 3, may influence our understanding of Daniel’s development. Moreover, specific sources and analogues to the individual Daniel stories and structure will be examined. This chapter also considers the interrelationships of ancient Near Eastern Hellenistic literature, as well as Daniel’s provenance. Finally, chapter 6 presents the conclusions of the study. For ease of reference, the bibliography includes all works mentioned in the volume. In sum, the present book approaches the first six chapters of Daniel and their later incorporation into the biblical editions of the book within the context of story-collections and story-cycles in the Ancient Near East and considers a wide variety of corpora, some of which have not been sufficiently utilized to date. Moreover, this approach is enriched by a careful examination of story-collection as a genre exhibiting specific literary and textual features.

C

h a p t e r

T

w o

The Story-Collection Genre: Survey and Prospect The story-collection, typically produced as popular literature, reached a highpoint at the level of serious literature in fourteenth-century Europe with such works as the Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron. 1 The story-collection at this time was a rich mixture of East and West with regard to both form and content. There was a renewed interest in classical collections, especially Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Aesop’s Fables, as well as in Arabic and Hebrew collections, which had found their way into Europe via Spain. The Disciplina clericalis, written in twelfth-century Spain by Petrus Alfonsi in Latin from Arabic and Hebrew sources, likely brought the “frame narrative” to the western story-collections. 2 1.  An exhaustive overview of the story-collection genre is impossible; instead, the focus of this chapter will be on story-collections that illustrate the basic characteristics and features of the genre. The genre is well attested in many of the world’s literatures, but because of the abundance and relevance of contemporary research in the area of medieval European storycollections and their antecedents in Classical, Indian, and Near Eastern collections, the emphasis here will be placed on evidence drawn from those examples of the genre. One could include some discussion of East Asian literatures, but doing so would take us away from our geographical, chronological, and cultural milieu, making the study too broad. Note, however, that the collective principle of east Asian literatures is present from very early on and continues into the present; see Earl Miner, “The Collective and the Individual: Literary practice and its Social Implications,” in Sumie Jones et al., eds., Principles of Classical Japanese Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 17–62. In modern western literature, the story-collection genre has nearly fallen out of fashion; nonetheless, for one example, note Italo Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore/If Upon a Winter’s Night a Traveler (Turin: Einaudi, 1979; trans. William Weaver; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981). 2.  See Joseph Ramon Jones and John Esten Keller, The Scholar’s Guide: A Translation of the Twelfth-Century Disciplina Clericalis of Pedro Alfonso (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1969), 13–16; and, on Petrus Alfonsi’s considerable influence upon England and northern Europe, see María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), 147–57; Carol F. Heffernan, The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), esp. 129–30. The best critical edition of the Disciplina clericalis is by Alfons Hilka and Werner Söderhjelm, Die Disciplina clericalis des Petrus Alfonsi (das älteste Novellenbuch

9

10

Chapter Two

Medieval Iberia was a literary polysystem formed by the interaction of disparate peoples, several languages, and three religions, and was very important for the history of the frame narrative and story-collection. 3 Petrus Alfonsi himself was born Moshe (Moses) in Huesca, Aragon, and was a rabbi, a scholar of Arabic science and literature, and a physician who converted to Catholicism in 1106 with no less than King Alfonso of Aragon as his sponsor. In 1110, he moved to England to become a physician at the court of Henry I; however, unlike the biblical character Daniel, who maintained his Jewish faith, this court scholar converted to the religion of his monarch. 4 As for Alfonsi’s Disciplina, it was accompanied and followed in Iberia by other frame narratives, especially those in Arabic and Hebrew of the maqāma genre (the Arabic tradition of prose fiction based on the oral transmission of the Ḥadīṯ, or sayings of Muhammad). One of the first of the maqāma genre in Hebrew was by Judah al-Ḥarīzī, who wrote his well-known Taḥkemonī (ca. 1200) “in an attempt to legitimize the maqāma genre for Hebrew audiences.” 5 Works such as Joseph ibn Zabāra’s Sefer Šaʿāšūʿīm (“Book of Delight”), from the late twelfth century, and Judah ibn Shabbetai’s Minḥat Yehudah, Soneh Hanašīm (“The Offering of Yehudah, the Women-Hater”), from the thirteenth century, directly influenced the later Libro de buen amor (“Book of Good Love”) by Juan Ruiz in Spanish (ca. 1330), and the fifteenth-century Spill (“Mirror”), also known as Llibre de les Dones (“Book of Women”), by Jaume Roig in Catalan (ca. 1460). 6 These works, Alfonsi’s Disciplina, and other European story-collections of the period—for example, the Directorium vitae humanae (a Latin translation of Kalilah des Mittelalters) nach allen bekannten Handschriften (Heidelberg: Winter, 1911); and an excellent translation is found in Petrus Alfonsi, La Discipline de Clergie: Disciplina clericalis (trans. Jacqueline-Lise Genot-Bismuth; St. Petersburg: Evropeïski Dom/Éditions de Paris, 2001). 3.  See, for instance: David A. Wacks, Framing Iberia: Maqāmāt and Frametale Narratives in Medieval Spain (The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World 33; Leiden: Brill, 2007). 4.  Not only is he responsible for bringing the Disciplina clericalis with its Arabic and Hebrew sources to England and thus from there to the rest of northern Europe, he also taught and wrote on Arabic methods of astronomy, introducing to western scholars for the first time the sexagesimal division of the zodiac, among other principles of Eastern science. 5.  Wacks, Framing Iberia, 12. For a translation, see David Simha Segal, The Book of Taḥkemoni: Jewish Tales from Medieval Spain (Portland, OR: The Littmann Library of Jewish Civilization, 2001). The maqāma genre in Arabic was begun by Badiʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī in late tenth-century Baghdad and was popularized by Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim ibn ʾAlī alḤarīrī (1054–1122 c.e.) in the Muslim East and al-Andalus; Wacks, “Reading Jaume Roig’s Spill and the Libro de buen amor in the Iberian maqāma Tradition,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 83 (2006), 597–616, esp. p. 599. See also Ignasi González-Llubera, “Un aspecte de la novellistica oriental a la literatura medieval Europea,” in Homenatge a Antoni Rubió i Lluch: miscellània d’estudis literaris, històrics i linguistics (Analecta sacra tarraconensia 12; Barcelona: Biblioteca Balmés, 1936), 463–73. 6.  On the influence of the maqāma genre on these two works, see Wacks, “Reading Jaume Roig’s Spill and the Libro de buen amor in the Iberian maqāma Tradition,” 597–616.

The Story-Collection Genre: Survey and Prospect

11

and Dimnah, the Arabic incarnation of the Indian Pañcatantra), and the Seven Sages of Rome (the western form of the Book of Sindibad)—contain stories belonging to a common pool that can be found later in the mature fourteenth-century collections—for example, the Gesta romanorum, the Alphabet of Tales, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Gower’s Confessio amantis. 7 The European story-collections of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries thus established a set of conventions on which those of the fourteenth century built, and by the fourteenth century, collections of legends, miracles, fables, folk-tales, histories and pseudo-histories abounded, quite often in preachers’ handbooks. Fourteenth-century authors such as Boccaccio in Italy, Chaucer and Gower in England, and many others consciously exploited the material and structure of the earlier collections. In spite of the fact that the great compositions of the fourteenth century may well be judged “sophisticated” or “artistically self-conscious” in comparison to earlier story-collections, according to Helen Cooper in The Structure of the Canterbury Tales, the medieval story-collections actually have “no clear lines of chronological development.” 8 Various structural features, such as the frame narrative or themes and materials found in particular stories, are present in the very oldest as well as the very latest of the collections.

2.1.  Defining the Genre As noted in chapter 1, it is within studies of the Canterbury Tales from the 1980s that one first finds attempts to develop a typology for the story-collection genre. Piero Boitani’s research on the development of short medieval English narratives stressed the growing artistic consciousness behind the incorporation of particular stories into story-collections by individual story-collection authors. 9 His work appeared just slightly before that of Helen Cooper, who in The Structure of the Canterbury Tales, gave a preliminary definition and survey of the genre that has now become classic. Although the genre “never acquired a single set of rigid conventions” because of its miscellaneous nature due to the very fact of gathering things together, 10 Cooper suggested the following preliminary definition 7.  Cooper, Structure, 24. 8. Cooper, Structure, 9. 9. Piero Boitani, English Medieval Narrative in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Note that, although Boitani sees development in the medieval story-collection genre, he, like Cooper, also thinks many features were present early on: “the movement is from simple structures and devices toward increasingly complex mechanisms that are less directly traceable to earlier models . . . but the structural complexity, narrative and compositional artifice, while they develop with the passing of time, can be seen even in the earliest compositions”; ibid., viii. 10.  Cooper, Structure, 8. For more on story-collection typology, see also Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, 5–26; ead., “Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,” 183–210;

12

Chapter Two

for story-collection (for convenience, although already cited in chapter 1, it is repeated here): A story-collection is a collection of separable tales compiled and written, or more probably re-written, essentially by a single author; and it circulates in a recognisably coherent form. It is different, therefore, from an anthology or a manuscript miscellany, or from a collection of separate works by a single man, where the different items do not necessarily belong together; and it is different from works such as interlaced romances, where there may be a number of stories but they are not at all easily extractable. The stories must be essential to the work, not incidental, and so a sermon with a generous use of story exempla is not in itself a story-collection. 11

One can isolate three major points in Cooper’s definition of “story-collection.” A story-collection: 1.  is a collection of separable tales that are essential to the whole, but extractable Cooper’s definition thus emphasizes both the individuality of the stories as well as their coherence within the literary form as a whole. Each story is complete unto itself and can be easily isolated from the collection, yet it gains new meaning and sense when it is taken with the other stories in the collection. Such aggregation often means a transformation of genre (see below). 2.  is compiled and written/rewritten essentially by a single author Cooper posits that there is usually a single hand behind each story-collection who is in some sense an author as well as a compiler. That is, the author did not merely gather random material together; the “story-collection” is really a composition reflecting an individual’s intentions, and the individual has often reworked the individual stories with the whole collection in view. 3.  circulates in a recognizably coherent form Although individual story-collections might share features and material with others, coherence is imposed on each story-collection through some kind of structure or ordering scheme. This scheme may be as basic as a common theme or genre among the stories or as elaborate as framing material, such as a prologue, epilogue, or a fully-developed frame narrative with links and connectives between stories.

Story-collections in the Middle Ages, both with and without frame narratives, were viewed as an independent genre. Evidence for this is found in the single-genre miscellanies consisting solely of extracts from story-collections. One example is manuscript Harley 463, which includes stories from the Disciplina clericalis along with other collections of beast-fables, legends, and miracles. Anead., “The Frame,” 1–22; Gittes, Framing the Canterbury Tales, 1–8; and Davenport, Medieval Narrative: An Introduction, 238–50. 11.  Cooper, Structure, 9–10.

The Story-Collection Genre: Survey and Prospect

13

other example is manuscript Harley 7333, which includes portions of the Gesta romanorum, the Confessio amantis, and the Canterbury Tales. 12 With regard to the Canterbury Tales, Cooper argues that “Chaucer’s work was not read in isolation: it was read as a story-collection, and understood in terms of the generic conventions associated with that form.” 13 Therefore, it only seems correct that modern scholars of the medieval story-collections have begun to view story-collections as members of a specific genre. Furthermore, since Cooper’s definition emphasizes the unity of disparate parts, the collector as author-compiler, and the coherent circulation of a storycollection, one must distinguish the story-collection from a “cycle,” a broader generic term often used for a collection or series of “traditional stories and poems concerning a central hero or theme,” 14 such as the Homeric epics, the Arthurian Romances, or the Nordic epic poems behind Wagner’s Ring, since “cyclic narratives are traditional accumulations given literary form by a succession of authors rather than by a single writer.” 15 Stories or poems in a cycle may circulate together, or one may speak of an individual story or poem belonging to a particular cycle or larger group. The stories from a particular story-collection, therefore, may or may not belong to a broader cycle. 16 The terms “cycle” and “collection” are both often used loosely for the Daniel narratives, but one should distinguish between the narratives in the Hellenistic Daniel cycle at large, in whichever written versions they might appear, and the individual Daniel story-collections. The different biblical editions of the narratives, especially the Masoretic Hebrew-Aramaic text and the two major Greek editions, Theodotion and the Old Greek/Septuagint, may be fruitfully thought of as individual story-collections, each, in their final forms, having a single author/ compiler, with varying intentions peculiar to each collection. Thus, when I use the term “Daniel cycle,” I mean Daniel narratives at large (narratives centered on Daniel), but by “story-collection,” I mean the biblical collection in a particular edition. Finally, the word “story,” “from Latin historia, ‘history’: a narrative, a sequence of events” (whether true or fictitious), 17 is often used synonymously with 12.  Cooper, Structure, 26. 13. Ibid. 14. Northrop Frye, Sheridan Warner Baker, and George Perkins, The Harper Handbook to Literature (2nd ed.; New York: Longman, 1997), 140. 15.  “‘ Cyclic’ was first applied to a series of epics supplementing Homer’s account of the Trojan War and written by a group of late Greek poets known as the Cyclic poets. Other examples of cyclic narrative are the Charlemagne epics and Arthurian romances. . . .”; see William Harmon and Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature (10th ed.; Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2006), 140. 16.  J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (4th ed., rev. C. E. Preston; Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 201. 17.  Frye et al., Harper Handbook, 443.

14

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two other terms, “narrative” and “tale,” although the former can have the particular nuance of “narration” (that is, the emphasis is on the fact that it is narrated or told), 18 and the latter can be used to emphasize the brevity or simplicity of a composition or even its entertainment value. 19 Here, however, I do not attempt to make formal discriminations between “story” and “narrative” or “tale” and will use all three interchangeably but will often prefer “story” in order to emphasize the connection to the “story-collection” genre.

2.2.  Basic Characteristics of the Story-Collection 2.2.1.  Complex and Compound Nature The stories within the extant medieval story-collections of Europe fall into a variety of genres: novella; sermon exemplum (example or model); fabliau (a comic tale in verse); lai (a narrative poem for singing); saint’s legendary biography or vita; history; animal fable; and others. 20 The story-collection is thus a compound and/or complex genre. It is compound in the sense that several genres can be strung together in juxtaposition within a collection in a more-or-less paratactic arrangement, and complex in the sense that some genres might be subordinate to others in a hypotactic arrangement; that is, genres might contain subgenres, which in turn might contain other subgenres. The story-collection itself, as a macro-genre, subordinates other genres in this way. According to Alastair Fowler, with any aggregation or collection of genre there is a “transformation” of genre. That is, the individual stories are written in a particular genre that is transformed into another when the stories are placed together and ordered with others: “such an aggregate is generically distinct both from its component parts and from unordered collections. Thus, Boccaccio’s Decameron represents a different genre from that of the tales it orders. . . .” 21 Stories about the great events of the world given a chronological ordering in a story18.  Frye et al., Harper Handbook, 309; and see also Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 340. 19.  “ A relatively simple narrative”; see Harmon and Holman, A Handbook to Literature, 516. Note Frye et al.’s definition: “A simple short narrative with a story-teller’s air,” Harper Handbook, 456. 20.  Perhaps to be included also is the nova, which was presented in courts, as “opposed to the exemplum used in the churches”; see Corradina Caporello-Szykman, The Boccaccian Novella: Creation and Waning of a Genre (Studies in Italian Culture, Literature in History 2; New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 37. It is almost completely lost to us and only known by references made in other texts; see Walter Pabst, Novellentheorie und Novellendichtung: Zur Geschichte ihrer Antinomie in den romanischen Literaturen (2nd. ed.; Heidelberg: Winter, 1967), 16. 21. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 171–72.

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collection must then be read as universal histories; for example, one finds the anonymous Middle English Cursor mundi, an early fourteenth-century collection of some 30,000 lines of verse, which adapts biblical history into “seven ages” of humankind. 22 Another example of transformation, this time involving didacticism, is found in Boccaccio’s Ameto, written shortly before the Decameron ca. 1341. In the Ameto, the moralizing nature of the work as a whole is not explicit in the individual, rather bawdy stories told by seven nymphs to Ameto the shepherd but is made known in the frame story when, at the end of the day of storytelling, Ameto realizes that the nymphs are really the seven virtues and his previous sexual love for the nymphs becomes a Christian, spiritual love. 23 Thus, when reading the stories with the frame in mind, the stories become lessons containing an allegorical message. 24 The importance of considering genre transformation in regard to the collection of stories in Daniel is readily apparent. Most obviously, one notes that the attachment of the popular and humorous stories about Daniel (also called by the Babylonian name Belteshazzar) and his friends in the foreign courts of the sixth century b.c.e. (chs. 1–6) to the apocalyptic visions (chs. 7–12), which allude to the realities of Jewish persecution in the Maccabean period in the mid-second century b.c.e., necessitates a reassessment of their function as purely entertainment. The tone of the book makes an abrupt change when the symbolic visions begin: suddenly, the foreign kings of history are portrayed as evil potentates whose kingdoms must be destroyed before the Jews can be delivered from oppression, as opposed to the kings of the stories, who are portrayed as quick-tempered and arrogant but whose rule is conducive to Jews who live righteously. As for Daniel, in the stories, he is a mantic possessed by the spirit of God who interprets the dreams and riddles of the court with ease, while in the visions he is a seer who is unable to interpret his own strange visions without the agency of an angel. 25 Thus, the genre of the stories is transformed by their juxtaposition with the visions: taken all together, the stories and visions of Daniel become part of the macro-genre or composite genre “apocalyptic,” as John G. Gammie, following 22.  Rev. Richard Morris, ed., Cursor mundi (The cursur o the world) A Northumbrian poem of the XIVth century in four versions (EETS O.S., 57, 59, 62, 66, 68, 99, 101; London: Published for the Early English Text Society by Kegan Paul,Teench, Trübner & Co., 1874–93), Vol. 57, Prologue. See also John J. Johnson, The Cursor Mundi: Poem, Texts and Contexts (Oxford: The Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 1998), 1–7. 23. Giovanni Boccaccio, L’Ameto (trans. J. Serafini-Sauli; Garland Library of Medieval Literature 33; New York: Garland, 1985), xvii. 24. See Gittes, Framing the Canterbury Tales, 74. 25.  Or, read another way, his abilities move from interpreting others’ dreams to becoming a dreamer of dreams himself, a progression of steady empowerment. See Fred Blumenthal, “The Book of Daniel: A Guide for Judaism in Exile,” JBQ 29 (2001), 73–79.

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Klaus Koch, has defined it, 26 whereas the stories on their own (except perhaps the one in ch. 2) 27 have little that can be called apocalyptic. 28 It is also in this context that one must take into account the different ordering of the stories and visions in the Greek texts (Theodotion and the Old Greek/ Septuagint) in contrast with the Hebrew-Aramaic Masoretic Text. If one views each edition of the stories as a retelling, then the order or arrangement of each must be seen as following the intentions of a different author/compiler. The deuterocanonical Greek additions to Daniel include not only extra poems set in the middle of ch. 3 (the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men) but two extra stories not in the MT—Susanna and Bel and the Serpent—so how they are ordered in the Greek editions may be significant. In the Theodotionic ordering, for example, one might well suppose that the author was thinking in terms of a Daniel biography, or vita, in that Theodotion Daniel chronologically follows Daniel’s career: it places Susanna, in which Daniel is a young man, at the beginning of the book, and Bel and the Serpent in which Daniel is serving under Cyrus—and therefore presumably an old man—at the end of the book after the visions in MT chs. 7–12. The Old Greek in Pap967, on the other hand, affixes both of the story Additions after chs. 1–12 (but Bel before Susanna) and rearranges the internal chapters (1–4, 7–8, 5–6, 9–12) to follow more chronologically. Like Theodotion Daniel, it thus begins and ends with stories set in the mundane world of daily life in the exile and thus diminishes the alarming worldview of the visions. The repositioning of chs. 7–8, visions set in the reign of Belshazzar, to precede ch. 5, the story of that king’s fall, also helps to do this. However, unlike Th Daniel, the OG’s ring composition emphasizes a concern for the education of Jewish young people, in that it begins with Daniel and his friends’ successful 26.  John G. Gammie, “Classification, Stages of Growth, and Changing Intentions in the Book of Daniel,” JBL 95 (1976), 192ff. Klaus Koch, in his Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik, has defined the “apocalyptic” of the Book of Daniel as a complex literary genre (Rahmengattung) consisting of subgenres (Gliedgattungen); see Koch, Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1970), 15–31, trans. M. Kohl as The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic (SBT 2/22; London: SCM, 1972), 18–33. Note that Gammie’s classification of the subgenres of the Book of Daniel does not stop at stories and visions but for his purposes includes: vision report, vaticinia ex eventu, parenesis, liturgical genres (blessings, woes, hymns, and prayers), nature wisdom, story, fable, allegory, dialogue, riddle, māšāl or parable, interpretation of prophecy or pĕšārîm, and eschatological prediction (Gammie, “Classification,” 193). 27.  The dream of a multisectioned statue in ch. 2 is mirrored by Daniel’s vision of four beasts in ch. 7 (both are interpreted as four empires). However, note Collins: “The dream in Daniel 2 should be regarded as an important prototype of the apocalyptic vision rather than as a fully developed example,” most notably because there is no angelic mediator of the dream (Collins, Daniel, 173). 28.  Pace Rainer Albertz, Der Gott des Daniel: Untersuchungen zu Daniel 4–6 in der Septuagintafassung sowie zu Komposition und Theologie des aramäischen Danielbuches (SBS 31; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1988); and idem, “Bekehrung von oben als ‘messianisches Programm.’ Die Sonderüberlieferung der Septuaginta in Daniel 4–6,” 46–62.

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struggle to remain Jewish while being trained in the Babylonian court (Dan 1) and ends with a praise of the virtues of all young people “beloved by Jacob” and an exhortation to “watch out” for them (Susanna 62).

2.2.2.  Structure: Diversity and Coherence In Cooper’s view, the story-collection had two guiding concerns. The first involved the organization of the miscellany within the story-collection, the imposing of “some kind of coherence or order, or both, on a mass of disparate material.” 29 The second was a concern with morals; there might be a variety of relationships between story and meaning, but “it was rarely sufficient for a story to exist solely for its entertainment value.” 30 These boundaries between the didactic aspect of the story collection and its entertainment aspect are fluid, and are sometimes artfully manipulated (see below.) A story-collection, while often containing quite disparate material, achieves coherence through a variety of organizing principles. In addition to the existence of enclosing or linking material, there is often the purposeful selection of stories based on common genre or theme and/or the imposition of a specific arrangement upon the stories that follows a particular spatial, chronological, or other applicable sequence. Cooper’s definition of the story-collection maintains that there are three kinds with regard to structure: Story-collections can be divided very simply into three kinds in terms of their structural ordering. There are those that consist simply of tales, with no enclosing material at all; there are those that have a prologue and sometimes an epilogue but no linking matter between the tales; and there are some that have a fully-developed framework enclosing and connecting the stories. 31

In all three of Cooper’s divisions by structure, the principle of selection by genre or theme, or even function, is at work. For story-collections without any frame material at all, this can sometimes be the only way of imposing structure. The most famous collection of unframed tales, the Gesta romanorum, was a collection of 180 stories, often with a moralization attached to each, that could be longer than the tale itself. 32 Both the Gesta and the Moralitates (47 stories written 29.  Cooper, Structure, 8. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was a distinctio (a group of typologically related things) or even a summa (encyclopedia of kinds) more than any other medieval story-collection, in that Chaucer used disparate genres and themes in his collection to demonstrate his artistry; Cooper, Structure, 72. 30. Cooper, Structure, 8. 31. Cooper, Structure, 9–10. 32.  Ed. Hermann Oesterley, Gesta Romanorum (Berlin: Weidmann, 1872); for an English translation, see Charles Swan, Gesta Romanorum (rev. Wynnard Hooper; London: Routledge; 1894; reprint New York: AMS, 1970).

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from 1334–42 by Robert Holcot and drawn from an early revision of the Gesta) 33 have as their selection principle the stories’ function as sermon exempla and have no connection between the stories or any logical ordering. Another means of ordering the unframed collections is to arrange the events sequentially, if not chronologically. The Alphabetum narrationum attributed to Etienne de Besançon and its fifteenth-century English translation, the Alphabet of Tales, have arranged the stories in alphabetical order of moral catchword in order to aid preaching (“A” includes such topics as abbots, abstinence, adultery, ambition, angels, etc.), and there is no separate moralization. 34 Finally, saints lives and miracles may occur with or without an introduction or prologue and therefore may be placed in either Cooper’s first structural category or in the second. The second kind of story-collection, which has a prologue or even epilogue from the author but no real frame or linking material as such, often orders its stories chronologically too, in addition to having the same genre or theme. These include saints’ lives (vitae), miracles, and legendaries, such as The South English Legendary of the thirteenth century, which follows the church calendar for order, 35 and secular biographies; for example, Petrarch’s De viris illustribus vitae, Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium and De claris mulieribus, Osbern Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen, Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, and Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. 36 Of these, only The Legend of Good Women 33. The Moralitates were printed in the sixteenth century at the end of Holcot’s commentary to the Wisdom of Solomon; see Robertus Holkot, In Librum Sapientiae Regis Salomonis Praelectiones CCXIII (Basel: sine nomine, 1586; photoduplicated by Chicago: University of Chicago library, 1970), 703–50. 34.  Etienne de Besançon, An Alphabet of Tales: An English 15th Century Translation of the Alphabetum Narrationum of Etienne de Besançon from Additional MS.25, 719 of the British Museum (ed. Mary Macleod Banks; EETS O.S. 126–27, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1904–5). 35.  Ed. Charlotte d’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill, The South English Legendary: Edited from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS. 145 and British Museum MS. Harley 2277, with Variants from Bodley MS. Ashmole 43 and British Museum MS. Cotton Julius D. IX (3 vols.; EETS O.S. 235–36, 244, London: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press,1956–1959). 36.  For critical editions, see (respectively): Francesco Petrarca, Le vite degli uomini illustri di Francesco Petrarca, volgarizzate da Donato degli Albanzani da Pratovecchio: Ora per la prima volta messe in luce secondo un codice Laurenziano citato dagli accademici della Crusca, ed. Luigi Razzolini (2 vols.; Bologna: G. Romagnoli, 1874–79); Boccaccio, De casibus illustrium virorum (ed. by Louis Brewer Hall using the Paris 1520 edition; Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1962); translated and abridged by Louis Brewer Hall as The Fates of Illustrious Men (New York: Ungar, 1965); for De claris mulieribus, see the translation by Guido Aldo Guarini, Concerning Famous Women (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1963), using the Berne 1539 edition; Bokenham: ed. M. S. Serjeantson, Legendys of hooly wummen, by Osbern Bokenham; edited from ms. Arundel 327 (EETS O.S. 206; London: Pub. for the Early English Text Society by H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1938); for Christine de Pizan, see Maureen Cheney Curnow, The Livre de la Cité des Dames of Christine de Pisan: a Critical Edition” (2 vols.; unpublished Ph.D.

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does not have a chronological or any other kind of internal ordering, and the stories seem to be held together by genre alone. One would also include in this second category the animal fables called “Aesopets,” such as Marie de France’s Fables in Anglo-Norman 37 and the Fabulae of Odo of Cheriton in Latin, 38 which have a prologue but no clear internal ordering system to their single-genre collections, as well as Marie de France’s Lais, that, like her Fables, have a prologue in which she specifically defines the genre of the stories she has collected. Fitting in somewhere between Cooper’s second and third category, because they do not have an overriding frame story, but do have an introduction and some linking between tales, are story-collections such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae. 39 The Metamorphoses is chronologically ordered, and the stories adhere via their common motif of metamorphosis, while the Historia regum Britanniae is a history and thus also has a chronological arrangement. As for the third category of structure, the frame narrative, it has often been understood by many scholars past and present as the representative form of the story-collection par excellence, rather than merely being one type of storycollection. R. Clawson established a commonly accepted definition for the framing story in 1951: A frame-work or framing story is to be understood as a narrative which, however interesting in itself, was composed for the primary purpose of introducing and connecting a series of tales, which are the raison d’être of the whole work. 40

A frame narrative is, therefore, often a story about story-telling, and the stories themselves are implicitly the creation of the story-telling character(s) of the frame. As mentioned above, it has been suggested by some that Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina clericalis, with its Arabic and Hebrew sources, either brought the frame dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1975); and for an accessible translation in English, Rosalind Brown-Grant, The Book of the City of Ladies (London: Penguin, 1999); Geoffrey Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women (ed. Janet Cowen and George Kane; Medieval Texts and Studies 16; East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1995). 37.  Die Fabeln der Marie de France (ed. Karl Warnke; Bibliotheca Normannica VI; Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1898). 38.  Ed. Léopold Hervieux in Les Fabulistes Latins depuis le Siècle d’Auguste jusqu’à la fin du Moyen Age (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1884–99), Vol. IV. 39.  See Jacob Hammer, ed., Historia regum Britanniae: A Variant Version Edited from Manuscripts (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1951); and for a translation, Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, translated and with an introduction by Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1966; reprint, 1968). For a more recent edition and translation, see Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain; edited and translated by Michael Faletra (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2008). 40.  W. H. Clawson, “The Framework of the Canterbury Tales,” University of Toronto Quarterly 20 (1951), 137–54, esp. p. 137.

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narrative to the west or at least renewed interest in it, and B. E. Perry’s proposal that Western Asia—and not India—is the “original nursery” of the “paratactic arrangement of stories on one frame” has been widely received. 41 The three sophisticated fourteenth-century collections mentioned at the outset of this chapter fall into this category of structure. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (ca. 1388–1400) has as its frame a group of pilgrims traveling to Canterbury who decide to tell each other tales on the way. The frame story in Boccaccio’s Decameron (1348–52) concerns the flight of seven ladies and three gentlemen from the plague in Florence, who, to pass the time once they have arrived at a country estate outside the city, each tell one story per day in the course of ten days, one hundred stories in all. The Confessio amantis of Gower (1390) has a lover, “Amans,” confessing all he has suffered for love to Genius, a priest of Venus, who then tells Amans exemplary stories of behavior and fortunate love ordered in the sequence of the seven deadly sins. Note that the purpose of the storytelling given in the frame of the first two is for the amusement of the travelers, while the second is ostensibly for the instruction of the main character. Similarly, the Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry, a story-collection written in 1371–72 by Geoffrey de la Tour-Landry, a French knight, has as its frame narrative the widowed knight’s wish to tell edifying stories for the education of his three daughters. 42 The twelfth-century Disciplina clericalis (the Scholar’s Guide or Instruction) of Petrus Alfonsi also indicates that the storytelling is for instruction, but in this case the storytellers are many: an Arab father giving advice to his son; Enoch (Idrīs, in Arabic) and Balaam (Luqmān in Arabic) speaking to their respective disciples; as well as several unnamed philosophers or teachers telling stories or giving lists of aphorisms. 43 El Conde Lucanor, written by Don Juan Manuel in 1335, greatly resembles the Disciplina clericalis in variety of content, but in its framing story has only one adviser, Patronio, from whom Count Lucanor asks advice. 44 On the other hand, rather than amusement or instruction, the Book of Sindibad and the Seven Sages of Rome, the eastern and western versions of the 41.  B. E. Perry, The Origin of the Book of Sindbad (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1960), 25. See also Gittes, Framing the Canterbury Tales, 9–20; Hans R. Runte, J. Keith Wikeley, Anthony J. Farrell, eds., The Seven Sages of Rome and the Book of Sindbad: An Analytical Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1984); and Johannes de Alta Silva, Dolopathos, translated and edited by Brady B. Gilleland; (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1981), xiii–xix. 42. Thomas Wright, ed., The Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry (EETS O.S. 33; New York: Greenwood, 1868). 43.  Cooper discusses the Disciplina clericalis in her section on the frame narrative but expresses reservations that there was a consistent speaker or coherent frame; see Cooper, Structure, 20ff. But see also Gittes (Framing the Canterbury Tales, 5) as an example of those who detect a clear frame narrative in the Disciplina clericalis. 44.  See the edition by José Manuel Blecua (Don Juan Manuel, El Conde Lucanor, trans. José Manuel Blecua, with updated notes by Fernando Gómez Redondo [Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 2000]).

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same basic medieval collection, have the need to delay or defend against an execution as the purpose behind the telling of stories by characters in the frame. The frame narrative includes the instruction of a prince by a sage or sages, who learn through astrology that the prince will die if he does not remain silent for a time. When the prince’s stepmother tries to persuade him to speak, and then to seduce him, she is rebuffed by his silence; after she cries rape, the prince is condemned to death. To delay his execution, the seven sages tell stories for seven days, and the stepmother responds with her own about the evils of sons; at the end of the week, the son is again able to speak and is freed. 45 This delay tactic is also famously echoed in the frame story of Alf laylah wa-laylah, or A Thousand Nights and a Night (also known as the Arabian Nights). In the Nights, Shahrazad, the new bride of the misogynist king Shahrayar, who has executed a series of brides before her, postpones her death day after day by arousing the king’s interest in the stories she nightly tells to her sister from her bed. The king is so enthralled with each installment of story-telling that he does not kill Shahrazad and finally gives up his plan after 1001 nights and after she has borne him a child or two. 46 Sometimes, three or more levels of narration can be operating simultaneously, when an enclosed story just beneath the level of the framing story itself encloses another story or stories, something reminiscent of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls. This is rare for the medieval European story-collections (but see the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” for an example in the Canterbury Tales, in which Chauntecleer, the rooster, tells stories about dreams that have come true); an excellent example, however, is provided by the Indian Pañcatantra. Originally composed in Sanskrit probably ca. 300 c.e. and translated into Pahlavi in the sixth century, most non-Indian modern versions go back to an Arabic version known as Kalilah wa-Dimnah, or the Fables of Bidpai, ca. 750 c.e. 47 In the frame, a sage promises to teach three princes practical and political wisdom by telling them stories, mainly beast fables, over a period of six months. This framing story in turn surrounds five boxing stories (“books”), each containing other stories that, in each of the five 45.  There are several differences between the Western and Eastern versions, including the number and content of the stories (the Western versions tell only one story each while the Eastern versions tell two or more, and only four of the Eastern stories appear in the Western versions), the presence or absence of Sindibad as the main teacher of the prince (the Western versions do not mention Sindibad), etc., but the frame is otherwise nearly the same. See below, ch. 3. For a summary of theories concerning the eastern origins of The Book of Sindibad and an excellent edition of the Old Spanish version (Libro de los engaños), see María Jesús Lacarra, Sendebar (3rd ed.; Madrid: Catedra, 1996). 46.  The extant manuscripts of the Nights divide into two branches, the Syrian and the Egyptian, of which the Syrian seems to be the older. The most recent and best edition of the Nights is by Muhsin Mahdi and is based on the oldest Syrian manuscript; see Muhsin Mahdi, Alf layla wa-layla (2 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 1984). The best English translation of the Mahdi edition is by Husain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights (New York: Norton, 1990). 47. Carl Brockelmann, “Kalīla wa-Dimna,” in E. van Donzel et al., eds., The Encyclopaedia of Islam (new ed.; Leiden: Brill, 1978), vol. 4, 503–6.

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“books,” focus on a different aspect of knowledge: the losing of friends, the winning of friends, war and peace, loss of gains, and hasty action. The descendants of the Pañcatantra via the Arabic Kalilah wa-Dimnah add about a dozen stories and include Calila e Dimna in Spanish by Alfonso X in perhaps 1251 48 and the Directorum humanae, a thirteenth-century Latin translation by John of Capua from a twelfth-century Hebrew version of the Arabic. 49 When one compares the structure of Daniel 1–6 to Cooper’s categories of structure for story-collections, one notes that there is a kind of prologue (MT ch. 1 in Hebrew, which can be seen to cover both the Aramaic stories alone and the book as a whole, since it gives the length of Daniel’s career in v. 21), some limited connections between the stories, and several layers of narration. In Daniel, however, the prologue is not the kind in which an author states his or her intentions, nor does it introduce an overt storyteller or storytellers, characters in the first layer of narration who tell the individual stories that follow. Thus, the collection of stories in Daniel 1–6 compares to the more simply structured kinds of storycollections, rather than those with a full framework introducing and surrounding the stories. The organization and coherence of the stories is provided by similar motifs and/or genre, the centralization on a main character, Daniel, and an imposed chronological progression through three foreign empires and their kings. The few cross-references between stories also aid coherence, yet one notes that the links are rather sporadic; for example: in Dan 5, King Belshazzar is told about Daniel by the queen (or queen mother), who recounts events from the story in ch. 4, but in ch. 2, King Nebuchadnezzar meets Daniel for the first time as if the events of ch. 1 never took place. This emphasizes the discrete and self-contained nature of the stories as opposed to displaying novelistic or linear development of plot from ch. 1 to ch. 6. On the other hand, when one considers other stages of Daniel, the situation is more nuanced. If the collection of Daniel 4–6 was either an earlier or later (apocopated) version of the Daniel 1–6 collection, as some suggest, then the opening (3:31–33) and closing doxology (6:25–28) of this collection in the Masoretic Text work as a prologue and epilogue to the short collection of three stories. 50 Or, if one considers the addition of the visions to the stories, the view is also altered. In 7:2, the third-person stories about Daniel switch to the firstperson visions of Daniel; the Daniel of the stories begins to speak, recounting his visions. The stories when read retroactively gain Daniel as their overt storyteller. Later, in chs. 11 and 12, especially in the angel Michael’s command to Daniel to keep the words and the book hidden or sealed, an implied audience is indirectly 48.  See Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua and María Jesús Lacarra, transl., Calila e Dimna (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1984). On the date, see pp. 12–19. 49. Joseph Derenbourg, ed., Directorium Vitae Humanae (2 vols.; Paris: F. Vieweg, 1887–89). 50.  See, for example, Collins, Daniel, 37–38. Note that the opening and closing doxologies are each told by a different king: Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian and Darius the Mede.

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addressed in the secretive language of apocalyptic. One may well assume that the audience is, or is encouraged to be, the maśkîlîm or ‘wise’ who “will give understanding to many” although they may “fall, so that they might be refined, purified, and cleansed, until the time of the end” (11:33, 35), who “will shine like the brightness of the firmament” (12:3), and who “shall understand” Daniel’s words when the wicked do not (12:10). In addition, Daniel, now the narrator, reflects on the composition of the very book at hand. He reports that the angel told him to keep the words secret and the book sealed, thus suggesting that the visions, and perhaps the stories as well, were written down by Daniel himself. But here again, the Greek editions of Daniel subvert the visions because of their ordering: in both Theodotion and the Old Greek, the book of Daniel does not end with the visions of chs. 7–12 but with an additional story or stories that are again told in the third person. The very serious tone of the first-person visions of Daniel is mitigated by a return to the third-person telling of entertaining stories about Daniel’s past successes.

2.2.3.  Function: Instruction vs. Entertainment One feature common to story-collections is a connection to “instruction” or “wisdom.” As noted above, the second guiding concern of a story-collection (after the concern with organization), is, according to Helen Cooper, a concern with morals. Entertainment alone is rarely enough as a purpose; at least a superficial nod to the didactic is required. A conspicuous intention within collections of sermon exempla is that the miscellaneous stories have been collected to inspire and admonish a community of believers. The saints’ legendaries, too, are used to instruct their audience; the good deeds and faith of the Christian saints are in some sense to be emulated. Often, the frame story of a story-collection includes a claim by the storyteller that the stories are for the instruction of someone else within the frame narrative, or there is a claim by the implied author that the implied audience or reader will be edified. In addition, the characters at the heart of many story-collections, especially in the story-collections originating in the East, such as the Disciplina clericalis, the Book of Sindibad/The Seven Sages of Rome, and the Pañcatantra, as well as their descendants, are frequently wisemen, learned courtiers, or philosophers. In the Book of Daniel, one notes that Daniel’s very name (“God/El is my judge”), his training and skills, and his profession as a royal adviser or courtier, all argue for the didactic nature of the book as a whole. In addition, wisemen have wise counsel and their deeds and words are often collected for posterity. The stories about Daniel thus become a foundation or frame for the apocalyptic visions narrated by Daniel. 51 51. Matthias Henze sees all of the MT stories as a frame for the visions, a view that is fair but does not fully account for the fact that the frame narrative is composed of not one but six separate narratives; see Henze, “The Narrative Frame of Daniel A Literary Assessment,” 5–24,

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The need for instruction, however, is often balanced by, or in lively tension with, the need to be entertaining as well. John of Capua’s prologue to the Directorium vitae humanae, the Latin translation of the Arabic Kalilah wa-Dimnah, reflects the original’s emphasis that the work is for both delight as well as instruction: “Iste liber est ad scientiam et ludum.” 52 Sometimes, the emphasis on the didactic is actually rather forced or even consciously ironic. In the Gesta romanorum, Cooper notes story no. 33, De jactantia, in which a man named Paletinus possesses a tree upon which all three of his late wives had hung themselves. When asked what to do about the tree, his friend tells him to sell cuttings from the tree to other men who might benefit from the tree’s properties! One may wonder how the misogynist story could be used as a sermon exemplum, but the allegorical interpretation found in the appended moral to the story understands the tree as the cross and the three wives as various kinds of sins. 53 As for the Decameron, Boccaccio states in the prologue that it was for the support and diversion of ladies in love that he took up his task, and even Boccaccio’s storytellers in the work are depicted as stressing the didactic character of the stories they choose to tell. When they do this for the bawdy tales, such as in “How to put the Devil back into Hell” (a story featuring an anatomically-ignorant girl and a lustful anchorite, which the storyteller says will save the souls of those who hear it), the humor is piquant. 54 Thus, sometimes, interpretations of story-collections stretch the plausibility of a “wisdom theme”; they are instead didactic in an ironic sense. The usage of a proverbial situation may be entertaining itself. In such cases, the entertainment is the point, not the didactic teaching, although these distinctions are often blurred. This is a point to return to when Daniel is discussed in chapter 4; the agglutination of stories, each ending in a predictably and repetitively fortunate manner for the Jewish courtiers, has a double function of being didactic as well as serving to entertain. 55 The reader or audience is given examples of Jewish esp. 6–7; idem, “The Ideology of Rule in the Narrative Frame of Daniel (Dan 1–6),” Society of Biblical Literature 1999 Seminar Papers (SBL Seminar Papers 38; Atlanta: SBL, 1999), 527–39. 52.  Derenbourg, ed., Directorium Vitae Humanae, 6. 53.  Cooper, Structure, 10–11. Chaucer uses the same story in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, without a moral and as an anti-feminist exemplum, which seems more suited to the story itself than the strangled allegory. 54. Giovannai Boccaccio, The Decameron (transl. Guido Waldman; introduction and notes by Jonathan Usher; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 240ff. 55.  On humor in Daniel, see, for instance: Edwin G. Good, “Apocalyptic as Comedy: The Book of Daniel,” Semeia 32 (1985), 2–70; Hector Avalos, “The Comedic Function of the Enumerations of Officials and Instruments in Daniel 3,” CBQ 53 (1991), 580–88; and David M. Valeta, “The Satirical Nature of the Book of Daniel,” in Christopher Rowland and John Barton, eds., Apocalyptic in History and Tradition (JSPSup 43; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2003), 81–93; idem, Lions and Ovens and Visions: A Satirical Reading of Daniel 1–6 (Hebrew Bible Monographs 12; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2008). On humor in the Bible more generally, see

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righteousness in the face of many challenges, but there is also much that is ironic and the audience is meant to be delighted at a story of just how God exalts the righteous at the expense of somewhat buffoonish gentile kings. The monarchs themselves are repeatedly forced to admit and praise the superiority of their Jewish advisers’ God. The amusement and the instruction are thus interdependent, and each reinforces the other.

2.2.4.  Orality and Literariness: The Interaction between Oral Performance and Written Composition The story-collection genre can be in almost any position on the spectrum of orality to literariness. The medieval collections of sermon exempla are examples of written texts that lie close to their oral performance; the truncated prose narratives report only the bare bones of the plot, leaving it up to the preacher to embellish upon the characters or other aspects. They were first written for the priests who worked them into oral sermons for their congregations, suggesting that the written word was merely a mnemonic device in the sermon exempla. 56 Similar to the exempla collections in this respect is Alf laylah wa-laylah (A Thousand Nights and a Night), the oldest extant manuscripts of which date to the fourteenth century 57 but which came to Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 58 The storytellers of the Nights usually worked from a written text or “prompt” text perhaps consisting of a mere outline of the story but sometimes also with an author/storyteller’s favorite elaborations appended. 59 On the other end of the Yehuda T. Radday and Athalya Brenner, eds., On Humour and the Comic in the Hebrew Bible, (JSOTSup 92; Bible and Literature Series 23; Sheffield: Almond, 1990). 56. The exemplum “raccoglie da tutte le parti episodi e spunti narrativi, che riduce alla loro più sobria struttura; e, a loro volta, questa serie di esempi vengono a costituire un vivaio di temi novellistici di prodigiosa fertilità”; S. Battaglia, “L’esempio medievale,” in his La coscienza letteraria del medioevo (Napoli: Liguori, 1965), 480; see also Boitani, English Medieval Narrative, 2–3. 57. Nabia Abbott, “A Ninth-Century Fragment of the ‘Thousand Nights’: New Light on the Early History of the Arabian Nights,” JNES 8 (1949), 129–64. Dating the Nights is notoriously problematic. The Nights are probably far older than any of their manuscripts; Abbott notes that extant manuscripts of Arabic light and entertaining literature often “consist of trade or private copies, usually dating from periods considerably later than that of the original work”; “A Ninth-century Fragment of the ‘Thousand Nights’,” 130. 58. E. Littmann, “Alf Layla wa-Layla,” in H. A. R. Gibb et al., eds., The Encyclopaedia of Islam (new ed.; Leiden: Brill, 1960), vol. 1, 358–64. Although the framework and possibly some stories had found their way to Europe, perhaps in the fourteenth-century; see Abbott, “A Ninth-Century Fragment,” 164. 59.  In 1924, Duncan MacDonald reported on the presence of story-manuscripts of the Nights in the personal library of a professional reciter in Damascus, and Edward Lane writes of storytellers in Egypt reading aloud from epics and occasionally from the Nights as part of their public performance in the early nineteenth century. See Duncan Black MacDonald, “The Earlier History of the Arabian Nights,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1924), 370; and Edward

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spectrum from the exempla collections and the Nights, one notes elaborate works such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Canterbury Tales, which, although they had an oral performance in that they were read aloud by their author or others, are poems that display more deliberately artistic or aesthetically conscious characteristics. 60 As such, they must thus rank as more literary than oral. By contrast, somewhere in the middle of the oral–literary spectrum, one finds collections such as the nineteenth-century Grimms’ Fairy Tales, which provide a remarkable case study not only for folk-story collecting (in their case, methodologically-unsound collecting) 61 but also for tracing the movement from oral to literary story-telling and the interaction between the two. The Fairy Tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are notorious for the fact that, in each of the seven large and ten small editions, all completed in the brothers’ lifetimes (from 1812–1858), they consciously edited stories to improve them stylistically, and one can discern from edition to edition that their original intent of reconstructing the “genuine” voice of the German folktale was gradually replaced by literary principles. 62 For example, one may compare the preface of their first edition in 1812 to that of their second edition in 1819. In the first, they claim that the stories are collected directly from the German Volk: “no particular has been either added through our own poetic recreation, or improved and altered,” 63 while in the second, they subtly change this to: “we have added nothing of our own, have improved no circumstance or trait of the story itself, but have given its content just as we received it; that the expression largely originates with us is self-evident.” 64 William Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians: Written in Egypt during the Years 1833, –34, and –35 (5th ed.; London: John Murray, 1860), 414–25. 60.  For the Canterbury Tales, see Leonard Michael Koff, Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 3ff. 61.  See John M. Ellis, One Fairy Story Too Many (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), for the most important skeptical examination of the Grimms’ methodology and use of their sources. 62. Siegfried Neumann, “The Brothers Grimm as Collectors and Editors of German Folktales,” in Donald Haase, ed., The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 24–40, esp. p. 32. See also Ruth B. Bottigheimer, “Marienkind (KHM 3): A Computer-Based Study of Editorial Change and Stylistic Development within Grimms’ Tales from 1808 to 1864” (ARV: Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore 46 [1990], 7–31), for a study of Wilhelm Grimm’s editorial reworking from one edition to another between 1808–64 of one particular fairy tale text, that of the “Marienkind.” 63. Brian Alderson, “The Spoken and the Read: German Popular Stories and English Popular Diction,” in Donald Haase, ed., The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 59. In their first edition, the Grimms were “intent upon tales issuing genuinely from the oral folk tradition and considered it important that such tales be recorded in their own right” (Neumann, “The Brothers Grimm as Collectors and Editors,” 27). However, after the first volume of the first edition did not sell well, Wilhelm began his tinkering with style in the second volume and in the subsequent editions. 64.  Alderson, “The Spoken and the Read,” 59–60. Italics mine.

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Concerning the interaction between the oral performance and the written composition of the Nights, Robert Irwin writes: Although the story collection should not be considered only in literary terms, it would be still less correct to consider it as merely oral folklore slapped down on paper. It is true that many of its stories first circulated as orally transmitted folktales, before being written down, but the point is that they were written down, and those who wrote them down almost invariably gave them a literary shaping. It is occasionally possible to detect the rhythms of oral delivery in the prose of the stories . . . however, there are only occasional traces in the Nights of such important features of oral transmission and delivery as sterotyped adjectives, mnemonic formulas and recurrent summaries of the plot so far. 65

The stories have a “literary shaping” then, with some few traces of “oral transmission and delivery” seen in stereotypical and formulaic features. David Pinault has gone even further, and in his book on story-telling in the Nights makes more explicit the features showing oral transmission behind the literary shaping of the story-collection: 66 (1) the repetitive designation of insignificant characters who reappear later in a significant role; (2) the use of Leitwortstil or Leitwort—a “leading word” that is repeated and expresses a motif throughout the story; (3) the use of thematic and formal patterning—that is, recurrent vocabulary, repeated gestures, accumulations of descriptive phrases around selected objects, etc; and, finally, (4)  dramatic visualization—“the representing of an object or character with an abundance of descriptive detail, or the mimetic rendering of gestures and dialogue in such a way as to make the given scene ‘visual’ or imaginatively present to an audience.” 67 On the other hand, other scholars of orality have severely criticized the wellknown oral-formulaic theory of Milman Parry and Albert Lord, which suggests that there are specific characteristics of oral poetry. 68 According to Kumiko Yamamoto, who works on the oral background of Persian epics, the most important drawback of the theory is that, without knowing the context of the performance, there is no way of knowing whether an author such as Homer really was an oral 65. Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (New York: Penguin, 1994), 114; see also David Pinault, Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 15. 66. Ibid., 16–30. 67. Ibid., 25. 68.  See, for instance: Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960; 2nd ed. by Lord et al., 2000); idem, Epic Singers and Oral Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Milman Parry, “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral VerseMaking, I: Homer and Homeric Style,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41 (1930), 73–143; idem, “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making, II: The Homeric Language as the Language of an Oral Poetry,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 43 (1932), 1–50; and Parry’s collected works in idem, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971).

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singer. 69 In addition, “oral traditional strategies can survive as textual rhetoric in written texts with roots in oral tradition.” 70 With regard to the Bible, several scholars (starting with Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig) have sought to expose the conventional or traditional behind its narratives. 71 For example, Susan Niditch in her Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature, suggests that “the interplay between orality and literacy is a central feature of Israelite self-expression and as such is a vital thread in ancient Israelite culture.” 72 For her, there is no hypothetical oral period followed by a time of literacy in Israel’s history; both interact throughout Israel’s literary history. The texts of the Bible are well-described as traditional-style or as having an oral register, in that, although we cannot prove that parts of the Bible were orally composed, they do reflect certain modes of composition similar to those in works that we can ascertain were orally composed, such as the repetitions, formulas, and conventions. 73 Thus, Niditch and others, such as David Carr, represent a departure from the classic formulation of Parry and Lord that texts can be shown to be either literary or oral; there is instead a complex interplay between oral and literate mentalities, “a continuum or sliding scale in which the aesthetics, purposes of, and attitudes to writing are circumscribed by an oral mentality.” 74 This is a move away from constructing variant editions from an “original” text and shows more respect for what the text meant in different traditions. 75 With regard to Daniel, Edgar Kellenberger has recently demonstrated that some textual variants in the Greek and Hebrew-Aramaic editions of the Daniel stories might be due to the influence of oral tradition during and after their commitment to writing. 76 69. Kumiko Yamamoto, The Oral Background of Persian Epics (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 1–19, esp. p. 19. 70.  Ibid., 19; see also J. M. Foley, The Singer of Tales in Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 60–98. 71.  See Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 88–113. 72. Susan Niditch, Oral World and Written Word: Ancient Israelite Literature (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 134. See also her Underdogs and Tricksters: A Prelude to Biblical Folklore (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 13: “Contemporary folklorists such as Dan Ben-Amos suggest . . . that multiplicity is at the heart of all folklore; tales always exist in multiplicity. These folklorists’ interest is in understanding this or that version in context, not in hunting for Ur-forms, a fresh approach to emulate in exploring the traditional-style narratives of Scripture.” See also Werner H. Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 1–89, and Robert Coote, “The Application of Oral Theory to Biblical Hebrew Literature,” Semeia 5 (1976), 51–64, esp. pp. 60–61; and Robert C. Culley, “Oral Tradition and the OT: Some Recent Discussion,” Semeia 5 (1976), 1–33, esp. p. 21. 73.  Niditch, Oral World and Written Word, 8–24. 74.  Ibid., 133. See also David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3–14. 75.  Niditch, “Oral Tradition and Biblical Scholarship,” Oral Tradition 18 (2003), 43–44. 76. Edgar Kellenberger, “Textvarianten in den Daniel-Legenden als Zeugnisse münd­ licher Tradierung? ” in Melvin K. H. Peters, ed., XIII Congress of the International Organization for

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This discussion of the oral register of written compositions will certainly have a great impact on the deliberation of the literary processes and composition history of the Book of Daniel below. As a preliminary statement concerning the oral register of Daniel, however, one first notes that folkloric elements are reflected in at least five of the six most common genre labels that have been attached to the Daniel stories: Märchen (fairy tale), legend, court tale, romance, midrash, and didactic wisdom tale. 77 (Perhaps only “romance” refers markedly to the literariness of the tales.) This suggests that scholars have understood Daniel to be somehow connected to an oral or traditional background, and there have been various approaches to Daniel from a formal folklore perspective. 78 W. Lee Humphrey’s 1973 division of the Daniel stories of MT into “tales of court conflict” (chs. 3 and 6) and “tales of court contest” (chs. 2, 4, and 5) has been accepted by most Daniel scholars. 79

2.2.5.  Popular Nature The genres found within the complex and/or compound genre “storycollection” are thus probably best described as popular types. They are vastly appealing to a wide variety of audiences, but it is only in the most developed forms of the genre, such as the Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, that they have been considered high literature. And even then, this may be a judgment of later audiences, not necessarily a contemporary one. In some cases, such as Boccaccio’s Decameron, a work that became a classic sometime later was initially thought to be merely popular or vulgar. 80 The move from the evaluation “popular and sub-literary” to “classic and literary” is thus somewhat subjective. Typically, Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Ljubljana, 2007 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), 207–23. 77.  Collins, Daniel, 42; see also Klaus Koch, Das Buch Daniel (Erträge der Forschung 144; Darmstadt: Wissentschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), 88–91. While midrash is utterly in­ appropriate, as Collins has shown, the other labels may overlap to some degree, with the core sense of each emphasizing a particular characteristic. 78.  See Susan Niditch and Robert Doran, “The Success Story of the Wise Courtier: A Formal Approach,” 179–93; and Pamela J. Milne, Vladimir Propp and the Study of Structure in Hebrew Biblical Narrative (Sheffield: Almond, 1988). Milne finds that applying the model Vladimir Propp used for Russian folktales actually cannot be done satisfactorily with regard to Daniel because the stories do not fit into the model. 79.  Humphreys does not analyze the story of ch. 1 other than to say that it serves as an introduction to the other five that follow; Humphreys, “A Life-Style for Diaspora,” 219. 80.  Musa and Bondanella suggest that there was a change in critical perspective of the Decameron in the sixteenth century that “led to its eventual elevation to the status of a classic and model for much of later Italian prose” (Boccaccio, The Decameron: A New Translation, 21 Novelle, Contemporary Reactions, Modern Criticism; selected, translated, and edited by M. Musa and P. Bondanella [New York: Norton, 1977], ix). See also their notes on the sixteenth-century critic Ludovico Dolce’s biographical essay on Boccaccio, which they take as indicative of this shift (ibid., 199).

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a popular work remains embedded in its culture and has the social function of entertainment, while high art becomes universal in its challenge. A popular work that rises out of its time and place of composition may continue to entertain “but will place a different challenge before the audience a century or millennium later from that which it presented at the first performance.” 81 High literature usually has acquired a fixed text, while popular literature may not have done so. The stories of Daniel have often been called “popular”: popular romances, popular court stories or legends, etc. 82 This is because they are amusing or entertaining, and there is a certain nonfixity of text, as is evident in the variations between the Greek and Aramaic editions, especially in chs. 4–6 but also in ch. 3 to a lesser degree. The stories’ connection to orality (as mentioned above) is also to be taken into consideration here. Even though the stories are connected to the more serious visions and the book was eventually canonized, one ought not forget the popular aspect of the stories’ nature.

2.3.  Literary Processes: Composition and Textual History Cooper’s definition stipulated that a story-collection circulate in a coherent form in some sense. The textual history of a particular story-collection, however, is often interwoven with the composition history. In the case of many storycollections, one must deal with unfixed texts—that is, manuscripts with so many variants in the order of stories or details within the stories, some even dating back to the author him/herself, that one suspects that there are multiple editions of a text rather than a single family tree branching off a single trunk, thus making issues of textual history very complex. Also, if each version of the story is really a retelling of the story, even or especially if it is translated into a new language across regional lines, then the same issues discussed above regarding the relationship of the oral performance to written composition are revisited here as well.

2.3.1.  Selection of Material The very act of selection must be seen as part of the composition process. Although there sometimes appears to be an almost complete randomness in the selection of stories, the author of a story-collection usually had an idea or theme as a guiding standard. 83 The two most common principles of selection or com81. Lawrence Wills, The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 35. See also Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (New York: Viking, 1975), 139 (the classic has “inherent plurality”). 82. See Wills, Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 40–67; Bickerman, Four Strange Books, 97; and E. W. Heaton, The Book of Daniel: Introduction and Commentary (Torch Bible Commentaries; London: SCM, 1956), 32–47. 83. J. Allen and T. Moritz, A Distinction of Stories: The Medieval Unity of Chaucer’s Fair Chain of Narratives for Canterbury (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981), 85–86.

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position were based on the collection of a common genre, and/or a common theme or motif, as with the genre “beast fable” frequent in the “Aesopets” of the Medieval period, or the genre of secular or saints vitae in Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus and De casibus illustribus vitae, 84 or the theme of transformation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 85 But sometimes the guiding standard was simply the function of the narratives, as with the sermon exempla, which usually had quite entertaining stories followed by a moral, such as the Gesta romanorum mentioned above or Robert Mannyng’s 1303 composition of Handlyng Synne, a manual for the confession of sin. For most story-collections without a prologue, it is easy to understand the principle behind the selection. For other story-collections, the unity of theme or genre is more difficult to discern. In the more developed collections with a frame narrative, such as the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron, there appears to be an overt thematic grouping of stories (this is even sometimes explicitly stated by the narrator or storyteller); the themes of “marriage” or “love” are very common. However, there are several stories that could be shifted into other sections without a noticeable breakdown in structure. For example, the outer framing story of the Pañcatantra is about the education of princes, while within it are five books based on five different didactic themes that themselves box various stories exploring the five themes. In Book II of the Pañcatantra, which has as its theme the winning of friends, the stories of Mother Sandili and the jackal have nothing to do with the winning of friends but rather deal with intelligence, a subject not expressly covered in any of the five themes within the Pañcatantra. 86 Of course, many stories were “borrowed” or adapted from some other source or often another collection in some way. This was freely done, often times without citing the source or another author (see below). The Daniel stories are organized around a central character, and they have common motifs if not similar genres involving this Jewish courtier Daniel/Belteshazzar who undergoes various conflicts and contests in the foreign courts at which he is in exile. While their original development may or may not have been associated with this specific name, at one point there was probably a large pool or cycle of Daniel stories that were in turn part of an even larger tradition of Near Eastern court tales with the same motifs and themes (see chapter 4).

2.3.2.  Sources and Analogues Story-collections were dependent on preceding literary and intellectual traditions; the authors of medieval story-collections turned to what they thought of 84.  See K. Grubmüller, Meister Esopus: Untersuchungen zu Geschichte und Funktion der Fabel im Mittelalter (Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur Deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters 56; Munich: Artemis, 1977); also Cooper, Structure, 13. 85.  Ibid., 25. 86.  See also Gittes, Framing the Canterbury Tales, 15.

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as authoritative sources, such as the Bible and classical mythology, but often to other medieval stories and story-collections as well. 87 The authors had no compunction about incorporating stories from other story-collections, in addition to borrowing certain devices or stylistic features. In fact, many stories must have been especially popular, because they show up in more than one story-collection. Since examples are abundant, I will cite here only a few story-collections and a few examples from them, namely, some broad outlines about Chaucer’s sources in the Canterbury Tales, some specifics about the Disciplina clericalis, in particular the case of the much-traveled story, “the Weeping Bitch,” and some comments about the borrowing of stories by a story-collection with even more fluid texts and connections to orality, Alf laylah wa-laylah (the Nights). 88 As for the terms “source” and “analogue,” one must define them carefully. In his work on the Decameron, Peter Beidler suggested that “source” should be used as a term for a work that was certainly known “because of external evidence or because of the closeness of narrative or verbal parallels.” Concerning “analogue,” Beidler further distinguishes between a “hard” and a “soft analogue”: the former has “near-source status” if the work would have been available to the compiler and has striking narrative resemblances, and the latter denotes a work that could scarcely have been known because of date or remoteness of parallels. 89 As L. M. Koff notes, Chaucer himself in no way hid the fact that he was reworking or retelling old stories: 87.  Note that both Chaucer and Gower took stories from the Book of Daniel. On Gower and Daniel, see Russell A. Peck, “John Gower and the Book of Daniel,” in Robert F. Yeager, ed., John Gower: Recent Readings: Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983–1988 (Studies in Medieval Culture 26; Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1989), 159–87. 88.  The following are just a few examples of scholars who have worked on the sources and analogues of particular collections, especially in tracing the borrowing of stories between collections; for the Canterbury Tales: W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, eds., Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), updated as Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, eds., Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (2 vols.; Chaucer Studies 28; Cambridge: Brewer, 2002, 2005); for the Decameron: A. Collingwood Lee, The Decameron: Its Sources and Analogues (New York: Haskell House, 1909, 1966), and Vittore Branca, ed., Decameron (3rd ed.; Turin: Einaudi, 1987); for the Disciplina clericalis: Haim Schwarzbaum, “International Folklore Motifs in Petrus Alphonsi’s “Disciplina Clericalis” Sefarad 21 (1961), 267–99; Sefarad 22 (1962), 2–59, 321–44; Sefarad 23 (1963), 54–73; for The Seven Sages of Rome/The Book of Sindibad in the Eastern and Western versions: Killis Campbell, The Seven Sages of Rome, lxxviii–cxiv; and for the Alf laylah wa-laylah: David Pinault, StoryTelling Techniques in the Arabian Nights. 89.  Peter G. Beidler, “Just Say Yes, Chaucer Knew the Decameron: Or, Bringing the Shipman’s Tale Out of Limbo,” in Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen, eds., The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 25–46, esp. pp. 41–42.

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“Old stories” in Chaucer’s day were available to everyone in the sense that members of any reading audience, Chaucer’s included, might have read or heard them before. In this respect, an author like Chaucer might claim that his story was original, or one of a kind, but only insofar as it was his retelling of an older story. Indeed, Chaucer never claims anywhere in his canon that he has written something wholly new; rather he asserts that he has literally, through his retelling of them, brought old stories to the public. 90

Indeed, Chaucer often cites or alludes to his sources. Chaucer mentions Ovid (Ovide) often, and the Metamorphoses specifically once (II. 93) in the “Man of Law’s Prologue” of the Canterbury Tales. He refers to Petrus Alfonsi three times in the “Tale of Melibee” as a source for proverbs (VII. 1053, 1189, 1218) and, in his “Merchant’s Tale,” he uses a story attributed to Petrus Alfonsi (“The Blind Man and the Fruit Tree”) in a fifteenth-century Middle English version of the Disciplina clericalis. While the Canterbury Tales do not mention Gower specifically, several narratives, at least his “Man of Law’s Tale,” the “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” the “Physician’s Tale,” and the “Manciple’s Tale” are all based on tales in Gower’s Confessio amantis. 91 Chaucer also mockingly refers to two of Gower’s stories from the Confessio amantis in the prologue to the “Man of Law’s Tale”: the Man of Law is made to say that Chaucer the pilgrim would never write such “abhomynacions” as Gower’s tales of Canacee and of Apollonius of Tyre, which both have to do with incest. Concerning Chaucer’s use of the Italian Boccaccio, who pre-dates him by half a century, there is much debate. Chaucer never cites Boccaccio by name, yet, “full-scale allusions to, direct echoes of, oblique glances at various works of Boccaccio appear in more and less apparent, but never named places throughout Chaucer’s corpus.” 92 This indirect use of Boccaccio is probably found in at least the “Knight’s Tale” which seems to borrow from Boccaccio’s Teseida and in the subtitle to the “Monk’s Tale,” De casibus virorum illustrium (Concerning the Falls of Illustrious Men), which has to be a nod to Boccaccio’s work of the same name and probably gave the basic idea to Chaucer’s mini story-collection in the “Monk’s Tale” (a catalog of some 16 men, including Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, as well as one woman, Queen Zenobia of Palmyra). 93 In addition, at 90.  Leonard Michael Koff, Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling, 37. See Chaucer’s claim in lines 15–25 of the Parliament of Fowls. 91.  Chaucer does, however, mention “moral Gower” in his Troilus and Criseyde, V. 1856. 92.  Koff and Schildgen, eds., The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, 11. 93.  The details about Zenobia are probably in their turn from Boccaccio’s companion to De casibus virorum illustrium, the De claris mulieribus (Concerning Famous Women), another storycollection. The Nebuchadnezzar (Nabugodonosor) and Belshazzar (Balthasar) stories in the “Monk’s Tale” are taken from the biblical Book of Daniel; the Nebuchadnezzar story combines the great statue and fiery furnace stories from Dan 3 with the beastly transformation in Dan 4, while the Belshazzar story follows Dan 5.

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least 6 of Chaucer’s 24 stories from the Canterbury Tales (the Reeve’s, Clerk’s, Merchant’s, Franklin’s, Shipman’s, and Man of Law’s Tale) have parallels in Boccaccio’s Decameron. 94 One may also argue for the influence of Boccaccio’s Filocolo on the so-called “marriage group” in the Canterbury Tales (the tales of the Wife of Bath, the Clerk, the Merchant, and the Franklin, which deal with relations between husbands and wives). One of the best analyses of the sources and analogues of the Canterbury Tales is still the work initiated by W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster. 95 The idea of the frame could have come to Chaucer during his visit to Spain, a place already noted as a source for framed Eastern collections, such as the Disciplina clericalis. 96 Some scholars have also suggested the Decameron’s frame as a model, or perhaps the Novelle of Giovanni Sercambi (based on his earlier work, the Novelliero). Like the Decameron, the journey in the Novelle is a flight from the plague; however, unlike the Decameron but like the Canterbury Tales, the Novelle has the telling of its 155 tales take place while the group is in motion and includes the author as both traveller and storyteller. 97 As for the Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi, it was translated into French in the twelfth century, and nearly half of its tales can be found in the thirteenthcentury Gesta romanorum, where Petrus Alfonsi is expressly cited (for an example, see story no. 171 in the Gesta). 98 Between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, there were 63 different manuscripts of Latin versions. 99 The fifteenth-century Middle English version omits 8 of the original stories and adds 3 that were in one manuscript of the Latin version. 100 94.  Cooper, Structure, 33ff. 95.  W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, eds., Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941); new edition by Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, eds., Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (2 vols.; Chaucer Studies 28; Cambridge: Brewer, 2002, 2005). 96.  Martha S. Waller, “The Physician’s Tale: Geoffrey Chaucer and Fray Juan García de Castrojeriz,” Speculum 51 (1976), 292–306. 97. Giovanni Sercambi’s Novelle (written after 1385) is based on his now-lost earlier work, the Novelliero, which uses the flight or travel motif during a plague in Lucca in 1374. See Giovanni Sercambi, Novelle, ed. G. Sinicropi (2 vols.; Bari: Gius, Laterza & Figli, 1972); and Robert A. Pratt and Karl Young, “The Literary Framework of the Canterbury Tales,” in W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, 21–81. Unlike Pratt and Young, Helen Cooper thinks it unlikely that Chaucer knew Sercambi’s work; see Cooper, Structure, 35; and ead., “The Frame,” in Correale and Hamel, eds., Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, vol. 1, 1–2. 98.  Swan and Hooper’s edition of the Gesta Romanorum, 322. 99. Dorothee Metzliki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 97. 100.  Of these added three, “The Blind Man and the Fruit Tree,” was already told by Chaucer in the “Merchant’s Tale,” and is similar also to the “Pear-tree” story of Day 7, tale 9 in the Decameron.

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To best illustrate the free borrowing among story-collections and the re­ working or retelling of old stories, one may turn to the famous example of the story of the “Weeping Bitch,” or Dame Sirith. The great use of the popular “Dame Sirith shows how completely an oriental story was absorbed into the popular tradition of medieval England within a hundred years of its first appearance in the West.” 101 The story in the twelfth-century Disciplina clericalis (no. 13, “Exemplum de Canicula Lacrimante”) is about a woman whose husband goes on a journey, and a lovesick admirer who, with the help of an old woman, deceives the wife into sleeping with him. The old woman’s strategy is to convince the younger that a weeping bitch (fed mustard bread on an empty stomach to induce the weeping) is the old woman’s unfortunate daughter who has been transformed into a dog because she too had a lover to whom she did not yield. The young wife is persuaded that she must no longer resist her admirer, or else the same fate will befall her, and she thus sleeps with the young man. 102 Essentially the same story appears in the Nights in the story of the fourth vizier in one of the Sindibad tales (Sindibad the sailor, not to be confused with Sindibad the philosopher in the Book of Sindibad); in the eight eastern versions of the Book of Sindibad (the philosopher); in the eleventh-century Sanskrit Katha Sarit Sagara; in the Middle English independent fabliau Dame Sirith; in the fourteenth-century Persian Ṭūṭī-Nāma; in the Interludium de clerico et puella (from thirteenth-century England, perhaps the oldest secular play in English); the European (but not the English) Gesta Romanorum (no. 28); as well as many more. 103 Although the story is basically the same in each of its appearances, the discrepancies probably demonstrate different approaches in different contexts. The European Gesta Romanorum cannot tolerate the happy ending for the pair: it has the husband discover his wife and her lover and put them to death. The English version of the Gesta, however, does not even include the story at all. For the Gesta, which often served as a source for medieval sermons, one might thus conclude that letting the wife get away with adultery does not suit a Christian moral. By contrast, when the story appears in the Hebrew (Mišlê Sendĕbar), Arabic, and Greek versions (Syntipas) of the Book of Sindibad, an amusing sequel is added that incorporates the young wife’s returning husband: the old woman can not find the lover after the young woman has agreed to yield to him and instead runs into the husband, whom she asks (not knowing his iden101.  Metzliki, The Matter of Araby, 98. 102. Edmund Stengel, Codicem Manu Scriptum Digby 86 in Bibliotheca Bodleiana Asservatum descripsit, excerpsit (Halis: Libraria Orphanotrophei, 1871). For the Latin and a French translation, see Jacqueline-Lise Genot-Bismuth (Petrus Alfonsi, La Discipline de Clergie: Disciplina clericalis, 188–95). For an English translation, see: Jones and Keller, The Scholar’s Guide, 61–64. 103.  See Haim Schwarzbaum, “International Folklore Motifs in Petrus Alphonsi’s “Disciplina Clericalis,” Sefarad 22 (1962), 24ff.; Metzliki, The Matter of Araby, 95–106; Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion, 63ff.

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tity) if he would like to sleep with a lovely young woman. When the old woman brings him to his wife, the wife has the presence of mind to seize him by the hair and beard before he can speak, accuse him of violating their marriage vows, and finally announce self-righteously that her husband has just failed her test of his faithfulness! In his comprehensive review of the motifs in the Disciplina clericalis in the 1960s, 104 Haim Schwarzbaum goes through the Disciplina clericalis tale by tale, exposing their various sources and analogues: “it served . . . as a sort of bridge or literary medium through which Eastern, predominantly Arabic popular stories, proverbs and sayings, have been transmitted or transplanted to Europe. . . . the whole structure of the Disc. Clericalis is modelled on Arab literary patterns which, in turn, are derived from older Indian, Persian and Jewish sources.” 105 While the “Weeping Bitch” story turned out to be incredibly popular, other stories from the Disciplina clericalis also fared well. 106 As for the stories of Alf laylah wa-laylah, they were not created “ex nihilo” for this particular collection but, as David Pinault suggests, “it seems more likely (and more consistent with the historical testimony concerning the earlier Hazār afsāneh) that many if not most of these tales pre-dated the Arabic Alf laylah and were modified and re-told for inclusion in the Nights.” 107 In fact, a separate Arabic manuscript tradition exists independently for many of those stories; these manuscript-collections can be described as “Alf laylah analogues.” Pinault adds, “They are usually untitled, lacking the Scheherazade-frame and any division into nights, but containing one or more narratives also present in Alf laylah texts of the Syrian and Egyptian traditions.” It is supposedly easy enough to compare the distinct versions; however, most of these analogues have never been published or edited. 108 104.  “International Folklore Motifs in Petrus Alphonsi’s “Disciplina Clericalis” Sefarad 21 (1961), 267–99; Sefarad 22 (1962), 2–59, 321–44; Sefarad 23 (1963), 54–73. 105.  Schwarzbaum, Sefarad 21 (1961), 269. 106.  Story no. 24, the “Exemplum de latrone et radio lunae” (“Story of the Thief and the Moonbeam”), is from Kalilah wa-Dimnah; story no. 11, the “Exemplum de Gladio” (“Story of the Sword”), and no. 14, the “Exemplum de Puteo” (“Story of the Well”), are derived from the Book of Sindibad. Part of the frame story of Disciplina clericalis, “Exemplum de Dimidio Amico” (“Story of the Half Friend”), a story about how rare a good friend is, is found in three Estonian oral versions, in the Gesta Romanorum no. 129, in Climente Sánchez de Valdera’s Libro de los Enxiemplos no. 18, in Conde Lucanor no. 48, in Giovanni Sercambi’s Venti Novelle, etc. The motif is also found in Jewish and Arabic folk literature, as well as in the Barlaam and Iosaphat legend (based on the life of Buddha) and in the Mahābhārata. The “Exemplum de Integro Amico” (“Story of the Whole Friend”), also in the frame story of the Disciplina clericalis, is found in the Gesta Romanorum, no. 171, and in the Decameron’s story of Titus and Gisippus in the 10th day, 8th story. 107.  Hazār afsāneh (One Thousand Tales) is a Persian forerunner to the Nights. See Pinault, Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights, 10. 108.  This is the case, for example, with The Fisherman and the Genie and The Enchanted Prince (found in the G and ZER Alf laylah wa-laylah collections) as well as The False Caliph

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Ancient analogues for the Daniel stories are relatively abundant, and much research has already been done on the ancient Near Eastern court tale genre. 109 Chapters 3 and 5 of this monograph will survey these analogues and include in the discussion some new analogues from Egypt that have not been previously examined in connection to Daniel. Moreover, the search for sources leads especially to the large Daniel cycle of stories and visions from the Hellenistic period that we know of from the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls, from the evidence of the Greek Additions, and perhaps from Josephus’s retelling of Daniel in the Antiquities, and yet other sources. After Josephus, however, Daniel material drops off for a few centuries before the Vita Danielis in the Lives of the Prophets (Vitae prophetarum) and other writings began to feature new traditions about Daniel. 110 As for sources and analogues to the Daniel structure—that is, the collection of stories—one finds no direct source but some analogues; in ancient Near Eastern literature, one finds at least three story-collections from Egypt and one from the Hurro-Hittite sphere (see ch. 3 below).

2.3.3.  Duplicate stories Sometimes the same story will even show up in a slightly different form or version in the same collection, especially in the story-collections on the orality end of the oral–literary spectrum. Mia Irene Gerhardt discussed this for the Nights in her The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights, to date the only comprehensive analysis of the Nights from the perspective of literary criticism. 111 She claims that there “is not always external evidence to help establish priority; and again, internal criteria may sometimes be found useful and sometimes not useful at all.” 112 According to her, there are three kinds of duplicates: (1) the same motif or plot has been treated twice; (2) there are two different versions of the same story; or (3) one original story is imitated by another. If the first option obtains, then similarities between the two stories are merely coincidental, and the authors must be independent and unaware of each other. If the second, it is likely that the divergences arose in the course of transmission. If the third, it is probable that some imitator liked the core story but modified and The City of Brass (present in the ZER but not G). Moreover, these stories continued to be transmitted in manuscript collections unaffiliated with the Alf laylah wa-laylah long after the tales had been incorporated into the Nights; see Pinault, Story-Telling Techniques, 10. G = Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, arabe 3609–11, the earliest Nights manuscript (transcribed after 1425) and the one available to Galland; ZER = Zotenberg’s Egyptian Rescension. 109.  See especially Lawrence Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, among others. 110.  There is a near hiatus in the production of new Daniel material from the second to the fifth centuries c.e.; DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 10, 231–32. 111. Mia Gerhardt, The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights (Leiden: Brill, 1963), 52–55. 112.  Gerhardt, The Art of Story-Telling, 52.

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it, whether for the better or for the worse. In this last case, one can hope that the chronological order can be known, but as with cases one and two, imitations may be inferior or superior to the model. Gerhardt notes that sometimes internal evidence appears to indicate which story is original, but external evidence makes the opposite case. In this regard, however, much depends on the serendipity of manuscript preservation, as Gerhardt’s own example of duplicate short stories about famous musicians proves (“Isḥāq el-Mawsilī with the Merchant” and “Ibrāhīm ibn al-Mahdī with the Merchant”). 113 Gerhardt, who at the time thought the Isḥāq story looked more convincing even though she had evidence that the Ibrāhīm story was older, cautiously reasons: The assumption suggested by the literary comparison of the two stories thus turns out to be merely one among a set of possibilities. Masʿudi’s story [the Ibrāhīm story] itself may have been copied from a musician story, in remembrance of Ibrahîm’s particular talents in this field; but it may also be independent from and possibly even older than the musician stories resembling it. The latter, in that case may be imitations improving upon the original, or may have been invented quite independently from what is reported by Masʿudi about Ibrahîm ibn el-Mahdî. There is, as far as I see, no means of effecting a well-founded choice between these different suppositions. 114

With regard to the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, the collection that demonstrates best how an author himself or herself may revise his/her own texts over a long period of time, one notes that the brothers (especially Wilhelm) deleted texts, merged texts with variants, or changed texts so that they no longer were close variants or near duplicates. As S. Neumann notes concerning the Grimms’ preparation of the second edition: Twenty-seven of the texts contained in the first volume and seven of those in the second were deleted, either because they no longer met the aesthetic demands of the Grimms or because they were otherwise questionable. . . . Eighteen texts of the first edition were merged with newly collected variants of specific tales or so substantially changed by other thematic or formal revisions that vir113.  Gerhardt concludes that, although the Isḥāq story is more convincing, fits its context better, and is well-motivated, the Ibrāhīm story must be older since it is preserved in an older manuscript from the tenth-century: al-Masʿūdī’s (d. 956) Murūj að-ðahab. However, she seems to have been unaware of a tenth-century manuscript for the Isḥāq story as well (in Abu l-Faraj al-Isfahīnī’s [d. 967] Kitāb al-Aġānī); see Ulrich Marzolph and Richard van Leeuwen, The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia (2 vols.; Santa Barbara: ABC Clio, 2004), vol. 1, 229 (Ibrāhīm), 233 (Isḥāq); and Heinz and Sophia Grotzfeld, Die Erzählungen aus “Tausendundeiner Nacht” (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 94–95. Marzolph and van Leeuwen remark of the Ibrāhīm story, “The story is a version, probably of a later date, of the tale of Ishâq of Mosul and the Merchant”; Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, vol. 1, 229. 114.  Gerhardt, The Art of Story-Telling, 55. Brackets mine.

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tually new texts resulted. And forty-five texts, revised in varying degrees, were incorporated as new texts in the collection, which now grew to 170 tales.” 115

The Grimms continued to add new or better fairy-tale texts with every new edition. Wilhelm in particular adopted new stories from other collections and replaced weak texts with better variants of the same stories, giving them new titles (e.g., no. 101 “Der Bärenhäuter” instead of “Der Teufel Grünrock”; no. 107 “Die beiden Wanderer” instead of “Die Krähen”; no. 136 “Der Eisenhans” instead of “Der wilde Mann,” etc.). 116 One finds with regard to Daniel that there might be at least three duplicate tales (not counting brief glosses or the like), all of which are in the Greek editions of Daniel: the tale of “Daniel in the lion’s pit” in both ch. 6 and Bel and the Serpent; the preface in the Old Greek of Dan 5; and the short narrative in Dan 3:46–50 between the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men. The lions’ pit or den motif first appears in ch. 6 but then is repeated with different plot and character elements in the second half of the so-called Bel and the Serpent of the Greek Additions. For instance, in the story of ch. 6, Daniel is involved in a court conflict with the Babylonian courtiers, who trick King Darius into condemning Daniel to be thrown in the lions’ pit. The story in Bel and the Serpent adds to the core plot the surreal scene with the prophet Habakkuk who, with his cooking pot, is dragged by the hair through the air by an angel from miles away to the pit where he feeds the hungry Daniel. The second duplicate, the strange preface in the Old Greek of Daniel 5, gives the basic skeleton of the “Writing on the Wall” story to follow, but changes details (e.g., the time of the feast, the number of guests, the order of the mysterious words, among others). It thus appears to be more than a synopsis of the “Writing on the Wall” story, and is better described as an independent form of it. It is also possible that, because of its truncated style and lack of suspense, it is an example of a written “prompt text,” meant to record primarily the basic core of a tale, which could then be modified or elaborated as a storyteller saw fit (see chapter 4). Finally, the short narrative in Dan 3 between the song and prayer in the Greek versions (vss. 46–50) has also been seen as an independent variant of the fiery furnace story, since it states that it is the “Chaldeans” near the furnace (that is, possibly those who actually denounced the three Jews) who are burned up, rather than merely the “strong men” who were the executioners—that is, those responsible for binding and throwing the three young Jewish men into the fire. This makes better sense of justice than the Aramaic edition of the story, which has only the executioners consumed by the fire. 117 115.  Neumann, “The Brothers Grimm as Collectors and Editors of German Folktales,” 28. 116.  Ibid., 29. 117.  Especially in the Theodotion edition, since it only has one group punished by immolation, and that is the Chaldeans who were standing too near (3:48). (The men who throw

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2.3.4. Open-endedness In all three of Cooper’s divisions by structure (story-collections without frame, those with introduction, and those with full framework), the arrangement of stories within the collection can often be varied without much effect on the sense of the whole; this is true for story-collections without a frame or linking material, such as sermon exempla or legendaries, as well as for the framed collections. A common characteristic of story-collections is the open-endedness or incompleteness of the whole. It often seems that more stories could be fit into the collection; the medieval histories could contain more of the same, and the legendaries of the saints have not run out of saints to include. In the Canterbury Tales, for example, the Host announces that each pilgrim will tell two stories coming from and going to Canterbury; however, the pilgrims never reach Canterbury and only 22 tell stories. Yet, at one point the Parson remarks that only one tale is lacking, and 4 stories are interrupted and never completed (the Cook’s, the Squire’s, the Monk’s, and that of Chaucer the pilgrim). Moreover, the precise number of pilgrims is unknown; 29 people are said to have been at the Inn (I.24), but later three priests are mentioned (I.164), and the Canon and his Yeoman join the party after the journey has begun. These oft-debated phenomena have been variously explained as due to the accidence of preservation or to Chaucer’s inability to complete what he started. Another possibility, however, is that Chaucer intentionally left his work incomplete or openended, a maneuver not necessarily unanticipated by his audience. 118 (Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women is also incomplete or unfinished.) In fact, the Canterbury Tales ends in Fragment X with the “Parson’s Tale,” a tract on penance, which seems clearly to be the last story to be told; the pilgrims are said to be at “a thropes ende” (i.e., at town’s end), not yet at Canterbury but nearly there. This final story is followed by Chaucer’s retraction—a traditional medieval conclusion to a work—recanting his writing of the tales and even apologizing for all his other works. In the words of Larry Benson in the Riverside Chaucer, “The Retraction leaves us in no doubt that, unfinished, unpolished, and incomplete as The Canterbury Tales may be, Chaucer is finished with it.” 119 the Jews into the furnace in Th 3:23 are not said to be burned by its flames.) This contrasts with the Old Greek, which has two groups immolated: the men who threw the three men into the fire (3:23) and the Chaldeans who were near the furnace (3:48). 118.  See, for example, Edward I. Condren, Chaucer and the Energy of Creation: The Design and the Organization of the Canterbury Tales (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999). It has also been suggested that Chaucer emulated Arabic or Near Eastern precedents in this; however, this is a feature also found in the classical collections, such as the Metamorphoses of Ovid; see Gittes, Framing the Canterbury Tales, 50–51, 109–11. 119.  “One wonders if a more finished, more nearly perfect version could have been any more satisfying”; Larry D. Benson, “The Canterbury Tales,” in Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer (3rd ed.; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 22.

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The Decameron also consciously violates the tight structure proposed in its introduction. Instead of 10 stories told over 10 days, the stories instead are recounted over 14 days, and 101 are told, not 100 (on the fourth day, Boccaccio tells a partial tale). Also, at the end of the tenth and final day, the group of storytellers argue over the meaning of the last story (the first time they do so), and the king of the day suggests that either they might return to Florence or they might choose another king for the next day and continue the storytelling. 120 The story-collection thus lacks closure, and the possibility exists that the stories might continue indefinitely. If this open-endedness is found in even the highly-structured story-collections such as the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron, then how much more in the Grimms Fairy-Tales or the Arabian Nights? The number “one thousand and one” in the title of Alf laylah wa-laylah (the Arabian Nights) was meant to convey an idea of infinity. Many copies of the Nights do not contain much more than half so many nights or stories, and it was Galland, the French translator, who felt the need to make up stories or turn to other sources in order to fill out the correct number. With regard to open-endedness, the Book of Daniel has room for additional tales, and the fixing of the stories to the reign or year of a particular king seems somewhat arbitrary or at least a secondary element of design, as several scholars have noted. 121 Only ch. 1, the prologue story, must be set in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, since he was the king who besieged Jerusalem and deported Judeans to Babylon, even though the date given the historical events is inaccurate and also inconsistent with other dates given Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel. 122

2.3.5.  Non-fixity or Indeterminacy of Text The protean nature of many story-collections is thus amply demonstrated. As a final note in this overview of literary processes, one returns to the idea of the fluid text so often found with popular literature. The story-collections that are closest to orality on the oral–literary spectrum have already been shown to have unfixed and varied texts. In their transmission and translations they have undergone revisions and retellings. As Gerhardt notes for the Nights: “All . . . 120.  Gittes, Framing the Canterbury Tales, 87–91. 121. For example, see Wills, The Jewish Novel, 50; Olivier Munnich, “Le cadrage dynastique et l’ordre des chapitres dans le livre de Daniel,” in J. Joosten and P. Lemoigne, eds., L’apport de la Septante aux études sur l’antiquité: Actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 8–9 novembre 2002 (Lectio divina 203; Paris: du Cerf, 2005), 161–95; and also Elias Bickerman, who says: “Nebuchadnezzar, burner of the Temple and a man of eight sins in the Jewish tradition is here a standardized king of the Oriental popular stories, from the ancient Egyptian novelettes to the Arabian Nights. He is indistinguishable from Sennacherib in the story of Achiqar or Darius in the same Daniel cycle” (Four Strange Books, 97). 122.  For an overview of the inconsistencies with known history especially in Daniel 1–6, see Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 29–42 and chapter 4 below.

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were storytellers: those who created the stories and those who repeated them, the narrators who worked them over, the redactors who wrote them down, the compilers who collected them, and the translators who made them accessible in other languages.” 123 This fluidity may also be true for some of the mature European storycollections of the fourteenth century. There are often quite variant orderings in the manuscripts of a particular collection. The situation with regard to the Canterbury Tales is well-known: there are 31 surviving manuscript witnesses, which have different orderings of stories in the 10 groups or fragments (fragments are editorial units determined by inter-story signs of linkage), as well as different orderings of the fragments themselves. Certain variants can perhaps be traced back to changes made by Chaucer himself: at an early stage of the composition, the Man of Law (in Fragment II) evidently told “The Tale of Melibee” (in Fragment VII), and the Wife of Bath (in Fragment III) told what is now “The Shipman’s Tale” (in Fragment VII). 124 However, there are no explicit external links between the fragments (except for IX–X, and in the Ellesmere manuscript tradition, IV–V as well), so it seems one is left with few indications of how Chaucer imagined the story-collection to be read. 125 As for the Decameron, Vittore Branca writes, The Decameron appeared as the masterpiece of its type, as the clever systemization of a material beloved but still raw and in a fluid state (although it might have needed a harmonious and stable arrangement). It did not exact the respect and the admiration owed to literary masterpieces but, as the manuscripts show, it evoked a happy and familiar confidence which encouraged alterations and omissions and insertions of new tales, as well as coupling with other narrations. 126

The Decameron with its explicit itinerary of ten tales a day for ten days is structurally organic, yet the pieces of the mosaic are fluid. One author of a medieval story-collection even suggested that his work ought to be amended just as the reader pleased: Juan Ruiz, archpriest of Hita and the author of the fourteenth-century Libro de buen amor (“Book of Good Love”), ca. 1330, wrote: Anyone who hears it (s.c., this book), if he knows how to make verses, Has here more (space) to add or amend, if he would want to; Let it (s.c., this book) go from hand to hand for whoever requests it, As with a ball among women, whoever can, take it. 127 123.  Gerhardt, The Art of Story-Telling, 41. 124.  The Fragment numbering used here is that of The Riverside Chaucer. 125.  Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 5. 126. Branca, Boccaccio: The Man and His Works, 202. 127.  “ Qualquier omne que·l oya, si bien trobar sopiere,/ más á ý [a] añadir e enmendar, si quisiere;/ ande de mano en mano, a quienquier que·l pidiere;/ como pella a las dueñas, tómelo

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While not all medieval authors actually gave their permission for additions and amendations, they still seemed to have the expectation of indeterminacy in both the reader’s relation to the text and also in the physical text itself. John Dagenais spells out the differences between the view of a text from the perspective of someone from today’s print culture versus someone from a manuscript culture in his Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing The Libro de Buen Amor. 128 While modern textual critics in the classical school of philology often think of a text as “fallen,” as somehow corrupted from an author’s original, and think of the scribe as the corruptor of that original text, Dagenais suggests that what medieval scribes wrote was what medieval readers got. The medieval reader who came across a puzzling passage either made his or her own sense of it or skipped on. Medieval reading did not break down at this point, did not cease. It seems to me that understanding how medieval readers dealt with the texts they did have is a far more vital (and interesting) problem for modern medievalists than is the reconstruction of authorial or “intelligible” texts in forms that never existed in the medieval world. 129

It is not that the critical edition detailing the genealogical relationship between manuscripts of a text is not useful; it is that the search for a single coherent or original text has “little or nothing to do with medieval literature as it was produced and received by medieval people.” 130 Daniel too is a product of a pre-print culture. Furthermore, the classical model of textual criticism is being challenged more and more in biblical studies. The fluidity of Daniel’s texts are most notable in the considerable differences, especially in chs. (3)4–6, between the Old Greek textual tradition on the one hand and Masoretic Text (MT) and Theodotion-Daniel on the other. Christine M. Thomas notes for what she calls the “Jewish novellas” of this period: “[they] are texts prone to additions, epitomization, or excerpting, they have variant readings that cannot be reduced to an original text, and were the objects of frequent translation.” 131 She suggests that some of the people who took part in transmitting these works were not merely scribes but compilers or authors and, furthermore, “the impulse to create a new version of the story with each retelling of it quien podiere” (1628); according to the edition of Alberto Blecua (Juan Ruiz, Libro de buen amor, 4th ed.; Madrid: Cátedra, 1998), 422. 128. John Dagenais, Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossing The Libro de Buen Amor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 129.  Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture, 114. 130.  Ibid., 112. 131.  Christine M. Thomas, “Stories Without Texts and Without Authors: The Problem of Fluidity in Ancient Novelistic Texts and Early Christian Literature,” in Ronald F. Hock et al., eds., Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative (Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative 6; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 284, 289.

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has more affinity with oral habits of performance than with the modern printconditioned tendency towards exact reproduction of texts.” 132

2.4.  Prospect for Daniel This chapter was concerned with pointing out in a preliminary way certain characteristics and literary processes that are typical of the story-collection genre and that therefore may be helpful in understanding the Book of Daniel, especially the earlier narrative section of chs. 1–6 composed of the uniformly brief and discrete courtier stories. Chapter 4 will expound upon these themes. The biblical Daniel stories demonstrate various complexities in their collected form that may be seen in a clearer light, especially their popular and entertaining yet didactic character, their closeness to orality, non-fixity of form, and open-endedness. On the other hand, perhaps some kinds of textual and literary criticism as well as a definitive account of the literary stages of Daniel’s three main editions will remain partly hopeless because of the loose, protean, and complex nature of the story-collection genre. 132.  Thomas, “Stories Without Texts and Without Authors,” 289.

C

h a p t e r

T

h r e e

The Story-Collection and Related Material in Antiquity The goal of chapter 2 was to survey the story-collection genre’s basic characteristics at the time of its floruit; this chapter’s selective overview serves primarily to analyze the form in its earliest known phases in classical Greece and Rome, India, Persia, and the ancient Near East—that is, the period beginning in the second half of the first millennium b.c.e. and into the first few centuries of our era. Because of the geographical, temporal, and generic proximity of these ancient texts to the Book of Daniel, it is plausible to explore their relationship to the book. However, although this study will venture proposals about the various sources and analogues or parallels to features in the Book of Daniel (here and in chapter 5), the main goal of this survey is not necessarily to posit genetic links between Daniel and either earlier or later story-collections (although, in some cases, this may be possible). 1 The story-collection genre is a versatile narrative template, likely originating simply in the human propensity to gather and collect, and often arose independently in the literatures in which it appears. As is true of the medieval story-collections, there “are no clear lines of chronological development” from the earliest to the latest story-collections of antiquity. 2 The frame narrative, which one might mistakenly suppose to be a late, sophisticated feature, is present in what seems to be the very earliest preserved story-collection, the Tales from King Cheops’ Court (Papyrus Westcar) of Egypt, which dates to the mid-second millennium b.c.e. The use of allegory, if it too were thought to be a mature feature, already appears in the Egyptian Myth of the Sun’s Eye in the Hellenistic period. In addition, like the Medieval storycollections, the story-collections of antiquity exhibit varying degrees of literariness: some are more popular in nature and perhaps closer to orality (e.g., Aesop’s 1.  Legends connected to Daniel were exceptionally popular from late antiquity onward (more popular than those about any other biblical figure except Adam) and do show up in various story-collections, especially collections of prophets’ vita (see now, for instance, Lorenzo DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature). However, the goal here is not to trace one character or set of motifs throughout history but to understand the genre of story-collection as it may relate to Daniel’s composition in its ancient Near Eastern setting. 2.  Cooper, Structure, 9.

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Fables), while others are artistically self-conscious literary productions (e.g., the Aetia of Callimachus and the Metamorphoses of Ovid). The overview of ancient material here is necessarily limited and privileges material that appears to be representative of the story-collection, as well as material that seems closest to the book of Daniel in structure, nature, and themes. Moreover, the kinds of stories included in story-collections will also be discussed. In many cases, the encapsulated genres are the same as those in the medieval European collections: fables, court tales, exempla, other various short narratives of popular or mythological character, and so on.

3.1.  Greece and Rome The Classical world produced a variety of story-collections. The “catalogue” poem, which was organized around genealogical lists and often included brief descriptions of characters and embellished stories, appears in the work of fifthcentury Greek poets, especially in Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women, and was emulated by Hellenistic authors. In addition, there were several fable collections, including those attributed to the famous Aesop, which may date back to the Archaic and Classical Ages of Greece but which reached us indirectly through Hellenistic and Roman collections. Still other story-collections occur in the works of certain Greek or Roman authors who consciously broke with traditional Aristotelian poetics to write in episodic narrative. These compositions—for instance, Callimachus’ Aetia and Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti—are models of the open-endedness and other structural techniques of the story-collection genre. The Metamorphoses in particular has had a historically long literary reach, greatly influencing the story-collections of the European Middle Ages.

3.1.1. Greece Unlike much of the Ancient Near Eastern material to be discussed, the Greek (and Latin) story-collections are attributed to an author. A unique kind of genealogically-oriented poetry is that of catalogue poetry, already known from Hesiod’s work, particularly his Great Ehoiai, Melampodia, and his Catalogue of Women (Γυναικῶν Κατάλογος) 3 but echoed by other authors including the Hellenistic poets Nicander, Aratus, Hermesianax, and Phanocles, and most fa3.  Also called the Ehoiai, or Ἠοῖαι, named after the repetition of the phrase: ἠ ὅιη ‘or such as’; Martin L. West, The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Its Nature, Structure, and Origins (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 1. This is not to be confused with the Great Ehoiai, or Μεγάλοι Ἠοῖαι, another Hesiodic poem, which was probably longer. West’s book remains the most important modern study of the poem. On other genealogical poets, see West, The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, 4–11. For a recent English translation of the Catalogue of Women, see Glenn W. Most: Hesiod II: The Shield, Catalogue of Women, Other Fragments (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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mously, by Callimachus, with his Aetia. 4 Hesiod’s Melampodia, was in three books at least and included stories about famous seers. The Catalogue of Women, in five books, was about the celebrated women who slept with the gods and gave birth to heroes and contains genealogies interspersed with narrative episodes. 5 “The poet calls upon the Muses to sing now of ‘the women . . . who were the finest in those times . . . and unfastened their waistbands . . . in union with gods’.” 6 The Catalogue of Women gives an account of the heroic age, from the earliest times to the Trojan War, and was composed as a continuation of the Theogony of Hesiod. Since the latter had to do with the origins of the gods and the former with those of heroes, the two seem to have been transmitted together for a time. The outline form of a genealogy was used in these cases, but narrative passages could take on a life of their own. The Hellenistic poets used formulas and narratives to engage creatively with the Hesiodic poem but applied the Hesiodic formulas to different genres or set their tales in frames of varying genres. Ni­ can­der’s Heteroioumena had a didactic framework, while Hermesianax’s Leontion catalogued erotic stories of the unfortunate love affairs of poets and philosophers and included a frame narrative in the first person. Other poets incorporated the Hesiodic formulas for their curse poems (e.g., the anonymous poet of the Tattoo Elegy and Euphorion in his Thrax). 7

3.1.1.1.  The Fables and Life of Aesop The man Aesop is said to have been a Phrygian or a Thracian who lived in the sixth century b.c.e. He was supposedly born dumb but was granted speech by the Muses and later became a slave to a philosopher (Xanthus or, sometimes, Iadmon) on the island of Samos. No accounts of Aesop survive from his own period, but several Greek authors from the fifth century onward, such as Herodotus, Plato, Aristophanes, and Aristotle, mention him as a fabulist, and other writers such as Demetrius Phalereus, Babrius, Phaedrus, and Avianus are said to have collected fables which they attributed to Aesop (Αἰσώπειοι λόγοι, ‘stories, or sayings, of Aesop’). 8 The earliest of these must be the collection by Demetrius 4. Richard Hunter, “The Hesiodic Catalogue and Hellenistic Poetry,” in Richard Hunter, ed., The Hesiodic Catologue of Women: Constructions and Reconstructions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 239–65; Helen Asquith, “From Genealogy to Catalogue: The Hellenistic Adaptation of the Hesiodic Catalogue Form,” in Hunter, ed., Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, 266–86. 5.  Because of recent papyri finds, there are now at least 50 surviving papyrus fragments in addition to quotations and other references, but this means that perhaps only about 1,300 lines and parts of lines are preserved, out of possibly an original 4,000 lines. Although it is generally believed that the Catalogue is Hesiodic, the date of its final version is hotly debated and must post-date the poet; see Hunter, Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, 1–2. 6.  West, The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, 2. 7.  Asquith, “From Genealogy to Catalogue,” 266. 8.  Francisco Rodríguez Adrados, History of the Graeco-Latin Fable (trans. Leslie A. Ray; Mnemosyne, bibliotheca classica Batava, Supplementum 201; Leiden: Brill, 1999), 1.8–13.

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Phalereus, from the fourth century b.c.e.; however, we have no manuscripts from such an early period. 9 The most important and earliest extant prose collections of Aesopic fables are preserved in the Augustana group of manuscripts (fourth or fifth century c.e.) 10 and other collections from late antiquity and the Byzantine era; the Vindobonensis group (early Byzantine) and the Accursiana group (either the ninth or fourteenth century c.e.) seem both to be derived from the Augustana. 11 All of these contain fables that may go back to Demetrius Phalereus, in addition to preserving some of the archaic or classical fables from before his time. 12 The Fables of Aesop were sometimes copied together with the Life of Aesop, which was probably written in the first century b.c.e. 13 It is extant now only in Roman period papyrus fragments and in two Byzantine recensions attached to the Augustana (Life G, thought to be closest to the original) and the Vindobo-

Λόγος was often substituted with μῦθος; both are “neutral with respect to oppositions of the type real/fictitious, myth/fable/anecdote/story, etc.” (The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.9). In Latin, the predominant term for a fable was fabula. For a succinct introduction to the collections of the Aesopic fables and their modern editions, see Niklas Holzberg, The Ancient Fable: An Introduction (trans. Christine Jackson-Holzberg; Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002; English translation of Antike Fabel, 2nd ed.; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001). 9.  J. E. Keller and L. C. Keating, Aesop’s Fables with a Life of Aesop (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 1. Phaedrus’ Fabulae Aesopiae in Latin, Babrius’ Fables in Iambics (Μυθίαμβοι Αἰσώπειοι) in Greek, and Avianus’ Fabulae in Latin were all variously preserved fable books in verse from the first through fifth centuries c.e.; Niklas Holzberg, The Ancient Fable: An Introduction, 3. 10.  Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.60–67. 11.  Ibid., 93; Adrados, Estudios de forma y contenido sobre los géneros literarios griegos (Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 1982), 13ff.; B. E. Perry, Studies in the Text History of the Life and Fables of Aesop (Haverford: American Philological Association, 1936), 204ff. There is no single standard edition of Aesop’s Fables. 12. Moreover, the Rylands Papyrus 493, dating to the first century c.e., preserves the remnants of a collection (four fables) that was independent of the main collections, and its relationship to those is still debated; Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.54–60. 13.  Perry, Studies in the Text History of the Life and Fables of Aesop, 71–130. Adrados, however, places the prototype of the various copies of the Life of Aesop in the Hellenistic period on the basis of its Cynic themes; Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.649–52. Both Perry and Adrados argued, however, on the basis of models such as the Lives of Euripides and Thucydides that were placed before their works, that Demetrius Phalereus himself had to have put a shorter version of the Life of Aesop before his collection of Aesop’s Fables. The text of Life G is edited by B. E. Perry, Aesopica: A Series of Texts Relating to Aesop or Ascribed to Him or Closely Connected with the Literary Tradition That Bears His Name. Collected and Critically Edited, in Part Translated from Oriental Languages, with a Commentary and Historical Essay, vol. 1, Greek and Latin Texts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press; 1952; reprint, New York: Arno, 1980). For a lively English translation of the Life based on Life G but supplemented in brackets with portions from Life W, see William Hansen, ed., Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998).

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nensis (Life W). 14 The Life of Aesop in the Accursiana collection was probably derived from Life W. 15 Like the Fables of Aesop, the Life of Aesop demonstrates an inheritance from Aḥiqar and the Near East more generally. 16 There are contest and conflict motifs, in that Aesop often outwits and mocks his master the philosopher as well as others, including the kings Croesus of Lydia and Nectanebo of Egypt, and solves problems and riddles that others are unable to solve. The Nectanebo episode (chs. 101–123) is derived from the Near Eastern story of Aḥiqar’s rise, fall, and rehabilitation in the Neo-Assyrian court; however, at the end of the Life, unlike Aḥiqar, Aesop is rather more of an anti-hero, since he is unable to save his own life and is killed. 17 The eastern traditions about Aesop were attached to an essentially Greek core comprised of a legend that already existed in the fifth century b.c.e. This legend can be traced back to a Eugaton or Eugaion of Samos, a historian of the fifth century (according to Aristotle in Rhetorica 2.20). Aesop used fables and stories in his arguments and became something of a politician before he was treacherously killed. Aristotle’s and Herodotus’ accounts probably both follow Eugaion, but they differ on the details, especially of Aesop’s death. Herodotus 2.134 says that Aesop was a slave on the island of Samos who was later killed by the Delphians, who were subsequently punished by Apollo for their act. According to Aristotle, however, Aesop appeared before an assembly of Samians, not before Delphians. The tradition that Aesop was an ugly hunchback is already found on a fifth-century b.c.e. Attic vase, where he is depicted conversing with a fox. 18 The episode in chs. 101–123 in which Aesop is made adviser to king Lycurgus (Lykergos) of Babylon and outwits king Nectanebo of Egypt clearly imitates the Near Eastern Story of Aḥiqar, especially as preserved in its later versions. 19 14. The Life G is named after the place, Grottaferrata, in which its one codex was kept and the Life W is named after its principal editor Westermann; see A. Westermann, ed., Vita Aesopi: Ex Vratislaviensi ac partim Monacensi et Vindobonensi codicibus (Brunswick: Westermann, 1845). 15. See Perry, Studies in the Text History of the Life and Fables of Aesop, 71–130; and Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.648. 16.  Ibid., 272, 299–303. 17. But see Wills’s interpretation of Aḥiqar, in which Aḥiqar is a pompous proverbspouting court sage who does not have the intelligence to avoid his nephew’s schemes; Wills, Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 44–49. According to Wills, the court tale thus makes a satire of the genre; only when Aḥiqar abandons the stale wisdom of the court and replaces it with that of the cunning hero does he succeed in his trials and have his revenge. On the fall of flawed heroes, see Richard I. Pervo, “A Nihilist Fabula: Introducing The Life of Aesop,” in Ronald F. Hock et al., eds., Ancient Fiction and Early Christian Narrative (SBL Symposium Series 6; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 77–120. 18.  Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.273. 19.  According to Diogenes Laertius of the third century c.e., Aḥiqar was translated into Greek by Democritus (ca. 460–ca. 370 b.c.e.; Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.276. In the earliest version of Aḥiqar, in Aramaic from fifth-century b.c.e. Egypt, there is a

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This occurs after Aesop has won his freedom from his philosopher master and convinced King Croesus of Lydia via a fable to respect the independence of Samos. Both the audience with Croesus and the episode borrowed from Aḥiqar either belong to or are related to the court-tale genre and bring to mind similar occasions in Herodotus’ Histories. 20 After Aesop has his dialogue with King Croesus, he travels to Babylon to Lycurgus’ court (note that in the texts of Aḥiqar, this king is either Esarhaddon or Sennacherib of Assyria), where he is made the king’s chamberlain. 21 He wins a reputation for Lycurgus by answering the conundrums of other kings and providing Lycurgus with riddles to send back. Those who cannot answer them pay tribute. Being childless and without heir, Aesop adopts a young man of good family named Helios, who begins carrying on with the king’s concubine. When Aesop warns him, he writes a letter in Aesop’s name to the king’s enemies, seals it with Aesop’s seal, and then delivers it to the king. The king is convinced that Aesop is a traitor and tells the captain of the guard to kill Aesop. The captain, who is a friend of Aesop’s, does not do so, although he tells Lycurgus that he has. The king makes Helios his chamberlain in Aesop’s stead. When the king of Egypt hears that Aesop is dead, he seizes his opportunity, and sends the king of Babylon a riddle. At this point, the episode closely follows the Syriac and other later versions of Aḥiqar: the pharaoh challenges the Mesopotamian king to find a wiseman to build a palace between heaven and earth and to answer any question posed to him. Aesop is produced, alive, and Helios is lectured by Aesop, who utters a series of proverbs until Helios stages a hunger strike and dies. Aesop then travels to Egypt and solves Nectanebo’s riddle. He trains eagles to fly with young men on their backs and brings them to Memphis, where he begins at once to bandy words with Nectanebo. The king brings him to the building site, and Aesop commands the young men and the eagles aloft. When the riders call out for the Egyptians to bring bricks and clay to the eagles in the air, the Egyptians are flummoxed. The pharaoh then claims that, when Lycurgus’ horses neighs in Babylon, the mares of Egypt miscarry their foals. Aesop responds by flogging a cat, which he declares lacuna before the end of the frame story and the beginning of the proverbs. It is not clear that the Egyptian episode could have fit there; but the riddle concerning the neighing of horses in Babylon is very similar to the Egyptian story of Apophis and Seknenre. Aḥiqar probably borrowed from it, and Aesop’s Life took it in turn from Aḥiqar. See below. 20.  The dialogue with King Croesus in Aesop’s Life is on the model of the Croesus dialogues with Solon in Herodotus (1.29–33): Solon is one of three of the famed seven sages of Greek tradition who appear in the Histories (Solon, Thales, and Bias). There are also other wise debates in Herodotus between Croesus and Cyrus (1.87–90) and between Croesus and Cambyses (3.35–36). See R. Lattimore, “The Wise Adviser in Herodotus,” Classical Philology 34 (1939), 24–35; and also Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 55–70. 21.  Lycurgus is probably to be connected with Nebuchadnezzar; John Strugnell, “Problems in the Development of the Aḥîqar Tale,” 206.

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has gone to Babylon in the night and killed his rooster. When pharaoh questions him, Aesop points out that, if Babylon is too far away for the cat to get there in one night, then how can the mares of Egypt hear horses in Babylon? The riddles continue until the pharaoh concedes victory to Aesop. As in many of the later versions of the Story and Proverbs ofAḥiqar, the Life of Aesop places chastising proverbs or fables in two places. In this case they are set immediately after the hero has arrived back in court and at the end of the tale, as part of the hero’s final defeat and the reason for which he dies. Only some of the fables of Aḥiqar are taken up by the Life of Aesop. 22 These episodes promote Aesop into an adviser who is superior to the kings and philosophers he counsels. In addition, the final episode relating Aesop’s assassination by the Delphians is connected to the silver cup episode in the Joseph story (Genesis 44). 23 (The Delphians hide a cup in Aesop’s baggage; Aesop defends himself from the accusation of theft with fables; nevertheless, he is tossed over a cliff by the Delphians, who are later punished.) Whether or not the Life of Aesop preserves a historical core connected to a real figure—the same question one asks about Aḥiqar—is unknown. Although Perry concluded that the Life of Aesop came from Egypt, 24 La Penna believed that it came from Syria. 25 Still, the Story of Aḥiqar was already known in Greece in the fifth century b.c.e. around the time that or shortly after the Aramaic version of Aḥiqar was written. There are many passages in the Life that imitate Aḥiqar, but there are major differences: Aḥiqar is not a travel narrative and does not have the agones or confrontations that occur between Aesop and administrators, rulers, philosophers, and his fellow slaves. 26 Moreover, Aḥiqar does not die in the end but wins out over his rival, whereas Aesop does die when his ability to maneuver himself out of dangerous situations runs out. Niklas Holzberg has shown that the Life has been worked into a literary unity; for instance, the end of the composition informs its beginning, creating a sort of frame for the middle. The speechless Aesop at the beginning of the Life is able to save himself from the plotting of the other servants through various silent actions, while the renowned storyteller of the later Life helps himself out of every predicament by his gift of gab, except for the last, when, in spite of all his fables 22. See, for instance, Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.301–3; Leslie Kurke, Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 176–85. 23.  For parallels between Joseph, Aḥiqar, and Aesop, see, Cristiano Grottanelli, “The Ancient Novel and Biblical Narrative,” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 27 (1987), 7–34; reprinted as “Biblical Narrative and the Ancient Novel: Common Motifs and Themes,” in idem, Kings and Prophets: Monarchic Power, Inspired Leadership, and Sacred Text in Biblical Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 147–71. 24.  Perry, Aesopica, 5. 25. Antonio La Penna, “Il romanzo di Esopo,” Athenaeum 40 (1962), 264–314. 26.  Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.663.

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of warning, he is put to death by the Delphians. 27 The composition has a five part structure: (1) prologue (chs. 1–19); (2) Aesop first tricks then helps his master Xanthos (chs. 20–91); (3) Aesop helps the Samians (chs. 92–100); (4) Aesop helps king Lycurgus of Babylon (chs. 101–123); and (5) Aesop in Delphi, where he cannot help himself (chs. 124–142). 28 The three types of λόγοι (‘fables’) in the Life also lend structure in their positioning. Type A (direct instruction in a monologue or dialogue) and type B (the solution of a problem, such as a difficult task, question, or riddle) appear when Aesop is a slave in Xanthus’ household (chs. 20–91) and when he is in Babylon and Egypt (chs. 101–123). Type C (a fable applicable to a particular situation) is only used when Aesop is helping the Samians against Croesus (chs. 92–100) and when he is in Delphi at the end of his life (chs. 124–142). 29 However, type C is only effective for Aesop in chs. 92–100 and not at the end of the Life. Thus, the “fables” of Aesop’s Life, with their A/BC(+)–A/B-C(-) pattern, help provide structure to that composition. As is true of many story-collections, the textual history of the Fables of Aesop is quite complex. Unlike the copying of the texts of a well-known classical author, in which a scribe would not often dare to change the text, in the transmission of the Aesopic fables, . . . as in that of popular lore generally, such loyal adherence on the part of scribes to a single manuscript source is the exception rather than the rule. Besides the fact that the text of a single fable is sometimes, though perhaps not very frequently, compounded of two or three different sources, there is tendency among Byzantine copyists to make up each his own collection of fables, drawing some of them from one manuscript collection and others from others, a practice which has likewise become traditional in the popular modern editions and translations of “Aesop’s Fables,” and which, apart from being easy and natural in the case of such small textual units, is due in the final analysis to the fact that a definitive edition of the Fables never existed, at least none that was universally recognized as such and as coming from the pen of Aesop himself. 30

The earliest extant texts of the Fables contained four books consisting of about 230 prose fables; some time later, a prologue and epilogue were attached. 31 The prologue contains descriptions of Aesop’s life and activities, and the epilogue concludes with, “Here ends the fourth book of the very ingenious and distin27. Niklas Holzberg et al., Äsop-Roman: Motivgeschichte und Erzählstruktur (Classica Monacensia 6; Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1992), 53ff.; Holzberg, “Fable: Aesop, Life of Aesop,” in Gareth Schmeling, ed., The Novel in the Ancient World (rev. ed.; Leiden: Brill, 2003), 633–39. In addition, Holzberg believes it is possible that the author of the Augustana collection of prose fables is also the author of the Life; for instance, the moral of fable no. 116, “The Sea and the Crab,” is close to the moral of one of Aesop’s closing fables before his life is taken. 28.  See also Pervo, “A Nihilist Fabula: Introducing The Life of Aesop,” 77–120. 29.  Holzberg, “Fable: Aesop, Life of Aesop,” 637. 30.  Perry, Studies in the Text History of the Life and Fables of Aesop, 73. 31.  Holzberg, “Fable: Aesop, Life of Aesop,” 633–39.

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guished fabulist, and there are no more books by him, but his fables are found in great number.” There is little linking material, and when it exists, it is as simple as “Here ends the first book.” The Augustana collection includes fables that can be divided into three parts of nearly equal length: an exposition, the story itself, and a moral proposed by one of the characters. The ‘fables’ (λόγοι) themselves in Aesop’s Fables were not solely animalistic, in contrast to the fable collections of modern times, especially those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe. There is instead a mixture of the animal fable with a variety of other elements: the human, divine, or animal anecdote, story, myth, novel, maxim, joke, etc. This is a feature shared not only with some of the medieval story-collections we have already reviewed such as the Disciplina clericalis by Petrus Alfonsi, Kalilah wa-Dimnah (derived from the Pañcatantra), the Book of Sindibad, and El Conde Lucanor by Don Juan Manuel, 32 but is also something found in some of the oldest proverb collections, such as those from Mesopotamia and the Proverbs of Aḥiqar. Still, the Greek collections were thought to be part of a single genre, the Aesopic fable (λόγος), even if there are subdivisions. The purpose of the individual fable was not only to be persuasive— sometimes even satirical or moralistic—but also to entertain. Syriac versions of Aesop’s Fables attribute the fables to Flavius Josephus, having turned Αἴσωπος to Ἰωσηπός. 33 They were translated from Greek into Syriac, possibly in the tenth or eleventh centuries c.e. 34

3.1.1.2.  The Aetia of Callimachus Easier to date than Aesop’s Fables because of its clear textual tradition, the Hellenistic period Aetia or Causes was written by Callimachus in the third century b.c.e. 35 Callimachus was from Cyrene (a Greek city in Libya) and arrived at Alexandria in the reign of Ptolemy II (285–247 b.c.e.). 36 As a philologist and author he was affiliated with the famous Alexandrian library 37 and was probably the 32.  Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.19ff. 33. Bruno Lefevre, Une version syriaque des Fables d’Ésope conservée dans huit manuscrits (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1939), iii. 34. Carl Brockelmann et al., Geschichte der christlichen Literaturen des Orients (2nd ed.; Leipzig: C. F. Amelang, 1909), 58. By contrast, William Wright thought this occurred approximately a century earlier; William Wright, A Short History of Syriac Literature (London: A. & C. Black, 1894), 241–42. 35.  Callimachus, Aetia, Iambi, Lyric Poems, Hecale, Minor Epic and Elegiac Poems, Fragments of Epigrams, Fragments of Uncertain Location, trans. and introduced by C. A. Trypanis (London: William Henemann, 1968), viii. See also Markus Asper, Kallimachos Werke: Griechisch und deutsch (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004), for a more recent translation of the Aetia and a brief discussion that utilizes new discoveries of papyri. 36.  On Egyptian elements in Callimachus’ poetry, see Susan A. Stephens, “Egyptian Callimachus,” in Franco Montanari and Luigi Lehnus, eds., Callimaque: Sept exposés suivis de discussions (Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique 48; Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 2002), 235–62. 37.  Nonetheless, it does not appear that Callimachus ever held the post of Librarian. See Rudolf Blum, Kallimachos: The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography (trans.

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best-known of the Alexandrian poets; the Aetia and the Hecale are considered his greatest works. 38 He is especially recognized for turning away from the traditional long epic and from the principles of linearity and narrative unity found in the Poetics of Aristotle in preference for episodic narrative. The Aetia as a whole is a four-volume collection of separate verse narratives in elegiac meter. 39 The work consists of perhaps 6,000 lines, but the individual aetia, or etiological myths and legends, vary greatly in length. The subject matter includes explanations for the origin of festivals, customs, institutions, and names. The extant Aetia are extremely fragmentary, and it is only since the edition of Rudolf Pfeiffer that the style and structure of the Aetia have been analyzable. 40 Pfeiffer’s formidable task was to compile the numerous and fragmentary papyri that dated from the first century b.c.e. through the sixth–seventh century c.e. One of Pfeiffer’s most valuable finds was the prologue to Callimachus’ work, which begins with Callimachus’ statement that his kind of poetry, which linked short tales together, is disliked by his opponents (he spitefully calls them Telchines): (I know that) the Telchines, who are ignorant and no friends of the Muse, grumble at my poetry, because I did not accomplish one continuous poem of many thousands of lines on . . . kings or . . . heroes, but like a child I roll forth a short tale, though the decades of my years are not few (1:1–6). 41

After the prologue, Callimachus begins with a story of a dream in which he is a young man transported from North Africa to Mount Helicon to dialogue with the Muses and so evokes the beginning of Hesiod’s Theogony, portraying himself as a “new” Hesiod. 42 He fires off questions about a wide variety of unusual customs, and the Muses willingly reply, often with a story. 43 The question and answer Hans H. Wellisch; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), for more on the Pinakes of Callimachus, a lost work that was a sort of very large catalog of all the Alexandrian libraries’ holdings (and, therefore, of virtually all Greek literature). The Pinakes was apparently arranged by genre in 120 books. 38.  “The fame and popularity of Callimachus must have exceeded that of every other Alexandrian poet, if we judge by the great number of Callimachean papyri—even greater than those of Euripides—and the constant quotations found in grammarians, metricians, lexicographers and scholiasts of late antiquity. To no other poet except Homer do the grammarians pay so much honour” (Trypanis’ introduction to the Aetia, xiii.) 39. A. Dihle, A History of Greek Literature: From Homer to the Hellenistic Period (trans. C. Krojzl; London: Routledge, 1994), 261. 40. R. Pfeiffer, ed., Callimachus (London: Oxford University Press, 1949–53). 41.  Translation is that of Trypanis (Callimachus, Aetia), 5. 42. Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter, Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 51–60, esp. pp. 52–54. 43.  For example, the first preserved question is: Why do the Parians sacrifice to the Graces without flute music and wreaths?

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session seems to continue through the first two books, after which this format is discontinued, and from thenceforth the presentation of the stories is in the hands of fictional characters, some of them as strange as “a lock of hair,” a speaking wall, or even “Callimachus” as a character himself. 44 The work concludes with an epilogue in which the poet says he will “pass on to the prose pasture of the Muses.” 45 Callimachus’s use of episodic narrative verse, a real departure from Aris­ totle’s principles of poetics, is striking. Callimachus’s [Aetia] is in no real sense an extended poem. It is a series of charms strung along a bracelet, or jewels in a necklace, each quite small, carefully shaped, and highly polished. There is no consistent theme in any individual book . . . in this use of discontinuous form he was striking out along his own lines. 46

Callimachus’ work shares this characteristic with Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Roman literature, a composition to be discussed next. The whole of the Aetia is not to be characterized as “Planlosigkeit,” however, since the final edition exhibits careful organizing principles. 47 The structure involves a tendency to group aetia into clusters of related stories (e.g., frag. 7.19—frag. 25 treat scurrilous rituals, and frag. 100–101, statues of Hera). There is also a kind of ring composition evident; for example, the Aetia is framed by passages at the beginning and end concerning the Muses and Hesiod (frag. 1–2 and frag. 112), argonaut themes occur in volume one and return in volume four, and poems honoring Berenice frame volumes three and four, etc. 48 On the other hand, it seems quite likely that some of the aetia circulated as individual poems before they were compiled or even that books three and four were late additions to a previously published two-volume Aetia. 49

3.1.2. Rome Ovid’s long poem, the Metamorphoses, is composed of about 250 stories of varying length that are united by a common theme of transformation or meta44.  For more on the structure of the Aetia, see M. A. Harder, “Aspects of the Structure of Callimachus’ Aetia,” in M. A. Harder et al., eds., Callimachus (Hellenistic Groningana; Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1993), 99–110; ead., “Callimachus and the Muses: Some Aspects of narrative Technique in Aetia 1–2,” Prometheus 14 (1988), 1–14; and ead., “Intertextuality in Callimachus’ Aetia,” in Montanari and Lehnus, eds., Callimaque: Sept exposés suivis de discussions, 189–223. 45.  Trypanis’ translation (Callimachus, Aetia), 87. 46. J. Ferguson, Callimachus (Twayne’s World Authors 589; Boston: Twayne, 1980), 30. 47.  A description given in E. Eichgruen, Kallimachos und Apollonios Rhodios (Ph.D. dissertation, Free University of Berlin, 1961), 166. See also Harder, “Aspects of the Structure of Callimachus’ Aetia,” 99–100. 48.  Harder, “Aspects of the Structure of Callimachus’ Aetia,” 99. 49.  Fantuzzi and Hunter, Tradition and Innovation in Hellenistic Poetry, 46.

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morphosis that span the history of the world from its creation to Ovid’s present, Augustan Rome—that is, the first decade of our era; it was written in 1–8 c.e. before Ovid was exiled to Tomis on the Black Sea by the emperor Augustus, for reasons that remain obscure. 50 The Metamorphoses was composed in epic meter (dactylic hexameter), but any epic features of the poem are apparently secondary to its episodic nature. 51 It is also unlike epic in that it is not serious, but mainly comedic. 52 There are many short episodes of ten to fifteen lines and some longer ones made up of hundreds of lines. 53 The work follows the aetiological tradition of Callimachus in breaking away from Aristotle’s principles of poetics and in being a catalogue poem. Many poems of the Metamorphoses also end in an aetion, or explanation. 54 The theme of the work, “metamorphosis” or transition, is universal in scope, from creation to Ovid’s present, but “its real scope is the microcosm of human psychology.” 55 Both humans and gods are subject to cruel and volatile forces beyond themselves. The chronological ordering is similar to Medieval European story-collections that are histories, such as the Historia Regum Britanniae, which surveyed the history of Britain, or the late twelfth-century Pantheon by Godfrey of Viterbo, which outlined world events from Noah onward. A frame is provided by the narrator, a fictional Ovid, and story-telling plays an essential part in the poem in that various characters narrate different stories. 56 (Ovid also utilizes internal frame narratives, such as that in the mini-storycollection in Book IV, where there is a frame story about the three daughters of King Minyas who pass the time with story-telling while spinning wool.) 57 There is no central figure in the Metamorphoses, although some stories do focus on a 50.  A convenient translation is provided by A. D. Melville (Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville, introduction and notes by E. J. Kenney; Oxford World’s Classics; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 51. The Metamorphoses was also written to be a response to Vergil’s Aeneid. “In spite of its lack of many of the characteristics we associate with epic—a major hero, a unified plot with temporal and geographical centering, careful integration of episodes into a single whole—Ovid clearly viewed his poem as a kind of epic”; see S. Mack, Ovid (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 117. 52. See Kenney’s introduction to the translation of the Metamorphoses by Melville, xvii–xviii. 53.  Mack, Ovid, 117, 108ff. 54.  For the relationship between Ovid’s aetiological myths and Callimachus’ Aetia, see K. Sara Myers, Ovid’s Causes: Cosmogony and Aetiology in the Metamorphoses (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 55.  Kenney’s introduction to Melville’s translation of the Metamorphoses, xviii. 56. Gianpiero Rosati, “Narrative Techniques and Narrative Structures in the Metamorphoses,” in Barbara Weiden Boyd, ed., Brill’s Companion to Ovid (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 271–304. 57.  The introduction of the mini-collection describes the daughters and their decision to tell each other stories. (The three stories told are: “Pyramus and Thisbe,” “The Sun in Love,” and “Salmacis and Hermaphroditus.”) Linking material is found in the daughters’ discussion

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single character (Orpheus, for example). Sara Mack claims that Ovid emphasizes the separateness of his stories by geographical and temporal variety, as well as variation in characters and subject matter: “Ovid seems to go out of his way to break up continuity.” 58 Several events in various characters’ lives are told out of chronological order. In addition, Ovid seems to have read much material that he does not include in the Metamorphoses; he often refers in “repeated ‘throw-away’ references to stories or variant versions which for one reason or another he did not choose to include or tell in full.” 59 Another of Ovid’s works, the Fasti, on which he labored simultaneously with the Metamorphoses and which shares some stories with it, “is most commonly considered the most ambitious and extensive Latin realization of Callimachus’ Aetia.” 60 The Fasti (or “Calendar,” from dies fasti, treating of days on which it was or was not permissible to transact legal and public business), is a long elegiac poem which was originally to have been in twelve books. 61 We have only the first six books (January to June) and this, in the end, may well have been all that Ovid wrote of the work, because there are strong intratextual links between Books 1 and 6. 62 Perhaps Ovid was exiled before he could complete the proposed last six volumes, or perhaps Ovid intentionally designed January through June as an integrated whole and the poem’s incompleteness can be interpreted as part of its meaning, as Ovid’s resistance to surrendering his poetic identity to the state. 63 Ovid’s goal was to study the calendar and give the various observances and festivals of the year and their origins, often presenting multiple explanations for between stories and in the conclusion, in which the daughters are transformed into bats once their story-telling is done. 58.  Mack, Ovid, 109. 59.  For example, see ii, 580–90; iv, 55–168, 276; vii, 362, 465; viii, 26; x, 65–71, 729; xiii 715, 717; Kenney’s introduction to Ovid, Metamorphoses, p. xiv. 60.  Myers, Ovid’s Causes, 63–64. On Callimachus and the Fasti, see R. Heinze, Ovids elegische Erzählung (Berichte der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologisch-historische Klasse 71.7; Leipzig: Teubner, 1919), 91–99 (reprinted in E. Burck, ed., Vom Geist des Römertums [3rd ed., Stuttgart:Teubner, 1960], 374–82); John F. Miller, “Callimachus and the Augustan Aetiological Elegy,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, II.30.1 (1982), 371–417; idem, “Ovid’s Divine Interlocutors in the Fasti,” in C. Deroux, ed., Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History III ( Collection Latomus 180; Brussels: Latomus Revue d’Études Latines, 1983), 156–92; A. Barchiesi, The Poet and the Prince: Ovid and Augustan Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 61.  Its full name was Liber fastorum. 62.  In spite of Ovid’s claims to the contrary, addressed to Augustus from Tomis, Ovid’s place of exile; John F. Miller, “The Fasti: Style, Structure, and Time,” in Barbara Weiden Boyd, ed., Brill’s Companion to Ovid (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 167. 63.  For instance, see C. E. Newlands, Playing with Time: Ovid and the Fasti (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 26. But against the idea that Ovid was explicitly opposing the emperor Augustus is the fact that Book 6 praises the imperial family (Miller, “The Fasti: Style, Structure, and Time,” 167).

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a name or practice without making a judgment. He includes a variety of topics: temple dedications, star-myths and risings or fallings of constellations, and uses shifting narrators and “presentational modes”: narrative, instruction, hymn. 64 The length of sections varies from brief epigrams to 200 lines. Although the overall structure of the poem is provided by the continuity of the days of the month, Ovid the author was very selective: he chose which holidays or constellations to include or to emphasize, sometimes downplaying major holidays in favor of lesser. In addition, what may seem to be a jumble is given an overarching order in that various motifs and connections are developed throughout; for example, Ovid’s varied references to Augustus and the imperial family, his reflections on the gods and heroes, etc. 65

3.1.3.  Summary of Classical Story-Collections These story-collections of both Greece and Rome exhibit several features that were either utilized by authors of story-collections generally or that influenced later examples of the genre. The characteristic of open-endedness—that is, the unlimited potential number of stories within a collection—is something that the classical collections have in common with other story-collections; most story-collections have a structure or frame that allows for any number of additional stories. Moreover, just as in chapter 2 it was noted that Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccacio’s Decameron do not actually contain the number of stories suggested by the narrator in the frame, so too is the case with Ovid’s Fasti, which ends after covering six months rather than a full year as is initially envisioned. Furthermore, utilizing various principles of order, such as a chronology in the genealogy poems or the calendrical schemata of the Aetia and the Metamorphoses, is also a feature of story-collections generally. Finally, the practice of collecting and reworking old stories (and not creating every narrative afresh) is found in not only the history of some of the poems collected by Callimachus for his Aetia, but that of both the Life and Fables of Aesop. The Life of Aesop reuses the Near Eastern Aḥiqar and even perhaps the Joseph story from Genesis, among other sources, while the Fables is a rich repository of ancient material. It is significant that Callimachus and Ovid consciously broke from the standard poetics of linearity to write episodically. The Aetia and the Metamorphoses— both sophisticated, artistic literary compositions (both poems)—demonstrate episodic narrative that resulted from conscious authorial intent. In addition, with only a single author and a delimited period of composition, neither had a very 64.  Miller, “The Fasti: Style, Structure, and Time,” 182–88, esp. 183. 65.  Note also that the proems that begin each book are paired (1 and 2 are addressed to the imperial family, 3 and 4 to the deities Mars and Venus, and in 5 and 6 three deities give differing etymologies for the month’s name). See especially L. Braun, “Kompositionskunst in Ovids Fasti,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.31.4 (1981), 2344–83; and Miller, “The Fasti: Style, Structure, and Time,” 182–88.

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complicated history. On the other hand, the popular Aesop’s Fables had a more fluid composition history, especially when it comes to the collections of fables in both prose and poetry. This very popular collection was constantly reshaped, fables or λόγοι added and subtracted, from age to age. These features have relevance for a study of Daniel’s composition. For example, the overarching chronology and choice of kings in Daniel leaves open the number of stories that could have been included in the book. Leaving aside some of the historically inaccurate elements of Daniel’s chronology, one notes that surely chs. 1–6 are not the only stories one could set in the days of the three kings who are mentioned—Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, and Darius—nor are these the only kings that could have been included. 66 (This observation goes for the larger collection of Dan 1–12 too: more visions could have been placed in the book as well.) 67 Furthermore, when the stories are added to the visions in MT Daniel, or when one thinks of the expanded additions in Greek Daniel, the aspect of sampling is also evident: any number of stories and visions could have been included. 68 Dan 5:11–12, the passage in which the queen describes Daniel to Belshazzar, actually hints at other Daniel stories that have not been added to the collection. 69 Finally, unlike medieval story-collections, which could have but were not required to have an enclosing frame narrative, the structure of the classical storycollections seems always to involve a frame of some sort. Sometimes this frame is just the prologue and linking material of a narrator (often the author as a character) or, in the case of the Fables of Aesop, it is the matter of a long story (the Life of Aesop) comprising the frame for the enclosed fables. One observes in advance that Matthias Henze sees the stories of Daniel in chs. 1–6 as the biographical frame for the visions, a view that seems quite appropriate, although it does not account for the episodic nature of the “frame” itself. 70 66.  Historically, the procession of kings was as follows: Nebuchadnezzar, Amel-marduk, Neriglissar, Nabonidus (with Belshazzar as coregent), Cyrus the Persian, Cambyses, Darius I Hystaspes, etc. Instead, the Book of Daniel presents its three kings as succeeding each other in an uninterrupted line, and it portrays Darius as a Mede rather than one of the Persian kings known as Darius. (There is no record of any Darius, king of the Medes; see chapter 4.) 67.  With regard to the visions, those of chs. 7 and 8 take place in Belshazzar’s reign, the vision in ch. 9 in Darius the Mede’s reign, and the single vision of chs. 10–12 during Cyrus the Persian’s reign. 68. Theodotion Bel and the Serpent, for instance, takes place in the reign of Cyrus, after Astyages has died (Th Bel v. 1). 69.  Daniel’s abilities there are listed as three: he interprets dreams, explains riddles, and solves problems (“unties knots”). One could imagine more stories about these activities, especially since the biblical book of Daniel up until Dan 5 illustrates only one of these skills, dream interpretation. 70. Matthias Henze, “The Narrative Frame of Daniel: A Literary Assessment,” 5–24; idem, “The Ideology of Rule in the Narrative Frame of Daniel (Dan 1–6),” 527–39.

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3.2.  India and Persia India produced numerous story-collections. Some of them centered around the Buddha’s past lives (for instance, the Jātakas, a collection of tales in which Buddha was often born as an animal, or the Bodhisattvāvadānakalpalatā, “The Magical Vine of the Bodhi-sattva’s Many Lives”), or other collections such as the Śukasaptati (“The Parrot’s Seventy Tales”), the Br̥hatkathāślokasaṃgraha (“The Emperor of the Sorcerers”), or the Bhojaprabandha (“In the Court of King Bhoja”). 71 However, all pale alongside the Pañcatantra (literally, “The Five Books” or “The Five Topics”), the oldest and best-known of the Indian story-collections, which has been translated into more than 200 languages and is justifiably listed among the most important compositions in world literature (see also chapter 2 of this study). 72 The Pañcatantra is a framed story-collection of primarily beast fables in five books, whose frame story indicates that it is a kind of Fürstenspiegel—that is, it was meant as a set of instructions for princes or administrators. 73 The earliest or most original text is the recension called the Tantrākhyāyika (possibly from Kashmir), which Edgerton estimated contained the general sense of 95% of the lost original, although in his opinion it did not have a privileged position among all the Pañcatantra versions. 74 The commonly accepted conviction is that “most of the stories in the Pañcatantra originated in India, many going back to the second century b.c., though their exact date of origin is unknown.” 75 On the other

71.  On the Jātakas, see Edward B. Cowell et al., The Jātaka: Or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births (6 vols.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895–1907; repr. 7 vols.; Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1990). For a translation of the Br̥hatkathāślokasaṃgraha by Budhasvāmin, see Sir James Mallinson, The Emperor of the Sorcerers (2 vols.; New York: New York University Press, 2005). 72.  The term Pañcatantra is probably an abbreviation for a longer title, perhaps, something like *Nītipañcatantrākhyāyika, or “The Little Story-book on the Five Topics of Government”; see Olivelle’s introduction to Viṣṇu-śarman, The Five Discourses on Worldly Wisdom (trans. Patrick Olivelle; New York: New York University Press and JJC Foundation, 2006), 22. 73. Franklin Edgerton, The Panchatantra Reconstructed, vol. i, 4. Edgerton’s reconstruction is the fundamental modern edition: The Panchatantra Reconstructed, i: Text and Critical Apparatus (AOS 2; New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1924), and The Panchatantra Reconstructed, ii: Introduction and Translation (AOS 3; New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1924). The latter was revised and reprinted as Panchatantra (Delhi: Orient Paperback, 1973). 74.  Edgerton, The Panchatantra Reconstructed vol. ii, 13–14. Edgerton’s opinions about the history of the Pañcatantra versions are different from those of Hertel, the discoverer as well as first translator and editor of the Tantrākhyāyika; Johannes Hertel, Das Pañcatantra: Seine Geschichte und seine Verbreitung (Leipzig: Teubner, 1914), 26–29. One of Hertel’s main assertions was that the Tantrākhyāyika itself was the Urtext of the Pañcatantra. 75.  Gittes, Framing the Canterbury Tales, 9; she cites K. Chaitanya, A New History of Sanskrit Literature (London: Asia Publishing House, 1962), 361. But on the debate see also Adrados, History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.308–14; and Hertel, Das Pañcatantra, 9ff., 20ff.

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hand, A. Hausrath has suggested the Greek derivation for several of the fables in the Pañcatantra. 76 The scholarly consensus is that the Pañcatantra was originally composed in Sanskrit in ca. 300 c.e. It was then translated into Pahlavi in the lifetime of the Sasanian king Khūsraw Anuširwān (531–579) by his physician Burzōe. Most non-Indian modern versions go back to an Arabic version known as Kalilah waDimnah, or the Fables of Bidpai, from ca. 750 c.e. by a Zoroastrian convert to Islam, Ibn al-Muqaffa. 77 The original Sanskrit of the Pañcatantra was lost, but the translation from Arabic (Kalilah wa-Dimnah) back into Sanskrit forms the basis of modern western texts. According to B. E. Perry, Arabs or Near Easterners provided the frame-narrative for the Indian story-collection. Western Asia provided the “paratactic arrangement of stories on one frame.” 78 The frame story tells of the instruction of three rather dull princes in the art of statecraft and other practical knowledge by a wise brahmin. 79 The octogenarian brahmin engaged by the king to teach his sons is usually identified as Viṣṇuśarman, although some southern recensions and Southeast Asian versions give the author as Vasu-bhāga. 80 Nevertheless, whether the author was a historical individual or a literary invention is unknown. Contained in the frame story are five books of stories, many of them beast fables, loosely grouped around a theme: the losing (separation) of friends, the winning of friends, war and peace, loss of gains, and hasty action. The first book is the longest (containing 45% of the whole), the third and second are next, in that order (26% and 22%), and the fourth and fifth books are extremely short and do not have the elaborate structure of the other books. 81 In each of the books, there is a framing or “boxing” story, secondary to the main frame narrative, that also encloses stories, that in turn can enclose even more in a hypotactic arrangement. There are thus at least three or more levels of narration operating simultaneously. The opening passages of each book seem to intertwine with the outer frame, but each bookends without returning to the frame of the princes, although the boxing story of each book is resolved. The work as a whole ends without resolving 76. A. Hausrath, “Fabel,” RE VI 2, 1704–36. For more on the sources of the Pañca­tantra, see Harry Falk, Quellen des Pañcatantra (Freiburger Beiträge zur Indologie 12; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1978). 77.  The first title uses corrupt forms of the Sanskrit names of the two jackals, Karaṭaka and Damanaka, who are the principal characters in the stories—the old Syriac translation is closer with Kalīlag and Damnag—and the second title is after the philosopher who tells the stories to the king. See Brockelmann, “Kalīla wa-Dimna,” 503–6, esp. p. 503. Neither the original Sanskrit nor its Pahlavi translation are extant, but there does exist one defective manuscript of an Old Syriac translation made from the Pahlavi by Būd in 570 c.e. 78.  B. E. Perry, The Origin of the Book of Sindbad, 25, 54. 79.  Note that the stress here is not on religious morality, but on practical wisdom. 80.  George T. Artola, Pañcatantra Manuscripts from South India (Madras: Adyar, 1957), 36. 81.  Olivelle, trans., The Five Discourses on Worldly Wisdom, 23.

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the overarching frame narrative of the royal court and the king’s wish to educate his sons; one is left only to assume that the wise man was able to do as he was challenged. This aspect makes the final composition seem unfinished and openended. The boxing tales are hypotactically arranged, while the frame is paratactic. Gittes states that, One tale always leads to another, and as the tales progressively end, they complete a structure like that of Chinese boxes. Since the Arabic outer framing story does not interfere with the collection of tales, each of the five books of the Pañcatantra can exist as a complete narrative. 82

It is only because of the framing story that the didactic nature of the Pañcatantra is apparent. If the entertaining individual stories had not been enclosed in the framing narrative, they would not appear to be instructional at all. One must read the stories with the frame in mind: the wise man is teaching about human nature through suitable fables. A transformation of genre has occurred on the level of the collection. On the other hand, since the princes are dull and it is the brahmin adviser who excels, some have questioned whether this book was not really for the instruction (and amusement, no doubt) of future counselors to kings rather than for future kings themselves. 83 From Persia, there are several story-collections, many of which are derivations or translations of Indian works, such as the Ṭūṭī-Nāma, “The Book of the Parrot,” an Indo-Muslim text from the fourteenth century composed by the Sufi poet Ziyāʾ al-Dīn Nakhshabī. 84 It is supposedly a rewriting of a Persian work Jawāhir al-Asmār, “Gems of Stories.” The Jawāhir might in turn have been a derivation or Persian translation of the Śukasaptati, “The Parrot’s Seventy Tales” (mentioned above), the Indian story-collection possibly written during the sixth century c.e., although the only available copies are in Sanskrit from the late twelfth century. Of the 52 stories in the Ṭūṭī-Nāma (called “nights” by Nakhshabī), 9 of them are based on 13 stories of the Śukasaptati. 85 Others are from the Pañcatantra, the Sindbad-Nāma, and Kalila wa-Dimna. In the prologue, Nakhshabī claims to have been approached by a nobleman with a book in Persian that had been translated from an Indian language, which the nobleman asks Nakhshabī to rewrite in a simpler, less florid style. After the prologue, the frame narrative of the Ṭūṭī-Nāma is very close to that of the Śukasaptati; and the main characters are the same, although their names are changed. It concerns a mynah and a parrot bought by a merchant and left 82.  Gittes, Framing the Canterbury Tales, 14. 83.  See Patrick Olivelle’s introduction to The Five Discourses of Worldly Wisdom, 35. 84.  Ziyaʾ uʾd-Din Nakhshabi, Tales of a Parrot: The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ṭūṭī-nāma (trans. Muhammad A. Simsar; Graz, Austria: Akademische, 1978). 85.  Translation of Simsar, in Nakhshabi, Tales of a Parrot, xxi.

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with his wife. When the mynah bird is asked for his advice concerning a tryst with a lover, he advises the wife to be faithful to her husband, so she kills it. Then the parrot is asked his opinion; his response is to recite a series of tales every night in order to keep the wife indoors and away from her lover (and to avoid getting killed like the mynah). Many of the tales are about cunning women, as in the Śukasaptati. When the merchant returns home, the parrot informs him of the wife’s intentions, and the merchant punishes his wife with death. 86 Just as the frame story of the Indian Pañcatantra involved a court setting and was ostensibly concerned with the instruction of princes at court, so is the case with some Persian tales as well. In fact, to some scholars, Persia is the home par excellence of court tales. 87 The national epic of Iran, called Shāh-Nāma or ‘Book of Kings’, was composed in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries c.e. by the poet Ferdowsi and is a history of Persia from the legendary beginnings of the world to the Arab conquest. Although it in itself is not a story-collection, since it covers the reigns of 50 pre-Islamic monarchs, several episodes take place in the royal court and deal with interactions between advisers to the king (one adviser, Mazdak, is especially prominent). The most recent and best translation of a substantial portion of the Shāh-Nāma into English has been produced by Dick Davis. 88 Davis notes that in Persian “the poem is written in one form throughout, couplets, which correspond quite closely in length to the English couplet”; however, in his translation, he follows the popular practice of naqqals, itinerant storytellers, which is to insert verses between passages of prose at significant moments resulting in a kind of a prosimetrum. 89 The medieval legends of Zoroaster in the court of Vištāspa (Greek Hystaspes) also reflect the Persian fascination with court tales. 90 While there are several variant legends that differ slightly in details, they were combined all together only in the Muslim period as Zardusht-Nāma, which became the normative version. 86.  On the frame narrative’s relationship to the “Husband and Parrot” tale found in the Arabian nights, see Pinault, Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights, 56–57. 87. Lawrence Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 40. 88. Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings (trans. Dick Davis; New York: Viking, 2006). Editions of the text may be found in: Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh (The Shanameh [The Book of Kings]; 5 vols., New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1988–1997); E. E. Bertels et al., (Shahnamah-i Firdawsi: matn-i intiqadi, 9 vols.; Musku: Idarah-i Intisharat-i Adabiyat-i Khavar, 1966–1971). 89.  Davis’s introduction to Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, xxxiii–xxxiv. He cites Yamamoto’s Oral Background of Persian Epics to explain the prosimetrum. Verses are inserted into the prose intermittently especially in order to: “enhance dramatic effects, to express the internal feelings of characters, or to sum up the story.” Thus the verse grabs the attention of the reader or listener, by “introducing different rhythms into the prose narration” (Kumiko Yamamoto, The Oral Background of Persian Epics, 28). 90.  See William Ronald Darrow, The Zoroaster Legend: Its Historical and Religious Significance (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1981), 385–421.

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The basic plot is that Zoroaster, as the representative of a new religion, goes to the court of Vištāspa to convert him. At court, his great learning and wisdom surpasses that of the jealous courtier-priests (called Chaldeans) in every dispute. They then plant evidence in Zoroaster’s room to suggest that he is a magician, and the king has him imprisoned. However, when the king’s prize black horse becomes ill, Zoroaster is retrieved and brought before Vištāspa to heal the horse, and in the process, converts the king to the new religion of Zoroastrianism. This theme of ethnic competition, or competition between rivals from different religions, has been noted as a feature of ancient Near Eastern court tales generally. 91 Finally, Alexander H. Krappe noted some time ago that the theme of a court minister who is reinstated to defend the kingdom from some external threat is also present in one of the derivations of the Śukasaptati and in Firdowsi’s Shāh-Nāma. 92 The Indian and Persian examples are significant for a study of Daniel in that they demonstrate an Eastern interest in entertaining story-collections as well as the subgenre “court tale.” Daniel’s court tales are all set in Mesopotamia and Persia, and although it seems unlikely that Mesopotamia had a productive court tale genre, 93 Persia as a setting for compositions of this kind as well as a location for their production is very evident. On the other hand, while these compositions from India and Persia may have ancient origins, their actual texts are of a relatively late date compared to Daniel.

3.3.  The Near East and Egypt Story-collections such as Alf laylah wa-laylah and The Book of Sindibad, already mentioned in chapter 2, stem from the Middle East. Both of these works share certain difficulties with regard to their dating and authorship, originating in the east but without a named author or specific place of origin, seemingly moving from East to West as a fluctuating and protean core of stories and structure. Their extant texts date rather late into the Common Era, although they may have existed much earlier in some oral or written form. A few more details about these two works may be relevant here, before moving on to the even more ancient material.

91.  See Lawrence Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 37–42, 68. Wills calls the perspective of a conquered ethnic population that continues to think of itself as superior a “ruled ethnic perspective.” 92.  Alexander H. Krappe, “Is the Story of Aḥikar the Wise of Indian Origin? ” JAOS 61 (1941), 280–84. 93.  See Paul-Alain Beaulieu, “Official and Vernacular Languages: The Shifting Sands of Imperial and Cultural Identities in First-Millennium b.c. Mesopotamia,” in Seth L. Sanders, ed., Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures (2nd ed.; Oriental Institute Seminars 2; Chicago: Oriental Institute of the Unviersity of Chicago, 2007), 191–220, esp. 194–95.

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The Book of Sindibad, the Eastern form of the Western Seven Sages of Rome, is a framed story-collection possibly as old as the fifth century b.c.e., although the earliest reference to it is by al-Yaqubi in the year 880 c.e. 94 The earliest form was believed by Killis Campbell to be an Indian composition, which may then have entered Arabia, although this early Arabic version is lost to us. 95 The Eastern versions are nonetheless preserved: the Syriac version is called Sindban and is the oldest, dating to the tenth century c.e.; the Greek version is called Syntipas, dates from the end of the eleventh century, and is based on the Syriac Sindban; the Hebrew version, Mišlê Sendĕbār, dates to the twelfth or thirteenth century; the Old Spanish, Libro de los Engaños (“Book of Deceits”), is from 1253, and the hero is there called Cendubete; the Arabic version is the “Seven Viziers” story found in several manuscripts of Alf laylah wa-laylah, dating to about the fourteenth century; and a final three versions in Persian include the late twelfth-century prose text of as-Samarqandi, the prose text of six stories found in the eighth night of Nakhshabī’s Ṭūṭī-nāma from around 1300 c.e., and the Persian poem Sindibādnāma of 1375. 96 It is probably the Hebrew version, Mišlê Sendĕbār, that provided the source for the Western story-collection, The Seven Sages of Rome, which has a much more complicated transmission history than the Eastern versions. 97 The Eastern and Western collections differ little in the frame narrative aside from the removal of Sindibad from the Western versions (the main roles there are played by seven wise men of Rome), but the number of stories that they have in common is, at the most, four. The Hebrew Mišlê Sendĕbār contains “three stories which are not found in any other version; and it has one important trait possessed by no other Eastern version in that it gives the names of the sages, a trait which it shares, however, with the Western versions.” 98 In the frame story of the Eastern versions, a king has many wives but no heir; a son is conceived and born by his favorite wife only after they pray. 99 (The name of the king in the Syriac and the Greek is Kurus—that is, Cyrus—and in Old Spanish Alcos—perhaps from Al-Curus?—and in the Hebrew, Bibar or Kibar. Other versions do not mention the name of the king, and none of the Eastern versions names the wicked stepmother or the prince.) A reading of the boy’s horoscope reveals the fact that he will be in mortal danger in his twentieth year—a 94.  Campbell, The Seven Sages of Rome, xi. 95. Ibid. 96.  Epstein, Tales of Sendebar, 329. For a German edition of Mišlê Sendĕbār, see Paulus Cassel, Mischle Sindbad, Secundus-Syntipas: Edirt, emendirt und erklärt. Einleitung und Deutung des Buches der Sieben weisen Meister (Berlin: Richard Schaeffer, 1888). 97.  Most agree that there are two groups here, the Dolopathos and the Seven Sages of Rome (Epstein, Tales of Sendebar, 333). 98.  Campbell, The Seven Sages of Rome, xiii. The sages are named: Sendebar, Ipokras, Apulin, Lukman, Aristalin, Hind, and Amami (Mišlê Sendĕbār lines 53–54). 99.  In the Hebrew Mišlê Sendĕbār, motifs such as the favorite wife’s approach to the king share parallels with the biblical Esther story.

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motif somewhat like the “doomed prince” motif of ancient Egyptian literature. 100 In the important Hebrew version Mišlê Sendĕbār, when he is seven years old, the sage Sindibad/Sendĕbār is chosen from among the seven wisest men of the kingdom to educate the boy. After twelve and a half years, the boy proves still to be as dumb as a post (the king tests him with riddles, which he cannot answer). Thus, after some verbal sparring before the king by the seven wise men, who attempt to show by their wise sayings that they deserve the next chance to educate the prince, the wise man Sindibad is chosen again to teach him, but this time he asserts that he will only take six months to do so. Just before he is due to present his pupil to the king (presumably around the time the prince is to turn twenty), he learns via a horoscope reading that the prince will die unless he remains silent for one week. The prince is sent on to court alone and cautioned to keep silent, while Sindibad promises to follow. Once the prince arrives and remains mute, the king assumes Sindibad has failed. One of the wives of the king is allowed to try to make the prince speak, and when he will not, she tries to seduce him. After his silent rejection of her, she accuses him of rape and he is sentenced to death. As a delaying tactic, the seven sages tell stories for seven days about the wiles of women, and the royal wife each day counters with a story about evil sons. After the seven days are complete, the son speaks and demonstrates his wisdom to his father. 101 As for the woman, in Mišlê Sendĕbār, she is pardoned, while in all the other versions she is punished or executed. 102 A Thousand Nights and a Night (Alf laylah wa-laylah) may well have pre-Islamic antecedents. The origin of this story-collection is an Arabic translation of the Persian work, Hazār afsāneh (“A Thousand Stories,” or perhaps “A Thousand Tales of Magic”), from which it took the name Alf laylah (“A Thousand Nights”). 103 Both the translation and the Persian collection have been lost, and so there is no way of being certain that any of the original material survives. In addition, “no one knows exactly when a given story originated, but it is evident 100.  Note the New Kingdom Tale of the Doomed Prince, where a king is told by the Hathors that his son will die through a crocodile, a snake, or a dog, and one of the embedded stories of the Demotic story-collection Stories of Petese. See discussion in Kim Ryholt, The Story of Petese Son of Petetum and Seventy Other Good and Bad Stories (P. Petese) (CNI Publications 23; Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1999) 85–88. 101.  In some versions, a few stories are inserted here and placed in the mouth of the prince to prove his wisdom. 102.  Epstein says that she goes free in the Hebrew version, Mišlê Sendĕbār, “upon application of the talmudic version of the Golden Rule” (Tales of Sendebar, 5). In Syntipas (the Greek version), she is condemned to wander through the streets on an ass while town criers shout out her crimes; in Sindban (the Syriac version), she is hanged; in El libro de los engaños (the Medieval Spanish), she is burned in a dry cauldron; and in the Arabic Seven Viziers, she is tossed into the ocean with a stone tied to her foot (Epstein, Tales of Sendebar, 295). 103. Persian afsān[e] “is semantically close to terms like afsun and fosun, both denoting a magic spell or incantation, and, hence, an activity linked in some way or other to magic”; Ulrich Marzolph, “The Persian Nights,” Fabula 45 (2004), 275–93, esp. p. 275.

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that some stories circulated orally for centuries before they began to be collected and written down.” 104 The earliest testimony for the Nights is a ninth-century fragment preserving a title page and the first page of a work called “A Book of Tales from a Thousand Nights.” 105 Furthermore, Al-Masʿūdī and ibn al-Nadīm, tenth-century historians, knew of the existence of such collections in their time. This first phase extended from the eighth century to the sixteenth century c.e.; 106 however, the oldest extant manuscripts date to the fourteenth century and contain far less than 1001 nights. 107 Most of the stories in the preserved manuscripts were probably brought into the collection during the so-called Baghdad and Cairo periods of Arabic influence. 108 The framework and possibly some stories found their way to Europe perhaps in the fourteenth-century, where the first to translate the Nights was Antoine Galland in 1704–17. 109 All attempts to edit and translate the Nights before Muhsin Mahdi in 1984, including Galland’s, are problematic for many reasons, not least because they often use sources indiscriminately to make the nights number 1001. 110 The plot of the framing story is well-known; like the Book of Sindibad, it involves the telling of stories as a delaying tactic. A certain king of India and Indochina, Shahrayar, becomes disenchanted with women on account of their infidelity, and resolves to marry a new woman every day and then put her to death after their wedding night. He carries out this plan, but when he eventually 104. Husain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights, xi. 105.  The title page and first page are preserved together on one folio of two joined; see Nabia Abbott, “A Ninth-Century Fragment of the ‘Thousand Nights’,” 129–64. The title page indicates the nature of the work; it is merely a selection of tales from a work called Alf laylah; the later name Alf laylah wa-laylah is not indicated. The first page of the text clearly indicates a frame narrative complete with Dinazad (the sister or maid to Shahrazad) asking for tales to be told. 106.  J. D. Latham, “Arabic Literature,” in D. M. Lang, ed., A Guide to Eastern Literatures (New York: Praeger, 1971), 23. 107.  The Syrian manuscript (the so-called Galland manuscript) translated by Mahdi contained 271 Nights. 108. Mia Gerhardt, The Art of Story-telling, 115–374; Marzolph, “The Persian Nights,” 275. 109.  Abbott, “A Ninth-Century Fragment,” 164. 110. Muhsin Mahdi, Alf layla wa-layla (3 vols., Leiden: Brill, 1984). For the first complete translation of the Arabic text of the Macnaghten edition (also known as Calcutta II) since Richard Burton’s in 1885–88, see Malcolm Lyons et al., trans., The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights (3 vols.; London: Penguin, 2008). This translation also includes the so-called “orphan stories” (stories whose original Arabic text has not survived), “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba,” and an alternative ending to “The Seventh Journey of Sindbad.” The orphan stories were heard or acquired by Galland in Europe for his edition, but “an original Arabic version predating Galland has never been found” (Marzolph and van Leeuwen, The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1.90). “Aladdin” in particular was supposedly told to Galland by the Syrian Maronite Hannā Diyāb, and Galland claimed he had a written version of it as well, which has never been confirmed. See Marzolph and van Leeuwen, The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1.84–85, 89–91.

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marries the daughter of his vizier, Shahrazad, she is able to postpone her execution indefinitely by cleverly arousing the king’s interest in the stories she tells nightly to her younger sister. The king listens to the story each night and becomes so interested to hear the next installment or another story that he is unwilling to put Shahrazad to death. Like the frame story, in which the king and his brother are dismayed to find wives (even their own) flamboyantly entertaining men other than their husbands, the individual tales are entertaining, outrageous, and often bawdy. There were other hybrid works from Arabia that are similar in form and content to A Thousand Nights and a Night and that were also considered to be popular, not classical, literature. A vast work comparable to the Nights in length of evolutionary process is Sīrat ʾAntar, a romance of Arab chivalry spanning 500 years and revolving around the exploits of ʾAntar, an Islamised epic hero. A similar collection of story-cycles, Sīrat Banī Hilāl (Saga of the B. Hilāl), grew up around the great migration of the Bedouin tribe of Hilāl, which, after erupting from the Arabian Peninsula, spent several centuries in a westward movement across Egypt and North Africa. Neither the Nights nor the historical romances referred to are held to represent a high form of Arabic literature. 111

The “thousand and one” of the title, A Thousand Nights and a Night, indicates a large, indefinite number that corresponds to the open-endedness of the collection. 112 The first editions did not contain 1001 stories; but as the collection moved through Europe, the story-collection was expanded in order to agree with the expected number. More stories from Indian, Persian, Turkish, and other sources were continually added. The story of Sindbad the sailor (not to be confused with the Book of Sindibad above) is surely a later addition, although of early date. Moreover, one of the most famous stories, “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,” was never one of the 11 basic stories of the original work and first appeared in an Arabic edition in 1787. 113 The introduction to a recent translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night by Husain Haddawy describes how the tales were part of the translator’s own childhood in Baghdad; his grandmother delighted to tell her family stories from the collection. 114 She would modify the stories with each telling to suit her fancy. 111.  Latham, “Arabic Literature,” 30. 112. Franz Rosenthal, “Literature,” in Joseph Schacht and C. E. Bosworth, eds., The Legacy of Islam (2nd ed.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), 337; also see Gittes, Framing the Canterbury Tales, 46. 113.  Haddawy, Arabian Nights, xiii. See also Marzolph and van Leeuwen, The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1.84–85. But this Arabic edition was a translation of Galland’s European Nights; no original Arabic text has ever been located. 114.  Haddawy, Arabian Nights, ix–xi. There was no need for her to use a “prompt text,” as reported for some professional Nights storytellers; Pinault, Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights, 13; Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion, 113.

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If she had time to spare, she would embellish and lengthen a familiar tale; if the opposite were true, she would just as easily omit portions and shorten the tale. This personal recollection most likely reflects a long tradition of oral improvisation with the Nights. The Arabic story-collections such as the Book of Sindibad or Alf laylah walaylah are rather late in date, only stretching back to antiquity via Indian forerunners. The individual stories in the collections are told as a delaying tactic or to fill time—an aspect of some of the ancient Near Eastern story-collections to be discussed (such as the Tales from King Cheops’ Court) and of some Medieval collections (for instance, the Decameron or the Canterbury Tales), which is not a facet of the stories of Daniel. The Book of Daniel has no overt storyteller who plays a role in the framing material, until the visions are added. However, like The Nights, Daniel exhibits a popular-literary character, a close connection to orality, and a text in flux. Nebuchadnezzar becomes a standardized oriental king, well-known “from the ancient Egyptian novelettes to the Arabian Nights.” 115

3.3.1.  The Ancient Near East The ancient Near East offers the oldest known frame-narrative and storycollection in the world, the Egyptian Tales from King Cheops’ Court in Papyrus Westcar, which dates to the early or mid-second millennium b.c.e. 116 In addition to Papyrus Westcar, there are a few other story-collections in Egypt with inserted fables or tales of wonder, especially from the latter half of the first millennium b.c.e., as well as a continuous stream of Egyptian “court tales” with the same characters or officials appearing in inset-stories or framed works. These will be especially important for this study, given that the so-called court tale genre has been much discussed in connection with the Daniel narratives. There are also a few other examples of story-collections or related material in other literatures of the ancient Near East. One notes a fragmentary collection of Hurro-Hittite fables with linking material between the stories from the second millennium b.c.e. (see below), or the collections of lives of eastern Christian martyrs in Syriac from late antiquity. 117 In addition, the use of frame narratives to enclose other material besides stories (proverbs, for example) was very common throughout the ancient Near East.

115.  Bickerman, Four Strange Books, 97. 116. See Pratt and Young (“The Literary Framework of the Canterbury Tales,” 6) for an example of modern scholarship on the European story-collections citing Papyrus Westcar as the first example of frame narrative. 117.  Such as the sixth-century c.e. Lives of the Oriental Saints by John of Ephesus or the lives of Persian martyrs from the fourth through seventh centuries c.e.; see Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the Lives of Eastern Saints (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Sebastian P. Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

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3.3.1.1.  Hurrian-Hittite Fable Collection A series of parables or exempla appears in a Hurrian-Hittite bilingual and may be part of a composition known as the Song of Release or Epic of Emancipation (KBo 32,10–104). 118 KBo 32,12 and 14 are thought by some scholars to represent tablets II and III of five or more tablets found in 1983 at Ḫattuša (modern Boğazköy) in Turkey, with further fragments discovered there in 1985. 119 However, it is quite possible that the parables were part of a different series, separate from the mythological and other narratives on the other tablets. The tablets are all divided into two columns, with the left containing the Hurrian composition and the right a Hittite translation, although tablet 14 (the best preserved of the two with parables) is only partly in the two-column format. The script is dated by Erich Neu to around 1400 b.c.e.; the Hurrian composition was probably brought to the Hittite capital Ḫattuša in the Middle Hittite period (ca. 1500–1400 b.c.e.), when it was translated from Hurrian into Hittite. 120 The Hurrian version itself must be somewhat older, perhaps from around 1600 b.c.e. 121 118.  The hand-copies were first published by H. Otten and C. Rüster, Keilschrifttexte aus Boghazköi, zweiunddreissigstes Heft: Die hurritisch-hethitische Bilingue und weitere Texte aus der Oberstadt (KBo 32; Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1990), 2–29; and first edited by E. Neu, Das hurritische Epos der Freilassung I (StBoT 32; Wiesbaden: Harrasssowitz, 1996), a volume reviewed by Volkert Haas and Ilse Wegner in “Literarische und grammatikalische Betrachtungen zu einer hurritischen Dichtung,” OLZ 92 (1997), 437–55. See also Volkert Haas, Die hethitische Literatur: Texte, Stilistik, Motive (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), 177–92; Erich Neu, “La bilingue hourro-hittite de Ḫattuša, contenu et sens,” Amurru 1 (1996), 189–95; idem, “Kešše-Epos und Epos der Freilassung,” Studi micenei ed egeo-anatolici 31 (1993), 111–20; idem, Das Hurritische. Eine altorientalische Sprache in neuem Licht (Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 1988); Jean Catsanicos, “L’apport de la bilingue de Ḫattuša à la lexicologie hourrite,” Amurru 1 (1996), 197–296; Gernot Wilhelm, “Hurritische Lexikographie und Grammatik: Die hurritisch-hethitische Bilingue aus Boğazköy,” Or n.s. 61 (1992), 122–41; among others. For an English translation, see Harry A. Hoffner, Jr. Hittite Myths (2nd ed.; SBL WAW 2; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), 65–80; and for an English description, see Gernot Wilhelm, “The Hurrians in the Western Parts of the Ancient Near East,” in M. Malul, ed., Mutual Influences of Peoples and Cultures in the Ancient Near East (Michmanim 9; Haifa: Reuben and Edith Hecht Museum, University of Haifa, 1996), 17–30. 119.  The title Epic of Emancipation or Song of Release is a literal translation of: SIR3 parā tarnumar, the designation given the work in the colophons of several of the tablets; Neu, Das hurritische Epos der Freilassung I, 7. The Sumerogram SIR3 means ‘song’, ‘hymn’, or even ‘epic’ and is used in Akkadian and Sumerian, as well as Hittite, texts. The Hittite parā tarnumar corresponds to Hurrian kirenzi, both terms meaning ‘emancipation, manumission’. The genre “songs of release” is attested also in Hattic; see F. Pecchioli Daddi, “A Song of Release from Hattic Tradition,” in G. Wilhelm, ed., Akten des IV. internationalen Kongresses für Hethitologie (StBoT 45; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 552–59. Concerning its Homeric parallels, see M. Schuol, “Zur Überlieferung homerischer Epen von dem Hintergrund altanatolischer Traditionen,” in M. Schuol, U. Hartmann, and A. Luther, eds., Grenzüberschreitungen: Formen des Kontakts zwischen Orient und Okzident im Altertum (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2002), 331–62. 120.  Neu, Das hurritische Epos der Freilassung I, 3–7. 121. Gernot Wilhelm, “Das hurritisch-hethitische ‘Lied der Freilassung’,” TUAT Ergänzungslieferung, 82–91, esp. p. 82.

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KBo 32,12 contains the remains of only a few parables in Hurrian, while KBo 32,14 has a series of seven well-preserved parables. The parables or exempla are described in the composition with various terms: ‘story’ (Hurrian tivšāri, Hittite uttar), ‘message’ (Hurrian amumi, Hittite ḫatreššar), and ‘wisdom’ (Hurrian madi, Hittite ḫattatar). 122 Each parable contains a brief story involving animals or objects, even a mountain, which behave unwisely and receive a suitable punishment. Each parable ends with a summation (almost a moral) that compares the behavior to similar behavior of a particular kind of human being, and after each summation the following parable begins by instructing the listener to forget the previous tale and to listen to another. For example, in the third parable of KBo 32,14, a coppersmith painstakingly forges an elaborate copper cup, which then curses its maker. In his turn, the coppersmith curses the cup. The summation of the narrator explains: “This is not a cup, but a human being. It is that son who is hostile toward his father. He grew up and reached adulthood, and no longer looks at his father. (He it is) whom his father’s gods have made accursed.” 123 The next parable then begins with “Leave that tale, and I will tell you another tale. Hear (my) instructions; I will tell you an instructive example.” 124 Such a statement provides linking material between the tales and suggests that the parables are not a miscellany. It is not at all clear who is telling each parable to whom nor whether the parables fit into the context of the Epic of Emancipation at all. According to the main editor, Erich Neu, the parables are part of tablets II and III and follow the proemium or prologue of tablet I, which introduces several gods and the destruction of the cities of Ebla and Nuḫašše. They are then succeeded by two other narrative sections. The first of these concerns a feast of the goddess Allani, and the other a meeting of the city council of Ebla over the emancipation (or perhaps debt-remission) of Hurrians, specifically the Hurrian city of Ikinkal and a Hurrian individual named Purra. 125 It is in this last section where the theme of “emancipation” in the title is most obvious. The Hurrian god Tessub of Kummi 122.  Harry A. Hoffner, Jr., Hittite Myths, 68. But note G. Beckman’s definition of ḫattatar as encompassing three ideas: ‘plan, plot’, ‘advice, guidance’, or the ‘ability to generate’ either of the two previous. See Beckman, “Proverbs and Proverbial Allusions in Hittite,” JNES 45 (1986), 30. 123.  Hoffner’s translation in Hittite Myths, 70. 124.  For an English translation of just the parables, see Gary Beckman, “Excerpt from the Hurro-Hittite Bilingual Wisdom Text,” in COS, 1.216–17. 125.  Neu notes that the reason why the Hurrians are enslaved is not given, but one thinks of the practice of indentured servitude because of unpaid debts that was the practice especially at Nuzi in northern Mesopotamia and elsewhere. On indenture, see Barry L. Eichler, Indenture at Nuzi: The Personal Tidennuti Contract and Its Mesopotamian Analogues (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). Compare kirenzi and parā tarnumar to Akkadian andurāru or durāru, and Biblical Hebrew dĕrôr, as release from debt or slavery; see Eckart Otto, “Kirenzi and derôr in der hurritisch-hethitischen Serie ‘Freilassung’ (parā tarnumar),” in Akten des IV. Internationalen Kongresses für Hethitologie, 524–31.

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seems to command the release of his people, but only Mēgi of Ebla complies with his threats. The other Eblaites are persuaded by the powerful orator Zazalla not to follow suit. The ending of the composition is not preserved, but KBo 32,19 (possibly part of the sixth tablet) seems to threaten destruction to the city of Ebla if there is release. There is disagreement on whether or not the five tablets represent a composite that the “Hurrian and Hittite scribes saw as a single work”—that is, a frame story into which exempla have been set. 126 Gernot Wilhelm strongly suggests that the parables of KBo 32,12 and 14 are really paralipomena and are actually from a different series than the other narratives within which Neu placed them. 127 The parables have little to do with the emancipation theme of the title, and if they do follow immediately after the proemium, they do so without any introduction at all. 128 Eckart Otto proposes, however, that the parables are to be fitted into the composition as Neu suggested; perhaps their theme is ingratitude and rebellion against those whom one owes everything, exactly as in the Ebla story. 129 There, the townspeople of Ebla owe the god Tessub for his aid on their behalf in time of war, and when his command for the release of prisoners is not respected, the Eblaites are deserving of the curse of destruction. The opposite model is provided by the story of the sun-goddess Allani’s festival banquet, in which all the gods obey and recognize Tessub as king of heaven. In the divine world, there is order, obedience, and proper acknowledgment of hierarchy. Thus, according to Otto, the Ebla story was once an independent, free-standing etiology of the destruction of Ebla, but in the Hurrian-Hittite bilingual edition that story is built up and illustrated by the addition of the parables and the mythological narrative about Allani’s banquet. 130 Even if the parables of KBo 32,12 and 14 ought not to be considered as inset exempla in a narrative frame provided by the Ebla and Allani stories, there is still framing material around them, in that the parables all concern a related theme and each begins with recognition of the previous parable. If the Epic of Emancipation is not the frame story for the parables, one suspects that there could well have 126.  Hoffner, Hittite Myths, 2nd ed., 67. 127.  Wilhelm, “Das hurritisch-hethitische ‘Lied der Freilassung’,” TUAT Erganzlieferung, 84. Note that TUAT presents the Epic of Emancipation separately from the parables, which are translated by Ahmet Ümal, “Hurro-hethitische bilingue Anekdoten und Fabeln,” (TUAT III/4, 861–65). See now also Eva von Dassow, “Piecing Together the Song of Release,” JCS 65 (2013), 127–62. 128.  Neu, Das hurritische Epos der Freilassung I, 59. Some scholars have suggested that the intent of the entire work is to explain the destruction of Ebla, but how the parables would fit into this purpose remains uncertain; Haas and Wegner, “Review of H. Otten and C. Rüster, Die hurritisch-hethitische Bilingue und weitere Texte aus der Oberstadt,” OLZ 86 (1991), 384–91. 129.  Otto, “Kirenzi and derôr in der hurritisch-hethitischen Serie ‘Freilassung’ (parā tarnumar),” 529. 130.  Ibid., 530.

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been more framing material, such as an introduction and conclusion, that was not preserved. At any rate, the fact that there is linking material at all indicates that this is a story-collection of either Helen Cooper’s type 2 (limited framing material) or type 3 (a full frame narrative with inset stories). Finally, Norbert Oettinger has suggested that the Hurrian-Hittite bilingual composition in its North Syrian provenance influenced the Aḥiqar parables of the fifth century b.c.e., which also may have originated from North Syria (and Aḥiqar, in its turn, influenced the Aesopic fables). 131 The intermediate stages, however, are not clear and, unfortunately, none of the seven well-preserved parables of the bilingual are parallel to those of Aḥiqar. At most, one can say they occasionally share the same theme of loyalty (to father and ruler, etc.), but other features such as plot motifs, characters, and the like are very different in the two compositions.

3.3.1.2. Mesopotamia Ancient Mesopotamia, to all appearances, does not have anything similar to the “story-collection” genre, although it does possess many compositions set in narrative frames (such as instructions and dialogues) and compilation tablets containing unframed proverbs and other miniature compositions often no more than one line in length. 132 A corpus of Sumerian proverbs was transmitted in collections, sometimes referred to as “rhetoric collections.” Mixed in with what are proverbs in the conventional modern sense (traditional sayings such as maxims, truisms, adages, etc.) are anecdotes, jokes, taunts, compliments, extracts from other literature (even shorter forms of other proverbs), short fables, phrases from incantations or prayers and curses, technical expressions about professions, and

131.  Oettinger, “Achikars Weisheitssprüche im Licht älterer Fabeldichtung,” in N. Holz­ berg, ed., Der Äsop-Roman: Motivgeschichte und Erzählstruktur (Tübingen: Narr, 1992), 3–22. 132.  For full publication of the 28 Sumerian proverb collections, see Bendt Alster, Proverbs of Ancient Sumer: The World’s Earliest Proverb Collections (2 vols.; Bethesda, MD: CDL, 1997); and for a publication of the proverbs found in the private Schøyen collection, see idem, Sumerian Proverbs in the Schøyen Collection (CUSAS 2; Bethesda, MD: CDL, 2007). Editions and discussions of the collections are provided in E. Gordon, Sumerian Proverbs: Glimpses of Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia (2nd. ed.; New York: Greenwood, 1968); idem, “Sumerian Proverbs: Collection Four,” JAOS 77 (1957), 67–79; idem, “Sumerian Proverbs: Collection Five,” JCS 12 (1958), 1–21, 43–75; idem, “A New Look at the Wisdom of Sumer and Akkad,” BiOr 17 (1960), 47–123; idem, “Animals as Represented in the Sumerian Proverbs and Fables: A Preliminary Study,” in N. V. Pigulevskaya, ed., Drevnij Mir: Sbornik Statej (Festschrift V. V. Struve) (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Vostočnoi Literatury, 1962), 226–49; Alster, “Sumerian Proverb Collection Seven,” in RA 72 (1978), 97–112; idem, “Sumerian Proverb Collection XXIV,” in Assyriological Miscellanies I (1980), 33–50; and idem, Studies in Sumerian Proverbs (Copenhagen: Akademisk, 1975). See also: R. S. Falkowitz, “Discrimination and Condensation of Sacred Categories: The Fable in Early Mesopotamian Literature,” in R. S. Falkowitz et al., La Fable: Huit exposés suivis de discussions (Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique 30; Geneva: Fondation Hardt, 1984), 1–32. Falkowitz refers to the proverb collections as “Rhetoric Collections.”

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“a great deal of material which is not yet understood.” 133 These tablets are preserved in Sumerian unilinguals from the Early Dynastic and Old Babylonian periods (third and early second millennium b.c.e.) and in Sumerian and Akkadian bilinguals from the Old Babylonian to the Neo-Babylonian periods (to the first millennium b.c.e.). 134 In Bendt Alster’s edition of the Sumerian proverb collections, there are 28 major collections reconstructed from three kinds of tablets used in scribal education: small school tablets with one or only a few lines copied by students, excerpt tablets consisting of one column on each side, and complete compositions on multicolumn tablets or prisms. 135 The excerpt tablets and the tablets with complete compositions were master copies for school exercises, often done by highly competent scribes, and they are organized by key word, not by genre, origin, meaning, or function. 136 They are thus miscellanies of a sort. 137 Some of the “proverbs” feature animals that speak, lending themselves to comparison with fables or to “dialogue” 133.  W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960; repr., Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999), 222. See also p. 224: “In addition to the usual problems of grammar and lexicon which any Sumerian text may present there is the frequent obscurity of content. Proverbs serve for a fixed occasion, and because of their epigrammatic nature are only meaningful against that background. We only know the proverbs out of their context, and in many cases we can only guess at the point. Many English proverbs would be difficult if not connected with a particular circumstance.” See also Alster, Proverbs of Ancient Sumer, 1.xvi, for a list of genres or classifications. 134.  See Bendt Alster, “Early Dynastic Proverbs and other Contributions to the Study of Literary Texts from Abū Ṣalābīkh,” AfO 38/39 (1991/92), 1–51. The Sumerian Proverbs, along with the Instructions of Šuruppak, both of which are attested in the Early Dynastic and Old Babylonian periods, contain the world’s oldest known sapiential literature. On tablet typology and Sumerian literature, see Steve Tinney, “On the Curricular Setting of Sumerian Literature,” Iraq 61 (1999), 159–72, esp. p. 160; Gonzalo Rubio, “Sumerian Literature,” in Carl S. Ehrlich, From an Antique Land: An Introduction to Ancient Near Eastern Literature (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 11–75, esp. pp. 28–30. 135.  Alster, Proverbs of Ancient Sumer, 1.xx–xiii; idem, Wisdom of Ancient Sumer (Bethesda, MD: CDL, 2005), 342–72. 136.  Falkowitz, “Discrimination and Condensation of Sacred Categories: The Fable in Early Mesopotamian Literature,” 5. For a debate about how the proverbs were used in the school curriculum, see Niek Veldhuis, “Sumerian Proverbs in Their Curricular Context,” JAOS 120 (2000), 383–99; and Bendt Alster and Takayoshi Oshima, “A Sumerian Proverb Tablet in Geneva With Some Thoughts on Sumerian Proverb Collections,” Orientalia 75 (2006), 31–72, pl. iii. Veldhuis thinks that the proverbs were used merely to teach grammar to beginners, after learning vocabulary from lexical lists and before going on to literature; but it is romantic to think they represent wisdom literature in any real sense. Alster and Oshima respond that the collections “at least to some extent include genuine proverbs,” are useful for comparative studies, and illustrate “scribal wit” if not so much wisdom; “A Sumerian Proverb Tablet,” 32–33. 137.  Examples of some of the more cross-culturally comprehensible proverbs or sayings include: “To have and insist on more is abominable” (1.23); “You don’t return borrowed bread” (1.31); and “In the city of the lame, the halt are couriers” (1.66). See Alster, Proverbs of Ancient Sumer, 1.11–12, 18.

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or “debate” poems; some of these entries in the proverb collections must be brief excerpts from or references back to myths. 138 Still, a small number of the other compositions on the tablets are slightly longer and do seem to include narrative devices along with the personified animals or objects, bringing them much closer to a modern understanding of what a fable is. 139 The Proverb Collections do not provide a true parallel for the storycollection genre, but they reveal a common impulse found in other literatures to gather proverbs, sayings, fables, etc., into collections. 140 One can see that the notion of wisdom in the ancient Near East included wise sayings that were collected with stories about the wise. Proverb collections in narrative frames, such as those in the Aḥiqar story, the Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy, and various “Instructions” from Mesopotamia (such as the Instructions of Šuruppak), Egypt, and elsewhere, are found throughout the ancient Near East. On a related point, one also notes that Mesopotamia did not have a productive native court-tale genre, in spite of its probably being the ultimate origin of the well-known Story of Aḥiqar, which is set in both the Assyrian and Egyptian courts. But Aḥiqar’s earliest extant text is in Aramaic from fifth century b.c.e. Egypt, and there is no cuneiform version, nor are there any other cuneiform court tales at all. 141 (For this reason Aḥiqar will be discussed in the next section, Northwest Semitic literature.) As much as we know about actual historical courtiers in Mesopotamia, perhaps it is strange that fictional accounts of their activities do 138. For example, there are phrases about a fox urinating in the sea or a river: RC 2.72(67), “Fox urinated into the sea. ‘The whole of the sea is my urine,’ (he said)”; or, UET 6/2, 216, “Fox, having urinated into the Tigris (said,) ‘I am raising up a carp-flood.’” See Falkowitz, “Discrimination and Condensation of Sacred Categories,” 13. (These examples are also in Alster, Proverbs of Ancient Sumer, 1.58, 306.) 139.  One of the most resonant of these few fables in the Proverb Collections is SP 5.55: A lion had caught a helpless she-goat (and said), “Let me go and I will give you my fellow ewe in return.” “If I let you go, tell me first your name!” The she-goat answered the lion, “You don’t know my name? ‘I am Cleverer Than You’ is my name.” After the lion had come to the sheepfold, he roared, “I released you!” She answered from the other side, “You released me, you were clever . . . the sheep are not here!” See Alster, Proverbs of Ancient Sumer, 1.128. This corresponds to no. 122D, “Caught Animal Promises Captor Better Prey” in the folklore index. The fable of the gnat and the elephant is found in Barius 84 (cf. Aesopica 137; see B. E. Perry, “Fable,” Studium generale 12 [1959], 27; Ebeling, Die Babylonische Fabel, 50). The gnat asks the elephant if he has been a burden, and if so, he will go away. The elephant responds that he notices neither the gnat’s arrival nor departure. 140.  For a discussion of Mesopotamian and Indian influences on the Greek fable from a classicist’s perspective, see Adrados, History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.287–366. 141.  Beaulieu, “Official and Vernacular Languages,” 194–95.

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not abound; the poetic Ludlul bēl nēmeqi may be the nearest we can get to such a thing. 142

3.3.1.3.  Northwest Semitic Syriac literature of Late Antiquity and the Medieval period produced or preserved several story-collections. In Syriac, one notes especially the assumed earliest version of the Pañcatantra, some collections of eastern saints’ Lives, and the 727 “Laughable Stories” collected by John Abu’l-Faraj (also known as Gregory Bar-Hebraeus), the head of the Jacobite Church in 1264–86. 143 Called in Syriac both “Book of Laughable Stories” (‫ܡܓܚܟܢܐ‬ ‫ܕܬܘܢܝܐ‬ ‫ )ܟܬܒܐ‬and “Book of Refreshing Stories” (‫ܡܦܝܓܢܐ‬ ‫ܕܬܘܢܝܐ‬ ‫)ܟܬܒܐ‬, there was an Arabic version made by the same author entitled “The Driving Away of Care” (Dafʿ al-Hamm). Bar-Hebraeus recommends his stories to the Muslim, Hebrew, Aramean, or even the foreigner. The book’s 20 chapters include the sayings of Greek philosophers, Persian, Indian, and Hebrew sages, Christian recluses, Muslim kings, Arab ascetics and physicians, as well as stories of teachers and learned men, the speech of irrational beasts, those whose dreams have come true, wealthy men, misers, thieves and robbers, and so on. The work is thus reminiscent of the medieval collections in Arabic and Hebrew from the Iberian peninsula and even Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina clericalis. In contrast to the later Syriac collections, earlier Northwest Semitic literatures provide less of relevance in terms of collections. The Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible contains collections of proverbs, and these, like other proverb collections, are often presented as advice from father to son or parent to child. A scant frame is provided by the introduction to the book, which declares that these “are the proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel,” and an assertion 142.  Ludlul bēl nēmeqi—that is, the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer or the Babylonian Job—is an Akkadian poem about a man named Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan, who contemplates human suffering and the inscrutability of the divine on account of various personal calamities, including the derision of some fellow courtiers, the anger of the king, abandonment by the gods, and confiscation of his property; Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature, 21–46; Amar Annus and Alan Lenzi, Ludlul bēl nēmeqi: The Standard Babylonian Poem of the Righteous Sufferer (SAACT 7; PFFAR 2; Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project; Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010). Karel van der Toorn has explored the poem’s relationship to Daniel, especially Dan 6 (see below); van der Toorn, “In the Lions’ Den: The Babylonian Background of a Biblical Motif,” CBQ 60 (1998), 626–40; idem, “Scholars at the Oriental Court: The Figure of Daniel against its Mesopotamian Background,” in John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint, eds., The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, 1.37–54. See also Stephanie Dalley, “Assyrian Court Narratives in Aramaic and Egyptian: Historical Fiction,” in T. Abusch et al., eds., Proceedings of the XLVe Recontre Assyriologique Internationale, Part 1: Harvard University: Historiography in the Cuneiform World (Bethesda, MD: CDL, 2001), 149–61, esp. pp. 153–55. 143.  Mâr Gregory John Bar-Hebraeus, The Laughable Stories (trans. E. A. Wallis Budge; London: Luzac, 1897; reprinted New York: AMS, 1976).

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of the book’s purpose. 144 This frame is not returned to at the end of the book; instead, the book concludes with the praise of the capable wife by the mother of King Lemuel. However, this ending does provide some closure and structure to Proverbs as a whole; it had begun with a young man being instructed in the good life by his father and ends with the prospect of the son leaving home for a new household run by an accomplished wife. More important for their relevance to this study are various court tales from Qumran and elsewhere, many in Aramaic. The Qumran texts include the fragmentary 4Q550 Tales of the Persian Court, a composition that may contain more than one court tale and will be discussed in ch. 5 (section 5.1.1.1). Also important are two texts to be examined here, the Aramaic Story and Proverbs of Aḥiqar and the Ḥor-bar-Pawenesh/Punesh texts, both from Egypt in the fifth century b.c.e. and both of which appear also in Demotic Egyptian versions. Aḥiqar is a court tale about a disgraced courtier of the Assyrian royal court, brought down by his adopted son and rival (whom he does defeat in the end), which supplies a frame narrative for some proverbs and fables. Aḥiqar does not represent a storycollection per se, but its court conflict or tale of rivalry between ministers at a Mesopotamian court and the wise sayings attributed to the superior Aḥiqar provide a tantalizing view of, once again, the proclivity of court settings and courtiers to attract collected narrative materials. The fragmentary Ḥor-bar-Pawenesh texts are the recto and verso of TAD C1.2 (AP 71). The recto is an Egyptian tale that features a confrontation or audience between a magician named Ḥorbar-Pawenesh (Ḥwr-br-pwnš, probably ‘Horus-son-of-the-Wolf ’ or ‘Horus-son-ofthe-Jackal’) and an unknown pharaoh. The verso, which may be unrelated to the recto, contains a prophetic text whose preserved highlight is the coming appearance of a “man of Zoan (Tanis)” and the birth of a child. These texts, along with the Aramaic Sheikh Faḍl inscription (TAD D23.1, which probably contains fifth-century traditions about the seventh-century Ina­ ros, an Egyptian rebel against the Assyrian invasion), all present Aramaic compositions from Egypt with Demotic versions from later periods. They illustrate the close interaction between Aramaic and Demotic in the second half of the first millennium b.c.e. in Egypt. Another text, Papyrus Amherst 63, best described as a miscellany related to the Mesopotamian New Year’s Festival but found in Egypt, must be an indication of this as well. It is written in the Aramaic language, but in Demotic script, and dates to the early Hellenistic period. 145 144.  There are four main collections in Proverbs: Prov 10:1–22:16, the “Proverbs of Solomon”; 22:17–24:22, the “Words of the Wise”; 24:23–34, more “Words of the Wise”; and 25:1– 29:27, “Proverbs of Solomon, transmitted by Hezekiah.” So Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 1–9: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 18A; New York: Doubleday, 2000), 4–5. 145.  Vleeming and Wesselius date the papyrus to the fourth century b.c.e., while Steiner dates it to the third or second century b.c.e. See Vleeming and Wesselius, Studies in Papyrus Amherst 63, vol. 1; Richard C. Steiner, “Papyrus Amherst 63: A New Source for the Language,

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3.3.1.3.1. Aḥiqar The Story and Proverbs of Aḥiqar have a well-known history throughout the Near East, appearing in several languages. The text’s influence on European literature and art has also been suggested. 146 The earliest manuscript of Aḥiqar is an Aramaic papyrus from the second half of the fifth century b.c.e. found in excavations at Elephantine, Egypt in 1906–8; it preserves 14 of what may once have been up to 21 columns, according to Porten and Yardeni, who in 1993 published a reconstruction of the text in TAD. 147 It is a palimpsest—that is, it was written over an older text, in this case an erased customs account that dates to 475 b.c.e. 148 There are also fragments of the Aḥiqar Story (and possibly the Proverbs) in first-century c.e. Demotic, and late versions in Syriac, Arabic, and Armenian, as well as Old Church Slavic, Karshuni (Arabic in Syriac script), and fragments in Ethiopic, none of whose extant manuscripts are earlier than the twelfth or thirteenth century c.e. 149 As mentioned above, the plot of the Story is Literature, Religion, and History of the Arameans,” in Studia Aramaica: New Sources and New Approaches, 199–207; Richard C. Steiner, “The Aramaic Text in Demotic Script,” in COS vol. 1, 309–27. It is comprised of a collection of poems, hymns, and rituals associated with a New Year’s festival and concludes with an epic narrative: the “Revolt of Babylon” or “Tale of Two Brothers,” an Aramaic version of the seventh-century rivalry between the two royal brothers, Assurbanipal of Assyria and Shamash-shum-ukin of Babylon (cols. 18–23). 146.  See, for instance, F. M. Fales, “Ahiqar e Boccaccio,” in E. Acquaro, ed., Alle soglie della classicità il Mediterraneo tra tradizione e innovazione: Studi in onore di Sabatino Moscati, vol. 1: Storia e culture (Pisa/Rome: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 1996), 147–67. 147. The editio princeps of the Aramaic is found in E. Sachau, Arämaische Papyrus und Ostraka aus einer jüdischen Militärkolonie zu Elephantine (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1911), 147–82 and pls. 40–50. Other editions include: A. Ungnad, Aramäische Papyrus aus Elephantine: Kleine Ausgabe unter Zugrundelegung von Eduard Sachau’s Erstausgabe (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1911), 62–83; F. Stummer, Der kritische Wert der altaramäischen Aḫiḳartexte aus Elephantine, Alttestamentliche Abhandlungen 5,5 (Münster: Aschendorf, 1914); A. Cowley, Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), 204–48. The Aramaic fragments have been reedited by Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni as TAD C1.1; see TAD III, xv–xvi, 23–53, foldouts 1–9. 148.  In their careful reconstruction, Porten and Yardeni see that the seven sheets (three columns) attached to the end of the papyrus also contained on their verso some columns of the Aḥiqar Story, written on top of another customs account. These columns, in the same hand as the Aḥiqar Story on the recto, contain a duplicate of 22 lines of the Story from plates C and D1 (Aḥiqar lines 43, and 48–64 according to TAD). See TAD III, 22–23. The scribe must have written his Aḥiqar once on top of an erased customs account, then tore from that story the seven sheets to add to another papyrus roll containing another customs account, enough for another Aḥiqar, then erased both sides and completed his Aḥiqar. 149.  And still later translations in Georgian, Romanian, Old Turkish, Russian, Serbian, and neo-Syriac. See J. R. Harris, F. C. Conybeare, and A. S. Lewis, The Story of Aḥiḳar from the Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Old Turkish, Greek and Slavonic Versions (2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913); R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), 2.715–84; Anīs Furayḥah, Aḥīqār ḥakīm min aš-šarq al-adnā l-qadīm [“Aḥīqar, a sage from the Ancient Near East”] (Bayrūt

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also present in one episode of the Greek Life of Aesop (chs. 101–123), in which it is Aesop who takes the role of Aḥiqar, in that he is sent by a Mesopotamian king (Lycurgus) to an Egyptian king (Nectanebo) in order to take part in a contest of wits. The Story was obviously very popular in the Mediterranean and the Near East, and so it is not surprising that in more modern times it was also included in a supplement to some printed editions of the Alf laylah wa-laylah. 150 The name and story of Aḥiqar is also briefly mentioned in the deutero­ canonical book of Tobit 1:21–22, 2:10, 11:18, and 14:10. Tobit probably dates to around 225–175 b.c.e. and thus provides an intermediate version of the story between the Aramaic version and the later Syriac-Arabic-Armenian versions or the Greek versions found in the Life of Aesop. 151 Like the Aramaic version, in Tobit, Aḥiqar serves under both Sennacherib (705–681 b.c.e.) and Esarhaddon (680–669 b.c.e.), and the names of the two Assyrian kings are in the correct order (later versions tend to invert them). The titles of Aḥiqar are similar (in Tobit, he is a “chief cupbearer, chief of the signet ring(s), comptroller, [and] treasury accountant”). 152 However, there are elaborations in Tobit that are close to the later versions of Aḥiqar, such as the mention of an underground hiding place for Aḥiqar (14:10) while he awaits rehabilitation to the court. In addition, Tobit describes Aḥiqar as the nephew of Tobit who intercedes for Tobit so he can return to Nineveh (1:21), and later cares for him for two years when Tobit is blind (2:10). 153 Unlike all other versions, including the Aramaic, however, the book makes Aḥiqar Jewish: not only is he Tobit’s nephew but he is also a pious almsgiver (14:10) and thus avoids the polytheism of the Aḥiqar tradition both earlier and later. [Beirut]: Jāmiʿat Bayrūt al-Amīrikīyah [American University of Beirut], 1962), 37–64 (Syriac), 115–46 (Arabic); Joan Ferrer and Juan Pedro Monferrer, Historia y enseñas de Ahíqar o la antigua sabiduría oriental (Studia Semitica Series Minor 2; Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba, 2006). For a modern neo-Aramaic version of Aḥiqar from Mlaḥsō, which is probably a translation from an Arabic version, see Shabo Talay, “Die Geschichte und die Sprüche des Aḥiqar im neuaramäischen Dialekt von Mlaḥsō,” in W. Arnold and H. Bobzin, eds., “Sprich doch mit deinen Knechten aramäisch, wir verstehen es!”: 60 Beiträge zur Semitistik Festschrift für Otto Jastrow zum 60. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002), 695–712. 150.  Lindenberger, “Ahiqar,” 492. 151. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Tobit (Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003), 52. 152. Aramaic Tobit in 4Q196 2:7–9 [Tob 1:22] has ‫רב ׁשקה‬, ‘chief cup-bearer’, ‫רב עזקן‬, ‘chief of the signet ring(s)’, ‫המרכל‬, ‘comptroller’, and ‫ׁשיזפן קדם אסרחריב מלך אתור‬, ‘treasury accountant under Sennacherib, the king of Assyria’; see Fitzmyer, Tobit, 123–24; M. Broshi et al., Qumran Cave 4 XIV: Parabiblical Texts, Part 1 (DJD 19; Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 8. 153.  There is a “comic tribalism” to the Tobit story in that Tobit claims to be related to what seems like everyone. See J. R. C. Cousland, “Tobit: A Comedy in Error? ” CBQ 65 (2003), 535–53, esp. p. 538; Wills, The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World, 78; Erich Gruen, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 157.

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The story of Aḥiqar is about a minister to the Assyrian king Sennacherib, who adopts his nephew Nadin or Nadan as his son (Nadab in Tobit’s version) 154 and educates him to take over his position when Sennacherib’s successor, Esarhaddon, begins to reign. 155 Aḥiqar’s titles in the Aramaic text include ‘wise and skillful scribe’ (‫)ספר חכים ומהיר‬, ‘counselor of all Assyria’ (‫)יעט אתור כלה‬, ‘keeper of the seal of Sennacherib, king of Assyria’ (‫)צבית עזקתה זי שנחאריב מלך אתור‬, ‘the master of good counsel’ (‫)בעל עטתא טבתא‬, and variations on the same. Nadin, through some unknown motivation, tells Esarhaddon that Aḥiqar is plotting 154.  The names can be either good Akkadian or Aramaic names; for example, Aḥiqar means “My brother is precious” in both. The name of the nephew can be vocalized either Nadin or Nadan and appears as Nadan in the later Aramaic versions of Aḥiqar. Nādin in Akkadian would be an active participle, ‘Giver’, or he gives’, and thus a hypocoristic with the theophoric element missing: ‘(the god DN) gives’); e.g., Nabū-nādin-zēr, ‘Nabu gives progeny’. The noun form Nadān, ‘Gift’, occurs in Akkadian as well, but less often. See Lindenberger, “Ahiqar,” 483. 155.  A common English translation and edition of the earliest version, the Aramaic, is by J. M. Lindenberger, “Ahiqar,” in J. H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2.479–507. Other translations include: H. L. Ginsberg, “Aramaic Proverbs and Precepts, The Words of Ahiqar,” in ANET, 427–30; Pierre Grelot, Documents araméens d’Égypt (Littératures anciennes du Proche-Orient 5; Paris: du Cerf, 1972), 427–52; Ghrīghūryūs Būlus Bahnām, Aḥīqār al-ḥakīm (Baghdad: Majmaʿ al-Lughah al-Suryaniyah, 1976); Fabrizio Pennacchietti, “Storia e massime di Achicar,” in Paulo Sacchi, ed., Apocrifi dell’Antico Testamento (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1981), 1.53–95; Ingo Kottsieper, “Die Geschichte und die Sprüche des weisen Achiqar,” in TUAT III/2 (1991), 320–47; Dāʾūd Sallūm and Ḥasan Muḥammad Rabābiʿah, Muḥāwalat qatl Aḥīqār al-ḥakīm al-āšūrī wa-aθaruhā fī l-adab al-masraḥī al-yūnānī wa-l-adab al-ʿarabī [“The assassination attempt of Aḥiqar, the Assyrian sage, and its influence on Greek drama and Arabic literature”] (Irbid: al-Markaz al-Qawmī li-n-Našr, 2000), 13–27; E. Martínez Borobio, “Libro arameo de Ajicar,” in Alejandro Diez Macho and Antonio Piñero Sáenz, eds., Apocrifos del Antiguo Testamento III (2nd ed.; Madrid: Ediciones Cristiandad, 2002), 167–87; Ricardo Contini, “Il testo aramaico di Elefantina,” in Ricardo Contini and Cristiano Grottanelli, eds., Il saggio Ahiqar: Fortuna e trasformazioni di uno scritto sapienziale. Il testo piú antico e le sue versioni (Studi biblici 148; Brescia: Paideia, 2005), 113–39; Herbert Niehr, Weisheitliche, magische und legendarische Erzählungen: Aramäischer Aḥiqar (JSHRZ Neue Folge 2.2; Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2007). Recent treatments of various issues concerning Aḥiqar, as well as translations of different versions, can also be found in Contini and Grottanelli, Il saggio Ahiqar, and in Suhayl Qāšā, Aḥīqār ḥakīm min Nīnawà wa-aθaruhu fī l-ādāb al-ʿālamīyah l-qadīmah [“Aḥiqar, a sage from Nineveh, and its influence on ancient international literature”] (Bayrūt [Beirut]: Bīsān, 2005). For a study or translations of the proverbs only, see P. Grelot, “Les proverbes araméens d’Aḥiqar,” RB 68 (1961), 178–94; J. Lindenberger, The Aramaic Proverbs of Ahiqar (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Ingo Kottsieper, Die Sprache der Aḥiqarsprüche (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990); Michael Weigl, “Mein Neffe Achikar” (Tob 1,22): Die aramäischen AchikarSprüche und das Alte Testament (Habilitationsschrift, Katholisch-Theologischen Fakultät der Universität Wien, 1999); idem, Die aramäischen Achikar-Sprüche aus Elephantine und die alttestamentliche Weisheitsliteratur (BZAW 399; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010). See also M. Küchler, Frühjüdische Weisheitstraditionen: Zum Fortgang weisheitlichen Denkens im Bereich des frühjüdischen Jahweglaubens (Freiburg: Universitätsverlag Freiburg / Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1979), 319–411.

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against him, and Esarhaddon asks an army officer from Sennacherib’s time, Nabu­ sumiskun (reflecting Akkadian Nabū-šum-iškun, ‘Nabu established a name’), to kill Aḥiqar. Fortuitously, this officer had previously been saved by Aḥiqar from death in some fashion, so Nabusumiskun returns the favor, keeping Aḥiqar alive by killing a eunuch slave in his place, and then hiding Aḥiqar in his own house. In the Aramaic version, the text breaks off here (perhaps up to four columns are missing) but resumes with a series of proverbs. The most common supposition is that these proverbs must have been appended at the end of the story which had its conclusion somewhere in the missing four columns (but see below). 156 In the later, complete versions, the proverbs are not in a fixed position; sometimes, proverbs appear twice in the story: once, near the beginning, when Aḥiqar is instructing his adoptive son, and again, near the end, when Aḥiqar is rebuking Nadin for his betrayal. In addition, the story portion concludes with a competition of wits between the Assyrian king and his court and the Egyptian king and his court. 157 After Aḥiqar has gone into hiding, the Egyptian king (unnamed) challenges Esarhaddon to find a wiseman to answer riddles and build a palace between heaven and earth. 158 Esarhaddon is able to find no courtier (the Arabic version has a long list of people assembled, including learned men, diviners, and astrologers), not even Nadin, capable of contending with the Egyptians. 159 At this time, Aḥiqar is produced alive and outwits the Egyptians. He trains eagles to fly with young men on their backs and has them shout out to others to bring the bricks and clay. Of course, no one can do so, and the impossible task is revealed for what it is. Another episode has pharaoh claiming that when Sennacherib’s horse neighs in Nineveh, the mares of Egypt miscarry their foals. 160 Aḥiqar responds by 156.  TAD III, 23. 157.  For a comparison of the Elephantine Aḥiqar with the later versions, see, for instance, F. M. Fales, “Riflessioni sull’Ahiqar di Elefantina,” Orientis antiqui miscellanea (1994), vol. 1, 51–60; John Strugnell, “Problems in the Development of the Aḥîqar Tale,” in Frank Moore Cross Volume (Eretz-Israel 26; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1996), 204–11. 158.  In the Life of Aesop, the Egyptian king is Nectanebo. 159.  Within the later versions, there are several points that invite comparison with Daniel. For instance, Aḥiqar’s condition when found is similar to Nebuchadnezzar’s in Dan 4: his hair has grown long like a beast’s, and his nails are like an eagle’s. Also, in the Syriac and Armenian versions, Nadin says that not even the gods themselves are capable of contending with the Egyptians; cf. Dan 2:11. 160.  This is conspicuously similar to the tale of the Quarrel of Apophis and Seknenre, the first parts of which are only partly preserved. It seems to be a Ramesside story. Apophis is a Hyksos leader ruling at Avaris, while Seknenre is a Theban prince who pays tribute. Apophis, directed by his scribes, wisemen, and high officials, sends a confounding message to Seknenre, saying that the hippopotamuses of Seknenre’s city do not allow citizens in the Hyksos city to sleep, and they should be removed. The story breaks off with the stupified king calling his high officials, equally dumbfounded, to help him find a solution to this challenge from the Hyksos leader. One can only assume that, as in the best Egyptian riddling contests, the Theban prince finds someone from his court or elsewhere who is able to outdo Apophis and his wisemen. For

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flogging a cat that he claims has gone to Nineveh in the night and has killed his rooster. When the pharaoh questions him, Aḥiqar points out that if Nineveh is too far away for the cat to get there in one night, how can the mares of Egypt hear a horse in Nineveh? A further contest includes the demand of pharaoh to build ropes out of sand, followed by some spoken riddles from the pharaoh to Aḥiqar, which he likewise solves. When he returns to Nineveh with three-years’ worth of taxes from Egypt, Sennacherib exalts Nabusumiskun and Nadin is given over to Aḥiqar to punish. Nadin is bound in chains and later swells up and bursts upon hearing further proverbs from Aḥiqar, something that he is unable to bear. Lawrence Wills argues that the oldest Aḥiqar from Elephantine and in the Aesop versions is a straightforward court conflict story, in contrast to the story in the Syriac, Armenian, and Arabic versions, which is a “complex, satirical retelling,” and an “anti-court legend.” 161 Furthermore, while the Elephantine proverbs have both general sayings and fables that have limited applicability to Nadin, the late versions have a strict division of proverbs and short narrative allegories (parables) closely linked to Nadin’s behavior, and the story as well as the placement of these demonstrate the development of wisdom in Aḥiqar himself. The first series of pompous proverbs that Aḥiqar tries on Nadin do not work. But after Aḥiqar is duped with the two letters forged by Nadin (one purportedly from Aḥiqar to the general asking him to meet Aḥiqar for a coup d’état and the other claiming to be from the king to Aḥiqar telling him to gather the army on the plain), and charged with treason by the king, Aḥiqar makes an about-face. Leaving behind institutional wisdom, he becomes truly clever and persuades the executioner to save him. When Ahiqar is produced alive to counter the pharaoh’s challenges in Egypt, he continues to use cunning and supernatural abilities, and triumphs over the pharaoh by employing the same strategy of forged letters that had formerly worked against Aḥiqar himself. Then, after his triumphal return to Assyria to confront Nadin in the locked room, instead of simple proverbs, Aḥiqar uses effective parables that directly relate to Nadin and his treachery. Wills’s interpretation of the Aramaic version as a straightforward court conflict tale in contrast to the later versions, however, depends on how one views the contents of the missing columns of the Aramaic Aḥiqar. According to Porten and Yardeni (TAD), there is only room for four columns between column 5, where the story breaks off, and column 9, which begins what is preserved of the proverbs, so there is presumably not enough room for the Egyptian episode. Ingo Kottsieper and John Strugnell independently suggest, however, that the Aramaic

the text, see Alan H. Gardiner, Late-Egyptian Stories (Bibliotheca Aegyptiaca 1; Brussels: Fondation Égyptologique Reine Élisabeth, 1932), xiii, 85–89. See also H. Brunner, “Apophis und Seqenenre,” LÄ I, 353–54; Hans Goedicke, The Quarrel of Apophis and Seqenenre (San Antonio: Van Siclen, 1986); and E. F. Wente, Jr., “The Quarrel of Seknenre,” in LAE, 69–71. 161.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 45.

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version did indeed contain it. 162 John Strugnell argues, by comparison with the later versions, that the four missing columns contain scenes in which a pharaoh hears of Aḥiqar’s death and sends a challenge to Esarhaddon to send his best sage to Egypt for a contest of wits. When Esarhaddon laments the death of Aḥiqar, he is produced alive. There is then enough room for a first instruction of Nadin, followed by the proverbs of TAD’s columns 9–20. 163 Strugnell would further contend that the rest of the story—Aḥiqar’s embassy to Egypt and the actual contests of wits with the Egyptians—appeared after column 20 (the last preserved column in the TAD reconstruction). 164 He contends that this makes sense narratologically, since, if you do not have the Egyptian episode in the earliest version, then there is no reason for the Assyrian king to miss Aḥiqar and no motivation for his rehabilitation. Strugnell also claims this makes sense papyrologically in that, in Porten and Yardeni’s edition, there is no continuing text between the two customs accounts (the under-text of the palimpsest) that were glued in and then erased before the Aḥiqar text was written down. If two customs accounts were glued together, what would have prevented additional papyrus sheets from being glued in originally between the existing columns of the text? While there is no way to resolve the papyrological argument without discovering more papyri, Strugnell’s narratological contention seems to have some force. Without some event like the Egyptian episode, there is no motivation for bringing Aḥiqar back to Esarhaddon’s court. There is now a near-consensus that the story of Aḥiqar, in spite of its Mesopotamian setting, was originally in Aramaic, not Akkadian, as previously thought. 165 Nonetheless, there is some debate about whether the two parts of the Aramaic text—the court tale and the proverb collection—are originally from different regions and/or in different dialects. The court tale is uniformly agreed to be in Official Aramaic, while the proverbs are usually considered to be older than the story, even if scholars disagree about their exact date or dialect. 166 Lindenberger argues that both the tale and the proverb collection were fixed in 162. See Strugnell, “Problems in the Development of the Aḥîqar Tale,” 204–11; Kottsieper, “The Aramaic Tradition: Ahikar,” in Leo G. Perdue, ed., Scribes, Sages, and Seers: The Sage in the Eastern Mediterranean World (FRLANT 219; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 109–24. 163.  Weigl disagrees and says that the reconstruction of Porten and Yardeni does not allow for any Egyptian episode; Weigl, Die aramäischen Achikar-Sprüch, 693. 164.  Strugnell, “Problems in the Development of the Aḥîqar Tale,” 209. 165.  Lindenberger, “Ahiqar,” in Charlesworth, ed., Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2.481. However, on an original Akkadian for the story and proverbs, see Simo Parpola, “Il retro­terra assiro di Ahiqar,” in Riccardo Contini and Cristiano Grottanelli, eds., Il saggio Ahiqar, 91–112. 166.  Greenfield understood the proverbs as a west-Aramaic dialect of Official/Imperial Aramaic; Greenfield, “‫קווים דיאלקטיים בארמית הקדומה‬,” Lešonenu 23 (1967–68), 364f. By contrast, Kutscher thought the proverbs were a mix of east and west Aramaic: E. Y. Kutscher, “Aramaic,” in T. A. Seboek, ed., Linguistics in South West Asia and North Africa (Current Trends in Linguistics 6; Paris: Mouton, 1970), 347–412, esp. pp. 365–66.

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writing during the late seventh or early sixth century b.c.e. (and probably joined then), but both were originally independent, the proverbs being perhaps a little older and first collected in an Aramean court, after which they were brought to Assyria. The proverbs were reedited by Aramaic intellectuals in the time of Sennacherib or Esarhaddon, even perhaps by Aḥiqar himself, or else they were only attributed to him later. The story was probably written by an Aramean scribe in the late Neo-Assyrian Empire or early Neo-Babylonian Empire, and the same author even wrote the proverbs that seem to be “inspired by the narrative” (50–52, 76, 80, and possibly 34 or others). 167 The dialect of the proverbs “is closer to the language of the very oldest Imperial Aramaic texts and the latest phase of Old Aramaic, a transition which took place roughly around the beginning of the seventh century b.c.” 168 Lindenberger’s argument is that the dialect of the proverbs has affinities with the Canaanite languages of ancient Syria–Palestine, and the use of a pantheon of gods (Shamash, El, and bʿl qdšn are named) that also appear together in north Syria argues for the north Syrian origin. 169 Beyer argues for specifically northeast Syria. 170 Kottsieper, however, proposes that the proverbs were written in Old Aramaic, 171 and, contra Lindenberger, the origin of the proverbs must stem from a tradition that comes out of the Aramean states of southern Syria—that is, from the Antilebanon or around Damascus. 172 In his recent study of the proverbs, Michael Weigl seems to agree with Lindenberger on the dialect of the proverbs but gives a more detailed determination of their history, not only as a collection, but proverb by proverb. 173 He concludes that the proverbs originated in north or northwestern Mesopotamia (in what is now the Jazīra region), not necessarily Syria, during the twelfth century b.c.e. Then, with the expansion of the Assyrian empire, they developed into an Aramaic collection (in pre-Official Aramaic or early Official Aramaic) by the end of the eighth century or first half of the seventh at the latest, at a time when Aramaic and Assyrian traditions were melding together and Aramaeans were rising in the Assyrian empire. 174 The proverb collection is a mix resulting from different locales, not to mention different cultures (Aramaic and Assyrian). 167.  Lindenberger, “Ahiqar,” 484. 168.  Lindenberger, The Aramaic Proverbs of Ahiqar, 20. 169.  Ibid., 279–304. 170.  ATTM 29 n. 1, 46; Klaus Beyer, The Aramaic Language (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), 15. 171.  Die Sprache der Aḥiqarsprüche, 241–46. 172.  Kottsieper argues that the proverbs cannot be Old Aramaic from the north Syrian region because of particular infinitive constructions (the G Infinitive with the m- prefix, the use of an unassimilated n before a consonant) and the replacement of the 3rd-feminine plural by the 3rd-masculine plural; Kottsieper, Die Sprache der Aḥiqarsprüche, 24. But see Weigl, Die aramäischen Achikar-Sprüche, 646–47. 173.  Weigl, Die aramäischen Achikar-Sprüche; and idem,“Mein Neffe Achikar” (Tob 1,22): Die aramäischen Achikar-Sprüche und das Alte Testament. 174.  Weigl, Die aramäischen Achikar-Sprüche, 756–60.

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As for the story, it has many authentic Mesopotamian details, “the Assyrian names simply belong to the Assyrian setting of the story” and “the mention of a Mesopotamian god shows only that the work was composed in an area under Mesopotamian influence.” 175 Lindenberger suggests that, because the Neo-Assyrian setting is authentic, it is unlikely that the manuscript was composed in Egypt because “nothing in either part of the text suggests an Egyptian background.” 176 Although Lindenberger’s composition-history for Aḥiqar does not seem unreasonable, there is really nothing to counter a suggestion that, in spite of their Mesopotamian and Syrian background and prehistory, the story and proverbs were not written down together in Egypt, especially Elephantine, where the papyrus was found. Stories may well be set in Assyria but this does not necessarily mean that they were composed there. First-millennium literature in Egypt by Arameans, Aramaic speakers, and even native Egyptians themselves often utilized material from elsewhere, and their narratives were set in Mesopotamia or Persia (see chapter 5, below). On the other hand, as Weigl argues, the Elephantine papyrus either represents the only collection of proverbs tied to Aḥiqar in circulation, or is the only one to collate the proverbs solely in Aramaic. 177 Whether or not there was a historical personage Aḥiqar behind the story is unknown. 178 However, in the 1959–60 excavations at Warka (ancient Uruk), a list of court scholars was found on a tablet dating to ca. 165 b.c.e. One Aba-EnlilDari is said to have been a sage (ummānu) in the days of Esarhaddon (W 20030,7: 19–20): “In the time of King Esarhaddon, 1a-ba-dninnu-da-ri, whom the Arameans (lúAḫlawû) call ma-ḫu-wa-qa-a-ri, was ummānu.” 179 At the very least, this mention reveals that an Aramaic tradition of Aḥiqar under Esarhadddon in the seventh century b.c.e. was known approximately five centuries later, in Seleucidera Mesopotamia. 180 However, in spite of all the sources we have that relate to 175.  Lindenberger, “Ahiqar,” 481. 176.  Ibid., 482. 177.  Weigl, Die aramäischen Achikar-Sprüche, 759. 178.  It was, however, a perfectly common Akkadian name; there is at least one governor in the sixth century so named. See F. Joannès and A. Lemaire, “Trois tablettes cunéiformes à onomastique ouest-sémitique,” Transeuphratène 17 (1999), 17–34, esp. pp. 27–28. 179.  See Jacobus van Dijk, “Die Inschriftenfunde,” in H. J. Lenzen, ed., XVIII. Vorläufiger Bericht über die vom Deutschen Archäologischen Institut und der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft aus Mitteln der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft unternommenen Ausgrabungen in Uruk-Warka (Abhandlung der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 8; Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1963), 39–62, esp. pp. 45, 51–52, pl. 20a–c, 27; Paul-Alain Beaulieu, “Official and Vernacular Languages,” 194–95. On the ummānu or ‘sage’ as a court official, see Erica Reiner, “The Etiological Myth of the ‘Seven Sages,’” Orientalia n.s. 30 (1961), 1–11. 180.  Kottsieper, “Die Geschichte und die Sprüche des weisen Achiqar,” in TUAT III/2, 322; J. C. Greenfield, “The Wisdom of Ahiqar,” in John Day et al., eds., Wisdom in Ancient Israel: Essays in Honour of J. A. Emerton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 44. On the historical value of the Seleucid tradition, see S. Parpola, Letters from Assyrian Scholars to the Kings Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal (2 vols.; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1970–83),

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the advisers of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, Paul-Alain Beaulieu notes that “no adviser named Aba-Enlil-Dari or Ahiqar/Ahuwaqar appears in them. On the other hand, the name Aba-Enlil-dari, which is a translation into learned Sumerian of the Akkadian name Mannu-kīma-Enlil-ḫātin (“Who is a protector like Enlil? ”), appears as an ancestral name in Nippur during the Achaemenid period.” 181 A shortened form of this name appears twice among members of the Murašû family, and Beaulieu even suggests that, since Nippur was a heavily Aramaicized area already during the Neo-Assyrian period, it is quite possible that the tradition of Aḥiqar, and even the writings associated with him, originated there. A šuilla prayer to Ninlil (BMS 35 [K 2757]) from the libraries of Nineveh even has as its colophon: “Nippur, house of Aba-Enlil-dari,” perhaps indicating that a scribal academy in Nippur traced its ancestry back to this scholar. 182 On the other hand, Beaulieu adds that there are no cuneiform parallels to the story of the successful courtier, a fact that has bypassed many a scholar who has investigated the ancient Near Eastern court tale genre. For her part, Stephanie Dalley thinks that Ludlul bēl nēmeqi could be a model for the story, but it is more likely that the closest parallels to the Aḥiqar story and proverbs are in the Egyptian, biblical, and West Semitic world. 183 As a court tale, however, Aḥiqar delivers on what Lawrence Wills has called the “ruled ethnic perspective” found in much of the genre—that is, the view of a minority culture that they are superior to their overlords (cf. the stories of Daniel, Esther, Joseph, etc.). 184 The story of Aḥiqar helping an Assyrian king neatly models the figure of the West Semitic god Amurru, who was the helper of Aššur. In fact, the theme of the successful courtier, says Beaulieu, suits very well the position of a cultural minority, which sees its identity and hopes crystallized in the figure of one of its own who rises to the top in the political structure which governs them but over which they exert limited influence. The very fact that in Hellenistic Uruk a cuneiform text still recognizes the specificity of a group called Ahlawû demonstrates that in spite of their long history in Mesopotamia and despite the fact that their language had become 449–50; F. M. Fales, “Storia di Ahiqar tra Oriente e Grecia: la propettiva dall’antico Oriente,” QuadStor 19 (1993), 143–57, esp. pp. 154–55, contra M. J. Luzzatto, “Grecia e Vicino Oriente: tracce della ‘Storia di Ahiqar’ nella cultura Greca tra VI e V secolo A. C.,” QuadStor 18 (1992), 5–84, esp. pp. 9, 66. 181.  Beaulieu, “Official and Vernacular Languages,” 194. He cites W. G. Lambert, “Ancestors, Authors, and Canonicity,” JCS 11 (1957), 1–14, esp. p. 6 n. 23a. The abbreviated names Ḫātin and Enlil-ḫātin appear in three generations of the Murašû family at Nippur. 182. ⸢EN.LÍL⸣ki É Ia-ba-50-da-ra translates as: ‘Nippur, house of Aba-Enlil-dari’. (“Fifty” is the sacred number of the god Enlil.) 183. Stephanie Dalley, “Assyrian Court Narratives in Aramaic and Egyptian: Historical Fiction,” 149–61, esp. pp. 153–55. 184.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 37–42, 68.

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the common vernacular of the Near East, the Arameans were still considered a separate ethno-linguistic group by some Babylonians. 185

There are at least two Aḥiqar papyrus fragments in Demotic and possibly a third, all translated by Karl-Theodor Zauzich. 186 The first is a Cairo papyrus (unknown number), published first in JEA 16 (1930), plate VII, 2 and identified as Aḥiqar by Spiegelberg in 1930. 187 The second is P. Berlin P 23729 and is probably by the same hand as the first fragment. Both probably date to the first century c.e. and may possibly be from the Fayyum in Egypt (especially because of the lambdacisms—that is, the use of l for an r). 188 Aḥiqar is spelled Ꜣḫykl and Ꜣḫygl in P. Berlin P 23729 and Ꜣḫyk[l] in the Cairo papyrus. Aḥiqar is not mentioned in the third fragment (P. Berlin 15658), because it seems to be a version of the proverbs, if it is indeed to be connected to Aḥiqar at all. 189 In P. Cairo (nr. unknown), Aḥiqar is called ‘the prince Aḥiqar’ or ‘the chief Aḥiqar’ (pꜢ wr Ꜣḫyk[l], line 12), and in P. Berlin P 23729, he is called ‘a great man’ (rmṯ šʿy). None of the preserved fragments in Demotic have any parallels close in phrasing to the Aramaic Aḥiqar. P. Cairo (nr. unknown) consists of thirteen fragmentary lines and must contain part of the episode in which Aḥiqar is tricked by his nephew into assembling the Assyrian army and Esarhaddon is deceived into thinking that the army and Aḥiqar have rebelled. The text mentions that “the 185.  Beaulieu, “Official and Vernacular Languages,” 195. 186.  For translations of and commentary on the first two Demotic fragments, see K.-T. Zauzich, “Demotische Fragmente zum Ahikar-Roman,” in Folia Rara, H. Franke et al., eds. (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1976), 180–85; and Marilina Betrò, “La tradizione di Ahiqar in Egitto,” in Ricardo Contini and Cristiano Grottanelli, eds., Il saggio Ahiqar, 177–91. For Pap Berlin P 15658, see Zauzich in M. Küchler, Frühjüdische Weisheitstraditionen, 333–37. In addition, J. M. Lindenberger gives an English rendering of Zauzich’s German translation of the Demotic fragments in Lindenberger’s The Aramaic Proverbs of Ahiqar, 310–12. 187.  G. P. G. Sobhy, “Miscellanea, 2. Demotica,” JEA 16 (1930), 3–4, and plate VII, 2; identified as part of Aḥiqar by W. Spiegelberg in, “Achikar in einem demotischen Texte der römischen Kaiserzeit,” OLZ 33 (1930), 961. 188.  See K. Ryholt, “The Assyrian Invasion of Egypt,” in Assyria and Beyond: Studies Presented to Mogens Trolle Larsen (ed. J. G. Derckson; Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2004), 498. 189.  Pap Berlin P 15658 has a script similar to the other two fragments: “Da es sich offenbar um das Fragment einer Weisheitslehre handelt, besteht die Möglichkeit, dass es sich dabei um Sprüche des Ahikar handelt” (Zauzich, “Demotische Fragmente zum Ahikar-Roman,” 185). See also Zauzich’s translation in Küchler, Frühjüdische Weisheitstraditionen, 336; Lindenberger, The Aramaic Proverbs of Ahiqar, 311–12. The text preserves parts of two columns and contains at least three negative commands: (“Do not thank. . . ,” “Do not reproach the prince . . . ,” and “Do not make confusion. . .”). A prince and someone’s (“his”) lord is mentioned. Betrò believes that, instead of being part of the Aḥiqar Proverbs, this fragment is general wisdom, having parallels in both Aḥiqar as well as the Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonchy and even the Instruction of Ani from around 1300 b.c.e. The tradition of Aḥiqar was fluid, and the story was meant to be the frame for any set of proverbs; Betrò, “La tradizione di Ahiqar in Egitto,” 177–91.

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army that rebelled is the one that has come to Ni[neveh?]” (or “to Na[din?]”; line 9), that someone finds prince Aḥiqar in a place, and that “a bad thing that has happened” must be considered. The second fragment (P. Berlin P 23729) has nine partially-preserved lines and may contain part of the Egyptian episode. 190 The fragmentary lines 4–6 especially lend themselves to this possibility. Line 4 has: “no one on earth understood what had happened to him,” while in line 5, Aḥiqar is called a “great man.” In line 6, someone “hesitated to go to the place in which Aḥiqar was found.” ‘The prince’ or ‘chief ’ (pꜢ wr) appears again, although it is not certain whether or not this is Aḥiqar, and an Assyrian is mentioned. Zauzich suggests that these lines reflect the reaction to the Egyptian king’s first riddle about building a castle of air: everyone thinks that Aḥiqar, the only man able to solve it, is dead, and they are surprised to find him alive. The relationship of Aḥiqar to the Daniel stories is not only that they are all set in an eastern (usually Mesopotamian) court but also that both characters are outsiders or cultural minorities in that court. As Beaulieu pointed out, Aḥiqar is remembered in the later traditions as an Aramean in an Assyrian realm; perhaps giving the story about him what Lawrence Wills calls the “ruled ethnic perspective” common to many ancient Near Eastern court tales. In addition, the court story of Aḥiqar becomes the frame in which to set instructional proverbs and fables. In Daniel, the court story collection becomes a suitable framework in which to place the apocalyptic visions of Daniel. 191

3.3.1.3.2.  The Ḥor-bar-Pawenesh or “Horus-son-of-the-Wolf” Texts (Aramaic) Texts concerning “Horus(-son-of)-the-Wolf ” appear in both Aramaic and Demotic in Egypt. Unpublished Demotic fragments of a text concerning this character (Pap. Berlin P 30023 [+23725+15675]) will be discussed below. The Egyptian magician in the Demotic text is called ‘Horus-the-Wolf ’ or ‘Horus-theJackal’ (Ḥr-pꜢ-wnš; wnš means ‘wolf ’ or ‘jackal’), a name possibly to be identified with the Setne II magician who is disguised as Setne’s son Si-Osire: Ḥr-sꜢ-pꜢ-nšy, ‘Horus-son-of-the-Wolf/Jackal’. 192 In the Aramaic text AP 71 (TAD C1.2 or Papyri Blacassiani), to be discussed here, the hero’s name is Ḥwr-br-pwnš, ‘Horus190. So Zauzich and Betrò. Zauzich suggests that it is the part where the Egyptian king has asked a riddle and Aḥiqar is produced alive (Zauzich, “Demotische Fragmente zum AhikarRoman,” 184). Betrò believes it to be part of that episode, or better, that episode’s preamble (Betrò, “La tradizione di Ahiqar in Egitto,” 178). By contrast, Ryholt thinks it is part of the episode where Aḥiqar is hidden away (Ryholt, “The Assyrian Invasion of Egypt,” 498–99). 191.  Henze, “The Narrative Frame of Daniel,” 5–24. 192. See Ritner, “The Adventures of Setna and Si-Osire (Setna II),” LAE, 482; Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 70–71 n. 320. That the name of the magician in disguise here includes a contraction of pꜢ-wnš ‘the Wolf ’ is shown by the pun in Setne II 6, 13. In the Aramaic Ḥor bar-Punesh/Pawenesh, Grelot also recognizes the translation ‘son of the wolf ’ (pꜢ-wnš = ‘Leloup’); Grelot, Document araméens d’Égypte, 428–29.

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son-of-Pawenesh’, that is, ‘Horus-son-of-the-Wolf/Jackal’. 193 The two fragments of AP 71 were acquired from the antiquities market in 1825–26, and were given to the British Library by a donor who had himself received them as a gift. They date to the third quarter of the fifth century b.c.e. and are said to have come from Saqqāra. The Aramaic text was subsequently discussed in full or in part by several scholars over the years, but the standard publication came to be that in A. Cowley (AP 71) in his Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century b.c. The papyrus has been recently rearranged and retranslated by Porten and Yardeni, and an even further exposition has been given it by Bezalel Porten in Festschrift Zauzich. 194 The full text of the recto, following Porten and Yardeni’s arrangement is provided here. ‫ [ לבני על תסהרא זי מלכא ושמע מ]לכא‬. . . . . . . . ]. ‫ מלכא וזעק ומשח‬. [  ] 1 ‫] וכזי שמע חור[ בר פונש הו אחר ענה מלכא ⸣ו⸢]אמר‬. ‫ ]  [ זנה זי קרה‬2 ‫ חור[ בר פונש מליא זי מלכא‬. . . . . . ] ‫א[תלנהי כן כזי עבדת לבנוהי‬/‫ת‬/ ‫ ]  י‬3 ]. ‫אמר ו‬ ]‫ ק[טלת המו תהך בחרב חילך וח‬. . . . . ]⸢‫ ]  [לולא באתר ימ⸣א⸢ קטלת ⸣המו‬4 ]‫ שעתסם בתמא יומן חמ]שה [⸣ה⸢ו יחלף לך ושביא זי שבית בזא שנתא‬.[  ] 5 ‫ [באלך וגרמיך לא יחתון שאול וטללך ל]א‬. . . ]‫ ]  [⸣ל⸢ך תהך ותשתה‬6 ‫⸣ת⸢ במנצ]יעת‬. . . . . ‫ה עם אלהן ולחש ⸣ח⸢ור ⸣ב⸢]ר פונ[ש על אלפי מלכא‬.[  ] 7 ]⸢‫[⸣ל‬. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]. ⸢‫בספינן‬/  ‫ ]  [ חור בר ⸣פו⸢נ⸣ש⸢ ⸣ו‬8 (1) the king . . . , and cried out. Then he anointed . . . to/for my sons upon the barque of the king. Then [the] ki[ng] heard (2) . . . this, which happened [ . . . Horus]-son-of-the-Wolf is he. Afterward the king answered and[said “. . . ] (3) [ . . he/you/I] will hang? him just as you/I did to his sons.” [And when Horus]-son-of-the-Wolf [heard] the words which the king said, and [ ] (4) [  ] “Unless in the place of the sea you/I killed them [     ]you/I killed them. You shall go with the sword of your army and . . [ . . .] (5) [ . . . ] . At the completion of fi[ve] days he will overthrow you and the captives which you captured in this year [ . . ] (6) [. . . . . . . ] . you will go and you will drink [ . . . ] in those, and your bones will not go down (to) Sheol, and your shade [will] no[t . .] (7) [ . . .] . . with gods.” And Horus-so[n-of-the-Wo]lf recited an incantation over the boats of the king . . . in the mid[st of . .] (8) [  ] Horus-son-of-the-Wolf, and/in ships? [  ] 193.  The Aramaic text was published by A. Cowley in Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century (Repr., Osnabrück: Otto Zeller, 1967), 179–82; Papyri Blacassiani = AP 71 = TAD C1.2. 194. Bezalel Porten and Ada Yardeni, TAD III, 54–57; Porten, “The Prophecy of Ḥor bar Punesh and the Demise of Righteousness,” 427–33, pls. 35–36. In the latter, Porten gives a more complete picture of the papyrus’s history and a new discussion of its contents. b.c.

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The following is the verso, col. ii, 18–26 (only the very end of the lines in column i of the verso are preserved, and since they consist of only a few letters at most, they are not presented here): ] ‫[ זי ינתן לה אבוהי‬. . . . . . . . . . . . .]⸢‫ ולא ימלא בטנהם לח⸣ם‬18 ] ‫זי‬/  ‫שי אלהי מצרין ו‬.‫[ל‬. . . . . . . . . . .] ‫ איש כיבי אלהיהם‬19 ]. ‫[מצרין ויהוון‬. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]‫ד‬/  ‫ קדמיהם עד יבנון קר‬20 [‫[מה ותאבד צדקתא ואי]ש לא יעבד‬. . . . . . . . .] ‫ וביומן אחרנן יאכל‬21 ] . ‫ צדקה לאבוהי ויזב]ן בנוהי ובנתה ל[כסף ויהנפק איש‬22 ]‫ ל‬. . . ⸢‫ ויתקלנהי בלבה ויקטל איש למ]רא[ה על דבר כספה ⸣ו‬23 ]‫[בספנן לקבלה ולא‬. . . ]⸢‫ מראה וישוה איש בני מרא⸣יהם‬24 ]‫ ויאמרון לה צעני וי‬1 ‫[ה‬. . . . .] ‫ לחם ויתכנשון אלהי מצרין‬25 ]‫ ותלד ול‬. . . . ‫[נתה בפלג‬. . . . . .]‫ ות‬4 20 20 ‫ שנן‬.[. . . . . . . .]. . 26 (18) And their stomach will not be filled with bread [. . .] which his father will give him [. . .] (19) each the pains of their gods [. . .] . . . the gods of Egypt who/and . . .[. . .] (20) before them until they build . . [. . .] Egypt, and they will be. . .[. . .] (21) And in latter days one will eat [. . .]. . .And justice shall perish and a ma[n will not do] (22) justice to his father and he will sel[l his sons and daughters? for] silver. And a man will bring forth . . .[. . .] (23) and he will weigh it in his heart. 195 And a man will kill his ma[ster] on account of his silver and . . .[. . .] (24) his master. And each will place the sons of their masters [. . .] on ships opposite/against him. And not [. . .] (25) bread. And the gods of Egypt will assemble [. . .] 1 [ ] and they will say to him/her: “A man of Zoan (there will be), and . . . [. . .] (26) . . .[. . .] 44 years, and she/you will? [. . .]. . . in half. . .and she shall bear a chil[d . . .] In the Aramaic fragments on the recto, it appears that Horus-son-of-the-Wolf (Ḥwr-br-pwnš) announces some coming disasters against a king. It seems that someone has someone else’s sons executed by hanging, a deed for which they should be punished—perhaps it is the king who has wronged Horus-son-of-theWolf in this manner, but it is not at all clear. The list of imminent calamities includes the king’s succession by another and the statement that his “bones shall not go down to Sheol.” Horus-son-of-the-Wolf seems to be casting a spell against the king, yet it is not clear whether the king in question is the pharaoh of Egypt or a foreign monarch. If this Horus-son-of-the-Wolf has the same patriotic feeling 195. Or ‫בידה‬, “in his hand.”

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toward Egypt as in Setne II, in which he aids Ramses II against the Nubians, then one might suppose he is pronouncing disaster against a foreign king. Yet, since this is possibly the product of a Jewish community, the reverse might be true. A. Gianto has suggested that the author might have in mind the story of Moses and Aaron’s contest with the Egyptian magicians and, thus, the “legendary magician Ḥor-son-of-Pawenesh now works against the the pharaoh.” 196 The papyrus, however, is too fragmentary to provide strong support for Gianto’s suggestion. On the verso of the papyrus, further disasters are enumerated. It is quite possible, however, that the verso has nothing to do with the recto. There is no mention of Ḥwr-br-pwnš or the king on the verso, but some new characters, “the gods (of Egypt),” are introduced. As fragmentary as the verso is, it seems to represent “apocalyptic” themes: someone will go hungry, “justice will perish,” “a ma[n shall not do] justice to his father and he will sel[l his sons and daughters? for] silver,” “a man will kill his ma[ster] on account of his silver,” “a man will place the sons of their masters [. . .] on ships opposite him,” and the gods of Egypt will assemble and speak. Also, at the very end of the preserved portion, “a man of Zoan (Tanis)” is mentioned, and there seems to be a prediction that a woman will give birth. It is not clear whether the “man of Zoan” is a savior-king of some sort, as is typical in Egyptian proto-apocalypses, and if it is his birth that is described. On the surface (and perhaps one should not read too much into a fragmentary text), the contents of the verso are reminiscent of the Middle Kingdom Prophecies of Neferti (or even some other Egyptian texts to be discussed in chapter 5), a literary composition containing prophecies pronounced by the sage Neferti to King Sneferu of the 4th Dynasty. Neferti declares that the nation will be overrun by Asiatics in the Delta, the land will undergo drought and famine, and sons will kill fathers. But Then a king will come from the South, Ameny, the justified, by name, Son of a woman of Ta-Seti, child of Upper Egypt. 197 In actuality, the Prophecies are prophecies ex eventu that were produced in the reign of Amenemhet I to glorify him as savior. These same themes of chaos also show up in the Roman period Oracle of the Potter, in which the 55-year rule of a good king in Heliopolis is predicted. The Oracle of the Lamb (also known as the Lamb of Bocchoris), whose text dates to 4 c.e., contains similar motifs as well. 198 196.  Gianto, “A New Edition of Aramaic Texts from Egypt (Ahikar, Bar Pawenesh, Bisitun, Accounts and Lists),” Biblica 76 (1995), 85–92, esp. p. 90. 197.  Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 1.143. Ta-Seti (“land of the bow”) was the southernmost nome. 198.  See K.-T. Zauzich, “Das Lamm des Bokchoris,” in Papyrus Erzherzog Rainer (P. Rainer Cent.): Festschrift zum 100-jährigen Bestehen der Papyrussammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek (Vienna: Hollinek, 1983), 165–74.

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If the recto of AP 71, the fragmentary Aramaic Ḥor-bar-Pawenesh story, is to be connected with the verso, then we would have another example of an Egyptian magician foretelling the future, this time in a Semitic language. The verso and recto are in different hands, however, and Porten sees them as two different texts, “The Prophecy of Ḥor-bar-Pawenesh” and the “Demise of Righteousness.” If the stories are connected, the connections to the biblical Daniel are clear: Daniel is himself a magician (he is “chief of the magicians” in Daniel 4 and 5 and is known for “untying or loosening knots,” mĕšārē qiṭrîn, that is, some kind of magic-working, in 5:11–12), and he foretells the future. 199

3.3.2. Egypt 3.3.2.1.  Use of the Frame Narrative The use of the frame narrative or story-within-a-story device was very popular in ancient Egyptian literature. The inserted story is often told to the main character of the frame in order to distract or entertain. 200 For instance, the story of Amasis and the Sailor in Demotic (third century b.c.e.) relates a narrative about the inebriated pharaoh Amasis of the 26th Dynasty, who is suffering from a hangover; when he asks for a diverting story, one of his great men or counselors tells him about a certain sailor who was also once “sick.” 201 The two best-preserved Setne Khamwas stories (Setne I and II) in Demotic each contain at least one story or more told by one character to another in the frame narrative (on which see more below). Moreover, the Shipwrecked Sailor of the early second millennium b.c.e. includes the story of a disheartened senior official who returns from a failed expedition and is told an exhortatory tale of a shipwreck and courage by his attendant. 202 The attendant’s recounting of the magical island whereon he was 199.  The point was already made in the author’s dissertation, Holm, “A Biblical StoryCollection: Daniel 1–6.” 200. John Tait notes that, in Egyptian literature, “major portions of many texts take the form of a story-within-a-story”; Tait, “Egyptian Fiction in Demotic and Greek,” in J. R. Morgan and R. Stoneman, eds., Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context (London: Routledge, 1994), 203–22, esp. p. 206. 201.  The story ends abruptly just as it gets underway, however, and one senses that it is not finished. The text is on the back of the Demotic Chronicle (P. BN 215); see W. Spiegelberg, Die sogenannte Demotische Chronik des Pap. 215 der Bibliothèque Nationale zu Paris nebst den auf der Rückseite des Papyrus stehenden Texten (Demotische Studien 7; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1914); see also DePauw, A Companion to Demotic Studies (Papyrologica Bruxellensia 28; Brussels: Fondation Égyptologique Reine Élisabeth, 1997), 89–90; and F. Hoffmann, “Einige Bemerkungen zur Geschichte von König Amasis und dem Schiffer,” Enchoria 19/20 (1992/1993), 15–21. Translation by R. K. Ritner in LAE, 450–52. Other traditions about the Saite king Amasis—especially concerning his origin from common stock, his love of drink, and his cleverness and good humor—are preserved in Herodotus 2.172–74. 202.  The main hieroglyphic text is A. M. Blackman, Middle Egyptian Stories, 41–48. See also: W. K. Simpson, “Schiffbrüchiger,” LÄ V, 1983, 619–22. Convenient translations are found in: W. K. Simpson, “The Shipwrecked Sailor,” LAE, 45–53; R. B. Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe

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shipwrecked encloses in its turn a narrative related by the sole inhabitant of the island, a giant serpent who calls himself the “Prince of Punt”; thus, the composition acquires three levels of narrative. 203 There are also several compositions that use a frame narrative to enclose narrative material other than brief stories—for instance, speeches, proverbs or maxims, pseudo-prophecies, or even a mixed variety of genres. Several of these compositions, such as the Eloquent Peasant, 204 the Prophecies of Neferti, 205 the Oracle of the Potter, 206 the Admonitions of Ipuwer, 207 Papyrus Insinger, 208 and the and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940–1640 bc (Oxford World’s Classics; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 89–101; Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 1.211–15; Bresciani, Letteratura, 177–81. 203.  Another tale-within-a-tale is found in EA 69532, a text recently acquired by the British Museum Department of Egyptian Antiquities (now the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan); John Tait, “Pa-di-pep tells Pharaoh the Story of the Condemnation of Djed-her: Fragments of Demotic Narrative in the British Museum,” Enchoria 31 (2008/2009), 112–43, pls. 12–13, esp. pp. 114–24. 204.  Dating from the Middle Kingdom, the frame story involves a peasant whose goods are stolen and is treated unfairly; so he petitions the Chief Steward for justice. He is so eloquent in his speeches that the king asks his Chief Steward to delay justice in order to record the peasant’s words to be read back to the king for his entertainment. After nine separate petitions, the peasant is finally allowed restitution. Text: R. B. Parkinson, The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant (Oxford, Griffith Institute, 1991). See also G. Fecht, “Bauerngeschichte,” LÄ I, 1975, 638–51. Translations: Vincent A. Tobin, “The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant,” in LAE, 25–44; Bresciani, Letteratura, 146–61. 205.  The text (Papyrus St. Petersburg 1116B) dates from the 18th Dynasty, but is set during or immediately after the reign of Amenemhet I of the 12th Dynasty; see E. Blumenthal, “Neferti, Prophezeiung des,” LÄ IV (1982), 380–81. 206.  This composition is in Greek but was perhaps a translation from a Demotic original. It is preserved on three fragments belonging to two versions, all dating to the second and third centuries c.e., although the original composition could date to around 130 b.c.e. when “the struggle between Ptolemy VIII and Cleopatra II raised hopes among the Egyptians that the Greeks would destroy themselves” (DePauw, Companion to Demotic Studies, 99). Text: L. Koenen, “Prophezeiungen des ‘Töpfers’,” ZPE 2 (1968), 178–209. See also: K.-T. Zauzich, “Töpferorakel,” in LÄ VI (1986), 621–23; L. Koenen, “Die Apologie des Töpfers an König Amenophis oder das Töpferorakel,” in A. Blasius and B. U. Schipper, eds., Apokalyptik und Ägypten: Eine kritische Analyse der relevanten Texte aus dem griechisch-römischen Ägypten (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 139–87, pls. i–iii. 207.  The beginning and end of this text (Papyrus Leiden 344) is lost, so the frame setting is not clear. The preserved middle indicates that Ipuwer and an unnamed pharaoh converse about political upheaval or national calamity, possibly describing the conditions under the First Intermediate Period of Egypt, just as the Prophecies of Neferti does. Text: A. H. Gardiner, The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage, from a Hieratic Papyrus in Leiden (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1909); or more recently, W. Helck, Die “Admonitions” Pap. Leiden I 344 recto (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995). See also J. Spiegel, “Admonitions,” LÄ I (1975), 65–66. Other translations: R. O. Faulkner, “The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage,” JEA 51 (1965), 53–62; Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 1.149–63, R. B. Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe, 166–99; Vincent A. Tobin, “The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage,” in LAE, 188–210; E. Bresciani, Letteratura, 102–17. 208. Translation: Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 3, 184–217.

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Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy (first century b.c.e.) 209 and some texts parallel to it (e.g., P. Louvre N 2414) 210 have the setting of their frame narrative in the royal court, and their purpose, as is common with frame narratives, is often to distract someone or to entertain a high official, even pharaoh himself. The common theme of instruction, especially of a father to a son, appears occasionally within a frame narrative: for example, “The Maxims of Ptahhotep,” Papyrus Insinger, or the Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy. In this, they are like Arabic collections of proverbs, the biblical book of Proverbs, or several medieval story-collections, such as the Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alfonsi. Papyrus Insinger has an especially complex organization of maxims arranged in 25 sections, each with a theme and title encapsulating the maxims of that section. 211 As for the Demotic Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy (P. British Museum 10508), it has often been compared to the Aramaic story of Aḥiqar, in that each contains a frame narrative about a courtier who rises and falls (and in Aḥiqar’s case, rises again or is rehabilitated) through the vicissitudes of court life. 212 However, unlike Aḥiqar, ʿOnchsheshonqy, a priest of Pre, seems to genuinely be at fault (he does not inform the pharaoh of a palace plot against his life) and remains in prison at the end, writing his proverbs, with only a slight hint that he is eventually to be released. 213 The various Egyptian pseudo-prophecies or apocalypses, such as the 209. The editio princeps by S. R. K. Glanville, Catalogue of Demotic Papyri in the British Museum, Vol. II, The Instructions of ʿOnchsheshonqy (British Museum Papyrus 10508) (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1955), must be used together with B. H. Stricker’s Dutch translation because of improved readings in the latter; see B. H. Stricker, “De Wijsheid van Anchsjesjonq,” OMRO 39 (1958), 56–79. For other references, see below. 210. See Lichtheim, Late Egyptian Wisdom Literature in the International Context: A Study of Demotic Instructions (OBO 52; Freiburg: Universitätsverlag / Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), 1, 93–106. 211.  Collections of instructions to “a son” that have a brief introductory description but no real frame narrative include: “The Instruction of Hardedef,” “The Teaching for King Merikare,” “The Teaching of King Amenehmhet I for his Son Senwosret,” “The Loyalist Instruction” (the implied author is not royal in this one but instead instructs his children to obey the king), and “The Instruction of a Man for his Son” (also a kind of loyalist instruction). 212.  Since the story of Aḥiqar is older, several scholars have wondered if its frame narrative influenced that of ʿOnchsheshonqy; however, Ritner observes, “This tale of an imprisoned sage owes nothing to the Aramaic Ahiqar, for its true antecedent is ‘The Eloquent Peasant’ of the Middle Kingdom” (Ritner, “The Instructions of ʿOnchsheshonqy [P. British Museum 10508],” in LAE, 499). See also Ryholt, “A New Version of the Introduction to the Teachings of ʿOnchsheshonqy,” 119–20; Marilina Betrò, “La tradizione di Ahiqar in Egitto,” 177–91, esp. 181–184. On the theory that ʿOnchsheshonqy is dependent on Aḥiqar, see Miriam Lichtheim, Late Egyptian Wisdom Literature, 13–22, esp. 21–22. 213.  One might ask if he is an anti-hero, like Aesop. At least his life is spared, in contrast to that of his friend from childhood, the chief physician Harsiese son of Ramose, who dreamed up the plot, and Harsiese’s co-conspirators (the guards, the generals, and the great men of the palace). ʿOnchsheshonqy, who counseled Harsiese to draw back from his plan, is sentenced to prison and whiles away the time writing down instructions for his son. The text ends with a

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Prophecies of Neferti, 214 the Demotic Chronicle, 215 the Oracle of the Lamb, 216 and the Oracle of the Potter  217 all contain series of (usually ex eventu) prophecies about disaster in Egypt often followed by predictions of a savior-king. The frame narrative device was also occasionally expanded into something more like the story-collection proper in Egyptian literature, with the storycollections Tales from King Cheops’ Court in Papyrus Westcar, the Myth of the Sun’s Eye, and the Stories of Petese Son of Petetum, and possibly others. 218 Moreover, the ancient Egyptian story-collection seems to fall into Helen Cooper’s third category of story-collections with regard to structure—that is, they include a frame narrative enclosing and connecting a series of stories, instead of just one or two. 219 In addition, following Clawson’s definition of a frame narrative, one final, rather hopeful proverb (“Do not be weary of calling to god. He has his hour for listening to the scribe”), which may hint at a positive end to the story—that is, the final release of ʿOnchsheshonqy (translation is Ritner’s in LAE, 529). 214. Published by Vladimir Golénischeff, Les papyrus hiératiques nos. 1115, 1116A et 1116B de l’Ermitage impérial à St Pétersbourg (St. Petersburg: Manufacture des Papiers de l’Etat, 1916), W. Helck, Die Prophezeiung des Nfr.tj (2nd ed.; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992). See also E. Blumenthal, “Neferti, Prophezeiung des,” LÄ IV (1982), 380–81. 215.  Editio princeps: W. Spiegelberg, Die sogenannte demotische Chronik des Pap. 215 der Bibliothèque Nationale zu Paris (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1914); Translation: Bresciani, Letteratura, 803–14. 216.  Text: “Das Lamm des Bokchoris,” in Papyrus Erzherzog Rainer (P. Rainer Cent.): Festschrift zum 100-jährigen Bestehen der Papyrussammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek (Vienna: Hollinek, 1983), 1.165–74, pl. 2. J. M. Janssen, “Over Farao Bocchoris,” Varia Historica aangeboden aan Professor Doctor A. W. Byvanck (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1954), 17–29. See also K.-T. Zauzich, “Lamm des Bokchoris,” LÄ III (1980), 912–13. Translations: R. K. Ritner, “The Prophecy of the Lamb (P. Vienna D. 10,000),” in Simpson, LAE, 445–49; E. Bresciani, Letteratura, 815–18. 217. L. Koenen, “Die Prophezeiungen des ‘Töpfers’,” ZPE 2 (1968), 178–209, pls. III–IV; idem, “Bemerkungen zum Text des Töpferorakels und zu dem Akaziensymbol,” ZPE 13 (1974), 313–19. 218.  For example, P. Demotic Saqqāra 2 has two separate stories on its recto and verso: The Vengeance of Isis and Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh. Thus, the papyrus is either a miscellany (like P. Harris 500) or else the stories are related somehow, perhaps with an unpreserved narrative connecting them. Setne II also contains a series of three, mostly independent, narratives. 219.  Cooper, Structure, 9–10 (see also the discussion of story-collection structure in chapter 2). For an example of unframed collections of Egyptian love songs, see Papyrus Harris 500, a miscellany text with two stories, “The Doomed Prince” and “The Capture of Joppa,” on its verso, and on its recto several love poems (group A, nos. 1–8, and group B, nos. 9–16); Michael V. Fox, The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). See also Bernard Mathieu, La Poésie amoureuse de l’Égypte ancienne: Recherches sur un genre littéraire au Nouvel Empire (IFAO, BdE 115; Cairo: Institut français d’archeologie orientale, 1996), 55–80; and Renata Landgráfová and Hana Navrátilová, Sex and the Golden Goddess I: Ancient Egyptian Love Songs in Context (Prague: Czech Institute of Egyptology, 2009), esp. 223–24. The latter authors describe the love songs on this papyrus as grouped into four collections.

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must remember that while the frame story may be interesting in itself, it is the inserted stories that are the real focus of the work. 220 As with the other frame narratives found elsewhere in Egyptian literature, or even the Decameron or The Canterbury Tales, the brief stories in the Egyptian story-collections are told to a specific character or characters in the frame narrative with the purpose of entertainment, persuasion, or distraction. 221 For example, the Tales from King Cheops’ Court in Papyrus Westcar, inscribed in the Hyksos period (ca. 1640–1550 b.c.e.) but possibly composed in the 12th Dynasty (ca. 1991–1783 b.c.e.), has its frame narrative set in the royal court, and it is the sons of the king who tell stories of magicians or produce magicians to entertain the king. 222 Another example is the Myth of the Sun’s Eye, which contains a frame-narrative myth with inset animal fables told by one character (Thoth in disguise) to persuade another character (Tefnut in disguise) to return home. 223 For its part, the recently published Stories of Petese (P. Petese) in Demotic Egyptian of the Hellenistic period seems to its editor to be similar in many respects to the Arabian Nights. 224 Like the Nights or even the Book of Sindibad, the Stories of Petese’s main character expects only a limited number of days to live (40), and so, he amuses himself by “making holiday” with his wife and with composing stories. Petese, who is also a magician, creates several creatures from wax, including two baboons to write down one good story and one bad for a total of 70 stories over the 35 days remaining in his life. After his death, a baboon tells the stories to his wife, presumably one each day, symbolically representing the 70 days of embalming. The Stories of Petese are also similar to the Nights, the Book of Sindibad, and the Indian Śukasaptati (and even some medieval story-collections like the Decameron) in that these embedded stories have to do with the virtues and vices of women. Moreover, the exact number of stories and the topic of women and their cunning is paralleled in the Indian Śukasaptati, “The Parrot’s Seventy Tales.” 220.  W. H. Clawson, “The Framework of the Canterbury Tales,” 137. 221. Kim Ryholt, The Story of Petese Son of Petetum and Seventy Other Good and Bad Stories (P. Petese) (The Carlsberg Papyri 4; CNI Publications 23; Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1999), 69. 222.  W. K. Simpson, “Pap. Westcar,” LÄ IV, 1982, 744. 223.  See W. Spiegelberg, Der ägyptische Mythus vom Sonnenauge (Der Papyrus der Tierfabeln–“Kufi”) nach dem leidener demotischen Papyrus I 384 (Strassburg: Schultz, 1917), and for a synopsis and comments, M. J. Smith, “Sonnenauge, Demotischer Mythus vom,” in LÄ V (1984), 1082–87. For fragments at Lille, see F. de Cenival, “Les nouveaux fragments du Mythe de l’Oeil du Soleil de l’Institut de Papyrologie et d’Egyptologie in Lille,” CRIPEL 7 (1985), 95–115; and F. de Cenival, Le Mythe de l’Oeil du Soleil (Demotische Studien 9; Sommerhausen, 1988). For fragments of a duplicate version from Tebtunis, see W. J. Tait, “A Duplicate Version of the Demotic Kufi Text,” AcOr 36 (1974), 23–37; and for the Greek version, see S. West, “The Greek Version of the Legend of Tefnut,” JEA 55 (1969), 161–83. 224.  Ryholt, The Story of Petese Son of Petetum; and idem, The Petese Stories II (P. Petese II) (The Carlsberg Papyri 6; CNI Publications 29; Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005).

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Other related Egyptian material includes the several cycles of court tales about various high courtiers or sages who do various “wonders.” In Egyptian literature, such sages are the priests and prophets who are educated in many learned skills, including magic. Although these cannot be called story-collections, they may perhaps be the matrix from which the latter are drawn. 225 As W. John Tait notes: Certain themes appear again and again in Demotic narratives. Stories concerning the exploits of magicians are relatively common in the literature. These, however, probably form a separate genre of their own, and we may guess that incidents involving magicians were not incorporated as episodes in other kinds of texts. Although only a proportion of texts focus upon the exploits of Egyptian kings, the king and the royal court lie at the heart of many narratives, and most texts refer to the court at some point. Often texts concern priests. This is hardly surprising, as in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods the priesthood roughly constituted that portion of the population that was literate in Demotic. 226

These Egyptian stories center around a particular famous figure of the past, quite often a priest or prophet who is able to do magical deeds, as in the Tales from King Cheops’ Court and the Stories of Petese. Several of the magicians or sages that appear together in Setne I–II show up as the central characters in other texts. 227 It has even been speculated recently that just as there was a cycle of stories about the high-priests of Ptah at Memphis (the Setne Khamwas stories are called Stories of the High Priests at Memphis by their principal editor, F. L. Griffith), there was also one about the priests or prophets of Re at Heliopolis, as in the Stories of Petese or the Horus(-son-of)-the-Wolf tales in both Demotic (ḥr-pꜢ-wnš or ḥrsꜢ-pꜢ-nšy) and Aramaic (ḥwr-br-pwnš). 228 These narratives demonstrate a wide variety of wonders performed by the high-priests, who also often functioned as counselors to the pharaoh. In addition, these professional courtiers compete with each other in court contests and survive imprisonment and loss of reputation in 225.  All of the Egyptian story-collections just mentioned include magicians and wonder deeds. 226.  Tait, “Egyptian Fiction in Demotic and Greek,” 207, italics mine. See also K.-T. Zauzich, “Einleitung,” in Demotic Texts from the Collection (ed. Paul John Frandsen; Carlsberg Papyri 1; CNI 15; Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 1991), 6. Zauzich cites both the Setne and Aḥiqar stories as examples of these popular tales of magician/courtier contests in late Egyptian literature. See also Jacco Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites: The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian Ritual (100–300 ce) (Religions in the GraecoRoman World 153; Leiden: Brill, 2005), esp. 221–54. 227.  Setne Khamwas appears in several other texts; Si-Osire may be the miraculous child born in Spiegelberg’s jar-text B; and Naneferkaptaḥ’s son, Merib, possibly appears in Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh (P. Demotic Saqqāra 2, verso). See below. 228.  Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 81; DePauw, A Companion to Demotic Studies, 91. See also below.

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court conflicts. It is worth going into some detail about these Egyptian court tales and cycles, because they have thus far received little attention from scholars discussing the ancient Near Eastern “court tale.” In addition, several of the biblical court tales with a foreign setting, such as those about Daniel, Joseph, and Moses, include competitions and rivalries in magic, dream interpretation, and divination, that seem to draw from an ultimately Egyptian sphere in some way and even use the Hebrew-Armaic term *ḥarṭōm, which is derived from an Egyptian term and concept.

3.3.2.2.  Egyptian Magicians: Priestly Sages and Court Scholars Priests as fictional characters tend to appear in two types of literary texts. The first are rhetorical-didactic texts, in which the priest is a sage and embedded narrator who instructs a pupil in behavior, or else he converses with himself (“with his [own] heart”) or with the pharaoh. The second are fictional narratives, in which Egyptian priests are miracle workers “who are concerned with solving their own particular problems or satisfying their curiosity for magical texts, thereby frequently trespassing ideal rules or conduct.” 229 In the latter, the ritual experts are of the past, their arena of “display and conflict” is the royal court, their magic is not condemned, and their knowledge is based on the consultation of books (it is especially books written by the god Thoth that are most important). 230 While these categories of literary texts occur throughout Egyptian history, there was perhaps an increase of the second category by the Late Period. While priests in general had the ability to compose or read spells and hymns (two closely aligned terms in the Egyptian world, since they arise from the same religious theology), one Egyptian priest, the ẖry-ḥb (ḥry-tp), ‘the (chief) lector priest’ or ‘magician’, is particularly associated with magical practices. 231 According to Donald Redford, the ẖry-ḥb (ḥry-tp) is: “the (chief) lector-priest,” literally “the (chief) one-who-carries-the-ritualbook”; and because he is a lector (i.e., one who reads the liturgy) he must be literate, and then in Egyptian thinking it would follow that he is learned. Since magic is such a major component in all ancient Egyptian religious literature, the “lector” easily translates into “magician.” It is this aspect of the lector, his ability to work magic, that forms the core of his role in stories from the Middle King229.  Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites, 222. 230.  Ibid., 223. 231.  “The commonplace role of ‘magic’ within Egyptian religion obviates as well all questions of ‘social deviance,’ for the magician did not defy social norms but fulfilled them. . . . Preconceived notions of the magician as playing ‘a lone hand’ on the outskirts of tradition are totally inappropriate for Egypt, where the magician was invariably a literate priest, the very source of tradition”; R. K. Ritner, “Egyptian Magical Practice under the Roman Empire: The Demotic Spells and their Religious Context,” in W. Haase, ed., Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.18.5 (1995), 3333–79, esp. p. 3354.

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dom and New Kingdom in Egypt. . . . The magician is also a “wise scribe” who can make predictions, and whose “teaching” survives in writing. . . . 232

R. K. Ritner surveys the ẖry-ḥb (or ẖry-ḥb ḥry-tp) in his overview of priests and practitioners of magic in The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice. 233 These were also designated “scribes of the House of Life” or even “good scribes and wise men,” and their magical acts are deemed the ‘deeds of a good scribe’ or the ‘deeds of a scribe’ (wp.t n sẖ nfr; sp n sẖ). 234 The ‘House of Life’ (pr-ʿnḫ), was the sacred scriptorium attached to temples in which scribes and priests were schooled and magical incantations, hymns, rituals, etc., were composed and written. 235 “Theology” and “magic” were not two opposing concepts within Egyptian religion, as is demonstrated by the usage of the common Egyptian term for magic, ḥkꜢ, which was even personified as a deity, Heka, who was thought to be the first emanation from the Egyptian creator-god. A full overview of Egyptian magic is beyond the scope of this monograph, but it is important to note that Egypt provides an interesting case study for the intermingling of religion, magic, and medicine; attempts to demarcate boundaries between these concepts in ancient Egypt are impossible. 236 Historically, one notes that the lector priest ẖry-ḥb was not a mere priest in any modern sense; this skilled scholar was doctor, magician, and priest rolled into one, and in addition to often being connected to a particular temple, could be highly placed at court and thus perform administrative or other similar tasks. 237 In the Old Kingdom, the ẖry-ḥb functioned as a vizier and, until the 4th Dynasty, this position was filled by the king’s son. 238 In the 6th Dynasty, the term was even used for regional princes. Some of the great architects of tombs were lectorpriests, as was the case with Imhotep, the vizier and architect of Djoser in the 3rd Dynasty who was revered as a sage from the Middle Kingdom onward and from the Saite period was considered a deity. 239 Although the priests were connected 232. Donald Redford, Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 428–29. On motifs involving magicians or wisemen, see idem, A Study of the Biblical Story of Joseph (Genesis 37–50) (VTSup 20; Leiden: Brill, 1970), 94–97. 233.  SAOS 54; Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1993, 220ff. 234.  Ibid., 222. 235.  See Manfred Weber, “Lebenshaus I,” LÄ 3 (1980), 954–57; Alan H. Gardiner, “The House of Life,” JEA 24 (1938), 157–79. 236.  See, for instance, R. K. Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 1–28, “Toward a Definition of Magic.” 237. See Kees, “Der sogenannte oberste Vorlesepriester,” ZÄS 87 (1962), 119–39, for an overview of the ẖry-ḥb ḥry-tp in Egyptian history. 238.  Ibid., 121. 239.  The term ẖr-ḥb.w ḥr-ı͗tm, ‘chief lector priests’, in Demotic is used “in reference to embalmer priests associated with the royal burial in Pap. Krall, 8(=G)/13–14”; Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 221 n. 1025. See Wilhelm Spiegelberg, Die Sagenkreis des Königs Petubastis (Demotische Studien 3; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1910), 48–49. On

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to temples, they rotated their service in phyles, leaving them opportunity for private practice in the community when they were not on duty. 240 According to Kees, the title of “chief lector priest” was reserved for the lector priest in the king’s service. 241 In the trial records of the Harem conspiracy against Ramses III (ca. 1182–1151 b.c.e.) in the New Kingdom, several priestly professionals are listed among the accomplices of queen Tiye and are said to have used sorcery as a weapon against the king: three “scribes of the House of Life,” a “chief lector priest,” and an “overseer of priests of the goddess Sakhmet”; 242 the fifth person, Iyroy, was also called a “chief lector priest” and “held authority in the House of Life affiliated with the Bubastite temple of Sakhmet, the goddess of both healing and destruction.” 243 When the plot is found out, it is not sorcery that is condemned but the treason of the royal harem and others in the court. The title “Scribe of the House of Life of the Lord of the Two Lands” indicates that “a scribe concerned with religious writings is shown by his titles to have been in the direct employment of the king.” 244 The lector priests and other priests had political functions as well, in that they could be sent to foreign lands as emissaries. 245 Petiese, chief prophet of Amun at Teuzoi under Psammetichus II, accompanied the king along with prophets of other towns to Syria. 246 Imhotep, see Wildung, “Imhotep,” LÄ III (1980), 145–48. For an inscription by Khamwas, son of Rameses II, on a granite basin dedicated to “Imhotep the Great, son of Ptah,” see James P. Allen, “A Monument of Khaemwaset Honoring Imhotep,” in Emily Teeter and John A. Larson, eds., Gold of Praise: Studies on Ancient Egypt in Honor of Edward F. Wente (SAOC 58; Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1999), 1–10. The granite basin was probably originally at Saqqāra, in sight of Djoser’s pyramid complex of the 3rd Dynasty, of which Imhotep was the architect. 240.  “Combining in himself the roles of composer, compiler, and performer, it is the priest alone who constitutes the ‘private’ magician in ancient Egypt”; Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 232. 241. H. Kees, “Der sogenannte oberste Vorlesepriester,” 119–39. 242.  Sorcery or magic in itself was not condemned in Egypt; its good or evil depended on the use to which it was being put. Magic was a weapon comparable to the sword; see Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 199. The book used in the sorcery actually came from the king’s own library: p. 13. 243.  Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 213. 244.  Gardiner, “The House of Life,” 176. 245. Labib Habachi, “Khatâʿna-Qantîr: Importance,” Annales du service des antiquités de l’Égypte 52 (1954), 498, pl. xxvii. A certain Ṯnry is described on a doorway as “the deputy of the king [to every foreign land], the one who foretells the events, the royal scribe and the chief lector-priest Thnry, the blessed” (lines 5–8 on the upperpart of the right side of a doorlintel). The restoration of “deputy of the king [to every land]” is assured, as it is a formulaic expression and is used for a charioteer on another doorway (p. 499). 246.  “The Petition of Petese,” Papyrus Rylands 9 xv, i; Francis Llewellyn Griffith, Catalogue of the Demotic Papyri in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, with Facsimiles and Complete Translations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1909; reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1972), vol. III, 96, 237; vol. I/II, pls. xxxvii, 32. See also Gardiner, “The House of Life,”

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It is in the Hellenistic period that we finally find evidence that oneiromancy was one of the activities conducted under the auspices of the “House of Life” and that institutionalized dream interpretation took place under the auspices of specific temples. 247 The first indication of an Egyptian consulting a dream specialist about a dream, however, is from a Ramesside papyrus (P. Deir el-Medineh 6), 248 and the first compilation of dreams and their interpretations is also New Kingdom Ramesside (P. Chester Beatty III, recto cols. 1–11), 249 even if it is not clear how this early dream book was used or who used it. 250 Toward the beginning of the Late Period, the Nubian Pharaoh Tanutamani (664–657 b.c.e.) had a dream about two snakes, and when he wakes up, he wonders what the dream means: “Then it was interpreted to him saying, ‘To you belongs the land of the South, take for yourself Lower Egypt. . . .’” 251 Although the interpreter is not named in the text, nor given a title, it is likely that the priest of Amun who later in the text 166, 176. Petese is told that, as a scribe of the House of Life, he will be able to answer any question put to him in Syria. 247. Kasia Szpakowska, Behind Closed Eyes: Dreams and Nightmares in Ancient Egypt (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2003), 56, 61; eadem, “Through the Looking Glass: Dreams in Ancient Egypt,” in Kelly Bulkeley, ed., Dreams: A Reader on Religious, Cultural & Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 37. The archive of Ḥor of Sebennytos contains numerous dreams and their meanings from the second century b.c.e.; see J. D. Ray, The Archive of Ḥor (Texts from Excavations; London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1976); also idem, “Ancient Egypt,” in M. Loewe and C. Blacker, eds., Divination and Oracles (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 174–90. See also P. Carlsberg XIII and XIX, which date to approximately the second century c.e.; Aksel Volten, Demotische Traumdeutung (Pap. Carlsberg XIII und XIV Verso) (Analecta Aegyptiaca 3; Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1942), 3. For a proposed list of temples having a House of Life, see Katarina Nordh, Aspects of Ancient Egyptian Curses and Blessings: Conceptual Background and Transmission (Boreas: Uppsala Studies in Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Civilization 26; Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1996), 193–207; for a list of the titles of the staff of the House of Life, see pp. 208–12. 248.  This letter mentions a woman who, because of a dream she had seen, “has come in order to stand in the presence of Nefertari.” This is probably a reference to an oracular consultation; Szpakowska, Behind Closed Eyes, 65–66. The letter was published by J. Černý, Papyrus hiératiques de Deir el Médineh (Paris: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1978), 19, pls. 22–22a; KRI VI, 266–67; translated in Edward F. Wente, Letters from Ancient Egypt (SBLWAW 1; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990), 151. 249.  The Chester Beatty collection of magical rolls from the Ramesside Period at Deir el-Medīna were the property of Amennakhte and Keniherkhepeshef, scribes, and one of the rolls (P. Chester Beatty 8) was found in a library room of the temple; Ritner, The Mechanics of of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 206; Alan Gardiner, Hieratic Papyri in the British Museum, Third Series: Chester Beatty Gift (London: British Museum, 1935), 1.68. 250.  “For nearly the first 2,000 years of Egypt’s history, there is no extant evidence for the mantic use of dreams nor for rituals designed to solicit dreams”; Szpakowska, “Through the Looking Glass,” 34. 251.  Translation is by Szpakowska, Behind Closed Eyes, 55. Text in H. Schäfer, Urkunden der älteren Aethiopenkönige, Urk., III (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1905–8), 57–77; N.-C. Grimal, Quatre stèles naptiennes du Museé du Caire: JE 48863–48866 (Études sur la propagande royale égyptienne II (Caire: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1981), 3–20, pls. i–iv; Francis Breyer,

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reveals that Amun-Ra had sent the dream is the one responsible for its interpretation (Tanutamani Dream Stele 29–31). 252 From the Late Period (664–323 b.c.e.) on, there are more and more references to dreams that need interpretation, and in the Ptolemaic Period, dream interpretation was definitely part of the institution called “the House of Life,” as is evidenced by the archive of interpretation records kept by Ḥor of Sebennytos, and P. Carlsberg 13 and 19. 253 As members of the House of Life, the ḥry.w-tp, also take part in this activity. In texts 16 and 17A of the archive of Ḥor of Sebennytos, a priest of Isis in the early second century b.c.e., records sending a difficult matter, either a dream or oracle, to four magicians (ḥr-tb) to be interpreted. Only the magician of Imhotep (the god Imhotep is here specified as the “son of Ptah, to whom they call throughout the entire two lands because of his magic-making”) is able to do so. 254 There also seems to be a reference to a king calling upon a ḥr-tb specifically for a dream interpretation in the unpublished P. Carlsberg 465 from the first or second century c.e. and another reference in the Life of Imhotep (only partially published) from the first century c.e. 255 Dream interpretation was also associated with the deified Imhotep, a ḥry-tp (see Excursus below). Note also the Bohairic Coptic translation of Gen 41:8, 24 from the fourth century c.e. 256 For the του`ς ἑχητὰς in Greek (the Septuagint’s translation of Hebrew ḥarṭummîm), the Bohairic has ⲥⲫⲣⲁⲛϣ (sphraneš), ‘dream interpreter’, probably from the older Egyptian sš pr ʿnḫ ‘scribe of the house of life’, 257 while the Sahidic has ⲣⲉϥⲟⲩⲉϩⲣⲁⲥⲟⲩ, derived from rmṯ ı͗w.f wꜢḥ rsw ‘the man who interprets dreams’. 258 In the magician narratives that function as court tales, the ḥry.w-tp (and other priests or prophets) are depicted in a variety of activities: they utilize spells to do wonders (Tales from King Cheops’ Court in Papyrus Westcar; Setne II); they Tanutamani: Die Traumstele und ihr Umfeld (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2003). Another translation can be found in Bresciani, Letteratura, 530–33. 252.  The composition falls into the genre of “Konigsnovelle” and is propaganda legitimizing the rule of Tanutamani. 253. See Volten, Demotische Traumdeutung, and Ray, The Archive of Ḥor. 254.  Text 16, line 7: ı͗y-m-ḥtp sꜢ pth ı͗-ı͗r-w ʿš n-f n nꜢ tꜢ wy dr-w r-dbꜢ pꜢy-f ı͗r-spy; Ray, The Archive of Ḥor, 61–66, 134–35. Note that Ḥor of Sebennytos himself is someone who both receives and interprets dreams, often by temple incubation, but this dream must have been too difficult. The preserved archive contains his own writings, texts 8–18 of which record several dreams and oracles. 255. Kim Ryholt, personal communication; idem, “The Life of Imhotep (P. Carlsberg 85),” in G. Widmer and D. Devauchelle, eds., Actes du IXe Congrès International des Études Démotiques, Paris, 31 août–3 septembre 2005 (BdÉ 147; Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2009), 305–15; idem, “The Assyrian Invasion of Egypt,” 500–501; idem, “Djoser og Imhotep. Fra samlingen af Carlsberg Papyri,” Papyrus 20/1 (2000), 33–35. 256. Julio Trebolle Barrera, The Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible: An Introduction to the History of the Bible (trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson; Leiden: Brill, 1998), 364. 257.  Ritner, The Mechanics of of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 222. 258.  Szpakowska, Behind Closed Eyes, 65.

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participate in contests of magic with other magicians (Setne II; Djoser and Imhotep/ Life of Imhotep; perhaps Naneferkasokar); they save the king or his family, sometimes called upon in the middle of the night to sort out the distress of a sleepless or otherwise afflicted king (Merire and Sisobek; Setne II; Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh); they cure the king of maladies (Merire and Sisobek, and possibly the story about a youth at the royal court in Papyrus Wien D 62, verso); they receive dreams (Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh; Setne II) or they interpret dreams (Life of Imhotep also known as Djoser and Imhotep); they read sealed writings or are otherwise concerned with divine books (books written by Thoth in Setne I and II and traditions about Imhotep and Petese); they animate creations from wax (Setne I and II; Tales from King Cheops’ Court in Papyrus Westcar; Ḥi-Ḥor; and Horus-son-of-the-Wolf traditions in Aramaic and Demotic); and speak to birds and animals (Setne I and Ḥi-Ḥor/  Ḥenenu). Finally, the ḥry-tp or ḥr-tb is not the only priestly sage who performs magic. For instance, the ḥm nṯr, another kind of priest (lit., ‘god’s servant’, but often translated ‘prophet’), also performs magic. 259 In several of the magician stories to be discussed below, it is the ḥm nṯr who does precisely the same kinds of things that the ḥry-tp/tb is described as doing. In fact, there is now some evidence that there are several texts, many unpublished, of a cycle of stories surrounding the high priests or prophets of Atum-Re at Heliopolis (for instance, the Stories of Petese published by Ryholt) that parallel the stories surrounding the High Priests of Ptah at Memphis (the so-called Setne stories). In addition, Ḥor-son-of-Paneshy, who takes the form of Setne’s son, in Setne I, is a priest of Re at Heliopolis in an unpublished text. 260 Another term used for a professional magician is rḫ-ḫ.t, ‘one who knows things’—that is, someone who knows “sacred” things. 261 By contrast, the term rḫ ‘wise man’ alone (or rmṯ rḫ ‘wise man’), which is used of the ḥry-tp Naneferkaptaḥ in Setne I, is less specific and may or may not occur in a magical context. 262 Note also that the “scribes of the House of Life” in general, among 259.  Under “Prophet” (vol. 4, col. 1122), the Lexikon der Ägyptologie refers the reader to “Priester(tum)” (cols. 1084–97). W. Erichsen’s Demotisches Glossar translates this into German as “Gottesdiener, Priester,” with the Greek translation of προφήτης (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1954, 305). In Coptic, the term means ‘pagan priest’: ϩⲟⲏⲧ; see Werner Vycichl, Dictionaire Ètymologique de la langue Copte (Leuven: Peeters, 1983), 306 ‘prêtre païen’; W. E. Crum, A Coptic Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939), 691. For Ptolemaic Egyptian texts from the Temple of Edfu, see Penelope Wilson, A Ptolemaic Lexikon: A Lexicographical Study of the Texts in the Temple of Edfu (OLA 78; Leuven: Peeters, 1997) “priest,” 643. 260.  Pap. Berlin P 30023 (+23725+15675); the text is announced in K.-T. Zauzich, “Neue literarische Texte in demotischer Schrift,” Enchoria 8 (1978), 36. 261. See Hellmut Brunner, “Die ‘Weisen,’ ihre ‘Lehren’ und ‘Prophezeiungen’ in alt­ ägyptischer Sicht,” ZÄS 93 (1966), 29–35. As Ritner notes (The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 230 n. 1061), Brunner’s examples include “‘scribes and sages’ of the palace who are able to interpret a mysterious lock of divinely-created hair.” 262.  Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 229–30.

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whom the ḥry.w-tp are often numbered, can function as exorcists and physicians or problem solvers. For instance, in the Bentresh stela, the scribe (ḥry-tb) Thothemheb is sent to Bakhtan to find out what malady has afflicted Bentresh, the younger sister of the foreign Egyptian queen Neferure. 263 One should also note that Djedi, the greatest magician in the Papyrus Westcar Tales from King Cheops’ Court, is called a nḏs, ‘commoner’, in contrast to the previous magicians, who are each a ẖry-ḥb ḥry-tp, ‘chief lector priest’. 264 Therefore, several Egyptian stories include tales of wonder set in the days of a king of the past. 265 There is often a connection to wisdom and court etiquette. Redford notes that the stories of the Late Period “confer on the wiseman a far more serious role” than that of merely trivial entertainment. 266 They protect the kingdom from evil foreign magicians; they save the lives of the king and other members of the royal family, thus performing “the same function fulfilled by Daniel on two occasions with Nebuchadrezzar (Dan 2) and Belshazzar (Dan 5) in tales of Hellenistic date.” 267 Redford cites several of the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman period texts to be discussed below, but first we turn to the preserved storycollections of Egypt, all of which relate magical activities performed by various characters, two of which attribute them to the priestly sages called ḥry.w-tp.

Excursus: Egyptian ḥry-tp/tb, Hebrew-Aramaic *ḥarṭōm, and Akkadian ḫarṭibi The first to suggest that Hebrew-Aramaic *ḥarṭōm was to be derived from the Egyptian designation for “chief lector priest” was B. H. Stricker in 1937, and this etymology has generally been accepted since, with only a few dissenters. 268 263.  It turns out that she is possessed by a ghost, which Thothemheb removes by having a statue of the god Khonsu brought to Bakhtan. Text: M. Broze, La princesse de Bakhtan (Monographies Reine Elisabeth 6; Brussels: Fondation Egyptologique Reine Elisabeth, 1989); K. Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), 2.284–87; A. de Buck, Egyptian Readingbook (4th ed.; Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1977), 106–9. Translations: E. Bresciani, Letteratura, 633–36; E. Brunner-Traut, Altägyptischen Märchen, 163–67; G. Lefebvre, Romans et Contes de l’Epoque Pharaonique (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1949), 221–32; Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 3, 90–94; Ritner in Simpson, LAE, 361–66. 264.  But note that Neferti in the Prophecies of Neferti is both nḏs and ḥry-tp, so the two terms are not mutually exclusive. 265.  On Egyptian tales of wonder in general, see Susan Tower Hollis, “Tales of Magic and Wonder from Ancient Egypt,” in CANE IV, 2255–64. 266.  Redford, Egypt, Canaan and Israel in Ancient Times, 428. 267.  Ibid., 429. 268.  B. H. Stricker, “Trois études de phonétique et de morphologie,” AcOr 15 (1937), 6, 20. For more information on the history of the understanding of this term, see Alan H. Gardiner, “The House of Life”; Wilhelm Spiegelberg, “Die Lesung des Titels ‘Vorlesepriester, Zauberer’ in den demotischen Texten,” Demotica I (SBAW 1925/6; Munich: Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1925), 4–7; Jozef Vergote, Joseph en Égypte: Génèse ch. 37–50 à la lumière des

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H.-P. Müller’s entry on *ḥarṭōm in the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament presents the majority consensus: Heb[rew] and Biblical Aram[aic] ḥarṭōm derives from De[motic] ḥr-tb(i) < ḥr-tp, ‘reciting priest, magician’, in which the second element of Egyp[tian] ẖry-ḥb.(t) ḥry-tp, ‘chief bearer of the ritual scrolls’, i.e., chief reciter or reciting priest, has become independent. 269

The etymology from Demotic ḥr(y)-tb (or the earlier Egyptian ḥry-tp) for the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Akkadian terms is commonly accepted now. 270 The title études égyptologiques récentes (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1959), 66–73; H. Kees, “Der sogenannte oberste Vorlesepriester,” 119–39. For dissent, see, for instance, Thomas O. Lambdin, “Egyptian Loan Words in the Old Testament,” JAOS 73 (1953), 150–51; and H. Goedicke, “ḥarṭummîm,” Or 65 (1996), 24–30. Goedicke instead takes biblical ḥarṭummîm not from ḥry-tp/tb but from ḥr tmꜢ, ‘on the mat’, an idiom for executing either legal or administrative office, i.e., ‘the one on duty’ (he cites Admonitions 6,8, or Pap. Anastasi II 8, 5–9, 1); he understands the Egyptian term ḥry-tp as “chief ” of an administrative branch wherever it occurs, in order to qualify the rank of specific professions, and argues that it does not mean “chief lector priest” unless it occurs with ẖry-ḥb. However, he does accept Demotic ḥry-tb as a shortened form of ẖry-ḥb ḥry-tb but does not think the activities of lector priests in texts later than the Papyrus Westcar should be labeled as “magic.” Nevertheless, in both of Goedicke’s examples, the Papyrus Vandier and Setne II, the individuals called ḥry.w-tp (Merire and Ḥor-son-of-Paneshy) do indeed perform magic (animating wax figurines, reading sealed documents, etc.). Contra Goedicke, Merire and Ḥor-son-of-Paneshy do not simply “act as any minister, religious or secular, would do in the same situation, namely, trying to councel [sic] their lord” (“ḥarṭummîm,” 25–26). Note that Lanckau is not opposed to Goedicke’s interpretation (Jörg Lanckau, “ḥar­ṭum­ mîm—die Traumspezialisten? Eine methodische Problemanzeige in der Suche nach Josefs Kontrahenten in Gen 41,8.24,” BN 119/120 [2003], 115), which he thinks could be complemented by the old suggestion that Hebrew ḥrṭ (‘stylus’ in Isa 8:1; see BDB 355: ‘engraver’ as the first meaning of *ḥarṭōm) could have something in common with ḥarṭōm, thus indicating someone who belongs to the scribal profession or who knows the scribal arts. However, there are few cases of the afformative -ōm on noun forms in Hebrew; it is not a productive nominal suffix. In fact, Bauer and Leander suggest that most of the few forms that occur with -ōm rather than -ām are dialectical, as in ‫ ִּפ ְתאֹם‬and ‫עֵירֹם‬, perhaps from an original locative ū > ō + m, or are originally by-forms of III-m nouns (H. Bauer and P. Leander, Historische Grammatik der hebräischen Sprache des Alten Testamentes [Halle/Saale: Max Niemeyer, 1922], §61ki). On the other hand, ‫ׁש ְלׁשֹום‬ ִ is a composite form from *šāliš, ‘third’, and *yōm/yām, ‘day’; cf. Akk. šalšūmī; see Koehler-Baumgartner, 1545. At any rate, an -ōm ending on a noun form was not grammatically productive. 269. H.-P. Müller, “ ‫ ח ְַרטֹם‬ḥarṭōm,” in TDOT, 5.177. Nonetheless, note that the form ḥrytp or ḥry-tb was thought by Spiegelberg to be a term coordinate to ẖry-ḥb and not a shortened form of the title ẖry-ḥb(t) ḥry-tp. Spiegelberg would translate the full title as ‘Lector-priest and chief ’ rather than ‘chief lector priest’, since he saw ḥry-tp, ‘one who is at the head of ’, as an independent form that came to mean ‘magician’ and not as a higher-level priest; Spiegelberg, “Die Lesung des Titels ‘Vorlesepriester, Zauberer’,” 4–7. 270. Note also that the Greek transcriptions of the Demotic word in Ptolemaic and Roman times reflect a pronunciation b rather than p at the time. To long-known examples,

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ẖry-ḥb(t) ḥry-tp is clearly abbreviated as ḥry-tp in the magical Papyrus Harris from the Ramesside period 271 and is found again in the Demotic stories as ḥr-tb. 272 The phonological shift from an Egyptian labial stop to a Northwest-Semitic labial nasal (/b/ or /p/ > /m/) is a typical cross-linguistic phenomenon, 273 and Egyptian itself attests a switch from b to m. 274 (Note that Akkadian ḫarṭibi preserves the later Egyptian pronunciation.) The shift of /t/ to /ṭ/ (‫ )ט‬is more difficult because Egyptian /t/ is usually rendered as Semitic /t/ (‫)ת‬. To solve this problem, both Vergote and Quaegebeur adduced inscriptional evidence from the time of Ramses II that ḥr-tb and ḥr-ı͗db/wdb were written in parallel, designating the same person, and suggested that the terms were interchangeable. There would thus be no problem with Egyptian d < ḏ being represented by Hebrew ṭ, since this was a typical Egyptian-Hebrew equivalence. 275 Unfortunately, as Quaegebeur admits, ḥr-ı͗db/ wdb is best understood as a ritual that is the task of the royal scribe lector-priest, rather than as a different spelling of the title ḥr-tb, so this solution does not help clarify the derivation of *ḥarṭōm from ḥr-tb. 276 Y. Muchiki proposes a different solution: because /t/ becomes /ṭ/ between a labial and ‫ ח‬in five or more cases in Egyptian loanwords in Northwest Semitic (for instance, Aramaic ‫ פחטמוני‬for Quaegebeur adds φριτ⟨ο⟩β in P. Lond. 2188 (149 b.c.e.) and φριτοβ in P. Cairo 10361 (ca. 148 b.c.e.); see J. Quaegebeur, “On the Egyptian Equivalent of Biblical ḥarṭummîm,” in Pharaonic Egypt: The Bible and Christianity, ed. S. Israelit-Groll (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1985), 167. 271.  P. mag. Harris (P. Br. Mus. 10042), has in 6,10: “The first spell of all water-enchantments—now the head ones [ḥry.w-tp] have said with regard to it, Open the heart to no strangers concerning—a true secret of the House of Life”; H. Lange, Der magische Papyrus Harris (Copenhagen: Høst, 1927), 55. See also Gardiner, “House of Life,” 164; B. H. Stricker, “Trois études de phonétique et de morphologie copte,”AcOr 15 (1937), 6–7, 20. 272.  The term ḥr-tb occurs independently in at least the hieratic Papyrus Vandier and the Demotic Setne stories (Setne I: 1,1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; 2,10, 13; 3,1, 10; 5,1, 7, 8, 11, 12 and Setne II: 5,3, 5, 10–11; 6,7–8, 11–12, 14). 273.  “Because /b/ can become /m/ after [u] vowel,” as in the case of χνουμις // χνουβις : ‫ חנום‬// ‫ ; חנוב‬see Y. Muchiki, Egyptian Proper Names and Loanwords in North-West Semitic (SBLDS 173; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999), 245. See also C. Preust, Egyptian Phonology: An Introduction to the Phonology of a Dead Language (Monographien zur ägyptischen Sprache 2; Göttingen: Peust und Gutschmidt, 1999), 167: m > β and β > m in the neighborhood of r / l (cf. Semitic *mVnšār > *mVššār [as in Hebrew ‫‘( מַּׁשֹור‬saw’)] > Sahidic? and Boharic ⲃⲁϣⲟⲩⲣ /ba'ʃur/). Note also that E. Bresciani reads ẖr-ḥb ḥry-tm in col. VIII, 1.14 of the Demotic papyrus P. Krall of the Roman period and translates it “Balsamierer und Zauberer”; Der Kampf um den Panzer des Inaros (Papyrus Krall) (Mitteilungen aus der Papyrussammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek [Papyrus Erzherzog Rainer] n.s. 8; Vienna: Prachner, 1964), col. VIII, 1.14. This may indicate that the b of ḥry-tb has made the phonological change to m internally within Demotic. The text is slightly damaged, however. 274.  Quaegebeur (“On the Egyptian Equivalent of ḥarṭummîm,” 169, 172 n. 45) cites Jürgen Osing, Die Nominalbildung des Aegyptischen (Mainz am Rhein: von Zabern, 1976), 95. 275.  Quaegebeur, “On the Egyptian Equivalent of Biblical ḥarṭummîm,” 162–72. 276.  See also Goedicke, “ḥarṭummîm,” 26–27. However, contra Goedicke, it does not follow that “when it is realized that ḥry ı͗db/wdb is not a variant spelling of ḥry-tp the premise of the assumed Egyptian prototype of ḥarṭummîm vanishes” (p. 27).

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Egyptian pꜢ-ḫ.t-mnı͗.t; Aramaic ‫ פטחרטים‬for Egyptian ptḫ-ı͗-dı͗-sw), then that is what happened here, even though “/r/ a resonant intervened between ‫ ח‬and ‫ט‬.” 277 This seems to be an entirely plausible phonological explanation. In addition, one should consider the reverse situation when loanwords were borrowed in the opposite direction, from Semitic into Egyptian. Because Egyptian speakers did not themselves have a /ṭ/, they tended to represent Semitic /ṭ/ by both /d/ and /t/ in Egyptian. In fact, they used /t/ only slightly less often than /d/ (40% of the time versus 60%, in Hoch’s estimation). 278 Thus, ḥry-tp, ‘chief ’ or ‘magician’, shows up in its Demotic form ḥr-tb as a loanword in Hebrew (*ḥarṭōm, pl. ḥarṭummîm) 279 and Aramaic (*ḥarṭōm, pl. ḥarṭummîn / ḥarṭummayyāʾ ), 280 both usually translated ‘magician’, and it occurs in Neo-Assyrian Akkadian as ḫarṭibi, usually translated ‘dream interpreter’. 281 We know from at least two Akkadian historical texts that Egyptian professionals called ḫarṭibi were transported to Assyria in the days of Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal. In ADD 851, a functionary list from the court of Assurbanipal (668–625 b.c.e.), there are groups of priestly experts at the Assyrian court in which Egyptian names appear; three are said to be ḫarṭibi (their names are [. . .]guršî, Raʾsî, and Ṣiḫû), while another three are said to be “Egyptian scribes” (a.ba.meš mu-ṣura-a; their names are Ḫuru, Nimmurau, and [Ḫu]ruaṣu). 282 They occur alongside Assyrian professionals of varying kinds; the list includes: seven astrologers ([a.ba] 277.  Muchiki, Egyptian Proper Names and Loanwords, 245, 319–20. However, although there are several examples of t between a labial and a ḥ becoming a ṭ, there are no examples of a resonant intervening. 278. J. Hoch, Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 407, 431–33. This counts only occurrences with high certainty (Hoch’s level 5), not those with only fair certainty. See also D. Sivan and Z. Cochavi-Rainey, West Semitic Vocabulary in Egyptian Script of the 14th to the 10th Centuries b.c.e. (Beer-Sheva Studies by the Department of Bible and Ancient Near East 6; Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 1992), 26. Note the rendering of Semitic place-names in Thutmose III’s topographical list: for instance, Akkadian URUṬú-bu or Hebrew Ṭôb as Tu‑bi-i (Thutmose III No. 22). Other examples include Semitic words such as *ṯapaṭa (‘to judge’, cf. Hebrew ‫ׁשפט‬, Akkadian šapāṭu, etc.), and *šibṭa (‘staff ’, cf. Hebrew ‫ׁשבֶט‬ ֵ ‘staff ’, and Akkadian šabāṭu ‘to beat’), which are rendered in Egyptian as ša-pa-ta (El Ḥilbe) and ši2-ba-ta (O. Turin 57387 10), respectively; Hoch, Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts, 276–78 (nos. 397 and 398, but see also no. 202 on pp. 154–55). In some sources, Egyptian also represents the Semitic ṭ with a d (note ši2-b-da2 in P. Turin B, vs. 1, 9). 279.  Koehler-Baumgartner, 1.352–53. 280.  Koehler-Baumgartner, 2.1880. 281.  CAD Ḫ 116, AHw, 328. 282.  C. H. W. Johns, Assyrian Deeds and Documents (Cambridge: Bell, 1898–1923), vol. 2, pl. 97 (text 851, iv 2). ADD 851 = SAA VII, no. 1. See also H. Ranke, Keilschriftliches Material zur altägyptischen Vokalisation (AKPAW 1910/2; Berlin: Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1910), 37; Karen Radner, “The Assyrian King and His Scholars: The Syro-Anatolian and the Egyptian Schools,” in M. Luukko et al., eds., Neo-Assyrian and Related Studies in Honour of Simo Parpola (Studia Orientalia 106; Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society, 2009), 221–38.

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ud-an-be

or ṭupšar Enūma Anu Enlil), nine exorcists (maš.maš.meš or mašmaššû), five diviners (hal.meš or bārû), nine physicians (a.z[u].meš or asû), six lamentation priests (uš.ku.meš or kalû), and three augurs (da-gí l-mušen or dāgil iṣṣūrî). 283 In Winckler AOF 2, 21, Egyptian professionals (lúḫar-DI-i?-bi) are taken captive as booty from Egypt in the time of Esarhaddon (680–669 b.c.e.). 284 The list in ADD 851 may more clearly make a connection between the ḫarṭibi and mantic abilities, just because of the other members in the list. In addition, in the diplomatic correspondence between Ramses II and the Hittites, Egyptian ḥry-tb is translated as Akkadian āšipu ‘exorcist’ (that is, a trained expert who diagnosed diseases and offered incantations and magic to remedy them), a frequent term in Babylonian texts from the Hellenistic period, thus adding to our understanding that the Akkadian ḫarṭibi were mantic. 285 Nonetheless, it is not clear from the two occurrences of ḫarṭibi exactly what sphere of meaning the term denotes in Akkadian. 286 Egyptian ḥry-tp/tb enters into Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic as *ḥarṭōm in the context of stories with a foreign setting: the Joseph story in Genesis and the story of Moses, Aaron, and the Egyptian magicians in Exodus, which are both set in Egypt (Gen 41:8, 24; Exod 7:11, 22; 8:3, 14, 15; 9:11), as well as the Daniel stories that are set in Mesopotamia (Dan 2:10, 27; 4:4, 6; 5:11). As with its parallel in Akkadian, there has been some debate about what meaning *ḥarṭōm brought with it from its original Egyptian setting. In the Joseph story (whose date has been much debated), 287 the context is clearly dream interpretation (none of the 283.  See F. M. Fales and J. N. Postgate, eds., Imperial Administrative Records, Part I: Palace and Temple Administration (SAA 7; Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1992), 4–5. 284. First published by Winckler in AOF 2, 21 (Bu. 91-2-9, 218); then re-edited by R.  Borger, Die Inschriften Asarhaddons Königs von Assyrien (AfO Beiheft 9; Gratz: Weidner, 1956), 114. This text is also translated in ANET by A. Leo Oppenheim (p. 293). See also CAD Ḫ 116; AHw 1.328; and Oppenheim, Dreams in the Ancient Near East, 238. But contra Oppenheim’s negative statements concerning oneiromantic divination in Assyria, which needed “interpreters of dreams . . . to come from Egypt to be acceptable” (pp. 238–39), see S. A. L. Butler, Mesopotamian Conceptions of Dreams and Dream Rituals (AOAT 258; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1998), 6ff., 15ff. Butler notes that there is much more evidence for prognostic dreams in the Akkadian sources than Oppenheim observed (partly because the Mari dream reports were not available in his time). 285. Elmar Edel, Ägyptische Ärzte und ägyptische Medizin am hethitischen Königshof (Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1976), 53–63, 68–69; CAD A/1 431. 286.  The editors of SAA 7 translate ḫarṭibi rather generically as ‘Egyptian scholars’. 287.  The Joseph story has been dated anywhere from the thirteenth century b.c.e. (Vergote, Joseph en Égypte) to the second or first century b.c.e. (B. J. Diebner, “Le roman de Joseph, ou Israël en Égypte: Un midrash post-exilique de la Tora,” in O. Abel and F. Smyth, eds., Le livre de traverse de l’exégèse biblique à l’anthropologie [Paris: Cerf, 1992], 55–71). Much more reasonable are dates between the tenth century and the third century b.c.e., with preference for the middle of this period. Redford dates the story to about 650–425 b.c.e., the Saite period, and relates it to other “diaspora novella” such as Esther (A Study of the Biblical Story of Joseph (Genesis 37–50) (VTSup 20; Leiden: Brill, 1970), esp. 241–43); and John Van Seters prefers the earlier

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Egyptian ḥarṭummîm or ḥăkāmîm, ‘wisemen’, can interpret pharaoh’s dreams, but Joseph is able to). 288 In the Exodus story, Moses and Aaron’s battle against the Egyptian ḥarṭummîm has nothing to do with interpreting dreams and everything to do with a contest between magicians, a motif often found in native Egyptian narratives: Moses and Aaron compete with and defeat the Egyptians in performing several wonders, including turning water to blood, staffs into snakes, etc. (the Egyptian magicians are able to copy these marvelous deeds up to a point, but finally fail in their attempts to produce lice). 289 The Exodus magician competition may also be considered a “diaspora novella,” just as the Joseph and Daniel stories. 290 However, none of the three—not Joseph, Moses, or Aaron—are ever themselves called ḥarṭummîm in the Bible; they merely compete with them. In Daniel, however, where the setting is Mesopotamian rather than Egyptian, Daniel is actually described in 4:6 and 5:11 as chief of the ḥarṭummîn; in 5:11b–12a: “chief of the ḥarṭummîn, enchanters (ʾāšĕpîn), Chaldeans (kasdāʾ în), and diviners (gāzĕrîn), because an excellent spirit, knowledge, and understanding to interpret dreams, explain riddles, and solve problems were found in this Daniel.” The third ability in the list has to do with magical spells, literally ‘to loosen knots’ (mĕšārē qiṭrîn), and is used in Aramaic magical incantations, as others have shown. 291 Moreover, Daniel’s activities include what can be seen as a mix of those part of Redford’s date (“The Joseph Story: Some Basic Observations,” in Gary N. Knoppers and Antoine Hirsch, eds., Egypt, Israel, and the Ancient Mediterranean World: Studies in Honor of Donald B. Redford [Leiden: Brill, 2004], 361–88). 288.  Joseph himself is never called a *ḥarṭōm in Genesis, but he does interpret dreams as a youth, and later, when he becomes second-in-command under pharaoh, he is said to own a divining cup (Gen 44:5). On Joseph as a seer and on the possibility that Hebrew ptr was borrowed from Egyptian ptr/ptrj ‘to see’, note Manfred Görg, “Josef, ein Magier oder Seher? ” BN 103 (2000), 5–8. 289.  For a recent overview of the widespread view in antiquity of Moses as a magician, see Rivka Ulmer, Egyptian Cultural Icons in Midrash (Studia Judaica: Forschungen zur Wissenschaft des Judentums 52; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 107–41, esp. 124–41. In midrashic texts, Moses is believed to have raised Joseph’s bones and coffin from the Nile by using various water rituals. 290.  See, for instance, Thomas C. Römer, “Competing Magicians in Exodus 7–9: Interpreting Magic in the Priestly Theology,” in Todd E. Klutz, ed., Magic in the Biblical World: From the Rod of Aaron to the Ring of Solomon (JSNTSup 245; London: T. & T. Clark, 2003), 12–22. 291.  For Daniel as a magician who unbinds spells, see Cyrus H. Gordon, “The Aramaic Incantation in Cuneiform,” AfO 12 (1937), 105–17; re-edited most recently by M. J. Geller, “The Aramaic Incantation in Cuneiform Script (AO 6489 = TCL 6.58),” JEOL 35–36 (1997– 2000), 127–46. Gordon does not understand “knot of a wall” as a spell but as a “binding” in the construction of a wall in obverse line 1 and reverse line 1 of the incantation (pp. 133, 135). This understanding of Daniel as a magician of some sort is found in the following commentaries: A. A. Bevan, A Short Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1892); M. A. Beek, Das Danielbuch: sein historischer Hintergrund und seine literarische Entwicklung: Versuch eines Beitrages zur Lösung des Problems (Leiden: Ginsberg, 1935), 11; R. H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1929), 130; J. Steinmann, Daniel (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1961), 74; N. W. Porteous, Das Danielbuch (ATD 23; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1962), 60, 65.

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found in the ḥarṭummîm or their opponents in both Genesis and Exodus. He not only interprets dreams as does Joseph (Dan 2 and 4), but his riddle- or problemsolving includes actually telling Nebuchadnezzar the content of the dream he had (Dan 2; an even more remarkable feat than merely giving an interpretation of a dream after he has been told it!) and reading the divine writing on the wall in ch. 5 as if it were a magical “knot” or a spell. 292 As a professional trained in Babylonian science and literature (Dan 1), he competes with other, native experts and out-performs them. Finally, he is promoted to ever higher administrative positions: in 2:48, he is made ruler over the entire province of Babylon and chief prefect over all the wise men as a reward for solving Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a statue; in 5:29, he is made third in the kingdom as a reward for deciphering the writing on the wall; and in 6:2, he is one of three ministers in Darius’ kingdom to whom 120 satraps give account. This argues for some administrative responsibilities inherent in the biblical term *ḥarṭōm, as in the Joseph story, where Joseph is rewarded for his interpretations by being exalted to the position of second in the realm after Pharaoh. While the Bible’s use of the term *ḥarṭōm thus includes dream interpretation, administration, and the performing of wonders in contests with rival magicians or courtiers, the sphere of meaning that the term ḥry-tp/tb had in its native Egypt when it was borrowed into Hebrew, Aramaic, or Akkadian is nowadays disputed. It used to be a given that the Egyptian term encompassed dream interpretation; this position was held by Egyptologists 293 and by biblical scholars who followed them, 294 as well as even Oppenheim, the Assyriologist, who exhaustively examFor more on the double entendre of Aramaic qĕṭar/qiṭrîn, ‘knot/s’ meaning ‘spell/s’ as well as ‘sphincter’ in Daniel 5, see Al Wolters, “Untying the King’s Knots: Physiology and Wordplay in Daniel 5,” JBL 110 (1991), 117–22. See also Shalom Paul, “Decoding a ‘Joint’ Expression in Daniel 5:6, 16,” Comparative Studies in Honor of Yochanan Muffs = JANES 22 (1992), 121–27, esp. 126–27. He suggests that this may mean breaking a magical spell and looks at the equivalent Akkadian expression, ‘loose knots’ (kiṣrū paṭāru/puṭṭuru), and at Aramaic and Syriac texts. See also Scott B. Noegel, Nocturnal Ciphers: The Allusive Language of Dreams in the Ancient Near East (AOS 89; New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 2007), 160–62. The term rzʾ, ‘mystery’, found in Dan 4:6 and throughout Dan 2 is also used in Aramaic incantations; see Christa Müller-Kessler, Die Zauberschalentexte in der Hilprecht-Sammlung, Jena, und weitere Nippur-Texte anderer Sammlungen (Texte und Materialien der Hilprecht Collection 7; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), 189 for a list of texts in this volume with this word. 292.  Gordon, “The Aramaic Incantation in Cuneiform,” 109 n. 13. 293.  Zibelius-Chen identified ḥry-tp with the dream interpreter and derives the institution from the title; see Karola Zibelius-Chen, “Kategorien und Rolle des Traumes in Ägypten,” SAK 15 (1988): 277–93. Note that ḥry-tp is claimed to be a “dream interpreter” in so much of the specialized literature that even a more general recent book on dreams in the ancient world continues to say, “Der Titel ḥrj-tp für den Traumdeuter ist ein Belege für das Vorhandensein einer institutionalisierten Traumdeutung” (Beat Näf, Traum und Traumdeutung im Altertum [Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004], 26). 294.  For example, Shaul Bar, A Letter That Has Not Been Read: Dreams in the Hebrew Bible (Monographs of the Hebrew Union College 25; trans. Lenn J. Schramm; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2001).

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ined dreams throughout the ancient Near East. 295 However, some Egyptologists such as Hans Goedicke and Kasia Szpakowska have recently debated whether biblical *ḥarṭōm ever included the function of dream interpreter, as it did in Egypt. Although Goedicke argues that *ḥarṭōm was derived from Egyptian ḥrytmꜢ ‘the one on the mat’, a term for an administrator and not for either a magician or dream interpreter, 296 Szpakowska states that, from whatever the biblical and Akkadian terms derive, “there is no evidence that these were technical terms for dream interpreters in Egypt.” 297 She adds, Whether or not one accepts any of these tentative etymologies, the evidence for ḫarṭibi or ḥarṭummîm meaning ‘dream specialists’ remains inconclusive, and based mostly on context and tradition. These individuals should instead be considered either as wise men, magicians, or priests who did not necessarily have much experience at all in the practice of dream divination, or at best practised oneiromancy as one of their many specialities. While dream interpretation was practised, perhaps as early as the Late Period, and definitely in the Hellenistic Period, during that time there seems to have been no identifiable word or expression referring to Egyptian oneirocritics as a distinct category. Rather, dream divination seems to have been just one of the priestly activities under the auspices of the ‘House of Life’.” 298

Goedicke and Szpakowska have both hinted that, in the biblical Joseph and Daniel stories, the understanding of *ḥarṭōm as dream interpreter is specific to the biblical context of each story and is not drawn from an Egyptian background. 299 They suggest that previous Egyptologists may have gotten their definition of ‘dream 295.  Oppenheim thought that the Assyrian importation of Egyptian ḫarṭibi meant something in particular (The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East, 238–39): This situation reflects not only the lack of importance of oneiromantic divination in Assyria, where the scribes apparently could not even find a corresponding native term for this profession, but it demonstrates also that in Assyria as well as in Palestine, through many centuries, the interpreting of dreams was considered the highest and the typical achievement of Egyptian divination-techniques, exactly as, later, astrology was internationally recognized as the Chaldean art. In Assyria proper, the mantic importance of dreams was recognized to a certain extent but the techniques and the qualifications of the native oneirocritics were not considered adequate. Interpreters of dreams had to come from Egypt to be acceptable. 296.  Goedicke, “ḥarṭummîm,” 24–30. 297.  Szpakowska, Behind Closed Eyes, 65. 298.  Ibid. It has even been suggested by J. D. Ray that it was the pastophoroi, or “semipriests,” rather than the ḥry.w-tp who interpreted dreams; Ray, “Phrases Used in Dream-Texts,” in S. P. Vleeming, ed., Aspects of Demotic Lexicography (Leuven: Peeters, 1987), 1.85–93, esp. 89–91. 299. Ann Jeffers, Magic and Divination in Ancient Palestine and Syria (Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East 8; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 44–49; and Kasia Szpakowska, Behind Closed Eyes, 65. Ann Jeffers contends that we should understand the title in Joseph and Daniel as covering a wide field of “educated activity,” including magical knowledge.

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interpreter’ for ḥr(y)-tp/tb from the Hebrew and Akkadian use of the term, rather than from the Egyptian. For example, the Bohairic translation of ḥarṭummîm in Gen 41:8, 24 (mentioned above) is ‘dream interpreters’, which could possibly have been influenced by the biblical context rather than a recognition of the Egyptian origins of the translated term. Jörg Lanckau, a biblical scholar, has been much influenced by Goedicke, as has David Clines, who dismissed the translation ‘dream interpreter’ as one of the core meanings for *ḥarṭōm in the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew. 300 Clines defines *ḥarṭōm as ‘magician, soothsayer, or perh[aps] minister (of state)’, following Hans Goedicke. 301 This extreme pessimism regarding dream interpretation as an inherent function of the Egyptian term when it was borrowed into the Semitic languages and texts seems unwarranted. But Szpakowska is probably right when she says that the ḥry.w-tb “practised oneiromancy as one of their many specialities.” 302 Dream interpretation by professionals in Egypt dates back to the New Kingdom and achieved institutionalization in the Hellenistic Period, as noted above, even if we do not always know what specific title or titles the Egyptians gave their oneirocritics. In addition, one ought not to disregard the few but significant occurrences in Demotic texts from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods in which a ḥry-tp or ḥr-tb has been asked by someone to interpret a dream given by a deity. For instance, four lector priests in the archive of Ḥor/Horus of Sebennytos texts 16 and 17A are asked to interpret Ḥor’s difficult dream or oracle, and it is only the ḥr-tb of Imhotep who is able to interpret it. (That Ḥor often tells to other priests his dreams about events to come is demonstrated in text 1 of the archive of Ḥor, in which Ḥor goes to Heliopolis to get instruction from a priest [wʿb] of Imhotep and tells a dream to a prophet [ḥm nṯr] of Khons, the scribe of pharaoh at Memphis.) Moreover, Kim Ryholt has provided the intriguing news that, among the unpublished papyri from Tebtunis, he has found a narrative “in which we find the first explicit reference to the hry-tp, ‘chief ritualist’ (Biblical hartummīm), as an interpreter of dreams at the royal court, just as in the Biblical stories of Joseph (Gen. 41:8, 24) and of Daniel (Dan. 1:20; 2:2).” 303 The specific hand in which this papyrus, P. Carlsberg 465, is written dates to around 100 c.e. 304 In addition, Ryholt reports that in the only partially-published P. Carlsberg 85, the Life of Imhotep (also re300. Jörg Lanckau, “ḥarṭummîm—die Traumspezialisten? ” 101–17. See also Lanckau, Der Herr der Träume: Eine Studie zur Funktion des Traumes in der Josefsgeschichte der Hebräischen Bibel (Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments 85; Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 2006), 249–50. 301.  David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), 3.316, 400. 302.  Szpakowska, Behind Closed Eyes, 65. 303. Kim Ryholt, “A Parallel to the Inaros Story of P. Krall (P. Carlsberg 456 + P. CtYBR 4513): Demotic Narratives from the Tebtunis Temple Library (I),” JEA 84 (1998), 152. The papyrus is known as P. Carlsberg 465; Kim Ryholt, personal communication. 304. Kim Ryholt, personal communication.

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ferred to as Imhotep and Djoser), Djoser asks a ḥr-tb (possibly named Osirsobk) about a dream he has been sent by the sun-god. 305 In the dream (as noted below), Djoser is told not to return the divine images he has retaken from the Assyrians to Egypt but to build a temple for them until such a time as the “son of Osiris” (perhaps the famous Inaros from the Demotic story-cycle about that character) will return them. When he is consulted, the ḥr-tb tells Djoser to obey the god. In addition, that the deified ḥr-tb Imhotep was associated with dreams is demonstrated not only by the archive of Ḥor of Sebennytos but also by mention of him in the biographical text on Tayimhotep’s (TꜢi-iy-m-ḥtp) funerary stele dated to 42 b.c.e. (BM EA147). This woman is given a male child after she prays to Imhotep, and he sends a dream to her husband, the high priest of Ptah, PsenPtah. Imhotep tells Psen-Ptah to make an image in a temple in the necropolis, in return for which he will send them a son. 306 Dieleman suggests that Setne’s wife Mehsehet in Setne II also received directions, possibly from Imhotep in an incubation dream. 307 (Of course, it cannot be clear from these texts whether the deified Imhotep retained his human ability as lector priest to interpret dreams or that dream-interpretation was a divine property.) Imhotep also features as a royal adviser in the so-called Famine Stele, a text in which King Djoser receives a dream from the god Khnum. 308 In this inscription, King Djoser, troubled by a seven-year-long famine, only receives his dream about the inundation of the Nile after he has summoned Imhotep, who consults his books in the House of Life and uncovers information about Elephantine, the bedchamber of the inundation, and Khnum, its deity. (The dream Djoser has after his audience with Imhotep is a message dream predicting the immanent inundation, however, and does not require Imhotep to interpret it.) Although the ḥry-tp/tb was likely not the only Egyptian professional from the Houses of Life or elsewhere to interpret dreams (note the priest of Amun in the Tanutamani Dream Stele), it is possible to be more optimistic than Szpakowska or Goedicke that the biblical context is not the sole basis for the interpretation of the ḥarṭummîm as dream interpreters; this function was likely part of the original sphere of skills connoted by the Egyptian term when it was borrowed into Hebrew, Aramaic, and perhaps Akkadian. The biblical narratives in which the ḥarṭummîm are dream interpreters were likely composed in a period coincid305. Kim Ryholt, “The Life of Imhotep (P. Carlsberg 85),” 310. 306.  See: E. A. Reymond, From the Records of a Priestly Family in Memphis (2 vols.; ÄgAbh 38; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1981), 1.nr. 20, 165–79; Dietrich Wildung, Imhotep und Amenhotep: Gottwerdung im alten Ägypten (MÄS 36; Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1977), 68–70. On spells to bring dream revelations, see Samson Eitrem, “Dreams and Divination in Magical Ritual,” in Christopher A. Faraone and Dirk Obbink, eds., Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 175–87. 307.  Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites, 234. 308. Carsten Peust, “Hungersnotstele,” TUAT Neue Folge 1, 208–17.

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ing with that of the Egyptian Late Period; the Daniel narratives probably developed in the Persian or Hellenistic periods before they were collected together in Maccabean times, and the story of Joseph likely dates to the seventh century b.c.e. or later.

3.3.2.3.  Egyptian Story-Collections 3.3.2.3.1.  Tales from King Cheops’ Court (Papyrus Westcar) Papyrus Westcar, the oldest extant story-collection, dates to the Hyksos period in Egypt (ca. 1640–1550 b.c.e.) but may have been composed in the 12th Dynasty (ca. 1991–1783 b.c.e.). 309 The language used is Middle Egyptian. 310 The beginning and ending of the papyrus are destroyed, but it is apparent that the papyrus contained a series of at least three stories within an extended narrative framework. These stories are in various states of preservation: only the very last part of the first story is extant, the second story contains large lacunae, and it is solely the last story that is complete. The preserved part of the narrative framework consists of formulaic links between the stories and of a long narrative after the individual stories, the ending of which is missing. 311 The setting of the frame-story is the 4th Dynasty of the Egyptian Old Kingdom (ca. 2575–2467 b.c.e.) in the reign of Khufu (that is, Cheops, builder of the great pyramid at Giza, ca. 2551–2528 b.c.e.). The sons of King Khufu are entertaining their bored royal father with stories of marvels performed by past magicians in the reigns of past kings. Because the beginning of the papyrus is missing, it is possible that there were even more stories than those partially preserved. The three preserved stories are attributed to one son whose name is missing and to the sons Khaefre (aka Chephren, who succeeded his father as king and who also 309.  All dates for Egyptian dynasties and kings are from David O’Connor and David P. Silverman, Ancient Egyptian Kingship (Probleme de Ägyptologie 9; Leiden: Brill, 1995). 310.  Otherwise called Papyrus Berlin 3033. For the hieroglyphic text, see A. M. Blackman, The Story of King Kheops and the Magicians Transcribed from Papyrus Westcar (Berlin Papyrus 3033), edited by W. V. Davies (Reading: Berks, 1988). See also Brunner-Traut, Altägyptische Märchen, 11–24; Adolf Erman, ed., Die Märchen des Papyrus Westcar (Mitteilungen aus den orientalischen Sammlungen 5–6; Berlin: Spemann, 1890), 7ff.; idem, The Ancient Egyptians: A Sourcebook of Their Writings (trans. A. M. Blackman, introduction to Torchbook edition by W. K. Simpson (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), xxiv, lxviii–lxix, 36–49; G. Le­febvre, Romans et contes égyptiens de l’èpoque pharaonique (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1949), 70–90; Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 1.215 ff.; and, more recently: R. B. Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe, 102–27; W. K. Simpson, “King Cheops and the Magicians,” in LAE, 13–24; Verena M. Lepper, Untersuchungen zu pWestcar: Eine philologische und literaturwissenschaftliche (Neu-)Analyse (Ägyptologische Abhandlungen 70; Wiesbaden: Harrassowtiz, 2008). 311.  Lichtheim’s introduction to the papyrus is somewhat misleading. She rightly indicates that there are a “series of tales woven together by a narrative frame”; however, she claims that the whole cycle consisted of at least five stories, but her final two stories are really merely a resumption of the frame narrative.

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built the second pyramid at Giza) and Bauefre. 312 A final son, Hardedef—himself revered in the Middle Kingdom as a sage—also speaks before the king. 313 King Khufu is known to have had more than four sons (perhaps as many as nine), and it is possible that the 12th-Dynasty author knew about all of them and attributed a story to each. 314 The first wonder tale, of which almost nothing is preserved, is set in the days of Djoser, the king in whose reign the Step Pyramid was built, and the wonder related is perhaps performed by Imhotep. The name is not preserved, but Imhotep was historically the lector-priest and architect under Djoser. 315 The second, better-preserved tale, told by Khaefre, tells of a wonder performed by the lector-priest Ubainer (not a historical figure) in the days of a king Nebka (possibly a 3rd Dynasty king) and includes the creation and animation of a wax crocodile by the lector-priest/magician in order to catch his wife’s lover. Ubainer orders the crocodile to hunt down any man washing in his lake. The crocodile catches the lover and takes him to the bottom of the lake, where he remains for seven days without breathing. Bringing Nebka to the river, Ubainer calls upon the crocodile to bring up the man to show the pharaoh. This the crocodile does, and when it returns, Ubainer bends down, retrieves it, and it returns to wax in his hand. The pharaoh is mightily impressed. 316 The third, well-preserved wonder tale, told by Bauefre, relates an incident during the days of the good king Sneferu (first king of the 4th Dynasty and father of Khufu) on an occasion when he is bored by life in the palace and is persuaded by the fictional lector-priest Djadjaemankh to be rowed around a lake by a bevy of maidens clad only in fishnets. 317 When a maiden 312.  Bauefre may not be historical, but he is mentioned as a jovial king in the Prophecies of Neferti and appears in a New Kingdom graffito listing royal names; see Simpson, LAE, 13, 121 n. 14. 313.  Hardedef was considered to be one of the sages of Egypt as well as an author, and part of an Instruction attributed to him has survived; Simpson, “The Instruction of Hardedef (First Part),” LAE, 127–28. His verses are also mentioned in P. Anastasi I, 11,1; the Harper’s Song; and P. Chester Beatty IV verso 3,5; Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites, 224. In addition, he was remembered as the discoverer of some of the spells in the Book of the Dead (30B, 64, 137A and 148); he found the spells while on a temple-inspection tour throughout the country. In the Greco-Roman period, he was also credited with discovering the Book of the Temple. 314.  Erman, The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, 36; Brunner-Traut, Altägyptische Mär­ chen, 255. 315. The Harper’s Song (pHarris 500, 6.6–7) mentions the words of Imhotep and of Har­ dedef, so perhaps some day a set of Instructions under Imhotep’s name will be found. Imhotep is called a “lector priest” in the Famine Stele (a Ptolemaic piece that is nonetheless set in the 3rd Dynasty under Djoser). He was deified in the Late Period. See below, section 3.3.2.4.3. 316.  After the king hears the story of the man’s adultery with Ubainer’s wife, the king then orders the crocodile, “Take what belongs to you” (that is, the lover), and the crocodile returns to the lake. The adulterous wife is burned to death. 317.  On the good reputation of Sneferu in Egyptian tradition, see: Erhart Graefe, “Die Gute Reputation des Königs ‘Snofru’,” in Sarah Israelit-Groll, ed., Studies in Egyptology Presented to Miriam Lichtheim (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1990), 1.257–63.

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loses her turquoise fish-pendant, Djadjaemankh says words of magic to fold back one side of the water of the lake on top of the other in order to find it. After each of the wonder stories, there is a brief return to the frame, where Khufu orders an offering to be made to the royal predecessor during whose reign the marvel was performed, as well as an offering made to the magician who had performed it. These offerings of extravagance (1,000 loaves of bread, 100 jugs of beer, an ox, and 2 incense cones to the dead king, and one cake, one jug of beer, a joint of an ox, and one incense cone to the lector-priest) are formulaic and structurally form a link between the stories. After Bauefre’s story, the remainder of the composition stays in the frame narrative. When it is the turn of Prince Hardedef to tell a story of a past wonder, he instead suggests that a commoner (nḏs, and not specifically a ẖry-ḥb ḥry-tp, ‘chief lector-priest’) that he knows, Djedi (a fictional character), has performed more spectacular deeds than any magicians of the past (7,1). 318 The description of the 110-year-old man whose daily diet includes 500 loaves, half an ox, 100 jugs of beer, and who can join a severed head, make a lion walk tamely behind him, and finally, someone who knows the “number of the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth” (7,5) so intrigues King Khufu that he orders his son to bring Djedi before him. Djedi is fetched and performs his miracles. He refuses to experiment on a living human being, as the king suggests, and instead reattaches the severed heads of a goose, another fowl, and an ox. However, when asked the number of the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth, he says that he only knows that the number is written in a casket in a room in Heliopolis and that he himself cannot retrieve it. He then predicts the miraculous births of the first three kings of the coming 5th Dynasty (in this story said to be the sons of the sun-god Re and a mortal woman), the eldest of whom will bring the chest with the number inside it to the king. 319 After his prediction, Djedi is granted food and board by the king: he is to be provisioned for the remainder of his life (1,000 loaves of bread, 100 jugs of beer, an ox, and 100 bundles of greens) and taken to live in the house of Prince Hardedef. This provisioning parallels the formulaic offerings made for the past kings and magicians after each of the wonder tales. In fact, the ideal life span of Djedi (110 years) and the funerary nature of his provisions demonstrate that “Djedi is a figure of the past although still alive.” 320 318.  The term nḏs literally means ‘small’ and can be contrasted with someone ‘great’ (wr). “Its precise social significance remains uncertain, but it describes people with titles and considerable wealth, as well as farmers” (R. B. Parkinson, “Individual and society in Middle Kingdom Literature,” in Loprieno, Ancient Egyptian Literature: History and Forms, 142). Neferti in the Prophecies of Neferti is both a nḏs and a “lector priest,” so it is not necessarily clear that Djedi the nḏs could not also be a lector-priest at the same time. 319.  Userkaf, Sahure, and Neferirkare. 320.  Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites, 225 n. 96. In this, he is to be compared to SiOsire in Setne II, in which Si-Osire is also made the object of offerings.

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Djedi’s prediction of the births of the kings-to-come provides the device for a major transition in the frame narrative. In fact, the court setting is completely abandoned and all of the previous characters disappear as soon as Djedi has been rewarded. From there on until the break in the papyrus, the narrative remains in the present and tells of the fulfillment of Djedi’s prediction and related events. Presumably, this section of the composition is a linear narrative lacking a conclusion. In it, triplets are born to a certain Reddjedet, attended by divine midwives. The gods leave three crowns in a sack of barley as a sign of the royal future ordained for the three babies. Reddjedet is later shown the crowns by her handmaid, and she in turn shows them to her husband, Rewosre, who rejoices. Just before the papyrus breaks off, the handmaid of Reddjedet schemes to tell King Khufu of his new rivals, but she is snatched by a crocodile before she can carry out her plan. The papyrus abruptly ends in the middle of a dialogue between the handmaid’s brother and Reddjedet in which the brother is relating his sister’s misfortune to her mistress. In this story, the contemporary magician, Djedi—described as a “commoner”–can generally do what the chief lector-priests of the stories do and even surpasses them all in his ability to predict the future. 321 Ubainer was able to animate a crocodile from wax, order it to catch his wife’s lover, and retrieve the lover from the crocodile seven days later. Djedi, too, can control fierce animals; he is said to be able to make a lion walk tamely with his leash dragging behind, and when he reanimates the ox whose head he reattaches, it too walks with its tether on the ground. Like the crocodile, both the lion and the ox may be symbolic of “uncontrolled or uncontrollable natural or royal power.” 322 Djedi can also perform resurrections: in the act of reuniting head and body of animals, he makes them live again. Finally, when the king wants to go to see Reddjedet, the woman who will give birth to the first three kings of the next Dynasty, Djedi says he will manipulate the water on the sandbanks of the Nile, adding four cubits to them so that the king’s boat will be able to pass. So, too, Djadjaemankh piled up the waters of the lake in the story set in Sneferu’s day (in his case, he placed 12 cubits of water on top of another 12 cubits). However, what is most extraordinary is Djedi’s ability to predict the future. In this, he outdoes the other magicians. The tone of Papyrus Westcar is lighthearted and very entertaining, and dis­plays many differences in language in comparison to the Story of Sinuhe or other compositions, which seem to be more “classically” Middle Egyptian. Papyrus Westcar uses the uncommon and perhaps “inelegant” construction: infinitive + pw + ir.n.f and uses folkloristic repetitions extensively to mark parallels throughout the stories (the good king Sneferu is contrasted with the inhumane 321.  See C. J. Eyre, “Yet Again the Wax Crocodile: P. Westcar 3,12 ff.,” JEA 78 (1992), 280–81. 322.  Ibid., 281.

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king Khufu/Cheops who would have Djedi behead a living human; there are two crocodiles, two rowing expeditions, two groups of beauties or divine women; etc.). The carefree boredom of the kings in the palace at Memphis is a subject for enjoyment. Papyrus Westcar is “amusing, with subjects including adultery, voyeurism, and the straightforward exotica of the priests’ conjuring tricks.” 323 A. Erman’s opinion long ago was that This tale . . . does not belong to the higher literature. It is of a popular character, as is shown both by the simplicity of its style and of its matter, which, at times, is burlesque, and by the fact that it is written in the vernacular; it might well be ascribed to a public story-teller. 324

Some scholars have disagreed with this characterization, preferring instead to emphasize the use of the literary device of the frame narrative as a sophisticated feature or the “academic” use of historical figures as the main characters. 325 Nevertheless, the entertaining nature of the stories in Papyrus Westcar may easily be compared to the Arabian Nights, and it is clear that the stories in both cases are told in order to while away or win time. 326 Verena M. Lepper refers to Westcar as a “Kunstprosa-Text” and suggests that it was specifically written to be performed or read out loud, because of various stylistic features in the text. 327 The significance of Papyrus Westcar for the Book of Daniel lies in the use of a story-collection as a device to propel a prediction of the future by a clever magician and in the very popular, entertaining nature of the stories, all set in the reigns of famous kings of the past and telling of wonders performed by their lector-priests, the last of whom surpasses all the rest. The characters of these ancient kings are juxtaposed and contrasted with each other (for example, Sneferu is portrayed as a likeable old fool but Cheops as an inhumane, cruel fellow), just 323.  Parkinson, Tale of Sinuhe, 104. 324.  Erman, Literature of the Ancient Egyptians, 36. For more discussion of the story-telling art in Papyrus Westcar, see E. S. Meltzer, “The Art of the Storyteller in Papyrus Westcar: An Egyptian Mark Twain? ” in B. M. Bryan and D. Lorton, eds., Essays in Egyptology in Honor of Hans Goedicke (San Antonio, TX: Van Siclen, 1994), 169–75; and Hans Goedicke, “Gentlemen’s Salutations,” VA 2 (1986), 161–70. 325.  See H. Goedicke, “Thoughts about the Papyrus Westcar,” ZÄS 12 (1993), 23–36, esp. 23–24; and Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 1.215. Lichtheim believes that the Westcar stories are written in classical Middle Egyptian. 326.  For instance, Hellmut Brunner, Grundzüge einer Geschichte der altägyptischen Literatur (3rd ed.; Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), 46f. 327.  Lepper, Untersuchungen zu pWestcar, 301–3. She sees four hands at work in the composition of P. Westcar and sees each story as falling differently on the scale between Middle Egyptian and Late Egyptian (with the third story being Middle Egyptian and story two being farther away from Middle Egyptian and closest to Late Egyptian; stories four and five are somewhere in the middle), 295–301.

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as kings are compared in the Daniel collection. 328 As for the lector-priests/magicians, these reattach severed heads, find a brooch lost at the bottom of a lake by overturning the lake, animate a waxen crocodile, know secrets others do not, and perform other marvelous deeds. As H.-P. Müller and Scott Noegel have observed, these wonders parallel miracles in the Moses story in Exodus, such as the parting of the Sea in Exod 14 and the miracles performed in the contests between the Egyptian magicians and Aaron and Moses in Exod 7–9. “The legendary motifs surrounding the leaders of the exodus have incorporated a fragment of a tale recounting a contest of rank between professional sages.” 329 In the Book of Daniel, Daniel and his friends are able to do a variety of marvelous deeds: the friends are able to survive fire, and Daniel is able to interpret dreams, decipher the mysterious handwriting on the wall, and survive lions. Each of these marvelous acts is credited to the power of the Judeans’ God; however, Daniel especially is credited with “solving riddles and untying knots” (mĕšārē qiṭrîn) in 5:12—an expression that hints at divinatory or magical capabilities. 330 In addition, just as in the Papyrus Westcar, where each tale ends with an expectation of continuity provided by the offering of the funerary sacrifices to the kings and their wonder-workers, several of the Daniel tales conclude with certain repetitive features: the foreign king praising Daniel’s God and (once) even going so far as to prostrate himself and offer sacrifice and incense to Daniel (Dan 2:46). 331

3.3.2.3.2.  Myth of the Sun’s Eye The next Egyptian story-collection to be discussed here is found in the Myth of the Sun’s Eye (commonly referred to by scholars as the Mythus or Mythos after the German editio princeps) and contains a series of animal fables within a narrative frame. 332 It has limited applicability to the discussion of Daniel’s court 328.  For more on the Egyptian kings’ characterizations, see R. B. Parkinson, Poetry and Culture in Middle Kingdom Egypt: A Dark Side to Perfection (London: Continuum, 2002), 182–92. In Daniel, Belshazzar stands out as the king with the most antagonistic relationship with Daniel and he never confesses or praises the Most High at the end of his tale (Dan 5), in contrast to Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, who are quite persuaded to do so. However, Nebuchadnezzar is depicted in Dan 2 as someone quite cruelly capable of dismembering all the experts in his court if they do not tell him his dream and its interpretation, and in Dan 3 as someone willing to burn to death anyone who does not comply with his demand to bow to the great statue. 329. H.-P. Müller, “ ‫ ח ְַרטֹם‬ḥarṭōm,” 178. See also Scott Noegel, “Moses and Magic,” 45–59. 330.  The phrase “loosening” or “untying knots” is used in Aramaic magical incantations to refer to spells, as noted in the Excursus above (pp. 104–114); Wolters, “Untying the King’s Knots: Physiology and Wordplay in Daniel 5,” 117–22; Paul, “Decoding a ‘Joint’ Expression in Daniel 5:6, 16,” 126–27; Noegel, Nocturnal Ciphers, 160–62. 331.  Parkinson, Tale of Sinuhe, 103. 332.  The most extensive manuscript in Demotic is P. Leiden I 384, which dates to the second century c.e.; see W. Spiegelberg in Der ägyptische Mythus vom Sonnenauge (Der Papyrus der Tierfabeln “Kufi”) nach dem Leidener Demotischen Papyrus I 384 (Strassburg: Schultz, 1917). A new edition was produced by F. de Cenival, Le Mythe de l’oeil du soleil. See also M. Smith,

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themes but nicely illustrates the ongoing tradition of the story-collection genre in Egyptian literature. The Mythos is extant in several papyri written in Demotic Egyptian and perhaps dates to the end of the first century c.e. There are also several Greek fragments that date to the third century c.e. 333 and possibly an unpublished hieratic fragment dating to the Ramesside period (ca. 1307–1070 b.c.e.) in Florence. 334 The Greek text is almost certainly a translation of the Demotic, since the Greek seems to resort “to simplifications and omissions, perhaps whenever the Greek threatened to make little sense.” 335 No part of the series of inset fables seems to be extant in the Ramesside fragment, although there is no way of knowing if this means that the fables were not part of the original composition. The existence of the beast fable in Egypt from the New Kingdom onward is suggested by many illustrated papyri and ostraca depicting animals acting as humans and by two decorated blocks from a chapel of Shepenupet II in Medamud that contain not only illustrations but accompanying hieroglyphic text. 336 The Mythos in general can be “reconstructed through hieroglyphic inscriptions on

“Sonnenauge, Demotischer Mythus vom,” LÄ V (1984), 1082–87. The publication of the firstcentury c.e. fragments from Lille (P. Lille 31) can be found in De Cenival, “Les nouveaux fragments du mythe de l’oeil due soleil de l’Institut de Papyrologie et de l’Egyptologie de Lille,” in CRIPEL 7 (1985), 95–115; eadem, “Transcription hiéroglyphique d’un fragment du Mythe conservé à l’Université de Lille,” in CRIPEL 9 (1987); see also “Les titres des couplets du Mythe,” in CRIPEL 11 (1989), 141–46. A duplicate version of the Mythos is found in fragments from Tebtunis dating to 90–120 c.e.; see W. J. Tait, “A Duplicate Version of the Demotic Kufi Text,” AcOr 36 (1974), 23–37; and idem, Papyri from Tebtunis in Egyptian and in Greek (Texts from Excavations 3; London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1977), 35–37, pl. 3. Other unpublished copies from Tebtunis (Roman period) are mentioned by K. Ryholt, “On the Contents and Nature of the Tebtunis Temple Library: A Status Report,” 156. Recent translations of the Mythos include: Antonio Loprieno, “Der demotische ‘Mythos vom Sonnenauge’,” in TUAT 3/2, 1038–77; Bresciani, Letteratura, 738–72; Quack, Einführung in die altägyptische Literatur­geschichte III: Die demotische und gräko-ägyptische Literature (Münster: LIT, 2005), 128–40; Friedhelm Hoffmann and Joachim F. Quack, Anthologie der demotischen Literatur (Münster: LIT, 2007), 195–229, 356–60. 333.  See S. West, “The Greek Version of the Legend of Tefnut,” JEA 55 (1969), 161–83. 334.  In F. de Cenival’s 1988 publication of the Demotic text, she announced that E. Bresciani had discovered this Ramesside manuscript; private communication between the two (F. de Ceneval, Le Mythe de l’oeil du Soleil, ix). 335.  Tait, “Egyptian Fiction in Demotic and Greek,” 213. 336.  For ostraca, wall reliefs, and papyri depicting scenes of cats and mice aligned in battle against each other or these and other animals acting as priests, musicians, charioteers, herders, servants, etc., see Emma Brunner-Traut, Altägyptische Tiergeschichte und Fabel: Gestalt und Strahlkraft (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980), pls. 1–36. The Medamud blocks are described as a “Proto-Myth of the Sun’s Eye” in Early Demotic by Alexandra von Lieven; “Fragments of a Monumental Proto-Myth of the Sun’s Eye,” in G. Widmer and D. Devauchelle, eds., Actes du IXe Congrès International des Études Démotiques, Paris, 31 août–3 septembre 2005 (BdÉ 147; Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2009), 173–81. For photos and more, see Philippe Collombert, “Des animaux qui parlent néo-égyptien (relief Caire JE 58925),” in C. Gallois et al., Mélanges François Neveu = BdÉ 145 (2008), 63–72.

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temple walls, mainly from the late pharaonic era,” and is an explanation of the solstice. 337 The frame story of the Mythos is an Egyptian myth concerning the goddess Tefnut (the daughter of Re, also called the “Sun’s Eye”) and her withdrawal from Egypt into Nubia in the south. The god Thoth, on behalf of the sun-god Re, attempts to persuade her to return to her native land by discoursing on the value of Egyptian culture and religion and by telling a series of animal fables, each of which has a moral lesson. The frame story takes on the outward appearance of a beast fable itself in that the god Thoth and the goddess Tefnut assume beast forms throughout. In fact, it is not until the end of the text that one is sure that the two major characters, ‘the small dog-ape or wolf-ape’ (pꜢ šm n wnš kwf, but sometimes just pꜢ kwf, ‘the ape’), 338 and the ‘Ethiopian cat’ (ı͗my.t ı͗kš.t), who changes into other animals periodically as well (e.g., lioness, vulture, and gazelle), are to be identified as Thoth and Tefnut, respectively. 339 There are at least five fables in the Mythos interspersed with the dialogue between the “small dog-ape” and the “Ethiopian cat,” in addition to a lively variety of proverbs, hymns, and poetry, all meant to persuade the powerful and destructive Tefnut to go home. Two of the fables are found in other versions in ancient Near Eastern, Indian, and/or Classical literature. The first fable is that of the vulture and the cat, who strike a deal not to harm each other’s offspring by making an oath before Re; but each breaks their oath. The cat disputes with one young vulture over a morsel of food and causes it to die, and on another day the vulture pays her back by eating the cat’s young when she is out hunting. When the cat complains to Re, the vulture sees a Syrian cooking a piece of meat, and she picks it up to bring it home. 340 Unbeknownst to her, the meat has a coal stuck to it, which when brought to the vulture’s nest, burns the nest and causes the vulture’s young to fall to the ground at the foot of the tree. This fable is paralleled in the Akkadian epic of Etana and elsewhere (e.g., Archilochus’ tale of the eagle and the fox). 341 337.  DePauw, Companion to Demotic Studies, 92. 338.  In the Greek fragment, the small dog-ape is called a λυκόλυγχ, “lycolynx,” a neologism (e.g., in fr. A, col. 1, 47); West, “The Greek Version of the Legend of Tefnut,” 162–63. West suggests that the best translation therefore is “the small wolf (called) kwf,” following Reymond’s personal communication. 339.  M. J. Smith, “Sonnenauge, Demotischer Mythus vom,” in LÄ 5, 1082–87. 340.  In fact, Syria is mentioned twice in the fable, already in i, 26 in uncertain context, and here in ii, 8, at the end. In i, 26, Franzow translates, “Es geschieht, wenn die Vergeltung kommt in die fernen Gegenden [des Landes] Syrien, so wird sie hierher zu einer anderen Zeit (wieder) zurückkehren”; G. Franzow, “Zu der demotischen Fabel vom Geier und der Katze,” ZÄS 66 (1931), 46–49, esp. p. 49. Franzow believes that this preserves evidence for the likelihood of Syria as the intermediary between Mesopotamia and Egypt. 341.  In the Akkadian fable, it is an eagle who breaks its oath with a snake. The snake there also prays to the sun-god (Akkadian Shamash), who tells the snake how to wreak his revenge.

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The fable is intended to persuade Tefnut that breaking an oath has consequences; the disaster that she has caused Egypt by leaving will be recompensed to her. The ape then utters a hymn in praise of the homeland, further conversation ensues, and the “cat” is astounded and sad. After another hymn, the ape starts to tell another fable about the friendship of a kite with a vulture and a cuckoo but is interrupted by Tefnut, who changes herself into a fearsome lionness, threatening the life of the ape. The fast-thinking ape praises her beauty, after which Tefnut is appeased and resumes her cat form. The ape then entertains her with a dialogue between two vultures—the second complete fable—who are called Sight and Hearing. 342 The first sees to the end of darkness, and the second hears what is in heaven. Their “conversation features a fable, in which each of a series of creatures is swallowed in turn by the next larger, until a griffin acts as the final instrument of divine punishment.” 343 These are fabulous creatures, who can do magic: the Hearing-Bird says that she is able to enchant (pẖr) the sky in order to hear what goes on among the gods. The next fable is that of two jackals in conversation with an angry lion. The last fable is commonly known as “The Lion in Search of Man” and is told by the ape in response to Tefnut’s doubts that she can be saved from her unhappiness. 344 The ape tells her that there is always someone stronger, more powerful, more masculine, and braver. In the fable that he relates to illustrate this, a lion successively meets various other animals that have been harmed or chained by humankind, and is told to beware men. The lion is puzzled by the descriptions of this curious being, who seems to have power over every creature, and he seeks to find him. Of course, man ties him up, and it is a mouse who frees the lion from his bonds. The last part of this fable, the encounter between a lion and a mouse, has a shorter form that appears in many versions of Aesop’s Fables and even in the Pañcatantra, where the role of the lion is played by an elephant. 345 The pair return to Egypt without haste (the cat wants the journey to go slowly). The trees of Nubia help them as they wander through that region. The ape eats fruit while the cat badgers him with a walking stick. 346 In Thebes, the ape is able to make true the moral of his fables (that the weak can save the strong): in the middle of the night, an Apophis snake—the enemy of Re—appears, and 342.  But in another version, “Ansprecher” and “Angesprochener” (Loprieno, “Der demotische ‘Mythos vom Sonnenauge’,” in TUAT III/5, 1063). 343.  Tait, “A Duplicate Version of the Demotic Kufi Text,” 26. 344.  An English translation of this fable without the others is found in Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3.156–59. 345.  For further details on influences from the Greek tradition, see F. de Cenival, “Obscurités et influences dans le mythe de l’oeil du soleil,” in Acts of the Seventh International Conference of Demotic Studies, Copenhagen, 23–27 August 1999, ed. K. Ryholt (CNI Publications 27; Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2002), 39–43. 346.  This scene appears on a Berlin ostracon (Brunner-Traut, Altägyptische Tiergeschichte und Fabel, pl. 10).

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the ape saves the cat from a snake bite by running with her into a swamp. The journey continues through the cult places of Egypt and ends in Heliopolis, city of the sun-god, where Tefnut is reunited with and reconciled to her father Re. The fables appear to serve as persuasive maneuvers utilized by the “small dog-ape” of the frame story and thus further the main story. Clawson’s definition of a “frame narrative,” discussed in chapter 2, specified that the material framing a collection of stories must be secondary to the stories. 347 In Mark DePauw’s opinion, it is the discussion between the dog-ape and Tefnut that is the core of the composition, “the account of the myth itself, with the eventual return of the goddess to Egypt and her arrival in Memphis, is in fact reduced to a frame-story.” 348

3.3.2.3.3.  The Stories of Petese Son of Petetum The Stories of Petese is a partially preserved story-collection with a long frame narrative in which the protagonist is told he has only 40 days to live. So he spends his time “making holiday” with his wife and producing 70 stories, 35 on the vices of women, and 35 on their virtues; after his death, one is told each day to his wife. Its scope and theme is thus partly similar to Alf laylah wa-laylah (the Arabian Nights), in which a story is told each night by Shahrazad in order to amuse the king and to postpone her death. The embedded stories are “numbered and classified into stories of what may be translated as the ‘scorn of women’ (sḏy n sḫf sḥm.wt) and the ‘praise of women’ (sḏy n ḥs sḥm.wt).” 349 One of the partially preserved stories of female vice, “The Blinding of Pharaoh” (otherwise known as the Pheros Story), was translated into Greek by Herodotus (Histories, 2.111) in the mid-fifth century b.c.e. 350 A slightly different version appears in 347.  Clawson, “The Framework of the Canterbury Tales,” 137–54. 348.  DePauw, A Companion to Demotic Studies, 93. In addition, the Mythos provides explanations of hieroglyphs, an account of the natural history of the honeybee, and a “rudimentary system of zoological classification according to which all creatures on earth are divided into five distinct groups”; Smith, LÄ 5 (1983), 1085. 349.  Ryholt, “An Elusive Narrative Belonging to the Cycle of Stories about the Priesthood at Heliopolis,” in Kim Ryholt, ed., Acts of the Seventh International Conference of Demotic Studies, 361. There are two other texts of around the same period, P. Insinger (a copy of which is also in the Tebtunis temple library) and the Harpist, which refer to writings about the scorn of women (ḫsf n sḥm.t) as if they were a particularly well-known genre. Ryholt suggests that these contemporary texts are alluding to the Stories of Petese. If so, those texts contain aphorisms about wicked and virtuous women, while Stories of Petese provides the stories. 350.  The Pheros story in Herodotus is about a king called Pheros (Φερῶς, a name that here is probably just a transliteration of “pharaoh”), who is said to be the son of king Sesostris. He becomes blind during an inundation of the Nile and remains so for ten years. An oracle from Buto in the eleventh year tells him that he will recover if he washes his eyes in the urine of a woman who has only slept with her husband and no other. After trying the urine of many women, starting with his own wife, and having no result, he finally finds one whose urine cures his blindness. He then gathers together all the adulterous women into one city and sets fire to the city. He then marries the chaste woman whose urine has healed his sight. See Herodotus, History, 2.111 (trans. David Greene; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; 176).

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Diodorus 1.59, 351 and Pliny the Elder alludes to the story in his Historia Naturalis 36.74. 352 The first three manuscripts of the Petese Stories were published in 1999 by Kim Ryholt in the Carlsberg Papyri series of new Demotic texts. 353 Two of the fragmentary manuscripts (P. Petese Tebt. A. and P. Petese Tebt. B) were found at the temple of Sobk/Suchos at Tebtunis with other literary papyri—all still in the process of being published—and are dated to around 100 c.e. 354 The third and smallest of the three, P. Petese Saq., had been published previously by H. S. Smith and W. J. Tait. It was found in surface debris at North Saqqara in 1971–72, but on the basis of other literary texts from that site, is probably to be dated to the end of the fourth century b.c.e. 355 Since their publication, a fourth manuscript from Tebtunis (written in two hands, so therefore called P. Petese Tebt. C and D), also fragmentary, has been published by Ryholt as The Petese Stories II (P. Petese II). 356 P. Petese Tebt. C has the same hand as P. Petese A, but P. Petese Tebt. C and D are on the same papyrus, so it seems that the scribe of P. Petese Tebt. D 351.  See Diodore de Sicile, Bibliothèque historique: Livre I (ed. François Chamoux et al.; Paris: Les belles lettres, 1993), 119–20. In Diodorus, the only chaste woman is the gardener’s wife. 352.  He mentions a pharaoh who is blinded and then cured by an oracle of the sun. 353. Kim Ryholt, The Story of Petese Son of Petetum and Seventy Other Good and Bad Stories (P. Petese); P. Petese Tebt. A = P. Carlsberg 165, completed by fragments from Florence (PSI inv. D 4) and from Yale (P. CtYBR 4514); P. Petese Tebt. B = P. Carlsberg 389, completed by fragments from Florence (PSI inv. D 3). For P. Petese Saq., see H. S. Smith and W. J. Tait, Saqqâra Demotic Papyri I (P. Dem. Saq. I) (Texts from Excavations 7, Excavations at North Saqqâra, Documentary Series 5; London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1983), 149–53, pl. 11a. P. Petese Tebt. A and P. Petese Tebt. B preserve part of eight columns of the story in 85 fragments and one column in eight fragments, respectively. 354.  In contrast to other literary papyri from Tebtunis, none of these three papyri were palimpsests, probably testifying that they had some special status. P. Petese Tebt. A was even corrected grammatically and repaired in antiquity. Ryholt suggests that the composition was therefore a popular one, enjoying “circulation for at least close to 500 years, from the 4th century bc to the 2nd century ad” (The Story of Petese, 91). As he notes, the Tebtunis material is complicated to publish, because much of it was sold on the antiquities market and is scattered over many collections: the individual manuscripts are made up of tens of thousands of minor fragments mixed together and divided up among various collections (Ryholt, The Story of Petese, xiii–xiv). 355.  Ryholt, on the basis of the onomastic material, believes it dates to “roughly within the first half of the 1st millennium bc, although a date as late as the 4th century bc cannot be excluded” (The Story of Petese, xiii, 88). 356.  P. Petese Tebt. C consists of: P. Carlsberg 324, PSI inv. D 8, P. Berlin P 14.467(E) and 30.022, and P. Mich. 6391g and 397r (a total of 118 fragments over all the manuscripts; 74 have been joined and numbered). P. Petese Tebt. D includes: P. Carlsberg 394, PSI inv. D 9, and P. CtYBR 889, 4100/5, and 4947/3 (66 fragments all together; 51 joined and numbered). The height of the original papyrus was probably 30.5 cm, and the width of the sheets is not uniform but does average ca. 15.5 cm. See Kim Ryholt, The Petese Stories II (P. Petese II), 20–21; and idem, “An Elusive Narrative,” 361. For the original announcement of the fourth manuscript

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must have taken over for the scribe of P. Petese Tebt. C for awhile. 357 The new fragments are probably a “continuation and companion to the main manuscript, P. Petese Tebt. A” and have led to the rearrangement and a new understanding of the previously published material. 358 Since P. Petese Tebt. A and CD do not overlap at any point, “it may therefore be argued that CD was a direct continuation of A.” 359 However, whereas the ordering of the fragmentary columns of P. Petese Tebt. A (the largest manuscript) is now relatively clear, the columns of P. Petese CD are without fixed position, and it is not at all certain where they ought to be placed. 360 The period of composition thus can be placed roughly between 400 b.c.e. and 100 c.e. The date, however, may be fixed more precisely on various bases. The Saqqāra manuscript, which preserves on a single fragment the upper margin of a column recounting an episode found also in col. 3 of P. Petese Tebt. A, probably contained only the frame story. 361 Thus, since the frame story dates to the fourth century b.c.e. and “The Blinding of Pharaoh” or Pheros Story is even earlier, but the final form of the story as we have it partially preserved in the Tebtunis library does not date until around 100 c.e., we are dealing with a storycollection in process. Ryholt believes the reference to a ‘royal auction’ (ʿyš n pr-ʿꜢ) in fragment C5,x+2 may be an indication of when the story-collection as a whole and in its present form came into existence. 362 Since the term refers to a Hellenistic institution and is not attested prior to the third century b.c.e., 363 it is likely that popular stories were collected and framed sometime in the Hellenistic period, although at least two stories (the frame and “The Blinding of Pharaoh”), if not more, existed much earlier. Ryholt now thinks that the complete story (P. Petese Tebt. CD), see Ryholt, “An Elusive Narrative,” 361–66; also mentioned in idem, “A Parallel to the Inaros Story of P. Krall,” 151. 357.  Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 22–23. 358. See Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, especially 1,147–54, for the rearrangement and corrections to P. Petese Tebt. A first published in Carlsberg Papyri 4: The Story of Petese. Most importantly, column one of the first publication is not to be thought of as the first preserved column (Friedhelm Hoffmann in his review of The Story of Petese suggested that column 1 may not actually be the beginning of the story; OLZ 96 [2001], 38–44). Instead, the order should be columns ‘2’–‘6,’ then column ‘1’ and then column ‘8.’ However, there is no way to know how many columns were lost before column ‘2’ and after column ‘6’ before column ‘1,’ nor between column ‘1’ and ‘8’ or after ‘8.’ 359.  Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 26. 360.  Ibid., 19. 361.  Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 11. 362.  Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 16, 64; Chicago Demotic Dictionary ʿ (03.1), 39–40. 363.  For more on the institution, see J. G. Manning, “The Auction of Pharaoh,” in Emily Teeter and John A. Larson, eds., Gold of Praise: Studies on Ancient Egypt in Honor of Edward F. Wente (SAOC 58; Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1999), 277–84. The “auction of Pharaoh” was a Greek institution brought to Egypt by the Ptolemies (p. 279).

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would have had an impressive size—perhaps as much as 110 columns, over two papyri—and thus would be comparable to the length of The Myth of the Sun’s Eye as reflected in an unpublished Tebtunis manuscript of that text whose pagination indicates that it might have covered up to 124 columns. 364 The beginning of the Petese Stories is lost, so the frame story as we have it begins in medias res—in the middle of a discussion between Petese son of Petetum, prophet of Atum in the temple of Heliopolis, and a ghost (this is in P. Petese Tebt. A col. ‘2,’ which now must be seen as the first of the preserved columns). 365 In ‘2,’10 Petese is told to complete his life on earth. When he casts a spell on the ghost to find out the length of his lifetime, however, the ghost says he cannot make this known. The text is quite fragmentary here, and it is not clear how Petese does it, but he is eventually able to get the answer to his question. He is told that the remaining length of his life is forty days. He returns home, sadly, to his wife, Sakhminofret (Sḫmy.t-nfr.t), the other main character of the frame story. She asks him what the problem is, and he seems not to think it fitting to tell her. The next five days (cols. ‘3’,5–‘5’,2) are spent in a quarrel with Hareus son of Tjainefer, a lesonis, 366 concerning 500 pieces of silver that Petese wishes to get from the treasury of Re for his burial. Since the text mentions some hidden books in the temple and then refers to the “dignity of the temple” (‘3’,7–8), it is possible that Petese proposes to reveal the meaning of these hidden books in order to enhance the reputation of the temple of Atum. 367 The other priests agree to give Petese the sum he wants, but Hareus refuses. Petese finally gets the money by force by fashioning a she-cat and a falcon out of wax; he sends them to the home of Hareus. People are amazed at what they see, and someone says “a feat of magic is that which Petese has done” (‘3’,30). 368 Apparently, Hareus relents, brings the 500 pieces of silver to Petese, who is lying in bed (ill?), and promises 500 more, since he feels responsible for previously denying the request. After these events, books are again mentioned, and Petese is able to make preparations for his burial. Petese then magically begins to create three sets of 364.  Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 17. This represents a change of opinion on the part of Ryholt, who, before identifying P. Petese CD and reviewing other Tebtunis manuscripts, thought that The Petese Stories could not have been very long and definitely would not have contained all 70 “good” and “bad” stories (The Story of Petese, 69). 365.  See above the discussion of the new ordering of P. Tebt. Petese A: cols. ‘2’–‘6,’ followed by cols. ‘1’ and ‘8.’ 366. A lesonis was a temple overseer. 367.  In P. CtYBR 422, an unpublished text from Tebtunis, a certain Petese (quite possibly this same fellow) is called before pharaoh and rewarded for deciphering an ancient book on astrology written by Imhotep that had been discovered in the temple of Heliopolis (Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 2, 13–15). 368.  sp n sẖ is literally a ‘feat of a scribe’; Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 16, 33, 54, 106, pls. 3 and 9. A later correction in P. Petese Tebt. A has “Saying a feat of magic; he who has done it is Petese.”

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creatures from wax. In the first set, one is perhaps an exorcist or conjurer 369 and the other a lector-priest/magician (ḥry-tp). In the second set, four beings are created; although the identities of the first two are missing, the third is a scribe of the god’s book and the fourth a shrine-opener or pastophoros (wn). These creatures are given books (perhaps funerary books), and they are to do something comparable to what is done for a pharaoh, leaving nothing undone (‘5’,7). Finally, Petese creates two baboons, and he tells them to write down 35 bad or wicked (wy[h]y) and 35 virtuous or good (mnḫ) stories (‘5’, 2–16). 370 He provides the 70 stories for the creatures, a number that equals the usual period for embalming, setting them down for future generations (“books that will be found after him in another time”). 371 He then returns to his wife to enjoy his last days. The stories themselves are not told yet; they are stories of scorn of women (sḏy n sḫf sḥm.wt) and stories of praise of women (sḏy n ḥs sḥm.wt). On the fortieth day, Petese reminds his wife what she has to do, proceeds to his tomb, anoints himself and apparently dies (‘5’,20–21). The next day, Sakhminofret goes to Petese’s store-rooms, prepares incenses, and prays to the sun-god. She addresses herself to Petese, says that the sun-god Re will rescue him with remedies being prepared, and is answered by Re in the voice of Petese. In ‘6’, x+13, someone presents offerings. Rameses II (WꜢs.t-mꜢʿ-[Rʿ], Wastmaatre) is mentioned in ‘6’, x+12 and may be the king in whose reign these events are set, but because the context is lost, we cannot be certain. The stories are then told to the wife by a baboon after Petese has departed. The telling of stories seems to begin before the middle of col. ‘6’, with “A Story of an Unfaithful Wife and Mother” (presumably this is a “wicked” story or a story of the vice of women). Cols. ‘1’ and ‘8′, which are now to be placed after ‘2’–‘6’, contain stories whose position in the whole composition is not certain. The new fragments (P. Petese Tebt. CD) are also unfixed, although two of the stories partially preserved therein are numbered in the Demotic edition as 18 and 19. Interestingly, in his publication of the first fragments identified, 369.  Vittmann suggests that the term for the first of the two, [. . .]l is to be read [s]⸢š⸣ l (sḫr), a “zu Fall Bringender,” that is, a “(Dämonen-)vertreiber,” or “(Geister-)Beschwörer” (Günter Vittmann, Review of “Ryholt, Kim: The Story of Petese . . .” Enchoria 26 [2000], 196). Ryholt in his second publication (The Petese Stories II, 151) follows this interpretation but suggests the translation ‘exorcist’. 370.  Literally ‘bad’ and ‘good’; however, since the stories are later called “stories of scorn of women” or “stories of praise of women,” the distinction is between stories of vice and virtue. Perhaps mnḫ can be best translated as ‘virtuous’ or ‘perfect’, and wyhy can be translated as ‘wicked’ or ‘incompetent’ and the nominal forms as ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’; Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 6–8. 371. As Jasnow has noted, “he does not apparently want the stories merely as entertainment for himself, but also as a sort of monument for posterity” (R. Jasnow, “‘And Pharaoh laughed . . .’: Reflections on Humor in Setne 1 and Late Period Egyptian Literature,” Enchoria 27 [2001], 64).

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Ryholt believed that the stories were appended to the frame narrative, rather than inserted. It now seems to be quite clear, after the discovery and edition of the new fragments (P. Petese Tebt. CD), that very short installments of the frame story are continued between the embedded stories. The stories seem to be told to Sakhminofret by a baboon—each is introduced with “The baboon said, O my sister Sakhminofret.” In addition, the baboon gives the number of the story to follow and places it in a category (“The Xth story; it is the story of scorn/praise of women”). 372 The stories seem to conclude with the baboon saying again “O Sakhminofret,” possibly followed by the title of the story (‘this was the story of X’ [pꜢ sḏy n X pꜢy]). 373 Then there is a brief return to the frame story. However, since these sections are not well preserved, we are able only to know that Sakhminofret does something the “next morning”—that is, “according to her daily habit”— even though other words or actions by Sakhminofret or the baboon may also be briefly described. 374 It thus appears that Sakhminofret is told a story by a baboon every day and that there is a day-to-day alternation between the stories of virtue and the stories of vice. 375 Since Egyptians thought of the utterances of baboons as divine speech (they were animal representatives of the god of writing, Thoth), it could be that the stories are told to Sakhminofret by the sun-god himself (speaking to her in the voice of Petese), especially because she makes offerings and prays to that deity after her husband’s death. Ryholt suggests that “as in the case of The Myth of the Sun’s Eye, one or more of the stories might then contain a moral which inspires or enables Sakhminofret to accomplish what Petese desires of her. They would, in other words, lead to the eventual resurrection of Petese or some other spectacular outcome.” 376 He also speculates that the story must then have been rather complex; Petese creates the baboons and the stories before his death and therefore must have anticipated everything in advance, including an eventual remedy for his death. The stories themselves share much in common with Tales From the Court of King Cheops (Papyrus Westcar), because they are concerned especially with 372.  The categories of scorn (sḫf or ḫsf ) and praise (ḥs) of women are also found in the proverbs of ʿOnchsheshonqy 22,10–11. See also Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 5. 373. Ibid. 374.  Ibid., 5, 149. 375.  Two of the stories with numbers (18 and 19) indicate that the stories of praise have odd numbers and the stories of scorn have even numbers; Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 5. 376.  Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 4. For more on baboons as literate or as entertainers, see ibid., 10–11. Note that in the Oracular Amuletic Decrees from the turn of the first millennium b.c.e., there were a pair of baboons named Khons-wm-nḫn and Khons-pꜢ-i.ir-sḫr.w, who were associated with books of life and death. See also E. Brunner-Traut, “Der Sehgott und der Hörgott in Literatur und Theologie,” in Jan Assman et al., eds., Fragen an die altägyptische Literatur: Studien zum Gedenken an Eberhard Otto (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1977), 125–45, esp. 139–40.

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adultery, magic, and prodigal children. 377 Only parts of five stories are preserved in P. Petese Tebt. A. The first story is called “A Story of an Unfaithful Wife and Mother” by Ryholt, and it is only well preserved in the bottom seven lines of col. ‘6,’ after the end of the main part of the frame story. The story seems to involve a son who appears to have been sent home by his father for some reason and who climbs a tree to look in a window, only to find his mother committing an act of adultery with a kalasiris soldier. 378 Apparently the mother finds out that the son has caught her in the act and says “Woe and misery! My son has seen me sleeping with the kalasiris. He will tell it to [his] father. He will place a curse . . . together with everyone who belongs to me” (‘6,’ 29–30). The end of this almost Boccaccian story is lost. 379 P. Petese Tebt. A contains another four stories that must be placed in the composition after the one that starts in col. ‘6,’ because the latter begins immediately after the main part of the frame story ends. Col. ‘1’ seems to preserve parts of two stories, 380 and Ryholt calls the first partially preserved story on col. ‘8’ “A Story mentioning a High-Priest of Ptah.” It seems to be the conclusion only of a story that featured a certain Setne—that is, a high-priest of Ptah. In line 2, this Setne casts a spell upon someone, after which someone greets someone else. Ryholt speculates that the Setne here could well be Setne Khamwas, known from previously published Setne texts, because in the Setne texts Khamwas is usually referred to simply as Setne, while the other high-priest known from Demotic literature, the high-priest Ptahhotep, is always named in association with his title. 381 The second story of col. ‘8,’ “A Story of a Doomed Prodigy Child,” is the best preserved of any on P. Petese Tebt. A, but only the beginning of it is 377.  Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 8. 378. Demotic gl-šr, kalasiris develops into a proper name by the Roman period; Ian Rutherford, “Kalasiris and Setne Khamwas: A Greek Novel and Some Egyptian Models,” ZPE 117 (1997), 203–9, esp. 208. 379.  Note the similarities to the “Enchanted Pear Tree” story of the Decameron (day 7, story 9) and the Canterbury Tales (the Merchant’s Tale). In the Decameron, a husband is persuaded by his faithless wife to believe that a pear tree is enchanted and is able to make the one who climbs it see things that are not true, such as his wife having sex with a servant. Although in the The Petese Stories, it is the son and not the husband who sees the woman, it is possible that either the woman does something dire to her son to prevent him from telling his father or else, as in the Boccaccian model, she finds a way to fool her son (or later her husband, after he is told by the son) into believing that he did not see what he in fact saw. 380.  The end of the first story concerns the wife of the Prophet of Atum, who goes before pharaoh and accuses another woman (the wife of the Prophet of Nebethetepet) with being pregnant by her own husband. She asks the pharaoh to give the child to her, and it seems that he does so. The beginning of the next story concerns someone named Hareus (not the same Hareus of the frame story), and the events seem to occur outside Egypt, because someone takes silver and gold to Egypt. However, the column here is too fragmentary to make much more sense of this story. 381.  Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 84–85.

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extant. It is very similar to a New Kingdom text, the Doomed Prince, in that two of the main characters (an unnamed Prophet of Horus-of-Pe and his wife Nebese, the daughter of the Prophet of Neith, whose courtship and wedding are also narrated) are unable to conceive a son without divine intervention. In a dream, the prophet is later told, “You will be given a son, but when he [reaches] the time of sleeping with a woman, he will die” (‘8,’ 23–24). In the last few preserved lines, their son grows old enough to go to school, where it is said that he writes as well as the school master and is told, “May there be a friend for you [ . . . ] in every place” (‘8′,30). Ryholt suggests that at this point the son may be leaving home to explore the world before he is doomed to die prematurely, just as in the Doomed Prince. 382 The fragments of P. Petese Tebt. CD also contain portions of several stories, although it is impossible to say how many. 383 Several involve the pharaoh’s court, even the king’s harem, but others are set in the private lives of priests and prophets. On P. Petese Tebt. C, the tale titled “The Blinding of Pharaoh” or the “Pheros story” is an Egyptian version of a tale that appears in Herodotus. The embedded Pheros story in this version differs from the version in Herodotus in some details: for instance, it is probably the tears of a chaste woman rather than her urine that will be the cure for the pharaoh’s blindness, and the person who is able to find the only virtuous woman is the king’s son, here named “Necho.” 384 In addition, in the first preserved line of the story, someone says, 385 “you yourself, they 382.  But note that the conclusion to the New Kingdom tale is also lost. For the text, see Alan H. Gardiner, Late-Egyptian Stories, ix, 1–9. For translations and comments, see: Bresciani, Letteratura, 390–93; Brunner-Traut, Altägyptische Märchen, 24–28; eadem, “Prinzenmärchen,” LÄ 4 (1982), 1107–12; G. Lefebvre, Romans et contes égyptiens, 114–24; Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 2.200–203; Eric T. Peet, “The Legend of the Capture of Joppa and the Story of the Foredoomed Prince,” JEA 11 (1925), 225–29; M. Pieper, Das ägyptische Märchen (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1935), 41; Georges Posener, “On the Tale of the Doomed Prince,” JEA 39 (1953), 107; Edward F. Wente, “The Tale of the Doomed Prince,” in LAE, 75–79. 383.  There seem to be at least five stories that can be distinguished on P. Petese Tebt. C, three of which Ryholt names “The Blinding of Pharaoh,” “The Prince and the Kalasiris,” and “The Crocodile Story” (the two others are labeled “Fragments mentioning Heliopolis” [C3–7] and “Fragments mentioning Pnebhetep” [C8–9]). On P. Petese Tebt. D (by a different hand than C, but part of the same text), it may be possible to distinguish six stories: “The Rape of Hatmehit,” “A Story of Adultery and the Royal Harem,” “The Avaricious Merchant,” “Story Featuring a Prophet and His Children,” “Buried Alive,” and “Story Mentioning Bartering in Egypt.” 384.  Perhaps this reflects a specific historical setting in the Saite period: a political alliance between Sais and Heracleopolis (the historical Necho I was from Sais and the chaste woman of the story is from Heracleopolis). Note that there was a historical Petese son of ʿOnchsheshonqy of Heracleopolis, who married into the royal Saite family and governed from Memphis to Aswan until he retired in the fourth regnal year of Psammetichus I. See Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 45–46. 385.  Since the average size of each embedded story is less than 2 columns and the extant part of this story is already nearly two full columns, not more than half a column can be missing from the beginning of this text; Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 41.

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would have placed you in the furnace” (col. 1, 1). 386 These words are presumably said to the pharaoh, because in the next line the pharaoh becomes enraged and throws an object at the man that pierces his chest and kills him. The man’s wife appears next, grieving before the pharaoh, and he then has her taken into his harem. Pharaoh promises to bury her husband and, after a lacuna, the story picks up with the king having become blind, and continues with the search and finding of a faithful woman, much as in the Herodotus story. Ryholt suggests that the blinding of pharaoh may be due to the fact that he had coveted the wife of the man who chastized him. It is because of this that the man dares declare that, in other circumstances (if their situations were reversed?), the pharaoh himself would have been placed in the furnace. 387 Thus, the moral of the Demotic version may involve a kind of Boccaccian quid pro quo: just as the king wished to cuckold someone else, he too has been cuckolded; the members of his royal harem whom he thought to be chaste are not at all so. In summation, the frame story of the Stories of Petese is related to three typical Egyptian literary themes, according to Ryholt: stories of fate, stories of prophets (ḥm.w-nṯr), and stories of magicians (ḥr.w-tb). 388 Petese himself is never called a ḥr(y)-tb in what is preserved of the text, but he does perform the typical magical deeds of a lector-priest, as do some of the characters in the inset stories. Just as the lector-priest of Papyrus Westcar creates beings out of wax, so does Petese: once, when he creates beings to plague Hareus’s home and drive him into paying him his silver, and the second time, when he creates the three sets of magical beings, some of whom write down his 35 stories of vice and virtue. If the manuscripts of the Stories of Petese have been correctly dated, then the “composition was in circulation for at least close to 500 years, from the 4th century bc to the 2nd century ad.” 389 Since the manuscript seems to have been updated grammatically in the course of those 500 years, we may conclude that the composition was very popular. Petese himself may or may not have been a historical figure. He was, however, considered a renowned astrological expert in both Egyptian and Greek liter386.  ḥty[=k wn]-nꜢw iw=w di.t⸢=k⸣ r pꜢ ʿš (Ryholt’s translation, ibid., 34). 387.  Based on a parallel elsewhere, Ryholt further proposes that the man’s wife tragically dies after her husband is buried (although this is not clear, since these lines are fragmentary), and this is what compels the gods to punish the pharaoh with blindness. In the unpublished P. Carlsberg 205, a similar event occurs, and in that text it is clear that the wife commits suicide after the burial of her husband (Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 45). By contrast, in the earlier Herodotus version of the Pheros story, the king is struck blind for throwing his spear into the heart of the river at the height of its flood—suggesting some kind of defiant or perhaps prideful action against the divine Nile. If the Herodotus version more closely reflects an original (or at least earlier) Egyptian version, then it shows the pharaoh’s actions as more clearly rebellious against the gods. 388.  Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 81–83. 389.  Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 91.

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ary tradition. For instance, in an unpublished astrological text in Demotic from the Tebtunis temple library (P. CtYBR 422), which claims to be a copy of the “book of Imhotep” and to have been discovered on a papyrus in the temple of Heliopolis, Petese is credited with being able to explain the nature of this text to the pharaoh. 390 The astrological expertise of a certain Petese is also evidenced by the Greek P. Rylands 63 from the second or third century c.e., which contains a series of dialogues between Plato and some prophets, and preserves the last twelve lines of a dialogue between Plato and a certain Peteesis (a Greek writing of Petese), who explains to Plato some astrological phenomena. 391 All of this leaves open the possibility that, just as with many other Tebtunis texts, Petese of Heliopolis was a historical figure, although this does not necessarily mean that he ever discussed anything with Plato. 392

3.3.2.3.4.  Summary of Egyptian Story-Collections The three Egyptian story-collections discussed at length are similar in some respects, but not in all. All three story-collections are structured around a frame narrative, and the narrators of all the embedded stories are characters in the frame. Moreover, the inset stories are meant for both edification and amusement, the twin goals of most story-collections. The moralistic fables of the Mythos are meant to persuade Tefnut as well as to extend the journey, and at least two of its embedded fables were extremely popular and were utilized in later storycollections in other languages. The stories of the vices and virtues of women written down by the baboons in the Stories of Petese are probably meant to persuade Petese’s wife, Sakhminofret, to do what is right in relation to Petese—that is, whatever funerary or other tasks she was to perform for him after his death. 393 390.  The text is introduced with, “Here is a copy of the book of Imhotep the Great, son of Ptah, the great god”; Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 13. 391.  Edited by John de Monins Johnson et al., Catalogue of the Greek Papyri in the John Rylands Library II. Documents of the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods (Nos. 62–456) (Manchester: The University Press, 1915), 2–3, no. 63. See also, Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 13–16, esp. 14. The tradition that Plato lived in Heliopolis for thirteen years with Eudoxus and spent time learning astrology from Egyptian priests is found in Strabo 17.1.29; see Joachim Quack, “Die Spur des Magiers Petese,” CdÉ 77 (2002), 76–92. 392.  Neither the unpublished astrology text from Tebtunis nor Greek P. Rylands 63 mention in which king’s reign Petese lived, making it even harder to put a date on any possible historical Petese. P. Petese Saqqāra provides the earliest reference to Petese, and so, if he existed, he has to be placed no later than the end of the fourth century b.c.e. (Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 13–16). Plato’s alleged visit to Egypt, and Petese’s supposed chats with the philosopher, might belong to literary tradition and not historical reality. For a discussion of ancient sources regarding an alleged trip to Eygpt, see Bernard Mathieu, “Le voyage de Platon en Égypte,” ASAE 71 (1987), 153–67. 393.  It has been suggested that the tales in the Stories of Petese may allude to those of the Mythos; Ryholt credits Richard Jasnow with this observation (The Petese Stories II, 9). The deities who are the main characters in the frame story of the Myth of the Sun’s Eye are Thoth

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On the other hand, the Tales from King Cheops’ Court (Papyrus Westcar) differs from the other two story-collections in that it is at first a story-telling contest at court about great deeds of past magicians meant to amuse a bored king before it transitions into a prophecy about the next Egyptian Dynasty, given by Djedi, the living magician. 394 The Stories of Petese is more like the Arabian Nights or other story-collections in which story-telling is meant to encourage a whiling-away of the hours—in this case, the 70 days of the embalming period after Petese’s death, one story per day told by a baboon to Petese’s wife. Of the three Egyptian story-collections, wondrous deeds or magic are important in only the Papyrus Westcar and the Stories of Petese (although the Seeing- and Hearing-Birds of the Mythos also do magic). However, only in Papyrus Westcar are the magicians specifically called chief lector-priests (ẖry-ḥb ḥry-tp), and the most important of the magicians is described as a nḏs, or commoner. The Stories of Petese comment on their own composition; the occasion and manner of their writing is fully explained in the frame narrative. This elevates the status of the stories and suggests the possibility that Petese’s writings are meant to be compared with the writings of another great sage, Imhotep. 395 The enclosed stories have many settings and seem to be of varying genres, although their main theme is covering the vices and virtues of women, as in many story-collections from many periods. Some stories involve the court, while others center around the private lives of highly placed officials. The story-collection that is most comparable to the Book of Daniel is certainly the Tales from King Cheops’ Court (Papyrus Westcar). It is a full-fledged “court contest,” one of the genres that is typically applied to the biblical Daniel narratives. Furthermore, like the Daniel narratives, the collection of tales ends up being a launching point for a prediction or predictions that follow the collection. While the Tales from King Cheops’ Court ends with the prediction about the next dynasty, Daniel’s story-collection is supplemented by the visions of the stories’ main character. On the other hand, one main difference between Daniel and the Tales from King Cheops’ Court is that the tales in the latter are narrated by characters within the frame (and the frame story itself is a story-telling court contest), and Tefnut, appearing in the guise of a baboon and a “small dog-ape,” respectively. In the Stories of Petese, there is a baboon (possibly representing Thoth?) telling stories to a woman named Sakhminofret (“the good Sakhmet”), who may represent the daughter or eye of the sun-god (cf. Tefnut) and, thus, the peaceful aspect of the goddess. It is possible, then, that Petese, who does not appear during the telling of the stories he has assembled, could be taking the role of the sun-god who, in the Myth of the Sun’s Eye, does not appear but is intimately involved with the events. 394.  Note also that, in both the Stories of Petese and Papyrus Westcar, “adultery, magic and prodigal children are prominent topics,” and “neither shows much interest in physical strength and soldiery” (Ryholt, The Petese Stories II. 8). 395.  Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 3.

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while there is no frame with storytellers in the Book of Daniel until Daniel relates the narratives of his visions at the end of the book. 396 How can one explain the similarities? It is not likely that Papyrus Westcar was a source or even a near analogue for Daniel, since the two are separated by more than a thousand years and there is no evidence for any versions of Papyrus Westcar that would have been known to Daniel’s author. It is more likely that the Tales from King Cheops’ Court is a “soft analogue” to Daniel (using Beidler’s terminology), rather than anything else. 397 The use of court professionals as characters is popular in later Egyptian stories, however, and it is especially in the Late and Demotic periods of the second half of the first millennium b.c.e., the time in which the Daniel stories were composed, that Egyptian tales of court professionals and their conflicts and contests abound.

3.3.2.4.  Egyptian Court Tales and Cycles of Court Tales There are several story-cycles in Late Period Egyptian literature, especially in Demotic, dating to the Hellenistic period and later. These cycles each centered around a particular famous figure, such as a warrior and his family (as in the “Cycle of Inaros”), or a magician or learned sage of the court such as a priest or prophet. 398 The “Cycle of Inaros,” formerly known as the “Cycle of Petubastis,” was probably “the largest, connected group of narrative literature from ancient Egypt,” and Inaros himself “was certainly the most popular hero in Egyptian literature during the Greco-Roman period.” 399 The stories are set in the seventh century b.c.e. although they were composed in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Because there are no parallels in Egyptian literature for the plots and style of the stories, it has been suggested that Homeric poems were the model for this “heroic” cycle. 400 However, “some of the stories plainly pursue traditional Egyptian 396.  Characters in Daniel do speak in the first person, however, and much of Dan 4 is told by Nebuchadnezzar in the first person. 397.  Peter G. Beidler, “Just Say Yes, Chaucer Knew the Decameron,” 41–42. See also chap. 2 above. 398.  For an overview of the stories in the “Cycle of Inaros,” see, for instance, DePauw, A Companion to Demotic Studies, 88–89; W. Helck, ‘Petubastis-Erzählung,’ in LÄ 4 (1982), 998–99; Michel Chauveau, ‘Les romans du Cycle d’Inaros et de Pedoubastis,’ Égypte, Afrique & Orient 29 (2003), 19–28; Joachim Friedrich Quack, Einführung in die altägyptische Literatur­geschichte III, 44–61. On the historical background, see Kenneth A. Kitchen, The Third Intermediate Period, 1100–650 b.c. (3rd ed.; Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1996), 455–61. For a description of new Inaros stories published and unpublished in Copenhagen, see K.-T. Zauzich, “Einleitung,” 6; K. Ryholt, ‘A Parallel to the Inaros Story of P. Krall,” 151–69. 399.  Ryholt, “The Assyrian Invasion of Egypt,” 491. P. Carlsberg 164 contains the Inaros epic on 46 columns of small writing; ibid., 492. The former name of the cycle was the “Cycle of Petubastis” because it was thought that king Petubastis II was at the center of these stories. Now, however, it seems that Inaros of Athribis and his relatives and allies appear most in these narratives, while Petubastis is portrayed as a rather bumbling king who only appears in a few of them. 400.  In favor of Greek influence is Volten, “Der demotische Petubastisroman und seine Beziehung zur griechischen Literature,” in H. Gerstinger, ed., Akten des VIII. internationalen Kongresses für Papyrologie, Wien 1955 (MPER N.S. 5; Vienna: Rohrer, 1956), 147–52.

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themes,” so that need not have been the case. 401 The main narratives of this cycle include the mostly unpublished Inaros Epic (on numerous papyri from Tebtunis dating to the first or second century c.e.); 402 the Struggle for the Armor of Inaros (P. Krall, 137/138 c.e.); 403 the Struggle for the Prebend of Amun (P. Spiegelberg and P. de Ricci, first century b.c.e.); 404 and Egyptians and Amazons (P. Vienna D. 6165 and D. 6165 A; ca. 200 c.e.). 405 There are also independent stories linked 401. J. Tait, “Egyptian Fiction in Demotic and Greek,” 211. See also J. W. B. Barns, “Egypt and the Greek Romance,” in H. Gerstinger, ed., Akten des VIII. internationalen Kongresses für Papyrologie, 29–36; and Friedhelm Hoffmann, Ägypter und Amazonen. Neubearbeitung zweier demotischer Papyri. P. Vindob. D 6165 und P. Vindob. D 6165 A (MPER N.S. 24; Vienna: Hollinek, 1995), 20–26. 402.  Three fragments of the Inaros Epic are described by Ryholt, who is working on their publication (“The Assyrian Invasion of Egypt in Egyptian Literary Tradition,” 492–95): Esarhaddon’s letter to Inaros; the duel between Inaros and an Assyrian sorceress in the shape of a griffin; and an Egyptian visit to Esarhaddon’s sleeping-quarters (P. Carlsberg 68+123, P. Carlsberg 80, P. Carlsberg 164, P. Carlsberg 458, and P. Carlsberg 591). For a description of small fragments already published but not identified as belonging to this story, see Quack, Einführung in die altägyptische Literaturgeschichte III, 45 n. 72. Translated but not yet critically edited is the fragment concerning Inaros and the Griffin (P. Carlsberg 80); see E. Bresciani, “La corazza di Inaro era fatta con la pelle del grifone del Mar Rosso,” EVO 13 (1990), 103–7; ead., Letteratura, 945–47. 403.  Bresciani, Der Kampf um den Panzer des Inaros (Papyrus Krall), (MPER N.S. 8, Vienna: Prachner, 1964); Hoffmann, Der Kampf um den Panzer des Inaros: Studien zum P. Krall und seiner Stellung innherhalb des Inaros-Petubastis-Zyklus (MPER N.S. 26; Vienna: Hollinek, 1996); Ryholt, “A Parallel to the Inaros Story of P. Krall,” 151–69. Translations: Bresciani, Letteratura, 922–40; Hoffmann in Hoffmann and Quack, Anthologie der demotischen Literatur, 59–87. 404. W. Spiegelberg, Der Sagenkreis des Königs Petubastis, nach dem Strassburger demotischen Papyrus sowie den Wiener und Pariser Bruchstücken (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1910); F. Hoffmann, “Die Länge des P. Spiegelberg,” EVO 17 (1994), 145–55; F. Hoffmann, ‘Der Anfang des Papyrus Spiegelberg—ein Versuch zur Wiederherstellung,” in S. P. Vleeming, ed., Hundred-Gated Thebes: Acts of a Colloquium on Thebes and the Theban Area in the Graeco-Roman Period (P. L. Bat., 27) (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 43–60; C. Traunecker, “Le papyrus Spiegelberg et l’évolution des liturgies thébaines,” in S. P. Vleeming, ed., Hundred-Gated Thebes, 183–201; F. Hoffmann, “Neue Fragmente zu den drei großen Inaros-Petubastis-Texten,” Enchoria 22 (1995), 27–39; W. J. Tait, “P. Carlsberg 433 and 434: Two Versions of the Text of P. Spiegelberg,” in P. J. Frandsen and K. Ryholt, eds., A Miscellany of Demotic Texts and Studies (The Carlsberg Papyri 3; CNI Publications 22; Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 59–82. Translations: Bresciani, Letteratura, 909–21; Hoffmann in Hoffmann and Quack, Anthologie der demotischen Literatur, 88–106. 405. A. Volten, Ägypter und Amazonen: Eine demotische Erzählung des Inaros-PetubastisKreises aus zwei Papyri der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek (Pap. Dem. Vindob. 6165 und 6165A) (MPER N.S. 6; Vienna: Prachner, 1962); F. Hoffmann, Ägypter und Amazonen: Neubearbeitung zweier demotischer Papyri. P. Vindob. D 6165 und P. Vindob. D 6165 A (MPER N.S. 24; Vienna: Hollinek, 1995); M. Chauveau, “Les romans du Cycle d’Inaros et de Pedoubastis,” Égypte, Afrique & Orient 29 (2003), 21–28. Translations: Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3.151–56; Bresciani, Letteratura, 940–42; Hoffmann in Hoffmann and Quack, Anthologie der demotischen Literatur, 107–17. For the possibility that there is only one Egyptian (Pedikhons son of Pakrur) and he is at the head of the Assyrian army who fights the Amazons, see Philippe Collombert, “Padikhonsou fils de Pakrour: ‘(ein) Ägypter und (die) Amazonen’? ” Enchoria 30 (2006/2007), 141–43.

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to the cycle, such as the Love-story of Bes and a narrative about Inaros’ travels to Nubia. 406 Finally, the earliest version of an Inaros story or stories is possibly the Aramaic Sheikh Faḍl inscription from near Oxyrhynchus in Middle Egypt from the first half of the fifth century b.c.e. This connection was made only fairly recently by Kim Ryholt, based on the reading Ynḥrw (Inaros) in this text first proposed by Günther Vittmann. 407 Previously, the name had been read Snḥrw (Porten and Yardeni) or Ynḥtw (Lemaire), 408 but the new reading of the name as well as other parallels in main characters, location, deities, and plot supports this connection. 409 Since the many stories concerning magicians do not seem to be incorporated into other kinds of texts, it is the opinion of some Egyptologists that they likely formed a separate genre of their own. 410 The stories of the cycles are usually, but not always (as with the Setne texts), preserved individually and are independent from other stories in a cycle. They seem to be entirely self-contained in that there are no cross-references between the stories themselves. 411 We can only as406.  Hoffmann’s edition of the love story is forthcoming (Hoffmann and Quack, Anthologie der demotischen Literatur, 55), but it has been independently translated by Bresciani (Letteratura, 947–49) and by Hoffmann (in Hoffmann and Quack, Anthologie der demotischen Literatur, 55–59). According to Ryholt, there are twenty identified manuscripts of the cycle of Inaros stories from Tebtunis, including copies of the Inaros Epic, the Struggle for the Prebend of Amun (P. Spiegelberg), and the Struggle for the Armor of Inaros (P. Krall); Ryholt, “On the Contents and Nature of the Tebtunis Temple Library,” 155. 407.  Vittmann makes this suggestion without reference to the Demotic stories of Inaros; Günter Vittmann, “Ägyptische Onomastik der Spätzeit im Spiegel der nordwestsemitischen und karischen Nebenüberlieferung,” in M. P. Streck and S. Weninger (eds.), Altorientalische und semitische Onomastik (AOAT 296; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2002), 92; see also Vittmann, Ägypten und die Fremden im ersten vorchristlichen Jahrtausend (Kulturgeschichte der antiken Welt 97; Mainz am Rhein: von Zabern, 2003), 104–5. Ryholt makes the connection to the Demotic Inaros in “The Assyrian Invasion of Egypt,” 496. 408. A. Lemaire, “Les inscriptions araméennes de Cheikh-Fadl (Égypte),” in M. J. Geller, J. C. Greenfield, and M. P. Weitzman, eds., Studia Aramaica: New Sources and New Approaches (JSS Sup 4; Manchester: Oxford University Press, 1995), 77–132; Porten and Yardeni, TAD IV, 286–99, foldouts 5–8. 409.  For a comparison of the “Cycle of Inaros” in Demotic with the Aramaic narrative or narratives at Sheikh Faḍl, see Tawny L. Holm, “The Sheikh Faḍl Inscription in Its Literary and Historical Context,” Aramaic Studies 5 (2007), 193–224. Note that the text features Pharaoh Necho, Taharqa king of the Nubians, and Esarhaddon—three of the characters who interact with Inaros in the many Demotic stories and all of whom are attested historically in the inscriptions of Assurbanipal. Necho II and other Delta kings, perhaps even a historical Inaros, allied with Taharqa in a revolt against the Assyrians around the time of Esarhaddon’s death in 669 b.c.e. 410. Wilhelm Spiegelberg, “Der demotische Papyrus Heidelberg 736,” ZÄS 53 (1917), 30–33, esp. p. 33; idem, Demotische Texte auf Krügen, 8 n. 1; Tait, “Egyptian Fiction in Demotic and Greek,” 207 (but compare an earlier opinion by Tait in “P. Carlsberg 207: Two Columns of a Setna-Text,” 34). 411.  Tait, “Egyptian Fiction in Demotic and Greek,” 210.

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sume—and it seems fairly likely—that the original audience was aware of several narratives about the same character or group of characters. Many of the magician stories are court tales—that is, stories of the successful courtier who survives conflicts and contests, because a prominent arena of performance for such specialists in ritual, religion, and medicine was the royal court where intrigue and rivalry abounded, as was demonstrated above in the discussion about the ḥry-tb/tp.

3.3.2.4.1.  High Priests of Memphis The best-known compositions to be considered here are those of the Setne Khamwas cycle, but a few others will be included because of their possible relationship to Setne Khamwas or to Memphis. Spiegelberg’s Jar-text B.1 will be discussed, since it concerns a certain Si-Osire who seems to be the same fellow as Setne’s son in Setne II (who in Setne II turns out to be the resurrection of a famous magician of the past). Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh may also involve a son from the Setne cycle, but in this case the son is Merib, the offspring of the magician Naneferkaptaḥ and his wife. Finally, Merire and Sisobek bears no clear relationship to the Setne cycle but does take place in Memphis, probably during the New Kingdom (like the Setne stories), and the featured Merire may be the renowned “General Merire” of Ramesside times.

3.3.2.4.1.1.  The Setne Khamwas Cycle The stories of Setne Khamwas are found on two somewhat damaged papyri and several fragments that contain stories said to be about Prince Khamwas (Ḫʿm-Wʿs or Ḫʿ-m-Wʿs.t). The historical Khamwas was the fourth son of Rameses II (ca. 1290–1224), who was High Priest, or Setne, of Ptah at Memphis in his lifetime (stme/stne in Demotic, sm/stm in hieroglyphs and hieratic) and later revered as a learned sage or scholarly priest in his own right. 412 He has even been termed the “first Egyptologist,” in that he investigated and restored ancient monuments, leaving inscriptions throughout the Memphite necropolis, where he was himself later buried alongside the sacred bulls of Ptah. 413 He was responsible for the construction of the Serapeum, the underground burial complex for the sacred Apis bulls, and various renovation projects on Old Kingdom pyramids around 412.  Griffith, Stories of the High Priests of Memphis, 4–5; Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3.125–27. A certain Sethos (Σεθῶν), king of Egypt and priest of Hephaestus, appears in Herodotus 2.141. The Herodotus story is set during the time of an advance of Sennacherib, who is called “king of the Arabians and Assyrians” in the text, against Egypt. The battle is won not by human effort but by field mice who swarm the enemy camp and eat the quivers, bows, and handle-thongs of their shields. Griffith has suggested a literary relationship between the Herodotus story of Sethos and 2 Kings 19, in which Sennacherib’s army suffers a miraculous defeat before King Hezekiah of Judah (p. 7). 413.  R. K. Ritner, “The Romance of Setna Khaemuas and the Mummies (Setna I),” in LAE, 453. On the historical Khamwas, see Farouk Gomaà, Chaemwese: Sohn Ramses’ II. und Hoherpriester von Memphis (Ägyptologische Abhandlungen 27; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1973).

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Memphis were carried out in his name. A Book of the Dead spell on two Ptolemaic manuscripts “is presented as a text found by Khaemwaset under the head of a mummy in the Memphite desert.” 414 Thus, it is no wonder later tales circulated about him. The two major papyri are known as Setne Khamwas I and II (P. Cairo CG 30646 and P. BM 10822); both are missing a large part of their beginning and also possess some damaged sections. 415 Setne I, or Setne and the Book of Thoth, dates to the third century b.c.e., while Setne II, or Setne and Si-Osire, dates to the first century c.e. 416 The numerous text fragments contain variants of the two major papyri as well as additional episodes in the adventures of Khamwas. 417 Of these, P. Carlsberg 207 dates to the second century c.e. and seems to be a story that “comes from a very similar mold” as Setne I, and although the Setne in P. Carlsberg 207 is not specifically named Khamwas, it is most likely the same character. 418 In addition, there is at least one story belonging to this cycle on a terracotta sherd (Krugtext or jar-text) dating to the first or second century c.e., 419 several unpublished texts from Tebtunis, 420 as well as P. Cairo 30692 and P. Cairo 30758 (both possibly dating to the early Ptolemaic period), 421 and now a fragment in Marburg (pMarburg Inv. 38). 422 Ryholt 414.  Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites, 227; see Spells Pleyte 167–69 in T. G. Allen, The Book of the Dead (SAOC 37; Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1974), 216. 415.  First published by F. L. Griffith, Stories of the High Priests of Memphis, vol. 1. Translations of Setne I and Setne II include: Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3.125–51; BrunnerTraut, Altägyptische Märchen, 171–214; Bresciani, Letteratura, 615–26; Hoffmann in Hofffmann and Quack, Anthologie der demotischen Literatur, 118–52. 416. E. Bresciani, “Chaemwase-Erzählungen,” LÄ I (1975), col. 899. 417.  Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3.125. 418.  J. F. Quack and K. Ryholt, “Notes on the Setne Story P. Carlsberg 207,” 163. Quack and Ryholt found smaller fragments and made joins to P. Carlsberg 207. See the initial publication of the papyrus: W. J. Tait, “P. Carlsberg 207: Two columns of a Setna-text,” 19–46. 419.  The story about the birth of Si-Osire in jar-text B, lines 1–9; see Wilhelm Spiegelberg, Demotische Texte auf Krügen (Demotische Studien 5; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1912), 18–19. 420.  DePauw, A Companion to Demotic Studies, 88. See also K.-T. Zauzich, “Einleitung,” 6. P. Carlsberg 423 + PSI inv. D 6 is one of these unpublished Tebtunis texts; Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 84. 421.  For P. Cairo 30692, see Spiegelberg, Die Demotische Denkmäler II (Strassburg: Dumont Schauberg, 1906–8), 1.112–15, vol. 2, pl. LI. For a free retelling that includes lines 11ff. (not translated by Spiegelberg), see E. Brunner-Traut, Altägyptische Märchen (Düsseldorf: Eugen Diederichs, 1963), 173. She follows Spiegelberg in seeing it as part of the Setne I story. Zauzich clarifies certain points of this text in “Die schlimme Geschichte von dem Mann der Gottesmutter,” Enchoria 6 (1976), 79–82. For P. Cairo 30758; see Spiegelberg, Die Demotische Denkmäler II, 1.115, 145–48, vol. 2, pl. LVIII. Spiegelberg wondered if P. Cairo 30758 were part of P. Cairo 30692; Tait disagrees (“P. Carlsberg 207: Two Columns of a Setna-Text,” 34). P. Cairo 30758 includes an unnamed Setne and a character Ptahhotep. 422. J. Quack,“Ein Setne-Fragment in Marburg (pMarburg Inv. 38),” Enchoria 30 (2006/7), 71–74. The fragment preserves the name of Naneferkaptaḥ, and Quack believes it

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has suggested that one of the embedded narratives in the Stories of Petese may also involve Khamwas (see above). 423 Thus, there was a cycle of stories, titled “The Stories of the High Priests of Memphis” by Griffith, that centered on the figure of Khamwas, son of Rameses II and that circulated independently as well as a unit beginning in the third century b.c.e. into the first centuries c.e. Both Setne I and II humorously focus on Setne’s dealings with magicians, and the pharaoh is portrayed differently in each. In Setne I, the pharaoh is the wise, cautious counselor to Setne’s impatient obsessive, who wishes to possess the magical book of Thoth in spite of all the harm it does to humans who try to claim it. In Setne II, the pharaoh plays the more traditional court-tale role of the befuddled king in which he is the one in sore need of advice and aid, while the magician-courtiers must rise to the occasion and rescue him. Setne I possesses one central theme: Setne Khamwas’ desire for a book of magic written by the god Thoth, which he robs from the tomb of the powerful magician and prince Naneferkaptaḥ (NꜢ-nfr-kꜢ-Ptḥ, “Beautiful is the bull of Ptah”), a name attested only in Setne texts. 424 The first two pages are lost, but it seems that before Setne Khamwas is able to take the book from the tomb, he is told a long inserted story by the ghost of the magician’s widow, Ihweret, describing the difficulty Naneferkaptaḥ experienced in getting the book and how doing so had cost Naneferkaptaḥ his life and that of his wife and son, Merib. 425 Page 3 picks up in the middle of Ihweret’s story. Naneferkaptaḥ’s task involved magically creating rowers and sailors out of wax, which he then animated in order to sail out to the island in the sea of Coptos where the book of Thoth was located. The book of Thoth was found inside a box that was actually a series of chests made of various precious materials (from iron to gold), and around the perimeter of the chest were snakes, scorpions, reptiles, as well as an eternal snake. Naneferkaptaḥ killed the snakes, scorpions, and reptiles with magical spells and, after killing the eternal snake three times, finally realized that he needed to divide the body and separate its two parts with sand. He then retrieved the book from the chest and represents a loose rendering of themes already known from other Setne stories instead of an entirely new narrative. 423.  P. Petese Tebt. A, col. ‘8,’ lines 1–2; Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 20. The unnamed Setne there casts a spell on someone, and Khamwas is often referred to as just “Setne” without the accompanying name in Setne I and II (Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 84). 424. Steve Vinson, “The Names ‘Naneferkaptaḥ,’ ‘Ihweret,’ and ‘Tabubue’ in the ‘First Tale of Setne Khaemwas,” JNES 68 (2009), 283–304, esp. 287. Setne’s book of Thoth may be “a popular and literary interpretation” of the composition entitled the Book of Thoth and edited by Jasnow and Zauzich; see Richard Jasnow and Karl-Theodor Zauzich, The Ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth: A Demotic Discourse on Knowledge and Pendant to the Classical Hermetica (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), 1.76. 425.  The name of Merib might also be read Meribptah, with the Ptḥ element written phonetically; see some examples in E. Luddeckens et al., Demotisches Namenbuch (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1980–2000), 1.13, p. 600.

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recited one formula that enabled him to hear the conversation of all animals, birds, and fish. A second formula gave him the power to see the god Pre, the Ennead, the moon, and the constellations. Naneferkaptaḥ then returned to Ihweret, copied the book on a new sheet of papyrus, dissolved it in water after burning it with fire, and drank it, in this way memorizing its contents. 426 When Thoth found out what Naneferkaptaḥ had done, he asked Pre to allow him vengeance. On the return to Memphis, Naneferkaptaḥ’s son and wife fell into the water, one after the other, and drowned. Naneferkaptaḥ was able to manipulate the water with a spell and cause their bodies to rise out of the water so they could be buried. He was even able to make his dead son Merib speak via a spell in order to find out that Thoth had been behind his death. He then threw himself into the water to drown, after binding his own body to the book. After Ihweret’s ghost finishes this story, Setne competes with the ghost of Naneferkaptaḥ in a deadly senet board game to win the book of Thoth. At first, Setne Khamwas seems to be losing and at every misstep is pounded into the ground, all the way up to his legs, then groin, then ears. 427 In the end, he wins by cheating: he rises from the ground by using his magical amulets, which are brought to him by his foster-brother Inaros. 428 Warned by the pharaoh to return the book to the tomb of Naneferkaptaḥ, Setne does not and has a nightmare in which an evil but beautiful woman (Tabubu) bewitches him, takes his belongings, and kills his children. When Setne awakens in a fright, he returns the book to the tomb in repentance, and even assists the dead magician in finding the tombs of his wife and child to rebury them near the magician. Setne I is thus a tightly arranged tale, told “within a series of interlocking narratives nested like the chests enclosing the critical scroll of Thoth.” 429 There are 426.  “Swallowing magic”; Ritner, Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 107–8. 427.  See Peter A. Piccione, “The Gaming Episode in the Tale of Setne Khamwas as religious metaphor,” in David P. Silverman, ed., For His Ka: Essays Offered in Memory of Klaus Baer (Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 55; Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1994), 197–204. Senet is a game that always had both secular and religious overtones, and according to Spell 405 in the Coffin Texts, “the dead can play senet with the living as a means of communication between them” (p. 197). By the Twentieth Dynasty, playing the senet game “evoked the nocturnal journey of the sun god through the netherworld” and the player, whether alive or dead, was securing “new spiritual life” (Piccione, “The Gaming Episode,” 198). 428.  The movement of the book or papyrus of Thoth also connotes resurrection in the story. When Setne Khamwas removes it from the tomb, all light fades from the tomb, just as when Re passes through the Netherworld, light enters and leaves with him (Piccione, “The Gaming Episode,” 202). On the archaeological evidence for board games in Canaan preceding the introduction of the Egypt senet, see Michael Sebbane, “Board Games from Canaan in the Early and Intermediate Bronze Ages and the Origin of the Egyptian Senet Game,” Tel Aviv 28 (2001), 213–30. 429.  Ritner, “The Romance of Setna Khaemuas and the Mummies (Setna I),” in LAE, 454.

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elements of irony and humor throughout the story. Setne and Naneferkaptaḥ are both excellent scribes, but “neither are truly wise men,” in that both ignore the advice of others to leave the book of Thoth alone. 430 The name of the temptress Tabubu (Ta-bwbwe) means “She of splendor” or “She of the god Babi/Bebon,” the god of raucus sexuality. 431 Setne II actually contains three stories: the miraculous birth of Si-Osire; his visit to the Netherworld with Setne; and his duel with the Nubian sorcerer or shaman. These stories concentrate on the son of the Setne, Si-Osire (Sı͗-Wsı͗r, “Son of Osiris”), rather than Setne himself, and in the end Si-Osire turns out to be a reincarnation of a famous magician named Ḥor-son-of-Paneshy (Ḥr-sꜢ-pꜢnšy, with pꜢ-nšy being a shortened form of pꜢ-wnš, “the Wolf ”), who is known from other tales, in both Demotic and Aramaic versions (as mentioned above). 432 The miraculous child Si-Osire is granted to Setne and his wife Mehusekhe after a period of barrenness. He grows quickly and is precociously learned: he is able to recite the writings that only the scribes of the House of Life know. The second story of Setne II relates a journey to the Netherworld; Si-Osire takes his surprised father into the Netherworld, where they tour its halls and observe the fates of the dead in the hereafter. 433 This story ends with the statement that “[When the] boy Si-Osire [reached] twelve years of age, it came to pass that there was no [scribe and learned man] in Memphis [who could compare] with him in reciting spells and performing magic.” 434 The third story of Setne II has the motif of contests between magicians at the royal court. 435 A “shaman” (Ꜣte) from Cush/Nubia ap430.  Jasnow, “‘And Pharaoh Laughed. . .’,” 73. 431.  The god Babi/Bebon is punished in the Papyrus Jumilhac (Jasnow, “‘And Pharaoh Laughed. . .’,” 80). For more on the names Ihweret and Tabubu as reflections of Isis (the former a reflection on the beneficent aspect of Isis and the latter on the threatening aspect), see Vinson, “The Names ‘Naneferkaptaḥ,’ ‘Ihweret,’ and ‘Tabubue’ in the ‘First Tale of Setne Khaemwas,” 283–304. Michel Chauveau has further observations on Tabubu in “Les richesses meconnues de la litterature demotique,” Bulletin de la societe francaise d’egyptologie 156 (2003), 20–36, esp. 27–28. 432. See Ritner, “The Adventures of Setna and Si-Osire (Setna II),” in LAE, 482; idem, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 70–71 n. 320. That the name of the magician in disguise here includes a contraction of pꜢ-wnš “the Wolf ” is shown by the pun in Setne II 6,13. 433.  They tour the seven levels of the Netherworld and find out the fate of the righteous poor man whom Si-Osire had seen being carried out of Memphis on a mat in a miserable burial without a procession. Si-Osire is able to show his father that, in the Netherworld, such a man is rewarded with luxurious trappings for his good deeds. The lists of people and their punishments in the Netherworld are probably adapted from Greek myth (Ritner, “ The Adventures of Setna and Si-Osire [Setna II],” in LAE, 471). 434. M. Lichtheim’s translation, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3.142. 435.  For more discussion of this part of Setne II, see N. Grimal, “Le roi et la sorcière,” in C. Berger et al., eds., Hommages à Jean Leclant (Bibliothèque d’Etude 106/4; Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1994), 4.97–108.

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pears at court, asking if there is any good scribe or wise man who can read the sealed document bound to his body without removing the seal or opening the letter. The pharaoh and his noblemen are disconcerted, and the pharaoh then sends for Setne Khamwas for advice, who in turn asks for ten days to solve the mystery. Grieving at home and not knowing what to do, Setne Khamwas’ son Si-Osire comes upon him. Once he learns the problem, Si-Osire laughs and demonstrates to his father his ability to read documents without looking at them. Later on, at court, Si-Osire recites the story written on the sealed document bound to the body of the Nubian shaman. The story he recites is a long tale of contests from 1,500 years earlier between an Egyptian magician, Ḥor-son-of-Paneshy (Horus-son-of-the-Wolf), and a Nubian shaman named Horus-son-of-the-Nubian-woman. (At several points, he interrupts his amazing story to ask the Nubian shaman, whom he has bound with an oath, to tell the court nobles that the story he is reciting is truly from the contents of the sealed document.) Once, in the reign of Thutmosis III (Eighteenth Dynasty) the king (kwr) of Nubia overhears three shamans of Cush in the latrine, boasting about how they each would cast their magic against Egypt. 436 The king chooses the one who proposes to magically remove the Egyptian king to Nubia to beat him with 500 blows and to return him to Egypt, all within the space of six hours (in a single night). Horus-son-of-the-Nubian-woman makes a litter with four porters from wax and animates them with a spell; they carry out his request. The pharaoh is returned to Egypt bruised and beaten and asks his counselors how it could have happened. They think he is crazy to suggest he was taken out of Egypt in the night, until he actually shows them his bruised buttocks. His magician (ḥry-tp), Ḥor-son-of-Paneshy, is the only one able to tell pharaoh that it was the sorcery of the Nubians that has done it, and he is able to use his magic (a spell and an amulet) to protect the pharaoh. Then he goes to the temple of Thoth at Hermopolis and receives a dream from Thoth to go to the library of the temple and find a chest with a papyrus book in it, which he is to copy. That night, when the magical beings of Horus-son-of-the-Nubian-woman return to beat pharaoh again, they are unable to do anything. On the next day, Horus-son-of-the-Wolf himself animates his own litter of wax with four porters to go at night to Nubia and return the favor to the Nubian king. For three nights in a row, the Nubian king is taken to Egypt and beaten and then returned to his own land. He curses Horus-son-of-the-Nubian-woman, who attempts to protect the king from the actions of Horus-son-of-the-Wolf with sorcery. The story in the document continues with a recounting of how the Nubian sorcerer, Horus-son-of-the-Nubian-woman, goes to Egypt to try to defeat Horus436.  The two shamans not chosen by the king of Nubia include one who proposes to send darkness upon Egypt for three days and nights and one who would cause the fields to be unproductive for three years.

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son-of-the-Wolf. The Nubian king has said he will put him to death if he does not save him from the Egyptians. Before he leaves, Horus-son-of-the-Nubianwoman tells his mother what he will do, and she warns him that he will not be able to defeat them. He tells her that, if he is suffering in Egypt, she will receive a sign: her food and water will become the color of blood, as will the sky as well. In Egypt, Horus-son-of-the-Nubian-woman finds his nemesis, Horus-son-of-theWolf, in pharaoh’s court. 437 There is a contest in which, first of all, the Nubian sorcerer makes fire break out in the presence of the court using a written spell (hp n sẖ); Horus-son-of-the-Wolf extinguishes it with his own spell. Next, the Nubian sorcerer casts a cloud over the court so that no one is able to see, and Horusson-of-the-Wolf dispels it. The third feat of sorcery by the Nubian is to create a vault of stone in the sky to loom over pharaoh; Horus-son-of-the-Wolf creates a sky boat with a spell to drag the vault away. Finally, the Nubian, in an attempt to escape to Nubia, turns himself into an invisible gander. Horus-son-of-the-Wolf reveals the gander to the court, and the Nubian sorcerer is about to be killed by a fowler when his magician mother in Nubia, warned by the agreed-upon portends, comes to rescue him in the shape of a goose. She, too, is exposed and is about to be killed when she pleads for her life and that of her son. She promises to leave Egypt forever, while Horus-son-of-the-Nubian-woman promises not to return to Egypt for 1,500 years. At this point, the enclosed story—that of Si-Osire reciting the contents of the sealed letter about the events 1,500 years earlier—ends. Si-Osire stops his recitation and reveals himself to be Horus-son-of-Paneshy (“Horus-son-of-theWolf ”) returned to life in the form of Setne Khamwas’s son. The messenger is revealed to be that very Nubian sorcerer who plagued the king of Egypt 1,500 years earlier. 438 The Nubian is burned up with fire cast by Horus-son-of-theWolf ’s spell, and Horus-son-of-the-Wolf in the form of Si-Osire disappears from the awed court and his sorrowing father, Setne Khamwas. Pharaoh and his great men declare, “There is no good scribe or wise man like Horus-the-son-of-theWolf! No other will come into existence after him ever again!” 7,7). At the end of the papyrus, before its colophon, Setne Khamwas and his wife are reported to 437.  They greet each other as if they had formerly been close colleagues; perhaps lost episodes in the cycle are referred to here. Horus-son-of-the-Wolf seems to have once saved the Nubian shaman from a watery grave, and Horus-son-of-the-Nubian-woman uses a pun on Horus-son-of-Paneshy’s name (son-of-the-Wolf), reminding him that he had once taught him the “language of wolves” (Ritner, “The Adventures of Setna and Si-Osire (Setna II),” in LAE, 486). 438.  The proposed chronology is awkward and demonstrates the distance between the period of the story’s setting and the time in the Hellenistic or Roman period in which it was actually composed (the papyrus itself dates to the first century c.e.). The first appearance of the Nubian shaman is said to have occured 1,500 years prior to the time of Ramses II during the reign of Thutmosis III. However, Thutmosis III of the Eighteenth Dynasty ruled from 1479 to 1425, while Ramses II of the Nineteenth Dynasty (1290–1224) reigned only 200 years later.

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have another son to replace Si-Osire and to never fail to offer burnt offerings and libations to the spirit of Ḥor-son-of-Paneshy. In both Setne I and II, there is at least one enclosed story within a larger frame. In Setne I, it is a flashback in which Ihweret tells her story and the tale of her husband’s (Naneferkaptaḥ’s) misfortunes on account of the book of Thoth. In Setne II, it is Si-Osire’s narration of a past event recorded on the sealed document held by the Nubian sorcerer/shaman. In each case, however, the enclosed story is neither the major focus nor independent from the boxing story but develops the plot and characterization within the larger frame. Furthermore, in addition to one story-within-a-story, Setne II has a paratactic structure of three stories or episodes set alongside one another (the miraculous birth of Si-Osire, the descent to the Netherworld, and the story of Si-Osire’s reading of the sealed document. Hans-Peter Müller notes that, as with Papyrus Westcar, the Egyptian wonders performed by Horus-son-of-the-Wolf in Setne II recall certain miracles from the Exodus story. In the contests between Horus-son-of-the-Wolf and the Nubian magician, the Nubian conjures fire and Horus-son-of-the-Wolf produces water to put it out, then the Nubian creates a mist so dark that no one can see anyone else and Horus-son-of-the-Wolf disperses it (cf. Exod 10:23). 439 This may also parallel the magician contest in Naneferkasokar and the Babylonians, in which the sky turns dark during a contest, and it parallels the magician contest of Djoser and Imhotep (also known as the Life of Imhotep) in which the rival magicians battle with snakes and fire (see below). One also notes the ethnic component to all of these battles: Egyptians struggle against foreigners. Just as Naneferkasokar battles Babylonians on behalf of Egypt and Imhotep wars with Assyrians, Horus-son-ofthe-Wolf contends with a foreign shaman from Nubia who once humiliated and defeated a past pharaoh and has come back for more. As for the other Setne manuscripts that are all in extremely fragmentary states, note that, although in each case a main character is referred to as a Setne, never is the Setne actually called by the name of Khamwas. However, they have been considered part of the same cycle about Khamwas for various reasons. P. Carlsberg 207, which dates to the second century c.e., contains the same themes as Setne I and/or Setne II: 440 in each case, the Setne is the son of a king (Ramses II in Setne I and II, unnamed in P. Carlsberg 207); in each case Setne 439.  Müller, “ ‫ ח ְַרטֹם‬ḥarṭōm,” 178. One should also note the signs that the Nubian tells his mother will indicate whether or not he is in trouble: anything she eats or drinks will become the color of blood, as will the sky (cf. the Nile water that is turned to blood in the Exodus story, Exod 7:20–22); see William H. C. Propp, Exodus 1–18: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Bible 2; New York: Doubleday, 1999), 349; N. M. Sarna, Exploring Exodus (New York: Schocken, 1986), 69. 440.  The initial publication of the papyrus is by W. J. Tait, “P. Carlsberg 207: Two columns of a Setna-text,” 19–46. New fragments were found and a reworking of the text has been carried out by J. F. Quack and K. Ryholt in “Notes on the Setne Story P. Carlsberg 207,” 141–63.

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meets a great magician of the past, “whose powers put his own pretensions in the shade” (Naneferkaptaḥ in Setne I, Horus-son-of-the-Wolf disguised as Si-Osire the Setne’s son in Setne II, and the Prophet of Sokar-Osiris and the son of a Prophet of Amun-Re in P. Carlsberg 207); 441 and the device of a story-within-astory is used. Both Setne I and P. Carlsberg 207 share a ghost who tells the story of the death of his family, probably because of something the father has taken (Naneferkaptaḥ steals a book of Thoth in Setne I; in P. Carlsberg 207, it is some unnamed item taken by the Prophet of Amun-Re), and in both, the children are killed first, then the wife, and finally the father. The ghost who is encountered in each case is never the father himself (it is the wife in Setne I and the son in P. Carlsberg 207). Furthermore, in both texts, the Setne tells the story to pharaoh and aids the families by giving them a proper burial. Other details—such as how quickly Setne is persuaded to help the ghost—differ. In Setne I, it is the god Thoth who kills the family of Naneferkaptaḥ; therefore, no revenge is expected of Setne. In P. Carlsberg 207, however, Setne goes to Abydos, where the murderer Petese, a Prophet of Isis, is found, then shackles him and his associates and kills them with a spear. 442 P. Cairo CG 30692 (dating to the Ptolemaic period) and P. Carlsberg 423 + PSI inv. D6 (unpublished, from Tebtunis), may also be related to the Setne Khamwas stories in that both mention a foster-brother Inaros, and the first has as a main character the Naneferkaptaḥ already known from Setne I, the famed magician who took the book of Thoth. 443 Spiegelberg thought that the text probably belonged to the missing section of Setne I, but it is more likely that the two missing columns of Setne I could not contain all of the material in P. Cairo 30692. 444 (It could also be that Naneferkaptaḥ appears in more than one story or that the same story appears in variant versions.) In this text, too, Setne speaks to a “great man”—that is, the ghost of a dead person. Finally, another extremely fragmentary text that is perhaps part of the Setne tales is P. Cairo 30758, which dates to the Ptolemaic period (like P. Cairo 30692). 445 P. Cairo 30758 includes a certain Ptahhotep and an unnamed Setne who could be Khamwas. 446 Of note in this text is a marvel, although it is not 441.  Tait, “P. Carlsberg 207: Two columns of a Setna-Text,” 33. 442.  Ibid., 19–46. 443. W. Spiegelberg, Die Demotische Denkmäler II, 1.112–15, 2.pl. 51. See also K.-T. Zau­ zich, “Die schlimme Geschichte von dem Mann der Gottesmutter, der ein Gespenst war,” Enchoria 6 (1976), 79–82; Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 84. 444.  Tait, “P. Carlsberg 207: Two columns of a Setna-Text,” 34. 445.  Spiegelberg wondered if it were part of P. Cairo 30692; W. Spiegelberg, Die Demotische Denkmäler II, 1.145–48, 2.pl. 58. Tait disagrees, saying the writings of various words and signs are “significantly different.”; Tait, “Carlsberg 207: Two Columns of a Setna-Text,” 34. 446.  Note that P. Dem Saq. 1 includes a brief mention of an unnamed Setne at 7,5 and a “Ptahhotep the Setne” twice in 14,20–21, where he is being mourned. This Ptahhotep is not a

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clear what role it serves in the story or why it occurs: the Setne sees a sparrow in a papyrus boat that does not sink. At any rate, the Setne cycle demonstrates the popularity during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods of tales about the deeds of past magicians. Setne II in particular “links the cycles of three magician heroes: Setne, Si-Osire, and Ḥor-son-of-Paneshy (“Horus-son-of-the-Wolf ”) or Ḥor-bar-Pawenesh/Punesh (in Aramaic), the last of whose adventures are known from both Demotic and Aramaic versions.” 447 These magicians are all set in the reigns of Thutmose III and Ramses II, they serve at court or interact with the pharaoh, and they are often at odds with rivals. As in the book of Daniel, the magicians are able to read the sealed or hidden writings of the gods, out-perform their rivals, and receive dreams. Unlike the book of Daniel, however, these stories are concerned with Egyptian narrative themes such as ghosts, lost families, romance, the perfidy of women, and proper burial.

3.3.2.4.1.2. Si-Osire In Setne II, Si-Osire is the son of Setne Khamwas (son of Ramses II), who is actually the reincarnation of Horus-son-of-the-Wolf (Horus-son-of-Paneshy), a famous magician from years before. The same Si-Osire may be found among the Spiegelberg jar-texts (Krugtexte)—that is, the sherds of jars purchased by Wilhelm Spiegelberg from an antiqities dealer in Cairo in 1903 or later identified by him in the Berlin collection of Demotic literary ostraca. 448 The jar-texts were dated by Spiegelberg to the first and second centuries c.e., and he believed them to be scholarly exercises, since the writing appears hurried and full of mistakes, and the contents themselves seem to be abbreviated or summarized. 449 Jar-texts A and B both contain abbreviated texts about magicians, while the texts of C and the other fragments (D–F) are too broken to know exactly what the gist of their contents are. 450 The various texts on the jars are written in the form of letters main character of the text and is possibly part of an incident recalled from the past (Smith and Tait, Saqqâra Demotic Papyri I, 46). 447.  Ritner, “The Adventures of Setna and Si-Osire (Setna II),” in LAE, 470–71. SiOsire is found also in jar-text B, lines 1–9 (see below). 448.  Krug A, whose sherds made up nearly an entire jar about 40 cm in height, was sent to Berlin by Spiegelberg; today, nothing of this jar exists, because it was destroyed in WW II (Betrò, “La storia del mago Hi-Hor,” 24). It is now known as P 12345 in Berlin, not P12845 as cited imprecisely by Spiegelberg; see Philippe Collombert, “Le conte de l’hirondelle et de la mer,” in Kim Ryholt, ed., Acts of the Seventh International Conference of Demotic Studies, 59–76, esp. p. 60. 449.  Spiegelberg, Demotische Texte aus Krügen, 7. 450.  Jar-text A has four letters, jar-text B has two, and jar-text C (and fragments D–F) is so broken that it is impossible to know whether there is a letter format. Jar-text C may contain something about the priesthood at Heliopolis. Jar-text A, lines 16–23, which contains the fable of the “Sea and the Swallow,” is re-translated in Philippe Collombert, “Le conte de l’hirondelle et de la mer,” 59–76. This fable has a parallel in the Pañcatantra, as mentioned above. See also: Brunner-Traut, Altägyptischen Märchen (Düsseldorf: Diederichs, 1963), 126–27, 280–81 (#19);

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from various individuals to their “lord” or to the pharaoh; all of the individual narratives in jar-texts A and B, except the second letter of jar-text A, use the letter form as a means of introducing a narrative. The story on Spiegelberg’s Jar-text B.1 (Jar Strassburg, lines 1–9) relates the birth and childhood of someone who is not himself expressly named but is called the son of Setne and his wife Mehusekhe, thus making it more than likely that this is the Si-Osire of Setne II, whose parents are also so identified. 451 He was exceptional from birth and seems to have done well as a pupil, although the last part of the letter hints at some youthful foolhardiness. 452

3.3.2.4.1.3.  Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh (P. Dem. Saqqāra 2 verso) P. Dem. Saqqāra 2 (fragments of primarily one column), dating to the fourth but possibly the third century b.c.e., 453 contains two interesting Demotic narratives of perhaps the same genre as the Setne Khamwas stories but which are not part of that cycle. The text of the recto, The Vengeance of Isis, involves a woman who supplicates the famous Imhotep in order to save a dying man from the vengeance of Isis (see below). The text of the verso, Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh, may continue the same tale as the recto but is concerned with the abduction of a pharaoh to a wilderness, where he lives among animals and is then rescued by a courtier named Merib who has been falsely accused in regard to the pharaoh’s disappearance. The pharaoh is possibly to be identified as Badja, the first king of the 2nd Dynasty according to an Abydos list. 454 Since it is not likely that the two separate stories fit together into a single narrative due to their distinct events and characters, there are two possibilities for explaining the relationship between the two stories: “either two or more stories of similar character were written by the scribe on a single papyrus or a framing story of rather general character may have included two or more long, quite diverse incidents, illustratead., “Fabel,” LÄ II (1977), 71–73; and ead., Altägyptische Tiergeschichte und Fabel, 39–40, 53, 55–56. 451. Text and translation in Spiegelberg, Demotische Texte auf Krügen, 18–19, 51–52; translation in Robert K. Ritner, “The Childhood of Si-Osire (Jug Strassburg),” in LAE, 490–91. 452.  Spiegelberg, Demotische Texte auf Krügen, 19. His mother asks the schoolteacher if her son is stupid; someone mention that his/her limbs were beaten; and an absence is referred to; see Ritner, “The Childood of Si-Osire (Jug Strassburg),” in LAE, 491. 453.  H. S. Smith and W. J. Tait, Saqqâra Demotic Papyri I, 70–142. Translation in Bresciani, Letteratura, 951–54; description in Joachim Friedrich Quack, Einführung in die altägyptische Literaturgeschichte III, 26–27. 454.  The name of the pharaoh is partially preserved in three lines: x+I, 1, 2, and 4; the cartouche is damaged in all contexts. The first element BꜢ is clear; however, the second element might be ḏꜢ, mn, or nfr. BꜢ-ḏꜢ is the preferred reading by the editors, since it resembles the name for the first king of the 2nd Dynasty in Abydos list 9; see Smith and Tait, Saqqâra Demotic Papyri I, 114–15. However, all three possible names BꜢ-ḏꜢ, BꜢ-mn, or BꜢ-nfr could be “archaizing attempts to produce a Pharaonic name of early Old Kingdom type” (p. 114).

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ing, for instance, the importance of not offending the gods or marvels that could be wrought by magic (cf. Papyrus Westcar).” 455 If Merib is to be identified with the Merib of Setne I, the son of the magician Naneferkaptaḥ and Ihweret, then this story may belong to the Setne Khamwas cycle. In Setne I, he is drowned as a boy, but the editors of the text suggest that he could appear here in reincarnated form, as Si-Osire did in Setne II. Unfortunately, because no patronymics or titles are preserved, there is no way of knowing if this is the same Merib, and thus it is “best not to assume any direct relationships between the texts.” 456 Parts of two columns are preserved: a minimal portion of one 37-line column and one nearlycomplete column of 38 lines. With regard to the plot, it seems that the pharaoh is being held in the mountains or desert (dw.w) somewhere outside Egypt (perhaps Amurru or Assyria). 457 In the fragmentary column, he seems to be praying to a goddess, and from information here and in the more complete column, it appears he is without food, drink, warmth, or sandals. A dream, someone waking up, and a letter are also mentioned. The next column begins with a prayer to Hathor from a certain Merib (Mr-ı͗b), whose title is not preserved but who seems, because of his actions, to be a court official. He asks Hathor to let him know what has happened to the pharaoh, since it is he (Merib) who put the awe of Hathor in the pharaoh’s heart. He also says that he has been accused of causing the pharaoh to perish, although the identity of his accuser is not preserved. Merib then falls asleep and is sent a dream by the goddess. In the dream, she shows him a lion that she gave to pharaoh to be his servant. 458 The lion—perhaps a symbol of Hathor’s protection—seems to be rejected by pharaoh, and Hathor thus becomes enraged and places a mortal sickness upon the king. 459 However, in the dream, Merib sees that Hathor sends the pharaoh food, even sending salt to him, via the lion. There are other beasts surrounding pharaoh as well (a giraffe, hyena, etc.). 460 Hathor 455.  Smith and Tait, Saqqâra Demotic Papyri I, 142. 456.  Ibid., 141. In addition, the setting of each is very different: the Setne stories are clearly New Kingdom, while Merire’s Pharaoh Badja might be Old Kingdom. 457.  The name ı͗mrṱ (Amurru) or ı͗šrṱ (Assur, that is, Assyria or Syria; the name can designate both in Demotic; see Erichsen, Demotisches Glossar, 45) is based on a possible reconstruction of line 16 by the editors: Smith and Tait, Saqqâra Demotic Papyri I, 120, 140. Note also that the beasts of the mountain are exotic—giraffe, hyena, etc.—hinting at a foreign locale. 458.  x+I, line 10: sdm[-ʿš] sfy, “servant of the sword,” that is, “sword-bearer”? (Smith and Tait, Saqqâra Demotic Papyri I, 110, 118). 459.  x+I, line 12: dı͗=y ⸢šn⸣ pꜢ ⸢mwt⸣ [n-ḥꜢt.ṱ=f?], “I placed ⸢sickness of death⸣ [in his heart?],” probably a forerunner of Coptic ϣⲱⲛⲉ ⲙⲡⲙⲟⲩ “mortal sickness” (Smith and Tait, Saqqâra Demotic Papyri I, 118). See also Crum, A Coptic Dictionary, 571a: ϣⲱⲛⲉ “sickness.” Smith and Tait observe that it is certain that the final word is a noun from the stem mwt; and for the intervening word, šn fits the traces best. 460.  That the animals are protecting the pharaoh, just as the lion is, seems very possible. In x+I, 16–17, immediately after the lion is sent to the pharaoh on the mountain, a group surrounds him and speaks to the pharaoh, saying that they will rescue him and bring him back

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then tells Merib to reassure the people and to inform the court-guard; he is then to fetch Pharaoh Badja on a horse without using a bridle or reins, letting the horse go as it wills without beating it or getting someone to lead it. This Merib does. At the court, he tells the guard that, although they have not been able to find pharaoh, he himself knows how to find him: “There is no one who knows (about) these wanderings of Pharaoh among you, (but) they are not concealed from me” (x+I, 26). This angers a certain letter-scribe (pꜢ sẖ n pꜢ wḫꜢ, literally “the scribe of the letter”), who scoffs at Merib, asking him if he thinks he is the High Steward who appointed the pharaoh or is suggesting that he is even pharaoh himself. 461 The High Steward (pꜢ mr-ʿwı͗, ‘the overseer of the house’, whose name is not preserved) then claims that he knows where to find the king. The letter-scribe, apparently an ally of the High Steward, writes all this down and then suggests to the High Steward that certain children (the pharaoh’s or Merib’s?) should be imprisoned, and the High Steward agrees. As for Merib, he mounts the divinely-guided steed, and the High Steward follows him. They find the monarch seated among the group of animals, and he speaks to Merib, who prostrates himself while inwardly thanking Hathor for her guidance. As the High Steward approaches, the animals part way to reveal the pharaoh only when the lion roars. As soon as the High Steward has bowed before him, pharaoh accuses him of being the one who has kept him captive. It is not clear why the pharaoh does this; perhaps the chamberlain actually did abduct him (although if he did, why did he have to follow Merib to find out where the pharaoh was hidden?) or the chamberlain was somehow responsible for pharaoh’s disobedience to Hathor, which prompted her disfavor and the illness. The story breaks off at this point. The theme of a king made ill by a deity and sent to live among wild animals but later rescued by a courtier reminds Joachim Friedrich Quack of both Daniel 4 and “The Prayer of Nabonidus.” 462 In all three, the courtier is a devotee of a particular deity, who blesses him, and it is the courtier who persuades his monarch to venerate that deity. The parallel may be even closer to the Old Greek edition of Dan 4, where the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar is specifically taken away by an unnamed usurper who is said to be a corrupt person from within the king’s own household. This corresponds nicely to the situation in Merib, where it is the “overseer of the house”—that is, the High Steward—who is somehow responsible to Egypt. Since there are no other characters around at this point, it may be the animals who gather and speak here. None of the other animals talk in what is preserved of the story, but both the lion and later the horse seem to have magical abilities. The lion has a divine determinative after the lion designation (mꜢı͗) and so might be a divine character or a human who has been transformed by Hathor or Isis, one of the other goddesses mentioned in the text (Smith and Tait, Saqqâra Demotic Papyri I, 139). 461.  The letter-scribe’s name is only partially preserved: Mer-(. . .); x+I, 26. 462.  Quack, Einführung in die altägyptische Literaturgeschichte III, 27. Quack only notes this briefly in passing.

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for holding pharaoh captive on a remote mountain. The same fellow is even seen by the court as the one who appointed pharaoh to the throne in the first place and is then in charge while the pharaoh is absent (so says the letter-scribe in his speech). In addition, the High Steward appears not to be a follower of Hathor, the main goddess of the piece and the deity worshiped by Merib and the pharaoh, but of Isis instead. Moreover, the accusation or slandering of a courtier in Merib is reminiscent of plot features found in other court conflicts, especially Dan 3 and 6 (and in the Joseph story and Aḥiqar, too). Merib has been falsely charged with kidnaping pharaoh by other members of court, and in his prayer to Hathor also seems to be asking for help to clear his name. The end of the story is not preserved, but we can assume that, since the pharaoh denounces the High Steward when he sees him on the mountain, he will later repudiate him again to the whole court when he returns, thus “rehabilitating” Merib. 463 There is also more than a hint of court contest in Merib’s relationship with his colleagues. The High Steward claims to know what has happened to pharaoh (indeed, he may be the one who hid him away), and in response to Merib’s claim that he will find the king, asserts that it is actually he, the High Steward, who will do so. Moreover, the letter-scribe— an ally of the High Steward—accuses Merib of behaving as if he were pharaoh, while at the same time the letter-scribe has aided the High Steward in usurping pharaoh’s place. This contest element is reinforced by the appearance of the divinely-guided horse who gets Merib to the sequestered king first.

3.3.2.4.1.4.  Merire and Sisobek (Papyrus Vandier) Papyrus Vandier is a text of unknown provenance written in hieratic script (but in a language close to early Demotic) dating to the late sixth- or possibly the fifth-century b.c.e. 464 The papyrus partially preserves on its recto a story about 463.  The story also has some superficial elements in common with the story of Daniel in the lions’ pit, especially in the version found in Bel and the Serpent: a captive human is set among wild beasts—in particular, a lion or lions—who make no effort to harm him because they are restrained or controlled by a deity; miraculous meals are delivered to the prisoner; and someone is wondrously carried to the place of confinement by a deity in order to help the captive (in Merib it is Merib on a divinely-guided horse who comes to release pharaoh, and in Bel and the Serpent it is the prophet Habakkuk who is picked up by his hair by an angel and borne through the air, carrying his stew to Daniel in the lions’ pit). 464.  Editio princeps: G. Posener, Papyrus Vandier (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1985). Other translations include: Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert, “Der Pharao, die Magier und der General—Die Erzählung des Papyrus Vandier,” BiOr 44 (1987), cols. 6–21; Frank Kammerzell, “Miʾjareʾ in der Unterwelt (Papyrus Vandier),” in TUAT III/5, 973–90; Quack in Hoffmann and Quack, Anthologie der demotischen Literatur, 153–60. The verso contains a copy of the Book of the Dead that was copied later than the story on the recto. It was likely this religious reuse of the papyrus that assured its survival. The provenance of the papyrus is unknown, however, since it first surfaced on the antiquities market in Paris in 1973 (Posener, Papyrus Vandier, 1). It was bought anonymously and donated to the Institute de Papyrologie

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a magician (ḥry-tp), scribe, and general named Merire (Mry-Rʿ). The pharaoh Sisobek (SꜢ-Sbk), in whose reign the story takes place, is probably fictional, although the setting is likely late New Kingdom, perhaps 1300–1100 b.c.e. The person of Merire may be identified with a legendary “General Merire” (mr-mšʿ Mry-Rʿ, a title also given the Merire of Papyrus Vandier somewhat later in the story), known from a fragmentary Ramesside text found at Deir el-Medīna. 465 Nonetheless, the legends may ultimately go back to a real son of Ramses II, just as there was a historical Setne Khamwas about whom legendary stories also arose. Posener, the editor of Papyrus Vandier, prefers to think that the story began with a historical Merire in the Eighteenth or Nineteenth Dynasty, after which the legends developed. In addition, F. Kammerzell has suggested that P. Tebtunis Tait no. 9, verso, may contain a Demotic translation of an older Vorlage of Papyrus Vandier. 466 Hans-W. Fischer-Elfert believes that the existence of the Deir elMedīna fragment (P. Deir el-Medineh 39) indicates that Merire was transmitted over a period spanning Ramesside times to the sixth century, but that it had to circulate in the literary underground because of the way the pharaoh is portrayed as a slave to his courtiers. 467 The story of Papyrus Vandier is only coherent in the first 5 well-preserved pages; pages 6–10 are very fragmentary and nearly unreadable. 468 However, the gist of the tale involves some themes already found in stories of other magicians, as well as a few new ones. et d’Égyptologie de l’Université de Lille III, where it was registered as PL 139 and designated Papyrus Vandier. On its language, see DePauw, A Companion to Demotic Studies, 32. See also A. Shisha-Halevy, “Papyrus Vandier Recto: An Early Demotic Literary Text?,” JAOS 109 (1989), 421–35; and J. F. Quack, “Notes en marge du papyrus Vandier,” RdÉ 46 (1995), 163–70, who calls the language of the text Proto-Demotic. 465.  Edited by S. Sauneron, “Deux pages d’un texte littéraire inédit. Papyrus Deir elMedineh 39,” which was completed by Y. Koenig, in Livre du centenaire 1880–1980 (ed. Jean Vercoutter; MIFAO 104; Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéology Orientale, 1980), 135–41; and Frank Kammerzell, “Der Tötung des Falkondämonen,” TUAT III/5, 970–72. In Papyrus Deir elMedineh 39, Merire encounters the gods and fights alongside Heryshef against a divine falcon. 466. Frank Kammerzell, “Ein demotisches Fragment der Merire-Erzählung? pTebtunis Tait Nr. 9 und pLille 139,” GM 127 (1992), 53–61. See also W. J. Tait, Papyri from Tebtunis, 37–39, pl. 3. Kammerzell’s readings differ from Tait’s in at least three points. According to Kammerzell, the Tebtunis fragment says someone cannot eat and drink and cannot sleep; pharaoh is mentioned several times and is said to speak, but it is not clear that he is the one who is upset; the “great ones” of Egypt are called, while in Papyrus Vandier it is the ḥr.w-tp “magicians.” There are several other loose parallels, which Kammerzell believes indicates that Papyrus Vandier and the Demotic p.Tebtunis Tait no. 9 are witnesses to the same composition; Kammerzell, “Ein demotisches Fragment der Merire-Erzählung? ” 60–61. 467.  Fischer-Elfert, “Die Arbeit am Text: Altägyptische Literaturwerke aus philologischer Perspektive,” in Loprieno, ed., Ancient Egyptian Literature: History and Forms, 507. 468.  The papyrus was in better shape when it first surfaced; the first photos and handcopies are invaluable for reconstructing the text. It can be pieced together because of the text on the verso, which contains sayings from the Book of the Dead.

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The story in Papyrus Vandier begins immediately with an introduction of the main characters. In the reign of a certain king Sisobek (SꜢ-Sbk) of Upper and Lower Egypt, 469 there lives a good scribe (sš) 470 and magician (ḥry-tp) Merire, who is young and whose excellence is kept from the pharaoh by the other magicians out of fear that they will be thrown out of the court. The setting of the court is not given; however, it is quite possible that the royal palace of the story is in Memphis, as is the case in Papyrus Westcar (mentioned once, in 2,15). After this explanatory introduction, king Sisobek becomes ill upon consuming his customary nightly repast and calls for all his magicians (ḥry.w-tp). His food tastes like clay, his beer like water, his eye is fixed, he is unable to sleep, and he apparently sweats so much that his clothes no longer cling to his body and he is like a man who has stepped out of a river. 471 After describing his state to his magicians, they cry out and tell him that the same condition had been manifested in Mycerinus (king in the 4th Dynasty, successor to Khafre/Chephren). 472 After opening their books, they are able to tell Sisobek that he has only seven days to live. This recalls the story about Mycerinus in Herodotus’ Histories (2.133), where Mycerinus is told by a certain Buto that he would live six years and die in the seventh. 473 469.  In the editio princeps, Posener claims that the king named here does not seem to be a historical personage as would be typical for Egyptian stories. But see H.-W. Fischer-Elfert, “Der Pharao, die Magier und der General—Die Erzählung des Papyrus Vandier,” 15–16, for a discussion on the possible renderings of SꜢ-Sbk as a historical name, Shepseskaf, Sheshonq I, or a “Son-of-Shabako.” R. Jasnow suggests also that Diodorus Siculus 1.94 and Herodotus 2.136 preserve a tradition of a successor of Mycerinus whose name Sasukhis/Asukhis may be a loose rendering of SꜢ-Sbk (Jasnow, “A note on Pharaoh SꜢ-Sbk in Papyrus Vandier,” Enchoria 23 [1996], 179). This makes sense especially because F. Kammerzell reads Mn-kꜢ.w-Rʿ (Mycerinus) as the name of the king who preceded SꜢ-Sbk and in whose day supposedly a similar event occurred (pVandier 1, 6; see F. Kammerzell, “Die Nacht zum Tage Machen: pVandier Rto. 1, 2–7 und Herodot II 133,” GM 96 [1987], 45–52). Thus, while there can be no conclusion regarding whether or not the SꜢ-Sbk of Papyrus Vandier is to be identified with a historical king, the Greek sources possibly reflect the same tradition as in Papyrus Vandier—that he was a successor to Menkaure/Myce­ri­nus. If so, the author in the sixth or fifth century b.c.e. has chosen names from different ancient periods (Mycerinus from the Old Kingdom and Merire from the New). 470.  The word here indicates a learned man, versed in writing, and probably does not indicate a bureaucratic function; see Posener, Papyrus Vandier, 17. As in the two Setne Khamwas stories, Merire is described as a “good scribe” and a “skillful magician.” 471.  Posener notes that the illness as described is rather banal and must not be indicative of any actual disease to be found in traditional Egyptian medicine (Posener, Papyrus Vandier, 24). The recourse of the magicians to books of some kind is typical in Egyptian stories as well as in other texts. Some others suggest that the illness is due to poisoning (see, for instance, Hans-W. Fischer-Elfert, “Die Arbeit am Text: Altägyptische Literaturwerke aus philologischer Perspektive,” 506). 472. Following Kammerzell, contra Posener who reads Djedkare (Ḏd-kꜢ-Rʿw); see Frank Kammerzell, “Die Nacht zum Tage machen: pVandier Rto. 1, 2–7 und Herodot II 133,” 45–52. 473.  The reason given is that Mycerinus had been behaving too well when it had been decreed by fate that Egypt was to be afflicted in his reign; see Kammerzell, “Die Nacht zum Tage machen,” 45–52.

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The king asks if he has done any of them evil that they will not ask for a prolongation of life for him; the magicians begin to weep and confess that none among them is able to request a longer life for pharaoh, except a certain Merire. The king is angry that the magicians have procrastinated in producing such a remarkable man until shortly before his death. Merire is then brought before the king and, weeping, says he can request a prolongation of the king’s life, but it can be achieved only at the expense of Merire’s own (there is no explanation as to why this is the case). 474 The next section of the text (1,12–3, 15) is dedicated to discussions between Merire and the pharaoh about his preparations for a descent into the Netherworld. The king proffers a long list of honors he would grant Merire if he were to agree to take his place: he would show favor to Merire’s young son and give Merire a good funeral and mortuary cult (very important to an Egyptian)—all Egypt will mourn for him, he will be honored at Heliopolis (perhaps even buried there), flowers will be offered, and his name established in the temples for all eternity. 475 In his turn, Merire extracts an oath from the pharaoh that the pharaoh will not allow Merire’s wife Ḥnwt-nfrt to leave her husband’s house nor should he allow either a noble to enter in or even the pharaoh himself to look at her. But this is not all: Merire also asks that the children of the magicians, whom he blames for holding him back from the pharaoh, be sent to the Netherworld with him. Pharaoh seems to agree, claiming that they will be Merire’s replacement(?) and that Merire will again be with him someday. It appears that Merire then prepares himself, shaving and dressing in fine linen (2,13), and goes to the pharaoh to ask him to come to Heliopolis and perform certain rituals so that Merire might learn the way to the Netherworld. The first five lines of page 3 are incomplete, but it seems the other magicians arrive before the pharaoh. Merire (who is from 3,2–3 onward called “General Merire,” as if he were the leader of a foreign expedition), when asked again what might be done for him, again requests that some people (literally, “their people,” presumably more members of the magicians’ families?) be made to go into death with him; pharaoh has the women of the people brought. 476 There seems to be a repetition in 3,7–11 in which the pharaoh vows by Re-Herakhty that Merire will live again, an assertion that is echoed by the magicians, but Merire continues to tell them he is going to die and will not return. Before finally departing, Merire asks permission to take a statuette of Hathor-of-the-Red-Lake with him into the Netherworld (the statuette, like the magicians’ children, does not seem to be mentioned again). Merire’s final words to the king are in 3,14–15: he says that 474.  Although “la croyance qu’un mourant pouvait être sauvé et même un mort ressuscité grâce à un substitut sacrifié à sa place, existait en Egypte” (Posener, Papyrus Vandier, 25). 475. As Posener notes, the construction of a tomb is not mentioned nor the establishment of a full mortuary cult, unless the flowers offered later are indicative of the latter (Papyrus Vandier, 26). 476.  Kammerzell, “Miʾjareʾ in der Unterwelt,” TUAT III/5, 980.

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he is going to present the pharaoh’s prayers before “the great living god” (pꜢ nṯr ʿꜢ ʿnḫ), and that pharaoh is to stand far off and not watch him depart. He then expresses the wish that Re-Herakhty might let him be with pharaoh again. At the end of page 3, Merire departs to the Netherworld and is greeted by Hathor, whom he tells that he has come to request prolongation of life for the pharaoh; she says she will present him to the great living god, the master of the Netherworld, who otherwise remains unnamed. Before the great living god, Merire is asked to report on the condition of temples and other matters on earth, and Merire confesses that the temples are prosperous, although the common people seem to be in misery and unhappy over certain social ills. In a very fragmentary section, the great living god seems to grant the pharaoh a longer life (perhaps to the hundredth year, 4,8), and Merire asks to be brought back on high, but the latter is apparently a wish not granted at this time. In 4,9–12, Merire asks the goddess Hathor to check on his affairs when she next goes up to earth for a particular festival, since he is unable to leave. When she returns, she makes known to him that the pharaoh has broken his promise: he has taken Merire’s wife as a royal spouse, has given his house to someone else, and has killed Merire’s only son. When a weeping Merire asks who was behind this, the goddess informs Merire that it was the magicians who had incited the king’s actions. In the increasingly broken text of page 5, since Merire is not allowed to ascend to the world of the living, he magically fashions from clay and brings to life “a man of earth” (rmṯ n sꜢ ṯw), or golem, to send in his place. 477 The golem goes to stand before the pharaoh and tells him that he should punish the evil magicians by throwing them into the furnace (ʿḫ) of Mut at Heliopolis. 478 The pharaoh is unable to see anyone around him and is thus startled by the words he hears. Be477.  The theme of animating figurines is found in other Egyptian magician stories. Note, for example: the second preserved story of Papyrus Westcar, where the magician makes a crocodile out of wax; the “Imprisoned Magician” stories in Demotic (Berlin P 12345 and Papyrus Heidelberg 736), in which birds are brought to life to save the magician from captivity; the wax litter animated in the Setne Khamwas II story; and in the The Stories of Petese where various creatures are animated from wax. On the golem as a folkloric motif and the relationship of the golem in Papyrus Vandier to an Egyptian shabti (the statues of terra cotta or other material that accompanied the dead in their tombs), see Emma Brunner-Traut, “Der Magier Merirê und sein Golem,” Fabula 31 (1990), 11–16; Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt (trans. David Lorton; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 110–12. For a golem in early Semitic material, see Shataqat (šʿtqt) in the Ugaritic Kirta story, tablet 3, col. 5, 25–col. 6, 14. Shataqat is a female creature made by El to cure Kirta’s illness. 478.  Translated by Posener as “fournaisse” and by other translators similarly; see W. Erichsen, Demotisches Glossar, “Feuerbecken, Ofen,” 69; “Feuerbecken, als Gerät zum Brandopfer,” or in the Greek period “auch vom Opferfeuer, das die Böses verbrennt” (Adolf Erman and Hermann Grapow, Wörterbuch der Ägyptischen Sprache [Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1926–63], 1.223); or “ustensile sur lequel on faisait du feu, sorte de brasero ou de foyer mobile” (G. Jéquier, “Matériaux pour servir à l’établissement d’un dictionnaire d’archéologie égyptienne,” BIFAO 19 [1922], 1–271, esp. 88–90).

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cause of this, he calls for all his magicians and, although the text is broken here, it seems the man of earth makes his request again and some (other?) magicians are brought out of prison (where they must have first been imprisoned for some reason and at some time that is unclear). The pharaoh then goes with the magicians to Heliopolis, where he orders them to be killed; they are put in the furnace of Mut. 479 The king returns to his palace while the magicians stand in Re’s presence, with the golem among them without anyone noticing. After a damaged passage, the golem returns to Merire in the Netherworld with a bouquet of flowers, which Merire offers before the great living god, who asks him how he got it. After this point, pages 6–10 are too broken to read satisfactorily, and only isolated phrases and words are preserved. We do not know how the story ends, but it seems likely that Merire gets out of the Netherworld eventually, if one can trust the broken last lines of page 9xy, where someone (perhaps Merire) seems to go again before a king, this time named Menptah (6,7 and 13). 480 Page 7x has repeated promises of a good funerary cult. Finally, with the old magicians out of the way, perhaps new people become part of fresh intrigues and problems for Merire. In his analysis, Posener suggests that there are actually two joined stories here: a primary story presumably stretching throughout the composition involving Merire and the king’s request for him to find a prolongation of his life, and a secondary story that ends on page 5—that is, the conflict with the other magicians at court, which ends in their death and Merire’s vindication. 481 Both have points in common, especially the introduction in which the king, the magicians, and Merire are announced. Since the second story ends on page 5 but there seem to be further incidents between Merire and the king with the introduction of some new characters in the fragmentary pages 7–10 (“your daughter,” “the poor,” a pharaoh “Menptah”), Posener suggests that the frame narrative might even box in another story, as does Setne II. 479.  Posener seems to think the magicians are killed first before they are thrown into the furnace (Papyrus Vandier, 32–33). Other translators and commentators agree that the execution of the magicians is by the fire, as elsewhere; see Ricardo A. Caminos, “Review of George Posener, Papyrus Vandier. . . ,” Or 58 (1989), 535–39; Stephen G. Quirke: the magicians are “immolated” (“Narrative Literature,” in Loprieno, ed., Ancient Egyptian Literature: History and Forms, 275); and Kammerzell, who describes the actions of the golem thus: “Das Kunstgeschöpf setzt beim Pharao durch, dass die Mitglieder des Beraterkollegiums den Flammen überantwortet werden” (“Mi’jare’ in der Unterwelt [Papyrus Vandier],” TUAT III/5, 975). 480.  A good parallel to the theme of the story can be found in the legend of Alcestis, as in the play by Euripides; if so, claims Posener, then there is every chance the hero Merire returns to the world of the living at the end (see Georges Posener, “Philologie et archéologie ègyptiennes,” Annuaire du Collège de France 78 [1977–78], 547; idem, Papyrus Vandier, 34). Quack also believes that Merire returns to the living and speaks again with the pharaoh (Hoffmann and Quack, Anthologie der demotischen Literatur, 160.) It is possible that Petese of the Stories of Petese also returns from the dead or the Netherworld in that narrative (see above discussion). 481.  Posener, Papyrus Vandier, 36–38.

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The story of Merire in Papyrus Vandier is obviously concerned with typical Egyptian themes: magicians (ḥr.w-tp) quarreling at court, a descent to the Netherworld, the magical animation of a modeled creature. 482 Several things are notable. This is the first time in an Egyptian story that there is a group or school of magicians at court waiting in attendance on the king (Posener says this dates back to the reign of Ramses II). 483 These magicians do not do anything particularly magical (except that Merire fashions and animates a golem while he is in the realm of the dead), but in 1,6–7 they do seem to be expected to have some training or competence in medical matters. Also, in this story, the Egyptian king is given a very bad reputation: he is weak, susceptible to the influence of the courtiers, breaks his vows, and is unable to punish the wicked counselors until forced to do so. Finally, this school of magicians exhibits professional jealousy of the young and clever Merire—a theme that Posener believes occurs here for the first time in Egyptian literature. 484 There are many elements shared between this story and those in the Book of Daniel. 485 The theme of professional jealousy is most clearly found within the book of Daniel in the story of Daniel 6, in which the ministers (and in MT, the satraps as well), are jealous of the king’s esteem for Daniel and so trick the king into throwing Daniel into the lions’ den. The contest motif is also found in Daniel 2 and to some extent in Daniel 1, 4, and 5, although it is not as obvious that the foreign courtiers are actively seeking the downfall of Daniel. Note the clear parallels between Merire and Dan 2, 4, and 5, in which the king has a difficulty, calls in his sages, who are unable to solve the problem, before the most skilled courtier (Merire or Daniel) arrives last of all—or is sent for belatedly. King Nebuchadnezzar in chs. 2 and 4 is terrified by a dream and in ch. 2 is even said to be unable to sleep after his dream, just as Sisobek cannot sleep after his meal. The theme of a king’s disrupted sleep or sleeplessness is also found in 1 Esdras 3, 4Q550, and Esther. In Dan 5, however, even more agitation is displayed after the appearance of the hand-writing on the wall; Belshazzar’s face changes, his thoughts disturb him, and his loins are loosened and his knees knock against each other. When the golem speaks before the king in Merire, the king is “surprised” (ḫp) and can see no one. 486 The magicians of Papyrus Vandier have a negative role and deserve their punishment of death by fire. The theme of punishment by immolation is a common one in Egyptian literature and appears in three other Egyptian court tales (the “Pheros story” in the Stories of Petese mentioned above and two tales yet to 482.  A descent into the Netherworld is probably a native Egyptian topos, not an influence from Greek literature; Ritner, “The Adventures of Setna and Si-Osire (Setna II),” in LAE, 471. 483.  KRI II, 326, 7; Posener, Papyrus Vandier, 19. 484.  Ibid., 22. 485.  Holm, “The Fiery Furnace in the Book of Daniel and the Ancient Near East,” 97. 486.  The word ḫp has the sense of “surprendre”; Posener, Papyrus Vandier, 76.

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be discussed: the Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy and the story in P. Saqqāra 1). In Daniel 3, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are heads of state who are punished by being thrown into the fiery furnace ‫אתון נורא יקדתא‬, 3:6) for not bowing to Nebuchadnezzar’s statue on the plain of Dura. The surprise of Dan 3 is that they do not burn up in spite of the heat of the furnace, which instead consumes those who have bound and thrown them in; and the king is astonished by the fact that they walk around in the fire accompanied by a fourth figure who looks like a divine being (literally, a “son of a god”). Nebuchadnezzar has them brought out and praises their God for delivering them. One would expect the Chaldean accusers to be thrown into the furnace in their place, but in the Aramaic text they are not punished, unlike the story of the lions’ den in Dan 6, in which Daniel’s accusers are thrown into the den after he has survived the night. One must turn to the Greek editions of Dan 3 to find the possibility that the Chaldean accusers of the three friends meet due justice.

3.3.2.4.2.  The Priesthood of Heliopolis Ryholt and Dieleman, among others, suggest that there was a cycle of stories about the priesthood of Atum-Re in Heliopolis that parallels the cycle about the priesthood of Ptah in Memphis—that is, the Setne Khamwas stories. 487 The Heliopolis cycle is less well-preserved than the Setne Khamwas stories but would include The Stories of Petese discussed above, with its two main characters, Petese son of Petetum and Hareus son of Tjainefer, a lesonis at the temple of Atum at Heliopolis; the Ḥor-bar-Pawenesh/Punesh narratives in Demotic (unpublished) and Aramaic (AP 71); and more stories about Hareus son of Tjainefer in unpublished texts from Tebtunis and elsewhere, including possibly a partially published text in abnormal Hieratic. 488 While the Instructions of ʿOnchsheshonqy does not seem to be related to these texts and does not share any characters, ʿOnchsheshonqy is a priest of Re in Heliopolis during the Late Period, so his story will be discussed in this section too.

3.3.2.4.2.1.  The Ḥor-Pawenesh or “Horus(-son-of)-the-Wolf” Text (Demotic) There is both an Aramaic text and a Demotic text dealing with a character who seems to be connected to the Horus-son-of-Paneshy (Ḥr-sꜢ-pꜢ-nšy) or “Horus-son-of-the-Wolf ” character from Setne II (he is disguised there as SiOsire, the son of Setne Khamwas). The text in Aramaic was discussed above, 487. Jacco Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites, 226; Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 81–82. 488.  Spiegelberg’s very fragmentary Jar-text C mentions “prophets” and “Atum, Lord of Heliopolis.” See also Ryholt, The Story of Petese Son of Petetum, 82. A story about Hareus son of Tjainefer is partly published by Ryholt in “An Elusive Narrative,” 361–66. To these, P. Turner 8 (which mentions Tinouphis, the Greek form of ṯꜢy-nfr, or, Tjainefer) perhaps should be added.

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while that in Demotic is on unpublished Berlin papyri fragments about the Re priests of Heliopolis. 489 The story features a main character whose name is ḤrpꜢ-wnš, “Horus-the-Wolf,” a name probably to be equated with Ḥr-sꜢ-pꜢ-nšy, the character from the Setne II story of the “High Priests of Memphis.” That the name in Setne II is not to be interpreted as “Horus-son-of-the-Expeller” but as a contraction of pꜢ-wnšy, “Horus-son-of-the-Wolf ” instead, is shown by the pun in Setne II 6,13. 490 Zauzich’s initial description of the Berlin fragments in 1978 reports that there are 15 fragments from what appear to be at least three different manuscripts. Only a small amount of text is preserved on each fragment, but three seem to fit together to present a column about 26 cm wide, of which 60% can be reconstructed (Pap. Berlin P 30023 [+23725+15675]). In the unpublished Berlin fragments, this Horus-the-Wolf or Horus-theJackal is apparently called “magician of the Pharaoh” (Ḥr-tp pꜢ pr-ʿꜢ). 491 The new text also purportedly contains other features of the Setne Khamwas stories: the same chieftain or king (Meroitic kwr) of Meroe in Nubia, the magic book of Thoth and its reading, the production of a sedan chair out of wax by using a magical formula, and even the episode of the abduction of the Egyptian king to Meroe via magic and his thrashing there. In line 13 of the Demotic text (Pap. Berlin 30023 (+23725+15675), Horus-the-Wolf uses a magical formula (hp-n-sẖ) to animate a ship of wax. 492 This is reminiscent of the Aramaic Ḥor-bar-Pawenesh texts; on the recto of AP 71 (line 7), Ḥor-bar-Pawenesh casts a spell over some boats, although it is not clear that they are made of wax. There are some differences between the Berlin fragments and Setne II, however. 493 In the Berlin fragments, there is also a woman with the name Nb-ḥtpy, and the pharaoh of the narratives carries the name WꜢḥ-ib-rʿ-mn lʿḥ-ms. Neither of these names is found in the Setne II story.

3.3.2.4.2.2.  P. Turner 8 and Other Stories of Hareus Son of Tjainefer Another story that may belong to the cycle of stories concerning prophets 494 is P. Turner 8, a small fragment of a Greek manuscript from the second century 489.  The text is announced in K.-T. Zauzich, “Neue literarische Texte in demotischer Schrift,” 36. Zauzich says that there are 70 more papyrus fragments in Copenhagen that remind him of the Ḥr son of pꜢ-wnš story (Zauzich, “Einleitung,” 6). The heroes’ names are all different. 490.  R. K. Ritner, “The Adventures of Setna and Si-Osire,” in LAE, 482, 486. Ritner’s translation of the pun is “At the moment when Horus-son-of-the-Wolf said these words, Horusthe-son-of-the-Nubian-woman answered him, saying: ‘Is it the one whom I instructed in the language of wolves who now performs magic against me?’” 491. So Porten, presumably informed by Zauzich; Porten, “The Prophecy of Ḥor bar Punesh and the Demise of Righteousness,” 437. 492. See Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 70–71. 493.  Zauzich, “Neue literarische Texte in demotischer Schrift,” 36. 494.  Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 82.

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c.e. 495

One character’s name is Tinouphis (a Greek form of Egyptian ṮꜢy-nfr or Tjainefer), and he is called a magos, a term that obviously suggests a priestly function. If this same Tinouphis is to be identified with a certain prophetes mentioned later (the Greek term for Egyptian ḥm-nṯr), as the editor finds quite plausible, the text could be part of the Egyptian prophet stories. 496 Someone in the story, perhaps the prophet, is probably condemned and delivered from either torture or execution by a demios (public executioner). The presence of an adulteress also hints at the sensational and sentimental and reminds the editor of the Greek romances. Additional compositions belonging to the cycle of stories about the priesthood of Heliopolis and mentioning a Hareus may include P. Berlin P 23758 (unpublished) and Spiegelberg’s jar-text C, 497 in addition to at least three unpublished narratives from Tebtunis that have several names identical to those in the Stories of Petese edited by Ryholt; their date is the first or second century c.e. 498 In P. CtYBR 422, Petese, son of Meritum, the Prophet of Atum at Heliopolis, discovers an astrological composition, which he reads before pharaoh. Although the name of this character’s father is slightly different from that of Petese son of Petetum from the Stories of Petese (mr-ı͗tm instead of pꜢ-dı͗-ı͗tm), it might be the same character. Furthermore, in P. Carlsberg 422 + PSI inv. D 11 +Unidentified, one finds a certain Hareus; his father Tjainefer, son of Hareus, the Chief Scribe; as well as another Hareus, son of Tjainefer, the Prophet of Atum at Heliopolis, who is referred to as a “brother” of Tjainefer. 499 In the story, there is apparently a heated discussion between the father and the son about a woman the son wishes to marry. Hareus’s profession is different from that of the Hareus in the Stories of Petese; instead of being a lesonis, he is here a prophet of Atum like Petese. Finally, in P. Carlsberg 159 + PSI inv. D 10, the main character again is Hareus, who falls 495.  M. W. Haslam, “Narrative about Tinouphis in Prosimetrum,” in Papyri Greek & Egyptian Edited by Various Hands in Honour of Eric Gardner Turner on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (P. Turner) (Graeco-Roman Memoirs 68; London: Egypt Exploration Society, 1981), 35–45, pl. IV. The fragment preserves only the lower part of a single column of writing containing the remains of 25 lines whose beginnings are missing. The mix of prose and verse (prosimetrum) in the composition, as well as what can be understood of its contents, puts it in the tradition of Menippean satire. 496.  Otherwise, the text contains only non-Egyptian names: Magoas (a Persian name that brings to mind Bagoas, a eunuch under Artaxerxes III in charge of certain military operations in Egypt) and Sosias (a “Greek slave-name familiar from Greek and Roman comedy”); Haslam, “Narrative about Tinouphis in Prosimetrum,” 38. There is, perhaps, a feminine name Isias as well. 497.  Ryholt, “Elusive Narrative,” 362. 498. Idem, The Story of Petese, 81–82. 499.  Idem, “Elusive Narrative,” 362. The unidentified text (of which Ryholt only has a photograph found in the late Aksel Volten’s papers) contains a fragment of three columns. P. Carlsberg 422 and PSI inv. D 11 are “two fragments that provide most of the missing part of the second column shown in the photograph.”

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in love and marries the daughter of a Prophet of Atum. The story is set around the temple of Heliopolis. The woman gives birth, and Hareus must eventually, or already, have many children, since he is called Hareus-of-the-children. Ryholt suggests that the story is a sequel to the Stories of Petese. 500 In addition, there is an unpublished text in abnormal Hieratic at Oxford (P. Queen’s College) that may be the oldest in the cycle of stories concerning the priesthood of Heliopolis, since it is dated to the twenty-first regnal-year of Piye (750–712 b.c.e.) or Taharqa (690–664 b.c.e.). 501 The text probably comes from Thebes but has a Heliopolitan setting. Some 80 lines on four partly extant pages are preserved. The main text begins in the middle; in the preliminary report of its contents, Baines, van Heel, and Fischer-Elfert report that body parts are named, a request for the “price of ointment” is made, and there is perhaps an unnamed general (mr- mšʿ). 502 Certain legal proceedings include many oaths of Re, and then someone is told to listen to an event that happened in the time of Rameses II. The event narrated describes the building and garden construction at the temple of Atum in Heliopolis. On the fourth and last partly preserved page, a certain Petese is told to bring in Amenemope, who is found guilty of a crime against someone named Ihy. He pays 700 deben of silver and a box of writings(?) to Ihy, who later brings these with him to meet the priests in Heliopolis.

3.3.2.4.2.3.  The Instructions of ʿOnchsheshonqy The Instructions of ʿOnchsheshonqy is a court tale attached to sayings or proverbs and dates to the Ptolemaic period or earlier. 503 The main manuscript 500. Idem, The Story of Petese, 82. 501.  Preliminary reports are in: J. Baines, K. Donker van Heel, and H.-W. Fischer-Elfert, “Abnormal hieratic in Oxford: Two New Papyri,” JEA 84 (1998), 234–36; and J. Baines, “An Ancient Text in a Modern Library,” Egyptian Archaeology 14 (1999), 33–34. The text is under preparation by Hans-Werner Fischer-Elfert. See also Ryholt, “Elusive Narrative,” 361. 502.  Baines et al., “Abnormal hieratic in Oxford,” 235. 503. The editio princeps by S. R. K. Glanville, Catalogue of Demotic Papyri in the British Museum, Vol. II: The Instructions of ʿOnchsheshonqy (British Museum Papyrus 10508) (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1955), must be used together with B. H. Stricker’s Dutch translation because of the latter’s improved readings; see B. H. Stricker, “De Wijsheid van Anchsjesjonq,” OMRO, 39 (1958), 56–79. See also H. S. Smith, “The Story of ʿOnchsheshonqy,” Serapis 6 (1980), 133–57; H. J. Thissen, Die Lehre des Anchscheschonqi (P. BM 105008) Einleitung, Übersetzung, Indices (Papyrologische Texte und Abhandlungen 32; Bonn: Habelt, 1984); idem, “Die Lehre des Anchscheschonqi,” LÄ III (1980), 974–75; idem, “Die Lehre des Anchscheschonqi,” in TUAT, III/2, 251–77. The new, slightly later fragments of the same story or a variant of it have been identified in Copenhagen and published by Kim Ryholt: “A New Version of the Introduction to the Teachings of ʿOnch-Sheshonqy,” in P. J. Frandsen and K. Ryholt, eds., A Miscellany of Demotic Texts and Studies (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2000), 113–40; Tait, “Demotic literature: forms and genres,” 185. For other translations see: E. Bresciani, Letteratura, 825–46; R. K. Ritner, “The Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy (P. British Museum 10508), in LAE, 497–529; Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3.159–84; ead., Late Egyptian Wisdom

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is P. British Museum 10508; its provenance is unknown, and the handwriting dates to the late Ptolemaic period. 504 It is comprised of 28 columns, with gaps in the first two, and many illegible lines from pages 24 onward due to holes and rubbing. The first lines of every column are missing, because the upper edge of the papyrus is gone. A new version of the introduction (that is, the story without the proverbs) from Tebtunis was identified in Copenhagen and published in 2000 (P. Carlsberg 304 + PSI inv. D 5 + P. CtYBR 4512 +P. Berlin P 30489). The Tebtunis manuscript dates to the late second century c.e., and contains parts of at least 10 columns. The story in it is quite different in wording and details from that in P. British Museum 10508 and seems likely to be part of a manuscript that never included the teachings at all, according to Kim Ryholt, the editor. 505 The story of ʿOnchsheshonqy is set in the Saite Period (26th Dynasty, 672– 525 b.c.e.). Its main characters are the children of two priests of Re, one of whom is the ʿOnchsheshonqy son of Tjainefer of the title role and the other his best friend Harsiese, son of Ramose. They are given to nurses, who care for them so that they are nourished and strong, and they are then sent to school together, where they seem to outperform the other children of the priests of Re. Eventually, ʿOnchsheshonqy becomes a priest of Re like his father, and Harsiese becomes a physician. Then, one day, pharaoh commands that a youth be brought to the house of the physicians. Harsiese is questioned first by the physicians en masse, then the chief physician, and then pharaoh himself. Because he pleases everyone with his knowledge, he is made an assistant to the chief royal physician. After the chief physician dies, Harsiese inherits his position and becomes a main adviser to the pharaoh (“Pharaoh did nothing without consulting Harsiese son of Ramose about it,” 1,14–15). 506 At this point in the story, his childhood friend ʿOnchsheshonqy goes to Memphis to visit him. He seems to have some “great trouble,” about which he would like to seek Harsiese’s counsel (in the Tebtunis manuscript, the trouble is an illness). While there, Harsiese informs ʿOnchsheshonqy of a plot against the pharaoh in which he is involved, and ʿOnchsheshonqy reprimands him and praises the king. It seems to be a rather widespread conspiracy, involving councillors, generals, and other officials of the palace. However, Harsiese declares that the matter is already settled and the plan is set. Their conversation is overheard by Wahibre-mekhy son of Ptahertais, a man of the household whose assignment on the nightly guard rotation before pharaoh’s private chamber was set for that very night. In the middle of the night, pharaoh awakens and calls out for whomever is Literature in the International Context, 13–92; Quack, “Die Lehre des Chascheschonqi,” in Hoffmann and Quack, Anthologie der demotischen Literatur, 273–99. 504.  Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3.159. 505.  Ryholt, “A New Version of the Introduction to the Teachings of ‘Onchsheshonqy,” 114. 506.  Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3.161.

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outside his door. Wahibre-mekhy answers. Pharaoh shouts out, “Woe is at hand!” and asks Wahibre-mekhy if he will survive (wḏꜢ). He enters to reassure the pharaoh and, in so doing, reveals the conversation he had overheard. 507 The king cannot sleep for the rest of the night, and the next day, he accuses Harsiese in the presence of everyone in his audience hall, as the lead conspirator. Harsiese admits his guilt, and when asked if he had alerted anyone else to his scheme, he admits that he has told ʿOnchsheshonqy. ʿOnchsheshonqy is brought before pharaoh and questioned as to why he did not inform against Harsiese. ʿOnchsheshonqy responds that he had tried his best to stop his friend, but rather lamely adds that he knew pharaoh would find out anyway. All the conspirators are sentenced to death by immolation in an altar of earth at the door of the palace specially built for the occasion, while ʿOnchsheshonqy is sentenced to prison at Daphnae. In despair, ʿOnchsheshonqy asks for a palette and a scroll in order to write down instructions for his young son, whom he believes he will never see again. After the king allows ʿOnchsheshonqy only a palette but no scroll to be brought to him, ʿOnchsheshonqy begins to write his paternal instructions on the broken sherds of wine-jars. The Tebtunis manuscript represents a variant retelling of the core story, so different that there are few parallel phrases between it and the British Museum manuscript. Some of the differences are significant. 508 For instance, in the Tebtunis manuscript, the chief physician dies first, before the pharaoh interviews Harsiese for the position; this heightens the need for someone to fill the post. The Tebtunis manuscript also specifically states that ʿOnchsheshonqy goes to Harsiese to ask his professional advice regarding an illness. Moreover, in the Tebtunis manuscript, Harsiese actually tells the conspirators that he will refuse to take part in the plot until after he asks the opinion of his friend ʿOnchsheshonqy. Thus, since Harsiese indicates that he requires ʿOnchsheshonqy’s advice, and since ʿOnchsheshonqy counsels him against participating in the plan, it is quite likely that Harsiese has decided not to be part of the plot by the time he enters the audience hall and receives his fate. In addition, in the British Museum manuscript, it is not clear what threat against pharaoh the conspiracy entails. We only know that he has awakened in alarm—perhaps he is already suffering some effects or has been jolted awake by an ominous foreboding—and that he is told by Wahibre-mekhy that he will be saved by Re and the other gods, as if the guardsman is able to tell him exactly what the problem is because he heard it in his for507.  Ryholt seems to disagree with Lichtheim’s “be saved” and suggests that the better translation for wḏꜢ is “prosper,” since the “pharaoh has not yet been informed that he is in danger” (“A New Version of the Introduction to the Teachings of ‘Onchsheshonqy,” 131). However, the very fact that pharaoh awakened, shouting, in such a state indicates that he knows something is wrong. 508.  Ibid., 134–36, for an overview.

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tuitous eavesdropping. In the Tebtunis manuscript, however, the conspirators say “we will let a burial take place” (5,2), which may indicate the use of poison or a more subtle means of assassination instead of a blatant murder employing a knife or the like. Furthermore, when pharaoh goes to his audience hall to confront his treacherous officials in columns 7–8, he seems to take magical or other precautions: amulets of good luck that were first on his body are placed on the body of Horus-Great-of-Strength (Ḥr-ʿꜢ-pḥṱ.t), some medicaments produced “at the place of the secret sycamore” are mentioned, and pharaoh does something with a sycamore-fig of gold (perhaps wears it, along with his royal accoutrements?). Yet, in the audience hall, he seems already to be suffering from an ailment; specifically, he has become blind: “Pharaoh could not see [those on the right] and those of the left” (8,6). 509 The sayings that are attached to the British Museum manuscript are a “combination of pragmatism and humor” and are phrased as short commands or observations, usually in monostichs. 510 Since ʿOnchsheshonqy shares many proverbs in common with four other proverb collections that do not have the introductory story (P. Berlin P 15658, P. Cairo CG 30682, P. Louvre 2414, and P. Sorbonne 1260), and since the Tebtunis manuscript shows indications that it contained no proverbs, it seems possible that the story of ʿOnchsheshonqy existed independently at one time and only later were the proverbs added. 511 The text ends with a final, rather hopeful proverb (“Do not be weary of calling to god. He has his hour for listening to the scribe”), which may hint at a positive end to the story—that is, the final release of ʿOnchsheshonqy. 512 At the very least, it is an appropriate end to a set of proverbs whose introduction is a court tale about an unrehabilitated courtier who has displeased the king. As was noted above, ʿOnchsheshonqy shares many points in common with especially the Aramaic and late versions of Aḥiqar—not least that it is a court conflict with proverbs attached. Moreover, it is one of the few Egyptian court tales that has sometimes been compared to biblical or other ancient Near Eastern court tales such as Daniel. On the other hand, the judgment that its composition is only due to Persian influence in Egypt must be incorrect, given the great number of court tales from Egypt from many periods that we now have in hand. 513 Finally, the theme of immolation in a brazier or furnace as a punishment for sacrilege, treason, or other crimes is found in other Egyptian court tales and in Dan 3.

120. 529.

509. Ibid.,132. 510.  Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3.160. 511.  Ryholt, “A New Version of the Introduction to the Teachings of ʿOnchsheshonqy,” 512.  Ritner, “The Instructions of ʿOnchsheshonqy (P. British Museum 10508),” in LAE, 513.  Pace Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 55.

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3.3.2.4.3.  Texts about Imhotep Imhotep, the lector-priest and historical vizier and architect of pharaoh Djoser in the Third Dynasty, was revered as a sage from the Middle Kingdom onward and was considered a deity from the Saite period onward. 514 By the Hellenistic period, he was identified with Aesclepius and had also become associated with divination, especially astrology. As a god, he grants a revelatory dream to the husband of Tayimhotep as recorded in Tayimhotep’s funerary stele from 42 b.c.e. (BM EA147). In Egyptian tradition, he was credited with the authorship of several books, including works on astrology and wisdom. In the Tebtunis library alone, four astrological treatises are attributed to him, one in conjunction with Hardedef; for example, the unpublished P. CtYBR 422 from the Tebtunis temple library, an astrological work, introduces itself as, “Here is a copy of the book of Imhotep the Great, son of Ptah, the great god.” 515 Moreover, in the “Harper’s Song” (pHarris 500, 6.6–7), he and Hardedef are mentioned as authors of wisdom texts, and since a composition entitled “Instructions of Hardedef ” has been preserved, perhaps some day a set of “Instructions” under Imhotep’s name will also be found. Imhotep is a main character in some stories, too. In the so-called “Famine Stela” (a Ptolemaic-period piece written in hieroglyphs but set in the Third Dynasty under Djoser), he is said to be a “chief lector-priest/magician” (ẖry-ḥb ḥry-tp) who delivers to Djoser a message from the god Khnum. 516 King Djoser is despondent because of a seven-year-long drought and summons Imhotep. Imhotep consults the books in the House of Life in the sanctuary of Thoth at Hermopolis and returns, describing the city of Elephantine and its deity Khnum, who controls the yearly inundation of the Nile River. Later, King Djoser receives a dream from Khnum, promising a return of the Inundation and an end to the famine. 517 514.  On the preserved sources for this tradition, see Wildung, Imhotep und Amenhotep, 5–248. 515.  Ryholt, The Stories of Petese II, 13. 516. Paul Barguet, La stèle de la famine à Séhel (Institut français d’árcheologie orientale bibliothèque d’étude 24; Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1953). Note that, since the king in question is Djoser, it is clearly Imhotep himself who is the messenger, not the “chief lector priest of Imhotep,” as Barguet and Lichtheim have it (Barguet, La stèle de la famine à Séhel, 16, col. 4, pl. iii; Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3.96). See Robert K. Ritner, “The Famine Stela,” in LAE, 386–91, esp. p. 387. 517.  The motivation behind the stele probably is to “provide the priesthood of Khnum at Elephantine with a ‘historical’ claim to all revenue of the territory known as the Dodecaschoinus (12 schoinoi, or some 80 miles), extending southward from Aswan into Lower Nubia” (Ritner, “The Famine Stela,” in LAE, 386–91, esp. 386). Connections between the motifs in the stele (such as a seven-year famine, a wise official who somehow resolves the famine, a king’s dream) and those of the Joseph story have often been made; see for instance, Redford, A Study of the Biblical Story of Joseph (Genesis 37–50), 98–100. Redford notes that famines of seven years’ duration are a common motif rooted in fertility myths (cf. Aqhat III i, 43; Gilgamesh vi, 104).

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3.3.2.4.3.1.  Djoser and Imhotep The story of Djoser and Imhotep (or the Life of Imhotep) is preserved on a papyrus from Tebtunis (P. Carlsberg 85) and dates to the first or second century c.e. Only a few excerpts have been published so far, but the papyrus is in a very poor state of preservation and is in at least 500 fragments. 518 The most discussed episode is about a campaign of pharaoh Djoser to Assyria in order to retrieve the “forty-two divine limbs”—that is, the remains of the god Osiris, who in Egyptian myth was murdered and dismembered by his brother Seth (the number 42 is also symbolic of the Late Period division of Egypt into 42 nomes). In the story, Djoser’s vizier Imhotep has a magician contest with an Assyrian sorceress. 519 Some of Imhotep’s family members are mentioned, as well as one or two magicians (ḥr-tb), one of whom is called Osirsobk. 520 Both Djoser and Imhotep are historical persons from the Third Dynasty, but the story as a description of an invasion of Assyria by Egypt reflects the trauma undergone by the Egyptians in the seventh century and following, when it was the Assyrians who invaded and occupied Egypt. In the duel of magic, the sorceress creates and animates an image of the Egyptian god Geb to enter the battlefield on the Assyrian side. Imhotep counters by producing an image of the goddess Nut. They continue to animate images, ending with the sorceress’s creation of a great snake one hundred cubits long that enters the battlefield to wreak bloody havoc on the Egyptian army. After Imhotep responds to her snake, she forms a fire that Imhotep is able to extinguish. This fragment breaks off just as Imhotep begins to make a speech. In it, he addresses the sorceress as his “sister,” thus indicating his respect for her powers and suggesting that he perhaps considers her to be his equal. A second fragment describes the Assyrian king’s presentation of a tribute of gold and silver to the Egyptian king after the Assyrians have been defeated. The Egyptian king then proceeds to Nineveh, taking tribute from every city through which he passes. Moreover, Djoser is told in a dream by the sun-god not to return the 42 divine limbs to Egypt 518.  This extensive text is already known in a few excerpts through J. W. B. Barns, “Egypt and the Greek Romance,” 33; Dietrich Wildung, Rolle ägyptische Könige im Bewusstsein ihrer Nachwelt: I, Posthume Quellen über die Könige der ersten vier Dynastien (MÄS 17; Berlin: Hesslin, 1969), 91–93; Wildung, Imhotep und Amenhotep, 130–31. See also J. K. Winnicki, “Carrying Off and Bringing Home the Statues of the Gods,” JJP 24 (1994), 149–90, especially 153; Kim Ryholt, “The Life of Imhotep (P. Carlsberg 85),” 305–15; idem, “The Assyrian Invasion of Egypt,” 500–501; idem, “Djoser og Imhotep. Fra samlingen af Carlsberg Papyri,” Papyrus 20/1 (2000), 33–35. 519.  This sorceress was at first taken by Ryholt to be named Seshemnefertum; however, he now says that this Egyptian name belongs to someone else with an unknown role but who converses with Imhotep (Kim Ryholt, “The Life of Imhotep (P. Carlsberg 85),” 309). 520.  The family members include his divine father Ptah, his mother Khereduankh, and his little sister Renpetneferet; the latter two appear with Imhotep in reliefs on the temples of Philae and Deir el-Bahri from the Ptolemaic period. The magician Osirsobk could be the magician who interprets Imhotep’s dream, but this remains unclear (Kim Ryholt, “The Life of Imhotep (P. Carlsberg 85),” 310).

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immediately but to build a temple for them somewhere in Assyria. 521 He tells the dream to a ḥr-tb (perhaps Osirsobk), who responds that Djoser must do as he is told. Djoser then returns to Egypt. Other episodes feature the sister of Imhotep, who dies after a walk and conversation with the magician Osirsobk, ghosts, a lost golden necklace, pharaoh’s blindness (which is healed by Imhotep), a royal tomb (possibly the Step Pyramid), and an encounter with Libyans. 522

3.3.2.4.3.2.  The Vengeance of Isis (P. Demotic Saqqāra 2, recto) Another text featuring Imhotep is the Vengeance of Isis (P. Demotic Saqqāra 2, recto). This papyrus, probably dating to the fourth but possibly the third century b.c.e., may contain a single story on both sides of the papyrus. However, the narrative preserved on the recto seems to be strikingly different from that on the verso. The story on the verso, Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh, was already described above. The text of the recto, The Vengeance of Isis, concerns a woman who entreats the sage Imhotep to save a dying man from the goddess Isis. Magic seems to be used and Imhotep appears as a winged scarab-beetle who transforms himself into his normal form in front of a group of people. Since only one fragmentary column of the text is preserved, with only a few partial lines from the column before and after, not much more can be said. The story does seem to be narrated by someone and there may have been a larger frame story in the unpreserved parts.

3.3.2.4.4.  The Imprisoned Magician (Ḥi-Ḥor and Ḥenenu) The “Imprisoned Magician” story has two versions. One is Spiegelberg’s jartext A.1 (Jar Berlin 12345, lines 1–9) from the first or second century c.e., featuring a certain Ḥi-Ḥor (Ḥı͗-ḥr), 523 and the other is on the recto of P. Heidelberg 736 from the second or third century b.c.e., featuring Ḥenenu-son-of-Ḥor (Ḥn-n=w sꜢ Ḥr). 524 521.  The sun-god mentions “a son of Osiris” (wʿ šr Wsı͗r), and “he is the one who shall [ . . . ] Egypt.” Ryholt suggests that this is a mention of Inaros I, the Egyptian rebel who fought against the Assyrians in the seventh century and is known from the Demotic Inaros Cycle. He is often called “the son of Osiris” in the cycle. If so, this would be an instance of intertextuality (Kim Ryholt, “The Life of Imhotep (P. Carlsberg 85),” 309–10). 522.  Ibid., 308–12. 523. W. Spiegelberg, Demotische Texte auf Krügen, 8, 14–15, 48. Translations: Ritner, “The Magician Hihor (Jug Berlin 12845),” in LAE, 492–93; E. Brunner-Traut, Altägyptischen Märchen, 215–216 and 300–301; G. Roeder, Altägyptischen Erzählungen und Märchen (Jena: Diederichs; 1927), 312–13. It is also discussed in DePauw, A Companion to Demotic Studies, 90–91; Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 83, 89. See also Marilina Betrò for a new reading of the text and translation: Betrò, “La storia del mago Hi-Hor: variazioni Egiziane sul tema de Ahiqar,” in P. Negri Scafa et al., eds., Donum natalicium: Studi presentati a Claudio Saporetti in occasione del suo 60. compleanno (Roma: Borgia, 2000), 23–35. The text was incorrectly cited as Berlin 12845 by Spiegelberg; it actually is Berlin 12345; see Philippe Collombert, “Le conte de l’hirondelle et de la mer,” 60. 524. W. Spiegelberg, “Der demotische Papyrus Heidelberg 736,” ZÄS 53 (1917), 30–35; also discussed in Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 89.

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Ḥi-Ḥor the Magician is just one of several stories appearing on jar-texts published by Spiegelberg (see the discussion above). It takes the form of a letter from Ḥi-Ḥor the magician (ḥry-tb) to the pharaoh, offering to tell him of “the brother of Taneith and his birds and everything pertaining to him and pharaoh in its entirety.” 525 Ḥi-Ḥor is apparently languishing in the royal prison at Elephantine because of some incident involving the brother of Taneith and his birds; the incident itself is unclear both because of the lacunas in the text and because the text probably contained only a summarized version of the story. 526 The two birds, a duck and a hen to whom Ḥi-Ḥor had previously “given life” when they were but eggs, fly to Egypt and find out that Ḥi-Ḥor is imprisoned. 527 They then fly south to him at Elephantine and tell him to write his story on rolls of papyrus so that they can drop them before the pharaoh in his audience hall. Ḥi-Ḥor is provided with writing materials, and he does as the birds tell him. They subsequently take the papyrus rolls to drop before pharaoh, keeping a copy with them. After this, the story is left unfinished on the jar-text; this is probably just one episode in a larger story, or it is a summary of the story as a whole by a hurried pupil writing this as a school exercise. 528 The genre of letter 1 of jar-text A fits the Egyptian magician or courtier story genre in its themes and motifs; the theme of injustice to a magician who is imprisoned for some (perhaps imagined) fault is not least of these (cf. the Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy). We do not know exactly why Ḥi-Ḥor has been imprisoned, but the birds convince him that writing his story down and throwing it before pharaoh will be of some help to him. This suggests that the full matter of Ḥi-Ḥor’s imprisonment is not known to pharaoh. Another theme is that of the animation of matter that is often attributed to Egyptian magicians in the stories about them. As M. Betrò notes, the birds’ claim to have been given life by Ḥi-Ḥor may be an allusion to a preceding episode in which the birds were either saved from death or else were magically animated from some inanimate material. If it is an issue of animation, such a story may fit well into the tradition of the capacity of magicians to animate creatures modeled of wax or of clay magically (see Setne I, in which a wax model of a ship and its rowers and sailors are made to come alive; Setne II, in which a sedan-chair and its four porters made of wax are animated by speaking a magic spell and giving them breath; the animation of a wax crocodile in Papyrus Westcar’s story; modeling of a 525.  “Brother of Taneith,” following Ritner, instead of “Sen-ta-nub(?),” as preferred by Spiegelberg and others; see Ritner, “The Magician Hihor (Jug Berlin 12845),” in LAE, 493; and also Betrò, “La storia del mago Hi-Hor,” 26. 526.  Betrò thinks the translation of “under (ẖr) Elephantine” might be possible, thus possibly indicating a subterranean dungeon at Elephantine; see Betrò, “La storia del mago Hi-Hor,” 25 n. 13. 527.  Spiegelberg identifies these two birds as a wrt-bird (a rooster?) and a hen; see Demotische Texte auf Krügen, 15. 528.  Betrò, “La storia del mago Hi-Hor,” 25.

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golem from clay in Papyrus Vandier; the Stories of Petese, where Petese models numerous creatures from wax; etc.). This gives us a character who not only animates the inanimate but understands the speech of animals, as in Setne I. 529 The stories of Aḥiqar, ʿOnchsheshonqy, and Merire provide parallels to the theme of injustice imposed on a courtier imprisoned by a king, and ʿOnchsheshonqy also shares with the Imprisoned Magician stories the motif of writing memoirs while incarcerated. (ʿOnchsheshonqy loses hope of ever getting out, so he writes “Instructions” for his son.) The story of Ḥi-Ḥor also shares with Merire in Papyrus Vandier the theme of fabricating and animating the instrument of justice or vengeance. Ḥenenu-son-of-Ḥor (Ḥn-n=w sꜢ Ḥr) appears in Papyrus Heidelberg 736 (recto) from the second or third century b.c.e. 530 Since the story is similar to that of the later Ḥi-Ḥor the Magician narrative on jar-text A from the first or second century c.e., one wonders if the two magician stories are about the same character. In this extremely fragmentary text, Ḥenenu is in prison in the town of Sais (Sı͗) at the command of pharaoh, and two birds from heaven visit him in his cell. The birds seem to speak to pharaoh at some point before Ḥenenu is thrown in prison. Ḥenenu is not called a ḥr-tb here but something else that Spiegelberg reads as mḥ-tbe? (line 1) and translates as “magician” (“Zauberer”). 531 Spiegelberg suggested that perhaps both stories are from a collection of stories originally about Ḥenenu, but the name Ḥenenu-son-of-Ḥor was distorted in the Roman period to Ḥi-Ḥor. If so, then the Heidelberg piece goes back to the Ptolemaic period. Ryholt believes it is the same story but was “orally transmitted and was committed to writing at different localities and, perhaps, at different times.” In this opinion, Ḥi-Ḥor from the first or second century c.e. would not be a re-edition of the earlier story of Ḥenenu from the second or third century b.c.e. 532 Marilina Betrò not only has connected the story of Ḥi-Ḥor/Ḥenenu and that of Aḥiqar, she also sees Ḥi-Ḥor as “un Ahiqar in travestimento egiziano.” 533 In addition to the fact that the riddle that Aḥiqar successfully solves is for an Egyptian king, 534 Betrò sees parallels between several elements: the names Aḥiqar and Ḥi-Ḥor; the setting of jar-text A.1 at Elephantine (although Ḥenenu’s story is set in Sais in the Delta); the title given Ḥi-Ḥor: mr-sš or snty; and the general motif 529.  Note here the book of Thoth in Setne I, which allows the understanding of the speech of birds, fish, and animals. On various iconographic representations and much later hymns and traditions about the communication between magicians or Egyptian saints and birds, see Betrò, “La storia del mago Hi-Hor,” 28–29; Edda Bresciani, “Iconografia e culto di Premarres nel Fayum,” EVO 9 (1986), 49–58. 530. W. Spiegelberg, “Der demotische Papyrus Heidelberg 736,” 30–35. Also discussed in Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 89. 531.  On this term, see Spiegelberg, “Der demotische Papyrus Heidelberg 736,” 31. 532.  Ryholt, The Story of Petese, 89. 533.  Betrò, “La storia del mago Hi-Hor,” 23–35. 534.  Betrò notes the New Kingdom intellectual tradition of scribes writing about contests and skirmishes, see ibid., 30.

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of the rehabilitation of a minister. She suggests that the Ḥi-Ḥor story was probably composed by someone who had contacts with the Aramaic-Jewish military colony at Elephantine. She expressly states, however, that the stories of Ḥi-Ḥor and Aḥiqar are not the same (note the Egyptian motif of messenger birds) but that Ḥi-Ḥor is from an Egyptian context that reworked Aḥiqar’s story in the direction of a fable and away from any historical plausibility. Unfortunately, many of Betrò’s suggestions do not seem likely. First of all, the name Ḥi-Ḥor, which does not appear anywhere else but in this text, is probably not a transcription or egyptianizing echo of the foreign name Aḥiqar, as she proposes. We have actual examples of Aḥiqar’s name written in Demotic in the first century c.e. Demotic fragments of Aḥiqar, making it less feasible to argue that the older name was misunderstood or reanalyzed as Ḥi-Ḥor by Egyptians who heard it. In the Demotic fragments of Aḥiqar, the name Aḥiqar is written Ꜣḫykl and Ꜣḫygl, as one would expect: with the ḥet written as [ḫ] and the qof as [k] or [g]. 535 Semitic qof in loanwords is seemingly never rendered as Egyptian [ḫ] but rather as [k], [q], or [g]. 536 It seems best to follow Ranke in supposing Ḥi-Ḥor to be a theophoric name based on Horus, although the first element Ḥi- fits oddly with it. Perhaps Ḥi-Ḥor is a Roman-period distortion of the name Ḥenenu-son-of-Ḥor, as Spiegelberg suggested long ago. 537 Furthermore, to Betrò, Elephantine seems an odd place for a court magician to be; in an authentically Egyptian story, he would be posted in Memphis or Thebes or wherever a royal residence might be found. Thus, because the fifth-century b.c.e. Aramaic version of Aḥiqar is from Elephantine, she believes the setting of Ḥi-Ḥor in a prison there seems suggestive, as does the fact that the author of the first letter in jar-text B is named ‫“( אספמת‬Espemet”), a typical Elephantine onomastic. 538 However, the magician is not “posted” to Elephantine 535.  See K.-T. Zauzich, “Demotische Fragmente zum Ahikar-Roman,” 180–85. 536.  James E. Hoch, Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) does not have any examples of a Semitic [q] showing up in Egyptian transliteration as a [ḫ]. In addition, in the Aramaic papyrus in Demotic script, Papyrus Amherst 63, Semitic [g], [k], and [q] are written with monoconsonantal Demotic signs that are never used for any consonants other than these, while the Demotic sign used for Semitic [ḫ] is also entirely distinct. As for the multiconsonantal Demotic sign used for the forms of the Aramaic word qwm, it is equivalent to the Egyptian gm, the Egyptian word “to find”; see S. P. Vleeming and J. W. Wesselius, Studies in Papyrus Amherst 63: Essays on the Aramaic text in Aramaic/demotic Payprus Amherst 63 (2 vols.; Amsterdam: Juda Palache Instituut, 1985, 1990), 2.110–11. It thus seems there is no evidence for supposing that any Egyptian would have heard ʾAḥiqar as Ḥi-Ḥor. 537.  He suggests that it is possibly a transcription of a Babylonian name ḫaya or a diminutive of the royal name Amenhotep (from the Eighteenth Dynasty) (Hermann Ranke, Die ägyptische Personennamen [2 vols.; Glückstadt: Augustin, 1935, 1952], 1.233–34 n. 18. 538.  The name ‫ אספמת‬appears also in TAD C3.4:7 and 12, a text from the early fifth century b.c.e. (TAD III, 77). Betrò notes the cosmopolitan social fabric attested by the names of the other authors in the jar-texts: the third letter has a theophoric name compounded with

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but imprisoned there. In addition, there are stories and characters concerned with Ele­phantine in other Egyptian texts: note the location and contents of the “Famine Stela,” found on Sahel island near the first cataract (not far from Elephantine). In this Ptolemaic-period text carved in stone on the island, both the Third Dynasty king Djoser and his deified lector-priest Imhotep appear as characters. 539 The third parallel for Betrò is the title given to Ḥi-Ḥor in line 3. Spiegelberg read it as mr-sš “der Oberschreiber” (“chief scribe”), although the text is quite faded. Betrò reads it as “snty (?),” which corresponds to a sequence of muchdiscussed signs whose reading is disputed but often confused with mr-sš/mr-sẖ. 540 Betrò translates snty here as “guardasigilli” (“keeper of the seals”). The term designated a high functionary in the Persian period and corresponded to the office of chief financial officer in the Ptolemaic period. Betrò thinks this corresponds closely to Aḥiqar’s title, “seal-keeper of the king.” Even if this reading were certain, however, this does not have to be a reference to Aḥiqar. Finally, as a last argument against Betrò’s identification of Ḥi-Ḥor with Aḥiqar, note that, unlike Ḥi-Ḥor or Ḥenenu, Aḥiqar is not portrayed as a magician in either the Aramaic Story of Aḥiqar or any of the later versions (he is clever and can more than match wits with the Egyptians, but telling the men to fly up on eagles’ backs is not magic). On the other hand, the parallels between the two as sages who are in disfavor with the king, who are imprisoned or hidden away from said king, and who are later rehabilitated (one assumes this for the unfinished stories of Ḥi-Ḥor and Ḥenenu), are interesting. The two magician stories may be different tellings of a core story, while the Story of Aḥiqar is likely a hard or soft analogue to them (but not precisely a reworking).

3.3.2.4.5.  Djedseshep, Nanoufesakhme, and Ḥarmakhroou (P. Demotic Saqqāra 1) P. Demotic Saqqāra 1 features a prophet of Horus, Lord of Letopolis, named Djedseshep (Ḏd(t)-sšp) as one of its main characters. The story is given the name Djedseshep, Nanoufesakhme, and Ḥarmakhroou by its editors, Smith and Tait. Like other papyri from Saqqāra, it may well date to the fourth century b.c.e.; and it is preserved on fragments of four columns (two on the recto and two on the verso) but was probably more than sixteen columns in length originally. 541 The setting Khnum, and the second letter of jar-text B has a Syrian or Assyrian name, Ḫrlmnty (Betrò, “La storia del mago Hi-Hor,” 33). 539.  As noted above, Imhotep uses his powers to reveal the secrets of the Inundation and the reason behind a seven-year famine during the reign of King Djoser. 540.  Betrò is here following J. Yoyotte’s reading of snty, “planner” (Jean Yoyotte, “Le nom egyptien du “Ministre de l’Economie”—De Saïs à Méroé,” CRAIBL 1989, 73–90). 541.  The major fragment is very large, measuring 37 cm in height and 29 cm in width. This text and the other Saqqāra narratives are probably the earliest in Demotic but are as long

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of the story may well be the Saite 26th Dynasty of the seventh century b.c.e. 542 The story has many characters and involves intrigue at court, murder, execution of priests in a brazier at the command of pharaoh, a faithful wife whose husband is dead; and in the end, probably resulted in the vindication of the good and the punishment of the evil. 543 In their tentative reconstruction of the plot and story, the editors believe that Ḥarmakhroou is the hero of the story, whereas Djedseshep is the fulcrum for the action. Apparently, Djedseshep, the prophet of Horus, Lord of Letopolis, is unjustly killed (possibly in a tower), presumably at the instigation of the (unnamed) Chief Scribe of Moeris and the guards, generals, and great men of pharaoh, leaving behind his wife Nanoufesakhme and children. She hides in the Memphite necropolis and is advised or helped by Ḥarmakhroou. Ḥarmakhroou is responsible for finding the bodies of Djedseshep and his companions and making sure that they are properly buried. In the text, the guards, generals, and great men of pharaoh (a typical description of the collective at the court; see ʿOnchsheshonqy) are said to have “ordered a very great evil” and to deny not knowing what has taken place (col. 9, frag. 3, line 6). Later, a prophet of Horus, Lord of Letopolis, and his family and fellow priests are executed or are ordered to be executed in a brazier in front of the palace in Memphis by command of pharaoh (col. 14, lines 3–4, 35–36). Ḥarmakhroou then seems to address the army to ask that no others belonging to the prophet of Horus, Lord of Letopolis, be placed on the brazier, for there are no longer any who survive. The prophet of Horus who is executed with his family and fellow priests is probably not the main character Djedseshep but an evil successor to the post. 544 One passage may recount a magical activity by “a girl”; this female may be a goddess or high-born human in disguise and is perhaps partly responsible for the enemies of Djedseshep finding his hiding place in a tower and killing him. However, it is not often clear who is speaking or narrating a particular incident or whether or not the incident narrated is a flashback. It has been suggested that P. Dem. Saqqāra 1 could be linked to a known story cycle—specifically, the Setne Khamwas cycle. There are two characters in the text who are Setne priests; one, named Ptahhotpe, must be dead, because pharaoh and the women of the royal harem go to mourn for him, and the other is as the longest Demotic stories from the Roman period. See H. S. Smith and W. J. Tait, Saqqâra Demotic Papyri I (P. Dem. Saq. 1), 1–69, pls. 1–3c for P. Dem Saq 1 and 1a; see also Tait, “Demotic Literature: Forms and Genres,” 180–81. 542.  The mention of “the fourth prophet” in the text in connection to Thebes (col. 16, frag. 2,3, 5) calls to mind the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, “when a preeminent political role was played at Thebes by the fourth prophet of Amun, Montuemḥat” (Smith and Tait, Saqqâra Demotic Papyri I, 61). So the setting of the story must be then or shortly thereafter in the 26th Dynasty. 543.  Ibid., 60. 544.  Ibid., 51.

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an unnamed character who speaks in the text, telling someone “Do not kill. . .” (col. 7, frag. 2,3). This unnamed character may be identified with the Setne Khamwas; however, if the setting of the story is the seventh century b.c.e., it would not match that of the Setne Khamwas stories (Khamwas is the son of Rameses II of the Nineteenth Dynasty, in the thirteenth century b.c.e.).

3.3.2.4.6 Texts and Traditions about Pharaoh Nectanebo Nectanebo II was remembered in Egypt not only nostalgically as the last native king of Egypt (ruling from 360 to 343 b.c.e.) but as a great magician. In the first episodes of the Greek Alexander Romance (book 1, 1–14), perhaps composed in Egypt in the third or second century b.c.e. (though the earliest manuscript dates to the third century c.e.), Nectanebo is a magician who practices lecanomancy (the use of bowls or other vessels for divination), animates wax ships, manipulates dreams, and even disguises himself as a god to trick Olympias, wife of Philip of Macedon, into sleeping with him. 545 He is therefore presented as being the true father of Alexander the Great, and Alexander in turn is made out to have been a real Egyptian, son of a legitimate Egyptian pharaoh, and thus an Egyptian savior-king who defeats the Persians who had invaded Egypt. 546 The Greek “Nectanebo’s Dream,” an unfinished narrative written by a certain Apollonios, dating to the first half of the second century b.c.e., must be related to the Nectanebo episodes of the Alexander Romance and seems to be about a prophecy concerning the demise of Nectanebo. 547 Even before a Demotic ver545. Richard Stoneman, The Greek Alexander Romance (London: Penguin, 1991); idem, Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); and idem, “The Alexander romance: From History to Fiction,” in J. R. Morgan and R. Stoneman, eds., Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context, 117–29. The composition is sometimes known as Pseudo-Callisthenes due to a medieval attribution of it to Alexander the Great’s court historian, Callisthenes. This has always seemed unlikely because Callisthenes was executed before Alexander completed his Asian campaign, and the Romance covers Alexander’s entire life and death (Stoneman, The Greek Alexander Romance, 8). For a comparison of the Greek to the Syriac and other eastern forms known at his time, see Theodor Nöldeke, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alexanderromans (Denkschriften der Kaiserlichen akademie der wissenschaften: Philosophischhistorische classe 38.5; Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1890). 546. The Alexander Romance began to be composed perhaps within a generation of Alexander’s death and is a work “which went on being rewritten, expanded and modified throughout antiquity, and which formed the basis of an enormous literature on Alexander that was produced in the Greek east and penetrated Arabic and Persian traditions, medieval and modern Greece, and via two Latin translations, the romances of western Europe” (Stoneman, Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend, 2). There are many European versions from the Middle Ages. 547.  It was found at the Serapeum in 1820. Among others, see Jörg-Dieter Gauger, “Der ‘Traum des Nektanebos’: Die griechische Fassung,” in A. Blasius and B. U. Schipper, eds., Apokalyptik und Ägypten: Eine kritische Analyse der relevanten Texte aus dem griechisch-römischen Ägypten (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 189–219. For another translation, into German, see Hoffmann, “Der Traum des Nektanebos,” in Hoffmann and Quack, Anthologie der demotischen Literatur, 162–65.

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sion of “Nectanebo’s Dream” surfaced and was subsequently edited and translated by Kim Ryholt in 2002, Richard Jasnow argued that the Nectanebo episode of the Greek Alexander Romance was originally an Egyptian Demotic composition. 548 The newly discovered Demotic fragments of “Nectanebo’s Dream” and a sequel, found at Tebtunis and dating to the first or second century c.e., do indeed seem to be solid evidence that this was the case. 549 The Egyptian episodes of the Greek Alexander Romance concerning the magician-pharaoh Nectanebo and his fathering of Alexander the Great by tricking his mother Olympias (columns 1–14) rely on several Egyptian themes. This Nectanebo was skilled in the art of magic, and by its use overcame all peoples and thus lived in peace. If ever a hostile power came against him, he did not prepare armies, nor build engines of war nor construct transport wagons, he did not trouble his officers with military exercises, but took a bowl and carried out a divination by water. He filled the bowl with spring water and with his hands moulded ships and men of wax, and placed them in the bowl. Then he robed himself in the priestly robes of a prophet and took an ebony staff in his hand. Standing erect, he called on the so-called gods of spells and the airy spirits and the demons below the earth, and by the spell the wax figures came to life. Then he sank the ships in the bowl, and straightaway, as they sank, so the ships of the enemy which were coming against him perished. All this came about because of the man’s great experience in the magic art. And thus his kingdom continued in peace. 550

Nectanebo is later told by a general that a “great storm cloud of barbarians” is coming against Egypt. He at first scoffs but then uses his magic arts to stare into his divining bowl again and discovers that the gods of Egypt are sailing with the ships of the barbarians, and Egypt is doomed. Therefore, Nectanebo leaves his throne and in disguise travels to Macedonia as an Egyptian prophet. The Egyptians receive an oracle from the god in the Serapeum saying: “This king who has fled will return to Egypt not as an old man but as a youth, and he will overcome 548. Richard Jasnow, “The Greek Alexander Romance and Demotic Egyptian Literature,” JNES 56 (1997), 97, 101. Jasnow especially explores the likelihood that a Greek scribe, translating from Demotic, misunderstood the Egyptian word pẖr, whose specialized meaning is “to enchant, charm” but which has a primary meaning “to go around, turn around.” The scribe understood the primary meaning and translated sugklonew (root kloneo), “jumbled up,” in reference to the magical activity Nectanebo performs in relation to the heavenly bodies when he is advising Olympias regarding the most auspicious time to give birth. 549. Kim Ryholt, “A Demotic Version of Nectanebo’s Dream (P. Carlsberg 562),” ZPE 122 (1998), 197–200. For publication of P. Carlsberg 424, 499, and 559, sequels to “Nectanebo’s Dream,” see idem, “Nectanebo’s Dream or the Prophecy of Petesis,” in A. Blasius and B. U. Schipper, eds., Apokalyptik und Ägypten, 221–241. 550.  Book 1, para. 1, in Richard Stoneman’s composite of the three major recensions; his translation: The Greek Alexander Romance, 35.

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our enemies the Persians.” The Alexander Romance uses the prophecy as a foretelling of Alexander the Great. In Macedonia, the disguised Nectanebo is able to trick Olympias, Alexander’s mother and wife of Philip, to sleep with him. He does so by using a writing tablet and an ivory box as his tools to divine her future for her, and tells her that she must sleep with the god Amun to give birth to a god. As a sign that what he has told her is true, he tells her that she will dream about Amun. She does so, because Nectanebo uses magic: he incants over an infusion of herbs that he sprinkles on torches, and he molds a wax figure of Olympias. Then, disguised as the god Amun, Nectanebo sleeps with her, and she becomes pregnant. Later, to bring Philip home to discover Olympias’ pregnancy, Nectanebo casts a spell on a sea-hawk that flies to Philip at war and speaks to him in a dream. To interpret the dream, Philip calls upon a Babylonian dream-interpreter, who counsels the Macedonian king that it surely means his wife has slept with the Libyan god Amun. Philip returns home, displeased and suspicious that she has committed adultery not with a god but with a mortal man. To keep him from harming his wife, Nectanebo sends to his dinner table a serpent who goes to his wife and then transforms into an eagle, thus leading Philip to believe his wife was truly blessed by a god. Later in the garden, Philip once again sees a snake, this time a young one breaking out of an egg. On this occasion, Philip consults an interpreter of signs. When Olympias eventually gives birth, Nectanebo is beside her, telling her to delay giving birth until the most auspicious moment according to the star signs. Once born, the young Alexander grows to the age of twelve, at which time he actually kills Nectanebo, his true father. As Nectanebo lies dying, pushed off a cliff, he tells Alexander that it had all been foretold. The story depicts Alexander as the true heir of Nectanebo, and further adventures of Alexander later in life detail his journey to Egypt and the foundation of Alexandria. While certain information in the Alexander Romance (such as that about the city’s foundation) seems to reflect historical events, other material about Egypt relies on the long tradition of wonder-tales in that country’s literature, as well as Egyptian sorrow at the loss of their last native king, Nectanebo II, in 343 b.c.e. to the Persians. The water-filled bowls for divination, figurines of wax, revelations by dreams, etc., that are used by Nectanebo have their background in traditional Egyptian magic. 551 (Interestingly enough, in the biblical Joseph story, which is set in Egypt, the cup that is “stolen” from him by his brothers is his divining cup.) 552 551. See R. K. Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 219; idem, “Egyptian Magical Practice under the Roman Empire,” 3346–47. 552.  See B. E. Perry, “The Egyptian Legend of Nectanebus,” TAPA 97 (1966), 327–33. For several examples of lecanomancy (vessel divination), see Francis Llewellyn Griffith and Herbert Thompson, The Leyden Papyrus: An Egyptian Magical Book (reprinted, New York: Dover, 1974), 20–39 (cols. 1–3), 66–81 (cols. 9–10, 22); 98–105 (col. 14); etc.

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The unfinished Greek “Nectanebo’s Dream” begins with Nectanebo’s request that the gods reveal the future to him. Nectanebo then has a dream in which the god Onuris complains to Isis that his sanctuary at Sebennytos has never been completed. When the king awakens, he calls for the priests of Onuris and they tell him that only the hieroglyphic inscriptions of the temple remain uncompleted. All the hieroglyph-cutters are then assembled and asked who is the most expert. Petesis, son of Hergeus, from Aphroditopolis rises and says that he can finish the work within a few days, and the other hieroglyph-cutters agree that Petesis is the most skilled. Unfortunately, Petesis is sidetracked by drink and the sight of a beautiful woman named “Noble Hathor” or “Hathor is Noble” (῾Αθύρεψε, from Ḥw.t-Ḥr-šps.t). 553 The story stops here abruptly, without anything further; Apollonios seems simply to have ceased writing. That the Greek narrative concerned a prophecy is something that was already suggested by Ludwig Koenen and is now nearly proven in the Demotic fragments of the “Dream” and a sequel episode from Tebtunis published by Kim Ryholt. 554 The sequel gives account of Nectanebo saying: I am sad because of the (terrible) things that have happened to Petesis, son of Hergeus, the skilled sculptor of Aphroditopolis, in the temple of Sebennytos. [I] have given orders [to] find out the length of the time in which the said things will take place. I have given orders to find out the might of the foreigners that will come after me. I have given orders to find out the need which they will cause while they dwell in Egypt. 555

According to Koenen, who wrote before the Demotic fragments were found, “Nectanebo’s Dream” belongs to the genre of prophecy and can be compared to the Oracle of the Lamb and the Oracle of the Potter. He suggested that the story continued with the king asking Petesis about his laziness, and Petesis defending himself by utilizing a prophecy that would have went something like this: “As I neglected my work, thus Egypt will be neglected by the gods, in particular Ares/ Onuris. The enemies (the Persians) will conquer Egypt, and all that is good will be turned into evil. In the end, however, the god will send a king under whom Egypt will flourish again.” 556 Thus, Petesis’s unwillingness to complete his task was not frivolous, but a “symbolic anticipation of the prophecy proper.” The date given the Greek “Nectanebo’s Dream,” as well as the three copies of the sequel, is the sixteenth year of Nectanebo, while the date given the 553.  The name connotes romance and destruction, since Hathor is the goddess of love and drunkenness, among other things, and is also the deity who once tried to destroy humankind in the myth found in the Book of the Heavenly Cow (Ryholt, “Nectanebo’s Dream,” 231). 554. Ludwig Koenen, “The Dream of Nektanebos,” BASP 22 (1985), 171–94. 555.  Ryholt, “Nectanebo’s Dream,” 229–30. 556.  Koenen, “The Dream of Nektanebos,” 191–92.

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Demotic fragment of “Nectanebo’s Dream” is the eighteenth year. Historically speaking, Nectanebo’s final year as king was his eighteenth (343 b.c.e.), two years after the invasion of Artaxerxes III, after which he fled Egypt. According to Ryholt’s analysis, the sequel makes very clear that Nectanebo has received a prophecy, that foreigners are due to overrun Egypt, and that something has since happened to Petesis the hieroglyph-cutter. Ryholt suggests that “Nectanebo’s Dream” originally contained a prophecy that not only described the chaos of Egypt’s invasion by foreigners, but the description of a native savior-king who restores order. Thus, the “Dream” may be connected to the Alexander Romance in that it predicts a return of a native king in the form of Alexander. This kind of political and nationalistic propaganda in Egyptian literature could be copied over long periods, always having continuous relevance to every period, because Egypt was never again ruled by a native king. Prophecies such as the Oracle of the Lamb and the Demotic Chronicle originally alluded to the Persians as evil foreigners but were updated later by interpolating mentions of the Greeks. While the original “Nectanebo’s Dream” would presumably have been fairly generic, its sequel would have proclaimed “Alexander the Great as the son of Nectanebo II and as the saviour king of Egypt who would expel the Persians after years of occupation.” 557 The king’s visit to Haroeris would have informed the king that he would produce a son who would liberate the Egyptians from the Persians. Ryholt proposes that the Nectanebo episodes in the Alexander Romance were thus at least partly based on “Nectanebo’s Dream” and its sequel. 558 Ryholt also believes an unpublished fragment found in the Tebtunis temple library perhaps witnesses to the fact that Alexander was featured in Egyptian prophecies. This fragment, which seems to describe the return of order to the land, predicts that “a young falcon (ḫm n bk) will come to be in Egypt.” 559 Since the attribute of “young” before falcon, a symbol for the king, is unusual, Ryholt suggests that the prophecy recalls the passage in the Alexander Romance that expects Nectanebo to return to Egypt in the incarnation of Alexander: “The

557.  Ryholt, “Nectanebo’s Dream,” 235. 558.  For a different interpretation, see Gauger, “Der ‘Traum des Nektanebos’, esp. 218– 19. He questions whether the Greek story is even a prophecy, because it is incomplete; perhaps the unfinished story proceeds with a conflict, or perhaps the love story between Petesis and the woman becomes the focus. There is no comparable papyrus in Ptolemaic Egypt. At any rate, for Gauger, the Demotic version of “Nectanebo’s Dream” must be independent from the Greek version and is perhaps a later development. For example, the dating does not agree (the Demotic has year 18, while the Greek has year 16 of Nectanebo), and the dream in the Greek version is longer than the seven lines given the dream in the fragmentary Demotic version. In addition to still other objections, Gauger notes that one cannot know if the dream in the Greek version was a negative prophecy. If not, there is no basis for a relationship of content between the dream versions and the Alexander Romance. 559.  Ryholt, “Nectanebo’s Dream,” 237.

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king who has fled will return to Egypt not as an old man but as a youth, and he will overcome our enemies the Persians.” 560 The value of these traditions and texts about king Nectanebo for the current study is not that there is a magician king like him in the Book of Daniel. But they indicate the connection of the royal court and skilled professionals (specifically artists in “Nectanebo’s Dream”), one of whom is meant to deliver a message concerning a prophetic dream of the king. The message itself, if one is inferring correctly from other texts, is that a future savior king or kingdom is expected. This foretelling is not eschatological in scope, unlike the dream in Dan 2, in which a future kingdom of God is foreseen to knock down a series of four earthly kingdoms like a stone. However, there is a kind of native Egyptian messianic expectation. (See below, section 5.1.2.5.2.)

3.3.2.4.7.  Boy at Court Who Is Asked About the King’s Health (P. Wien D 62, Verso) This fragmentary story, designated as a “pseudohistorische (Zauberer[?])Erzählung” by its editor Friedhelm Hoffmann, 561 is of unknown provenance and may date to the first half of the second century c.e. 562 It is preserved on two fragments, the greater of which preserves nine nearly complete lines and the smaller of which contains hardly a few words each of four lines. The recto of the same papyrus seems to contain a mythological narrative by a different hand. The setting of the story is the court of King Menkhepperre Si-Amon (the throne name of Thutmosis III of the Eighteenth Dynasty), the same king as that of the inset narrative in Setne II. The text preserves the beginning of the story (a rare occurrence for Demotic narratives), “It happened one day and one time in the time of Menkhepperre Si-Amon, when he was an excellent king in the [entire] land, when Egypt prospered from everything good in his time . . .” (lines 1–3). 563 Among the people in the audience hall is a boy (ẖl) to whom the pharaoh speaks, asking if he (pharaoh) is well. The response of the youth includes a date, perhaps the last day of the Festival of Ptah in the Edfu calendar, but how this is part of an answer to the question about the pharaoh’s health is not clear. 564 After this point, 560.  Book 1, para. 34; Stoneman, The Greek Alexander Romance, 68. On such propaganda, see Alan B. Lloyd, “Nationalist Propaganda in Ptolemaic Egypt,” Historia 31 (1982), 33–55. 561.  Hoffmann, “Zwei neue demotische Erzählungen (P. Wien D 62),” in F. Hoffmann and H. J. Thissen, Res severa verum gaudium: Festschrift für Karl-Theodor Zauzich zum 65. Geburtstag am 8. Juni 2004 (Studia Demotica 6; Leuven: Peeters, 2004), 249–59, pls. 18–19. 562.  For date, perhaps see E. A. E. Reymond, “Demotic Literary Works of Graeco-Roman Date in the Rainer Collection of Papyri in Vienna,” in Festschrift zum 100-jährigen Bestehen der Papyrussammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. Papyrus Erzherzog Rainer (P. Rainer Cent) (Vienna: Hollinek, 1983), 50. See also Hoffmann, “Zwei neue demotische Erzählungen,” 250. 563.  Ibid., 257–58. 564.  Hoffmann is not sure about the reading of this date (ibid., 259).

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the larger fragment mentions “the breast of pharaoh” and breaks off. Perhaps there is a reaction to the youth’s response to the king’s question about his health? The four broken lines of the smaller fragment contain just a few words each, and of course we cannot know at what point in the story these are to be placed. Clothing is mentioned, and in the last preserved line, pharaoh “jumped up.” Perhaps the appearance of the king Menkheperre Si-Amon (Thutmosis III) is one clue regarding the genre of this text. The editor, Hoffmann, suggests that in Demotic literature there are certain kings who are connected to certain types of stories. 565 Since this same king features in the Setne II inset story, Hoffmann proposes that P. Wien D 62 Verso, like Setne II, may tell of some magical actions against Nubia. 566 Of course, the appearance of a youth who is asked about the king’s health is reminiscent of the magician stories where the king is ill and is likely to die after a certain number of days (for instance, Merire and ʿOnchseshonqy). No one is called a magician in the preserved text, but it is tempting to see the boy in some role of power over the king’s health, since the king asks him to tell him if he is well. Furthermore, in Setne II, the magician is disguised as a boy (that is, Si-Osire, the son of Setne Khamwas).

3.3.2.4.8.  Neferti as Court Tale In this proto-apocalypse already mentioned above (Papyrus St. Petersburg 1116B), the protagonist Neferti is called, among other things, a “skilled scribe” and a “lector priest” (ḥry-tp). 567 He is also a commoner (nḏs), like the talented Djedi of Papyrus Westcar. He is summoned to the court of king Snefru because the pharaoh asks his Court of the Residence to find him someone who is “wise, a brother of yours who is outstanding, a friend of yours who has done a noble deed, one who will speak to me a few fine words and elegant phrases so that my Majesty may be pleased by listening to them.” 568 When he arrives, the king asks him to speak on things that will come to pass. The prophecies uttered by Neferti in this text are ex eventu, because the composition is not from Snefru’s time in the 4th Dynasty but was written perhaps during the reign or just after the death of Amenemhet I of the 12th Dynasty as a political justification for that king’s seizure of the throne from the Mentuhotep 565.  Ibid., 251. 566. Ibid. 567. Published by Vladimir Golénischeff, Les papyrus hiératiques nos. 1115, 1116A et 1116B de l’Ermitage impérial à St Pétersbourg (St. Petersburg: Manufacture des Papiers de l’Etat, 1916), and Wolfgang Helck, Die Prophezeiung des Nfr.tj (2nd ed.; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992). See also E. Blumenthal, “Neferti, Prophezeiung des,” LÄ IV (1982), 380–81; E. Blumenthal, “Die Prophezieung des Neferty,” ZÄS 109 (1982), 1–27; Hans Goedicke, The Protocol of Neferty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Translations include: Vincent A. Tobin, “The Prophecies of Neferty,” in LAE, 214–20; Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 1.139–45; Bresciani, Letteratura, 122–28. 568.  Translation of Vincent A. Tobin, “The Prophecies of Neferty,” in LAE, 215.

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family. The prophecies describe the chaos of the First Intermediate Period and predict the coming of “a king from the south,” whose name will be “Ameny, justified” and who will unite the Two Lands. I will return to this in ch. five.

3.3.2.4.9.  Naneferkasokar and the Babylonians This story is preserved on a papyrus from Tebtunis from the third or second century b.c.e. (P. Carlsberg 303 +Papyrus Berlin 13640) and an ostracon from the first century c.e. One fragment of the Tebtunis papyrus in Berlin has been published, as has the short text on the ostracon. 569 The story takes place in Babylon where the god Bel is worshiped (the king of Babylon swears by him several times). However, since it refers to satraps whose personal names are Persian (lines 29ff.) and whose inhabitants are called “Assyrians,” this may be one of those texts, such as the Coptic Cambyses Romance and the “Cycle of Inaros,” in which the eastern empires—Babylonians, Assyrians, and Persians—are indistinguishably mingled. An unnamed wr, “great one” or “chief,” of Babylon rules with his princes and commands over satrapies. Part of the action takes place in the fifteenth regnalyear of a King PyꜢ (possibly the Demotic form of the Kushite king Piye, who reigned over Egypt about 750–712 b.c.e.). 570 The story involves one Naneferkasokar (NꜢ-Nfr-Ky-Skr), who may be a magician but who refers to himself as a mighty warrior. Some scholars used to think that this narrative belonged with the “Cycle of Inaros,” but this now seems unlikely. 571 In the preserved fragments, he is given no status or title. Naneferkasokar converses with the Babylonian king, for whom he puts on fine clothes. In the conversation, Naneferkasokar says to the king of Babylon, “I have not seen a man who was stronger than I!,” words that seem to anger the king and seem to indicate a victory of an Egyptian over a foreigner in a contest. Naneferkasokar then relates a previous event to the Babylonian king in which there was a duel with a lance or some other contest in Egypt, to prove who was strongest. According 569.  The Berlin fragment was published by W. Spiegelberg, “Aus der Geschichte vom Zauberer Ne-Nefer-Ke-Sokar: Demotischer Papyrus Berlin 13640,” in S. R.K. Glanville and Nora McDonald Griffith, eds., Studies Presented to F. Ll. Griffith (London: Egypt Exploration Society / Oxford University Press, 1932), 171–80; and there is a translation in Italian by E. Bresciani, Letteratura, 942–44. The ostracon from Edfu is published in M. Chauveau, “Montouhotep et les Babylonians,” BIFAO 91 (1991), 147–53. The unpublished Copenhagen fragments, which preserve columns numbered 19 and 27, are mentioned in Zauzich, “Einleitung,” 1–11; Chauveau, “Montouhotep et les Babylonians,” 147–53; Ryholt, “The Assyrian Invasion of Egypt,” 502–4; and in Quack, Einführung in die altägyptische Literaturgeschichte III, 42–43. 570.  Zauzich, “Einleitung,” 6, and Ryholt, “The Assyrian Invasion of Egypt,” 504. 571.  See, for instance, Bresciani, Letturatura, 942. Bresciani numbers this story among those of the Inaros/Petubastis cycle because of the episode involving a battle with a lance, which she says “è quasi certamente la lancia di Inaro di cui si parla in altri racconti del Ciclo di Inaro-Petubasti.” DePauw says that the story is definitely not part of the Inaros cycle, and Ryholt (“The Assyrian Invasion of Egypt”) seems to agree.

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to Spiegelberg, however, this is not a typical battle, in that the powers of nature (the gods) get involved; the heaven darkens either because of rain or an eclipse. Ryholt calls the event a “celestial phenomenon” but does not go so far as to say that Naneferkasokar is a magician. 572 The preserved part of the remainder of the story has the king of Babylon returning to his residence, after Naneferkasokar has defeated 14 men in some kind of contest. This story could be another wonder-tale similar to those arranged under the name of the magician: Setne, Si-Osire, Horus-son-of the-Wolf, or Imhotep, and even the tales of the imprisoned magician (Ḥenenu-son-of-Ḥor and Ḥi-Ḥor). If so, like stories about those magicians, it too reminds one of the contests between Aaron and Moses and the Egyptian magicians in Exodus 7–9 in the Bible and of the exodus plagues more generally, especially the plague of darkness in Exod 10:21–29. 573 On the other hand, the contests that take place before the Babylonian king may not involve magic; however, it is significant that it is the (Egyptian) foreigner who defeats the Babylonian or Persian heroes. Finally, note that the Assyrian invasion and occupation of the land in the seventh century b.c.e. had such an impact that it “gave rise to a rich literary tradition in Egypt” that lasted until the late second century c.e. 574 Sometimes, this literary tradition confused the Near Eastern empires—Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians—or misconstrued history, something that occurs in the Book of Daniel as well. (For example, the Darius of Dan 6 is called a Mede, although historical kings with the name “Darius” were all Persians.)

3.3.2.5.  Conclusions about Egyptian Story-Collections and Court Tales Egyptian stories about famous sage-magicians of the past—their marvelous deeds, their books and wisdom, their saving of kings, etc.—were especially popular and circulated in various forms. Setne Khamwas, Imhotep, Petese son of Petetum, Nectanebo, and perhaps Horus-son-of-the-Wolf seem to have been among the most famous of these magicians. Their deeds often have to do with their activities at court before the king (or sometimes with the king out on the battlefield). Several of these can be subsumed under the genre label “court tales.” Moreover, utilizing Humphrey’s terms for sub-genres of the ANE court tale, some of these stories are court contests and others are court conflicts. For instance, Papyrus 572.  Ryholt, “The Assyrian Invasion of Egypt,” 503. 573. H.-P. Müller, “ ‫ ח ְַרטֹם‬ḥarṭōm,” 178; Noegel, “Moses and Magic,” 45–59; Römer, “Competing Magicians in Exodus 7–9,” 12–22. 574.  See K. Ryholt, “The Assyrian Invasion of Egypt,” 483. Ryholt lists the following compositions from Egypt as concerned with the Assyrian occupation: the various texts having to do with the Epic of Inaros (including the Aramaic Sheikh Faḍl inscription), the Story of Aḥiqar, Fragment P. Berlin P 15682, Fragment P. Trier Univ. Bibl. S 109A, Djoser and Imhotep, Naneferkasokar and the Babylonians, and the Story of Nakhthorshen.

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Westcar has a court contest involving both story-telling and wonder-working, and Setne II’s third episode concerns the battles between the Egyptian magician Horus-son-of-the-Wolf versus the Nubian shaman in the courts of Thutmosis III and Ramses II. (The unpublished Demotic tales of Horus-the-Wolf seem to have this as well). Djoser and Imhotep and Naneferkasokar also contain contests. Merire seems to have elements of both court contest and conflict. First of all, the rival courtiers are in competition with Merire for the correct solution to the king’s illness, and they incite the king to harm Merire’s family before they are punished in a furnace. It can also be seen as a court conflict in that Merire voluntarily enters the Netherworld in order to save the king’s life, and it is not clear that he ever gets out. In these contests, it is wonder-working or problem-solving more than anything else that is the subject of rivalry between courtiers. With regard to court conflict, in the Merib story, Merib is falsely accused by a rival courtier concerning the abduction of Pharaoh Badja, but it is his own cleverness, with the help of Hathor, that allows him to find the hidden pharaoh and rehabilitate himself. The “Imprisoned Magician” stories of Ḥenenu and Ḥi-Ḥor are probably court conflict tales in which the pharaoh or someone else has imprisoned courtiers (similar to Aḥiqar and ʿOnchsheshonqy). Neither story is preserved well enough to tell whether or not the magician is able to get out of his jam, but each send off birds to pharaoh. P. Demotic Saqqāra 1 contains some kind of court conflict or contest: rival courtiers somehow cause Djedshesep to be killed, and in return, other courtiers are put to death in a furnace. These Egyptian tales of courtiers circulated independently, in cycles (sometimes with more than one story or episode on a single papyrus, as in Setne II or P. Demotic Saqqāra 2), and sometimes in story-collections. The idea of Petese son of Petetum as a sage who wrote stories led to the collection of several narratives in his name; most of the embedded stories in the Stories of Petese are fragmentary, but some of them are tales set in a court, and others deal with high officials. The Egyptian perspective that the magicians of the royal courts of the 4th Dynasty were especially interesting presumably led to the story-collection in the Papyrus Westcar (Tales from King Cheops’ Court). A third story-collection is the Myth of the Sun’s Eye, but its frame was highly mythological, and its embedded stories were popular fables rather than court or magician tales. Unlike the court legends found in traditions from Asia Minor and Persia, the Egyptian court tales do not have as a predominating theme what Lawrence Wills calls a “ruled ethnic perspective,” in that they are not tales concerning the superior wisdom of a conquered people in contrast to their ethnically-different overlords. However, some of the later contests from the late first millennium b.c.e. do have an ethnic component that could have stemmed from the experience of the Assyrian or Persian occupation of Egypt. For example, Setne II portrays the superiority of Egyptian wisdom and magic in contrast with Nubian, and this is not merely for the sake of showmanship, since it is the very person of the king himself

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who is threatened by the Nubian shaman’s magic. In Djoser and Imhotep, it is a battle of Egyptians versus Assyrians, and in Naneferkasokar, an Egyptian defeats Babylonians in Babylon. On the other hand, there does not seem to be an ethnic component in Merire and Sisobek, nor in Papyrus Westcar. Papyrus Westcar’s Tales from King Cheops’ Court portrays dynastic succession and superiority but not ethnic rivalry. As for Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh, it does not seem to be about ethnicity; the point is that Merib worships a different deity than his rival, and it is his deity Hathor who saves the pharaoh.

3.4. Summary Many kinds of narrative materials—fables, court tales, proverbs—in the Classical world and the ancient Near East were easily gathered into collections. In Greece and Rome, episodic narrative was a conscious creative choice that was in contrast to the more typical Aristotelian poetical sensibilities. Several of the ancient story-collections have an extensive frame narrative in which to enclose the embedded stories; others do not. Scholars of Medieval European story-collections always claim that the frame narrative was an eastern creation, and early examples of it are evident in the material covered here. The very earliest frame narrative to embed stories seems to be that in the Tales from King Cheops’ Court from the early-to-mid second-millennium Egypt, and the other story-collections from the ANE discussed here also included frames or framing material. This survey of ancient story-collections and related literature has revealed much. Certain aspects of the ancient material are very like those encountered in the survey of the medieval story-collections, such as the emphasis on entertainment as well as instruction, the basic open-ended structure, the conscious application of episodic narrative, and the complex textual and compositional histories. These aspects will be investigated in the next chapters regarding their relevance for the book of Daniel. Other features found in these story-collections are not present in Daniel at all—for example, the elaborate framing material of the Pañcatantra. Another feature not found in Daniel is the presence of a storyteller telling the stories—that is, a character on the first level of narrative who narrates tales that comprise one or more other levels. It is not until the storycollection of Dan 1–6 becomes a collection of both stories and visions when Dan 7–12 are added that Daniel gains a narrator who is also a character in the work. A significant result of the survey is the discovery that, in addition to court tales from India, Persia, and the ancient Near East that were already well-known, there are many more Egyptian story-collections and cycles of court tales centering on officials (often priests or prophets, especially the lector-priest or magician called ḥry-tb, a term that was borrowed into Semitic languages and whose functions are found in the biblical court tales with ḥarṭummîm/n) than have been previously recognized. Thus, there is more (especially) Persian and Hellenistic

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material from Egypt (in both Demotic and Aramaic) that may be of assistance than previously thought. Particularly important are the themes of court conflicts and contests, marvelous deeds and riddle-solving by the courtier on behalf of the king, the rescue or saving of the king, the forecasting of the future, dreams and interpretation of dreams, etc. The Egyptian courtiers who are skilled political and religious advisers as well as wonder-workers have a parallel in the Jewish mantic Daniel who is ‘chief of the magicians’ (rab ḥarṭumayyā) in Dan 4 and 5, and political adviser and/or dream interpreter in Dan 2, 4, and 6. Even Dan 3, the story of Daniel’s three friends, finds a close analogue in this Egyptian material: the common motif of the fiery furnace as capital punishment for courtiers who commit treason or sacrilege.

C

h a p t e r

F

o u r

The Book of Daniel in Light of the Story-Collection Genre The Masoretic Text (MT) of Daniel falls into two sections of more or less the same length: chs. 1–6 comprise six popular stories centered around the figure Daniel and his friends, while chs. 7–12 consist of four apocalyptic visions attributed to the same figure. This structural division by genre seems to be straightforward, but our understanding of the book is otherwise complicated by several factors. The principal critical problems in Daniel, long identified and debated, are these: the Semitic text of Daniel (MT) is written in two languages, Hebrew (1:1–2:4a and 8–12) and Aramaic (2:4b–7:28), 1 but the division by language does not coincide with the division by genre (court tales in chs. 1–6, apocalyptic visions in chs. 7–12) 2; the text in the Greek versions Theodotion and the Old Greek (Th and OG) is longer and often has a different character from the Semitic, especially in chs. 3–6; the history of the composition of the book shows a complex evolution dating from as early as the Persian or Hellenistic period to the Maccabean, and includes literary and intellectual contributions of various origins; and, finally, this complex evolution leaves unclear the social setting of the final author-compilers of the book. These problems of language, form, text, composition, and social setting are at many points interwoven, and consideration of any one often involves consideration of the others. A new approach to some of these critical problems is offered by turning to the story-collection genre. The earlier chapters of this study presented preliminary evidence that, even on the basis of a surface reading of Daniel, the book possesses overt characteristics in common with this macro-genre. The literary unit in Daniel 1–6 contains clearly separable, extractable episodes that yet “belong together,” since they are connected to the figure Daniel and his friends, share the 1.  Aramaic appears elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible only in the correspondence in Ezra 4:8–6:18 and 7:12–26; one verse in Jeremiah (Jer 10:11); and a phrase in Genesis (Gen 31:47). 2.  The first, introductory narrative about Daniel (ch. 1) and the very beginning of another (2:1–4a) are in Hebrew, unlike the rest of the narratives, which are in Aramaic, while one entire vision (ch. 7) is in Aramaic, unlike the other three visions (chs. 8, 9, and 10–12), which are in Hebrew.

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same setting and chronology, and have aspects of genre and theme in common. These separate tales were compiled and written or rewritten into a collection that, according to many scholars, most likely circulated in some form earlier than the Maccabean form of the book that existed ca. 164 b.c.e. (reflected in the MT), which added the visions of chs. 7–12. 3 Daniel 1–6 shares various elements of structure and arrangement with many story-collections, such as framing material, narrative links between the stories, an open-endedness and fluidity in the number and arrangement of the stories, as well as the dual functions of entertainment and instruction, just to mention a few. In the past, while most scholars have readily observed that Daniel 1–6 is a “collection” of stories, few have tried to address precisely why this is so. One attempt to comprehend Daniel’s episodic or composite nature was made by JanWim Wesselius, who uses the term “linear literary dossier” (or “linear composed dossier”) for the Book of Daniel. He proposes a previously unrecognized biblical genre in which a work “looks like a collection of various pieces of literature, but was in reality composed as a whole and should be read as a whole in its present form.” 4 To Wesselius, the book emulates the structure and details of other biblical literature, especially the life of Joseph in Genesis 37–50 and the HebrewAramaic Book of Ezra, in order to produce the impression of a series of documents from different backgrounds. Wesselius’s observation, that the act of selecting and assembling items into a coherent collection implies a certain unity and is a product of authorial intention, seems correct. On the other hand, the term “dossier” does not really account 3. For proponents of this commonly-held view, see, among others: James A. Montgomery, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel (ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1927), 96; H. L. Ginsberg, Studies in Daniel, 27; Reinhard Gregor Kratz, Translatio imperii: Untersuchungen zu den aramäischen Danielerzählungen und ihrem theologiegeschichtlichen Umfeld (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1991), 77–160; John J. Collins, Daniel (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 24–38; T. C. Vriezen and A. S. van der Woude, Ancient Israelite and Early Jewish Literature (trans. Brian Doyle; Leiden: Brill, 2005), 479. On the literary unity of chs. 2–6 as evidenced by specific features found there and not in the other chapters of the book, see J. W. Wesselius, “Language and Style in Biblical Aramaic: Observations on the Unity of Daniel II–VI,” VT 38 (1988), 194–209. See Collins, Daniel, 24–38, for a convincing preliminary analysis of the Book of Daniel’s development. 4.  Wesselius, “The Literary Nature of the Book of Daniel and the Linguistic Character of Its Aramaic,” Aramaic Studies 3.2 (2005), 241–83, esp. p. 274. See also Wesselius, “Discontinuity, Congruence and the Making of the Hebrew Bible,” SJOT 13 (1999), 24–77; idem, “The Writing of Daniel,” in John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint, eds., The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception (VTSup 83; Leiden: Brill, 2001), 2.291–310; idem, “Daniel,” in J. P. Fokkelman and W. Weren, eds., De Bijbel Literair (Zoetermeer: Meinema, 2003), 251–61; idem, “Hoe de valse beschuldiging een echte beschuldiging wordt. De relatie tussen de beschuldigingen in Genesis 38–44 en Daniel 3 en 6, en de bedoeling van het boek Daniel,” in C. Houtman, ed., De leugen regeert . . .Valse beschuldiging in de Bijbel en in de wereld van de Bijbel (Kampen: Kok, 2004), 58–80.

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for the perceivable uniformity in other aspects of Daniel. Rather than a near hodgepodge of material, the book’s six stories and four visions involve the same setting in foreign courts of the Eastern diaspora, the same or similar characters (exiled Jews serving as courtiers, their anonymous rival courtiers, and certain Babylonian, Median, and Persian kings), and, with regard to the stories, similar plots (an optimistic outcome after a court contest or conflict) and motifs. A few scholars have used some of the terminology from the story-collection genre without reference to the genre itself. Lawrence Wills has called the stories of Dan 1–6 a collection of legenda and has compared them to the medieval saints’ legenda but is more interested in them as the beginning of a novelistic impulse than in their collective nature. 5 This impulse finds its fruition in the expanded Greek editions. Once the additions of Susanna and Bel and Susanna and the two prayers of ch. 3 are included, the Old Greek and Theodotion editions of Daniel are considered by him to be examples of early Jewish novels. Furthermore, Matthias Henze, has used the term “narrative frame” to refer to the Daniel narratives in order to indicate that they provide the (court) setting for the visions. 6 Use of this designation does not seem inappropriate, since the narratives do establish Daniel’s character as a righteous and accomplished Jewish sage in a foreign royal court and they thus legitimize or set the foundation for Daniel’s apocalyptic visions about the future. On the other hand, simply to describe the six narratives as a “narrative frame” (a term for a feature commonly found in story-collections) for the four visions without recognizing the plurality of narratives in the frame does not go far enough in applying terminology or typology from studies of the storycollection genre. It ignores the observation that each of the six Daniel stories is self-contained and discrete from the others, with not much more overarching plot linearity between them than the chronological outline imposed at the beginning of each story to create the frame. The stories are not a single narrative piece, as is typical for a frame narrative, but a concatenation or chain of narratives, and it is this feature that points to the story-collection genre as a significant vantage point for seeing Daniel with fresh eyes.

4.1.  The Story-Collection Definition and Daniel 1–6 Helen Cooper’s definition of the story-collection genre discussed in chap. 2 of this study possesses three interrelated parts. 7 A story-collection: (1) is a collection of separable tales that are essential to the whole, but extractable; (2) is compiled and written/rewritten essentially by a single hand (someone who 5.  Wills, The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World, 45–46. 6.  Henze, “The Narrative Frame of Daniel: A Literary Assessment,” JSJ 32 (2001), 5–24, esp. 6–7; idem, “The Ideology of Rule in the Narrative Frame of Daniel (Dan 1–6),” 527–39. 7.  Cooper, Structure, 9–10.

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is author as well as a compiler, who often reworked preexisting tales); and (3) circulates in a recognizably coherent form that is given coherence through some kind of structure or ordering scheme (such as common theme or genre, framing material such as a prologue, epilogue, or a fully-developed frame narrative with links between stories). With regard to Cooper’s first point, the tales in Daniel belong together by virtue of their setting, genre, main characters, and relative uniformity in length and plot. However, they are quite separable from the whole, having only minor links between them and mainly independent, self-contained story-lines. Their few cross-references indicate “that they were transmitted separately, and it is difficult to posit a function for the separate stories in the written medium.” 8 For example, the chronology of MT ch. 1 does not fit that of ch. 2 in that ch. 1 has Daniel and his compatriots in training for three years in Babylon after having been deported by Nebuchadnezzar, while ch. 2 sets its events in the second year of Nebuchadnezzar (following ch. 2’s chronology would mean that Daniel and his friends were deported before Nebuchadnezzar’s reign began). 9 Then, in ch. 2, Daniel is introduced to the king as if he had never met or been honored by him in 1:18–20. Moreover, ch. 3, the story of the three friends in the fiery furnace, is the only story of the six to concern solely the three friends (Hananiah, Azariah, and Mishael), not mentioning Daniel at all. By contrast, chs. 4–6 only mention Daniel and none of the friends. Furthermore, in ch. 5, king Belshazzar, here said to be the son of Nebuchadnezzar, is unaware of the renowned Daniel and has to be told by the queen (perhaps the queen mother) about events in his father’s reign before he calls Daniel onto the scene to read the writing on the wall. In addition, if the chronological or regnal notices at the beginning of each tale are ignored, many of the individual narratives seem to be interchangeable within the collection, leading to an intriguing textual tension. As Henze notes, “we find a humbled heathen monarch ready to revere the Jews and their God at the end of one chapter, only to threaten them again at the beginning of the next.” 10 It is even suspected that the names of Daniel and his three friends were not original to the stories and became attached only when the stories were collected; in an earlier form, some of the stories may have involved Babylonian or other non-Jewish characters. 11 8.  Wills, The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World, 45; italics his. 9.  Even if the chronological notices were not original and were added by an editor (as Munnich suggests; see “Le cadrage dynastique et l’ordre des chapitres dans le livre de Daniel,” in J. Joosten and P. Le Moigne, eds., L’apport de la Septante aux études sur l’Antiquité: actes du colloque de Strasbourg, 8–9 novembre 2002 [Paris: Cerf, 2005], 161–96), the fact that they are at variance with one another does not support the idea of a close connection between the two chapters. Note that the OG and Th editions of Daniel have smoother chronologies. 10.  Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 12. 11.  Belteshazzar, Daniel’s Babylonian name, is especially prominent in Dan 4 and 5, perhaps indicating that the original hero was not Jewish and that the name Daniel was associated with the Babylonian protagonist when Dan 4 and 5 were attached to the other stories. The fact

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In addition, that there came to be a pool of stories and visions circulating around a certain “Daniel” in the last centuries b.c.e. is demonstrated by the fact that the Greek editions have more stories (Susanna and Bel and the Serpent) and prayers (the additions to ch. 3: the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men) featuring Daniel or his friends than the MT. Josephus seems to reflect other traditions, too—for example, that Daniel built a fortress (βᾶρις) at Ecbatana in Media, in which the kings of Media, Persia, and Parthia were henceforth buried and that was watched over by a Jewish priest (Antiquities 10.265). Moreover, there are parabiblical Daniel materials—both court tales and apocalypses—in the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls that contain analogues if not sources for the biblical Daniel (see ch. 5 below). The existence of this kind of material “shows that the stories and visions that make up the Masoretic Book of Daniel were selected from a wider corpus of Danielic literature.” 12 Helen Cooper’s second and third points—that the compiler of a storycollection is in some sense an author and that a story-collection circulates in a coherent form—may also be helpful in considering the Book of Daniel. Author-compilers of story-collections often gathered tales from various sources and shaped or composed them to fit their new context—a particular structure and order determined by the author. That MT chs. 1–6 were written earlier than the visions can be shown in some of the features found in these chapters. Most importantly, the visions are radically different from the stories in genre and tone, and they give particular attention to the Hellenistic period, especially the activities and persecutions of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, while the stories concern the Babylonian and Persian periods and portray them as only moderately dangerous times for Jews under more benign rulers. It is unlikely that tales that are not very critical of the foreign court and that advocate the possibility of a rewarding life for a Jew in that court (a “lifestyle for diaspora”) could have been written in the same period as the visions, which are sharply critical of foreign kings and kingdoms. 13 Moreover, it has long been maintained that the book is more accurate about the Hellenistic history behind chs. 7–12 (perhaps because it is closer to the author’s time) than about the Babylonian and Persian history of chs. 1–6. 14 Elements of structure also seem to reveal that Dan 1–6 was an independent collection prior to the final Maccabean book. The stories are set in chronological order by the notices of kings’ reigns at the beginning or end of each—Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar the Babylonians, Darius the Mede, and Cyrus the Persian—even if the contents of the stories are only loosely attached to the specific that the four young men are given Babylonian names in ch. 1 may be because of this earlier tradition, although it is interesting that exiled Jews in other biblical stories are given native names as well (Hadassah becomes Esther and Joseph becomes Zaphenath-paneah). 12.  Collins, Daniel, 4. See also Eugene Ulrich, “From Literature to Scripture: Reflections on the Growth of a Text’s Authoritativeness,” DSD 10 (2003), 3–25, esp. p. 17. 13.  Humphreys, “A Life-Style for Diaspora,” esp. pp. 221–22. 14.  Koch, Das Buch Daniel, 10.

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king in whose reign they are set. Some form of what is now ch. 1 probably served as an introduction to the other stories, describing the fall of Jerusalem and the deportation of noble youths to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar, thus setting up the basic predicament of Daniel and his three friends. 15 Dan 1:2 mentions temple vessels that will play a role in Belshazzar’s feast in ch. 5. Furthermore, the conclusion of ch. 1 gives an open-ended and flexible range to Daniel’s career that could encompass any number of stories (or visions), through several kings’ reigns: “And Daniel continued there until the first year of King Cyrus” (Dan 1:21). 16 Dan 6:29 closes the collection with: “So this Daniel prospered during the reign of Darius and the reign of Cyrus the Persian,” an end that encompasses both the collection of stories as well as the visions. There are also some important links between the stories of the collection. For example, chs. 4 and 5 are connected by the queen’s reminder to king Belshazzar in ch. 5 regarding Daniel’s past activities under his father Nebuchadnezzar’s reign in ch. 4, thus encouraging Belshazzar to send for Daniel himself to read the mysterious writing on the wall. Some terminology and phrases are also shared between chapters. A link between four of the chapters (1–2, 4–5) is found in the lists of court professionals who are rivals to Daniel and his friends (‫ן‬/‫חרטמים‬, “magicians”; ‫ן‬/‫אׁשפים‬, “exorcists/enchanters”; ‫ן‬/‫מכׁשפים‬, “sorcerers”; ‫ן‬/‫כׂשדים‬, “Chaldeans”; ‫ן‬/‫חכימים‬, “wisemen”; and ‫ן‬/‫גזרים‬, “diviners”). Some phrases are shared by chs. 2 and 3, such as “to dismember” (see MT 2:5, ‫הדמין תתעבדין‬, “you shall be dismembered,” cf. 3:29); and “to make houses into refuse heaps” (see MT 2:5, ‫בתיכון נולי יתׂשמון‬, “your houses shall be made into refuse-heaps,” cf. 3:29). Chs. 3 and 6 both employ the colorful Aramaic phrase “to eat the pieces,” meaning “to slander” or “accuse” (see MT 3:8 ‫אכלו קרציהון‬, “they ate their pieces,” that is, “they slandered them,” cf. 6:25). Another phrase frequent in two stories is the description of Daniel as having a “spirit of holy gods” in him (‫;רוח אלהין קדיׁשין‬ MT 4:5, 6, 15; 5:11). These are just a few phrases that link the stories to a small degree. Links between chs. 1 and 6, the beginning and ending chapters of the story-collection, are especially illustrative of an authorial attempt to structure the material. For instance, both are concerned with tests that have to do with 15.  Dan 1 also has an story of its own that may have once been independent (vv. 8–16). It recounts Daniel and his friends’ refusal to eat the king’s food while they are in training in the literature and language of the Chaldeans; when they request permission to eat only vegetables and water, they prosper more than the other youths. 16.  This gets Daniel into the reign of the Persians, but not as far as the fourth vision, which is set in the third year of Cyrus the Persian. But as Hartman and Di Lella note, Dan 1:21 perhaps only refers to Daniel’s length of service at the Babylonian court until the end of the exile and the capture of Babylon by the Persians, not to his entire career. If so, there is no contradiction between 1:21 and 10:1, in which the last vision is said to take place in the third year of King Cyrus. In addition, this date is probably chosen in order to set the span of Daniel’s entire career at 70 years, a biblically perfect number (Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 48–49, 277).

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conforming to religious practices and not giving in to the foreign world: ch. 1 has to do with dietary restrictions (kašrût), while ch. 6 has to do with thrice-daily prayer. This arrangement, the return in ch. 6 to a theme from ch. 1, provides a nice summation for the collection, a structural epanadiplosis or inclusio. Finally, according to Hans-Peter Müller, Dan 1 presupposes Dan 2–6 in that it introduces the kinds of wisdom, both courtly and mantic, that appear in them. 17 In chs. 3 and 6, the concern is courtly wisdom, and in chs. 2, 4, and 5, it is mantic wisdom (that is, wisdom having to do with divination, interpreting dreams, or the like). There thus seems to be good evidence that the stories in Daniel were once independent in some form, perhaps in the late Persian or early Hellenistic era, before being placed in a collection sometime before the Maccabean period, when the visions were added. Most scholars nowadays posit a developmental theory (“Aufstockungshypothese”) for MT Daniel’s composition that includes Dan 1–6 as an early collection. Few think that the entire MT book is either a literary unity (written by one author from one time period) 18 or to have been composed from many fragments by several authors at various times. 19 Instead, the current developmental theory posits that the book grew gradually from an early core to its Maccabean edition. Nonetheless, in this theory, even if one supposes that there were some minor redactions to the book before its final form, the number of essential stages or different authors are usually presumed to be relatively few. 20 The most common proposal is that MT Daniel had two main stages: a preMaccabean collection of stories, and the Maccabean form in which the visions were added. 21 On the other hand, there are also indications that there may have 17.  Müller, “Mantische Weisheit,” 279. 18.  This was the common position in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for both scholars who endorsed a traditional sixth-century date for Daniel and for those who argued for a Maccabean date for the entire book (Collins, Daniel, 27). In the twentieth century, the following scholars are some of those who continued to favor the unity of the Book of Daniel, regardless of their preferred date of composition: Robert H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1929); Norman W. Porteous, Daniel: A Commentary (OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965), Otto Plöger, Das Buch Daniel (KAT 18; Gütersloh: Mohn, 1965), and H. H. Rowley, “The Unity of the Book of Daniel,” in H. H. Rowley, The Servant of the Lord and Other Essays on the Old Testament (2nd ed.; Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 249–60; Joyce G. Baldwin, Daniel: An Introduction and Commentary (Leicester/Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity, 1978). A few very recent scholars, such as Valeta and Wesselius, argue that Daniel was written all at one time in the Maccabean period but drew from earlier materials. See Wesselius, “The Literary Nature of the Book of Daniel and the Linguistic Character of Its Aramaic,” 241–84; and David M. Valeta, Lions and Ovens and Visions, 30–31. 19. Leonhard Bertholdt, among others (Bertholdt, Daniel aus dem Hebräisch-Aramäischen neu übersetzt und erklärt mit einer vollständigen Einleitung und einigen historischen und kritischen Exkursen [Erlangen: Palm, 1808]). Bertholdt proposed that there were as many as nine authors. 20.  For exceptions, see Ginsberg, Studies in Daniel, and Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel. They suggest that Daniel grew slowly but that there was a final author-compiler. 21.  It is even possible, according to Eugene Ulrich, that the earlier collection remained in circulation simultaneously with some form of MT Daniel during the last half of the sec-

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been an even earlier collection of Daniel stories in chs. 4–6. These chapters only mention Daniel (not the three friends); they are enclosed by doxologies at the beginning of ch. 4 (misnumbered as the end of ch. 3 [3:31–33]) and the end of ch. 6 (6:26–28), as if to provide a frame for the three stories; and the Old Greek edition diverges widely in content and character from the other main editions only in these chapters. Thus, the outline of stages in the composition of the Hebrew-Aramaic (MT) text of Daniel that has received the most support is something like the following 22: 1.  The individual tales of chs. (1)2–6 were composed and circulated independently in some form in the late Persian and Hellenistic periods. 2.  Abbreviated Story-Collection: Three tales were collected and circulated together: MT 3:31–6:29. (In MT they are framed by doxologies.) This allowed at least two widely divergent textual traditions of these tales to develop (what would become the MT and the OG). 3.  Story-Collection 1–6: A larger collection of tales was compiled in the Hellenistic period (chs. 2–6), with some form of ch. 1 attached as an introduction. 4.  Possible Aramaic Collection: The earliest of the visions (ch. 7) is in Aramaic and may have been composed in the early days of Antiochus Epiphanes’ persecution, about 167 b.c.e. An all Aramaic collection of chs. (1)2–7 may have circulated very briefly. 23 5.  Final MT form of the Daniel book: Hebrew chs. 8–12 were added and ch. 1 translated into Hebrew as frame for the Aramaic chapters by about 164 b.c.e.

On the face of it, this basic outline of the stages of MT Daniel seems to be backed by the evidence. The difficulty, however, is to relate this to the Greek editions as well. The Greek editions both differ greatly from MT in ch. 3, while the two main Greek editions, OG and Th differ from each other substantially in chs. 4–6. It seems likely that the growth of the Greek editions has as complex a developond century b.c.e., each representing a different edition of Daniel (Ulrich, “From Literature to Scripture,” 18). Against the idea that an early version of chs. 2–6 survived the creation of MT Daniel, see DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 110. However, the so-called “Little Daniel” of Ebed-Jesu, among other options, could refer to some smaller collection of Daniel material, perhaps an abridged form of the Book Daniel (ibid., 110–12). 22. Following Collins (Daniel, 38), with minor modifications. 23.  The appeal of positing an all-Aramaic collection of chs. 2–7 is based not only on the language factor but the concentric pattern of the chapters (chs. 2 and 7 parallel each other through their four-kingdom pattern; chs. 3 and 6 are miraculous deliveries; and chs. 4 and 5 echo each other in their chastisements of kings). See especially Lenglet, “La Structure littéraire de Daniel 2–7,” Biblica 53 (1972), 169–90. On the other hand, arguing for ch. 7’s later date are the facts that ch. 7 is of a different genre (an apocalyptic vision) and has a harsher, more nationalistic tone than chs. 2–6; it is not in chronological order with chs. 2–6; and it alludes to Antiochus Epiphanes, when chs. 2–6 do not.

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ment as that of MT, but since the MT form of Daniel dates to the mid-second century and the OG form only shortly thereafter, they may have been aware of each other and edited and reworked toward each other, in extremely complicated ways as well. 24 The possibility also exists that these five “stages” were not distinct—that is, there may have been overlap: more than one collection of stories or stories and visions existed at the same time. In this chapter, the goal is to set Daniel against an explicit definition of storycollection to see if it is productive to view aspects of the book through this lens. I will primarily address the basic characteristic of Daniel 1–6 as having once been an independent story-collection before it was joined to the other chapters of the book, but will also, to a lesser extent, deal with the effect the addition of the visions had upon the collection. This will illuminate the stages in the composition of the Book of Daniel and the final structure of the main editions (Hebrew and Aramaic MT; the Old Greek; and the Theodotion Greek). Left for ch. 5 of this study are further investigations into the Second Temple cycle of Daniel traditions from which the biblical stories were selected and consideration of the ancient Near Eastern sources and analogues to the Book of Daniel.

4.1.1.  Basic characteristics of the story-collection The basic features of a story-collection as outlined in ch. 2 above involve issues of genre, structure, function, open-endedness, textual fluidity, and placement on the oral-to-literary spectrum. By reason of their composite nature, storycollections have both complex and compound genre that is often transformed by the agglutination of materials. Moreover, the structure imposed upon the stories is meant to bring coherence out of diversity, while their divergent texts are witness to great fluidity due to multiple tellings and retellings of the core story material, often without any single text being demonstrably the ancestor of all the others. Furthermore, the function of the enclosed stories often balances instruction with entertainment, and they are often on the popular side of literature. The collection of stories in Dan 1–6 exhibits these features in ways that will now be outlined.

4.1.1.1.  Genre: Daniel 1–6 and the Court Tale As noted in ch. 2, the story-collection can be seen as a macro-genre, with sometimes both paratactic and hypotactic arrangement at the same time, with the propensity for a transformation of genre by the very aggregation of stories. In turn, the stories can subordinate other genres. In Daniel’s stories, these subgenres include but are not limited to: vaticinia ex eventu, parenesis, liturgical genres (blessings, woes, hymns, and prayers), nature wisdom, fable, allegory, dialogue, riddle, māšāl or parable, interpretation of prophecy or pĕšārîm, and eschat24.  See, for instance, Meadowcroft, Aramaic Daniel and Greek Daniel, 272–77.

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ological prediction. 25 As for the individual stories of Daniel 1–6, John Collins in his massive 1993 commentary sets forth a distilled list of six labels in current use: Märchen, legend, court tale, romance, midrash, and didactic wisdom tale (weisheitliche Lehrerzählung). 26 As Collins notes, these designations are not all on the same level. Some are simply inappropriate or misleading. For example, the designation “midrash” for MT Daniel is inapplicable, since the main intent of midrash is to interpret or retell Scripture, and although Dan 1–6 shows affinities to the Joseph and other stories, it in no way uses the older texts as its “point of departure.” 27 The label “martyr legend,” a sub-genre of “legend,” is objectionable in that none of the Daniel heroes die and thus are not martyrs. 28 The term Märchen, meaning “fairy tale” (not folktale), can be somewhat misleading because, “on the whole the world of the tales is realistic” (not fantas25.  Gammie, “Classification,” 193. The visions of chs. 7–12 comprise the sub-genre “vision report.” 26.  Collins, Daniel, 42. He lists the five labels K. Koch affirmed were current in 1980 and adds the “didactic wisdom tale” as a sixth. See K. Koch, Das Buch Daniel, 88–91. Märchen: see H. Gunkel, Das Märchen im Alten Testament (Tübingen: Mohr, 1921), 106, 142; Baumgartner, “Ein Vierteljahrhundert Danielforschung,” 133–35; H-P. Müller, “Märchen, Legende und Enderwartung,” 338–50. Müller sees chs. 4 and 5 as Märchen. Legend: see J. J. Collins, Daniel, with an Introduction to Apocalyptic Literature (FOTL 20; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 42; idem, “Daniel and His Social World,” Int 39 (1985), 34; R. M. Hals, “Legend,” CBQ 34 (1972), 166–76, esp. pp. 172ff. (reprinted in G. W. Coats, ed., Saga, Legend, Tale, Novella, Fable [Sheffield: JSOT, 1985], 45–55); Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 12. See also Müller, “Die weisheitliche Lehrerzählung im Alten Testament und seiner Umwelt,” WO 9 (1977), 77–98, esp. p. 78; he classifies chs. 3 and 6 as legends. Court tale: see, e.g., R. Wilson, “From Prophecy to Apocalyptic: Reflections on the Shape of Israelite Religion,” Semeia 21 (1981), 79–95, esp. p. 88; Hartman and Di Lella, Daniel, 55; W. L. Humphreys, “A Life-Style for Diaspora,” 220; J. J. Collins, “The Court-Tales in Daniel and the Development of Apocalyptic,” JBL 94 (1975), 218–34, esp. p. 219; idem, The Apocalyptic Vision of the Book of Daniel (HSM 16; Missoula: Scholars Press, 1977), 33; idem, Daniel, 42–43; S. Niditch and R. Doran, “The Success Story of the Wise Courtier: A Formal Approach,” JBL 96 (1977), 179; H. L. Ginsberg, “Daniel, Book of,” in Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, eds., Encyclopedia Judaica (2nd. ed.; New York: Macmillan, 2007), 5.419–425, esp. p. 423. Romance: E. W. Heaton, The Book of Daniel, 32–47; Hartman and Di Lella, Daniel, 55. Midrash: C. Gaide, Le Livre de Daniel (Paris: Mame, 1969), 19–20; M. Delcor, Le Livre de Daniel (SB; Paris: Gabalda, 1971), 23; Hartmann and Di Lella, Daniel, 55. Didactic wisdom tale: H.-P. Müller, “Die weisheitliche Lehrerzählung,” 77–98; E. Haag, Die Errettung Daniels aus der Löwengrube: Untersuchungen zum Ursprung der biblischen Danieltradition (SBS 110; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1983), 83–88. 27.  A. G. Wright, The Literary Genre Midrash (Staten Island: Alba, 1967), 74; see also Collins, Daniel, 39–40. 28.  The suggestion has been made most recently by U. Kellermann, “Das Danielbuch und die Märtyrertheologie der Auferstehung,” in Die Entstehung der Jüdischen Martyrologie (ed. J. W. van Henten; SPB 38; Leiden: Brill, 1989), 50–75; esp. p. 54; and J. C. H. Lebram, “Jüdische Martyrologie und Weisheitsüberlieferung,” in van Henten, Die Enstehung, 88–126, esp. p. 91. M. A. Beek long ago observed that there are no martyrs in the stories (see Beek, Das Danielbuch: Sein historischer Hintergrund und seine literarische Entwicklung [Leiden: Ginsberg, 1935], 73).

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tic), and the term is usually used to refer to a “stage of the tradition.” 29 However, with Collins, one must admit that the term is somewhat appropriate in that it emphasizes a few of the same elements and motifs that Märchen or fairy tales possess, such as the preoccupations of kings in their courts, trials of young people, heroic deeds, miraculous transformations, and so on. These elements of delight and entertainment regularly recur in the Daniel stories. Other designations are valid either on a different level of generality, such as romance (which usually refers to a story with an optimistic outcome) 30 and novel, 31 or as overlapping but noncontradictory genre categories, such as legend, court tale, and didactic wisdom tale. In fact, Lawrence Wills, in his study The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, was unwilling to forgo any of the nuances provided by the last three labels and so called Daniel a “wisdom court legend.” 32 The fact that there are a variety of genre labels is partly a result of the varying criteria employed in the analysis of the Daniel stories. 33 Those who wish to emphasize the literary nature of the stories (as opposed to the oral) have used terms such as novel, romance, short story, and even comedy or satire to describe them. 34 Others, considering the didactic or edifying nature of the stories most important, 29.  Collins, Daniel, 42. 30.  Collins states that this category “means little more than tale.” In addition, the erotic element often associated with this genre is not present in Dan 1–6 (Collins, Daniel, 42). On the other hand, there is definitely a slightly erotic flavor to the Theodotion telling of Susanna. 31. Cristiano Grottanelli, “Biblical Narrative and the Ancient Novel,” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 27 (1987), 7–34; reprinted in “Biblical Narrative and the Ancient Novel: Common Motifs and Themes,” in Grottanelli, Kings and Prophets: Monarchic Power, Inspired Leadership, and Sacred Text in Biblical Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 147–71. 32.  Collins, Daniel, 42. 33.  Wills writes: “the definition of genres . . . can proceed along different lines; different sets of criteria give rise to different groupings of exempla of the genre, which can be conceived, for instance, in overlapping circles” (The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 12.) M. Nel suggests that the Daniel and other narratives (Joseph, Esther, Aḥiqar, Tobit, Judith, and 1 Esdras 3:1–4:63) should be read as wisdom literature, but since there is no consensus on genre, the lack of an agreed-on system for classification of genres hurts the discussion (“Literêre genre van die Daniëlverhale,” IDSk 35 [2001], 591–606). 34.  R. I. Pervo seems to include the Daniel stories in his list of works categorized as novels (Pervo, Profit with Delight: The Literary Genre of the Acts of the Apostles [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987], 120). See also the recent work by L. M. Wills, The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World, which was much influenced by Pervo. “Short story” is a designation given to Dan 1–6 by D. N. Fewell, Circle of Sovereignty: A Story of Stories in Daniel 1–6 (JSOTSup 72; Sheffield: Almond, 1988), 10; and perhaps by W. L. Humphreys as well; “Novella,” in G. W. Coats, ed., Saga, Legend, Tale, Novella, Fable: Narrative Forms in Old Testament Literature (JSOTSup 35; Sheffield: JSOT, 1985), 82–96, esp. p. 85. E. M. Good suggests comedy as a label (“Apocalyptic as Comedy: The Book of Daniel,” Semeia 32 [1985], 41–70); while David M. Valeta specifies the kind of comedy as “Menippean satire” (Lions and Ovens and Visions). This latter term seems chronologically unrealistic, since Menippean satire is a genre from the Roman empire; however, as a heuristic ploy to draw out the many comic aspects of Daniel, Valeta’s typological approach is extremely productive. On romance, see above.

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have preferred legend or wisdom tale. 35 Very often, the setting of the stories within the court has been the major criterion, which has led to the widely accepted designation “court tale” or “successful courtier tale.” 36 Indeed, the closest parallels to Dan 1–6 are often identified as the biblical stories of Joseph and Esther and the story of Aḥiqar, although this court motif can also be found in the apocryphal story Bel and the Serpent (and to a lesser degree, in Susanna) and in the story of the three bodyguards of Darius in 1 Esdras 3:1–4:63, as well as in several of the stories of Herodotus (e.g., the encounters of Solon with Croesus, Croesus with Cyrus, and Croesus with Cambyses). 37 Several studies produced at the end of the last century and in the first half of this century noted the court setting of tales like those in Daniel but did little systematic comparison of the “court tales.” 38 However, W. L. Humphreys, in 1973, followed soon after by John Collins, in 1975, began to investigate the genre more carefully. 39 Humphreys concluded that the stories of Esther, Daniel, Joseph, Nehemiah, and of Aḥiqar shared a common literary type called “the tale of the courtier,” which could then be divided into two sub-types, “tales of court conflict” and “tales of court contest.” 40 In “tales of court contest,” a wise hero of undistinguished status solves a problem that the native courtiers have not been able to solve and thereby wins elevation to a higher position (Daniel 2, 4, 5, and Genesis 40–41). In tales of court conflict, the native courtiers seek the ruin of a 35. While legend is a much debated term, it is primarily defined by the intent to edify; see Collins, Daniel, 44. 36. See Collins, “The Court-Tales in Daniel and the Development of Apocalyptic,” 219; idem, The Apocalyptic Vision of the Book of Daniel, 33; Hartman and Di Lella, Daniel, 55–61; C. L. Seow, Daniel (Westminster Bible Companion; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 9–10. 37.  Herodotus 1.29–33; 1.87–90; 3.35–36. See R. Lattimore, “The Wise Adviser in Herodotus,” Classical Philology 34 (1939), 24–35; and also Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 55–70. Wills gives an overview of what he believes are the Ionian and Lydian court legends in Herodotus. On the folklore motif 922 or 922A, see Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, Based on the System of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. Part I: Animal Tales, Tales of Magic, Religious Tales, and Realistic Tales, with an Introduction (Folklore Fellows’ Communications 284; Helsinki: Academia scientiarum fennica, 2004), 554–56. 38.  E.g., Ludwig A. Rosenthal, “Die Josephgeschichte, mit den Büchern Ester und Daniel verglichen,” ZAW 15 (1895), 278–84; P. Riessler, “Zu Rosenthals Aufsatz, Bd. XV, S. 278ff.,” ZAW 16 (1896), 182; Rosenthal, “Nochmals der Vergleich Ester, Joseph, Daniel,” ZAW 17 (1897), 125–28; Baumgartner, Das Buch Daniel, 6–10; idem, “Ein Vierteljahrhundert Danielforschung,” 131; Ginsberg, Studies in Daniel, 27; Heaton, The Book of Daniel, 32–47. See also Arthur Jeffrey, “The Book of Daniel: Introduction and Exegesis,” in George Arthur Buttrick, ed., IB (New York: Abingdon, 1956), 6.359–60; and G. Fohrer, Introduction to the Old Testament (Nashville: Abingdon, 1968), 474. 39.  Humphreys, “A Life-Style for Diaspora,” 211–23; Collins, “The Court-Tales in Daniel and the Development of Apocalyptic,” 218–34. 40.  Humphreys, “A Life-Style for Diaspora,” 217–21.

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wise hero of prominent status, who first suffers a setback but is later vindicated before the foreign king (Daniel 3, 6, Aḥiqar, Esther, and some elements of the story of Nehemiah). The distinction of the two sub-types has been followed by subsequent scholars. 41 As noted in ch. 3 above (and a topic to which I will return in ch. 5), several Egyptian court tales ought to be considered in this connection too, such as: the Instructions of ʿOnchsheshonqy (a court conflict), the Tales from King Cheops Court in Papyrus Westcar (a court contest of story-telling), Setne Khamwas I and II (a court conflict and a court contest, at least in part), the imprisoned magician stories (Ḥi-Ḥor and Ḥenenu, court conflicts), Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh (P. Demotic Saqqāra 2, verso; a court conflict), and Merire and Sisobek (court contest and court conflict). In addition, other Egyptian stories, especially from the Hellenistic period, have a court setting and include a king and courtiers, although many are so fragmentary that the main plot elements are not discernible. Finally, several Qumran tales must be included as well: 4Q550, Tales of the Persian Court (perhaps including both a court conflict and court contest) and others more fragmentary, such as: 4Q246, the Aramaic Apocalypse; 4Q243–244 and 4Q245, the Pseudo-Daniel texts; 4Q552–553, the Four Kingdoms Apocalypse; and 4Q242, the Prayer of Nabonidus. Alexander Krappe’s 1941 investigation of the parallel motifs contained in Aḥiqar and a particular Indian tale provided the impetus for similar studies applying folklore categories to the courtier stories of Daniel. 42 Niditch and Doran have employed the type and motif indexes of Aarne and Thompson, 43 and Pamela Milne has used the “structuralist-morphological” approach of Vladimir Propp to focus on parallel structural relationships between the stories—that is, the finite 41.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 3; Milne, Vladimir Propp and the Study of Structure, 280ff.; Collins, The Apocalyptic Vision of the Book of Daniel, 3; idem, Daniel, 45–46. Collins modifes the two categories somewhat. He notes that Dan 3 and 6 “undeniably represent a distinct type of tale,” however, “the problems the heroes encounter are specifically religious in nature, and the heroes attain deliverance not by their own wits or by the connivance of others but by divine interventions” (Collins, Daniel, 46). With regard to the so-called “tales of court contest,” Collins agrees with Humphreys that the designation seems to apply to Dan 2 but believes that chs. 4 and 5 seem to have a different emphasis. The emphasis of Dan 4, which is in the form of an epistle, is on Nebuchadnezzar’s fall and restoration rather than Daniel’s success as an interpreter, while in Dan 5 the emphasis is on Daniel’s admonition to the king (ibid., 46– 47). (On Dan 4 as an epistle, see also Pamela Milne, Vladimir Propp and the Study of Structure, 258.) Finally Collins considers ch. 1, the introduction to the stories of chs. 2–6, to belong at least marginally to the “tales of court contest,” because there Daniel and his three compatriots outperform all the youths in training as well as the court sages more generally. 42.  Alexander H. Krappe, “Is the Story of Aḥikar the Wise of Indian Origin? ” 280–84. 43. A. Aarne, Verzeichnis der Märchentypen (Folklore Fellows Communications 3; Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1911); idem, The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography (trans. and enlarged by S. Thompson; Folklore Fellows Communications 184; Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1961); Niditch and Doran, “The Success Story of the Wise Courtier.”

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number of functions in the action sequence of each story. 44 Although more emphasis is placed on content than form in the “Historic-Geographic” method of Aarne and Thompson, the formalist approach of Vladimir Propp is quite the opposite: it is plot-based, concerned with emphasizing actions. Niditch and Doran suggest that Syriac Aḥiqar 5–7, Genesis 41, and Daniel 2 conform to Aarne-Thompson type 922. 45 They emphasize the following ordering of motifs: 1.  person of lower status is called before a person of higher status to answer difficult questions or to solve a problem requiring insight; 2.  person of high status poses the problem, which no one seems capable of solving; 3.  person of lower status does solve the problem; and 4.  person of lower status is rewarded for answering. 46

Unfortunately, although Niditch and Doran were careful to state that not all courtier tales belonged to a single literary type, the tales that they say belong to type 922 still admit “variations”—that is, they do not strictly adhere to the type. 47 Pamela Milne uses Propp’s specific model for the narrative surface structure of the heroic fairy tale, finding that Daniel 4 does not succumb to Proppian analysis, probably because it has the form of an epistle rather than strictly a tale. 48 Both studies indicate that court or courtier tales as a designation for the stories of Daniel is slightly loose, although very helpful. 49 44. Pamela Milne, Vladimir Propp and the Study of Structure, 11; Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (2nd English ed.; trans. Laurence Scott; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 25– 65. Propp’s famous functional sequence proceeds: lack — response — lack liquidated or resolution. 45.  See now Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales: Part I, 554–56. 46.  Niditch and Doran, “Success Story,” 180. 47.  Wills observes, “the tale type numbers which they adduce from the Aarne-Thompson index to designate their pattern, 922 and 922A, do not correspond exactly to the narrative they analyze” (Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 7). 48.  Interestingly enough, Milne’s results concerning the sub-groups of chs. 1–2 and 5 v. chs. 3 and 6 support the previous findings of others, especially Humphreys. All the tales use function 31(W), reward, except Dan 4. Dan 4 also lacked the one function, 8(A) = problematic situation, which is the one function absolutely necessary to Propp’s definition of a tale (Milne, Vladimir Propp and the Study of Structure, 257). She concludes that there are precisely three different genres utilized: the non-ethnopoetic genre epistle (ch. 4), the ethnopoetic genre sacred legend (chs. 3 and 6), and finally, a third genre (in chs. 1–2 and 5) “which cannot yet be identified but which bears a closer resemblance to an ethnopoetic genre than does Daniel 4 but less resemblance than do Daniel 3 and 6” (Milne, Vladimir Propp and the Study of Structure, 264). For some criticisms of Milne, especially the decision to analyze chs. 1–2 as a single unit, see: Goldingay, “Story, Vision, Interpretation: Literary Approaches to Daniel,” in van der Woude, ed., The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings, 300. 49.  Collins suggests that the court tale label “first . . . prepares us to appreciate certain stereotypical features of the tales, such as the impetuous king or the fact that the wise heroes

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Lawrence Wills’s three-pronged designation wisdom court legend indicates that the court setting is central to the genre and that the intention of the stories is to edify. 50 Wisdom seems to be closely associated with the ancient Near Eastern court. 51 Courtiers in the Bible are often called wise (Gen 41:8; Isa 19:11, 29:14; Jer 18:18, 50:35, 51:57; Esth 1:13; Dan 2:13, etc.), as are kings (2 Sam 14:2, 20:16) and leaders of the tribes (Deut 1:13). Non-Israelite courtiers revered as sages include Aḥiqar, Aesop (“the most famous figure of Greek popular wisdom”), and the three Greeks appearing at the court of Croesus in Herodotus’ History who are among the famous “Seven Sages” of Greek tradition. 52 Within the “court tales,” Joseph (Gen 41:39), Daniel and his companions (MT Dan 1:20, 4:15, and 5:11–16), as well as Aḥiqar (Aḥiqar 1:1), are all referred to as wise. In addition, collections of “wisdom” such as proverbs often circulated with stories of wise courtiers (e.g., Aḥiqar, the Life of Aesop, the Egyptian ʿOnchsheshonqy), and in Egypt, proto-apocalyptic or pseudo-prophetic literary texts often have a court setting (e.g., the Prophecies of Neferti, the Oracle of the Lamb, etc.) Beyond this surface association to wisdom, however, it is difficult to define wisdom in the context of narrative material. 53 Von Rad and Talmon both have suggested that in the narrative wisdom of the so-called court tales, “the ideals of Hebrew proverbial wisdom were embodied by the protagonists, and that the stories served to dramatize the proper role for a wise Jew in the world.” 54 Müller rejuvenated von Rad’s term “Lehrerzählung” and suggested the genre label “weisheitliche Lehrerzählung” (“didactic wisdom narrative”) for the Joseph story, the frame narrative of Job, Genesis 37–50, Daniel 1–6, Tobit, Esther, and Aḥiqar. 55 By contrast, J. L. Crenshaw has denied all claims for the existence of survive the sentence of death. . . . Second, the wider context throws some light on the function of such tales” (Collins, Daniel, 44). 50.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 12–38. See also: Hans Strauss, “Weis­ heit­liche Lehrerzählungen im und um das Alte Testament,” ZAW 116 (2004), 379–95. 51.  S. H. Blank, “Wisdom,” IDB IV, 853–56; Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 23–24. 52.  Ibid., 24. 53.  Defining the term wisdom even within the so-called traditional “canon” of wisdom texts (i.e., Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, Ben Sira, Wisdom of Solomon, and sometimes the wisdom psalms) eludes scholars. The very term wisdom is ambiguous and can be used for a broad variety of distinct kinds of wisdom, including what has been called “narrative wisdom.” Wills’ list includes: clan wisdom, courtly wisdom, scribal wisdom, theological wisdom, mantic wisdom, philosophical wisdom, narrative wisdom, etc. (The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 25). These labels to some degree reflect the social contexts within which scholars think they occurred; however, one can not provide a setting for every text (R. Murphy, Wisdom Literature [FOTL 13; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981], 3). 54.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 2. See also G. von Rad, “The Joseph Narrative and Ancient Wisdom,” in The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 292–300; and Shemaryahu Talmon, “Wisdom in the Book of Esther,” VT 13 (1963), 419–55. 55.  Müller, “Die weisheitliche Lehrerzählung,” 77–98.

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“narrative wisdom,” since he thinks there are too many non-wisdom elements. 56 For Crenshaw, someone such as Joseph could not personify a wise model or exemplar, because he was never able to control his emotions, he was a braggart, he seemed to enjoy torturing his brothers concerning the fate of their younger brother Benjamin, and so on. As a solution to Crenshaw’s objections, Wills proposes that the characters in narrative wisdom are “marked” by wisdom—not that they are wise models whose actions are to be emulated: “the protagonist in Jewish wisdom court legends succeeds, not through or by means of wisdom, but on account of his or her wisdom. For the person characterized as wise, justice prevails.” 57 Another kind of wisdom proposed for Daniel is “apocalyptic wisdom,” most recently expounded by Marco Settembrini especially for the visions of chs. 7–12, in that the discernment encouraged is that the wise learn how to survive in times of persecution. 58 The Book of Daniel provides the reader examples in the stories and encouragement in the visions to look forward to God’s ultimate intervention and the vindication of the wise. (Note especially Dan 12:3, the prophecy that “the wise will shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who lead many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever.”) “Mantic” wisdom has also been suggested as a category for Daniel, most especially by Hans-Peter Müller. 59 Mantic wisdom is closely tied to magical arts, divination, and dream interpretation, found especially in Mesopotamian (but also Egyptian) texts. In the Book of Daniel, Daniel is clearly included in the list of Chaldean magicians, and he and his friends are so well-educated in Babylonian sciences that, in their test in ch. 1, they surpass everyone else in training. In the Hebrew Bible, mantic wisdom in Israel is ambiguous except in the book of Daniel and in the Joseph story; only in Daniel and in the Joseph story is the practice of 56. See J. L. Crenshaw, “Method in Determining Wisdom Influence upon ‘Historical’ Literature,” JBL 88 (1969), 129 for a bibliography of works claiming wisdom influence for nonhagiographic literature. 57.  Wills’s suggestion stems from the work of H-P. Müller, who depicted the protagonist’s virtues as paradigmatic (Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 33). By contrast, Shannon Burkes Pinette sees Daniel as so passively wise that he becomes less wise as the book progresses, until in 9:23 and 10:19 he receives angelic wisdom “because he is beloved,” not wise (Burkes Pinette, “The Lady Vanishes: Wisdom in Ben Sira and Daniel,” in Daniel C. Harlow et al., eds., The “Other” in Second Temple Judaism: Essays in Honor of John J. Collins [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010], 160–72, esp. p. 171). 58. Marco Settembrini, Sapienza e storia in Dn 7–12 (Analecta biblica 169; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 2007). See also M. Küchler’s definition of apocalyptic wisdom, Früh­ jüdische Weisheitstraditionen, esp. pp. 65–71. 59. See Müller, “Magisch-mantische Weisheit und die Gestalt Daniels,” UF 1 (1969), 79–94; idem, “Mantische Weisheit und Apokalyptik,” VTSup 22 (1972), 268–93; and Collins, “Court-Tales,” 218–34. Knibb seems to agree that this is mantic wisdom, and that apocalyptic can therefore be located in wisdom (Sir 36:1–17’s prayer has an eschatological note); Michael A. Knibb, “‘You are Indeed Wiser than Daniel’: Reflections on the Character of the Book of Daniel,” in van der Woude, ed., The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings, 399–411.

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mantic wisdom by a Jew acceptable, and in each case, the story is set in a foreign land (Babylon, Egypt) within which divination is practiced by professionals in a royal court. 60 For Müller, the roots of apocalyptic are especially in divination in that they both share four things in common: a certain determinism, a claim to inspiration, similar use of symbolic imagery, and pseudonymity—features that are not found in prophecy. 61 On the other hand, some authors have opposed Müller’s idea of mantic wisdom as central to understanding Daniel or as a source of apocalyptic. 62 Michael Fox suggests that mantic wisdom is a branch of courtly—that is, human or didactic—wisdom and that, while Daniel and Joseph have this human wisdom, their human abilities do not really move the plot forward. The actual dream interpretation or problem solving that they both participate in comes from supernatural communication with God. 63 Daniel’s and Joseph’s most important characteristics are their piety and tenacity of faith; thus, the “wisdom” of the stories is pietistic and inspired wisdom, not the ethical and practical wisdom of Wisdom literature. 64 Andreas Bedenbender argues in the same vein that the wisdom of Daniel is not mantic wisdom but “revealed wisdom.” 65 Although the text praises Daniel’s dream-interpreting abilities from the point of view of the Babylonians, when he actually interprets a dream, it is God in heaven who is said to have revealed it (Dan 2:27b–28a; cf. Gen 40:8 in the Joseph story). B. A. Mastin also thinks that Daniel contains what he calls “bestowed wisdom”: Daniel is not superior because he is clever (even though he is indeed 60.  Sometimes, divination is expressly forbidden; see Num 23:23 and Deut18:10. 61.  By contrast, VanderKam proposed that both prophecy and (mantic) wisdom were the ancestors of apocalyptic and overlap in five areas: (1) both see the deity or deities as revealing themselves to selected individuals; (2) both deal with the future and learning it in advance; (3) both involve deciphering encoded messages (at least late prophecy); (4) they utilize the same media, such as dreams and night visions; and (5) their divine messages bear on political and military situations and events. See James C. VanderKam, “The Prophetic-Sapiential Origins of Apocalyptic Thought,” in James D. Martin and Philip R. Davies, eds., A Word in Season: Essays in Honour of William McKane (JSOT Sup 42; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1986), 163–76. 62.  For instance, S. B. Reid believes that mantic wisdom is an “outmoded” category (Reid, Enoch and Daniel: A Form Critical and Sociological Study of the Historical Apocalypses [BIBAL Monograph Series; Berkeley: BIBAL, 1989; 2nd ed. 2004], 24). 63.  Michael V. Fox, “Wisdom in the Joseph Story,” VT 51 (2001), 26–41. 64.  On the oft-overlooked eschatological interests already present in wisdom literature, see Diethelm Michel, “Weisheit und Apokalyptik,” in van der Woude, ed., The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings, 413–34. 65. Andreas Bedenbender, “Jewish Apocalypticism: A Child of Mantic Wisdom? ” Henoch 24 (2002): 189–96. Daniel does not use mantic techniques to discover the meanings of dreams or the writing on the wall; in particular, he uses no techniques for reading texts in unknown alphabets. See Bedenbender, “Seers as Mantic Sages in Jewish Apocalyptic (Daniel and Enoch),” in Leo G. Perdue, ed., Scribes, Sages, and Seers: The Sage in the Eastern Mediterranean World (FRLANT 219; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 258–70, esp. pp. 260–65.

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clever) but because God gives him the solutions. 66 However, the very “choice of Jewish diviners at a foreign court as the heroes of the stories of Dan. i–vi, and the subsequent composition of vision reports which provide Daniel with a different but related role in the disclosure of the future, demonstrate the authors’ interest in mantic lore.” 67 This means that “the author(s) accept the legitimacy of divination, and some of its characteristics colour their thought.” 68 Similarly, for Jack Lawson, Daniel is thus not doing something different from what the Babylonians do; he is in the very mold of a mantic sage. 69 Sages from across the ancient Near East understood that knowledge was a product of divine revelation. Daniel is clever and skilled—as is Joseph (who not only dreams and interprets dreams but also owns a divining cup in Gen 44:5)—but the ultimate source of his wisdom is his God. Perhaps the likelist possibility for why divination and training in the Babylonian mantic sciences is acceptable for the Jewish Daniel in the Daniel court tales is proposed by R. Glenn Wooden. His explanation is that some of the Daniel stories, especially chs. 4 and 5 (where Daniel is called “chief of the magicians,” ‫)רב חרטמיא‬, were perhaps preexisting stories about an unnamed court diviner. 70 Upon their incorporation into the Book of Daniel, they were edited to make the hero into a “divinely assisted interpreter,” and it is only in the stories’ final form that the mantic professions are somewhat critiqued and ridiculed. 71 I will return to this matter below.

66.  B. A. Mastin, “Wisdom and Daniel,” in John Day, Robert P. Gordon, and H. G. M. Williamson, eds., Wisdom in Ancient Israel: Essays in Honour of J. A. Emerton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 161–69. 67.  Mastin, “Wisdom and Daniel,” 169. Paul A. Porter (Metaphors and Monsters [Lund: Gleerup, 1983], esp. p. 18) says that the animal imagery behind the dreams of chs. 7 and 8 find their source in the Mesopotamian šumma izbu omens, an idea that Mastin refutes. 68.  Mastin, “Wisdom and Daniel,” 167. 69.  Jack N. Lawson, “‘The God Who Reveals Secrets’: The Mesopotamian Background to Daniel 2.47,” JSOT 74 (1997), 61–76. 70.  The Ugaritic figure Daniel could be the source of the name “Daniel,” as well as some characteristics of a wise hero. See below. 71.  The key to this is the repetitious language of ch. 2, in which Daniel’s ability is more than once said to be due to revelation and the gift of wisdom from God; Wooden, “Changing Perceptions of Daniel: Reading Daniel 4 and 5 in Context,” in William H. Brackney et al., eds., From Biblical Criticism to Biblical Faith: Essays in Honor of Lee Martin McDonald (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007), 9–23. In his dissertation, Wooden says the pronounced role of Daniel as interpreter in chs. 4–6 was an addition by a maśkîlîm redactor: The Book of Daniel and Manticism: A Critical Assessment of the View that the Book of Daniel Derives from a Mantic Tradition (Ph.D. dissertation, University of St. Andrews, 2000). See also idem, “The Witness of Daniel in the Court of the Kings,” in R. Glenn Wooden et al., eds., ‘You Will Be My Witnesses’: A Festschrift in Honor of the Reverend Dr. Allison A. Trites on the Occasion of His Retirement (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003), 30–52.

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Excursus: The Genre of the Additional Stories in Greek The two stories in the Greek Additions of Daniel, Susanna and Bel and the Serpent, probably circulated independently of Daniel 1–12 at first. 72 Bel and the Serpent introduces Daniel as a “companion of the king,” and the OG adds that he is a priest. Susanna introduces Daniel late in the tale, as a “young boy” (Th— παιδάριον) or “young man” (OG–νεώτρος). Bel and the Serpent’s setting is the royal court of Babylon (in OG, the king is unnamed, but in Th the king is Cyrus the Persian). Susanna’s setting is quite different from the court tales of Dan 1–6, in that no king is ever mentioned and the setting involves a local court within a Babylonian Jewish community, not the royal court, and Daniel is not even an elder, let alone someone in the hierarchy of the kingdom or empire. 73 As for genre, Bel and the Serpent seems to retain some continuity with the court tales of chs. 1–6. This is evident in Daniel’s relationship to the king as “companion” or “friend” in both parts (Bel v. 1 and OG 6:13), his conflict with the priests in the Bel section, and the pressure his enemies apply in order to ensure that he is punished for his destruction of Bel and the serpent by being thrown into a lion’s den (as in Dan ch. 6). Daniel as “companion of the king” is a source of advice to the king, and via practical wisdom—the cleverness and wit of a detective—persuades the king to realize, first, that the statue of Bel and, then, that the living serpent, are neither one worthy of worship. 74 Bel and the Serpent in its two episodes (one about the statue of Bel and the other about the serpent who is worshiped) also contains traces of at least two other genres: prophetic legend (especially in the Old Greek) and idol parody. 75 The prophetic legend is evident especially in the lion’s-den section of the story, in which Habakkuk is carried by the hair to serve Daniel a meal during the week he is trapped with the lions. The idol parody is evident in both episodes: in the story about the idol Bel, Bel is 72.  Collins, “The King Has Become a Jew,” 335–37; idem, Daniel, 433; Wills, Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 79, 130; Knibb, “The Book of Daniel in Its Context,” 31; Kottsieper, “Zusätze zu Daniel,” 219. 73.  Cf. Dan 2, where he is given rule over Babylonian province; Dan 5, where he is made third in the kingdom; and Dan 6, where he is one of three ministers over the 127 satraps in the Median kingdom. 74.  Collins says this “practical wisdom” is more like that in Aḥiqar rather than the mantic wisdom of Dan 1–6 (Collins, Daniel, 417). 75.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 129 n. 102. Both Greek versions include the episode of the prophet Habakkuk bringing food to Daniel in the lions’ pit; however, the OG introduction to the tale specifically assigns the tale to “the prophecy of Habakkuk, son of Joshua, of the tribe of Levi.” “The attempt to turn this court legend into a prophet legend can be detected only in those sections that deal with Habbakuk and may not be original to the text” (ibid.). Anton Scholz in 1892 proposed the existence of a “Habakkuk collection” that included Bel and the Serpent with Susanna, Esther, Judith, Tobit, Habakkuk, etc. (Commentar über das Buch “Esther” mit seinen Zusätzen und über “Susanna” [Würzburg: Leo Woerl, 1892], 137).

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given an enormous amount of provisions: 12 bushels of flour, 4 sheep (40 in Th), and 6 measures of oil (OG) or wine (Th) every day; and in the story of the living serpent, Daniel is able to cause it to burst. The first idol cannot really eat and thus is not a living god, and the second may eat but can be destroyed. 76 Daniel not only mocks the idol and the serpent (actually laughing several times at the former), but, in contrast to idol parodies elsewhere in biblical literature (e.g., Isa 44:9–20; Hab 2:18–19; Jer 10:1–16; and Psalms 115 and 135; and the Letter of Jeremiah in the Deuterocanon), the idols in Bel and the Serpent are not merely parodied but actually eliminated. 77 The idol Bel and his temple are pulled down by Daniel after he has proved that the priests and their families are stealing Bel’s offerings at night, and the serpent is blown apart when it swallows the strange mixture of pitch, fat, and hair that Daniel prepares. As for Susanna, it has no obvious connection to the court or to a foreign king, although some scholars think that it retains enough associations with the court to be called a court tale. Wills considers it to be an “adaptation of the standard court legend genre to a Jewish middle-class audience.” 78 DiTommaso finds that it contains many of the same themes as Dan 1–6, such as: the Babylonian setting, Daniel as protagonist, the solution of a mystery, and the overall message about God’s preservation of the faithful, not to mention the conflict between Jews who remain faithful to the Mosaic Law and those who break it. 79 Steussy believes that both Bel and Susanna display features of the “court conflict” genre, like Dan 3 and 6. 80 It is unlike the “court contest” genre in that there is not much of a contest between Daniel the young man and the two elders who have accused Susanna. Instead, it is Daniel who steps forward to examine them and expose their lies via a clever sleuthing strategy. Because Susanna illustrates unfit elders who are questioned by a young boy who proves to be a worthier arbiter of justice than they, the story has been open to interpretation as at least three other kinds of genre: 81 “midrash” (especially on Jer 29:21–32, the story of the false and adulterous prophets Ahab and Zedekiah who are condemned to death by Nebuchadnezzar), “folklore,” and “wisdom tale.” 82 76. Claudia Bergmann, “The Ability/Inability to Eat: Determining Life and Death in Bel et draco,” JSJ 35 (2004), 262–83. 77.  Wolfgang M. W. Roth, “For Life, He Appeals to Death (Wis 13:18): A Study of Old Testament Idol Parodies,” CBQ (1975), 42–43. 78.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 77. 79.  DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 61–62. 80.  Steussy, Gardens in Babylon, 167. 81.  Collins, Daniel, 435–37. 82.  The midrash connection is made in the Hebrew version of Susanna in the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a medieval text with far older traditions. In Jerahmeel, the story of the false prophets Ahab and Zedekiah is placed just before Susanna. See Eli Yassif, Sefer ha-Zikronot huʾ Divrey ha-Yamim le-Yerahmeʾel (‫ ;ספר הזכרונות הוא דברי הימים לירחמאל‬Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2001), 246–49.

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The first category, midrash, was advocated most memorably by Brüll, who believed that the questioning of witnesses displayed a pro-Pharisaic stance from the time of Simeon ben Shetach, the first century b.c.e. rabbi and head of the Sanhedrin. 83 Another version of the midrash theory was put forth by van Henten, who understood the story as a midrash and commentary on Dan 1:2. Most uniquely, he suggested that Daniel and his three friends were actually the four children of Susanna (see OG v. 30, where they are unnamed) and that Jehoiakim, the husband of Susanna, was no less than king Jehoiakim. 84 This interpretation has not caught on. 85 The strong folklore elements of Susanna were pointed out by Huet and by Baumgartner, both of whom turned to The Nights for the theme of a wise young child who uncovers an injustice and the theme of the falsely accused young woman. 86 The label “wisdom narrative” is espoused by Engel (specifically, the OG of Susanna is described as a “theologische Lehrerzählung mit paränetischer Absicht” and Th Susanna, a reworking of OG, as a “legendhafte weisheitliche Lehr- oder Beispielerzählung”). 87 Collins notes, however, that, just as is the case in Dan 3 and 6, the example of persecution of the godly here does not make Susanna a “martyr legend,” since Susanna is not actually killed. 88 Finally, because of the erotic element added especially in the Th version, which make Susanna “closer to the Greek romances than any of the other Daniel stories,” perhaps “novella” or “short story” would be a good generic label for Susanna. 89 As short stories, perhaps both Bel and Susanna share a relationship to the detective genre. 90 83.  Simeon ben Shetach was also the brother of Queen Alexandra Salome (Brüll, “Das apokryphische Susanna-Buch,” 1–69). See also C. J. Ball, “The Additions to Daniel II: The History of Susanna,” in H. Wace, ed., The Holy Bible: Apocrypha (London: Murray, 1888), 2.323–43; Delcor, Le livre de Daniel, 274; Engel, Die Susanna Erzählung, 68. The latter accepts the derivation but rejects the pro-Pharisaic stance. Note that Kottsieper instead sees a proSadducean stance in Th Susanna (“Zusätze,” 214–18, 292–93). 84.  J. W. van Henten, “The Story of Susanna as a Pre-Rabbinic Midrash to Dan. 1:1–2,” in A. Kuyt et al., eds., Variety of Forms: Dutch Studies in Midrash (Papers Read at the Workshop “Midrash”) (Publications of the Juda Palache Institute 5; Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1990), 1–14. 85. Brüll’s proposal was refuted by Baumgartner (“Susanna: Die Geschichte einer Le­ gende,” in idem, Zum Alten Testament und seiner Umwelt: Ausgewählte Aufsätze [Leiden: Brill, 1959], 42–67, esp. pp. 48–49 [originally in ARW 24 [1825], 259–80); and van Henten’s was refuted by DiTommaso, among others (The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 60–61). 86.  No. K2112 in Thompson’s Motif-Index; no. 882 in Uther, The Types of International Folktales, 505–6. G. Huet, “Daniel et Susanne: Note de littératur comparée,” RHR 65 (1912), 277–84; 76 (1917), 129–30; Baumgartner, “Susanna: Die Geschichte einer Legende,” 42–67. 87.  Engel, Die Susanna Erzählung, 177. 88.  Collins, Daniel, 436–37. R. A. F. MacKenzie gave it this label; see “The Meaning of the Susanna Story,” CJT 3 (1957), 211–18. 89.  Collins, Daniel, 437. 90. Stuart Lasine, “Solomon, Daniel, and the Detective Story,” Hebrew Annual Review 11 (1987), 247–66. A relatively recent volume on the novel genre marks Bel and Susanna as the

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4.1.1.2.  Transformation of Genre: The Relationship of the Stories to Each Other and to the Visions The genre of the Daniel stories is transformed not only by their aggregation but by their juxtaposition with the visions, so that the entire Book of Daniel becomes part of the macro-genre or composite genre “apocalyptic.” 91 Indeed, the Book of Daniel has long been seen as the fons et origo of apocalyptic, since it is one of the earliest examples of the genre, 92 and among the Jewish apocalypses as a group, only portions of 1 Enoch are older. 93 This view of the stories as an introduction to the visions subordinates them to the imagery and message of the visions, which depict the persecution of Jews by Antiochus Epiphanes during the Maccabean period, the time in which the visions were composed. While it is typical for an apocalypse to focus on a great figure of the past, What is unusual in Daniel is the use of a collection of stories and the ideological tensions between them and the subsequent revelations. Yet in the final form of Daniel these stories definitely serve as an introduction to the revelations, and the dominant form of the whole is an apocalypse. 94

Concentration on the visions has thus somewhat subverted or distorted our view of the narrative parts. Interpreting the stories from the point of view of the visions, Daniel appears in the serious role of a prophet whose prophecies ex eventu serve to bolster the faith of the persecuted—not as a pious but clever courtier outwitting his rivals and earning success in the presence of arrogant yet sometimes gullible despots. This bias toward the perspective given in the visions is also reflected in the association of the book with the Prophets (instead of with the Writings, as in the Jewish canon) in the Greek versions and later Christian editions. It has only been with the rise of critical scholarship that scholars have begun emphasizing the popular nature of the stories. 95 According to A. Fowler, the aggregation of short complete works leads to a coherent unit that is “generically distinct both from its component parts and two oldest detective stories in the world: Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (London: Continuum, 2004), 505. 91.  John G. Gammie, “Classification, Stages of Growth, and Changing Intentions in the Book of Daniel,” 192ff.; Koch, Ratlos vor der Apokalyptik, 15–31 (trans M. Kohl, The Rediscovery of Apocalyptic, 18–33). 92.  “Its composite origin gives it an ad hoc, experimental character,” and the combination of stories and visions does not become a recurrent feature (Collins, Daniel, 58). 93.  Particularly the Book of the Watchers and the Astronomical Book, and perhaps the Apocalypse of Weeks; E. Isaac, “1 (Ethiopic Apocalypse of) Enoch,” in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1: Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments (ed. J. H. Charlesworth; New York: Doubleday, 1983), 7. 94.  Collins, Daniel: With an Introduction to Apocalyptic Literature, 33. Italics his. 95. See Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, for example, as well as several of the studies on Daniel as folklore, above.

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from unordered collections” 96—that is, there is a transformation of genre in story-collections. In the case of Daniel, the transformation occurs first of all in the piling up of entertaining court tales in Dan 1–6. The repetition of optimistic outcomes for Daniel or his friends, through all sorts of adventures, emphasizes that righteous Jews during the Babylonian exile led rewarding, successful lives. In conflicts and contests in the royal court, the righteous continue to out-perform the Babylonians and rise to the top of foreign government. As Lawrence Wills notes: Nebuchadnezzar can hardly be threatening—or even worthy of condemnation—in the comic triumph of these legends. The episodic nature of the legends contributes to this impression. No danger is so real that it is met just once, overcome, and relegated to the past; rather, Daniel has an opportunity to model his resolve again and again. 97

This is not to underplay the true patterns of danger in the stories. Sharon Pace has depicted Nebuchadnezzar as inept—yes—but also dangerous. 98 Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians may be out-done by Daniel and his three friends, but the Babylonian king is a menacing presence as well. In ch. 2, he threatens all the sages with dismemberment and that their houses will be made into trash heaps. In ch. 3, he never backs down from his threat to throw into a furnace anyone who will not worship the statue, even when he finds out that there are three of his ministers who refuse to do so. This is a threat specifically against Jews that the Diaspora audience would understand. Nonetheless, the stories of Daniel also display their entertainment function in the optimistic outcome of each episode about Daniel or the three friends. The overarching pattern of the stories—a clever Jewish courtier succeeding in a conflict or contest at a foreign court—must be adhered to, no matter how rigorously the events of the story strain against that pattern. In Dan 5, for instance, the plot sequence is much like the other stories in that Belshazzar has a problem that he needs solved—in this case the interpretation of the writing on the wall—and the wise Daniel is able to solve it miraculously with the help of his God. However, in this story, the solution of the 96. A. Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 172. 97.  Wills, The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World, 48. And see Collins, Daniel, 45: “The characters in the tales have a stereo-typical quality, and character development is limited to the rather abrupt reversals of attitude by the gentile kings. The individual stories are self-contained, with little carryover from one to the next.” 98.  On the harsh nature of Diaspora life as illustrated in Daniel, see: Sharon Pace, “Diaspora Dangers, Diaspora Dreams,” in Peter W. Flint et al., eds., Studies in the Hebrew Bible, Qumran, and the Septuagint Presented to Eugene Ulrich (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 21–59; and also Daniel Smith-Christopher, “Prayers and Dreams: Power and Diaspora Identities in the Social Setting of the Daniel Tales,” in Collins and Flint, eds., The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, 1.266–90.

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puzzle involves terrible news for the king: his kingdom has been scheduled for conquest and dissolution that very night. Yet, in spite of this alarming news, the story has Belshazzar take no action in protest or anger; Daniel is duly rewarded. There is no harm to Daniel the interpreter and messenger. The pattern of the stories, which always envisages a happy end for the successful Daniel or his friends, must be retained. The next “transformation of genre” for the stories occurred when the visions were added. MT contains six stories to which are added four visions; this concentration of visions in the last half of the book stresses the apocalyptic over the legendary, as we have noted. Seen in connection with the visions, the marvelous stories about Daniel and his friends themselves are transformed into “literature of crisis,” 99 which gives lessons on “lifestyles for diaspora.” 100 The entertaining tales of “comic triumph” become the foundation for visions and prophecies ex eventu (chs. 7 through almost all of 11) regarding the Hellenistic period and Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who placed the “desolating abomination” on the altar of the Jerusalem temple (alluded to in Dan 8:13; 9:27; 11:31). The book then ends with truly predictive prophecy (Dan 11:40 onward), culminating in the message from the angel Michael to Daniel about a future time in which some will be resurrected and the wise will shine like the brightness of the firmament. The reader imagines the wise Daniel silenced by his exhausting visions, which he has written down and sealed, waiting for his end (in 12:13 the angel has instructed him to “go his way and rest” until he “rises” for his reward). Humphreys has suggested that the emphases of Daniel’s stories were radically readjusted by the attachment of the visions: The reader must stretch his credulity to the breaking point in being asked to accept that the Daniel, who is both completely loyal to his Jewish heritage and God and is able to function as a skilled and loyal courtier holding the highest office in the court of foreign monarchs, is also the Daniel whose visions in the latter part of the book reveal these same monarchs and nations as oppressive and completely condemned in the divine plan. . . . Tales that had their origin in the post-exilic diaspora and that present a style of life for the diaspora Jew which affirms most strongly that at one and the same time the Jew can remain loyal to his heritage and God and yet can live a creative, rewarding, and fulfilled life precisely within a foreign setting, and in interaction with it, have been taken over into a new framework that stresses an exclusiveness and even a nationalistic stance over against and in conflict with the foreign context of the Persian and Hellenistic diaspora. 101

99.  The term is Wills’s (The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World, 52). 100.  Humphreys, “A Life-Style for Diaspora,” 211–23. 101.  Ibid., 223.

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The message of the visions, although universal or world-wide in the scope it portrays for the coming kingdom of God (Dan 7), becomes nationalistic, disheartened, and antagonistic to foreign rule. The author-compiler of Dan 1–12, writing in the middle of the Antiochene persecutions (167–164 b.c.e.), is personally living through the tyranny and anguish caused by the boastful and destructive “little horn,” the Syrian-Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes, whose end is predicted in detail in 11:45 (unlike the deaths of the kings in the stories, which are usually not remarked, with the exception of Belshazzar’s death in 5:30). Read together, the stories and visions focus on the theme of judgment and of the disruption of and resistance to imperial earthly authority. The humor of the stories, which already promotes at least some mocking of authority, is given an even more satiric edge by the visions. 102 Furthermore, when one considers the Greek editions of Daniel, the message and genre of stories and visions is again transformed. Both Theodotion Daniel and Old Greek Daniel begin and end with the popular, rather light-hearted stories, suggesting that the fulfillment of Daniel’s visions has been even further delayed. In the Th manuscripts of Daniel, the book is transformed into a kind of Daniel vita; it begins with the young Daniel in Susanna, is followed by chs. 1–12 (stories and visions), and concludes with Bel and the Serpent, when Daniel in his old age serves under Cyrus the Persian. Moreover, the universalist message of the apocalyptic visions is subverted with the return to the realm of the court tale. Once again, the protagonist is clever and righteous, solving problems for foreign kings, illustrating anew that foreigners can still be convinced to worship the God of the Jews. In OG Daniel, the arrangement consists of chs. 1–12, with Bel and Susanna appended (Pap967). 103 With Susanna as its conclusion, the compiler of OG Daniel sought to return the arc of the book to young righteous heroes (the beautiful chaste Susanna and the precocious young Daniel), who are examples for the Jewish community when their own elders have become corrupt. Life in exile goes on.

4.1.2.  Function: Instruction vs. Entertainment in Daniel The story-collection genre, according to Helen Cooper, always balanced the didactic with entertainment, although one would often outweigh the other. Story-collections are frequently concerned with educating the listener, or pre102.  See Daniel Valeta, “Polyglossia and Parody: Language in Daniel 1–6,” in Roland Boer, ed., Bakhtin and Genre Theory in Biblical Studies (SBL Semeia Studies 63; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 91–108; and Matthew Rindge, “Jewish Identity under Foreign Rule: Daniel 2 as a Reconfiguration of Genesis 41,” JBL 129 (2010), 85–104. Rindge argues that Daniel plays a balancing act of “moderate resistance,” neither fully assimilating to nor fully rejecting foreign power and culture. 103.  Ms 88 and Syh, the post-hexaplaric witnesses to OG, have the stories appended in the opposite order: Susanna and Bel.

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tending to, and often the narrator or characters are renowned wise men, learned courtiers, or philosophers, as in the Disciplina clericalis, the Book of Sindibad/Seven Sages of Rome, Kalilah wa-Dimnah, etc. In Daniel, the concatenation of tales reinforces both entertainment and instruction. Indeed, some of the comic or satirical features of Daniel are as broad or as subtle as anything in the medieval story-collections. 104 Philip R. Davies views Daniel as “serious entertainment,” along with Esther, Ruth, Jonah, Tobit, and Judith. 105 These stories themselves stress wisdom, writing, and instruction: “the scribal character and background of the Daniel collection is indisputable, especially in the second half of the book: the mantic culture, in which the secrets of the universe are encoded in written signs (chs. 5, 9, 12); the emphasis on writing and books; the belief that intellectuals (maskilim) constitute the religious leadership of Judaism (ch. 12).” 106 Davies notes the many references to books opening and closing in Daniel (Dan 1:4, 1:17, 7:10; 12:1, 12:4); to the sealing of books (12:4); to training in books (the youths are trained in literature in ch. 1); and Daniel’s own writing and reading of books or inscriptions (the writing on the wall in ch. 5; Daniel writing down his dream in 7:1; Daniel reading about the exile in the books in 9:2). The Book of Daniel is concerned with the books of the Chaldeans and with secret books, and then the very book itself written by Daniel. 107 Writing is the “gateway to divine secrets. In Daniel, writing is a symbol of authority and power.  . . .” 108 Elsewhere in Daniel, the didactic is especially exhibited in the prayers, hymns, and doxologies that show up throughout the stories, in all the editions, including the Greek Additions to ch. 3. They are meant to emphasize God’s hand in every situation that involves Daniel and his friends in the foreign court and to demonstrate piety in the face of persecution and conflict. In addition, the overall theme of a righteous Jewish wise man or magician (and Daniel is called the “chief of the magicians” in 4:6 and 5:11) beating foreign magicians in their own court 104.  See especially David M. Valeta’s Lions and Ovens and Visions for a satirical reading of the MT stories and for examples of wordplay; also idem, “Polyglossia and Parody: Language in Daniel 1–6,” 99–104. 105.  Philip R. Davies, Scribes and Schools: The Canonization of the Hebrew Scriptures (Library of Ancient Israel; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 142–45. 106.  Davies, Scribes and Schools, 144. 107.  “Daniel, then is a book in which everything significant is done by writing. Political power is exercised in writing, including the political power of the deity. Judgment is in writing. The book of Daniel is also, of course, a writing. Is it a heavenly book which the reader must, like Daniel, decipher? Whatever we conclude from this, it is unmistakable that we are in a world in which writing, reading and deciphering (reading is deciphering!) are key symbols” (P. R. Davies, “Reading Daniel Sociologically,” in van der Woude, ed., The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings, 353–54). 108.  Davies, “Reading Daniel Sociologically,” 354. See also Donald C. Polaski, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin: Writing and Resistance in Daniel 5 and 6,” JBL 123 (2004), 649–69.

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and at their own game can be seen as both amusing and edifying, too. The stories are crisis literature and resistance literature. 109 Wills’s most important conclusion about what he calls “wisdom court legends” is that their function involves affirmations of ethnic pride or group identity by a people who have lost political power—a “ruled ethnic perspective.” 110 That is, the stories demonstrate the still superior worth of a conquered people by telling of a certain exiled figure who through wisdom rose to the highest position in the foreign kingdom. That the tales were instructive is also demonstrated by their later use in other didactic settings. 1 Maccabees (late second century b.c.e.) clearly refers to Dan 3 and 6, in a speech by Mattathias urging his sons to not flag when faced with persecution, perhaps even potential martyrdom. In 1 Macc 2:59–60, “Ananias, Azarias, and Misael believed and were saved from flame. Daniel, because of his innocence, was rescued from the mouth of lions.” 4 Maccabees (probably written in the second half of the first century c.e.) found the same stories especially important and cites them as examples of exemplary martyrdom or steadfast faith in the midst of adversity (13:9; 16:3, 21; 18:12–14). As Diaspora literature, the court tales are encouragement for righteous Jews to maintain their faith and practice; God will assist, support, and reward.

4.1.3.  Orality vs. Literariness Story-collections can be found anywhere along the oral-to-literary spectrum. Those like the Canterbury Tales or the Decameron can be self-consciously literary, while collections like the Nights are closer to the orality end. In general, the texts of the Bible often have an oral register; parts of the Bible reflect certain modes of composition similar to works that we know were composed orally, such as the use of repetitions, epithets, formulas, and conventions. 111 As Niditch has shown, many biblical texts are not really either literary or oral but reveal a complex interplay between the two mentalities. It is not that there was an oral stage far in the prehistory of the text, but: Various portions of the library [the collected works of the Bible] were preserved in various ways, states, and locations before the coalescing of the library we now call the Bible. Some may well have been written pieces kept in the archive of a particular interest group or party. Such written pieces may have been composed in writing or dictations from oral works. Some might have been abbreviated written aids to longer oral performances or, as in a case of legal texts, a sampling of the tradition of case law as a writer understood it. Some works may have taken shape through an oral process of recitation and receiving and could have been 109.  See, for instance: Anathea E. Portier-Young, Apocalypse Against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), esp. pp. 217–79. 110.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 68. 111.  Niditch, Oral World and Written Word, 8–24.

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or could not have been written down in various editions years earlier. Some may have become more or less set without the need for writing. For all of these works, understanding the interplay between the oral and the written is important. The written-down works of the Hebrew Bible were various in origin and would have existed in variants, written and/or oral, that came to be regarded as typical of the Israelite library. 112

Daniel is demonstrably one of the biblical books that has an oral register. Specific devices, such as the listing of officials and artifacts, as well as repetitive formulas throughout the Daniel stories, illustrate careful story-telling technique and certain features of oral transmission. Dan 3, the story of the three friends in the fiery furnace, is especially notable for its long and repeated lists of officials, the Babylonian names of the friends (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego), musical instruments, metals, items of clothing, etc., all set up before the great statue. 113 On the other hand, it is easy to see most of these characteristics in the other chapters of Dan 1–6 as well. In probably the most extended study of repetitions and lists in Daniel, P. Coxon notes the use of the “catchword principle” to make connections and give unity, not only in the many lists of items, but also in various other kinds of repetitive formulas and phrases and their variations for effect, the most simple of which are repeated phrases such as “you saw . . . ,” and “I saw . . .” throughout a passage. 114 Moreover, Niditch suggests that some texts are “abbreviated written aids to longer oral performances,” a point that recalls the medieval sermon exempla that were comprised of simple story outlines on which a preacher would embellish, and the written “prompt” texts used by the professional storytellers of the Nights (see ch. 2 above). This might be the purpose behind some of Daniel’s texts, especially the strange prologue to Dan 5 in the OG, which does not seem to be so much a synopsis of the story to follow as a possible variant (see below, in this chapter, where it is discussed as a “duplicate” to the core Dan 5 story). Niditch’s final point, that the oral process behind the stories could also have resulted in their being written down in variant editions (as seen for Daniel in the great 112.  Niditch, Oral World and Written Word, 116–117. 113. Lawrence Wills has thoroughly reviewed this story’s oral characteristics, following the “laws” of oral narrative formulated by Axel Olrik; Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 83–85. He cites (1) the law of calm opening and closing, (2) the law of dramatic duality in that only two characters or groups appear at once, (3) the law of contrasts in that main characters are polar opposites, (4) the law of repetition of events, (5) the law of contact in denouement, and (6) the laws of the single strand of plot and the law of concentration on the leading character (Wills puts the two together in one). See also Axel Olrik, “Epic Laws of Folk Narrative,” in Alan Dundes, ed., The Study of Folklore (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 129–41. 114.  See P. Coxon, “The ‘List’ Genre and Narrative Style in the Court Tales of Daniel” JSOT 35 (1986), 95–121.

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divergences between MT 4–6 and OG 4–6), is discussed in great detail later in this chapter. Edgar Kellenberger has suggested that oral influence was felt in the main editions of Daniel at several points, both during and after their writing down. 115 As noted above in ch. 2, David Pinault’s work on story-telling in the Nights is also of help in explaining oral characteristics of written works. He clarifies four features showing oral transmission behind the literary shaping of stories in a story-collection. 116 The repetitive designation of insignificant characters who reappear later in a significant role is seen in the various lists of wise men who are the main rivals of Daniel throughout most of Dan 1–6. A second element is the use of Leitwortstil or Leitwort—a “leading word” that is repeated to express a recurring motif (a device common in the Semitic languages). This is demonstrated, for example, in Dan 3 in the repetition of the punishment looming for those who will not bow down to the statue: the ‫אתון נורא יקדתא‬, “the furnace of blazing fire,” a phrase that, when spoken in Aramaic, falls trippingly yet menacingly off the tongue. Pinault’s third feature of orality, the use of thematic and formal patterning (that is, recurrent vocabulary, repeated gestures and phrases), is certainly close to what Coxon calls the “catchword” principle of the lists in Daniel. The fourth feature, dramatic visualization, that is, the use of abundant description to make a scene “‘visual’ or imaginatively present to an audience,” is found in Daniel as well. 117 Examples include: the lengthy tension-building dialogue between the king and his courtiers in Dan 2 in which he demands that they give not only the interpretation but the dream, too—or else they will be dismembered; in Dan 2, the abject worship of Daniel by the king (he prostrates himself to Daniel and has incense and an offering brought, as if Daniel were a deity); in Dan 3, the heating of the furnace seven times hotter than usual; and in Dan 5, the description of the king’s astonishment at the writing on the wall. In this last example, the phrase “his knots were loosened” (5:6) is not only a reference to puzzles as “knots” in Daniel but is also a humorously unkind allusion to the king’s shaky bowels in reaction to watching the detached hand ominously write mysterious words on the wall. A final example is the hyperbolic description of the deaths of Daniel’s accusers in the lions’ pit in Dan 6 (MT and Th); not only are the two co-ministers and their families thrown into the pit but potentially the 120 satraps and their families too, since those punished include “those who had accused Daniel” (6:24) and their wives and children (that is, potentially hundreds of people!). 118 115. Edgar Kellenberger, “Textvarianten in den Daniel-Legenden als Zeugnisse mündlicher Tradierung? ” 207–23. 116.  Pinault, Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights, 16–30. 117. Ibid., 25. 118.  That the satraps are in on the plot too is made clear by Dan 6:5. In the OG, only the two men who had testified falsely and their families are cast to the lions (OG 6:24).

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4.1.4.  The Popular Nature of the Book As noted above, the popular nature of the Daniel stories has often been overshadowed by the view of the Daniel book as the “paradigmatic apocalypse.” 119 This view leads to the depreciation of the value of the stories as delightful and entertaining compositions. In contrast to the esoteric nature of apocalyptic literature, the narrative part of Daniel is predominantly “popular” in that it is appealing to a broad audience. In the words of DiTommaso: Many of the biblical episodes involving Daniel represent the art of story-telling at its finest. . . . These tales possess all the elements of fine entertainment: an eminently likeable and admirable protagonist who is also the underdog, a locomotive plot that steadily builds tension, an affirming resolution to the tension, and an overarching message that stresses what for many persons are inherently good values. In the end, these were stories that demanded telling and retelling, the sort of tales that no doubt were able to forge and to reinforce bonds in families, communities, and confessions. 120

The Daniel narratives are good stories, with absorbing characters and satisfying outcomes. They concern the preoccupations of kings in their courts, the trials of young people, heroic deeds, miraculous transformations (the king’s “beast” transformation in ch. 4), the solutions to mysteries and puzzles, and so on. They also gratify the reader because of their resistance to overbearing authority. 121 The foreign kings are mockingly portrayed as doltish, capricious, and gullible, while their courtiers are clever and malicious, able to sway the king as they wish, and Daniel is far superior to them all, a Jewish captive whose great abilities and the backing of his God allow him to outsmart and outshine his rivals at every turn. Wills, who in his first study of the Daniel stories approached them under the weighted genre label “wisdom court legends,” took a different tack in another monograph, The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World. 122 There, he investigated Dan 1–6, along with Esther, Tobit, Judith, and the story of Joseph and Asenath, as Jewish “novelistic” attempts. These kinds of popular written narratives possess some 119.  Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to the Jewish Matrix of Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1984), 68. 120.  DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 86. 121.  See, for instance: Danna Nolan Fewell, “Chapter Five: Resisting Daniel,” in The Children of Israel: Reading the Bible for the Sake of our Children (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003), 117–30; Shane Kirkpatrick, Competing for Honor: A Social Scientific Reading of Daniel 1–6 (BIS 74; Leiden: Brill, 2005); Portier-Young, Apocalypse Against Empire, 217–79; and, for an example of Daniel as satire in an attempt to mock and critique authority, Valeta, Lions and Ovens and Visions, esp. pp. 111–38. 122.  Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. See also Wills, “The Jewish Novel,” in John Barton, ed., The Biblical World (2 vols.; London: Routledge, 2002), 1.149–61.

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of the aspects of “high” written literature and some of the aspects of traditional oral narrative. 123 Popular narratives contain formulaic stories whose plots, characters, and themes are taken from a fixed repertoire. 124 The audience expects that the popular narrative will conform to the conventions of whatever genre formula has been cued by the author. The author can be creative only within boundaries; there is to be no genre-jumping, no uncalled-for twists that interrupt the predictable outcome. Specifically for the case of the Jewish novels, Dan 1–6 included, Wills has suggested that the historical blunders of the novels are witness to their status as “popular” literature. Although the novels were anchored in reality with a historical setting, their authors willfully altered known history. For example, the book of Tobit makes Aḥiqar the Assyrian into an Israelite, and Nebuchadnezzar and Asueros (Ahasuerus or Xerxes) are said to have captured Nineveh, even though Nabopolassar and Cyaxeres actually did so. The book of Judith begins by describing Nebuchadnezzar as a king of the Assyrians whose capital is at Nineveh (a strange error—Nebuchadnezzar was the great king of Babylonia known by Jews as the destroyer of Jerusalem and its temple and as the conqueror responsible for the Judahite deportations and diaspora). As for the book of Esther, making a Jewish woman the queen of a Persian court is also trifling with history, since there is no evidence in the copious records of the Persians for such a thing. Wills suggests that the depiction of Daniel and his friends as the highest courtiers in the land is an intentional historical blunder committed in the same lighthearted spirit. In Egyptian literature of the Hellenistic period, there are also several examples of stories set in earlier days (especially the Assyrian, Babylonian, or Persian conquests of Egypt) that show glaring historical inaccuracies or exaggerations. Much of this literature is also nationalistically oriented, like Daniel, reflecting the idea that, even though a subordinate people has been conquered by foreigners, the conquered group is still superior and will be independent again. 125 In Daniel studies, one reason behind the view that the stories are preMaccabean but that the visions and the final form of the book have a context in the Maccabean period involves specific inconsistencies with known history in both the visions and the stories. 126 For instance, the succession of Near Eastern kings and their empires in the MT book is given as: Nebuchadnezzar the 123.  “Lack of a fixed text, anonymous authorship, conventional and repeatable plot motifs, one-dimensional moral characterizations (often balanced good against evil), and the easy appropriation of oral folk themes all bespeak a closeness with folk narrative” (Wills, The Jewish Novel, 33). 124.  Ibid., 35. 125.  See K. Ryholt, “The Assyrian Invasion of Egypt,” 483–510. This is close to Wills’s concept of the “ruled ethnic perspective” in wisdom court legends (Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 68). 126.  For an overview of these, see Collins, Daniel, 29–33.

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Babylonian; Belshazzar the Babylonian; Darius the Mede; then Cyrus the Persian. Of this list, only Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (Nebuchadrezzar II, that is Nabûkudurri-uṣur, 605–562 b.c.e.) and Cyrus the Great of Persia (550–530 b.c.e.) were historical kings. 127 As has long been known, the historical Belshazzar was not Nebuchadnezzar’s son, as the book states in 5:2; he was the son of Nabonidus (556–539 b.c.e.) and unrelated to Nebuchadnezzar. 128 In addition, Belshazzar never was king, although he was entrusted with the responsibilities of kingship while his father was in Arabian Teimāʾ for 10 years (549–539 b.c.e.). Also, although there were three distinct kings named Darius from Persia, 129 there is no evidence for a Darius from Media. 130 In addition, as far as the kingdom of Media is concerned, unlike the other three empires of the Daniel book (Babylon, Persia, and Greece), Media never conquered Judea, nor was it historically an empire. Second, the dating of historical events (given in regnal years of the kings) simply does not fit with dates known from other sources. MT Dan 1:1 says that Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem in his third year. This is difficult to synchronize with known history, not to mention the dating of this event in other parts of the Bible, specifically 2 Kgs 24:1, Jer 25:1, and 2 Chr 36:5–8. In 2 Kgs 127.  Theodotion adds another king to the list, in Bel; Cyrus only reigns after Astyages “was gathered to his fathers,” making its list of kings: Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian; Belshazzar the Babylonian; Darius the Mede; Astyages (a Mede?); then Cyrus the Persian. OG witnesses Ms88 and Syh also add another king to the line: when the Medes and Persians take rule away from the Chaldeans, Xerxes the Mede receives the kingdom after Baltasar/Belshazzar in 5:31. 128. Nebuchadnezzar died in 562 b.c.e. and was succeeded by Amel-marduk, his son (562–560 b.c.e.), who in turn was succeeded by his brother-in-law Neriglissar (560–556). Neriglissar was then succeeded by his minor son, Labashi-marduk, who was unseated by a usurper named Nabonidus (556–539). Nabonidus left his son Belshazzar in control of Babylon (as viceregent) when he was sojourning in Teimāʾ in the Arabian desert. See especially Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus King of Babylon (556–539 bc) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 149–203. For the inscriptions of Nabonidus, see Hanspeter Schaudig, Die Inschriften Nabonids von Babylon und Kyros’ des Grossen samt den in ihrem Umfeld entstandenen Tendenzschriften (AOAT 256; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2001). 129.  Darius I Hystaspes 522–486 b.c.e., Darius II 423–404 b.c.e., and Darius III 336–331 b.c.e. See Amélie Kuhrt, The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period (London: Routledge, 2007), 181–465. 130.  For attempts to identify “Darius the Mede” with some historical figure, see especially H. H. Rowley, Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the Book of Daniel: A Historical Study of Contemporary Theories (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1964), 12–60; Klaus Koch, “Dareios der Meder,” in Carol L. Meyers and Michael P. O’Connor, eds., The Word of the Lord Shall Go Forth: Essays in Honor of David Noel Freedman (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1983), 287–99; and Lester L. Grabbe, “Another Look at the Gestalt of Darius the Mede,” CBQ 50 (1988), 198–213. Rowley suggested that “Darius the Mede is a conflation of confused traditions” belonging to Cyrus and Darius Hystaspes (Rowley, Darius the Mede, 54–60). The author of Daniel transferred the age of Cyrus to Darius Hystaspes (the author also makes the mistake of saying that Darius was the son of Ahasuerus/Xerxes, when historically it was the other way around; Dan 9). Cyrus and Darius Hystaspes were Persians, but, according to Rowley, the author thought Darius was first and knew Cyrus established the Persians, so he made Darius a Mede.

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24:1, Jehoiakim is said to have reigned a total of eleven years, and during his time Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon made him his servant for three years. It is only during the reign of Jehoiakim’s son, Jehoiachin, that Nebuchadnezzar first besieges Jerusalem. In Jer 25:1, the first year of Nebuchadnezzar is the fourth year of Jehoiakim (cf. Jer 46:2, which says it was also the fourth year of Jehoiakim when Nebuchadnezzar defeated the Egyptians at Carchemish). In 2 Chr 36:5–8, no regnal years are given but Nebuchadnezzar is said to have taken Jehoiakim in fetters to Babylon, along with vessels of the temple. Historically, Nebuchadnezzar defeated the Egyptians at Carchemish in 605 b.c.e., and when his father Nabopolassar died in the same year, he returned to be made king. 131 The first reference to a siege of Jerusalem in Babylonian records is in Nebuchadnezzar’s seventh year (598–597), when the king “marched on Ḫatti, and set up his quarters facing the city of Yeḫud. In the month of Adar, the second day, he took the city and captured the king. He installed there a king of his choice. He colle[cted] its massive tribute and went back to Babylon.” 132 The Babylonian priest Berossus, who lived in the third century b.c.e., writes in his history that, when his father died, Nebuchadnezzar ended his battles against a rebellious satrap of Egypt and came home, sending Jewish, Phoenician, Syrian, and Egyptian prisoners home separately. 133 Jehoiakim’s reign is usually dated to 609–598 b.c.e. Thus, the date of the siege of Jerusalem, recorded in Dan 1 as in the third year of Jehoiakim, would be before Nebuchadnezzar’s coronation and a full eight years before the Babylonian Chronicles seem to place the historical siege of Jerusalem. 134 The date in Dan 1 is therefore not at all historically plausible, whereas 2 Kings 24:1 (although it does not give a regnal year for Nebuchadnezzar’s conquering Jehoiakim) does correspond to the Babylonian Chronicles, as does Jer 25:1 (the first year of Nebuchadnezzar = Jehoiakim’s fourth). Most commentators on Dan 1 thus understand it to be dependent on the inaccurate account in 2 Chronicles, in which Jehoiakim is said to be taken by Nebuchadnezzar in fetters to Babylon along with the temple vessels. Dan 1 then takes the three years of Jehoiakim’s submission to Nebuchadnezzar mentioned in 2 Kgs 24:1 for Jehoiakim’s first three years. 135 In 131.  D. J. Wiseman, Chronicles of Chaldean Kings (626–556 b.c.) in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1956), 25; Jean-Jacques Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles (Writings from the Ancient World 19; Atlanta: SBL, 2004), 226–29. 132.  Ibid., 230–31. 133.  As cited by Josephus (Antiquities 10.11.1; Against Apion 1.133–39). 134.  See, for instance, Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles, 230–31. 135. Note Koch, however, who understands Dan 1 as historiography using the few sources available when it was written. Koch sees the author taking the calculations of Jer 25:11, 29:10, and 2 Chr 36:21 that the exile lasted 70 years and calculating backward 70 years from Cyrus’ edict in 538 b.c.e. to 608 b.c.e. (Koch, Daniel, 27–30). The author did not take into account 2 Kgs 24:1 for some reason. Collins finds at least three problems with this theory: (1) “the title ‘king’ must be used proleptically for Nebuchadnezzar, in view of the synchronism of his first year with Jehoiakim’s fourth in Jer 25:1; (2) “Daniel must have ignored the implication of 2 Chr

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addition, it is hard to make the regnal years cited in Dan 1 fit those cited in Dan 2. Dan 1 states that Daniel and his friends studied for three years after arriving in Babylon, while Dan 2:1 says that it was in Nebuchadnezzar’s second year of rule when he had the dream that only Daniel is able to interpret. 136 Therefore, the book is inaccurate concerning the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries b.c.e., which are laid out as the setting for chs. 1–6, but increases in accuracy concerning the Hellenistic period in Palestine, from the fourth century down to about 164 b.c.e. 137 The Seleucid kings, particularly Antiochus IV Epiphanes, are treated in great detail, especially in chs. 7–12, even though these chapters are couched in the coded language of apocalyptic. In fact, Dan 7:8, 25; 8:11–14, 24–26; 9:27 and 11:31–36, describe a persecution of the holy ones that parallels actual events in Palestine of the Maccabean period under Antiochus Epiphanes. Dan 11:31 mentions “an abomination that makes desolate,” which is most likely a reference to the altar of Zeus that Antiochus Epiphanes erected in the Temple of Jerusalem (cf. 1 Macc 1:5; 2 Macc 6:5; Josephus, Antiquities 12.5.4). Are, then, the historical inaccuracies of the stories errors or purposeful contrivances, as Wills would have it? Sara Raup Johnson advocates for the term “historical fictions” as a broad category for these narratives. “Historical fictions” have something in common: “the manipulation of historical fact to communicate a particular message, the truth of which transcends mere historical exigency.” 138 The reconstruction of history in Daniel is “in no way capricious or random but is a deliberate fictional creation integral to the purpose of the text.” 139 The alternative history is maintained throughout; the book may be (mostly) internally consistent but does not fit the facts as we know them. “For the Book of Daniel, historical truth is meaningless in itself; history is meaningful only as a roll in which we read the realization of past prophecies and thus gain confidence in the validity of prophecies yet unrealized.” 140 As such, the book reinterprets the past for its own purpose—offering the choice of assimilation or persecution for the reader who can only look forward to the kingdom of God. Finally, the popular nature of the Book of Daniel is also demonstrated by its abundant biblical and parabiblical manuscripts at Qumran and its multiple major 36:21 that the period from the destruction of Jerusalem under Zedekiah to the edict of Cyrus was seventy years”—yet the Book of Daniel does not consider Zedekiah in its calculations, dating the exile rather from Jehoiakim; (3) “there is no reference to the prophecy of seventy years in Daniel 1–6,” just in Dan 9, and there the assumption is “that it did not find its fulfillment in the sixth century” (Collins, Daniel, 132–33). 136.  The OG version corrects this to “twelve” instead of “two.” 137. O. Eissfeldt, The Old Testament: An Introduction (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 521. 138.  Sara Raup Johnson, Historical Fictions and Hellenistic Jewish Identity: Third Maccabees in Its Cultural Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 55. 139.  Ibid., 24. 140.  Ibid., 45.

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editions (OG, Th, MT; see below). Wills observes that all of the early Jewish novels existed in multiple versions, “suggesting that they were popular enough to be copied and altered often. These stories were evidently viewed as malleable entertainments that could be expanded and altered at every turn to address a new audience.” 141 He proposes that at Qumran this kind of literature was on shorter scrolls, what Milik calls the “pocket editions of the ancient world.” 142

4.1.5.  The Structure of Daniel Cooper’s typological overview of the story-collection genre included a division based on how much framing material was utilized. 143 The first kind of storycollection, in terms of structure, is the kind with no enclosing material at all. The second kind has a prologue and possibly an epilogue but no linking matter between the tales. The third kind of story-collection possesses a full framework that encloses as well as connects the stories. What Cooper does not discuss explicitly is the fact that story-collections with framing material (prologue, epilogue, links) often have a first-person narrator who is also a character in the frame—that is, a story-teller. The structure of MT Dan 1–6 has a scant frame, provided by the prologue in Dan 1:1–7, the beginning chronological notices in some chapters, and the epilogue in 6:29 (MT/Th; OG 6:28) concerning the length of Daniel’s career. The sporadic links between the stories (common phrasing, characters, etc.) are usually not overtly part of the framing material but are part of the contents of the individual stories. Unlike many story-collections, Dan 1–6 does not have a narrator who serves as a story-teller for each story. The stories are told by an anonymous third-person narrator, but the narration of prologue and epilogue remains on the same level as the stories—that is, the stories are not introduced as such. There occasionally are other layers of narration and, in Dan 4 in particular, Nebuchadnezzar becomes the narrator of his own story; however, the first layer of narration remains omniscient and anonymous. Thus, the collection of stories in MT Dan 1–6 are closer to the more-simplystructured kinds of story-collections (types one and two) rather than those with a full framework introducing and surrounding the stories. The organization and coherence of the stories is provided by similar motifs and/or genre, the centralization on a main character Daniel, and an imposed chronological progression through three foreign empires and their kings. In this, it is more like type two, the medieval collections of saints lives (for example, the The South English Legendary) or secular biographies such as Petrarch’s De viris illustribus vitae or Boccaccio’s De 141.  Wills, The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World, 150. 142.  J. T. Milik, “Les modèles araméens du livre d’Esther dans la grotte 4 de Qumrân,” RQ 15 (1992), 321–406, esp. pp. 363–65. 143.  Cooper, Structure, 9–10.

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casibus virorum illustrium and De claris mulieribus. 144 On the other hand, Dan 1–6 shares with type one story-collections, such as the Gesta romanorum and the Moralitates of Robert Holcot, the fact that it has no narrator on the first level of narration (that is, a story-teller). Moreover, in its third-person narration on the first level, Daniel is actually closer to Near Eastern story-collections, such as the Tales from King Cheops Court from ancient Egypt (Papyrus Westcar) and the Hebrew Tales of Sendebar, a medieval work with origins in late antiquity. The situation is more nuanced, however, when the visions are attached to the stories and the story-collection has been transformed into a collection of both stories and visions. Suddenly, in 7:2, the Daniel of the stories begins to speak in the first-person and becomes a narrator-character, describing his visions and his interactions with the divine intermediaries, and he continues to do so until the end of the book. When read retroactively from the perspective of the visions recounted by Daniel, the stories might be thought to gain a narrator, too. Then, in chs. 11 and 12, especially in the angel Michael’s commands to Daniel, an implied audience is indirectly addressed. The audience is meant to identify with the maśkîlîm or “wise,” who will be persecuted but “will shine like the brightness of the firmament” (12:3) and “shall understand” Daniel’s words when the wicked do not (12:10). In the end, Daniel reports that the angel tells him to keep the words secret and the book sealed, thus suggesting that the visions, and perhaps the stories as well, were written down by Daniel himself. Dan 12:13 alludes to Daniel’s death (“But you, go to the end, and rest”; MT) and promises him resurrection (“you shall rise for your portion at the end of days”; MT), including him among the wise who will shine in the future. 145 When we consider the order of the Greek editions, the structural situation changes again. OG and Th Daniel both have Daniel continuing to live past the period of his exhausting visions and encounters with angels. Although OG (in the Pap967 order) intersperses stories and visions throughout (its chapter arrangement is: 1–4, 7–8, 5–6, 9–12), it calmly ends with two long tales, Bel and Susanna, back in the friendlier times of Daniel solving problems for others during the Babylonian captivity, no longer receiving visions of his own. Th Daniel begins the entire book with Susanna and ends it with Bel, in a kind of Daniel vita or biography, following Daniel as a young boy to Daniel as an old man and companion to the king. These elements of arrangement will be discussed in greater detail below in section 4.2.4.

144.  Although it is similar to Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Dan 1–6 follows a chronology; the stories in Chaucer’s work are held together by genre alone. 145.  Perhaps the death of the seer solidifies or guarantees the prophecy, as in the protoapocalyptic works from Egypt, such as the Oracle of the Lamb and the Oracle of the Potter.

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4.2.  Literary Processes: The Book of Daniel as Multiple Collections After discussing general characteristics of Daniel, especially Dan 1–6, that seem to be illuminated by comparison with the story-collection genre, it is now time to turn attention to the literary processes behind the composition of the Book of Daniel. The goal here is to offer a coherent explanation for the arrangement, structure, and contents of the Book of Daniel in the main editions, with special attention to chs. 4–6, the chapters that are widely divergent in the Masoretic and Old Greek editions. While I do not argue that there was just one author of Daniel in one time period, each collection of Daniel (on the basis of Helen Cooper’s typology for the story-collection genre) will be approached as something created by an author-compiler, with his/her organizing principles and themes in mind, as he/she drew from earlier materials or other collections.

4.2.1.  Non-fixity of Text: Text-critical Problems As previously noted (ch. 2 above), the textual history of a story-collection is often interwoven with its composition history. Many story-collections have unfixed or fluid texts (even those, like the Canterbury Tales, that are not necessarily close to orality on the oral-literary spectrum); that is, manuscripts may exist in so many variants with regard to the order of stories or details within the stories, some even dating back to the author him/herself, that it is likely that there are multiple editions of a text rather than a single family tree branching off a single trunk. Each version of the story or the story-collection is really a new story or story-collection; in their transmission and translations, they have undergone revisions and retellings. This theme of multiple or variant editions of parts of Daniel is a current topic in Daniel studies, and thus a look to story-collections for more evidence is quite appropriate. 146 But first, a few words about the textual-criticism of Daniel are required. The book of Daniel poses an unusual situation in that the Masoretic text (MT) and its major witnesses date within 50–150 years of each other. Fragments of eight separate manuscripts of Daniel in Hebrew and Aramaic (as in MT) were found at Qumran (two in Cave 1, five in Cave 4, and one in Cave 6). 147 The oldest 146.  Koch, among others, thinks that the stories of chs. 4–6 are “zwei Erzählungsvarianten” (Koch, Daniel 1–4, 377). See below. 147.  Manuscripts from Cave 4 were published in: Eugene Ulrich, “Daniel Manuscripts from Qumran: Part 1: A Preliminary Edition of 4QDana,” BASOR 268 (1987), 17–37; idem, “Daniel Manuscripts from Qumran: Part 2: Preliminary Editions of 4QDanb and 4QDanc,” BASOR 274 (1989), 3–26; S. J. Pfann “4QDanield (4Q115): A Preliminary Edition with Critical Notes,” RevQ 17 (1996), 37–71; and critical editions in Eugene Ulrich, “Daniel,” in Eugene Ulrich et al., Qumran Cave 4, XI: Psalms to Chronicles (DJD 16; Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 239–289, pls. 19–38. See also Ulrich, “Orthography and Text in 4QDana and 4QDanb in the Received Masoretic Text,” in H. W. Attridge et al., Of Scribes and Scrolls: Studies on the Hebrew

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of these, 4QDanc (4Q114) was dated by F. M. Cross to the late second century b.c.e. and is thus only about a half century younger than the composition of the book. 148 4QDane (4Q116) is possibly only an excerpt from Daniel (in the judgment of its editor, Eugene Ulrich, it contains only Daniel’s prayer of ch. 9), not a copy of the entire book. 149 None of the Additions known from the Greek editions of Daniel have been found at Qumran, nor has any part of Daniel in Greek. The Daniel scrolls “show that [Daniel] was becoming popular and widely used at Qumran only forty years after being written.” 150 The Qumran fragments contain the same shift to Aramaic at 2:4b (in 1QDana, also known as 1Q71), and the shift back to Hebrew in 8:1 (4QDana and 4QDanb = 4Q112 and 4Q113, respectively). The contents of the Qumran Daniel manuscripts seem to testify to the same order of chapters as in MT, 151 and of the twelve chapters, only ch. 12 is not attested in the Daniel scrolls. 152 Bible, Intertestamental Judaism, and Christian Origins Presented to John Strugnell on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990), 29–42. Manuscripts from Cave 1 were published without photographs in D. Barthélemy and J. T. Milik, Qumran Cave 1 (DJD 1; Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), 150–52; the photographs are in J. C. Trever, “Completion of the Publication of Some Fragments from Qumran Cave 1,” RevQ 5 (1964–66), 324–44. Note also the tiny fragments of 1QDanb in the Schøyen Collection (ms 1926/4); see M. Lundberg and B. Zuckerman, “New Aramaic Fragments from Qumran Cave One,” The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon Newsletter 12 (1996). The largest fragment preserves part of Dan 3:26–27 and its first line joins Trever’s frg. 1 line 8. The manuscript from Cave 6 was published in M. Baillet and J. T. Milik, Les ‘Petites Grottes’ de Qumrân (DJD 3; Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 1.114–16, and vol. 2, pl. 23. 148.  F. M. Cross, The Ancient Library of Qumran (Garden City: Doubleday, 1961), 43. But note that in a work published the same year, “The Development of the Jewish Scripts,” (in G. E. Wright, The Bible and the Ancient Near East [2nd ed.; Garden City, NY: 1961], 133–202), Cross dated the script to 100–50 b.c.e. He did return to the previous dating, however; see F. M. Cross, “The Papyri and Their Historical Implications,” in Paul Lapp and Nancy Lapp, eds., Discoveries in the Wâdī ed-Dâliyeh (AASOR 41; Cambridge, MA: ASOR, 1974), 17–29, esp. p. 26. Eugene Ulrich in “Daniel, Book of: Hebrew and Aramaic Text” (in L. H. Schiffman and J. C. VanderKam, eds., Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1.171) states that, in a personal communication with him, Cross maintained the original late second-century dating. 149.  The measurements of the scroll indicate that it probably contained only this prayer and nothing more; Eugene Ulrich, “Daniel Manuscripts from Qumran, Part 1: A Preliminary Edition of 4QDana,” 18; E. Ulrich et al., Qumran Cave 4, XI: Psalms to Chronicles, 287. 150. Martin Abegg Jr. et al., The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: The Oldest Known Bible Translated for the First Time Into English (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999), 482. 151. 1QDana (1Q71): 1:10–17; 2:2–6; 1QDanb (1Q72): 3:22–30; 4QDana (4Q112): 1:16–20; 2:9–11, 19–49; 3:1–2; 4:29–30; 5:5–7, 12–14, 16–19; 7:5–7, 25–28; 8:1–5; 10:16– 20; 11:13–16; 4QDanb (4Q113): 5:10–12, 14–16, 19–22; 6:8–22, 27–29; 7:1–6, 11(?), 26–28; 8:1–8, 13–16; 4QDanc (4Q114) 10:5–9; 11–16, 21; 11:1–2, 13–17, 25–29; 4QDand (4Q115): 3:8–10(?), 23–25; 4:5–9, 12–16; 7:15–23; 4QDane (4Q116): 9:12–17; pap6QDan (6Q7): 8:16– 17(?), 20–21(?); 10:8–16; 11:33–36, 38. 152.  But since Dan 12:10 is quoted in another scroll from Qumran, 4QFlor (4Q174) ii, 3–4a, this is probably only due to the vagaries of preservation.

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As for the Greek versions, the Old Greek (OG Dan) version must date to the late second century b.c.e., 153 and the so-called Theodotion (Th Dan) version, which many scholars think presupposes it, 154 is probably to be dated slightly before the turn of the era. 155 In this study, the term “Old Greek” for this edition of Daniel will be used, as opposed to “Septuagint” (abbreviated LXX), in conformity with recent scholarly preference. 156 The OG may have been written in Alexandria, although Leontopolis has also been proposed as a location. 157 Th Dan is so-called because it was formerly thought to have been written by Theodotion in about 180 c.e. It is now apparent that Th Dan predates Theodotion. 158 As mentioned above, the Greek versions of Daniel differ most significantly from the MT in that they are longer and have three primary additions: the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men and two stories, Susanna and Bel and the Serpent. The Prayer and Song are inserted in ch. 3 between vv. 23 and 24 (MT), with a brief addition of prose at the beginning of this section and between the two poems as well (OG/Th 3:24–90). Susanna and Bel and the Serpent have been added, but in different places: in Th Dan, Susanna is before Dan 1 and Bel and the Serpent is after the visions and concludes the book; however, in OG Dan, both stories are appended after the visions at the very end of the book, though in a different order. In one of the three OG witnesses (Papyrus 967), Bel and the Serpent is before Susanna, while the other two OG witnesses (ms 88 and Syh) put Susanna before Bel and the Serpent. OG Dan and Th Dan differ in character as well. Early on in the history of the Christian canon, the former was abandoned in favor of the latter, and it was Th Daniel—which seems to follow MT closely in many places—that was used in 153.  The Greek text of 1 Maccabees, which dates to around 100 b.c.e., seems dependent on the Old Greek of Daniel; see August Bludau, Die alexandrinische Übersetzung des Buches Daniels und ihr Verhältnis zum massoretischen Texten (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1897), 7–8. 154. See Collins, Daniel, 11, for example. 155.  For a summary of the debates concerning the dates of both the OG Dan and Th Dan, see Collins, Daniel, 3–11. 156. This is because, although this oldest Greek translation of Daniel has long been treated as part of the Septuagint translation of the Bible, it is in reality like many of the other books, “not homogeneous with the LXX translation of the Pentateuch” (see R. A. Kraft, “Septuagint,” in Keith R. Crim et al., eds. Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Supplementary Volume [Nashville: Abingdon, 1976], 807–15, esp. p. 811; and also Collins, Daniel, 4). 157.  Koch, “Stages in the Canonization of the Book of Daniel,” 425–26. 158.  In actuality, neither the OG nor the Th of Daniel are homogeneous with the rest of their respective translations of the Bible. Theodotion Daniel is in the same tradition as the translation of the Bible attributed to Theodotion in 180 c.e., but it predates it. For a discussion of this problem, see Collins, Daniel, 10–11, and Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (2nd rev. ed.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 145. For a thorough comparison of Theodotion Daniel with the rest of Theodotion, see Armin Schmitt, Stammt der sogenannte ‘θ′’-Text bei Daniel wirklich von Theodotion? (NAWG.PH8; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966), 281–392; idem, “Die griechischen Danieltexte (‘θ′’ und o′) und das Theodotionproblem,” BZ 36 (1992), 1–29.

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the church. (This occurred probably between 150–200 c.e. in the Greek Church and 230–250 c.e. in the Latin). 159 The church fathers specifically state that this was done because the OG diverged widely from the veritas hebraica (the Masoretic Text in Aramaic and Hebrew), while Th did not. 160 Therefore, although Theodotionic witnesses abound, there are to date only three major witnesses to the OG 161: Codex Chisianus (ms 88), 162 the Syro-hexapla (Syh), 163 and Papyrus 967 (Pap967). 164 The first two witnesses, one in Greek and one in Syriac, attest to the fifth column of Origen’s Hexapla (mid-third century c.e.) in which asterisks 159.  R. H. Pfeiffer, History of New Testament Times, With an Introduction to the Apocrypha (London: A. & C. Black, 1949), 444. 160.  Origen knew of both OG and Th in the mid-third century c.e.: they are the fifth and sixth columns of his Hexapla; but about 393 c.e., Jerome, in his Preface to Daniel wrote: The Churches of our Lord, the Saviour, do not read the prophet Daniel according to the Seventy interpreters. They use Theodotion’s version, but why this came to pass I do not know. Whether it be that the language is Chaldee, which differs in certain peculiarities from our speech and the Seventy interpreters were unwilling to preserve the same lines of language in a translation; or that the book was published in their name by someone or other not familiar with Chaldee; or if there be some other reason, I know not. This one thing I can affirm: that it differs widely from the truth, and has been by a correct judgement rejected Patrologia Latina 28 (ed. 1845), 938; (ed. 1889), 995–96, trans. Braverman; see J. Braverman Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel: A Study of Comparative Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the Hebrew Bible (CBQMS 7; Washington, D.C.: Catholic Biblical Association, 1978), 31. 161.  There are also fragments of a few verses in a fifth-century papyrus from the Fayyum: Vienna, Nat.-Bibl., P. Gr. Vind. G 29255 (ms 813); and in a third-century papyrus from lower Egypt (ms 875; this is in a private collection). See Joseph Ziegler and Olivier Munnich, eds., Susanna, Daniel, Bel et Draco, 18. Munnich also mentions ms 613, a thirteenth-century manuscript from Patmos (Ἰωάννου τοῦ θεολόγου), as a curiosity (p. 19). It is a witness to the Th text, but in a few places also has examples of the corresponding passage in the OG version. 162.  Dated from the ninth to eleventh centuries; see Montgomery, Daniel, 26. Ms 88 is sometimes listed incorrectly as ms 87. 163.  A Syriac translation made by bishop Paul of Tella in 616–617 c.e.; see A. M. Ceriani, Codex syro-hexaplaris ambrosianus (Monumenta sacra et profana 7; Milan: Bibliotheca Ambrosiana, 1874). 164.  Pap967 dates from the early third century c.e. or slightly earlier. The fragments belonging to the Chester Beatty Papyri of Dublin were published by F. G. Kenyon in The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri (London: Walker, 1937). The fragments from Cologne were published in A. Geissen, Der Septuaginta-Text des Buches Daniel 5–12 sowie Esther 1–2, 15 (PTA 5; Bonn: Habelt, 1968); W. Hamm, Der Septuaginta-Text des Buches Daniel Kap. 1–2 nach dem Kölner Teil des Papyrus 967 (PTA 10; Bonn: Habelt, 1969); and idem, Der Septuaginta-Text des Buches Daniel Kap. 3–4 (PTA 21; Bonn: Habelt, 1977). R. Roca-Puig published the Barcelona fragment in “Daniele: Due semifogli del codice 967: P. Barc. inv. nn. 42 e 43,” Aegyptus 56 (1976), 3–18. At the time of the first Ziegler edition of Daniel, only the Chester Beatty portion of Pap967 was available (Joseph Ziegler, Susanna, Daniel, Bel et Draco [Septuaginta 16/2; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1954]). The new edition of Greek Daniel appeared in 1999 and includes the Cologne and Barcelona fragments of Pap967: Joseph Ziegler and Olivier Munnich, eds., Susanna, Daniel, Bel et Draco (2nd ed.; Septuaginta 16/2; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,

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marked passages found in Hebrew or Aramaic but not in Greek, and obeli marked passages that were in Greek but missing from the Semitic. Pap967, however, is the most reliable of the three witnesses, since it preserves a pre-hexaplaric text dating to the early third century c.e., 700 years earlier than ms 88 or Syh. One remarkable detail about Pap967 is that it differs from most witnesses (OG or Th) by placing chs. 7 and 8 before chs. 5 and 6 and by placing Susanna after Bel and the Serpent instead of before. The character of the OG against that of the MT and Th in the canonical form of Daniel varies from chapter to chapter. 165 In chs. 1–2 and 7–12, the OG differs only slightly from the MT or Th, but in chs. 3–6 (especially chs. 4–6) it differs greatly in matters of style, grammar, and vocabulary. In the Greek Additions, ch. 3 has the Addition of the Prayer and Song, as well as a prose interlude between them. However, in the other parts of Dan 3, OG differs from the MT/ Th much less. In ch. 4, the doxology is after the story in the OG witness Pap967, in contrast to before it in the MT and Th (which both place it at the beginning of ch. 4). 166 In addition, the OG text (all witnesses) is longer than the MT/Th in ch. 4, but in ch. 5, it is the MT/Th that is longer. 167 Furthermore, there is no counterpart in the OG to MT in 4:3–6(6–9). In OG ch. 5, the OG has an abbreviated version of the story that the MT does not have, but otherwise does not have large portions of the MT vv. 3, 10–13 and lacks any equivalent for the MT vv. 14–15, 18–22, and 24–25. In ch. 6, the length and structure of the divergent texts are similar but they differ in details. 168 Many scholars believe that the OG’s text in chs. 4–6 is witness to a different Semitic Vorlage than that of the MT or Th, or they think that there is a different translation technique at work. If it is witness to a different Semitic Vorlage, the priority of this Semitic Vorlage over the MT is much debated. 169 The Greek Ad1999). For an English translation of Greek Daniel (both OG and Th), see R. Timothy McLay, trans., “Sousanna,” “Daniel,” and “Bel and the Dragon,” in NETS, 986–1027. 165.  For a list of OG readings supported by the Qumran Daniel scrolls, see O. Munnich, “Texte Masorétique et Septante dans le Livre de Daniel,” in Adrian Schenker, ed., The Earliest Text of the Hebrew Bible: The Relationship between the Masoretic Text and the Hebrew Base of the Sepuagint Reconsidered (SBL Septuagint and Cognate Studies; Atlanta, SBL, 2003), 93–120. 166.  The verses of doxology are actually at the end of ch. 3 (3:31–33) according to the medieval chapter division of the Vulgate, a division that has been kept in modern editions of the MT. “The decision to place these verses at the end of a chapter may have been influenced by the fact that doxologies usually come at the end of tales, but this division of the material is not ancient and does not reflect any traditions from antiquity” (Collins, Daniel, 221). 167.  The pluses in OG ch. 4 are: vv. 14(17), 19(22), 23–25(26–28), 28(31), 30(33), while the minuses are: vv. 20–22(23–25). 168.  There are large pluses in OG 6:3(4), 5(6), 12a, 14(15), 17–18(18–19), and 22(23), and minuses in 15(16), 23(24). 169. J. Schüpphaus, “Das Verhältniss von LXX- und Theodotion-Text in den apokryphen Zusätzen zum Danielbuch,” ZAW 83 (1971), 49–72; Collins, Daniel, 7.

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ditions in the OG are generally agreed to be from a Semitic (Hebrew or Aramaic) Vorlage. The character of the so-called Theodotion text has also been discussed. Schüpphaus and Collins believe it to be a revision of the OG, while Grelot, Di Lella, and McLay, among others, think it was an independent translation of the MT. 170 For Di Lella, it is “a fresh translation of the Hebrew and Aramaic form of the book with an eye on LXX-Daniel rather than a recension in the usual sense of that word.” 171 Concerning the Greek Additions in Th, Kottsieper believes all are independent from the OG. 172 In contrast, Steussy thinks the Greek editions of Bel and the Serpent are independent but that Th used OG as a base for Susanna. 173 Thus, investigations into OG and Th’s relationship to the MT or each other have tended to look for a Semitic Vorlage or to look for a particular translation technique to account for the differences in each. Here, however, I will turn to some recent work on “multiple literary editions” and other studies on the number of verbatim agreements and standard vocabulary equivalents between the Greek editions to demonstrate that the OG and Th editions were significantly independent from each other, although Th’s relationship to the MT remains a problem that is outside of the scope of this study. As we will see below, Th follows the MT very closely in chs. 4–6 but less so (and closer to the OG) in the rest of the book. As for the other ancient editions, such as the Old Latin, Coptic, and Ethiopic, they are “sub-versions of the Greek, the majority based on [Th], and have little independent value for text criticism.” 174 The Syriac Peshiṭta, however, is based on the MT, although it was influenced by Th. 175 In this study, I am limiting the examination to only the MT, OG, and Th Daniel as story-collections.

4.2.2.  Translations or Multiple Literary Editions? The text-critical problems of Daniel arise from the existence of what is often described as two major text types, a situation made still more complex in that, 170. P. Grelot, “Les versions grecques de Daniel,” Bib 47 (1966), 381–402; Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 83; McLay, The OG and TH Versions of Daniel, 216; idem, “The Relationship between the Greek Translations of Daniel 1–3,” BIOSCS 37 (2004), 29–53, and “The Old Greek Translation of Daniel Chapters 4–6 and the Formation of the Book of Daniel,” VT 55 (2005), 304–23. 171.  Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 82. 172.  Kottsieper, “Zusätze zu Daniel,” 214. 173.  Steussy, Gardens in Babylon, 35. 174.  Collins, Daniel, 11. 175.  Ibid., 12. See now Richard A. Taylor, The Peshiṭta of Daniel (Monographs of the Peshiṭta Institute 7; Leiden: Brill, 1994); the Peshiṭta had a Semitic Vorlage very close to the consonantal text of the MT and was probably translated by the end of the second century c.e., although the earliest copy dates to 532 c.e. There is no influence from the OG and only some influence from Th.

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within one of these, one family stands apart from its type and in certain sections follows more closely the opposite type. 176 The MT and its witnesses from Qumran (1QDana,b =1Q71 and 1Q72; 4QDana, b, c, d, e = 4Q112, 4Q113, 4Q114, 4Q115, and 4Q116; and pap6QDan = 6Q7) belong to the text type having the short edition of Daniel, with six stories and four visions, while the Greek versions (OG and Th) belong to the other text type, which possesses the long edition of the book of Daniel: it includes the additions inserted in ch. 3, plus the appended Daniel stories, Susanna and Bel and the Serpent. However, in chs. 4–6 (and to a lesser extent in ch. 3), the Greek text of Th is closer to the MT against the OG. One way to confront the problem of the divergent texts of Daniel has been to ascertain the authority or priority of a particular text or its Vorlage. The presumed Vorlage of the OG is thought to have been Semitic for a variety of reasons: for instance, the continual use of καί . . . καί . . . καί (“and . . . and . . . and”), possibly reflecting the Semitic custom of parataxis (the conjunction w-, that is, ‫ ;)ו‬the scarcity of the particle δέ, which is unusual in Greek of this period; the use of specific vocabulary (e.g., κύριος as a proper name of God, ψυχή for “self ”) that seems more Semitic than Greek; and certain other features of syntax and vocabulary. 177 On the other hand, there is “evidence of some creativity on the part of the Greek translator, since a few terms (στάδια in 4:9; ἐπιστολή ἐγκύκλιος in 4:34b) cannot easily be retroverted into a Semitic language.” 178 In terms of which Semitic language lies behind the Greek—Hebrew or Aramaic—most commentators have preferred the latter, with some important exceptions. 179 There are three main positions with regard to the OG’s relationship to MT in the widely divergent chs. 4–6. 180 The first is that the MT chs. 4–6 represents a superior Vorlage and the OG of these chapters is derivative; the second is that OG 176.  This terminology is taken from the suggestions made by E. Ulrich, “Pluriformity in the Biblical Text, Text Groups, and Questions of Canon,” in J. Trebolle Barrera and L. Vegas Montaner, eds., The Madrid Qumran Congress: Proceedings of the International Congress on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Madrid 18–21 March, 1991 (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 1.38. 177. P. Grelot, “La Septante de Daniel IV et son Substrat Sémitique,” RB 81 (1974), 18–22. 178.  Collins, Daniel, 6. 179.  Grelot claims that the Vorlage for chs. 4 and 6 was in Hebrew; Grelot, “La Septante de Daniel IV et son substrat sémitique,” 19–21; and idem, “Daniel VI dans la Septante,” in G. Dorival and O. Munnich, eds., Κατὰ τοὺς ό: Selon les septante (Festschrift Marguerite Harl; Paris: Cerf, 1995), 103–18. Jahn (Das Buch Daniel nach der Setuaginta hergestellt [Leipzig: Pfeiffer, 1904, iv–xii]) argued that the entire book was originally in Hebrew, as did Bevan (A. A. Bevan, A Short Commentary on the Book of Daniel [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1892]), 38–39. Bevan suggested that an Aramaic version was issued at almost the same time; when a portion of the Hebrew was lost, it was filled in with the Aramaic. Albertz thinks chs. 4–6 was originally a linguistic mix: the Vorlage to ch. 4 was in Hebrew and that to chs. 5 and 6 in Aramaic (Der Gott des Daniel, 161). 180.  For an outline of all three, see Klaus Koch, Daniel. 1. Teilband Dan 1–4 (BKAT 22/1; Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 2005), 378–79.

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4–6 represents a superior Vorlage and the MT is derivative; and finally, the third position is that both are independent literary traditions of a common core story. The biggest reason given for the priority of MT 3:31–6:29 is that the similarities between the doxologies in 3:31–33 (thought by most to be the beginning of this section) and 6:27–28 are probably due to the redaction of 3:31–6:29, not the redaction of all the tales as a unit. 181 The OG does not have a doxology at the end of ch. 3 or at the beginning of ch. 4 but does have one (or two) at the end of the story in ch. 4. This means that OG ch. 4 formerly had a doxology at the beginning but moved it to the end of ch. 4 by analogy with the placement of doxologies in other chapters (chs. 2, 3, and 6). J. D. Michaelis already in 1781 suggested that chs. 3–6 were an independent document, 182 and in 1897 August Bludau observed that just these chapters have the greatest discrepancies between the MT and OG. 183 In fact, the Greek lectionaries have only chs. 3–6. 184 Montgomery, in his influential commentary of 1927, followed Bludau in the latter’s respect for the esthetic value of the OG edition of these chapters but decided that OG 4–6 was a translation from a Semitic copy that was not prior or superior to MT. 185 Grelot, Koch, Haag, Hartman and Di Lella, and Goldingay have all continued to think the MT is superior to the OG—that is, a better witness to the Vorlage of Dan 4–6. 186 On the other hand, some have argued that the OG text is superior in many readings, including R. H. Charles, G. Jahn, and Paul Riessler, 187 a position that has been maintained recently by several other scholars. 188 In 1988, Rainer Albertz 181.  Collins, Daniel, 37. 182.  J. D. Michaelis, Deutsche Übersetzung des Alten Testaments 10 Theil (Göttingen: Die­ terich, 1781), 22. 183.  Unlike other commentators of his day, Bludau found great value in the OG edition and suggested that chs. 4–6 in MT and OG were “zwei selbständige Erzählungen desselben Inhalts” (August Bludau, Die alexandrinische Übersetzung des Buches Daniel, 31, 143–54). 184.  Montgomery, The Book of Daniel, 37. 185.  Montgomery thought that the great differences were due to the presence of genuine glosses and doublet translations but that the OG translator otherwise “worked faithfully word by word” (The Book of Daniel, 36). 186.  Grelot, “La Septante de Daniel IV et son substrat sémitique,” 18–22, esp. p. 22; Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 77–79, 175; Goldingay, Daniel, xxvi; Koch, Das Buch Daniel, p.75; Haag, Die Errettung Daniels, 12. According to Haag, Dan 4–6 first consisted of two stories originally about Nebuchadnezzar and son Belshazzar, with no mention of Daniel (Dan 4:25–30 MT, the palace wall pronouncement, and a shortened version of Dan 5), which were then combined with Dan 4:1–23 (the wise courtier legend, in which Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s dream) and a short version of 6:4–27. See Haag, Die Errettung Daniels, 23–25, 49–62, 72–73; and D. Satran, Early Jewish and Christian Interpretation of the Fourth Chapter of the Book of Daniel (Ph.D dissertation, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1985), 62–94. 187.  Charles, Book of Daniel, lvi–lvii, 79–82, 119–24; G. Jahn, Das Buch Daniel nach der Setuaginta hergestellt, iv; Paul Riessler, Das Buch Daniel (Stuttgart/Vienna: Roth’sche, 1899), 28–44. 188.  Albertz, Der Gott des Daniel; Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 87–92; Johan Lust, “The Septuagint Version of Daniel 4–5,” in A. S. van der Woude, ed., The Book of

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demonstrated precise linguistic links between chs. 4–6 in OG, believing this indicated that these chapters were from a different translator and that the OG was therefore the best witness to the original collection of tales. 189 Nevertheless, because of terminological links between chs. 4 and 5 and the generally tight unity of chs. 4–6, he argued that the order of chapters in Pap967, the pre-hexaplaric witness to OG that places chs. 7 and 8 between chs. 4 and 5, would have to be later. (Another reason for thinking the Pap967 order is later is that Darius’ reign ends in ch. 6, so he cannot simply continue to reign, as is portrayed in ch. 9, if ch. 9 is placed immediately after ch. 6.) Albertz dates chs. 4–6 to the time of Ptolemy II (285–246 b.c.e.) and believes that it was originally written in Greek among the Alexandrian upper class; that chs. 2–7 were compiled some time during the revolt against the Ptolemies (ca. 200 b.c.e); and that the final compilation of the entire MT Daniel belongs to the Maccabean period. 190 Lawrence Wills, following Albertz’s arguments, concluded that the OG is not just superior in a few readings but throughout reflects an older and better Aramaic Vorlage than MT. 191 Johan Lust, Olivier Munnich, and Géza G. Xeravits have argued that not only is the OG witness to a superior Semitic Vorlage, but that the order of Pap967 is superior as well and that there was thus no separate translation in chs. 4–6. 192 (The Pap967 arrangement, according to this view, is thought to result in a smoother chronology; it keeps together stories and visions set in a certain king’s reign: chs. 2–4 are set in Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, chs. 7–8 and 5 in Belshazzar’s, chs. 6 and 9 in Darius’s time, and chs. 10–12 are dated to the first year of Cyrus). 193 Lust Daniel in the Light of New Findings, 41–53. Olivier Munnich, “Texte massorétique et Septante dans le livre de Daniel,” 93–120; McLay, “The Old Greek Translation of Daniel IV–VI,” 319; Géza G. Xeravits, “Poetic Passages in the Aramaic Part of the Book of Daniel,” BN 124 (2005), 29–40. See also P. S. David, The Composition and Structure of the Book of Daniel: A Synchronic and Diachronic Reading (Ph.D. dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven, 1991). 189.  Albertz believes that the OG translator of chs. 1–3 and 7–12 adopted a “popular” and older translation of 4–6 by someone else into his translation. He claims this can be seen in the theological emphasis on monotheism in chs. 4–6 (especially 4:34c[37], 23[26], 28[31], 34[37]; 5:23, which mention the “living God” who reigns “in heaven”), an emphasis that is also found in 3:17 (Albertz, Der Gott des Daniel, 164). 190.  Ibid., 161. Either the earliest collection of Daniel stories (chs. 4–6) were translated from an original Semitic or the Greek translator himself wrote down the stories as they now appear in OG. 191.  Wills used as his starting point Haag’s two-source hypothesis for MT 4–6 but, by also looking to the OG as the older and better witness to the original chs. 4–6 collection, found three different sources in ch. 4 behind an independent OG collection (Haag, Errettung, 23–25, 49–62, 72–73; Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 87–92). Wills does not comment on the witness of Pap967 to the chapter arrangement of the OG. 192. J. Lust, “The Septuagint Version of Daniel 4–5,” 41–53. 193.  Only Quodvultdeus, a fifth-century bishop of Carthage, follows the Pap967 order of chapters for Daniel in his survey of Daniel called Liber Promissionum; P.-M. Bogaert, “Le témoignage de la Vetus Latina dans l’étude de la Septante, Ezéchiel et Daniel dans le Papyrus 967,” Biblica 59 (1978), 384–95; see also Lust, “The Septuagint Version of Daniel 4–5,” 46.

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posits that the individual stories and visions of Daniel circulated independently, and this allowed different arrangements in different collections. The especially divergent chs. 4–6 were compiled and ordered in various patterns in the Vorlage of OG and MT. Leaving aside ch. 1, which Lust thinks may have once also contained Susanna, the original order in the pre-Maccabean Vorlage of OG included chs. 2–7 (in the order: 2, 3, 4, 7, 5, 6) plus Bel and the Serpent. 194 Chs. 2 and 8–12 were added in the Maccabean period. As for MT, it had fewer materials to work with and collected them in a different order; its earliest Vorlage consisted of an arrangement of chs. 2–7 in a concentric pattern, before adding chs. 1 and 8–12. 195 OG was progressively corrected toward the MT and eventually was discarded in favor of Theodotion, which followed MT more closely. In support of his theory, Lust sees few terminological links between Dan 4 and 5 in the OG, thus allowing room for the insertion of chs. 7 and 8 in what he says was the more original order of Pap967 (he gives limited evidence, however, for closer connections between chs. 4 and 7, or between chs. 8 and 5, or between chs. 6 and 9). 196 Olivier Munnich’s proposal is similar to Lust’s in that he believes Pap967 has the more original order of chapters, but his focus is to show that there is a literary development from the OG to the MT, as demonstrated by the witness of Pap967 and Qumran manuscripts, 197 especially in the evolution of Daniel’s character in chs. 4 and 5 (OG does not mention Daniel in ch. 4 until v. 15, while MT mentions him already in v. 5, thus emphasizing the court-contest motif). 198 Since the OG does not have 4:3–6 and since the beginning of v. 7 is almost identical to the end of v. 2 in MT (he claims the resumptive repetition or Wiederaufnahme in v. 7 194.  P. S. David expanded the idea in his Ph.D. dissertation with more specifics: ch. 8 was added to ch. 7, along with 1–2:4a, and followed by 10–12 and 9 (David, The Composition and Structure of the Book of Daniel, 92–96). He further proposed that the Greek translator had knowledge of three separate collections: chs. 2–7 plus Bel, chs. 1–8 plus Bel, and chs. 1–12 plus Additions. 195.  See especially A. Lenglet for an explanation of the concentric structure of the Aramaic chapters (“La Structure littéraire de Daniel 2–7,” Biblica 53 [1972], 169–90). Chs. 2 and 7 parallel each other through their four-kingdom pattern; chs. 3 and 6 are miraculous deliveries, and chs. 4 and 5 echo each other in their chastisements of kings. 196.  Lust, “The Septuagint Version of Daniel 4–5,” 40–46. Lust asserts that the connections he points out (p. 46) “should not be overemphasized. They certainly are less pronounced than in the MT. In the LXX the general impression is that of a loose connection between the respective episodes without distinction between biographic stories and autobiographic visions and revelations.” 197. But Munnich agrees with Ulrich that the OG is witness to an alternative literary edition (Olivier Munnich, “Texte massorétique et Septante dans le livre de Daniel,” 93–120). For the MT’s emphasis on the character of Daniel, see also: Munnich, “Les versions grecques de Daniel et leurs substrats sémitiques,” in Leonard Greenspoon and Olivier Munnich, eds., VIII Congress of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Paris 1992 (SBL Septuagint and Cognate Studies Series 41; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 291–308. 198.  Munnich, “Texte massorétique et Septante dans le livre de Daniel,” 93–120.

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is meant to pick up where v. 2 left off, because vv. 3–6 were an insertion), Munnich argues that 4QDand supports a reconstruction of a possible Semitic Vorlage that would not have had vv. 3–6. 199 In addition, Munnich also sees connections to Antiochus in the OG of chs. 4 and 7–8, thus indicating the closeness of these chapters. 200 However, as McLay has noted, the specific terminological links that Munnich sees are not very compelling (none of the terms are identical), and they “certainly do not sufficiently outweigh linguistic links that exist between other chapters.” 201 Furthermore, the same arguments against the originality of the order of chapters in Pap967 proposed by Lust can be levied against Munnich as well. Why would the MT editor move the chapters if the original sequence was successful? In addition, if chs. 7 and 8 refer to Antiochus IV and could have been put in any Mesopotamian king’s reign, why place them before Belshazzar’s death? In response to both Lust and Munnich, McLay points out that both the order as well as content in the OG of chs. 4–6 must be reckoned with; in addition, one must explain how the visions of chs. 7–8 (one in a different language) could be part of an alternative literary edition and still account for its translation into Greek. Furthermore, it is difficult to accept the order of Pap967 as superior based on the dating found in 7:1 and 8:1 because Munnich himself has already shown in another article that the chronological formulas are editorial and late. 202 Géza G. Xeravits goes even further than Lust; if the OG order 4–7–8–5–6 is independent and older, then the Aramaic chs. 4–6 cannot ever have been an independent collection. 203 He agrees with Lust that the Pap967 order is not a correction of MT. For Xeravits, OG 4–6 does not have a poetic piece introducing it but has instead two at the end of ch. 4 and one at the end of ch. 6 because the poetic passages in chs. 4 and 6 are secondary and are a result of late editing. At the end of ch. 4, 4:34 is dependent on the poetic passage in 2:21, which was made for its present context, so it had to have come first. “The formation of these other three units began only after chapter 2 and the material of chapters *(3)4–6 were combined.” 204 However, the very evidence Xeravits musters for his conclusion has been taken as exactly the opposite by David Satran, who also considers Dan 2:21 the model for Dan 4:34, but the OG an interpretation of MT. 205 The third and most promising option for solving the literary relationship between MT (3)4–6 and OG (3)4–6 is that they reflect two independently trans199.  But see the objections of McLay (“The Old Greek Translation of Daniel IV–VI,” 311–13). 200. Olivier Munnich, “Texte massorétique et Septante dans le livre de Daniel,” 118–19. For more on his view of the OG’s juxtaposition of Nebuchadnezzar in ch. 4 with his moral analogue Antiochus in chs. 7–8, see also: Munnich, “Le cadrage dynastique,” 160–195. 201.  McLay, “The Old Greek Translation of Daniel IV–VI,” 315. 202.  Munnich, “Le cadrage dynastique,” 161–95. 203.  Xeravits, “Poetic Passages in the Aramaic Part of the Book of Daniel,” 29–40. 204.  Ibid., 39. 205.  Satran, Early Jewish and Christian Interpretation of the Fourth Chapter of the Book of Daniel, 80–82.

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mitted Semitic variants or that both are independent secondary developments from an earlier Semitic core. Earlier scholars who supported this include Michaelis, Eichhorn, Berthold, and Bludau. 206 More recently, John J. Collins has claimed that MT 4–6 and OG 4–6 are “variant formulations of a common story. Neither can be regarded as the Vorlage of the other.” 207 Other scholars to go in this direction are Eugene Ulrich, Matthias Henze, T. J. Meadowcroft, D. O. Wenthe, and K. Koch. 208 Even Albertz, who considers OG Dan 4–6 to be superior to MT 4–6, starts with the proposition that the two editions were two independent story traditions. 209 Unfortunately, the strategy of searching for the Urtext, the authoritative and original text, has until recent years been considered by scholars to be the central task in any attempt at critically establishing biblical texts. 210 The assumption is that the history of a text can be diagrammed as a sort of genealogical tree possessing a trunk from which all text-groups branch. Since the 1980s, however, biblical scholars such as Eugene Ulrich, Emanuel Tov, Shemaryahu Talmon, and Bertil Albrektson have demonstrated the simplicity of this view and have begun outlining the multidimensional aspects of textual composition and development. 211 206.  Michaelis, Deutsche Übersetzung des Alten Testaments 10 Theil, 22; Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Einleitung in das Alte Testament (Göttingen: Carl Eduard Rosenbusch, 1824), vol. 4, 503; Leonhard Bertholdt, Daniel aus dem Hebräisch-Aramäischen neu übersetzt und erklärt mit einer vollständigen Einleitung und einigen historischen und kritischen Exkursen (Erlangen: Palm, 1808); August Bludau, Die alexandrinische Übersetzung des Buches Daniels, 31–33, 143–154. 207.  Collins, Daniel, 221. 208. Eugene Ulrich, “Double Literary Editions of Biblical Narratives and Reflections on Determining the Form To Be Translated,” in Perspectives on the Hebrew Bible: Essays in Honor of Walter J. Harrelson (ed. J. L. Crenshaw; Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1980), 101–16 and other works cited below; Matthias Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 38–49; Meadowcroft, Aramaic Daniel and Greek Daniel, 56; D. O. Wenthe, “The Old Greek Translation of Daniel 1–6,” 97; Klaus Koch, Daniel 1–4, 378–79. See also: Birte Braasch, Die LXX-Übersetzung des Danielbuches: Eine Orientierungshilfe für das religiöse und politisch-gesellschaftliche Leben in der ptolemäischen Diaspora: Eine rezeptionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung von Daniel 1–7 (Ph.D. dissertation, Fachbereich Evangelische Theologie der Universität Hamburg, 2004), 290–91; McLay, The OG and Th Versions of Daniel, 10, 145–46. 209. See Albertz, Der Gott des Daniel, 17; idem, Review of Matthias Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, Biblica 82 (2001), 564–68. 210.  See especially the “three (local) recensions” theory of Albright, which was then developed by Cross: W. F. Albright, “New Light on Early Recensions of the Bible,” BASOR 140 (1955), 27–33; F. M. Cross, “The History of the Biblical Text in the Light of Discoveries in the Judaean Desert,” HTR 57 (1964), 281–99; idem, “The Evolution of a Theory of Local Texts,” in R. A. Kraft, ed., 1972 Proceedings: IOSCS and Pseudepigrapha (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1972), 108–26; reprinted in F. M. Cross and S. Talmon, eds., Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 306–20. 211.  See, for instance: Eugene Ulrich, “Double Literary Editions of Biblical Narratives and Reflections on Determining the Form To Be Translated,” 101–16; idem, “Horizons of Old Testament Textual Research at the Thirtieth Anniversary of Qumran Cave 4,” CBQ 46 (1984), 613–36; idem, “Multiple Literary Editions: Reflections toward a Theory of the History of the Biblical Text,” in Donald W. Parry and Stephen D. Ricks, eds. Current Research and Technological

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The evidence of diversity in biblical texts from Qumran and elsewhere shows that “no standardization of the text had taken place” in the Second Temple Period 212; translations of the OG move “toward greater sterotyping and closer proximity to the parent text of the MT tradition in late antiquity.” 213 Eugene Ulrich in particular has argued for a pluriformity, or multiple literary editions, of certain biblical texts that cannot be traced back to an original as such and that likely existed alongside each other from earliest times and did not develop from each other. Concerning Dan 4–6 in the OG and MT, Ulrich has noted: “The variant editions found in the MT and in the Old Greek of Daniel 4–6 appear to be two different later editions of the story, both secondary, both expanding in different ways beyond a single form which lies behind both but which is no longer extant.” 214 At the same time, Ulrich thinks that the OG translation of chs. 1–12 is of one piece. 215 Developments on the Dead Sea Scrolls: Conference on the Texts from the Judean Desert, Jerusalem, 30 April 1995 (STJD 20; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 78–105, esp. pp. 88–99; “successive literary editions” is the term in idem, “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Biblical Text,” in Peter W. Flint and James C. VanderKam, eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 79–100; idem, “Pluriformity in the Biblical Text, Text Groups, and Questions of Canon,” 1.23–41; idem, “The Qumran Scrolls and the Biblical Text,” in Lawrence H. Schiffman et al., eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls: Fifty Years after Their Discovery, 51–59; idem, “From Literature to Scripture: Reflections on the Growth of a Text’s Authoritativeness” DSD 10 (2003) 3–26; E. Tov, “Criteria for Evaluating Textual Readings: The Limitations of Textual Rules,” HTR (1982), 429–48; idem, “A Modern Textual Outlook Based on the Qumran Scrolls,” HUCA 53 (1982), 11–27; idem, The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research (Jerusalem Biblical Studies 3; Jerusalem: Simor, 1981); idem, “The History and Significance of a Standard Text of the Hebrew Bible,” in idem, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, Vol. 1: From the Beginnings to the Middle Ages (Until 1300) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 49–66; and Bertil Albrektson, “Reflections on the Emergence of a Standard Text of the Hebrew Bible,” in Congress Volume 1977 (ed. J. A. Emerton; VTSup 29; Leiden: Brill, 1978), 49–65. See also Shemaryahu Talmon, “The Old Testament Text,” in P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans, eds., The Cambridge History of the Bible: Vol. I: From the Beginnings to Jerome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 159–99, esp. pp. 177–79 (reprinted in F. M. Cross and S. Talmon, eds., Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975], 1–41, esp. pp. 19–21); idem, “The Transmission History of the Text of the Hebrew Bible in the Light of Biblical Manuscripts from Qumran and Other Sites in the Judean Desert,” in Lawrence H. Schiffman et al., eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls Fifty Years after Their Discovery, 40–50. [See now also E. Ulrich, “The Parallel Editions of the Old Greek and Masoretic Text of Daniel 5,” in Eric F. Mason et al., eds., A Teacher for All Generations: Essays in Honor of James C. VanderKam (JSJSup 153; Leiden: Brill, 2012), 1.201–10, which appeared too late to be taken into account in this study.] 212.  D. O. Wenthe, “The Old Greek Translation of Daniel 1–6,” 5. 213.  Ibid., 30. 214.  Ulrich, “The Canonical Process, Textual Criticism, and Later Stages in the Composition of the Bible,” 285. 215.  “Though for chs. 4–6 the Old Greek is noticeably different from the MT, the nature of the Greek in those chapters is the same as that in the remainder of the book; that is, the Greek of chs. 1–12 is of one piece” (Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible

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Some scholars have begun to speak in terms of core material behind each “telling” of a story. For instance, D. O. Wenthe, a student of Ulrich, utilized Ulrich’s considerations in his careful assessment of the character of the OG in Dan 1–6. 216 In his overview of the OG’s word selection and word order, Wenthe takes up the challenge of whether the OG can rightly be described as a paraphrastic, free translation of a Semitic text, as it so often has. Like Ulrich, he concludes that the OG is consistent throughout the book of Daniel, even in most portions of chs. 4–6. 217 Thus, while the OG has a “larger vocabulary and translates with flexible literality, it is not accurate to describe it as paraphrastic.” 218 In addition, “there is no evidence of Tendenz or Midrashic activity on the part of the translator. The MT displays pluses similar to those in the OG.” 219 Wenthe posits that each of the Daniel stories of chs. 4–6 in its separate edition took on a different form, with its own length and pluses. Therefore, one cannot regard either of the textual traditions of these chapters as superior to the other. Instead, Wenthe concludes that two editions and two collections of Daniel 4–6 (MT/Th v. the OG) circulated independently of each other at an early period. Wenthe also goes on to describe these two editions of the three stories as “different tellings of the legend[s] in varied contexts” and adds that each edition of a story points to an earlier common core legend. 220 In his study of Dan 4, Matthias Henze agrees that there is no single Semitic “original”: “variant editions of the same story are best described as the literary deposit of multiple strands of transmission which originated and devel[Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 51–78, esp. p. 71). This chapter was originally published as “The Canonical Process, Textual Criticism, and Latter Stages in the Composition of the Hebrew Bible,” in Michael Fishbane et al., eds., ‘Sharʿarei Talmon’: Studies in the Bible, Qumran, and the Ancient Near East Presented to Shemaryahu Talmon (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1992), 267–91. 216.  Wenthe’s study is one of three dissertations of the past two or three decades that treat the character of the OG of Daniel. S. P. Jeansonne’s dissertation, which was published in 1988, reviewed the OG of Dan 7–12; see Jeansonne, The Old Greek Translation of Daniel 7–12 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1988). The third dissertation, unpublished, is that of A. McCrystall, who devotes a short chapter to the translation techniques of Daniel OG as a whole; see McCrystall, Studies in the Old Greek Translation of Daniel (Ph.D. dissertation; Oxford University, 1980). He compares the style of the OG to that of Th very briefly, and unlike Wenthe and Jeansonne, concludes that the OG does display Tendenz. 217.  Jeansonne concludes the same for Dan 7–12 (Jeansonne, The Old Greek Translation of Daniel 7–12, 132). 218.  Wenthe, “The Old Greek Translation of Daniel 1–6,” 247. 219.  Ibid., 87. “Nor is it entirely accurate to suggest, as is frequently done, that ‘every translation is an interpretation.’ To render one language into another requires many decisions. At times, these decisions are made difficult by the differences in vocabulary and structure of the respective languages. Yet, the purpose of the translator is not to add or to subtract from the orginal [sic]. If, of course, a pattern emerges which demonstrates such a Tendenz, then it must be taken into account” (ibid., 34). 220.  Ibid., 97.

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oped independently.” 221 Henze suggests that the situation is analogous to that of the Hekhalot literature and proposes that a synoptic model, such as that used by Peter Schäfer in his analysis of the Hekhalot writings, is more useful than a Stammbaum model. The assumption that the MT and the Old Greek have preserved variant editions of the same story presupposes the notion of a continuous writing process of Danielic tales which allowed for such alternative versions to evolve. In other words, the textual variations between the MT and the Old Greek are too substantial to assume anything less than a deliberate reworking of a received narrative tradition. Also, the discrepacies in the versions of Dan 4 do not appear to be random, but on the contrary show certain coherences on either side, such as the tendency in the Old Greek to embellish and dramatize certain elements, or the tendency in the MT to connect the narrative with its immediate canonical context. The divergences between the versions most likely stem from textual tradents who were actively involved in the transmission of the texts and who had significant impact on the literary history of their respective compositions. 222

It is possible that no single original ever existed and that the MT and OG represent parallel developments. “The formation of variant accounts of the same story as preserved in the MT, and elsewhere the Old Greek of Dan 4 is already part of the interpretive process.” 223 The editions of Dan 4 are a matter of “double literary editions, or duplicate narratives, of a common story.” 224 In addition, Edward Kellenberger has made strong arguments for the priority of both Th and OG and proposes that the divergences in the retellings of the Daniel stories in each are possibly due to oral variations of the tradition. 225 Furthermore, Lorenzo DiTommaso has noted that the process of telling and retelling has both a dynamic aspect and a static aspect. MT Daniel was swiftly accepted as authoritative, and much became fixed, including the narrative structure, the character of Daniel, and many elements of the story. However, this did not stop “the dynamic process 221.  Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 6, see also 23–49. 222.  Ibid., 41. 223.  Ibid., 49. Rainer Albertz, in his review of Henze’s book, agrees that the relationship of both versions of Daniel 4 is not a matter of text-critical but transmission-history methodology, since it is not a matter of a few changes of a base text but of two independent story traditions, although he believes that OG 4–6 has priority (Rainer Albertz, Review of Matthias Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, Biblica 82 [2001], 564–68). On the other hand, Albertz disagrees with Henze’s main point—that these are parallel literary editions, because there are so many agreements between the texts. 224.  Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 203. 225. Edgar Kellenberger, “Textvarianten in den Daniel-Legenden als Zeugnisse münd­ licher Tradierung? ” 207–23. Examples of pluses in Th that make it derivative of the OG: Dan 2:32 and 6:18 (MT 6:19); examples of pluses in the OG that make it younger than MT/Th: Dan 6:17 (MT 6:18) and 6:27.

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by which the story was continually told and retold,” so as to allow the OG to fix a slightly different version of it. 226 These studies by recent scholars are very suggestive for this study, and the concept that the OG and MT represent variant editions is supported by our knowledge of the literary processes behind story-collections. Story-collections indeed often do contain stories that have variant editions elsewhere, each maintaining the central core common to all but lacking a fixed text. For an example of a central core stylistically altered from edition to edition, we may take the opening lines of “The Frog King.” 227 This is from a collection of stories whose history is documented: Grimms’ Fairy Tales. The variants that follow are from the same author, Wilhelm Grimm. The first edition of 1812 reads: Es war einmal eine Königstochter, die ging hinaus in den Wald und setzte sich an einen kühlen Brunnen. Sie hatte eine goldene Kugel, die war ihr liebstes Spielwerk, die warf sie in die Höhe und fing sie wieder in der Luft und hatte ihre Lust daran. (Kinder- und Hausmärchen: 1812 und 1815 1:1) [Once upon a time there was a king’s daughter who went into the forest and sat down at a cool well. She had a golden ball that was her favorite toy. She would throw it up and catch it in the air and was amused by this.] 228

The second edition of 1819 elaborates slightly: Es war einmal eine Königstochter, die wußte nicht was sie anfangen sollte vor langer Weile. Da nahm sie eine goldene Kugel, womit sie schon oft gespielt hatte und ging hinaus in den Wald. Mitten in den Wald aber war ein reiner, kühler Brunnen, dabei setzte sie sich nieder, warf die Kugel in die Höhe, fing sie wieder, und das war ihr so ein Spielwerk. (Kinder- und Hausmärchen: 1819 1:9) [Once upon a time there was a king’s daughter who was so bored she didn’t know what to do. She took a golden ball that she often played with and went into the forest. Now in the middle of the forest there was a clear, cool well and she sat down next to it, threw the ball into the air and she would play this way.] 229

And the final edition of 1857 elaborates much further:

226.  DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 50. But he also adds that “the framework of the form and content of the Daniel story was established by the authoritative status of MT and LXX Daniel in a way it never had before. All post-biblical renditions of the Daniel story are in a sense retellings of the biblical version, regardless of their degree of drift from it.” 227.  The English translations have been taken from S. Neumann, “The Brothers Grimm as Collectors and Editors of German Folktales,” 29–30. 228.  Ibid., 29. 229.  Ibid., 29–30.

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Chapter Four In den alten Zeiten, wo das Wünschen noch geholfen hat, lebte ein König, dessen Töchter waren alle schön, aber die jüngste war so schön, daß die Sonne selber, die doch so vieles gesehen hat, sich verwunderte, sooft sie ihr ins Gesicht schien. Nahe bei dem Schlosse des Königs lag ein grosser dunkler Wald, und in dem Walde unter einer alten Linde war ein Brunnen; wenn nun der Tag recht heiß war, so ging das Königskind hinaus in den Wald und setzte sich an den Rand des kühlen Brunnens; und wenn sie Langeweile hatte, so nahm sie eine goldene Kugel, warf sie in die Höhe und fing sie wieder; und das war ihr liebstes Spielwerk. (Kinder- und Hausmärchen: Ausgabe letzter Hand 1: 29) [In olden times, when wishing still helped, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful, but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, which had seen so many things, was always filled with amazement each time it cast its rays upon her face. Now, there was a great dark forest near the king’s castle, and in this forest, beneath an old linden tree, was a well. Whenever the days were very hot, the king’s daughter would go into the forest and sit down by the edge of the cool well. If she became bored, she would take her golden ball, throw it into the air and catch it. More than anything else she loved playing with this ball.] 230

We can see that, by the final edition of the story, the core remained stable but the style in which the story was written by Wilhelm Grimm evolved remarkably. He had progressively added more and more detail to the story, and as S. Neumann states, “One can respond to the result in two ways—by lamenting the loss of the folktale’s simplicity, or by welcoming the poetic enrichment.” 231 That is, individuals may prefer one edition over another in response to their own esthetic judgment or story-telling needs of the moment; one edition is not necessarily superior to another. In a situation where there were separate tellers, or if oral in addition to written forms were considered, the complexities for establishing the relationships between texts are even greater. H. Haddawy’s accounts of the story-telling techniques for One Thousand Nights and a Night used by his grandmother’s friends in modern Baghdad are a case in point (see ch. three above, pp. 68–69); the story-teller utilized her skill at each telling to elaborate on details and to lengthen and shorten a story. Although the core story (functions and themes) are the same, the text may vary. In the case of the MT and OG of Dan chs. 4–6, it is not clear who the authors were nor if the Aramaic or the Greek story-tellers would have to have been different persons. Take, as an example of good story-telling, the description of the great tree in MT 4:7b–9. The Old Greek here has often been considered paraphrastic, since it adds details not in the MT:

230.  Ibid., 30. 231. Ibid.

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Behold, (there was) a tree in the midst of the earth, and its height was great. The tree grew great and strong; its height reached to heaven, and the sight of it (ḥăzôtēh) to the end of all the earth. Its foliage was beautiful, its fruit abundant, and food for all was in it. Beneath it the beasts of the field found shade; the birds of the sky lived in its branches. From it all flesh was fed.

OG 4:7b–9: Behold, a tall tree (was) growing on the earth. Its appearance (ἡ ὅρασις αὐτοῦ) was great and there was not another like it. Its branches were about thirty stadia long; all the wild beasts of the earth found shade under it, and the birds of the heaven made their nests in it. Its food was plentiful and good and it supported all living things. Its appearance was great; its crown came close to heaven and its trunk to the clouds, filling the region under heaven. The sun and the moon dwelt in it and it illumined the whole earth.

The description in the MT portrays a great tree that reached to heaven and could be seen all over the earth. Its foliage and fruit are described briefly, and the reader is told that it supplied food and shelter for every creature. The description in the MT is rather succinct; however, it is not necessary to pass judgment on the additional details in the OG as “sadly confused and absurdly amplified” or even “unintelligible” (with regard to the notion of the sun and the moon dwelling in the tree’s branches), as did Montgomery. 232 The expansive description seems instead to be part of good story-telling, intended to amplify the reader’s wonder, stress the tree’s uniqueness, and reinforce the cosmic imagery behind the story. This tree is so great that no other tree has ever been like it, its branches are approximately thirty stadia long (about five miles), and it takes up so much space in both heaven and earth that the sun and the moon are said to live in its branches. Whatever earlier traditions that this description relied on (and that the MT apparently did not have), part of the OG’s charm is that it is a good story. 233 Even the repetition of “its appearance was great” (καὶ ἡ ὅρασις αὐτοῦ μεγάλη) does not have to be judged as an unnecessary duplication due to a shoddy translator but may well 232.  Montgomery, The Book of Daniel, 247, 248. Montgomery is elsewhere very positive about the value of the OG: “the present writer’s opinion, independently attained, agrees with Bludau’s, that a careful study relieves much of the odium that has been cast upon the translation” (ibid., 36). 233.  The specifics in length and the statement that the sun and the moon live in the tree seem to have no parallels elsewhere in the cosmic tree traditions. In general, traditions of a cosmic tree that stretches from the earth to heaven, encompassing the universe, are well-known from antiquity to the present, and several scholars of Daniel have noted parallels or suggested sources for the tree of Dan 4. However, the image of the sun and moon has been harder to pinpoint; but see ch. 5 below for consideration of the “Oracle of Sun and Moon” from the Greek Alexander Romance as a source.

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be a lively story-telling device, emphasizing the marvel of the tree. 234 (Other examples of good story-telling techniques on the part of MT or OG, or even Th, in chs. 4–6 and elsewhere abound and will be utilized in the discussion below on the stages of the composition of Daniel.) One appealing solution, proposed by Lust, is that, since the Aramaic stories and visions originally circulated independently, chs. 4–6 were brought together according to different patterns. The OG collection utilized more materials. “We may conclude that the different order of the chapters in the LXX and in the MT may be due to an alternative arrangement of originally independent episodes.” 235 Even if we disagree with Lust about the priority of the OG (LXX), the general idea is attractive. Early on, there would have been more freedom to arrange the chapters differently, and it seems probable that copyists corrected their variant manuscripts toward one another. 236 This helps to explain why deciding which story is older or better in a different version is so difficult. As Meadowcroft (who thought both the MT and OG were translations but is not concerned about whether one was prior to the other) has observed, “The LXX seems to be later than the MT in that it tells the story [ch. 4] in a way that looks forward to the version. At the same time, the less crafted form of the story in the LXX suggests that it could be an earlier version than the MT.” 237 In regard to the book of Daniel, textual (lower) criticism and historical (higher) criticism go hand in hand. Although scholars are beginning to realize that this is true for many biblical texts that did not have a standardized text in the Second Temple Period, this is essentially so for Daniel because the major texts seem to date to within a few decades of each other. The same is true for textual criticism and literary criticism, as Emanuel Tov notes: “In our view, textual criteria should not be applied to data that were not created during the textual transmission. . . . In the analysis of literary traditions one does not speak in terms of preference.” 238 Nonetheless, “gray areas” of readings that lie between the realm of scribal transmission and literary growth remain. “If such readings belong to the area of the literary growth, textual evaluation should be avoided, but if they were created in the course of the scribal transmission, evaluation is essential.” 239 There is no need to posit a single Semitic original or Urtext from which all versions of the Daniel stories descended. It is better to speak of double literary editions (Ulrich) or of core material behind each “telling” of the story (Wenthe, 234.  Meadowcroft suggested that the description of the tree is more allegorical than symbolic (Meadowcroft, Aramaic Daniel, 55). 235.  Lust, “The Septuagint Version of Daniel 4–5,” 52–53. 236.  Ibid., 52. 237.  Meadowcroft, Aramaic Daniel and Greek Daniel, 56. 238. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 348–50, esp. p. 349. See also Edgar Kellenberger, “Textvarianten in den Daniel-Legenden als Zeugnisse mündlicher Tradierung? ” 207–19. 239.  Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 350.

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Henze, and Kellenberger). However, in contrast to Wenthe, who states “the evidence points to the variant of Semitic Vorlagen rather than de novo Greek compositions,” 240 Henze has argued that “neither MT or the Old Greek has served as the Vorlage of the other.” 241 Moreover, the reflexive appeal of scholars to a Vorlage as the source for any and all variant readings is due to unproven preconceptions about dependent textual relationships. The observed Semitic or Semitizing features (use of parataxis, etc.) occur alongside features that seem Greek rather than Semitic and would in fact be difficult to render back into Hebrew or Aramaic. As Bludau noted long ago, it is difficult to tell the difference between Semitizing Greek and a translation of a Semitic Vorlage. 242 Intentional shortening or expansion of what occurs in a different text are processes that can be entirely other than interpretation or Tendenz. 243 It is possible that the OG edition is not a translation but a retelling of the stories of Dan 4–6 with different aims. Each literary edition of Daniel may be viewed as a separate and independent collection of narratives drawing from a common pool of stories. The OG and MT “developed independently out of a common form of the story no longer extant.” 244 If we can now look at OG and the MT in this way, what about the relationship of the two main Greek editions of chs. 4–6, OG and Th? Timothy McLay argues that they, too, are independent from each other, even though they do not have the same relationship consistently throughout the book. 245 McLay’s findings are that the Greek versions actually show little relationship in grammar, style, and vocabulary. Less than 19% of the vocabulary of Th 4–6 agrees with OG 4–6, but when it does agree (398 out of 479 agreements, excluding titles or names), 83% are verbatim, suggesting that these agreements are due to textual corruption of the OG toward the Th. 246 This is in contrast to the much different 240.  Wenthe, The Old Greek Translation of Daniel 1–6, 96. 241.  Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 40. 242. A. Bludau, Die alexandrinische Übersetzung des Buches Daniels, 210. See also Klaus Beyer, “Woran erkennt man, daß ein griechischer Text aus dem Hebräischen oder Aramäischen übersetzt ist? ” in Maria Macuch et al., eds., Studia semitica necnon iranica: Rudolpho Macuch septuagenario ab amicis et discipulis dedicata (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1989), 21–31. 243.  Wenthe, The Old Greek Translation of Daniel 1–6, 35. 244.  Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 40. 245.  McLay views OG as prior to the MT (“The Old Greek Translation of Daniel IV– VI,” 305). See also Tov’s study of Baruch in comparison with Th Daniel or OG Daniel (Tov, “The Relation between the Greek Versions of Baruch and Daniel,” in his The Greek and Hebrew Bible: Collected Essays on the Septuagint [VT Sup 72; Leiden: Brill, 1999], 519–26). He finds that there is no dependence of Baruch upon Th Dan or OG Dan. When Th Dan and Baruch demonstrate the rendering of the same MT words by the same Greek words, this does not indicate a special relationship, just a penchant for literalness. There are two different literal translators, which is why there are so many agreements. 246.  McLay, “The Greek Translations of Daniel 1–3,” 32, quoting from his “The Greek Translations of Daniel Chapters 4–6,” forthcoming. See also McLay, “Daniel,” in NETS, 991.

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relationship between the MT or Th and OG in chs. 1–3, where there is much similar content, even if there are occasional big pluses or minuses. Th vocabulary in chs. 1–3 agrees with OG about 38% of the time, with the highest agreement in ch. 3. 247 But here again, for McLay, both Th and OG are independent translations; the agreements are only incidental or because of some corruption in OG toward Th, in response to the supremacy that Th Daniel eventually achieved. “Generally, there is very little relationship between the two Greek versions in chapters i–vi(vii), because their origins are chronologically and geographically distinct and their core translations were based on different Vorlagen.” 248 The reason for common readings especially in chs. 4–6 is also that the OG is corrupted with Th readings. However, there are also portions “where the verbal agreements between the texts are so strong that based on the available textual evidence it would appear that one is a revision of the other.” 249 By contrast, chs. 7–12 have an agreement of 50% or more between Th and OG, which gives the impression that Th is a revision of OG. For McLay, they are based on similar Vorlage, however, and equivalencies might just be stereotypical renderings. 250 In sum, several scholars are beginning to look at biblical Daniel (or parts of it) in the MT/Th and OG as variant literary editions that developed along parallel lines. The following section on the Book of Daniel as “multiple collections” charts a course through the established stages of the book in its main editions and attempts to form a coherent understanding of the relationships between these editions and their development. Moreover, this section will also delve into what the content and structure of the final forms of MT Daniel, OG Daniel, and Th Daniel mean for understanding each.

247.  Ibid., 991–92. Ch. 1 has 30% verbatim agreement with OG (115 out of 389), but several verses with virtually no relationship between OG and Th and some with extensive agreements (1:1, 4, 7, 10, 12, 14, 16; McLay, “The Greek Translations of Daniel 1–3,” 37). Ch. 2 mirrors the situation in ch. 1, because there is 36% verbatim agreement (389 out of 1,075 words, excluding titles or names; ibid., 40) but several verses with no relationship between OG and Th, yet twelve verses with extensive agreements (2:4, 22, 23, 24, 28[2], 31, 32, 34, 35[2], 39, 42, 47). Ch. 3 displays a higher degree of relationship between OG and Th than chs. 1–2: a 44% verbatim agreement (301 words out of 680; ibid., 44). This is due mostly to corruption of OG by Th (there is only one instance of the reverse, in 3:2). Generally, shared readings in OG and Th throughout chs. 1–6 are judged to be due to corruption of OG by Th. 248.  McLay, “The Old Greek Translation of Daniel IV–VI,” 323. 249.  Ibid., 323; italics his. In a study of just OG and Th Dan 4, Hans-Dieter Neef comes to some of the same conclusions as McLay for all of chs. 1–6. Neef proposes that the OG and Th Dan 4 have the same essential content and reflect the same underlying story, but they each freely expanded the material independently: Th Dan is not to be thought of as a revision of the OG (Neef, “Menschliche Hybris und göttliche Macht: Dan 4 LXX und Dan 4 Th im Vergleich,” JNSL 31 [2005], 59–89). 250.  McLay, “Daniel,” in NETS, 992.

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4.2.3.  Daniel Stages and Collections The outline of stages in the composition of the Hebrew-Aramaic (MT) text of Daniel that has emerged as a scholarly consensus is as follows. 251 The individual tales of chs.(1)2–6 were composed and circulated independently in some form in the late Persian and Hellenistic periods. Then, three tales were collected and circulated together, framed by doxologies: the Vorlage of, or some form of, MT 3:31–6:29. Two widely divergent textual traditions of these tales began to develop (what would become the MT and the OG). A larger collection of tales was compiled in the Hellenistic period, chs. 2–6, with ch. 1, or some form of it, attached as an introduction. Shortly afterward, in the early part of Antiochus’ persecution, the Aramaic vision (ch. 7) was composed and may have circulated with the Aramaic tales for a brief period. Finally, Hebrew chs. 8–12 were added and ch. 1 translated into Hebrew as a frame for the Aramaic chapters by approximately 164 b.c.e. This outline seems to account for many features of the MT, yet it is likely that the early stages may have overlapped with each other to some extent; for example, it is entirely possible, as Ulrich has hinted, that MT Dan 4–6 may have continued circulating for a time after the Dan 1–6 collection had incorporated it or that MT Dan 4–6 was an apocopated or abbreviated collection selected from a larger form of Daniel, as evidenced by its very neat arrangement of three stories, each under a different king (see below). In any case, keeping the same basic assumptions about MT Dan as his foundation, McLay has expanded the common overview of Daniel’s development to take into account the Greek versions as well 252: 1.  Individual tales of chs. 2–6. These were composed and circulated independently in some form in the late Persian and Hellenistic periods. 2.  First Collection: Three tales were collected and circulate together: (3:31)4– 6. This allowed two textual traditions of this collection to develop (what would become the MT and the OG). 253 3.  The addition of chs. 2–3 in some form. Ch. 2 did not have 2:13–23(24), 29–30, (40)41–43, 47, 49, and ch. 3 did not have Additions. 4.  Maccabean (Semitic) collection of chs. (1)2–6(7). There is much disagreement about whether this collection included ch. 7 or not; however, most scholars agree that at least the core of ch. 7 was added to chs. 2–6 before the other visions. Maybe an early version of ch. 1 was here included as an introduction, but the final form of ch. 1 derives from the final redaction of the 251.  Collins, Daniel, 38. 252.  R. Timothy McLay, “The Old Greek Translations of Daniel IV–VI,” 304–23, esp. pp. 318–22. 253. Here McLay follows Albertz and Wills in regarding the OG text as witness to an older and better text.

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book. The addition of ch. 7 was accompanied by the redaction of ch. 2 to include reference to the fourth kingdom but no reference to toes (vv. 41, 42). 5.  Egyptian Greek collection (1)2–6(7), sometime after 167 b.c.e., perhaps prompted by the Maccabean crisis in Palestine. Chs. 4–6 had been independent before, so they had already been translated into Greek. Maybe there had been a preliminary translation of chs. 2–3, but we cannot know. 6.  The final redaction of proto-MT after the desecration by Antiochus IV. Ch. 8 was added, then chs. 10–12 plus interpolations in ch. 2 (the toes) and 7 (the horns) and, finally, ch. 9 last of all. The introduction (ch. 1) is now written, or the initial one is translated into Hebrew and revised to emphasize the role of the maśkîlîm (compare 1:4, 7 and 11:33; 12:3). The maśkîlîm were responsible for additions to ch. 2:13–23, 27–29, 47, 49 and throughout chs. 4–6 where Daniel’s role as inspired interpreter is pronounced. 254 7.  Redaction of the Egyptian collection of chs. (1)2–6(7). The Prayer and Hymn were inserted in ch. 3, and Nebuchadnezzar’s confession and epistle were possibly moved to the end of ch.4 to separate it from them. Susanna and Bel became attached at some point. 8.  The Egyptian (OG) version gets reacquainted with the proto-MT. OG adds a translation of chs. 8–12 to the core of (1)2–6(7) and some revision of chs. 1, 2, and 7. (No toes in Pap 967 2:40–42). The core collection was already established, so chs. 4–6 remain very different. But there was a separate redaction of a common Vorlage with MT, because there are two literary editions of Daniel. 9.  The so-called Th version. This was a separate, independent translation enterprise in Palestine, based on a similar Vorlage to the MT. But Susanna and Bel were retained because they were already closely associated with the Greek Daniel collection. 10.  The transmission process: More scribal editing, in which OG suffered the most because MT was dominant and Th was based on a similar Vorlage to MT. Pap 967 was the only pre-hexaplaric witness to OG, and at some point a “well-meaning scribe” tried to fix the chronology by changing the chapter order of Dan 1–12 to: 1–4, 7–8, 5–6, 9–10.

While helpful, McLay’s specific outline of Daniel’s composition history in the MT, OG, and Th still allows for some skepticism on the details and for further modification. It is hard to tell when some passages were added; for other passages, a terminus post quem is simpler to give, such as the parts in ch. 2 that must be responses to the Hellenistic period (e.g., the feet and toes made of mixed iron and clay, which must be referring to the divisions of the Greek empire after Alexander the Great). On the other hand, it is probable that these main editions were aware of each other, in that the names of the main characters in the final 254.  R. Glenn Wooden, “The Book of Daniel and Manticism,” esp. pp. 197–99, 204–21; 248–51; 268–70.

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main editions are always the same (although not the year their stories take place), with few exceptions, 255 and the order of chs. 1–12 remained fairly stable; only the OG witness Pap967 disrupts the chronology. Pace McLay, it seems possible that OG never had a Dan 1–6 or a (3)4–6 collection; in general, OG Dan is even less integrated than either the MT or Th (see below). However, this does not mean that the OG variant editions of chs. 4–6 (so widely divergent from the MT and Th) could not have been composed before the final form of the OG or that what eventually became the OG or MT was not constantly subject to the retellings of story-tellers.

4.2.3.1.  Independent Stories and Selection of Material: The Hero Belteshazzar/Daniel The biblical Daniel stories are arranged under their connection to the Daniel character (Daniel means “God/El is my judge”); however, it is likely that they were originally independent stories whose protagonist or protagonists were not necessarily called by the Hebrew names given the four friends in the biblical book. MT Dan 4, for instance, consistently uses the name Belteshazzar for its hero and uses the name Daniel only in vv. 5 and 16, where it is set alongside his Babylonian name; Daniel is introduced in v. 5 as “Daniel, whose name is Belteshazzar like the name of my god, and in whom is a spirit of holy gods.” 256 The stories in the biblical form are presented as being about a righteous Judean man, Daniel, who lived in exile in the sixth century, and the visions are presented as a first-person account of that same Daniel. However, both halves of the Book of Daniel are antedated. Critical scholarship views the switch in ch. 7 from third-person to first-person as a switch from anonymity of authorship to pseudonymity, and no specific historical “Daniel” can be credited with having written the book. 257 The stories about Daniel and his friends are instead usually considered to be legendary in nature. 258 The Daniel stories are drawn from the larger pool of Daniel stories, which were in turn part of an even larger tradition 255.  Note that OG Pap967, at the end of ch. 5, says that Xerxes the Mede took the kingdom, while Syh and ms. 88 make it Artaxerxes. 256.  “Because the author/redactor of MT Daniel goes so far out of his way to insist that Belteshazzar is Daniel [in ch. 4], one must assume that this connection was fairly new and that rather than inheriting an already well-known connection either the author/redactor made the connection himself or it was made only a short while before his time” (DiTommaso, “4QPseudoDanielA-B [4Q243–4Q244],” 107 n. 23). 257.  The idea that a historical Jew named Daniel wrote the book in the sixth century in Mesopotamia has been out of scholarly favor for some time, for many reasons, not least of which is the necessity of dating the composition of the book of Daniel to a much later period. On the other hand, the possibility that Daniel was a historical figure even if the stories are legendary is still seen as possible by some; see, for instance, T. C. Vriezen and A. S. van der Woude, Ancient Israelite and Early Jewish Literature, 482. 258.  Note also the absence of any genealogy for the characters; see Hartman and Di Lella on this issue (The Book of Daniel, 8).

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of Near Eastern court tales with the same motifs and themes. This “larger pool” or Daniel cycle is demonstrated by: the existence of the two main Greek editions of Daniel, Theodotion (Th) and the Old Greek (OG), which add to MT Daniel two stories, Susanna and Bel and the Serpent, as well as two poems, The Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men (including also a short narration between them), which are inserted into ch. 3; the fragments of Daniel stories and visions found in the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls dating from the second century b.c.e. to the first century c.e. (not to mention the eight biblical scrolls); and other late Second Temple or early rabbinic traditions found in Josephus or the Lives of the Prophets (see ch. 5 below). There was thus a lively stream of stories and visions concerned with or attributed to the popular figure Daniel. Some of these must be influenced by the others, while others seem to be truly independent (see ch. 5 below). Daniel was a striking figure within the Jewish imagination, and the making of traditions around him was productive both in the first millennium b.c.e. and much later, after the biblical book was canonized. 259 How did the name Daniel become attached to this material? The popular name “Daniel” is found in the Masoretic Text predominantly in two bundles of texts: those having to do with an ancient pre- and non-Israelite sage who is wise and whose righteousness can be compared to that of Noah and Job, two other ancient worthies (Ezek 14:14, 20 and 28:3; spelled Dnʾ l); and those having to do with an exilic-period Israelite: either a priest, as in Ezra 8:2 and Neh 10:7, or the Judean exile in Babylon found in the Book of Daniel (spelled Dnyʾ l). 260 The Daniel mentioned in Ezra–Nehemiah, a family head and priest from the family of Ithamar, who travels from Babylon to Jerusalem with Ezra (this line of priests is still important in 1 Chr 24:1–18), is not at all intended to be the same Daniel who appears in the Book of Daniel, but one wonders if the Book of Daniel bor259.  Very few new compositions about Daniel appear from the second century until approximately the fifth century c.e. After the fifth century, new stories, visions, and even prognostica attributed to Daniel begin to appear again (e.g., the popular medieval Somniale Danielis and the Lunationes Danielis). See Lorenzo DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 10, 231–32. DiTommaso’s book categorizes the ancient and medieval Daniel legenda, apocalypses, and prognostica and “evaluates their generic relationship to the biblical book of Daniel” (p. xiii). See also Robert A. Kraft, “Daniel Outside the Traditional Jewish Canon: In the Footsteps of M. R. James,” in Peter W. Flint et al., eds., Studies in the Hebrew Bible, Qumran, and the Septuagint Presented to Eugene Ulrich (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 121–33. 260. M. O’Connor, “The Human Characters’ Names in the Ugaritic Poems: Onomastic Eccentricity in Bronze-Age West Semitic and the Name Daniel in Particular,” in Steven E. Fassberg and Avi Hurvitz, eds., Biblical Hebrew in Its Northwest Semitic Setting: Typological and Historical Perspectives (Jerusalem: Magnes / Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 269–83. The only other biblical “Daniel” beside the one in these two bundles of texts is a Daniel son of David by Abigail the Carmelite in 1 Chr 3:1, a list of the six sons born to David at Hebron. Note that the Greek manuscripts and the parallel Hebrew list in 2 Sam 3:3 have a different name (Chileab, ‫)ּכ ְלאָב‬. ִ

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rowed the name from this source. 261 This Daniel is not located in the exile but in the post-exilic period of Artaxerxes I (465–424 b.c.e.). 262 In addition, the deuterocanonical 4 Ezra 12:10–11 refers to Daniel as Ezra’s brother and thus continues the tradition of understanding Daniel as a priest. As for the Daniel mentioned in Ezekiel, most scholars consider Ezekiel’s use of the name alongside Noah and Job, non-Israelite heroes of old honored for their righteousness and their ability to save others (14:14, 20), 263 and in connection with an Eden story in ch. 28, to indicate that Ezekiel was drawing on a name with certain legendary associations, not a historical person of Ezekiel’s own period, the sixth century b.c.e. 264 Instead, a link between Ezekiel’s “Daniel” and the Daniel (spelled Dnı͗l) of the fourteenth-century Ugaritic Aqhat epic, in which Daniel is portrayed as a hero and king, has been maintained ever since that epic was deciphered in the twentieth century. 265 In the Aqhat epic, Daniel is a patriarch who is at first childless but who is finally given a son, Aqhat, by the gods. Aqhat, however, is killed by the goddess Anat because he refuses to give her his bow, and his sister, Pughat, sets out to avenge his death. The description of Daniel in the epic is rather limited, but he seems to revere the gods, is said to adjudicate 261.  The Daniel (Dnyʾ l) in Ezra 8:2 would date to the latter half of the fifth century rather than the sixth century b.c.e., the setting of the Daniel stories, so a connection between the exiled courtier Daniel of the Book of Daniel and the priest Daniel in Ezra is probably not intended. The two spellings of “Daniel,” with or without a yod, probably make no difference as to the actual pronunciation of the name, since the yod is a mater lectionis. Likewise, Ugaritic Dnı͗l “could correspond to either Hebrew vocalization” (Dānīʾēl or Dāniyyēʾ l) (Harold H. P. Dressler, “The Identification of the Ugaritic Dnil and the Daniel of Ezekiel,” VT 29 [1979], 152–61, esp. p. 156. 262.  Davies, Daniel, 40. 263.  Ezek 14:14: “Even if Noah, Daniel, and Job, these three, were in it (the land), they would save solely their own lives by their righteousness, says the Lord God”; Ezek 14:20: “Even if Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, as I live, says the Lord God, they would save neither son nor daughter; they would save solely their own lives by their righteousness.” 264. See Collins, Daniel, 1, among others, but note the objections of Dressler, “The Identification of the Ugaritic Dnil with the Daniel of Ezekiel.” Dressler claims that the Ugaritic Daniel is not said to be wise, righteous, or able to save his children. 265.  See, for example: R. Dussaud, “Brève remarques sur les tablettes de Ras Shamra,” Syria 12 (1931), 67–77, esp. p. 77; M. Noth, “Noah, Daniel and Hiob in Ezechiel XIV,” VT 1 (1951), 251–60, esp. p. 253. For the epic of Aqhat, see: CTA 1.17–19; ANET 149–55; D. Pardee, “West Semitic canonical compositions,” in COS, 239–375; Simon B. Parker, “Aqhat,” in Simon B. Parker, ed., Ugaritic Narrative Poetry (Writings from the Ancient World 9; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), 49–80; J. C. L. Gibson, Canaanite Myths and Legends (2nd ed.; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1978), 103–22. For an overview of interpretations up until 1999, see Nicolas Wyatt, “The Story of Aqhat (KTU 1.17–19),” in Wilfred G. E. Watson and Nicolas Wyatt, eds., Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (Handbuch der Orientalistik, 1/39; Leiden: Brill, 1999), 234–58. The idea that Ugaritic Daniel is not actually a king was taken up by B. Margalit in particular, although this is not commonly accepted; B. Margalit, The Ugaritic Poem of Aqhat (BZAW 182; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989), 253–54, 278, 292–93, 309, 361–62, 410, 424–27.

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for “widows and orphans” (a Near Eastern topos for a good ruler), and he utters incantations or spells on several occasions. The text breaks off before the end, but it is possible either that Aqhat is resurrected or a replacement for him is somehow found, since there is some indication in the plot of a happy ending. 266 Note too that Jubilees 4:20 probably also has connections to a pre-Israelite tradition; the passage speaks of a Danel who was an uncle and father-in-law to Enoch, the antedeluvian hero of Gen 5:21–24. 267 Nevertheless, Wahl and Dressler have argued that the Ugaritic Daniel was not the one known to Ezekiel nor is he to be connected to the Book of Daniel. For Dressler, the Ugaritic Daniel was not really stereotypically wise nor was his righteousness central to the story. Baruch Margalit and John Day have countered, however, that Daniel’s judging of widows and orphans and his pious behavior toward the ancestors and the gods make it appropriate that a character of this sort be admired in Ezekiel’s time as a non-Israelite example of righteousness, even if Ezekiel did not directly know the text of Aqhat. 268 Ugaritic Daniel’s wisdom may not be central to the story of Aqhat, but there is a “strong connection between just judgement and wisdom.” 269 Moreover, it is not only the Ugaritic Daniel’s piety and justice that made it into Ezekiel and Daniel, but his mantic abilities. For instance, Ezek 28:3 mentions Daniel in an ironic statement to the king of Tyre: “You are truly wiser than Daniel; not a secret is hidden from you.” Perhaps this reference to secrets hints at mantic wisdom or to the magical arts of Ugaritic Daniel. 270 (However, if 28:3 is a later interpolation, as some suggest, then it is not as clear that Ezekiel is borrowing ideas from Ugaritic Daniel rather than the Book of Daniel itself or later Danielic traditions.)  271 Hans-Peter Müller adduced 266.  Because the story begins with Daniel’s longing for a son, it is likely that it would conclude with a solution for him. Also, Ezek 14:14–20 seems to know of a tradition where, like Noah and Job, a pre-Israelite Daniel saves his children. 267.  Daniel is also the name of one of the Watcher-angels in 1 Enoch 6:7, but it is doubtful that this Daniel is related to the Ugaritic Dnı͗l. 268. John Day, “The Daniel of Ugarit and Ezekiel and the Hero of the Book of Daniel,” VT 30 (1980), 174–84. See also Baruch Margalit’s response to Dressler, “Interpreting the Story of Aqht,” VT 30 (1980), 361–65; and Dressler’s response to Margalit and Day: “Reading and Interpreting the Aqht Text,” VT 34 (1984), 78–82. 269.  Day, “The Daniel of Ugarit and Ezekiel and the Hero of the Book of Daniel,” 180. 270.  On the magical arts of Ugaritic Daniel, see B. A. Mastin, “Wisdom and Daniel,” 161–69, esp. p. 165; H.-P. Müller, “Magisch-mantische Weisheit und die Gestalt Daniels,” 79– 94; John Day, “The Daniel of Ugarit and Ezekiel and the Hero of the Book of Daniel,” pp. 181, 183. On the other hand, Harald-Martin Wahl suggests that the author of Ezekiel did not know the ancient traditions about the three heroes, only their biblical stories; “Noah, Daniel und Hiob in Ezechiel XIV 12–20 (21–3): Anmerkungen zum traditionsgeschichtlichen Hinter­ grund,” VT 42 (1992), 542–53. 271.  Robert R. Wilson, “The Death of the King of Tyre: The Editorial History of Ezekiel 28,” in John H. Marks and Robert M. Good, eds., Love and Death in the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of Marvin H. Pope (Guilford, CT: Four Quarters, 1987), 211–18, esp. p. 213.

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a great deal of material from Aqhat as evidence that Daniel was a mantic; three instances in particular stand out. Ugaritic Daniel utilizes incantations to slay eagles and reanimate them (CTA 1.19.iii.107 ff.), to bring rain from clouds (CTA 1.19.i.38–42), and to restore fertility to the grain fields (CTA 1.19.ii.62–74). 272 The good angel Daniel mentioned on two Aramaic incantation bowls who is appealed to as a “counter-magical power” recalls this aspect of Ugaritic Daniel as well. 273 That the Daniel of the Book of Daniel has mantic or divinatory abilities (dream interpretation, reading the writing on the wall, as well as “loosening knots” and “solving riddles” more generally, etc.) is true enough; however, there has been much debate over the degree to which the final form of the book emphasizes this. 274 Of course, it is just these mantic abilities that make the stories appropriate to connect to the visions of chs. 7–12. With regard to the two genre sections in Daniel—that is, stories and visions—Wills states: The two sections were not considered incompatible by the final redactor, however, since, as several scholars have recently observed, it is mantic wisdom which provides a point of intersection between the two. Although in many respects Daniel in chapters 1–6 is like the protagonist in other court legends, his mantic abilities are in general the key to his success. 275

272.  Note, too, the divinatory powers of his daughter, Pughat. She is a water-carrier and a “collector of dew from the fleece,” as well as someone who “knows the courses of the stars” (1.19.ii.1–3, 6–7; iv.37–38). For the possibility that Pughat is working magic to bring rain, see M. Dietrich and O. Loretz, “‘Wasser- und Tauschöpfen’ als Bezeichnung für Regenmagie,” UF 17 (1985), 95–98, esp. p. 98. On the difficulties of discerning whether or not these characteristics of Pughat are magical or simply domestic, see G. del Olmo Lete, Mitos y leyendas de Canaan: Segun la tradition de Ugarit (Institución San Jerónimo para la investigación bíblica: Fuentes de la ciencia bíblica 1; Madrid: Ediciones cristiandad, 1981), 347. 273.  He appears in a list of angels who are adjured to remove curses, magical arts, etc. See Day, “Daniel of Ugarit and Ezekiel,” 183; Cyrus H. Gordon, “Aramaic Incantation Bowls,” Or n.s. 10 (1941), 124–27; also C. D. Isbell, Corpus of the Aramaic Incantation Bowls (SBL Dissertation Series 17; Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1975), 102–3, no. 43, lines 4–5. Originally published by M. Schwab, “Les coupes magiques et l’hydromancie dans l’antiquité orientale,” Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 12 (1890), 292–342, esp. pp. 331–32, text no. 1. For the second bowl, see Schwab, “Coupes à inscriptions magique,” Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 13 (1891), 583–95, esp. pp. 590–91. This second occurrence of the name Daniel in a magical bowl was noticed by Wooden (“The Book of Daniel and Manticism,” 83–84). 274.  Several scholars rightly point out that on several occasions the text credits Daniel’s God with giving him the solution to a problem or the interpretation of a dream. So, even if Daniel has the right training and skills (Dan 1:4–5, 17, 18–20), he is always dependent on his God. However, the ability to “loosen knots”(mĕšārē qiṭrîn) is a magicial ability, as shown by its frequent appearance in Aramaic magical incantations; see Wolters, among others (“Untying the King’s Knots,” 117–22). 275.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 76.

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Whether or not the authors of Ezekiel and Daniel were aware of the Ugaritic Aqhat epic in detail is impossible to know, 276 nor can we know whether the Daniel of the Book of Daniel is directly modeled after Ezekiel’s Daniel or if Daniel’s author independently knew the pre-Israelite tradition. It seems possible that Ezekiel knew certain pre-Israelite traditions surrounding the name and that the author of Daniel picked up on some of the description in Ezekiel, perhaps understanding Daniel to be someone from Ezekiel’s time. 277 The characteristics of righteousness, wisdom, and knowledge of hidden secrets became attached to the stories about a sixth-century b.c.e. Jewish courtier exiled in the courts of Babylon, Media, and Persia. 278 We cannot dismiss the fact, however, that the Hebrew names of all four Jewish heroes in Daniel are also found in Ezra–Nehemiah, and the Daniel there (Ezra 8:2 and Neh 10:7) stands out from the others by being the only one of the four who is a priest. 279 As noted above, some scholars have suggested that the choice of names for the heroes in Daniel could have been taken directly from there. 280 However, it is possible that the name Daniel was chosen due to its mantic associations in Ezekiel and Ugarit, and the names of the friends were chosen based on their association with Daniel in the post-exilic material. 281 Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah (whose Babylonian names are Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego) are introduced with Daniel in the prologue, ch. 1, and appear again in chs. 2 and 3. In Dan 1:17, they and Daniel are said to have surpassing skill in all literature and wisdom, but they do not seem to be granted any further abilities, unlike Daniel, who in the same verse is said to have insight into all visions and dreams and in other chapters is given other skills. In ch. 2 they are briefly mentioned as supporters of Daniel who pray with him and who 276. As Collins notes, if the Ugaritic Daniel is the “same hero that Ezekiel refers to, the prophet must have known other traditions about him.” He continues: “Nonetheless it seems gratuitous to suppose that there were two unrelated legendary figures by the name of Daniel” (see Collins, Daniel, 2). 277.  What the author of Daniel does not take up is the idea in Ezekiel that Daniel, along with Noah and Job, were able to save their children (Ezek 14:14). The biblical Daniel does not have any progeny. 278.  On the other hand, O’Connor believes that the non-Israelite Daniel of the Ugaritic poem and Ezekiel may not have any connection with the later Daniel of exilic traditions; the name “appears in these two distinct groups of material just because it was (as it remains) a popular name” (“The Human Characters’ Names in the Ugaritic Poems,” 282). 279.  These names also appear in the Book of Nehemiah: Azariah in Neh 8:7 and 10:2; Mishael in Neh 8:4; and Hananiah in Neh 10:23. 280.  G. Behrmann, Das Buch Daniel, xvi; Delcor, Daniel, 64. Wooden suggests that Daniel is chosen as the name for the leader of the four because: (1) his name is the one that in Nehemiah is used for a priest; (2) it has links to the Daniel figure in Ezekiel; and (3) the theme of judgment is in the name (Wooden, “The Book of Daniel and Manticism,” 121–22). 281.  Wooden notes several borrowings in Daniel from Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah (ibid., 105ff.).

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are promoted along with him (2:13, 17–18, 49), while in ch. 3 in the story of the fiery furnace they are the feature players and appear without Daniel. In spite of the absence of Daniel, ch. 3 has much the same pattern as the other stories but is perhaps closest to ch. 6; the friends overcome their ordeal by relying on God, and they succeed just as Daniel does in the stories featuring him. The friends do not appear at all in chs. 4–6 nor in the apocalyptic visions of chs. 7–12. Daniel’s Babylonian name in the Book of Daniel is Belteshazzar, from either Akkadian balaṭ-su-uṣur “protect his life” or balaṭ-šar-uṣur “protect the life of the king.” 282 The MT vocalizes the name so as to emphasize the theophoric element “Bel.” 283 Having two names for the Jewish protagonist matches the practice in other biblical stories set in foreign courts; for example, Joseph is called ṢapenatPaʿneaḥ and Hadassah is named Esther. 284 The three friends of Daniel, who have rather unexceptional Hebrew names (Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah), 285 are given strange new names in the Babylonian court: Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Shadrach and Meshach were perhaps originally Persian names, 286 282.  The OG confuses his name with the name of the Babylonian king in ch. 5; they are both called Baltasar (Βαλτασαρ). 283.  Nebuchadnezzar, in Dan 4:8, says that the name was taken from his god—an allusion to Bel or Marduk, patron god of Babylon. 284.  Joseph in the Egyptian court is given an Egyptian name in Gen 41:45: ‫צפנת פנעח‬, Ṣapenat-Paʿneaḥ, most often understood as Ḏd-pꜢ-nṯr-iw.f-ʿnḫ. See Muchiki for Egyptian Ḏf(Ꜣ.i)-nṯ(r)-p(Ꜣ)-ʿnḫ, “My provision is god, the living one” (Muchiki, Egyptian Proper Names and Loanwords in North-West Semitic, 224). Muchiki believes his suggestion is more phonetically correct (iw.f is normally represented by ‫אף‬, thus an alep would be expected between the ‫ ת‬and ‫ )פ‬and fits the semantic context better. In the Book of Esther, the Jewish Hadassah, meaning “myrtle,” is given the name Esther, which might be related to the name of the Akkadian goddess Ishtar; for some other options, see Carey A. Moore, “Esther, Book of,” ABD, 2.633–43, esp. p. 633. 285. Hananiah means “Yahweh has been gracious” and Azariah means “Yahweh has helped.” Although the meaning of Mishael is unclear, most accept something like “Who is what God is? ” (see Collins, Daniel, 140). All three names occur elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, especially in Nehemiah and in close connection with each other and Daniel in Neh 8:4, 7; 10:7, 24. On the other hand, Hananiah and Azariah as well as their bi-forms seem to be very popular post-exilic names, while Mishael only appears in one other place beside the Book of Daniel (Neh 8:4). 286.  Collins notes that the name Sadrakes is found in Josephus, Antiquities 11.4.9 and 118, in a letter of King Darius (Collins, Daniel, 141). If this is an actual Persian name, then it is not necessarily “a deliberate perversion in spelling of Marduk” (Peter W. Coxon, “Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego,” ABD 5.1150). Lipiński has suggested that it is from the Old Persian name Čiθraka (Lipiński, review of Lacocque, The Book of Daniel, VT 28 [1978], 234). The Čiθ ra- element in Persian means either “lineage, origin” or “shining, splendid” (J. Tavernier, Iranica in the Achaemenid Period [ca. 550–330 b.c.]: Lexicon of Old Iranian Proper Names and Loanwords, Attested in Non-Iranian Texts (OLA 158; Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 582. An Elamite name Zí‑ut(?)-rák(?)-ka4(?) is found in an unpublished Persepolis Fortification tablet (PFNN 2374:13) (ibid., 158). The -ka element in Persian names is a hypocoristicon. The meaning of Meshach is also in dispute but is possibly Persian as well; the name Mi-iš-ša-ák-ka4 is found at

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while Abednego may be a distortion of Babylonian (Akkadian) Arad-Nabû, “servant of Nabu.” 287 A few scholars believe the Babylonian names were the original in the first form of the narrative; “the author ‘Judaized’ them by giving them the Hebrew names Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah in Daniel 1.” 288 C. L. Seow could be right, however, that the Babylonian names are “nonsensical” in Hebrew, “whatever their original meanings might have been.” 289 In addition, the fact that some of the names in this Babylonian setting (Shadrach, Meshach, as well as the name of the chief executioner Arioch in Dan 2:14–15, 24–25 290) are probably Persian names implies that the stories were composed in the Persian period or later. 291 It is also likely that the stories slightly conflate the two periods in details, something not unheard of in Near Eastern literature after the Persian period. 292 In addition, there is not much in each story or vision, taken by itself, that necessitates association with any specific regnal year of the kings named in the context, and some of the historical kings attached to the stories are only loosely connected to the events of a story (outside of Dan 1, which is necessarily connected to Nebuchadnezzar). This is the case especially in Dan 6, where the Persian Darius is mostly referred to simply as “the king.” Olivier Munnich thinks Persepolis (ibid., 246). This name would be composed of the divine name Miça (“Mithra”) plus the hypocoristic -ka. 287.  Substituting a Hebrew or Aramaic word for “servant,” ‫עבד‬, and distorting the divine name “Nabû” (‫ )נבו‬to ‫נגו‬. 288.  Paul L. Redditt, Daniel (New Century Bible Commentary; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 23; see also André Lacocque, The Book of Daniel (Atlanta: John Knox, 1979), 29. 289.  Seow, Daniel, 24. 290.  Arioch is probably also a Persian name, Ariyauka; see Collins, Daniel, 158; Pierre Grelot, “Ariok,” VT 25 (1975): 711–19; Ran Zadok, “On Five Iranian Names in the O.T.,” VT 26 (1976), 246; Lipiński, review of Lacocque, 235; and R. Schmitt, “Altpersische Ariyuka,” Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung (1974): 153–55. The name would be comprised of *Arya- (“Iranian”), plus the -uka- hypocoristic (Tavernier, Iranica in the Achaemenid Period, 117). 291.  Other vocabulary or phrases argue for this, too, such as the list of officials in Dan 3, where five of the seven terms for kinds of administrators are Persian, while the other two are Akkadian. See also, for instance, John Makujina, “Dismemberment in Dan 2:5 and 3:29 as an Old Persian Idiom, ‘To Be Made into Parts’,” JAOS 119 (1999): 309–12. Concerning haddāmîn titʿabdûn/yitʿăbēd, it was already accepted that the first term is a Persian loanword meaning “limb, body part” (*handāman-). However, Makujina shows that ʿbd does not have a doubleobject construction in Old and Biblical Aramaic and is the usual Aramaic word to translate kar- in Persian. Moreover, the use of Aramaic Hithpe. ʿbd, “to be made,” in this expression was not necessary unless the phrase was a loan translation from Persian, since Persian does not have a verb for “dismember.” 292.  Note several examples of this conflation of Mesopotamians (Assyrians or Babylonians) with each other or with the Persians in Demotic literature: the “Cycle of Inaros” stories such as Egypt and the Amazons or the compositions called Djoser and Imhotep and Naneferkasokar. See Ryholt, “The Assyrian Invasion of Egypt in Egyptian Literary Tradition,” 505.

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that the kings’ names as well as the date formulas and dynastic details that appear most often at the beginning and end of chapters in Daniel must be secondary in all editions. 293 On the other hand, DiTommaso argues that there was an accretive process at work in the book; the author “incorporated a substantial amount of traditional material associated with or attributed to Daniel, some of which was already firmly associated with certain kings.” 294 For instance, traditions tied to the historical Nabonidus are transferred to the more famous Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. Like the Prayer of Nabonidus, Dan 4 has a Jewish interpretation of the Teimāʾ sojourn, and throughout the stories Daniel only interprets the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar, since the book has borrowed the tradition that Nabonidus was known for dreaming and visiting diviners and dream interpreters. 295 However, the Nebuchadnezzar stories in Dan 2–4 could be in any order, and the single Belshazzar story in Dan 5 has transferred to him, for some unknown reason, an event (the fall of Babylon) that was also originally tied to Nabonidus, historically the last king of Babylon.

4.2.3.2.  The Abbreviated Story-Collection (MT Chs. 4–6): The Wise Courtier and the Hubris of Kings Dan 4–6 concerns only Belteshazzar/Daniel, and not the three friends. This Daniel is a dream interpreter, reader of secret writings, and a pious worshiper of the Most High under three kings: Nebuchadnezzar the Babylonian; Belshazzar, who is called Nebuchadnezzar’s son; and Darius the Mede. Both the first and the last king have somewhat of an affinity for Daniel, while Belshazzar (in the middle) seems to have a mutually antagonistic relationship with him. In both of their tales, Nebuchadnezzar and Darius are “converted” into praising the Most High, and each of their tales ends with a doxology (4:31–32 and 6:26–28). Belshazzar, however, remains unrepentant and has no praise for Daniel’s God. These contrasts between the kings (the outer two versus the middle king) make a ring composition of this collection in Dan 4–6. Furthermore, an addition of an additional doxology at the very beginning of the collection makes a frame of sorts for Dan 4–6. MT/Th 3:31–33 is the introduction to a royal encyclical and contains praise to the Most High God 293.  “Le cadrage dynastique et l’ordre des chapitres dans le livre de Daniel,” 161–95. For Munnich, the most important concerns of the authors of all editions were not chronological but symbolic links between the moral character of each king (Munnich, “Le roi impie dans le livre de Daniel,” in G. Dorival and D. Pralon, eds., Nier les dieux, nier dieu: actes du colloque organisé par le Centre Paul-Albert Février, UMR 6125, à la maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme, les 1er et 2 avril 1999 [Textes et documents de la Méditeranée antique et médiévale; Aix en Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2002], 199–210). 294.  DiTommaso, “4QPseudo-DanielA–B (4Q243–4Q244),” 108. 295.  See, for instance, Nabonidus’ inscription 13 col. iii, 1–3 (Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, 151–52; Schaudig, Die Inschriften Nabonids von Babylon und Kyros’ des Grossen, 493–94, 498).

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before the narrative of ch. 4 even begins (v. 33). Because a concluding doxology is more typical than one at the beginning, the presence of the doxology at the beginning of the story is curious: was it placed there to balance the one at the end of ch. 6? 296 The two outer doxologies provide a frame around the three stories and actually add a hint of story-telling to that frame as well. The first confession by Nebuchadnezzar nicely echoes Darius’s confession and promotes an expectation that the audience also will join in praising the Most High. Confessions or doxologies can play the same role as moralizations (see the medieval European story-collections in ch. 2 above): they encourage the audience to practice a modeled behavior. In the three-story story-collection, there is both balanced chronology and selective variety: one story per king, one episode of dream interpretation, one episode of solving the mysterious writing on the wall, and one episode of the hero being rescued from mortal danger in the lions’ pit. As hinted above, perhaps the three-chapter collection was an apocopation or abbreviation of Daniel or of Dan 1–6. (This would make sense of the beginning doxology of MT/Th ch. 4 and the odd piling up of doxologies at the end of OG ch. 4. 297) It is even possible, according to Eugene Ulrich, that more than one abridged collection of Daniel remained in circulation simultaneously with some form of MT Daniel throughout the last half of the second century b.c.e., each representing a different edition of Daniel. 298 The so-called “Little Daniel” mentioned by Ebed-Jesu (in his catalog of Hippolytus’ writings), among other possibilities, could refer to an early, smaller collection of Daniel material. 299 There is also a progression in Daniel’s advancement in the administration of the empire. In MT 4:6, Daniel is said to be chief of the ḥarṭummîn (in OG 4:15 he is “chief of the sages and leader of the dream interpreters”). We only find out in the speech of the queen in the Belshazzar story of ch. 5 that Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar’s father, specifically appointed him to this position (chief of the court professionals: magicians, exorcists/enchanters, Chaldeans, and diviners.) There is no specific reward for Daniel’s correct interpretation of the dream in ch. 4. However, in ch. 5, after Daniel has solved the problem of the mysterious writing on the wall, he is rewarded by Belshazzar: he is clothed in purple, given a 296.  The doxologies are in a style typical of the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible; see W. S. Towner, “The Poetic Passages in Daniel 1–6,” CBQ 31 (1969), 321. 297.  OG 4:34a is a confession, while OG 4:34b and 34c are redundant encyclicals of praise, and some have supposed them to be derived from the Aramaic doxology; see, for instance, Collins, Daniel, 220–21. 298.  Ulrich, “From Literature to Scripture,” 18. DiTommaso (The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 110) is against the idea. 299.  Hippolytus of Rome lived in 170–235 c.e., and he may have known and commented on a “Little Daniel” or “Lesser Daniel” (DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 88, 110–12).

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gold chain around his neck, and proclaimed third in rank over the kingdom. In ch. 6, Daniel begins as one of the three ministers over the satraps of the Median kingdom, and since this is not a contest story but a court-conflict story, there is no reward for him other than salvation from the lions’ pit. Because his rivals are thrown to the lions, one can assume that he remains in a high position in government. In MT 6:29, which, since it comes after the closing doxology, may be a summary statement closing the longer Daniel collection of Dan 1–6 (and not part of the three-chapter collection), Daniel is said to prosper in the reign of Darius. There is no corresponding statement in the OG. 300 Moreover, there is a little variety in genre as well. Ch. 6 is clearly a courtconflict story, while the other two, chs. 4 and 5, are usually seen as belonging to the court-contest genre, and their plots are linked together via the ch. 5 speech of the queen to Belshazzar. She introduces Daniel to Belshazzar by describing Daniel’s stellar achievements in the court of the previous king, Nebuchadnezzar. However, ch. 4 is generically odd in both the MT and the OG. In MT, the letter format of the chapter, which presents the events as if proclaimed in the first person by Nebuchadnezzar, makes it hard to analyze it as a straightforward court contest. Nonetheless, MT clearly does contain a competition between court professionals regarding the intepretation of the dream; in 4:3–6 (not in the OG), the sages are summoned, their failure to interpret is recounted, and then Daniel is said “finally” to enter the king’s presence. On the other hand, in the OG, the presence of other courtiers in addition to Daniel is scarcely hinted at; perhaps only in the appellation “chief of the sages and leader of the dream interpreters” is there any clue that Daniel is the head of a whole cadre of professionals at court. Chs. 4 and 5 also share another feature: both stories are probably more closely tied to Mesopotamian traditions about Nabonidus the dreamer than the other chapters of Daniel, and in both, Daniel is very much portrayed as a mantic (as he is in ch. 2). Ch. 6 carries no obvious ties to any specific king; Darius as a name was perhaps added later. In this collection of three stories, however, Belshazzar’s character is negatively contrasted with the kings in the tales on either side of Dan 5, and Darius’ great sorrow at Daniel’s punishment in the final tale makes him the most sympathetic king of the three. This makes the conclusion to the collection, Darius’ confession of Daniel’s God, even more robust and uplifting. As discussed above, the relationship of OG to MT is very different in these three stories in the abbreviated collection, and the relationship of MT to Th is so close (unlike the remainder of the book) as to suggest that Th may indeed be a correcting revision or translation of MT with an eye on the OG in these chapters. The core story of Dan 4 in both MT/Th and OG is essentially the same, with the same ordering of the plot. One night, Nebuchadnezzar’s sleep is disturbed by 300.  OG Dan 6:28 only mentions the death of Darius and the beginning of Cyrus’ reign: “King Darius was added to his fathers, and Cyrus the Persian received his kingdom.”

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a dream of a cosmic tree that is cut down by a command from heaven. Only a stump is left. When Daniel is summoned, he realizes that the dream is meant as an “oracle of doom” for Nebuchadnezzar. He interprets the dream for the king and appeals to him to atone for his sins so that he will not be punished. Twelve months later, however, the king, walking upon a wall overlooking the city, gives himself the credit for Babylon’s greatness. As a result, he is sent into exile for seven periods of time, until he confesses and praises the Most High. He is then returned to his throne. As noted above, Matthias Henze’s study of Dan 4 is important: he regards the MT and OG of that chapter as “double literary traditions.” 301 The pluriformity of the editions points to collateral development, not different stemma. However, in spite of several phrases and key terms that are the same in both MT and OG, 302 as Henze states, “nowhere throughout the biblical book are the divergences between the MT and the Old Greek as drastic as they are in Dan 4.” 303 Henze divides these into four kinds of discrepancies: (1) major divergences of form and content, such as the letter format of MT Dan 4 (exemplified in the epistolary prescript and encyclical that begin and end the narrative—3:31–33 and 4:34) versus an OG narrative whose only resemblance to a letter is found at the end of the narrative, not at the beginning (the encyclical notice is found in OG 4:34); (2) pluses or additions in MT that have no parallel in the OG (e.g., MT 4:3–6); (3) the amplification of elements in OG Dan 4 that make it one-fifth longer than MT in spite of MT’s pluses (e.g., the amplification of Daniel’s reaction to the king’s dream in OG 4:16; the account of a specific usurper taking the kingdom from Nebuchadnezzar as part of his exile in OG 4:28), as well as numerous pluses in the OG (such as the extended description of the king’s exile in OG 4:30); and (4) important divergences, such as narrative voice even in the sections where MT and OG seem parallel. In ch. 4, the doxology is after the story in the OG witness Pap967, but in MT and Th it comes before the story (both MT and Th place it at the beginning of ch. 4). In addition, the OG text (all witnesses) is longer than MT/Th in ch. 4, but in ch. 5 it is the MT/Th that is longer. The pluses in OG ch. 4 are, specifically: vv. 14(17), 19(22), 23–25(26–28), 28(31), 30(33); the minuses are vv. 20–22(23–25). In addition, there is no counterpart in the OG to MT in 4:3–6(6–9). The main pluses in OG reflect amplification of certain elements in 301. Matthias Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar. He builds on David Satran’s work, Early Jewish and Christian Interpretation of the Fourth Chapter of the Book of Daniel. 302.  The length of time for which Daniel is perplexed in Dan 4:16(19) (“for about an hour,” kĕšāʿāh ḥădāh = ὥραν μίαν), the length of time before Nebuchadnezzar has his burst of pride in Dan 4:26(29) (“twelve months later,” liqṣāt yarḥîn tĕrê ʿăśar = καὶ μετὰ μῆνας δώδεκα); and the length of Daniel’s exile from his throne for “seven years” (MT 4:13, 20, 22, 29) or “seven times” (OG 4:13, 29, 30a-c) (šibʿāh ʿidānîn = ἑπτὰ ἔτη). See Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 24. 303. Ibid.

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the story: Daniel’s physical reaction to the dream, the description of the cosmic tree, expansion on the political ramifications of Nebuchadnezzar’s exile and a usurper, description of the bestial metamorphosis, a second dream vision of untold content, the addition of a prayer from Nebuchadnezzar, and finally a voice from heaven restoring the kingdom to Nebuchadnezzar. As noted above, for Henze, these major differences between MT and OG are not due to literary dependencies. Instead, “their relation is best described as indirect and collateral in nature”; the MT and OG of Dan 4 are “double literary editions, or duplicate narratives, of a common story, and developed independently of each other.” 304 Ulrich suggests the variant editions “are signalled by the differing arrangements of various components and are confirmed by expansions in the Old Greek, such as the expansion (perhaps a Babylonian astrological motif) of the sun and moon dwelling in the great tree (4:8), etc.” 305 These retellings of a core story are very reminiscent of how Wilhelm Grimm amplified and elaborated stories across the different editions of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, with the Golden Ball paragraph from “The Frog King” (above, pp. 235–236) as a prime example. For instance, the MT (like Th) begins with an epistolary opening that includes a doxology of Nebuchadnezzar praising the “God Most High” (3:31–34) and ends with another doxology just after his reason is returned to him (4:34– 35), part of which echoes the beginning doxology and brings the letter to a close. Since these are in the first person and the prescript is addressed to “all peoples, nations, and languages that live throughout the earth,” the entire story of Dan 4 in the MT takes the form of a letter and recounts the story autobiographically from 3:31 to 4:18 and at the end from 4:34–37. (Only the middle of the MT story—4:19–33, the section in which Daniel interprets the dream and the king is punished with exile—is in the third person.) In the OG, there is no epistolary prescript, and the section that is in the third person is shorter and placed differently (vv. 28–33). Instead of an epistolary prescript, there is a chronological note: “In the eighteenth year of rule,” perhaps meant to suggest that these events took place immediately after Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple. 306 There is thus no letter format in the OG’s narrative and no clear addressee, but a parallel to MT’s epistolary prescript is found in the announcement of an encyclical sent out by Nebuchadnezzar in OG v. 34, at the end of the narrative. In fact, OG v. 34 presents such a long and confused finale that Ziegler divided it into three parts (a, b, and c), both b and c being duplicates of some sort. OG 4:34b and c each report Nebuchadnezzar’s address to “all the nations” and all who live in them in a manner that is rather like the introduction 304.  Ibid., 203. 305. Eugene Ulrich, “The Canonical Process and Textual Criticism,” 285. 306.  The same date as that in the Greek versions of Dan 3:1; MT lacks a chronological notice in both 3:1 and 4:1. It seems to reflect the date given in Jer 52:29 as the date for the destruction of Jerusalem.

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of the letter in 3:31–33 MT, leading some to suggest that OG 34c is misplaced. 307 However, Collins believes that “both the MT and the OG appear to have undergone redactional development,” since the epistolary prescript of MT 3:31–33 includes a doxology that might have been placed there to form an inclusio with the doxology at the end of MT ch. 6, thus enclosing chs. 4–6. 308 In MT, after the disturbing dream of Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel is found to be the only one of the courtiers able to interpret it (making this story a court contest, just like chs. 2 and 5). By contrast, OG Daniel does not include any overt rivalry between the magicians. Daniel’s reaction to the dream is reported quite differently in the MT and OG. MT 4:16: Then Daniel, whose name is Belteshazzar, was astounded for a while [literally: about an hour], and his thoughts troubled him. The king answered and said, “Belteshazzar, let not the dream and its interpretation trouble you.” Belteshazzar answered and said, “My lord, may the dream be for those who hate you and its interpretation for your enemies.” 309

OG 4:16: Daniel was greatly amazed and foreboding unsettled him. He was afraid; trembling seized him and his appearance changed. He shook his head for a moment [literally: one hour], dumbfounded, and answered me in a quiet voice: “O king, may this dream be for those who hate you, and may its interpretation come upon your enemies.”

The OG magnifies the effect the dream has on Daniel; however, the king does not attempt to comfort him as in MT. The wish that the dream and its interpretation might be for the king’s enemies could be a “substitute for an apotropaic procedure,” in that the very wish might constitute a means of dispelling the bad effects of both. 310 Nebuchadnezzar’s exile is also portrayed differently in MT and in OG. Comparing the dream that Nebuchadnezzar relates to Daniel (especially the part about chopping down the cosmic tree), Daniel’s interpretation of the dream, and the king’s actual exile in each of the sources helps to clarify this. First, note that the OG emphasizes the person to whom Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom will fall and primarily concerns the political circumstances such an exile entails. Second, the OG adds events that are not in the MT: during Nebuchadnezzar’s seven years of exile he prays and asks for forgiveness; Nebuchadnezzar has another dream during 307.  Montgomery, Daniel, 248; Meadowcroft, Aramaic Daniel and Greek Daniel, 34. 308.  Collins, Daniel, 221. 309. In Th 4:16, the only substantial difference from the MT is that Daniel is mute (ἀπηνεώθη), not astounded. 310.  Collins, Daniel, 228.

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his exile that is not told to the reader (OG 4:30b); and Nebuchadnezzar’s return from exile is prompted by another voice from heaven. Note also that, in the MT, Nebuchadnezzar’s sin is pride, but in OG 4:19 we are expressly told in Daniel’s interpretation that the king’s pride is in doing something very specific: “Your deeds were seen, how you desolated the house of the living God, pertaining to the sins of the holy people.” This echoes texts and circumstances from the Maccabean period (e.g., Antiochus’ desolating sacrifice on the Jerusalem altar in 167 b.c.e.), and “I will offer sacrifices for the sake of my soul to the Most High” (OG 4:34a) reflects the setting of the visions and the temple cult. 311 These great amplifications or embellishments upon the story—mostly in OG, but also in the plus of MT 4:3–6 in which Daniel’s competition with other magicians is related—as well as the change in narrative voice give the stories in MT and OG entirely different emphases. As Meadowcroft has observed, since Nebuchadnezzar speaks in the first person for more of the story in OG (only vv. 25–30, Nebuchadnezzar’s prideful proclamation from the wall and the voice from heaven declaring his exile, are actually in the third person), he has more responsibility for his own story, and it is perhaps more of an apologia. There is less concern with Daniel in the OG, who is wise but whose superiority in dreaminterpretation is not emphasized because there is no court contest as in the MT. In addition, rather than the MT’s mental derangement (in MT 4:30, at the end of Nebuchadnezzar’s exile, he reports that his “reason” has returned to him), OG’s concern with Nebuchadnezzar is that he is usurped, imprisoned, and banished by a certain person. The MT’s representation of Nebuchadnezzar as a great tree that can be cut down is really a condemnation of the sovereignty of human kings, while the OG is instead more concerned with Nebuchadnezzar’s specific reign and the usurper who arises from within his own household (“a despised man,” ἐξουθενημένος ἀνθρώπος). The various Mesopotamian and other sources for motifs in this story will be discussed in greater detail in ch. 5 below. In Dan 5, MT has the longer text; however, once again the plot structure in the MT and OG is almost identical. But in MT, chs. 4 and 5 are almost inseparable, while in OG they are “almost independent of each other,” and there are few connections between them. 312 The basic outline of the story in ch. 5 is as follows: King Baltasar (OG)/Belshazzar (MT) gives a great feast, with abundant wine. During the celebration, he brings out the temple vessels from Jerusalem, captured by his father Nebuchadnezzar, and praises human-made gods. Suddenly, a dis­embodied hand appears and writes a message on the wall. Belshazzar is terrified and calls for the Babylonian sages to read it, which they are unable to do. 313 311.  In the MT stories of chs. 1–6, only 2:46 refers to sacrifices, and they are made by the Babylonian king to Daniel. 312.  Meadowcroft, Aramaic Daniel, 57. 313.  Collins says that it requires a pesher (Daniel, 247). DiTommaso suggests that the writing is in “the archaeic, paleo-Hebrew script” (The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel

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The queen tells Belshazzar (who is either her husband or her son/grandson, if she is the queen mother rather than his wife) about the sage Daniel, who had previously aided Nebuchadnezzar with his dreams, riddles, and problems. Daniel is brought in, and he interprets the writing as signifying the impending end of the Babylonian kingdom; he also rebukes the king for false worship. In the end, Daniel is rewarded for his interpretation by Belshazzar, and the Babylonian kingdom comes to an end as predicted. The main plus in the OG is a prologue in which a shortened version of the entire story in Dan 5 is related. This alternative version differs in some respects from the longer story following it and will be discussed below (section 4.2.5.2). 314 On the other hand, the pluses found in MT are mostly speeches. The most extensive of these is MT 5:18–22, in which Daniel rebukes Belshazzar by recalling Nebuchadnezzar’s exile and contrasts his appropriate response to the Most High with Belshazzar’s pride; this rebuke is not paralleled in the OG at all. In addition, there are two other speeches that are expanded in the MT. The first is MT 5:11–12, the speech of the queen about Daniel’s history with Nebuchadnezzar, which is substantially longer than the same speech in the OG. The second, MT 5:14–15, extends the speech of the king to Daniel, in which he reports what the queen has said to him about Daniel’s abilities and makes the challenge to Daniel to decipher the writing almost into a dare. The question is whether or not these expansions are to be understood as additions to a superior text in the OG or whether or not the differences are at the level of story-telling. Ulrich, in his text-critical comparison of the MT and OG of this chapter suggests that the three speeches are present in MT due to differences in story-telling devices: “the edition preserved in the MT greatly expands for rhetorical and dramatic effect beyond the edition preserved in the Old Greek.” 315 According to Collins, the relationship between MT and OG in this chapter is complex: it is likely that many of MT’s pluses are redactional and were added to make connections with ch. 5 when the two were joined. 316 On the other hand, Collins suggests that in at least one place the OG can be seen to resolve a problem with MT; in OG 5:7–8, the sages are brought in twice to give an interpretation, rather than MT’s once. They are not told of the reward until it is needed as an inducement to try again after they had failed. However, this perhaps is merely a story-telling device that need not be explained by reference to Literature, 45). 4Q243 (a Pseudo-Daniel text at Qumran), like other Qumran texts, uses this script to write the divine name. The medieval Chronicles of Jerahmeel anachronistically explains that the letters were written in Hebrew though the language was Aramaic. 314.  For instance, the occasion of the feast is the inauguration of Belshazzar/Baltasar’s palace; the number of attendees is set at 2,000; and the text of the mysterious writing includes a transliteration of the Aramaic phrase in a different order. 315.  Ulrich, “The Canonical Process and Textual Criticism,” 285. 316.  Collins, Daniel, 242–43.

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a badly-told MT. After all, in MT 5:7–8, the reward is offered up front, as in ch. 2, where the reward—and punishment—are offered when the sages enter. (Note, however, that in ch. 2 the king expects them to tell not only the interpretation but the dream itself to prove themselves.) In the OG and Th, King Belshazzar’s name is Baltasar (βαλτασαρ), the same name that is given Daniel in OG 1:25 and 2:26 and seemingly the same as MT’s Babylonian name for Daniel (Belteshazzar, ‫)ּב ְֵל ְטׁשַ אּצַר‬, so to avoid confusion, Daniel is nowhere called by his Babylonian name in OG Dan 5. 317 MT has the more formal layout (the guests are “his [Belshazzar’] nobles,” ‫)רברבנוהי‬, while OG describes a private party (the guests are ἑταῖροι, “associates” in v. 2; ὁι φίλοι σου, “your [Baltasar/Belshazzar’s] friends,” in v. 23). This means that the king’s rebellion is more public in the MT. Meadowcroft describes the sin of Belshazzar as his pride, in that he desecrates the holy vessels as well as praises other gods. 318 There is also a different fate in each version: in the MT, Belshazzar is himself killed immediately (“in that night”), while in the OG his personal fate remains unmentioned. Instead, the kingdom is taken from the Chaldeans generally, rather than Belshazzar personally, and given to the Medes and Persians at an unspecified time. There is also a marked antagonism between Belshazzar and Daniel in the MT and a negative comparison of Belshazzar to his father Nebuchadnezzar that is not so evident in the OG. For example, in the MT, Belshazzar describes Daniel in v. 13 as “one of the exiles of Judah”; and although the queen introduces him by his Babylonian name, Belteshazzar, Belshazzar uses “Daniel” as if he prefers to “remember Daniel’s non-Babylonian origins rather than his function in his father’s court, and his Judean name rather than the one given him by a predecessor.” 319 Belshazzar shows his spite for Daniel in other ways: for instance, he says Nebuchadnezzar “brought” Daniel from Judah almost as if he were one of the temple vessels. He also will not admit the truth of anything the queen has told him about Daniel; when he meets him, he says “I have heard about you,” instead of Nebuchadnezzar’s “I know that. . . .” 320 In contrast, in the OG, Belshazzar does not question the queen’s opinion nor does the remembrance of Daniel in Nebuchadnezzar’s court play much of a role. In the MT, Nebuchadnezzar is remembered positively in spite of his pride, which was punished by exile, in con317.  In 2:26, the OG seems to notice that giving the same name to the king as to Daniel is a problem, because when it gives Daniel’s Babylonian name there, it adds “in Chaldean” (ἐπικαλουμένῳ δὲ Χαλδα¨ιστὶ Βαλτασαρ). For its part, Th deals with the problem in Dan 5 by only once using Baltasar as the name for Daniel (in 5:12) and in that case, simply, “the king gave to him the name Baltasar,” as in MT. 318.  Meadowcroft, Aramaic Daniel, 61. 319.  Ibid., 65. 320.  Meadowcroft suggests that the “court contest” genre breaks down here in that, for a court contest, Daniel should be a previously unknown sage (ibid., 66). However, it seems obvious that a “forgotten wiseman” fulfills the same function as an “unknown” one.

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trast to Belshazzar who is said to have known about Nebuchadnezzar’s exile and to remain unhumbled. The queen, too, is portrayed positively in the MT. She is simply described as ‫ מלכתא‬in the MT and ἡ βασίλισσα in the OG, and is either Belshazzar’s mother or grandmother (perhaps the wife of Nebuchadnezzar) or Belshazzar’s own wife or royal consort. 321 Because she is so familiar with the events of Nebuchadnezzar’s time, it is not unreasonable to assume that she is meant to be Belshazzar’s mother or grandmother, but it is not possible to rule out that she is his wife or consort. 322 In both the MT and OG, she takes on the role of the wise adviser of folklore, like Arioch of Dan 2. 323 The queen walks in unannounced in the MT, and after her words to Belshazzar, she herself seems to order subordinates to summon Daniel. In addition, in her speech to Belshazzar, she mentions his father’s establishing of Daniel (“he [Nebuchadnezzar] set him up,” ‫)הקימה‬, perhaps inciting an inferiority complex in Belshazzar by urging him to utilize one of his father’s former advisers since none of his own are up to the task. Daniel is on the one hand “a symbol of the regime of Nebuchadnezzar, and on the other he brings the judgment of God.” 324 In the OG, however, the queen comes when she is called (although this does not have to indicate disrespect for her on the part of king Belshazzar; perhaps he calls her because he knows she will have a valuable perspective that he must hear), and she does not summon Daniel; he simply enters. MT 5:10–12: Because of the words of the king and his nobles, the queen entered the banquet hall. The queen answered and said: “O king, live forever. Let your thoughts not 321. The tradition that she is the “queen mother”—that is, Belshazzar’s mother or grandmother—goes back to Josephus (Josephus thought her to be the grandmother, Antiquities 10.11.2); Origen apparently believed her to be the mother (according to Jerome; Gleason L. Archer, Jr., trans., Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1958], 58). See also Montgomery, The Book of Daniel, 257–58; Fewell, Circle of Sovereignty, 120–25; Collins, Daniel, 248. Collins implies that, if she were the queen consort, perhaps she would be called ‫ׁשגל‬, as in Neh 2:6, not ‫מלכתא‬. See also: H. J. M. van Deventer, “Another Wise Queen (Mother)— Women’s Wisdom in Daniel 5.10–12? ” in Athalya Brenner, ed., Prophets and Daniel: A Feminist Companion to the Bible (Second Series) (London: Continuum, 2001), 247–61. Van Deventer throws out the possibility that the queen is a reflection of either the mother or the wife of Antiochus IV, who were both named Laodice (this works if the foreign ruler behind the Dan 5 story is meant to be a reflection of Antiochus IV). On the role of the queen mother in general, see Niels-Erik A. Andreasen, “The Role of the Queen Mother in Israelite Society,” CBQ 45 (1983), 179–94. 322. Athalya Brenner wonders why it seems easier for (male) commentators to accept that the wise queen is an older female—mother or grandmother of the king—rather than his consort, who would likely be a younger woman (Brenner, “Self-Response to ‘Who’s Afraid of Feminist Criticism?’” in Brenner, ed., The Prophets and Daniel, 245–46). 323. See van Deventer’s comparison of Arioch to the queen in “Another Wise Queen (Mother),” 255–56. 324.  Meadowcroft, Aramaic Daniel, 68–69.

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trouble you and let your countenance not be changed. There is a man in your kingdom in whom is a spirit of holy gods, and in the days of your father enlightenment and intelligence and wisdom like the wisdom of gods were found in him. King Nebuchadnezzar, your father, appointed him chief of magicians, exorcists, Chaldeans, and diviners, because an extraordinary spirit and knowledge and understanding, ability to interpret dreams and explain riddles and solve problems [literally: untie knots], were found in this Daniel, whom the king named Belteshazzar. Now let Daniel be called, and let him read the writing and explain the interpretation.”

OG 5:9–12: Then the king summoned the queen about the sign, and he showed her how large it was, and that no one was able to tell the king the interpretation of the writing. Then the queen reminded him of Daniel, who was one of the captives from Judea. She said to the king, “That man was understanding and wise and surpassed all the sages of Babylon, and there is a holy spirit in him, and in the days of your father the king he expounded exceedingly difficult interpretations for Nebuchadnezzar, your father.”

The OG is not as concerned with the relationship between the stories of Dan 4 and 5. Instead, Daniel (and the queen to some extent) will contrast Baltasar/ Belshazzar with his father in the verses that follow: Nebuchadnezzar learned to be humble before God, while Baltasar/Belshazzar is prideful. Yet, the OG has a less adversarial tone and a more sympathetic portrayal of Belshazzar. The next section demonstrates this difference between MT and OG. MT 5:13–16 Then Daniel was brought before the king. The king answered and said to Daniel: “Are you the Daniel of the exiles of Judah whom my father the king brought from Judah? I have heard about you that a spirit of gods is in you and that illumination, understanding, and extraordinary wisdom were found in you. Now the wisemen and exorcists have been brought before me so that they should read this writing and make its interpretation known to me, but they were not able to explain the interpretation of the matter. I have heard about you that you are able to give interpretations and to solve problems. Now, if you are able to read the writing and make known to me its interpretation, you will be clothed in purple and have a gold chain on your neck and shall rank third in the kingdom.

OG 5:13, 16–17: Then Daniel was brought in to the king, and the king answered and said to him: “O Daniel, can you explain to me the interpretation of the writing? And I will clothe you in purple and place a golden chain on you, and you will have authority over a third part of my kingdom.”

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Note the suspicion or disdain with which the king talks to Daniel in the MT, and which is entirely missing in the OG. This is contrasted with MT’s speech in which the queen describes Daniel to Belshazzar in glowing terms. She does not mention that Daniel is a Judean exile captured by Nebuchadnezzar, but Belshazzar does. In addition, he repeats what the queen says about Daniel by prefacing it with “I have heard . . . ,” implying that her description may or may not be true; it remains to be seen. Since the king also reminds Daniel that the other magicians have tried and failed at the interpretation, his speech to Daniel almost amounts to a dare. Then follows a long plus in MT in which Daniel responds to the king with equal harshness, marking the contrasts he sees between Belshazzar and Nebuchadnezzar and making an apologia of sorts for Nebuchadnezzar: MT 5:17–22 Then Daniel answered and said to the king, “Keep your gifts to yourself and give your presents to another, but I will read the writing and make the interpretation known to the king. 325 As for you, O king, the Most High God gave kingship and greatness and honor and glory to Nebuchadnezzar, your father, and because of the greatness that he gave him, all peoples, nations, and languages trembled and feared before him. He would kill whomever he wished and give life to whomever he wished. He would exalt whomever he wished and humiliate whomever he wished. But when his heart became exalted and his spirit became strong with arrogance, he was deposed from his throne, and his kingdom and glory were stripped from him. He was driven from humans and his heart was made like that of a beast. His dwelling was with wild asses, and he was fed grass like cattle, and his body was bathed with the dew of heaven, until he learned that the Most High God is sovereign over the human realm, and that he appoints whomever he wishes over it. And you Belshazzar his son, have not humbled your heart even though you knew all this, but you have exalted yourself against the Lord of heaven, and the vessels of his house were brought before you, and you and your nobles, your wives, and your concubines have been drinking wine from them. You have praised the gods of silver and gold, bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which neither see nor hear nor know anything, and you did not honor the God in whose hand is your breath and all your ways.

This rebuke has no parallel in the OG, whose response to the king by Daniel begins in v. 17 directly with the interpretation of the mysterious writing. In the MT, this speech follows the king’s offer of a reward and precedes the interpretation. Just as Belshazzar’s dismissive speech to Daniel is antagonistic in tone, so is Daniel’s response to Belshazzar, in great contrast to Daniel’s behavior toward Nebuchadnezzar in MT 4. Here, in MT 5, this antagonism toward Belshazzar is 325. 4QDana has “its interpretation” (‫)פׁשרה‬.

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not found in any Schadenfreude at the king’s death in 5:30, but the narrator does seem to stress its immediacy (“that very night”). The interpretation of the writing is also treated differently in the MT and OG. MT 5:24–28: Then a hand was sent from before him, and this writing was inscribed. This was the writing that was inscribed: mĕnēʾ, mĕnēʾ, tĕqēl ûparsîn. This is the interpretation of the word: mĕnēʾ, God has numbered your kingdom and brought it to completion: tĕqēl, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; pĕrēs, your kingdom has been divided and given to Media and Persia.”

OG 5:17, 23–28 (there is no equivalent to MT’s 18–22): Then Daniel stood before the writing and read it, and thus he answered the king: “This is the writing: it has been numbered, it has been reckoned, it has been taken away. The hand that wrote ceased, and this is their interpretation. O king, you made a feast for your friends and you were drinking wine, and the vessels of the house of the living God were brought to you, and you and your officials drank from them and praised all the idols made by hands of men. You did not praise the living God. Your spirit is in his hand and he gave you your kingdom, and you neither blessed nor praised him. This is the interpretation of the writing: the time of your kingdom has been numbered, your kingdom is coming to an end, it is cut off and finished; your kingdom is given to the Medes and the Persians.

The condemnation of Belshazzar in OG here is in part parallel to Daniel’s rebuke of Belshazzar in MT but is less antagonistic and more matter-of-fact. The main problem here is exactly how the interpretation is dealt with. The MT interpretation repeats the “abracadabra” words (mĕnēʾ mĕnēʾ tĕqēl ûparsîn) before treating them swiftly and individually. The interpretation consists of a literal translation of each of the three words, each of which is a monetary unit in Aramaic. Note that the repetition of the abracadabra words includes saying mĕnēʾ twice, something that has been subject to a great amount of discussion but is most likely due to its euphony rather than to any confusion on the part of the MT’s author. Niditch suggests that the words have “a rhythmical, incantation quality when spoken, an assonance based on the repetition of ‘e’”; however, because they are not in descending or ascending order of value, they appear to be nonsense, almost as if one were to say “nickel nickel dime penny,” in English. 326 The OG reading of the mysterious writing does not have any rhythmic words or incantation but has: Αὕτη ἡ γραφή Ἠρίθμηται, κατελογίσθη ἐχῆρται, “This 326.  Niditch, Oral World and Written Word, 80–81.

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is the writing: It has been numbered, it has been reckoned, it has been taken away.” The first of these is parallel to MT’s mĕnēʾ, while the second and third are not at all similar to Aramaic’s tĕqēl or ûparsîn. 327 What is stranger, however, is that the interpretation of the writing in the OG does not reflect the second and third Greek words either. Later in v. 26–27, the writing is explained: τοῦτο τὸ σύγκριμα τῆς γραφῆς; ἠρίθμηται ὁ χρόνος σου τῆς βασιλείας, ἡ βασιλεία σου ἀπολήγει, συντέτμηται καὶ συντετέλεσται; ἡ βασιλεία σου τοῖς Μήδοις καὶ τοῖς Πέρσαις δίδοται: “This is the interpretation of the writing: The time of your kingdom has been numbered; your kingdom is coming to an end; it is cut off and finished. Your kingdom is given to the Medes and the Persians.” The problem of the differences between the OG prologue and the main story will be discussed below, in this chapter’s section on duplicates (section 4.2.5). The MT and the OG of Dan 6 are almost the same length (the OG is slightly longer) but have many differences in regard to details and emphases. Once again, the plot structure is the same in both the MT and the OG, and here the stories are of similar length. In the days of Darius the Mede, Daniel is promoted in the kingdom to become one of the triumvirs who are in charge of the satraps. Daniel’s fellow administrators hatch a conspiracy to accuse Daniel by exploiting his practice of praying daily to his God: they persuade the king to establish a decree that no one is to pray to anyone except King Darius for thirty days or else be thrown into a pit of lions. Daniel goes home to pray as usual, in spite of the decree, and is caught by the conspirators, who tell the king. The king is forced to have Daniel thrown into the lions’ pit, although he is unhappy about doing so. The king is unable to sleep that night and rises early to check on Daniel. When Daniel calls out to him from the pit, he rejoices and commands that Daniel’s accusers and their families be thrown to the lions instead. Darius then writes an encyclical ordering everyone to worship the God of Daniel. Collins notes that “neither text is in pristine form, but the differences are not as great as in chs. 4 and 5, and there is more evidence of development in the MT.” 328 The OG seems more reasonable in certain matters (e.g., Daniel’s opposition in OG is comprised of Daniel’s two fellow triumvirs rather than all the administrators and satraps; this makes sense when the opposition and their families are thrown into the lions’ pit). However, “it does not necessarily follow that [OG] is prior.” 329 The hyperbole of the MT might just be a “natural ingredient” of this genre of story or the OG is seeking to mitigate the hyperbole of MT. On the other hand, Albertz suggests that some of the elements in the MT but not in the OG are redactional. 330 For instance, the reference in MT 6:14 to Daniel as “one of the exiles of Judah” seems to recall Dan 2:25 and Dan 5:13. 327.  Theodotion parallels the MT and has a transliteration of the Aramaic: Μανη θεκελ φαρες. 328.  Collins, Daniel, 263. 329.  Ibid., 262. 330.  Albertz, Der Gott des Daniel, 150.

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The main pluses in OG are vv. 3, 5, 12a, 14, 17–18, and 22. The minuses are in vv. 15 and 23. In MT Dan 6:1, Darius is said to be 62 years old when he received the kingdom of Belshazzar; OG Dan does not refer to Darius’ inheritance and does not give his age. It seems possible that, because the story does not refer to the ruler by his name often (merely calling him “the king”), the king was originally anonymous. MT 6:2–4: It was pleasing to Darius that he establish over the kingdom a hundred and twenty satraps, 331 so that they should be throughout all the kingdom, and over them three ministers, of whom Daniel was one, so that these satraps should report to them and the king should not be troubled. Then this Daniel distinguished himself over the administrators and the satraps, because of his exceptional spirit, and the king thought to appoint 332 him over all the kingdom.

OG 6:1–3: And when Darius was full of days and illustrious in old age, he appointed a hundred and twenty-seven satraps over all his kingdom and over them three men who were in charge of them. Daniel was one of the three men with authority over all in the kingdom. Daniel was dressed in purple and was great and illustrious before King Darius, as he was understanding and intelligent, and had a holy spirit and prospered in the affairs of the king that he conducted. [Then the king decided to appoint Daniel over all his kingdom, and the two men whom he had appointed with him and the hundred and twenty-seven satraps.] 333

The OG has a small plus here in its description of Daniel: he was dressed in purple, and a list of adjectives is used to describe him: great, illustrious, understanding, intelligent, and possessing a holy spirit. MT merely remarks that he had an “exceptional spirit.” Also, MT makes clear that Daniel surpassed all the other administrators but OG does not. The OG is actually confused and repeats information, probably due to scribal error. MT 6:5–6: Then the ministers and satraps were seeking to find fault with Daniel with respect to the kingdom, but they were not able to find any fault or corruption, because he was faithful. They did not find any negligence or corruption concerning

331.  In Th, these are τακτικοί. 332.  Th “appointed.” 333.  The brackets in v. 3 indicate duplicate material due to an error on the part of the scribe (Ziegler and Munnich, eds., Susanna, Daniel, Bel et Draco, 322). Verse 4 repeats “when the king decided to appoint Daniel over all his kingdom” before describing the conspiracy of the two men.

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OG 6:4–5: Now, when the king decided to appoint Daniel over all his kingdom, then the two young men, speaking to each other, decided on a plan and resolved among themselves, since they found no sin or ignorance against Daniel concerning which they might accuse him to the king. And they said, “Come, let us establish an ordinance by ourselves that no one will make a petition or pray a prayer of any god for thirty days, but only of King Darius, otherwise he will die,” so that they might defeat Daniel before the king, and he might be thrown into the lions’ pit. For they knew that Daniel prayed and petitioned the Lord his God three times a day.

Montgomery notices that calling the triumvirs νεανίσκοι, “young men,” is not appropriate and is probably derived from 1 Esdras 3, where three young men also are at court, one of whom is Zerubbabel. 335 OG Daniel also may have gotten the number for the satraps from 1 Esdras (or Esther 1). 336 In the MT, the other ministers and the satraps try to find some way to find fault with him in matters of the kingdom, but upon finding none, they suggest that the only fault they might find in “this man Daniel” is perhaps in matters of the “law (‫ )דת‬of his God.” But the MT does not state in advance that the men knew about Daniel’s prayer habits. However, in OG, they say “let us establish an ordinance by ourselves that no one will make a petition. . . ,” and it clearly states that they “knew that Daniel prayed and petitioned the Lord his God three times a day.” In OG, it is the “two young men” who say that they themselves have enacted an ordinance and statute and that the edict will be against anyone inquiring of “any god.” They do not defer to the king until it is done, then in v. 8 they request that the king establish it and not change it. OG also repeats that they knew about Daniel’s praying. The MT is ambiguous about whether the Persian king is divine or not; prayers to “any god or man” are outlawed, so Darius’ status does not matter. OG is more clear cut: no prayer to any god is allowed (there is no mention of man). In OG, whether or not the king is divine enters the foreground. After they have gotten the king to make a decree, and when they approach the king to denounce Daniel, the conspirators actually require an oath from the king in the OG, while in the MT it is enough to remind him of his interdict.

334.  Th’s most important difference from MT is that it does not specify that the men were trying to find fault with Daniel “with respect to the kingdom.” 335.  Montgomery, “The ‘Two Youths’ in the LXX to Dan. 6,” JAOS 41 (1921), 316–17. 336.  Albertz, Der Gott des Daniel, 147–48. Furthermore, OG seems to have in mind a limited conspiracy of two, while the Aramaic envisions a larger conspiracy of the state (Collins, Daniel, 263).

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MT 6:13 Then they approached and said before the king. “Concerning the interdict, O king—did you not issue a interdict that anyone who should make a petition from any god or human being for thirty days, except from you, O king, should be thrown into the lions’ pit? ” The king answered and said, “The pronouncement is certain, like a law of Media and Persia, which may not be annulled.

OG 6:12 Then these men met with the king and said, “King Darius, did you not make an ordinance that no one should pray a prayer or make a request of any god for thirty days except from you, O king, otherwise be thrown into the lions’ pit? ” The king answered and said to them, “The word is accurate, and the ordinance stands.” They said to him, “We demand that you swear by the decrees of the Medes and Persians that you will not change the matter or have regard to person, and that you will not diminish anything of what has been said but will punish the person who has not abided by this ordinance.” He said, “Thus I will do as you say. This has been established for me.”

In what follows next in the MT, the king delays putting Daniel in the lions’ pit until the men come thronging to him again and push him into doing so. In the OG, on the other hand, the king has Daniel cast into the pit without prompting but seems even more distressed at Daniel’s suffering, striving to save him. MT 6:15–17 Then when the king heard the word, it was very disturbing to him, and he set his heart upon saving Daniel, and until the sun set made every effort to rescue him. Then those men came thronging in to the king and said to the king, “Know, O king, that it is a law of the Medes and the Persians that any interdict or ordinance that the king establishes is unalterable.” Then the king commanded that Daniel be brought and thrown into the lions’ pit. And he said to Daniel, “Your God whom you serve constantly will save you.”

OG 6:14–16: And grieving, the king ordered Daniel to be cast into the lions’ pit according to the ordinance which the king set up against him. Then the king was greatly grieved concerning Daniel, and strove to rescue him until the setting of the sun from the hand of the satraps. And he was not able to rescue him from them. But Darius the king cried out and said to Daniel, “Your God whom you serve constantly three times a day, he will rescue you from the hand of the lions. Have courage till morning.”

In the next section, both the MT and OG have the king return home to fast and to worry; however, the MT adds a detail and OG actually exposes the plot of the whole story:

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MT 6:19 Then the king went to his palace 337 and spent the night fasting. He had no diversions (‫ )דחון‬brought to him, and his sleep fled from him.

OG 6:18 Then the king returned to his palace and went to bed fasting, and was grieving over Daniel. But the God of Daniel, bringing about what he had foreseen for him (πρόνοιαν ποιησάμενος), shut the mouths of the lions, and they did not bother Daniel.

The MT has added that the king asked for no amusements and could not sleep. What makes for a significant plot development in the OG, though, is that it removes all suspense from the king’s night of waiting! The reader is explicitly told in advance that God has taken care of Daniel by shutting the mouths of the lions. But in the MT, the reader must wait until the king has hurried at dawn to the pit and called out to Daniel to find out whether or not Daniel has survived. It is only with Daniel’s response, “O king, live forever! My God sent his angel. . . ,” that the reader is allow to rejoice with the king. MT 6:22–23 Then Daniel spoke to the king: “O king, live forever! My God sent his angel and shut the mouth of the lions so they did not harm me, for I have been found innocent before him, and also before you, O king, I have done no wrong.”

OG 6:21–23 Then Daniel heard the loud voice and said, “O king, I am still alive, and the Lord has saved me from the lions, because righteousness was found in me before him. Before you also, O king, neither ignorance nor sin was found in me. But you listened to people who mislead kings and threw me into the lions’ pit for destruction.” Then all the authorities were assembled, and they saw Daniel, how the lions had not bothered him.

Here, in the OG, Daniel’s speech includes a chiding remark to the king about listening to bad advisers. The narrator also here inserts the notice that there were witnesses to Daniel’s survival; in fact, in OG v. 19, the narrator says Darius “took the satraps with him” when he went to the pit early in the morning. In addition, whereas MT has Daniel expressly lifted out of the pit, the OG assumes it; immediately after “all the authorities” see Daniel, the accusers and their families are thrown into the pit in his place. 337. 4QDanb has “the” palace.

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MT 6:25 Then the king ordered that those men who had slandered Daniel were brought and, together with their children and wives, were thrown into the lions’ pit. Before they reached the bottom of the pit, the lions overpowered them and crushed all their bones.

OG 6:24 Then these two men who had born witness against Daniel, they and their wives and their children, were thrown to the lions, and the lions killed them and crushed their bones. Daniel was appointed over all the kingdom of Darius.

In this case, the MT adds the extra detail “before they reached the bottom of the pit.” The MT has more hyperbole, and perhaps irony, says Meadowcroft. 338 For instance, in the MT it is assumed that all of the 120 satraps plus two ministers have joined the plot against Daniel (see MT 6:5, where all of the satraps plus the two ministers work against him), and all are thrown to the lions along with their wives and children. The OG, however, states in 6:5 that it is the two triumvirs who are responsible for Daniel’s ordeal, and thus a smaller number of people are thrown into the lions’ pit. (The triumvirs’ wives and children are also thrown into the pit here, however.) It seems that the MT prefers to make the situation more comic than realistic; as Wills suggests about the 122 men and their unfortunate families, “Surely they died of suffocation and not from the hungry lions.” 339 Dan 6 ends with an encyclical and doxology that is very like that at the the beginning of the Dan 4 story. Darius is said to write to “all peoples, nations, and languages that inhabit the whole earth.” He issues an edict for the entire kingdom that “people should tremble and fear before the God of Daniel.” In the doxology, Daniel’s God is described as a “living God, who endures forever, whose kingdom is indestructible, and whose dominion is until the end.” The epilogue of 6:29 simply says that Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius and in the reign of Cyrus the Persian. (OG adds that King Darius was gathered to his fathers and Cyrus the Persian succeeded to his kingdom; this is much more personalizing.) In contrast to chs. 2, 5, and 6, where Daniel is offered rule over a portion of the kingdom, there is no personal reward for Daniel in ch. 6, unless it is the destruction of those who accused him. In conclusion, MT Dan chs. 4–6 make a tight yet short collection, standing on its own: three different kings have been selected, one for each story; the stories are all concerned with the pride of kings and false gods; and Daniel alone is the 338.  Meadowcroft notes comedy in the list of officials in ch. 6 (Aramaic Daniel and Greek Daniel, 94); see also H. I. Avalos, “The Comedic Function of the Enumerations of the Officials and Instruments in Daniel 3,” 580–88. 339.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 138.

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main character (the friends of Daniel are not mentioned in these chapters). A further balance is provided in the nature of Daniel’s relationship with each king; the two kings in the outside (first and last) stories are friends of Daniel, while the center story about the fall of Babylon depicts Belshazzar and Daniel as strangers and enemies. In fact, the close ties between Dan 4 and 5 in the MT are due to the need to refer to Nebuchadnezzar’s days gone by and Daniel’s past service to that king in the queen’s speech in order to provide a comparison between Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, whose animosity to Daniel and Daniel’s God result in the immediate overthrow of his kingdom on the very night after the ominous warning on the wall of the banquet hall. Most importantly, the three stories are framed by the doxologies, which add to the note of instruction in this storycollection. Just as two prideful, weak kings have turned toward the Jewish god in confession and adoration, so should the audience. The unrepentant king at the center, Belshazzar, serves as the other kings’ counterpoint and is an example of unrestrained pride that is doomed for downfall. On the other hand, if MT Dan 4–6 was once an independent collection, these stories provide no back-story for Daniel’s arrival in Babylon; this is perhaps knowledge assumed on the part of the author or else it leaves the matter open, much as the queen in Dan 5 hints at a big story concerning how Daniel came to be known as “chief of the magicians” in Nebuchadnezzar’s time. Was OG Dan 4–6 an independent collection as well? If so, this would make sense of why these chapters, specifically, are so very different from the MT (and Th). However, the chapters are not tied together as closely as they are in the MT (especially chs. 4 and 5), and we will see other instances later where the OG is not as integrated as Theodotion Daniel or MT Daniel. While MT ch. 4 is a court contest (even if it is awkwardly couched in the form of a letter or encyclical), OG ch. 4 is a story all about politics and the usurper who will take away the king’s kingdom and is neither a true court conflict or court contest. (Even more than MT, OG is about the king rather than about Daniel.) Furthermore, OG Dan 4–6 uses only the name Daniel, not Baltasar, as in Th Dan (chs. 4–5; MT mostly uses Belteshazzar in ch. 4, and the name Daniel appears twice as a gloss). 340 This is probably to avoid the difficulty encountered in Th; Th follows MT in 5:12 in having Baltasar/Belteshazzar as a gloss, which makes Th rather awkward, because both the hero and the king are given the same name. Another point is that, in contrast to MT, there is less animosity between Daniel and Belshazzar in Dan 5, making less of a contrast to the stories on either side of it in which the MT portrays Daniel as quite friendly to both Nebuchadnezzar and Darius. The balanced inclusio of MT 4–6 is not there in the OG.

340.  OG twice uses Daniel’s Babylonian name, Baltasar/Belteshazzar outside of Dan 5: in 1:7 (the introduction to Daniel) and in 2:26.

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Albertz sees a clear distinction between the focus of the plot in the MT and that in OG. 341 The former is more apocalyptic; the future dominion of God is contrasted with the totalitarian rule of heathen kings in the author’s contemporary world. On the other hand, the OG is more concerned with eliminating false gods or idols and returning to the correct worship of the one true God. To Albertz, this places the genesis of the OG in Egypt. While it may be that the individual chapters of OG 4–6 originated in Egypt, there does not seem to be enough cohesiveness in OG 4–6 to suppose that just those chapters in OG circulated together. There seems to be more evidence in support of MT 4–6 as an individual collection than for OG 4–6.

4.2.3.3.  The Longer Story-Collection, MT Dan (1)2–6: More Courtiers, More Nebuchadnezzar, and More Foretelling The most obvious change in MT Daniel (1)2–6, the longer story-collection, is that three new protagonists are added. Whereas chs. 4–6 only concern Daniel and make no mention of the friends Hananiah (= Shadrach), Mishael (= Meshach), and Azariah (=Abednego), Dan 3 is entirely about these three and does not mention Daniel, let alone the fact that they are his friends. (Note that combining chs. 1–3 with chs. 4–6 seems not to have called for retouching chs. 4–6 to include mention of the friends.) Then, probably to account for their presence in Dan 3, both Dan 1 and 2 incorporate the three men rather marginally into their stories, although they nowhere act independently from Daniel. In Dan 1, the three are named with Daniel as Jewish exiles taken to Babylon for service there (v. 6) and are given new names (v. 7). Daniel is their head and spokesperson, however, and it is he alone who communicates with the chief of eunuchs and the superintendent. But the three friends are included in the tenday food test, and they and Daniel are given by God “knowledge and proficiency in all literature and wisdom” (Daniel is also given insight into all visions and dreams). All four are found by the king to be far superior to the other officials and are honored by the king. In Dan 2, however, the three friends hardly appear. They are mentioned as companions of Daniel who are sought in order to be executed in v. 13 but are not named in this verse. In v. 17–18, where the three are named, Daniel informs them about the matter and asks them to pray. And finally, at Daniel’s request in v. 49, the three are appointed over the administration of the province of Babylon; here, their Babylonian names are used, perhaps as an introduction to ch. 3, where in MT only their Babylonian names appear. A second thing to observe about the addition of Dan 1–3 to Dan 4–6 is that these stories have Nebuchadnezzar alone as the royal character; no other Babylonian, Median, or Persian kings appear. Perhaps the occasion for adding stories attached to the name Nebuchadnezzar was the fact that, from a Jewish 341.  Albertz, Der Gott des Daniel, 159–70.

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perspective, he was the great Babylonian king—the one who destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple and who took away the cream of its possessions and skilled young people. Furthermore, Dan 1 explains the presence of the four Jewish men in the royal court of Babylon as due to Nebuchadnezzar’s siege of Jerusalem. But the incorporation of Dan 1–3 makes this longer collection of narratives uneven in this respect: there are four stories about Nebuchadnezzar and only one of each of the kings Belshazzar and Darius. The addition of more stories about Nebuchadnezzar does allow for additional development of this king’s nature. In ch. 4, he is portrayed as prideful and arrogant but quite without antagonism toward his courtiers, whom he sentences to no punishment in spite of their failure to interpret his dream. The story is told as a flashback, after an initial doxology praising the Most High, and he tells of his frightening dream and call for interpreters without any remembered wrath at their inabilities. By contrast, both chs. 2 and 3 in the longer collection, linked together by the appearance of a statue in each, record a king who is quite capricious and cruel. In Dan 2, he demands the impossible task of not only telling him the interpretation of his dream but telling him the dream itself! Then he threatens to dismember all of the courtiers who have been assembled (magicians, enchanters, sorcerers, and Chaldeans) and even to tear down their houses as well because of their inability to solve this riddle. In Dan 3, the punishment of being thrown into a fiery furnace (heated seven times hotter than usual) for refusing to bow to a statue seems outsized and ridiculous, as is the huge statue itself. Moreover, the idea for this punishment is not portrayed as something that is forced upon the king, as is the case in Dan 6, where gullible Darius has been tricked into throwing his favorite courtier to the lions, but is an idea that perhaps stems from the king alone. No advisers are given credit or responsibility for it. On the other hand, Dan 2 provides the sequence of kingdoms that will govern the chronology of the entire book: Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece (the feet, which represent the diadochi, could well have been added, along with ch. 7, in the Maccabean period). Although this collection tends to emphasize the Babylonian kingdom more than the others, the possibility of more stories seems even more open-ended. Collins notes that the collector of the tales wished to present a range of situations. So chs. 4 and 5 provide a contrast of two pagan kings, one of whom learns to repent and one who does not. Chapters 3 and 6 show how similar dangers can arise from quite different causes, despite the differing attitudes of the kings. The variations among the tales, then, are utilized in the collection to provide a composite picture of Jewish life in the diaspora.

But he also observes that there is no certain way, “to establish the relative chronology of these tales. 342 342.  Collins, Daniel, 47.

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Chs. 2, 3, and 4 are in no particular order, and there is no reason that chs. 5 and 6 are placed in the reigns of the kings that they are. 343 The independent tales were not composed to fit the sequence: “if they were, we would not find two Babylonian kings and no tale in the time of Cyrus. Rather, it appears that a redactor put the tales together with the schema of the four kingdoms in mind.” 344 As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the connections between chs. 1 and 6 form a kind of inclusio. Both have to do with tests about adhering to religious practices and not giving in to the foreign world: ch. 1 concerns dietary restrictions (kašrût), and ch. 6 has to do with thrice-daily prayer. Dan 1 also presupposes Dan 2–6 in that it introduces the kinds of wisdom, both courtly and mantic, that appear in them. 345 In chs. 3 and 6, the concern is courtly wisdom, while in chs. 2, 4, and 5 it is mantic wisdom (that is, wisdom having to do with divination, interpreting dreams, or the like). The relationship between MT, Th, and OG in Dan 1–2 is very close, but MT Dan 3 is very different from Th and OG’s ch. 3, especially because of their long additions. Then, according to Timothy McLay, although chs. 1 and 2 have a verbatim agreement between OG and Th of 30% and 36% each, Dan 3 has a 44% verbatim agreement between the two main Greek versions. 346 Just as McLay understands OG and Th chs. 4–6 as independent Greek translations of a similar Semitic Vorlage, he thinks the same is true for chs. 1–3 and in chs. 7–12 as well. In Dan 1, there are few differences between the editions. Ch. 1 includes vv. 1–7 as an introduction to the setting of the exile and the Jewish protagonists. In the third year of Jehoiakim, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon besieged and captured Jerusalem, taking some of the Temple vessels back to Babylon to the temple of his god. In Babylon, he orders a chief eunuch to select young noble Judahite men of a specific profile to serve the king and to be educated in the literature and language of the Chaldeans. Daniel and his three friends, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, are chosen and are given Babylonian names (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego). Vv. 8–16 provide what amounts to an independent story recounting Daniel’s resolution not to defile himself with the king’s fare and his request that he and his friends be allowed to eat only vegetables and water for ten days. After the ten-day trial, the four are found to look better and healthier than the other young men. Vv. 17–21 conclude the story, stating that God gave the young men knowledge and ability in their education, and Daniel is granted the special ability of insight into dreams and visions. When the four are brought before 343.  Although one might argue that if, in the author-compiler’s mind, Belshazzar was the final king of the Babylonian empire (a historical inaccuracy) then the story of the downfall of Babylon in Dan 5 had to have been placed in his reign. 344.  Collins, “Court-Tales,” 229. 345.  Müller, “Mantische Weisheit,” 279. 346.  McLay, “The Relationship between the Greek Translations of Daniel 1–3,” esp. pp. 37, 40, and 44.

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Nebuchadnezzar, he finds them superior to the other specialists in the kingdom. Finally, v. 21 provides the duration of Daniel’s career at court, making it stretch to the first year of Cyrus the Persian. It thus provides not only an introduction to chs. 1–6 but to the book as a whole and may or may not have been added until after all the stories were collected and placed together as a unit. All three main editions (MT, Th, and OG) have the same date for the siege of Jerusalem and Nebuchadnezzar’s subsequent capture of Jehoiakim and the Temple vessels (the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim). Whereas MT and Th state that Nebuchadnezzar brought some vessels from the Temple to the “land of Shinar, to the temple of his god” where they are “deposited in the treasury of his god” (‫)בית אוצר אלהיו‬, the OG has the sacred vessels brought “to Babylonia, and he set them up in his idol-temple” (εἰδώλιον). The profile of the royal or high-born Judahite youths to be selected includes that they be without blemish, well-informed, and insightful—capable of serving in the palace and being educated in the “literature and language” of the Chaldeans. Daniel and his three friends are introduced: already learned in every branch of wisdom, without physical defect, and handsome. 347 Here and throughout ch. 1, the education of the youths in the OG is given a more literary character. Instead of merely “well-informed,” they are called grammatikoi in Greek, and the word for the “literature” of the Chaldeans is grammata. 348 In MT there are two keepers: the majordomo (‫ )אשפנז‬who is chief eunuch (‫ )רב סריס‬in vv. 3, 8–10 and a guard (‫ )מלצר‬in vv. 11, 16 who is an underling of the chief eunuch. Th takes the term for majordomo (‫ )אשפנז‬as a proper name Ασφανες in 1:3; while the OG witness Pap967 takes it as Ασπανες and other OG witnesses have a Semitized Αβιεσδρι in the same verse. Both versions in vv. 8–10 call this person a “chief eunuch” (ἀρχιευνοῦχος); Daniel requests of him first that he be allowed to refrain from eating the royal fare. The chief eunuch responds that he is afraid that he will be held responsible by the king for their diminished appearance if he allows it. Thus, in MT 1:11, Daniel appeals to a second person, the chief eunuch’s underling, the guard (‫)מלצר‬. The OG, however, does not have a second person but has the four men deal with Αβιεσδρι, the chief eunuch, throughout. OG strangely says that this Abiesdri was “the one appointed by the chief eunuch” (τῶι ἀναδειχθέντι ἀρχιευνούχωι), when it had previously identified the chief eunuch himself with the name Abiesdri. Th does have a second person, 347. Shemaryahu Talmon believes that the three friends plus Daniel illustrate the 3+1 pattern that is a typical ancient Near Eastern topos in which “a basic ‘complete’ unit of three is topped by a fourth of special standing and importance” (Talmon, “Daniel,” in Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds., The Literary Guide to the Bible [Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1987], 343–56, esp. p. 347. 348.  Wooden, “The Recontextualization of Old Greek Daniel 1,” in Craig A. Evans, ed., Of Scribes and Sages: Early Jewish Interpretation and Transmission of Scripture (London: T. & T. Clark, 2004), 1.47–68.

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but this is merely a transliteration of ‫ מלצר‬with a prothetic alep—that is, Amelsar (Αμελσαρ). 349 In all editions, there is a test within a test in order to creat suspense. The first test is that the guard allows them a period of ten days to eat only vegetarian food to see if they lose condition, but they are in better shape than the other young men who had been eating the royal rations. 350 It is only after the first test is over that the reader finds out how well the men do in the presence of Nebuchadnezzar the king (the second test). 351 MT 1:20 And every matter of wisdom of understanding which the king sought from them, he found them ten times better than (literally: “ten hands above”) the magicians, the exorcists who were in his whole kingdom. 352

Th 1:20 And in every matter of wisdom and knowledge which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the enchanters and magicians who were in his whole kingdom.

OG 1:20 (Pap967) And in every topic and understanding and education, which the king inquired of them, he took them to be ten times wiser; surpassing the sages and philosophers that were in the whole kingdom. And the king glorified them and appointed them in affairs in his whole kingdom.

Here, the OG does not want to put Daniel and his friends on the same level as the Babylonian sages; whereas in MT and Th the Jewish young men are said to be ten times better than the magicians or exorcists, in OG they are wiser, implying that they cannot be placed in the same category as the Babylonians. 353 The last verse of the chapter (Dan 1:21) gives the length of Daniel’s service until the first year of King Cyrus (but makes no mention of the three friends). This link makes 349.  Or variously Αμελσαδ or Αμελσαλ in some manuscripts. 350.  On table and food as a border between host and home community and between insider and outsider status in the diasporic novellas, see Mary E. Mills, “Household and Table: Diasporic Boundaries in Daniel and Esther.” CBQ 68 (2006), 408–20. 351.  Pace, “Diaspora Dangers, Diaspora Dreams,” 23. 352. 4QDana in v. 20 has a lacuna that may have held a longer text than MT, perhaps similar to Pap967 and something like: ‫]בכל מלכותו ויכבדם המלך ויראם ב[כל ד]בר[ במלכותו‬, “in all his kingdom, and the king honored them and made them see in every matter in his kingdom” (Collins, Daniel, 129). Ms88 and Syh have an even longer text here. 353.  Meadowcroft, Aramaic Daniel and Greek Daniel, 255.

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a connection with 6:29 (OG 6:28), the last verse of ch. 6, although no definite year of Cyrus’ reign is given there as an endpoint to Daniel’s career. 354 There are very minimal differences between MT, Th, and OG Dan 2. In addition, the redaction-history of the MT text is somewhat transparent. Vv. 40–43 and possibly vv. 13–23 may belong to the redactional level of the Maccabean book. The core of the story is as follows. King Nebuchadnezzar is unable to sleep at night because of troubling dreams, so he calls for the court professionals. He asks them to tell him his dream, an impossible task, and they ask him for the content of the dream. 355 The king then responds that they must tell him both the dream and its interpretation or they will all be dismembered and their houses made into trash heaps, but they will be rewarded if they can do it. 356 The professionals ask again for the dream, and the king tells them that they are just buying time in order to deceive him. They respond that no more difficult request has ever been made and that no human but only the gods (‫)אלהין‬, “whose dwelling is not with flesh,” can expound it. The angry king gives the order that all sages of Babylon be put to death. In v. 13, when the executioners come for Daniel and his friends, Daniel asks Arioch, the chief executioner, what the problem is. In v. 16, Daniel is even allowed to go directly before the king to ask for time to produce the interpretation. Daniel and the three friends pray at home, and Daniel receives a vision at night; he then praises God (vv. 20–23). In v. 24, Daniel goes to Arioch, telling him not to execute the sages and asks to be presented before the king. It is as if he had never gone to the king previously in v. 13. The king asks if he is able to make known the dream and the interpretation; Daniel responds that, although all the Babylonian professionals are not able to do so, God in heaven, who reveals mysteries, has revealed the matter. Daniel then tells the dream and its interpretation. The dream was of a large statue made of composite materials: a head of fine gold, a torso of silver, loins and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet partly of iron and partly of clay. A stone was cut and struck the statue’s feet, whereupon the statue broke into pieces and the wind blew them away. The stone then expanded into a mountain that filled the whole earth. The interpretation is: Nebuchadnezzar, represented by the head of gold, is to be followed by a succession of kingdoms, represented by the materials of diminishing quality. The final kingdom, represented by the feet of mixed iron and clay, in the interpretation is followed by a reference to the toes of the feet (also mixed), rep354.  By contrast, the last event in the book as a whole (Dan 10:1) is said to occur in the third year of Cyrus, 70 years after Dan 1:1, the third year of Jehoiakim. 355.  See Danna Nolan Fewell, Circle of Sovereignty, for the view that it is actually the king who is the subject of the Daniel stories rather than Daniel or his friends. Note also that in MT 2:4b the language switches to Aramaic when the Chaldeans begin to speak, asking to be told the dream; this switch in language is also found in the Qumran manuscripts of Daniel. 356.  See Ferdinand O. Regalado, “The Meaning of ‫ְּדא‬ ָ‫ ַאז‬in Daniel 2:5, 8 and its Implications for Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream.” DavarLogos 4 (2005), 17–37.

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resenting some kingdom that mingles in marriage (vv. 43–44). Finally, the stone that smashed the statue is interpreted as an indestructible kingdom that brings all the other kingdoms to an end and lasts forever. The response of the king to this news is shocking and puzzling. He falls down, worships Daniel, and orders a meal offering and incense to be offered to him. But it is of Daniel’s God that he speaks, “Surely your God is God of gods and Lord of kings and revealer of mysteries, since you have been able to reveal this mystery” (MT 2:47). As a reward, Daniel is given gifts, and authority over all the province of Babylon and made chief over all the sages of Babylon (Th oddly has “leader of the satraps”). Then Daniel requests that the king appoint his three friends (called here by their Babylonian names) over the administration of the province of Babylon, “and Daniel was (remained) at the royal court.” It is hard to read MT Dan 2 without noticing how oddly vv. 13–23 stick out. 357 The first interview of the king with Daniel in 2:16 is briefly mentioned but not recounted; he is said to ask the king for time. But in v. 24, he goes to Arioch and asks him to stop the executions. He then asks Arioch to introduce him to the king, and the executioner does so in v. 25, as if he had never personally met the king in 2:16 (let alone in ch. 1). Although Hartman and Di Lella believe that vv. 13–23 perhaps were inserted, 358 the evidence is not really conclusive— we cannot assume that “narrative time always corresponds to real chronological time.” 359 Agustinus Gianto, in a reading that emphasizes the dramatic aspects of ch. 2, resolves the problem by regarding v. 16 as an aside that anticipates v. 25 and the next “act” of the drama; v. 16 looks forward in advance to the meeting with the king in v. 25. 360 Much of the key vocabulary in these verses is not so different from elsewhere, but the friends are called by their Semitic names in this chapter only in this section. In terms of how different the OG is from MT or Th, Dan 3 represents a median point between chs. 1–2 and 4–6. The most obvious difference is that the Greek editions insert a large mass of material containing the Prayer of Azariah, 357.  For the excising of the redactional parts of ch. 2, see Philip R. Davies, “Daniel Chapter Two,” JTS 27 (1976), 392–401; and Amy C. Merrill Willis, Dissonance and the Drama of Divine Sovereignty in the Book of Daniel (Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 520; New York: T. & T. Clark, 2010), 37–40. 358.  Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 139. Segal suggests that it is really vv. 15– 23 that is at issue (with 13b and 24a as resumptive material added to smooth out the story). These verses are supplementary, brought in when ch. 7 was added. However, Segal does not agree that these verses represent an independent, alternative version of Dan 2 (Michael Segal, “From Joseph to Daniel: The Literary Development of the Narrative in Daniel 2,” VT 59 [2009], 123–49). 359.  Meadowcroft, Aramaic Daniel, 162. 360. Augustinus Gianto, “Notes from a Reading of Daniel 2,” in Yohanan A. P. Goldman et al., eds., Sopher Mahir: Essays in Honour of Adrian Schenker Offered by Editors of Biblia Hebraica Quinta (VTSup 110; Leiden: Brill, 2006), 59–68, esp. pp. 62–63.

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a prose interlude, and the Song of the Three Young Men between MT vv. 23 and 24. 361 With regard to the rest of the chapter, the differences between OG and MT or Th are less of the sort found in chs. 4–6 but slightly more than those found in chs. 1–2. The story in Dan 3 concerns only Daniel’s three friends, in the MT known only by their Babylonian names, and they do not actually enter the story until they have been accused by some Chaldeans in v. 8. King Nebuchadnezzar has made a golden statue and, at its dedication ceremony, commands that all those assembled, including several varieties of administrators, bow down and worship the statue whenever they hear music played by various instruments. If they do not do so, they will be thrown into a fiery furnace. At least one turn of music playing and responsive bowing has taken place when certain Chaldeans come to Nebuchadnezzar accusing the three Jews, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, of not doing as commanded. Nebuchadnezzar orders them to be brought before him, and he asks them if what they have been accused of is true. They reply that their God is able to save them from the fire but that they will not worship the statue. Nebuchadnezzar in anger has the furnace heated seven times hotter than usual and orders that the three men be bound and cast in. This is done, but the three are not consumed. Instead Nebuchadnezzar remarks that there are now four men, unbound and walking around in the furnace, the fourth of which looks like a god. He then calls them out of the fire, from which they emerge unharmed. Nebuchadnezzar then blesses the God of the three friends and makes a decree that no one can blaspheme that God or they will be dismembered and their house demolished. The three friends are then promoted in the province of Babylon. The story in MT technically ends in v. 30, since vv. 31–33 really belong to the story of MT Dan 4. The story in MT is full of lists and repetitions of those lists: the names of the officials or administrators who are present at the ceremony are listed three times (3:2, 3, and 27); 362 the names of the instruments that play the music are named four times (3:5, 7, 10, 15); 363 the phrase “peoples, nations, and people of 361.  For a recent discussion and translation, essentially based on Pap967 and indicating significant variants, see Di Lella, “A Textual and Literary Analysis of the Song of the Three Jews in Greek Daniel 3:52–90,” in Jeremy Corley and Vincent Skemp, eds., Studies in the Greek Bible: Essays in Honor of Francis T. Gignac, S. J. (CBQMS 44; Washington, D.C.: The Catholic Biblical Association of America, 2008), 49–64. 362.  The list varies a little at each telling. MT 3:2 lists: satraps, prefects, governors, counselors, treasurers, judges, magistrates, and all the officials of the provinces. Th and OG list only six titles, and OG sets “all the nations and tribes and languages” at the front of the list. The assembly in MT 3:3 includes: satraps, prefects, governors, counselors, treasurers, judges, magistrates, and all the officials of the provinces. OG simply has “the aforementioned were assembled and stood.” The list of those assembled to see the men alive after being thrown in the fire (MT v. 27) includes: satraps, prefects, governors, and counselors of the king. 363.  The lists of instruments exhibit less variation than the lists of officials. The command as first issued by the herald (MT v. 4) includes the following instruments: “horn, pipe,

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different languages” or similar occurs three times (3:4, 7, and 29); and even the names of the protagonists—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—are repeated almost every time they are mentioned instead of just being referred to collectively as “the three young men” or the like. 364 This perhaps reveals a close relationship to the oral story-telling stage of this story. In the OG, these lists are condensed. One main difference between MT and OG is that the statue is 60 cubits high and 6 wide in the MT, but in the OG’s Pap967 it is 12 cubits wide and thus sturdier. Moreover, in the MT, it is set in the valley of Dura, which the Old Greek understands as “enclosure.” 365 Furthermore, the accusation of the Chaldeans in v. 12 is that the three friends have not “paid attention” to the king nor do they serve his god (Th: “gods”; OG: “idol”) or worship the golden statue that he set up. The Additions result in different emphases in the stories. The Greek editions make the Additions central and lengthen the amount of time the three are in the furnace, while the MT seems to have vv. 16–18, the only time the three men speak, as the central point of the story. 366 A further rather large difference in each edition is the matter of who is burned in the furnace instead of the three friends. All three major editions have generic “Chaldeans” as the denouncers of the three Jews, and we would expect that these would be punished in a fitting manner at the end of the story, after the three Jews are recovered safe and sound from the furnace. However, in the MT, the only people to die in the furnace are the poor fellows who bound and threw the Jews into it; the Chaldean accusers are spared. In terms of genre expectations, this does not seem like a just result. In contrast, the OG has two sets of people burned in the flames: those who throw the men into the furnace and, in the prose interlude that has no equivalent in MT (OG/Th vv. 46–50), “[the fire] flared out and burned those of the Chaldeans whom it caught near the furnace” (v. 48). Thus, Th has the better story line here; it omits any equivalent zither, sambuke, harp, double-flute, and all kinds of music.” The people respond by bowing down when they hear (MT v. 7) the horn, pipe, zither, sambuke, harp, and all kinds of music (no double-flute). MT v. 10 and v. 15 repeat the same wording as MT v. 4: horn, pipe, zither, sambuke, harp, and double-flute, and all kinds of music. 364.  The Babylonian names are repeated throughout the story in MT. Only in v. 8 (“the Jews”), v. 12 (“these men”), v. 21 (“these men”), v. 24 (“three men”) are Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego referred to by something other than their personal names. 365.  The statue is erected “on the plain of the enclosure of the region of Babylonia,” ἐν τῶι πεδίωι τοῦ περιβόλου χώρας βαβυλωνίας. 366.  Meadowcroft, Aramaic Daniel and Greek Daniel, 129. See also Pierre-Maurice Bogaert, “Daniel 3 LXX et son supplément grec,” in van der Woude, ed., The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings, 13–37.

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to MT’s v. 22, and someone is only punished once—the Chaldeans, in v. 48. In addition, the men who throw the Jews into the furnace in v. 20 are in Aramaic, ‎‫ גברי־חיל‬or “warriors” (literally “men of valor” or “men of strength”). The OG calls them ἄνδρες ἰσχυροτάτοι “very strong men” in v. 20, and οἱ ἄνδρες οἱ προχειρισθέντες “the men who had been hand-picked” in v. 22. As Meadowcroft notes, this makes the men sound like an elite group in contrast to their description in the Additions v. 46, “laborers of the king” (ὑπερέται τοῦ βασιλέως). 367 The Additions also clarify the role of the fourth figure in the fire. MT v. 25 says the “appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods (a divine being)” (‫ורוה‬ ‫)די רביעיא דמא לבר־אלהין‬, while OG describes the fourth person as having the appearance of an angel of God. But the Additions give more detail about the angel’s work. In OG/Th 3:49–50, he comes down into the furnace with Azariah and his friends, shakes the flame of the fire out of the furnace, and makes the inside as if a moist breeze were blowing through it. In sum, the story-collection of Dan 1–6 begins and ends with the problems of remaining true to one’s religious practices in a foreign court. Chs. 1 and 6 thus form a kind of inclusio around the other chapters. The stories within contrast the nature of the three kings, while showing an even darker side to Nebuchadnezzar in Dan 2 and 3. Dan 2 adds a predictive dream to the dream in Dan 4, but one with more apocalyptic expectations. After reviewing MT Dan 1–6 as a collection, with a glance at some of the larger divergences between the MT/Th and OG, we must ask whether or not the OG also formed a collection of chs. (1)–6. The biggest argument in favor of this is that OG chs. 3–6 are radically different from MT, and OG chs. 4–6 are radically different from Th; but, if so, we are left wondering why chs. 1–2 are not also very different from the MT, at least in the OG. Against the idea that there was an independent collection of OG chs. 1–6 at some point is also the fact that the OG witness Pap967 rearranges Daniel chs. thus: 1–4, 7–8, 5–6, 9–12, followed by Bel and Susanna (Pap967). In general, the OG stories and visions are more loosely connected than in the MT and Th.

4.2.3.4.  An Aramaic Collection? The Story-Collection Plus Vision (MT Chs. 1–7) Some scholars believe that MT Dan 1–7, or perhaps just the Aramaic chs. 2–7, once circulated for a brief time as an independent unit before their incorporation into the full Book of Daniel. 368 The best arguments for this stage of MT are not only the fact that chs. 2–7 are in Aramaic (whereas Dan 1 and Dan 8–12 are in Hebrew) but also Torrey and Lenglet’s theory of a concentric ar367.  Meadowcroft, Aramaic Daniel and Greek Daniel, 125. Ὑπερέται only occurs elsewhere with a Semitic equivalent in Isa 32:5, where the corresponding Hebrew is ‫כילי‬. 368. A. Lenglet, “La Structure littéraire de Daniel 2–7,” 169–90.

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rangement in which chs. 2 and 7 parallel each other through their four-kingdom pattern (although ch. 2 is a story of Daniel’s interpretation of a dream and ch. 7 is Daniel’s first-person account of a dream); chs. 3 and 6 are court conflicts with miraculous deliveries and a concern for remaining Jewish; and chs. 4 and 5 echo each other as court contests that chastise kings. A major problem with postulating a collection of Dan (1)2–7, however, is chronology: Dan 7 is set in the court of Belshazzar and thus strangely returns the Daniel book to the setting of Dan 5, ignoring the intervening reign of Darius the Mede in Dan 6. Another is that the genre of ch. 7 fits that of chs. 8–12, the visions, and not that of the stories in chs. 2–6. Moreover, in ch. 7, Daniel is a dreamer as in chs. 8–12, and not an interpreter of dreams as in the court tales. Also, although there are dreams in chs. 2 and 4, they there “function as elements within larger stories, whereas in ch. 7, as in 8–12, the revelation is the sole focus of attention.” 369 Therefore, ch. 7 is bound to both sections, yet it alludes to Antiochus Epiphanes and therefore must date more closely to the time the visions were written. Finally, if MT Dan (1)2–7 ever circulated separately, it would have done so without any suitable conclusion for that collection, or at least no evidence for it was preserved. 370 Dan 7:28 (the last verse of Dan 7) merely closes the vision report and leaves Daniel pale, terrified, and pensive: “Here is the end of the account. As for me, Daniel, my thoughts greatly terrified me, and my face changed upon me; but I kept the matter in my mind.” One also notes that ch. 1, as a prologue to the stories, does not include any allusions to the vision or to Daniel as a dreamer himself. In Kratz’s view, the visions were added gradually, one by one, in an expanding commentary on the stories: they are text and commentary to each other. 371 Ch. 7 was added first as a response to the downfall of the Persian empire and the division of Alexander’s empire into rival states in the last quarter of the fourth century (ch. 8 translates ch. 7 into Hebrew with updates; chs. 10–12 continue editing the book for the second century b.c.e.; and ch. 9 was added last with a new recalculation that brings the visions of chs. 7–8 to an end). The theological conception of the stories in chs. 1–6 is destroyed; the vision in ch. 7 offers a new kind of Daniel, and the kingdom of God is relegated to the eschatological realm. The addition of ch. 7 also updates ch. 2 in certain key ways, thereby giving new meaning to all the narratives, especially a new eschatological emphasis. 372 Moreover,

369.  Collins, Daniel, 29. 370.  Ibid., 34–35. 371.  Kratz, “The Visions of Daniel,” 91–113. 372.  Kratz, Translatio Imperii, 197–222; idem, “Visions of Daniel,” 98–99. When ch. 7 was added, the metals in the statue were taken to represent the kingdoms of the world, although earlier they had been kings of the Babylonian empire. Moreover, a fourth kingdom was added to an original three, plus the stone representing the eschatological kingdom of God. In addition,

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the beasts of ch. 7 are borrowed from ch. 4 (the three beasts are the previous kingdoms, which do not become evil until the fourth appears) and Hos 13:7–8. In addition, one can also see the addition of prophecy to a story or stories as a regular feature in Near Eastern court tales. Moreover, the use of a story-collection as a literary device to launch prophecy can be seen as early as the mid-second millennium Tales from King Cheops’ Court (Papyrus Westcar). A series of stories told at court about magicians leads to the introduction of a living magician who is asked how to get to the book of Thoth. He responds that he does not know but predicts that a king of the next dynasty will be able to do so. Egyptian court stories were often the setting for foretelling the future. (See ch. five below.) This is less evident in the Mesopotamian pseudo-prophecies/proto-apocalypses, but can be seen in the Qumran court tales, such as Tales of the Persian Court (4Q550), the Pseudo-Daniel texts (4Q243–244 and 4Q245), the Aramaic Apocalypse (4Q246), Four Kingdoms Apocalypse (4Q552–553), the Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242), etc. Note, too, that pharaoh’s dream and its interpretation in the Joseph story involves prophecy (although it is not eschatological in any way). In summary, if Dan 7 was appended to Dan (1)2–6 at some point before the final form of the MT book, it may have been added to make explicit the connections to Dan 2, which is the chapter in Dan 1–6 having the strongest apocalyptic features. 373 Moreover, some verses in Dan 2 were possibly added during the Maccabean period as well, such as, for example, 2:41–43, the toes of the vision. Dan 7 begins by noting the court setting but is a vision, not a story. In Dan 7–12 overall, Daniel is a visionary whose visions are dated to specific king’s reigns, but almost nothing of the court atmosphere is preserved, even if the setting of the stories is presumed. If it was part of an early collection, ch. 7 transforms the genre of the tales and forms a kind of inclusio with ch. 2, which emphasizes the four empires of each chapter and their downfall before the kingdom of God.

4.2.3.5.  The Masoretic Collection of Stories and Visions (MT Chs. 1–12) It is possible that the addition of ch. 7 in the Maccabean period prompted the further addition of chs. 8–12 (although there is disagreement about the order in which they were added). 374 What seems almost certain, however, is that the schematization of history in Dan 2 influenced the actual order of the visions in the MT. The visions take from the story-collection not only the four kingdoms there are even later further “additions to an addition” in 2:41–43, such as the description of ten toes that are also of mixed iron and clay. 373.  Cook has argued that Dan 4 also has some apocalyptic features: Stephen L. Cook, “Mythological Discourse in Ezekiel and Daniel and the Rise of Apocalypticism in Israel,” in Lester L. Grabbe and Robert D. Haak, eds., Knowing the End From the Beginning: The Prophetic, the Apocalyptic, and Their Relationships (JSP 46; London: T. & T. Clark, 2003), 85–106. 374.  See the discussion of Kratz’s perspective (p. 281 above), for instance.

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(or three, in the pre-Maccabean Dan 2, adding the fourth in the Maccabean period) but also the story-collection’s particular view of revelation and need to interpret dreams and visions. Finally, the term maśkîlîm in Dan 1:4, which refers to those exiled to Babylon, is used again in Dan 11:33, 35, and 12:3 as the term for the wise Jews as opposed to the unwise. 375 One of the most important links between the stories and the visions is precisely this identification of all the deported Jewish youths as maśkîlîm in Dan 1:4 (‫ָכמָה‬ ְ ‫ילים ְּבכָל ח‬ ִ ‫ַׂש ִכ‬ ְ ‫ּומ‬, “knowledgeable in all wisdom”), and the maśkîlîm in vision four (Dan 10–12). 376 The term identifies the latter, the group to whom the author surely belongs, with the righteous Daniel and his friends from days gone by. In vision four, it is said of the maśkîlîm of the people that they will “instruct the many” (‫ )ומשכילי עם יבינו לרבים‬but “fall by sword and flame,” “to refine and purify and make them white until the time of the end” (Dan 11:33, 35). 377 The maśkîlîm in Dan 11 are a group in the prophecy ex eventu section who struggle against oppression during the time of the Antiochean persecution of the Jews. 378 They are also the subject of the predictive prophecy at the end of the vision (beginning in 11:40 and continuing to the end of the book): “The wise will shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who lead many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever” (Dan 12:3). This use of “the wise” in both Dan 1 and Dan 11–12 forms a very nice inclusio. 379 Another kind of inclusio is present in the language of Daniel; the Hebrew that begins and ends the book frames the Aramaic of the stories. Note that the Hebrew beginning and conclusion emphasize the nationalism of the Maccabean-era book. Whereas the stories are universalist in scope and portray foreign rulers as mostly benign (exilic life can be successful for those who are like Daniel, after all), the visions are apocalyptic, envisioning the survival only of the wise Jews, the maśkîlîm, but the end of all earthly kingdoms, especially the kingdom of Antiochus Epiphanes, the arch-enemy of the Jews. Further limited connections between the stories and visions are easily discernible. 380 Dan 1 and 10 are the only chapters in which Daniel refrains from food. Moreover, the Aramaic loanword ‫פתגם‬, “king’s food,” appears five times 375. See Collins, “Court-Tales in Daniel,” 230–31. 376.  The term maśkîlîm in the MT is not treated distinctively in Th and OG: it is not understood as specifying a particular group (Th usually uses συνίημι or its cognate σύνεσις to represent it and can use the same term to translate Hebrew ‫ ;בין‬OG uses both συνίημι and διανοέομαι for Hebrew or Aramaic words exhibiting the root ‫)ׂשכל‬. 377. The maśkîlîm desgination must be taken from Isa 52:13: maśkîlîm v. the rabbîm (Collins, Daniel, 385). 378.  Many scholars identify the maśkîlîm with the ḥăsîdîm, but the latter are the “mighty warriors” of 1 Macc 2:14—that is, the Maccabees themselves (Collins, Daniel, 385). The maśkîlîm are nonviolent, in contrast to the ḥăsîdîm. 379.  Lacocque, Daniel in His Time (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 10–11. 380.  James E. Miller, “The Redaction of Daniel,” JSOT 52 (1991), 115–24, esp. pp. 121–23.

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in Dan 1 and also in Dan 11:26. Both Dan 2 and Dan 9 report the contents of Daniel’s prayers, and Dan 6 joins them in being concerned with prayer generally. Finally, according to McLay, 50% of the words are identical between the OG and Th in chs. 7–12. 381 As noted above, Kratz sees chs. 7–12 as supplements and each of the four visions in these chapters as repetitions of the same ideas or variations on a theme, building on chs. 1–6 and inner-biblical exegesis. The toes in 2:41–43, the horns in chs. 7 and 8 (but not the core of 7), the 70 years in ch. 9, and the outline of history in ch. 11 refer to Antiochus IV and sacrileges committed between 169 and 164 b.c.e. 382 Everything is oriented toward the end time, which from the standpoint of the Maccabean-era author-compiler was occurring in his time. Kratz views ch. 8 as a Hebrew translation of the vision of ch. 7, with updating (a Hebrew Targum, in fact, stating expressly what was cryptic in ch. 7) and suggests that ch. 9 is an intrusion or interpolation into chs. 8–12 and, therefore, the last section to be added to MT Daniel. 383 Chs. 10–12 are for Kratz straightforward interpretations of ch. 8; they were added after ch. 8, while ch. 9 is, in effect, a second answer to ch. 8. Ch. 9 portrays Daniel as not understanding Jeremiah’s prophecy about 70 years of devastation, which this chapter then reinterprets to mean that the judgment of 587 b.c.e. against Israel is still being executed. For Katerina J. A. Larkin, Dan 9 is the centerpiece of the visions, and the rest are a ring construction, comprising a “mantological anthology” (Michael Fishbane’s term). 384 Andrew Steinmann has proposed that the structure is a “locked chiasm” that balances the entire Book of Daniel in a ring composition. 385 At any rate, the final form of Daniel, while it has peculiarities in its chronological ordering (see the section below on the arrangement of the individual editions in their final forms) does in the main support the idea that the author-compiler consciously shaped it. The story-collection has been turned into a frame for the visions, transforming them in many ways and subverting them to the visions, as noted above. The stories of Daniel were gathered into a collection in the preMaccabean period and attracted the addition of the first-person visions, just as the wise words of other sages were drawn into collections prefaced or padded with a story or stories featuring the key figure (such as, for example, Aḥiqar, 381.  McLay, “Daniel,” in NETS, 992. 382.  Kratz, “Visions in Daniel,” 98–99. 383.  For another view, see Philip R. Davies, “Eschatology in the Book of Daniel,” JSOT 17 (1980), 33–53, esp. p. 36. There is one hand behind all four visions, contra H. L. Ginsberg, “The Composition of the Book of Daniel,” VT 4 (1954), 246–75. 384.  Larkin, The Eschatology of Second Zechariah: A Study of the Formation of a Mantological Wisdom Anthology (Kampen: Kok, 1994), 238–39. 385.  Steinman thinks that the “locked chiasm” demonstrates the unity of Daniel; however, his argument that this unity (the entire book) dates to shortly after 536 b.c.e. is untenable (Steinmann, Daniel [Concordia Commentary; St. Louis: Concordia, 2008], 9, 22–25.

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ʿOnchsheshonqy, etc.). Prophecy (ex eventu and predictive) is launched from the court setting and from the mouth of the wise courtier Daniel, a renowned wise man who has a divinely inspired view of world empires rising and falling. Finally, the MT collection of stories and visions resolves in an eschatological prophecy, leaving a stunned Daniel to be comforted by the angel Michael, who tells him to keep the words secret and sealed in a book (12:4, 9). Daniel is also told to “go to the end and rest,” and that he will “rise” for his reward at the end of time. The seer’s own death will occur shortly, and perhaps this too is required to seal the prophecy fully. 386 From the perspective of the Maccabean period author-compiler, the ancient seer Daniel died long ago, but his words are still coming true.

4.2.3.6.  The Greek Collections: Two More Stories and More Poetry The Hebrew-Aramaic edition of the Book of Daniel (Dan 1–12) is slightly older than the Greek editions, which have, in addition to chs. 1–12, two stories—Susanna and Bel and the Serpent—and the ch. 3 Additions (the two poetic pieces called the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men, as well as a connecting prose piece between them). The OG witnesses place both Bel and Susanna at the very end of chs. 1–12, while Th places Susanna before ch. 1 and Bel after ch. 12. (For more on exactly what meaning the final order of the main editions conveys, see section 4.2.4 below.) Bel and the Serpent possesses certain similarities to Dan 1–6: 387 both text are set in the Babylonian court; both are generally similar in their attacks on idolatry; in both, the king confesses that the Lord God is greatest; hostility toward the heroes on the part of rivals is present in both; and Dan 6 and Bel share the motif of imprisonment in a lions’ pit. 388 However, the courtly elements are reduced, 386.  See, for instance, the conclusions of certain Egyptian prophecies, such as the Oracle of the Lamb or the Oracle of the Potter, in which the death of the seer secures the events predicted. In Nectanebo’s Dream, the prophet probably falls dead, too. 387.  For text, see Ziegler and Munnich, eds., Susanna, Daniel, Bel et Draco, 396–407. Commentaries on Bel include, among others: Andreas Wysny, Die Erzählung von Bel und dem Drachen: Untersuchungen zu Dan 14 (SBB 33; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1996); Klaus Koch, Deuterokanonische Zusätze zum Danielbuch; Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King; Marti Steussy, Gardens in Babylon: Narrative and Faith in the Greek Legends of Daniel (SBL Dissertation Series 141; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993); see also ibid., “The Vitality of Story in Second Temple Judaism,” in Lamontte M. Luker, ed., Passion, Vitality, and Foment: The Dynamics of Second Temple Judaism (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001), 212–41; Collins, Daniel, 405–19; Ingo Kottsieper, “Zusätze zu Daniel,” 209–328; Carey A. Moore, Daniel, Esther and Jeremiah: The Additions (AB 44; New York: Doubleday, 1977); M. Delcor, Le livre de Daniel (SB; Paris: Gabalda, 1971), 100–106, 260–92; Witton Davies, “Bel and the Dragon,” in Charles, ed., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, 1.652–64; Otto Plöger, Historische und legendarische Erzählungen: Zusätze zu Daniel; Schüpphaus, “Das Verhältniss von LXX- und Theodotion-Text in den apokryphen Zusätzen zum Danielbuch,” 49–72. 388.  See also Michael A. Knibb, “The Book of Daniel in Its Context,” in John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint (eds.), The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, vol. 1, 16–35.

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as are the legendary, and the polemic against idol worship is more central in Bel than in Dan 1–6. Bel is almost a detective story, more like “the practical wisdom of Aḥikar rather than the mantic wisdom of Daniel or Joseph.” 389 Furthermore, Wills notes that Dan1–6 is generally more negative about the king, and the characters in Dan1–6 maintain their religious observances but destroy that of others in Bel. 390 Finally, there is no reductionistic explanation of idols in Dan 1–6. In the OG, Daniel is introduced in Bel as if for the first time and described as both “priest” (ἱερε´υς) and “companion/confidant of the king of Babylon” (συμβιωτὴς τοῦ βασιλέως Βαβυλῶνος). OG Bel is perhaps even less closely connected to the canonical Book of Daniel than Susanna. The fact that Daniel is a priest in the OG contradicts Dan 1 and “suggests a date before MT Daniel had become authoritative (therefore, before the mid-second century).” 391 In Th Bel, which concludes Theodotion’s Book of Daniel, Daniel is not given a fresh introduction (nor is he called a priest); Theodotion’s more tightly-connected book assumes that the reader can identify Daniel from the preceding stories and visions. The story may well have had an early Semitic version, since the Chronicle of Jerahmeel (dated from the third to the tenth centuries c.e. but possibly preserving earlier material) includes a full Hebrew version of Bel and an Aramaic version of the snake episode alone. 392 The identification of Daniel as a priest in the OG is problematic, because the biblical Daniel was from the tribe of Judah (Dan 1:6), not the tribe of Levi. 393 Bludau thought that ἱερεύς could be a Greek mistranslation of Hebrew kōhēn, which can also denote a secular official of high rank. The name of Daniel’s father in OG Bel, Abal (Abel), does not help. It could be that, in the mindset of the OG’s author-compiler, anyone who kept company with the king and advised within a temple setting was naturally an official that one could refer to as a priest. However, the ascription “priest” may suit the Alexandrian place of composition of the OG, because Egyptian priests of all sorts were courtiers who were both religious officiants and political advisers. 394 The term ἱερε´υς in Bel may not be 389.  Collins, Daniel, 417. 390.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 133–34. 391.  Collins, Daniel, 418. 392.  Sections 3 and 7 in Jerahmeel; see Eli Yassif, Sefer ha-Zikronot, 245–46, and 250–60. Koch, following Gaster, understands the Aramaic to be the original of the story, but Davies and Collins believe that the Aramaic Jerahmeel version of Bel is a translation from a Hebrew original of Bel (Gaster, “The Unknown Aramaic Original,” 47; Koch, Deuterokanonische Zusätze, 1.61; T. Witton Davies, “Bel and the Dragon,” in Charles, ed., Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, 1.652–64; Collins, Daniel, 410–11). On the other hand, Kottsieper does not believe the Aramaic Jerahmeel is witness to any Semitic Vorlage but thinks it clearly follows Theodotion Bel (Kottsieper, “Zusätze,” 220). 393.  See, for example, Moore, Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah: The Additions, 133. 394.  The Greek term ἱερεύς is a generic term for “priest,” corresponding to Egyptian wʿb in the trilingual decrees (the Memphis Decree of March 27, 196 b.c.e.; the Canopus Decree of March 7, 238 b.c.e.), which list the ranks of Egyptian priests hierarchically (Dieleman, Priests,

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specifically any particular kind of priest, and in the Egyptian mind he would be thought to have the royal court as his “arena of display and conflict.” 395 In addition, as Knibb has noted, “Daniel himself courts the controversy with the king instead of being put into a situation of controversy by his opponents.” 396 The story of Bel and the Serpent is actually two stories, the story of Bel and the story of the serpent, and has further been divided up into three sequences or episodes: (1) the story of Bel the idol and the destruction of that cult, (2) the destruction of the living serpent worshiped by the Babylonians, and, finally, (3) the punishment (in a lions’ pit) and rehabilitation of Daniel, including his miraculous dinner delivered by Habakkuk who is flown in by an angel. 397 From the perspective of the Jewish author, both of the stories have to do with the idolatry of the Babylonians exemplified by their false worship of the idol Bel and a living serpent. Although the three separate episodes may have originated in different traditions, most agree with Nickelsburg that the two stories are “inextricably woven into a single plot (the conversion of Cyrus) which is resolved only at the end of the second.” 398 The two editions, Th and OG, are not as divergent from each other as they are in Dan 4–6 or in Susanna, and because they correspond perhaps 80% of the time, “they can hardly be independent of each other.” 399 The setting of Bel and the Serpent is variously described in OG Daniel and Th Daniel. In OG Daniel, the superscription states that what follows is “from the prophecy of Hambakoum/Habakkuk, son of Joshua of the tribe of Levi.” Thus, the king is not named, and the setting is simply sometime in the days of the Babylonian Empire, perhaps suggesting that the author of the story did not know of Dan 1–6. In Th Daniel, on the other hand, the setting is after King Astyages “was gathered to his fathers and Cyrus the Persian received his kingdom.” Perhaps the author of Th Daniel named Cyrus the Persian because he was thinking of Dan 6:29 or 10:1, in which Cyrus the Persian is explicitly cited as someone under whose reign Daniel prospers, and Dan. 1:21, where Cyrus is named as the last king under whom Daniel serves (although Cyrus is “king Cyrus” there, not “Cyrus the Persian”). The addition of Astyages to the line of kings places a legitimate Median king between Darius and Cyrus. The first episode deals with the worship of Bel (an idol) in his temple and the belief of the king that the food and wine brought daily to the idol by the priests is Tongues, and Rites, 207–8. See the Greek titles and their corresponding Egyptian terms in François Daumas, Les moyens d’expression du grec et de l’égyptien comparés dans les décrets de Canope et de Memphis (ASAE Sup. 16; Cairo: Institut de archéologie oriental, 1952), 179–85. 395.  Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites, 223. 396.  Knibb, “The Book of Daniel in Its Context,” 28–29. 397.  See especially Steussy, Gardens in Babylon, 70–71. 398.  Nickelsburg, Jewish Literature, 26–27. See also: Collins, Daniel, 409; here it is possibly a matter of true “conversion”; in the tales of chs. 2–6, there are confessions but no statement such as this: “there is no other beside him/you!” (v. 40). 399.  Collins, Daniel, 409.

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consumed by Bel. 400 The king proposes a test to which Daniel agrees: the priests must either tell who is taking the food and wine or else show that Bel is eating it; if the former, they will die, if the latter, then Daniel will. Daniel then demonstrates their falsity through a ruse involving the sprinkling of ashes on the floor after the daily offerings have been deposited. In the morning, when they open the door (which had been sealed) and see the tracks that the 70 priests and their families have left in the ashes leading to a secret door, the king is forced to admit that the priests had been taking the food in the night. 401 In the OG, the suspense of the trick using ashes is maintained as long as possible, at least for the king if not the reader. No one except Daniel and those who spread the ashes know that the temple has been rigged (v. 14). The king is kept in the dark, so when he arrives in the morning, he is at first overjoyed to see that the food and wine have disappeared, and he cries aloud, “Bel is great and there is no deceit in him!” (v. 18). Daniel then laughs and points out the tracks in the ashes, after which he takes the king to the priests’ homes to find the food and shows the king the false doors. 402 In contrast, Th removes the suspense by having the king watch the strewing of ashes, although this does not stop him from exclaiming in delight in the morning when he at first believes the food and wine are absent because Bel ate them (only then does he look at the floor to see the tracks in the ashes). Another difference is that the OG has Daniel tell the king to observe what is laid out and then to seal the door of the temple, while in Th it is the priests of Bel who ask the king to set out the food, mix the wine himself, and seal the door with his own ring, returning early in the morning. In Th, the priests are described as “contemptuous” (v. 13), because “they knew they had made a hidden entrance under the table, and they’d always come in through it and consume everything.” In the morning, the OG has everyone arrive before explaining in a narrator’s aside how the priests have fooled the king by eating and drinking everything during the night. Th repeats (v. 15) what it has already 400.  See Claudia Bergmann, who establishes that each of the sequences of Bel and the Serpent “plays with the motif of the ability/inability to eat as determining life and death” (“The Ability/Inability to Eat,” 263). The idol does not eat, but the priests do, and each is destroyed; the serpent does eat and is destroyed. The lions’ eating ultimately causes the destruction of Daniel’s foes, but the same lions are unable to eat Daniel. Finally, in the lion’s pit, Daniel eats from Habakkuk’s dish and survives. 401.  The king here is portrayed as extremely naive, in that he does not even know about the common Near Eastern practice of distributing the food offered to the statues of gods to the temple personnel. The story itself presents this as something unusual or offensive, heightening the narrative tension but allowing the king to be portrayed positively (Bergman, “The Ability/Inability to Eat,” 265). Note the use of words for eating and drinking here: when the king describes Bel’s eating, he employs terms for human consumption; when Daniel describes Bel’s eating, he utilizes terms for animal consumption. 402.  Finding the food and wine in the priests’ homes is thought by Steussy (Gardens in Babylon, 64) to be a narrative slip in that OG vv. 15–17 have them consumed in the temple.

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explained about the priests entering at night (v. 13), but when it is morning, they are not on the scene. Instead, the king arrives with Daniel the next day (in Th the king gets up early, as the priests told him to do in v. 12) and asks him if the seals on the doors are secure. In OG, it is Daniel who speaks to the king first and asks him, along with the priests of Bel, to check the seals. In OG, to balance the statement of the king that Bel is not a deceiver, Daniel says, “Look! See the priests’ deception!” and asks the king to whom the footprints in the ashes belong. Th is in general more emotive. In addition to the contempt of the priests, Th also has the king become furious upon seeing the tracks, and he then arrests not only the priests but also their wives and children; it is this entire group that shows the king the hidden doors. Then, in Th Daniel, the king “kills them” (presumably the entire group of men, women, and children) and hands over Bel to Daniel, who destroys the idol and its temple. In OG Daniel, the king hands over the priests and Bel’s provisions to Daniel (they are not explicitly said to be killed) and he (the king?) destroys Bel. 403 The transition to the episode of the serpent in v. 23 is made smoothly, in that the serpent is first introduced by the narrator, with the note that the Babylonians worshiped it, and the king then extends to Daniel the living serpent as a contrast to the man-made idol Bel of the previous episode. 404 The serpent in Greek is δράκων (Th states that it is a “great serpent”—δράκων μέγας). The Greek word, which is often translated “dragon,” can indicate a common serpent, but it can also be used to indicate non-ordinary snakes: a monster of mixed form, a magical or mantic being, a god in snake form or a symbol of a god, and so on. 405 Daniel asks the king to allow him to try to kill the serpent without any implement, neither iron (OG; Th has sword) nor wand, 406 and the king agrees to 403.  Steussy believes that neither version is very clear about who destroys Bel (Steussy, Gardens in Babylon, 64). However, if the king “handed Bel over to Daniel,” then Daniel should be the “he” in the phrase “and he overturned it and its temple,” since Bel is no longer in the king’s possession. 404.  Later, the people will refer back to both the Bel and the serpent when the lion-pit sequence begins. Steussy says these are the only two “internal anachronies” used to span gaps (Steussy, Gardens in Babylon, 77). 405. Margarete Schlüter, ‘Derāqôn’ und Götzendienst: Studien zur antiken jüdischen Religionsgeschichte, ausgehend von einem griechischen lehnwort in mAZ III 3 (Judentum und Umwelt 4; Frankfurt am Main/Bern: Peter Lang, 1982), 14–30. See now also Charlesworth, “Phenomenology, Symbology, and Lexicography, the Amazingly Rich Vocabulary for ‘Serpent’ in Ancient Greek,” RB (2004), 503–4. In the OG of the Bible, drakōn is sometimes used for animals that are not snakes, such as, for instance, goats in Jer 50:8 and young lions in Job 4:10 (Collins, Daniel, 414; Schlüter, ‘Derāqôn’, 31–40). Moore prefers to translate “snake” (Additions, 141–42), and many translators have enjoyed the mythical connotations of “dragon.” Charlesworth suggests that the noun may have developed from δέρκομαι, meaning “to see clearly,” a word that was “used to denote the fire that can flash from someone’s eyes (as in the Odyssey 19.446).” 406.  OG has ἄνευ σιδήρου καὶ ῥάβδου; Th has ἄνευ μαχαίρας καὶ ῥάβδου. Liddel, Scott, Jones has “magic wand” as the first meaning for ῥάβδος (A Greek-English Lexicon, 1562), but

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the test. Daniel’s cake (plural in the Th) of boiled pitch, fat, and hair 407 is put in the serpent’s mouth, and it bursts open. The action is abbreviated here: there is no potentially thrilling explanation of the means Daniel uses to get the mixture into the serpent and no mention of where the king is when Daniel does this. In the OG, Daniel “shows” the exploded serpent to the king before he speaks; in Th, he merely speaks to the king. In both editions, he says nearly the same thing, confronting him by pointing out “these things all of you have been worshiping.” In both editions of Bel, the people blame the king rather than Daniel, accusing him of “becoming a Jew” (adding “already” in Pap967), citing his actions of destroying Bel and the serpent (and, in Th, the priests as well). 408 Th has the Babylonians apply more pressure: they go to the king and say, “Hand Daniel over to us. If you do not, we will kill you and your family” (v. 29). Compelled by the pressure of the people, the king hands Daniel over to them. (In the OG v. 28, the king calls for his companions and tells them that he is “giving Daniel up to destruction.”) Daniel is thrown into a pit of (seven) lions—echoing a motif found in Dan ch. 6—for six days. In vv. 31–32, both versions cite the practice of throwing bodies into a lions’ pit, but they differ in details. The OG says that the practice was to throw in “traitors against the king,” two per day, but Th says nothing about the identity of the persons that the Babylonians used to throw in, merely that the daily count was two bodies as well as two sheep. An additional detail in the OG v. 32 is that the purpose for throwing Daniel in the pit is “so that he might be eaten and never have a burial.” The final sequence of Bel and the Serpent, vv. 33–42, includes the miraculous feeding of Daniel by Habakkuk, whom the Lord’s angel plucks up by his hair and takes (specifically “from Judah” in Th) to Daniel in Babylon. Habakkuk has just made a stew and broken bread into it and is on his way to take it to harvesters in a field (in OG, there is a skin of mixed wine as well). After the angel takes Habakkuk by his hair and sets him above the pit in Babylon, Habakkuk shouts to Daniel to take the lunch that God has sent. Daniel responds that God has remembered it can also mean “stick.” As Steussy notes, however, each of these three words plus the word δράκων appear in the Greek version of Moses’ and Aaron’s competition with the Egyptian magicians in Exodus (Steussy, Gardens in Babylon, 65). For the use of wands in Egyptian magic, see Richter, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Medicine, 19 n. 78, 227. 407.  The ingredients are the same in both versions, but the Greek sets the amount of pitch at 30 minas. Note that Marshall thought that “pitch” was a problematic ingredient; he saw connections here with Enuma Elish and Marduk’s killing of the sea deity Tiamat by using the winds. He says that the author confused Aramaic wêpiʾ with waʿapiʾ “south wind” (John T. Marshall, “Bel and the Dragon,” in James Hastings et al., eds., Hastings Dictionary of the Bible [New York: Scribner, 1901], 1.267–68). In the Hebrew version of the story in the medieval Chronicle of Jerahmeel, the lethal elements are iron combs that are hidden in the concoction (iron hatchets in the Aramaic). 408.  Th’s word choice is more vivid in general, here and elsewhere.

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him (in Th, as before, Daniel addresses God directly) and says that God does not forget people who love him. In v. 39, Daniel eats, and Habakkuk is returned to his place. (The OG sums this up, “So the Lord God remembered Daniel.”) The king, who grieves for Daniel, finds him alive (specifically on the seventh day in Th) to his great surprise. The surprise is managed in both OG and Th by having the king peer into the pit and see him sitting there. The king shouts in both versions nearly the same thing, but in Th (as is Th’s habit), the king addresses his object directly, “You are great, O Lord,Daniel’s God! There is no one like you!” Finally, in v. 42, the king takes Daniel out and in front of him throws those who “caused his destruction into the pit . . . and they were eaten up.” It is not clear whom the king executes, since those who caused the destruction are described in OG as “the country’s people” or the “crowd” and in Th the “Babylonians.” In general, OG Bel and Th Bel differ from each other in key ways. (1) In Th, the king addresses God directly, while OG talks about him in the third person. (2) In the OG, the protagonist and main role is taken up by Daniel, while in Th it is the king; 409 the OG edition starts and ends with information about Daniel, and the king is unnamed, while Th starts with the king, who is Cyrus, and ends with the king speaking about Daniel’s God. (3) In addition, the OG narrator is more of a presence than the Th narrator. 410 (4) OG Bel also sees the potential lack of burial for Daniel as a concern, while Th Bel does not. (5) Neither edition resolves the issue of the king’s feelings about Daniel’s religion until the lion-pit episode, in which the evildoers are punished and the king recognizes God. (6) The Th king Cyrus is friendlier to Daniel, since he has to be compelled to hand him over to the Babylonians, while the unnamed OG king sees that the people are united against Daniel, and he initiates the hand-over. (7) In Th, the priests are more of a threat to Daniel than the king. However, OG v. 28 has people angry at Daniel, while Th vv. 28–29 has people angry at the king. 411 There is a difference of opinion about where Bel originated, but the date of composition is likely to have been before the time of Antiochus Epiphanes because of the portrayal of the Persian king as benign. If the story was originally in Hebrew and from Palestine, Collins suggests that it was written in the first quarter of the second century b.c.e., but in different circles than Dan 1–6. 412 Another reason why Bel was probably never part of the Hebrew-Aramaic book of Daniel is that Daniel is specifically called a priest in the OG, whereas in the MT or Th he is only a Jewish elite taken captive. 413 The story also seems to stem from a time 409.  Steussy, Gardens in Babylon, 90; Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 134–38. 410.  Ibid., 98–99. 411.  Ibid., 70. 412.  Collins, Daniel, 411–12; idem, “The King Has Become a Jew,” 343. He believes the original was in Hebrew rather than Aramaic because the Greek betrays use of the waw consecutive. 413.  Ibid., 419.

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when Judaism desired the conversion of gentile rulers (note that the king is said to have “become a Jew” in both OG and Th). Kottsieper follows Brüll, Schüpphaus, and Wysny in saying that the OG is the older and that Th works over and improves the OG. 414 Others argue that the OG and Th are related, because they do not differ as much from each other as in chs. 4–6. Steussy believes that the Th “translator” of Bel did not use the OG as a base, since the verbatim repetitions are short, mostly stock phrases. 415 She thinks that one-third of each version has unique material; these are “independent translations of rather different source texts, rather than an original and its revision.” 416 With regard to Susanna, the OG and Th differ from each other substantially, far more so then they do in Bel and the Serpent. 417 Th is more than one-third longer than OG Susanna, but one-fourth of the OG text is nonetheless repeated verbatim in Th in long chunks, mostly in dialogue and at critical plot junctures. Moreover, the figure of Daniel in Susanna is not strongly connected to the Daniel of Dan 1–6. 418 The OG does not have an equivalent to the introductory verses of Th vv. 1–4. These verses may be missing in our present manuscripts (see McLay’s translation in NETS) or the OG may never have had them, as Engel suggests, followed by Knibb. 419 Knibb observes that the OG (Pap967) beginning could be perceived as a sufficient introduction: “Now, about what the Master (δεσπότης) said: ‘Lawlessness came forth from Babylon, from elders who were judges, who only seemed to steer the people.’ And cases came to them from other cities.” When the OG continues with “They saw a beautiful woman, wife of one of their Israelite brothers, named Susanna” (Sousa[n] in Pap967), there is a narrator’s aside, “she was Helkias/Hilkiah’s daughter, married to Joakim,” which supplies 414.  Kottsieper, “Zusätze,” 248. 415.  Steussy, Gardens in Babylon, 35. 416.  Ibid., 35. Contra Collins (Daniel, 409), who thinks the two versions correspond 80% of the time. 417.  For the text, see Ziegler and Munnich, eds., Susanna, Daniel, Bel et Draco, 216–33; and Helmut Engel, Die Susanna Erzählung. For translation and/or commentary see, among others: Marti Steussy, Gardens in Babylon; D. M. Kay, “Susanna,” in R. H. Charles, ed., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, 638–65; Klaus Koch, Deutero­ kanonische Zusätze zum Danielbuch; Ingo Kottsieper, “Zusätze zu Daniel,” 209–328; Carey A. Moore, Daniel, Esther and Jeremiah: The Additions, 77–116; M. Delcor, Le livre de Daniel, 260–92; Otto Plöger, Historische und legendarische Erzählungen: Zusätze zu Daniel; Schüpphaus, “Das Verhältniss von LXX- und Theodotion-Text in den apokryphen Zusätzen zum Danielbuch,” 49–72. 418.  Knibb, “The Book of Daniel in its Context,” 26–28. 419. H. Engel argues that the OG in fact did start with this in v. 5b, contra Geissen, who thought that “Concerning what” had to have an antecedent (Die Susanna-Erzählung, 12–15; Geissen, Der Septuaginta Text, 33–37, 280–81). “Verses 1–5a are obelised in the Syro-Hexaplar as not part of the Old Greek, and papyrus 967, the prime representative of the Old Greek, begins with a heading corresponding to v. 5b of Theodotion: ‘Concerning what the Lord said, that lawlessness came forth from Babylon, from elders, judges who seemed to guide the people’” (Knibb, “The Book of Daniel in its Context,” 26–28).

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the “missing information” given in Th vv. 1–4. From this perspective, it is not at all clear that the setting of the OG version of the story is Babylon. It could possibly be Israel: v. 28 places the assembly of Jews in the “home town” of the evil elders, where all the Israelites are gathered. So although lawless judges are said to come from Babylon, the story is not necessarily set there. Th begins by introducing Joakim, who lives in Babylon, and his wife Susanna. Susanna is the daughter of Hilkiah, very beautiful, and devoted to the Lord, “since her parents were righteous people and taught their daughter according to the law of Moses.” Joakim was very rich, possessed a house with a fenced property, and his home is the meeting-place for other Jews, because he is said to be “the most distinguished of them all.” Two elders who had been appointed judges are among those who come to Joakim’s home, and it is specifically they that Th identifies as those “about whom the Master said, “Lawlessness came from Babylon, from elders, judges who only seemed to steer the people.” Verse 7 of both versions describes Susanna’s practice of walking around in her husband’s garden. However, perhaps the OG introduces Susanna for the first time, if indeed Th vv. 1–4 have no equivalent in the OG. Th has already introduced Susanna and has introduced the subject of gatherings at Joakim’s house in vv. 1–4, so Th begins with a connective and explanation: “Now, when the people went away in the middle of the day. . . .” Both OG and Th say the elders lusted after Susanna (in Th, “fell into lust for her”) and use the very same language to describe their crime: they “perverted their understanding, turning their sights away from heaven and forgetting about fair judgment” (v. 9). In v. 10, both OG and Th state that “both were hurting over her,” but they did not tell each other their pain (Th; OG says they pretended to each other the opposite). OG v. 10 adds that “the woman knew nothing about the matter,” and Th says the reason why they did not speak about their mutual pain is “because they were ashamed to reveal their lust, their desire to have her,” and “each day they watched intently to see her.” Of course, they catch each other out. When both are watching Susanna out walking, they notice each other and question why the other came out early alone. They then confess and make an appointment to return when Susanna is alone. At this point, the OG has much less than Th, having only material that Ziegler lines up with Th vv. 19 and 22, while Th vv.15–27 amount to a long erotic plus. In OG, the elders decide to approach her together, and then they go and grab her (v. 19). 420 The “Jewish woman” then responds: “I know if I do it, it is my death, and if I do not, I will not escape your hands. But it would be better for me to fall into your hands, not having done it, than to sin before the Lord” (these are nearly the same words used in Th vv. 22–23). 420.  Ziegler numbers this as v. 19 because it partly parallels Th v. 19; but in a side-by-side translation Th has four verses (vv. 15–18) for which there is nothing corresponding in the OG. From then until Th v. 28, only Th vv. 22–23 have similar content in the OG.

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By contrast, the longer Th version implies that the two elders are still outside Joakim’s home, on the grounds, discussing their mutual lust, when Susanna comes out intending to bathe because it is hot. Vv. 15–19: And it happened while they were watching for an opportune day, she came into the grounds, as usual [literally: just as yesterday and the third day], with just two girls, and wanted to bathe in the garden, for it was hot. No one was there except the two elders, hidden and spying on her. She said to the girls, “Bring me some oil olive and soaps, and shut the garden gates, so that I can bathe.” They did just as she said, shutting the garden gates and going out through the side doors to bring the things they had been commanded. They did not see the elders because they were hidden.

It is not clear at what point the elders come out of hiding. Th v. 19 has: “When the girls went out, the two elders got up and ran at her.” Have the servants just gone out to get the bathing paraphernalia that Susanna asked for? Or are they leaving after having brought Susanna her things, as commanded? Is Susanna then already bathing, presumably unclad, as so many interpreters have supposed? Ellen Spolsky suggests that, however much Theodotion has enhanced the eroticism of the story, it has been further amplified by interpreters from the very beginning. 421 In Th Susanna, Susanna is alone in the garden but has only expressed a desire to bathe and is not actually already bathing when the elders approach her. In Th 20–21, the elders proposition her, saying “we will testify against you that there was a young man with you, and that was why you sent your girls away.” In v. 22, Susanna groans and says she is “hemmed in on every side.” Then, as in the OG version, she makes the decision that it is better to fall into their hands than to sin, because she will not escape their hands anyway. Th vv. 24–27 are unparalleled in the OG and heighten the suspense. Susanna screams, the two elders yell simultaneously, and one of them runs to open the gates. The household hears the uproar, and people come running to find out what has happened (v. 27): “When the elders made their speeches, the servants were very embarrassed, because never had such a thing been said about Susanna.” The Old Greek does not have this revelatory scene. Instead, after Susanna declares her intention not to comply with them, the rejected elders go away, murmuring threats and plotting her death (v. 28). They do not accuse her until they have come to the synagogue in their home town, holding council with those who were there, “all the Israelites.” Then the two elders, now described also as judges, stand up and call for Susanna: “Send for Susanna, Hilkiah’s daughter, who is married to Joakim.” She is summoned immediately. By contrast, in Th, where 421.  See “Law or the Garden: The Betrayal of Susanna in Pastoral Painting,” in Ellen Spolsky, ed., The Judgment of Susanna: Authority and Witness (Early Judaism and Its Literature 11; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 101–17.

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Susanna has already been exposed by the elders before her household, it is specifically “the next day” when people have gathered around Joakim, her husband, that the two elders also come, “full of wicked intent against Susanna, to cause her death” (v. 28). They call for her to come before the people. OG states that “the woman came,” along with her father and mother, 500 of her servants and maids, and her four children (this is the first time the children are mentioned; v. 30). Th has her arrive with parents, children, and all her relatives (v. 30). In v. 31, both OG and Th say that Susanna (“this woman” in OG) was very delicate, and Th adds “and beautiful of form.” The “criminals” (so both OG and Th) order that Susanna be uncovered (Th explains that “she was veiled”), so that they can sate themselves (“their lust” in OG) with her beauty (v. 32). 422 It is possible that the OG has her entirely stripped of clothing at this point. If so, it is not necessarily that the OG is more erotic but that the author is following a Mishnaic provision calling for the stripping of an adulteress. 423 The people begin to weep. In v. 34, the elders stand and lay their hands on Susanna’s head. Both versions in v. 35 have Susanna weeping, looking upward (“toward heaven”; Th), and trusting firmly in the Lord. However, OG places the prayer of Susanna here, whereas Th delays it until vv. 42–43. She weeps to herself (an internal prayer), “O Lord, Eternal God, the one who knows everything before it happens, you know I did not do what these men conspire to accuse me of ” (OG v. 35). The Lord is said to hear her prayer. 424 However, while the words have not yet been spoken, the unveiled or uncovered Susanna is surely aware that she is in great danger. Vv. 36–41 in both versions contain the speech of the elders accusing Susanna, with few differences other than those that are imposed by the previous events told in each version. Thus, the elders in both versions say that they were walking around in the garden and came upon Susanna lying with a man. Th, however, has to include that they first saw Susanna coming in with two maids and shutting the gates, then dismissing the maids, before they explain that a young man came out of hiding to her. Whereas the OG, which did not include the maids and the request to bathe, has the elders say that they watched the two have intercourse but did not recognize who they were. They claim that it is after they approach and recognize Susanna that the young man flees (completely covered up) and they catch Susanna. Th says the elders were “in the corner of the garden” when they see “this lawlessness,” and they imply that they struggled 422.  If it is the custom to unveil an adulteress as punishment (Ezek 16:39), then, according to Frank Zimmerman, uncovering Susanna is a perversion of justice because she has not been accused yet let alone convicted (“The Story of Susanna and its Original Language,” JQR 48 (1957–58), 236–37 n. 2). 423.  Wills, The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World, 57. 424.  Collins believes that the prayer is misplaced in the OG, because Susanna has not yet been accused (Daniel, 432).

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with the man, who is said to be stronger than they, before he escapes through the gates. Both versions have the elders say that they then asked Susanna who the man was but that she did not tell them. Then the elders swear to their story in v. 41 of both versions. The assembly believes them because “they were elders and judges of the people.” Only Th states: “so they condemned her to death” after hearing the story (Th v. 41; not in the OG). In Th, Susanna prays aloud at this point (vv. 42–43; in OG, she has already prayed internally). The Lord responds in vv. 44–45, but differently in each version. The OG says that an angel of the Lord came, while Th merely states that “the Lord heard her cry.” As she is being led away to be executed, Daniel appears for the first time in the story. In the OG, the Lord’s angel, as he was bidden, gives “a spirit of understanding to a young man (νεώτερος) named Daniel,” who then cuts his way through the crowd to take the stand. In Th, “God began to stir the holy spirit of a boy (παιδάριον) named Daniel.” 425 Th vv. 45b–50 actually have Daniel converse with the crowd, while OG has Daniel speak to them in a monologue. After the holy spirit of Daniel is roused in the Th version, Daniel shouts, “I am innocent of this woman’s blood!” gaining the attention of the people. They ask, “What is this that you have said? ” In response, he says “Are you such fools, Israelites? Have you really condemned an Israelite woman without investigating and recognizing the plain truth? Go back to the court, for these men have given false testimony against her” (Th v. 48). The people “turn back” (implying that they had begun to leave), and the elders invite him sarcastically to enlighten them, “since God has given [him] eldership” (v. 50). In the OG, Daniel’s monologue to the crowd is nearly the same as in Th v. 48, with the main exception that Daniel does not tell the crowd that the elders have lied in advance of hearing the elders’ story. In Th, Daniel has already judged them. Daniel asks the two accusing elders to be separated so that he can examine them (v. 51, in both editions). The OG actually has Daniel address the crowd again before he turns to the elders, “Now, have no regard that these are elders, saying ‘surely they will not lie,’ but I will cross-examine them according to what occurs to me.” In his examination of each elder, one at a time, Daniel begins with an accusatory pronouncement that is nearly the same in each version, then asks under which tree each saw Susanna having intercourse with the young man and concludes with a pun concerning the tree. To the first elder, Daniel says that he has “grown old in evil times and his past sins have caught up” (v. 52): specifically, he has been “condemning the innocent and letting the guilty go free” in spite of the Lord’s command, “You shall not kill the innocent or the righteous.” The OG inserts that it is especially in cases involving the death penalty that the elders have been unfair (v. 53). The answer of the first elder (called a “godless” man in 425.  Collins believes that there may not be much of a difference between the two terms for Daniel, in that παιδάριον can also indicate a young man of marriageable age (Daniel, 433).

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the OG) is “under a mastic tree (σχῖνος).” Daniel’s pun corresponds to the false answer the man has given: he will be split (σχίσει) in two. To the second elder, once the first is removed, Daniel speaks in the same condemnatory tone, and compares him to the offspring of Canaan (so Th; specifically to “Sidon” in the OG), implying that he is not a true Jew. 426 Daniel also tells the second elder that although he has treated “Israel’s daughter this way” and she succumbed because she was afraid, “Judah’s daughter” (Susanna) did not give in (OG says she “could not bear to endure your plague in lawlessness,” while Th says “did not endure your lawlessness”; v. 57). This implies that this elder or both elders had previously attempted and succeeded in coercing women into having sex with them, and it was only Susanna who was able to refuse. After Daniel asks under which tree (and in the OG, “where on the grounds”) the elder has seen Susanna having sex with the young man, the second elder responds, “under an oak (πρῖνος).” Daniel replies that the angel of the Lord is waiting with a sword (Th; “for the people” OG) to saw (πρῖσαι) you in two. 427 After the second elder answers differently from the first, the whole congregation, who had apparently been watching the examinations, call out and rise up against the two elders who had just independently established their guilt by their own false witness. However, the wording in each version has important differences. In the OG, the congregation shouts about Daniel, and the elders are dealt with in the way that they had planned to deal with their sister Susanna, according to the law. Specifically, they are gagged, led away, and thrown down a ravine. “Then the angel of the Lord cast fire in their midst.” 428 In Th, the congregation shouts in praise of God “who saves those who trust in him”—rather more of an emphasis on Susanna’s faith than on Daniel’s clever words. The people in Th simply kill the elders “according to the law of Moses.” Both OG and Th pronounce: “So innocent blood was saved that day.” OG and Th end the story of Susanna differently. The OG moves away from Daniel and his cleverness to generalize about young men: “on account of this, the youths are beloved of Jacob in their single-mindedness (ἐν τῆι ἁπλότητι αὐτῶν). 429 And as for us, let us also watch out for capable young sons, for youths will be pious, and there will be in them a spirit of knowledge and understanding for ever and ever.” Th, on the other hand, focuses on Susanna first, and then on Daniel: Susanna’s parents, husband, and relatives all give thanks for her, because she was not found to be improper, while Daniel is said to become great before the people from that day forward. 426.  Ibid., 434. 427.  Καταπρίσαι in OG v. 59. Daniel first says that this elder, too, has perjured himself. 428.  Perhaps this is meant to make a connection to Zedekiah and Ahab, the false prophets, who are burned with fire (in Jer 29:21–32 and in the Chronicles of Jerahmeel). 429.  ἁπλότης can also mean “simplicity” in either a good (plainness, sincerity) or bad sense (simple-mindedness).

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There are a great many differences between the Theodotion story of Susanna and the Old Greek. An angel gives Daniel a spirit (suggesting mantic wisdom) in the OG, while in Th it is Daniel’s own spirit that is roused by God. The OG is concerned with Jewish self-government, while Th is more concerned with Susanna, the heroine. In Th, the erotic aspect of the story is elaborated further in a large plus (vv. 15–21): Susanna sends out her servants to bring her bathing paraphernalia so that she can take a bath out of doors—something not present in the OG. Collins believes that the genre is better described as “novella” or “short story” because of this erotic element, and Wills in his Jewish Novel further notes how much the story has in common with other Hellenistic Greek literature. 430 Other Greek novellas also include an erotic feminine element but, like Susanna, always maintain their heroine’s purity. This is evident in Judith (another Jewish example) and elsewhere. As Collins and others observe, the confrontation is between Jews instead of between Jew and Gentile, as in the other Daniel stories. Susanna shows no familiarity with the earlier book of Daniel except that Daniel is located in Babylon (at least in Th’s story; OG merely notes that lawlessness comes from Babylon). There is no court setting, no mention of a foreign king, and the focus is on the detective story and Daniel’s cleverness, rather than the miraculous. 431 On the other hand, DiTommaso sees the story as having many similarities with Dan 1–6: the setting is still the Babylonian exile; Daniel is still the protagonist who solves a mystery; the overall message remains that God is on the side of those who are steadfast; and there is still a contrast between those who keep the Law and those who break it (the Elders in the Susanna story; the other youths in Dan 1). 432 Daniel’s abilities are also stressed in the court tales, and both Susanna and the court tales focus on Daniel’s spirit. There is no consensus on the date of Susanna. There is no citation of Susanna or evidence of its existence before the second century c.e., when Susanna is mentioned by Irenaeus of Lyons in his Contra Haeresis (XXVI.3). 433 It is not in the Dead Sea Scrolls nor is any form of it related in the Antiquities of Josephus. 434 There is, however, a version of the Susanna story that closely follows Theodotion in the Chronicle of Jerahmeel from the Middle Ages. Moore believes that the OG 430.  Collins, Daniel, 437; Wills, Jewish Novel in the Ancient World, 59. 431.  Collins, Daniel, 437. 432.  DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Literature, 61. 433.  The Anti-Nicene Fathers 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 497. 434.  J. T. Milik thought that 4Q551 was part of an Aramaic Vorlage: “Daniel et Susanne á Qumrân,” in De la Tôrah au Messie: Etudes d’exegèse et d’herméneutique bibliques offertes á Henri Cazelles (ed. Maurice Carrez et al.; Paris: Desclée, 1981), 337–59. But George W. E. Nickelsburg argues that it is better connected to Judges than to Susanna; “4Q551: A Vorlage to Susanna or a Text Related to Judges 19? ” JJS 48 (1997), 349–51. Tal Ilan proposes that Susanna, Judith, and Esther were not found at Qumran because they were produced by Hasmoneans (Integrating Women into Second Temple History [Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 76; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999], 141).

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additions probably date to the same time as the rest of OG Dan—that is, ca. 100 b.c.e.—and that Theodotion must date to the mid-first century b.c.e. 435 Tal Ilan places the book slightly earlier and is followed by Dan W. Clanton Jr.; 436 she thinks that the story might be part of the propaganda for the Hasmonean reign of Queen Salome Alexandra or Shelamzion (76–67 b.c.e.). 437 Steussy believes that the story itself originated in the late second century b.c.e., but she dates the OG form to 135–120 b.c.e. and Th to the mid-first century c.e. Nehemiah Brüll thought the legal debate referred to a dispute between the Pharisees and Sadducees about the questioning of witnesses in the time of Shimon ben Shetach, a brother of Queen Salome Alexandra, and he believed the story presented the pro-Pharisaic stance. 438 But it is difficult to tell if Susanna supports the Pharisaic or Sadduccean view. 439 Collins thinks that “there is general agreement that [Theodotion] presupposes the OG, because there are several instances of verbatim agreement.” 440 There is more elaboration in Th’s story in general but especially in the bath episode. The medieval Chronicles of Jerahmeel (to be discussed in the next chapter), which has the story in Hebrew, follows Th and must be secondary for many reasons. Moore, however, believes that OG Susanna is an early Aramaic version, and Th a later Hebrew version. 441 Steussy suggests that Th used OG as a base but expanded it. 442 Th is more than one-third longer than OG Susanna but onefourth of the OG text is nonetheless repeated verbatim in Th. Koenen argues that both Th and the OG show signs of development from an original. 443 This speaks against their direct literary dependence. 435.  Moore, The Additions, 33. 436.  Clanton, “(Re)dating the Story of Susanna: A Proposal,” JSJ 34 (2003): 121–40. For Clanton, OG Susanna is a “morality tale” (p. 121). 437.  The colophon to the Greek Esther says that it was translated in 77–76 b.c.e., one year before Shelamzion became queen in Jerusalem. “It may be suggested that certainly Esther (and with it Purim) was created as propaganda for this queen’s reign,” and Judith and Susanna share “formal and ideological similarities,” so they may serve the same purpose (Tal Ilan, Integrating Women into Second Temple History, 127–53, esp. p. 153). 438.  “Das apokryphische Susanna-Buch,” Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur 3 (1877), 1–69. 439.  Moore, The Additions, 88. Kottsieper sees a pro-Sadducean stance (“Zusätze,” 214– 18, 292–93). 440.  Collins believes that the Vorlage of Th was already a redaction of OG’s Vorlage (Daniel, 426). Engel argues for an Aramaic or Hebrew original of which the OG was a translation; Th then used OG (Die Susanna Erzählung). Schüpphaus also proposes the priority of the OG (“Das Verhältnis von LXX- und Theodotion-Text in den apokryphen Zusätzen zum Danielbuch,” 49–72). Moore thinks that both OG and Th are translations of an Aramaic or Hebrew Vorlage but that Th translated its Vorlage independently, looking only occasionally to OG (The Additions, 15). 441.  Ibid., 119–20. 442.  Steussy, Gardens in Babylon, 35. 443. Klaus Koenen, “Von der todesmutigen Susanna zum begabten Daniel,” 1–11. See also Lebram, Daniel, 342.

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In conclusion, the Greek editions of Daniel have a novelistic result, as Lawrence Wills has observed. 444 Susanna adds an innocent, beautiful woman, the domestic affairs of a family, eroticism, and individualism, especially in Theodotion. Bel and the Serpent adds more humor and extends Daniel’s biography into the reign of Cyrus. Thus, Greek Daniel is a novel by agglutination, the consequence of adding or including the Greek stories and the Additions to ch. 3. The Additions to ch. 3 also expand the novelistic effect; the prayers include confession of sin and elucidate the interior experience and emotions of the three friends. However, one notes that OG Daniel’s stories and visions are not as integrated as in Theodotion, which is why OG places the extra stories at the end of the book. In contrast, Th Daniel is cohesive, and the book’s units are ordered as a Daniel vita, as we will see now in the discussion of the different arrangements in MT, OG, and Th.

4.2.4.  Arrangement of the Individual Collections in Their Final Forms I now turn to the final order of Daniel in the three main editions: the OG and Th in Greek and the Hebrew-Aramaic MT. The final order is important to consider because the way the stories were incorporated into the final editions explains how the editions were understood as a whole by their author-compilers as well as their audiences. In the very act of collecting and shaping the material, the author-compilers of the main editions imposed their perspectives of the Daniel book. One of the few scholars to focus deliberately on how the Book of Daniel has been arranged is Marti Steussy. To the extent that our stories actually constitute part of the book of Daniel, we must reckon with diachronic effects resulting from the position of tales within the book. . . . The Book of Daniel probably belonged to the class of literary compositions that would be read/heard repeatedly (like a popular song today) rather than a single time (like most magazine stories). . . . One special effect of ordering, the privileged role of beginnings and endings in shaping interpretation, is if anything strengthened by repeated reading.” 445

In Steussy’s Gardens in Babylon: Narrative and Faith in the Greek Legends of Daniel, she is particularly concerned with the arrangement of the Greek versions. She believes “evidence is mixed” as to whether or not Susanna and Bel and the Serpent were thought to be part of the book of Daniel. The sole prehexaplaric witness to the OG, Papyrus 967, has the order (1) Daniel 1–12 (arranged: chs. 1–4, 7–8, 5–6, 9–12), (2) Bel and the Serpent, and (3) Susanna and concludes with the post444.  Wills, The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World, 65. 445.  Steussy, Gardens in Babylon, 163–64.

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script: “Daniel. Peace to the writer and the readers. Amen.” This suggests that the OG editor/author considered Susanna and Bel to indeed be part of the Book of Daniel. OG Daniel in ms 88 and Syh (the younger witnesses to OG), on the other hand, is ordered: Daniel 1–12, Susanna, and Bel and the Serpent. OG Daniel in these witnesses has the heading: “Daniel according to the Seventy,” and this note is found again at the end of Dan 12 and then yet again at the very end of Bel. This hints that “Susanna and Bel and the Dragon appear to have the status of appendices in these manuscripts: attached to Daniel, but separate from the main flow of the narrative.” 446 Theodotion Daniel often follows MT closely, especially in chs. 4–6, but it includes the Greek Additions that it holds in common with the OG witnesses. Most Th manuscripts follow the order: Susanna, Daniel 1–12 (using the MT ordering), and Bel and the Serpent. The fact that ms 88 and Syh order Th Daniel as they do OG Daniel (Daniel 1–12, Susanna, Bel) is probably due to the fact that Origen “displaced TH Susanna to the ‘appendix’ position (as in the OG) because it lacked a Semitic original, but kept the appendices in TH’s order (Susanna before Bel and the Serpent) since TH was the accepted Christian text and closer (in Daniel proper) to the Semitic as well.” 447 Note, too, that ms 88’s Th version sets the first two verses of Bel as a preface to Susanna—probably indicating that Bel was once directly after Daniel 1–12, as in Pap967. In the table below (see Table 1, p. 302), the OG of ms 88 and Syh is included but Pap967 will represent the OG in the discussion to follow.

4.2.4.1.  The Masoretic Text (MT): Daniel, the Mantic Courtier The MT’s combination of two genres—court tales (chs. 1–6) and later apocalyptic visions (chs. 7–12)—creates a transformation of genre; as noted above, the humorous, entertaining stories become something else when read with the visions. (This is not true in the Greek editions, which book-end the visions with stories and thus return the collection to the benign foreign courts in which the righteous Jewish courtier Daniel always prevails.) However, the two sides of the book are linked by Daniel’s mantic abilities; “it is mantic wisdom which provides a point of intersection . . . although in many respects Daniel in chapters 1–6 is like the protagonist in other court legends, his mantic abilities are in general the key to his success.” 448 Moreover, the stories become a frame for the visions as they introduce Daniel, the first-person narrator of the visions. Furthermore, the visions end in a final, universalizing and exalting tone: in ch. 12, the wise will shine like the firmament and some who have died will come “awake.” Prophecy ex eventu about the Babylonian, Median, Persian, and Hellenistic empires by the 446.  Ibid., 164. 447.  Ibid., 165. 448.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 76.

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Table 1.  Chapter Arrangements in Editions of Daniel MT

Th

OG (Ms88, Syh)

OG (Pap967)

Inscriptio: Daniel (mss Inscriptio: “Daniel B-26–239–5340, etc.) according to the Seventy” Susanna Inscriptio: Sousanna (mss 22–51)

ch. 1: 3rd year of Jehoiakim, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon besieges Jerusalem ch. 2: Nebuchadnezzar 2nd year ch. 3: Nebuchadnezzar, no date ch. 4: Nebuchadnezzar, no date ch. 5: Belshazzar of Babylon, no date

ch. 6: Darius the Mede, no date

Susanna — Setting is captivity in Babylon, no year date, no king ch. 2: Dating same as MT

ch. 2: Nebuchadnezzar, 2nd year ch. 3: Nebuchadnezzar, 18th year ch. 4: Nebuchadnezzar, no date ch. 5: Baltasar (Belshazzar), no date

ch. 6: Darius, no date

ch. 1: Dating same as MT

ch. 1: Dating same as MT

ch. 2: Nebuchadnezzar, 2nd year ch. 3: Nebuchadnezzar, 18th year ch. 4: Nebuchadnezzar, 18th year ch. 5: Baltasar (Belshazzar), no date at end: Xerxes king of the Medes receives kingdom ch. 6: Darius, when aged

ch. 2: Nebuchadnezzar, 12th year ch. 3: Nebuchadnezzar, 18th year ch. 4: Nebuchadezzar, 18th year

ch. 7: Baltasar (Belshazzar), 1st year ch. 8: Baltasar (Belshazzar), 3rd year ch. 5: Baltasar (Belshazzar), no date at end: Artaxerxes, the Mede receives kingdom ch. 6: Darius the Mede, when aged ch. 7: Belshazzar of Babylon, 1st year

ch. 8: Belshazzar, 3rd year

ch. 7: Baltasar (Belshazzar) king of the Chaldeans, 1st year (but 3rd in some mss) ch. 8: Baltasar (Belshazzar), 3rd year

ch. 7: Baltasar (Belshazzar), 1st year in reign over land of Babylonia ch. 8: Baltasar (Belshazzar), 3rd year

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Table 1.  Chapter Arrangements in Editions of Daniel MT

Th

OG (Ms88, Syh)

OG (Pap967)

ch. 9: Darius, son of Ahasuerus the Mede, 1st year

ch. 9: Darius, son of Asoueros “from the seed of the Medes,” 1st year ch. 10–12: Cyrus of Persia, 3rd year

ch. 9: Darius, son of Xerxes of Median lineage, 1st year

ch. 9: Darius, son of Xerxes of Median lineage, 1st year

ch. 10–12: Cyrus of Persia, 1st year; long postscriptio a

Susanna Setting may be captivity in Babylon, no year date, no king

ch. 10–12: Cyrus of Persia, 1st year; postscriptio: “Daniel according to the Seventy” Bel Inscriptio: “From a prophecy of Hambakoum, son of Iesous from the tribe of Levi” Bel and the Serpent In the reign of “the king of Babylon(?),” no date

Bel and the Serpent In the reign of “the king of Babylon(?),” no date, no king Subscriptio: “Daniel according to the Seventy”

Susanna Setting may be captivity in Babylon, no year date Subscriptio: “Daniel. Peace to the writer and the readers. Amen.”

ch. 10–12: Cyrus of Persia, 3rd year

Susanna Inscriptio: Sousanna

Bel and the Serpent Cyrus the Persian after “King Astyages was gathered to his fathers,” no date

 1

a.  Ms 88: δανιηλ κατα τους ο´ · εγραφη εξ αντιγραφου εχοντος την υποσημειωσιν ταυτην · εγραφη εκ των τετραπλων εξ ων και παρετεθη: “Daniel according to the Seventy. It was written from a copy having this annotation: It was written from the Tetrapla from which it was also collated.” Syh: τετελεσται δανιηλ κατα την εκδοσιν των εβδομηκοντα · ουτως ηρμηνευετο εν τω βιβλιω ελληνικω αφ ου μετετραπη δανιηλ εις συριστικον ουτως · εγραφη εκ εξ αντιγραφου εχοντος την υποσημειωσιν ταυτην · εγραφη εκ των τετραπλων εξ ων και παρετεθη: “Daniel has been completed according to the edition of the Seventy. In this manner it was interpreted in the Greek Bible from which Daniel was turned into Syriac the same way. It was written from a copy having this annotation: It was written from the Tetrapla from which it was also collated.”

Maccabean author-compiler becomes predictive prophecy about the defeat of Antiochus. The stories are ordered chronologically according to the reign of the foreign king to which they have been ascribed. With the exception of ch. 1, which sets up Daniel and his friends’ captivity in Babylon, this ordering probably is not inherent to the stories or their content but part of the story-collector’s imposed

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organization (see below). Chs. 1–4 take place in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar: ch. 1, although not given any date in his reign, does state that he besieged Jerusalem in the third year of Jehoiakim of Judah; ch.2 is ascribed to the second year of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign; and chs. 3 and 4 take place in Nebuchadnezzar’s time but are not given any regnal year date. Chs. 5 and 6 are set sometime in the reigns of Belshazzar the Babylonian and Darius the Mede, respectively, but are not dated in the MT. The several problems of chronology represented in the MT are conspicuous, and all subsequent editions or retellings of the Daniel narratives and visions tend to try to smooth them out. Dan 9:1–2a is an indication that the author of the visions (which were probably composed later than the stories) has realized some of the historical difficulties: “In the first year of Darius son of Ahasuerus, from the seed of the Medes, who became king over the realm of the Chaldeans—in the first year of his reign. . . .” The author-compiler adds another king here, Ahasuerus, and says he was a Mede by birth, thus attempting to resolve the question of Daniel’s problematic “Darius the Mede,” the identity of whom has been much discussed. (But this makes for another difficulty, since Ahasuerus/Xerxes was historically the son of Darius I, rather than the other way around!) The passage bridges the gap between Belshazzar in ch. 5 and Darius in ch. 6. Attempts to solve problems in Daniel’s chronology also exist in OG and Th and even in Josephus. 449 The four visions of chs. 7–12 do not proceed chronologically in relation to the stories; instead, they return to the Babylonian kingdom under Belshazzar before going forward through the reigns of Darius the Mede and Cyrus the Persian. Ch. 7 is said to take place in the first year of Belshazzar’s reign (which presumes the days of Nebuchadnezzar and, thus, chs. 1–4 but not chs. 5–6). Ch. 8 is set in the third year of the same king. Ch. 9 is said to take place in the first year of Darius the Mede, son of Ahasuerus 450 and thus presumes the downfall of Belshazzar and the Babylonian Empire recorded in ch. 5. Of course, historically this is inaccurate on two counts: there was no Mede named Darius and Xerxes I (486–465 b.c.e.) was the son of Darius I of Persia (522–486 b.c.e.). 451 The last vision, in chs. 10–12, is said to take place in the third year of Cyrus of Persia. In 449.  OG Dan 5:31 in Syh and ms 88 adds that Babylon was taken by Artaxerxes, thus adding an extra monarch to the series. Th Bel 1 has that story occurring during the reign of Cyrus, the successor to Astyages the Mede. Josephus puts Cyrus and Darius together at the siege of Babylon (Antiquities 10.247). 450.  In the OG, this is Xerxes, but Ahasuerus and Xerxes refer to the same king; the Hebrew ‫ַׁשוֵרֹוׁש‬ ְ ‫אח‬ ֲ is a transliteration of Persian Khshayârshâ, and Xerxes is the Greek rendering of the name. 451.  Darius II (423–404 b.c.e.) was the son of Xerxes II (423 b.c.e.), but it is not likely that the author was thinking of this pair, or it may be that the author did not know when these kings actually reigned. Moreover, if this pair of kings was in fact intended, then the placement of the story would be even more historically awry because it would stretch Daniel’s service from the 590s (the reign of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon) to 423 b.c.e. (Darius II of Persia).

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this way then, the introduction to the story-collection in Dan 1 has the entire book in view and thus the whole career of Daniel as disclosed in stories and visions combined. Unfortunately, there are a few other problems with MT’s chronology. Most conspicuous to modern scholars, although seemingly not of concern to the MT author-compiler, is the contradiction between Daniel 1:21, which relates that Daniel continued at the court until the first year of King Cyrus, and the vision in ch. 10, which is said to have occurred in year 3 of Cyrus. Hartmann and Di Lella have suggested that this is no contradiction: the first year of Cyrus marks the end of the Babylonian exile only and is not intended to refer to the end of Daniel’s career. 452 Another important and long recognized problem in ch. 1 is that, in addition to the problem of dating the siege of Nebuchadnezzar to the third year of Jehoiakim (as mentioned above), 453 Nebuchadnezzar is said to assign the young men three years’ worth of training, while 2:1 (the only story in Dan 2–6 with a regnal year date) is dated to year 2 of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign. Thus, ch. 2, which recounts Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and his audience with the dream interpreters, does not allow Daniel enough time to learn the skills required to be part of the group. As Collins notes in regard to Dan 2, “by far the simplest explanation of the date . . . is that it was not originally composed to fit the context provided by ch. 1, and that the editor of the tales did not notice the discrepancy.” 454 Other scholars such as Lawrence Wills and Olivier Munnich have suggested that the placement in a king’s reign and the order in which the stories of Dan 1–6 appear in the final form of the MT are arbitrary. 455 It is obvious that the problems have been resolved in different ways in the editions, the retellings of Daniel, and by commentators. 456 For example, Pap967 of the OG places the events of Dan 2 in the “twelfth year” rather than the second, and Josephus turns the second year of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign into “two years after the sacking of Egypt.” In addition to chronological discrepancies that are hard to explain, the arrangement of MT has long posed a problem with regard to its division by lan452.  Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 48–49, 277. 453.  This date is absolutely unreconcilable with the history of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign as known from the Babylonian Chronicles; see pp. 216–217. It was during the reign of Jehoiachin, the son of Jehoiakim, that Nebuchadnezzar first besieged Jerusalem, with the most likely date being the seventh year of Nebuchadnezzar—that is, 598–597 b.c.e. The Daniel author may have confused the account of 2 Kgs 24:1, which specifies that Jehoiakim reigned 11 years and during his days became the servant of Nebuchadnezzar for 3 years (later dying in his own land) and the unlikely account of 2 Chr 36:5–8, which contradicts 2 Kings, stating that Jehoiakim was taken to Babylon with some of the temple vessels. To add to the confusion, Jer 25:1 and 46:2 connect the first year of Nebuchadnezzar with the fourth year of Jehoiakim. 454.  Collins, Daniel, 155. 455.  Munnich, “Le cadrage dynastique et l’ordre des chapitres dans le livre de Daniel,” 161–195. 456. See Collins, Daniel, 154–155.

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guage. A variety of theories have been posited to explain the difficulty of having one story and the beginning of another in Hebrew (1:1–2:4a), five stories in Aramaic (2:4b-6:29), and one vision (ch. 7) in Aramaic but the remaining three visions in Hebrew (chs. 8–12). Collins summarizes four theories: 457 (1) a single author wrote the book in two languages, (2) the entire book was written in Hebrew, (3) the book was written in Aramaic, and (4) “the combination of languages results from the incorporation of older Aramaic material into a work whose final stage was composed in Hebrew.” 458 In Collins’s opinion, the first three theories are highly improbable and the fourth “does less violence to the evidence than attempts to reconstruct a single-language original by retroversion.” 459 A variation on this theme is provided by other scholars. Koch, Kratz, and Redditt, for example, have posited that the Hebrew of ch. 1 is a translation from Aramaic and that it can easily be retroverted into Aramaic. 460 This may mean that all of the stories were originally in Aramaic. Redditt suggests that there was a collection of Dan 1–7 in Aramaic as early as the early second century, from which the author-compiler translated and reduced Dan 1 in order to add the whole of chs. 1–7 to the Hebrew visions and have ch. 1 as introduction to the entirety instead of just 2–7. For Redditt, the final editor is nationalistic, which explains the Hebrew translation of Dan 1 and the Hebrew visions of Dan 8–12. 461 As the flip side of Redditt’s proposal, Coxon says ch. 7 was originally in Hebrew and was then translated into Aramaic. 462 However, a recent study by van Deventer utilizes new developments in translation studies to analyze Dan 1 and 7 to determine if the former is a Hebrew translation of an Aramaic original and the latter an Aramaic translation of a Hebrew original. 463 By looking at the ratio of the number of words in each text to the different words used in the same text, van Deventer concludes that neither is likely to have been a translation but an original composition. Translated texts tend to have a lower ratio than original writings, “indicating a narrower range 457.  For a detailed discussion of views, see Collins, Daniel, 12–24. 458.  Ibid., 13. 459.  Ibid., 24. 460. Klaus Koch, Daniel 1. Teilband Dan 1–4, 17; Kratz, “The Visions of Daniel,” 92. See also Peter Coxon’s review of Stefanovic ( JSS 39 (1994): 299–300) in which he concludes that ch. 7 by language does not connect to 1–6: “Dialect distinctions have been noted in the ch. 7 of the book of Daniel which set it apart from chs. 2–6 and suggest that it is a translation from Hebrew” (p. 300). These include the use of Ithpeʿel and Ithpaʿal over against Hithpaʿel, large numbers of Hophals, the absence of Akkadian, Persian, or Greek loanwords, and the use of the particle ʾaru over against ʾalu. 461.  Redditt, Daniel, 18–20. 462. Peter Coxon’s review of Stefanovic in JSS 39 (1994): 299–300. 463.  H. J. M. van Deventer, “Tampering with Texts and Translations: The Case of Daniel 1 and 7,” in Hermann Michael Niemann and Matthias Augustin, eds., Stimulation from Leiden: Collected Communications to the XVIIIth Congress of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament, Leiden 2004 (BEAT 54; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), 199–205.

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of vocabulary and thus laying bare the tendency towards simplification.” 464 As a control group, he uses the Theodotion Greek translation of the undisputed Hebrew and Aramaic sections of the MT; in contrast to Theodotion, both Dan 1 and 7 have too much variation in vocabulary to be translations. Similarly, A. S. van der Woude believes ch. 1 is from Hebrew traditions and not created on analogy to ch. 7; for example, Dan 1:1–2 draws from 2 Chr 36:6–7. 465 The position taken here is that, whether or not chs. 1 and 7 were translated from another language, the fact that ch. 7 is in Aramaic is a result of the desire to connect the Aramaic stories to the Hebrew visions. Ch. 7 even begins in the third person, before it switches to the first person, probably yet another link the two sections, since the stories of chs. 1–6 are told in the third person. Interestingly enough, a few scholars have returned to the old theory that the book is a unity as it is and was actually written in the two languages by a single author. Wesselius’s theory that the book is a “linear literary dossier” (or “linear composed dossier”) falls into this category. 466 On the other hand, others propose that, even if the stories are older and were placed with the visions only in the Maccabean period, the language switch was a choice. Collins remarks that a bilingual Aramaic-Hebrew text would not have been a difficulty for either the author or the intended audience, 467 because bilingualism presumably would have been the norm rather than the exception in Judea of the Maccabean period. 468 Perhaps, then, MT Daniel’s form is exactly what the author-compiler intended. Anathea E. Portier-Young uses sociolinguistics to demonstrate that the employment of both languages in the order that they are found is a conscious choice intended by the author to manipulate the audience. The first story in Hebrew establishes Hebrew as the mother tongue of Jewish identity and covenant yet places Jewish captives in a foreign court in which they will be educated and serve in Aramaic, the language of empire. The switch to Aramaic in 2:4b through ch. 7 illustrates the competing claims of divine and earthly empires, and chs. 8–12 return the audience to Hebrew, the language of covenant and God’s authority. 469 464.  Ibid., 202. 465.  Van der Woude, “Die Doppelsprachigkeit des Buches Daniel,” in The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings, 3–12. See also idem, “Erwägungen zur Doppelsprachigkeit des Buches Daniel,” in H. L. J. Vantisphout et al., eds., Scripta Signa Vocis: Studies about Scripts, Scriptures, Scribes and Languages in the Near East, Presented to J. H. Hospers by His Pupils, Colleagues and Friends (Gröningen: Egbert Forsten, 1986), 305–16. 466.  On an interlocked chiastic structure in Daniel, see also Steinmann, Daniel, 22–25. In contrast to Wesselius, Steinmann’s arguments for the unity of Daniel stem from a theological position of biblical inerrancy. 467.  Collins, Daniel, 24. 468.  One might also suggest that the Jewish audience was not only bilingual but trilingual, in view of the Greek editions that date so soon after the Semitic-language versions and that circulated alongside it. 469.  Portier-Young, “Languages of Identity and Obligation: Daniel as Bilingual Book,” VT 60 (2010), 98–115.

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The end result is a well-formed inclusio: the book begins and ends in Hebrew, framing the Aramaic language, the language of the foreign court. In sum, the final form of the MT edition of Daniel subordinates the amusing tales to the very serious visions, linked together by manticism. Apocalyptic visions were the crisis literature of the Maccabean period, and the attachment of the Daniel stories transforms the setting of these stories from a “fanciful atmosphere in which historical figures can be recast at will” into a basis for divinely inspired opposition. 470 The stories become a description of a skilled mantic and gifted prophet who is able to foretell the future, and thus the tales validate the visions. On the other hand, the visions are hopelessly out of chronological order vis-à-vis the stories; chs. 5, 7, and 8 could almost be in any order (they are set in the reign of Belshazzar, but although ch. 5 has no date, chs. 7 and 8 are dated to the first and third years, respectively), and ch. 9 (set in Darius’ first year) may well have taken place before ch. 6 (which takes place when Darius is aged). It is most likely that MT Dan 1–6 had been fixed as a unit and even circulated together for long enough so that the appended visions could not be interspersed with the stories.

4.2.4.2.  Theodotion (Th): A Daniel Vita 471 Theodotion Daniel in its ordering provides a biography for Daniel, as some scholars have noted. 472 It is thus a sort of Daniel vita, but it is a vita with flashbacks (Th does not reorder the visions and stories in chs. 5–8, placing chs. 7 and 8 before 5 and 6, as does OG Pap967 in its attempt to have a smooth chronology). Th begins with Susanna, where the setting is the Jewish community in Babylon and when Daniel is a young lad (the name of Daniel may even be secondary to the story) who arrives on the scene to adjudicate a situation that the elders of the community cannot. Susanna presumes the captivity of Daniel, and thus, in the Theodotion ordering of stories and visions, Dan 1’s story of how Daniel and his friends got to Babylon appears to be a flashback explaining the last verse of Susanna (v. 64), which states that “Daniel became great before the people from that day on.” The six stories of chs. 1–6 are then arranged with MT’s chronology (in the reigns of Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, and Darius), 473 as are the four visions in chs. 7–12 (in the reigns of Belshazzar, Darius, and Cyrus). The episodes in chs. 2–6 reinforce Daniel’s success and supremacy, and by Darius’s reign in ch. 6, he is one 470.  Wills, The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World, 52. 471.  That is, most Th manuscripts. Ms88 and Syh arrange Th Daniel as they do OG Daniel. 472.  Steussy, Gardens in Babylon, 170; Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 76. 473. With the exception that Th sets ch. 3 in the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar instead of MT’s undated year in Nebuchadnezzar’s reign. Some manuscripts also place ch. 7 in year three of Belshazzar (as in ch. 8) rather than the first year as MT.

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of three ministers in the kingdom. However, in the later episodes (chs. 7–12), he is portrayed as having troubling visions himself, just like king Nebuchadnezzar in chs. 2 and 4. In this sequence, however, chs. 7 and 8 are flashbacks to a time before ch. 5, which is set in the last days of Belshazzar’s reign. Although the prayer and vision of ch. 9 are set in the days of Darius (whose reign was described in ch. 6), the last, long vision (chs. 10–12) is set in the days of Cyrus, the king mentioned in Dan 6:29. The book concludes with Bel and the Serpent in the reign of Cyrus, when Daniel is old. DiTommaso suggests that Susanna could actually have fit after any of MT Daniel chs. 1, 2, or 3, the last of which includes the three friends of Daniel while they are still youths. Therefore, for DiTommaso, Susanna is placed first in Th because “it was composed/trans. by someone who recognised that in it Daniel was a youth and understood the problems with the OG placement, but who was also well aware of the authoritative status of the court tales of MT Daniel and was loathe to interrupt its sequence.” 474 This is in contrast to van Henten, who proposed that Susanna was meant to be an addition to and commentary on MT Dan 1–2, specifically to clarify issues of chronology. 475 Van Henten also suggested that Daniel and his three friends were the four sons of Susanna (in Susanna, four sons are mentioned but remain unnamed) and that Joakim, the husband of Susanna, was to be identified with Jehoiakim the king of Judah. 476 His proposal does not explain why Daniel and the three friends would not be named as Susanna’s sons outright in Susanna nor is there a good reason not to refer to Joakim as the king of Judah, if he in fact was. Moreover, the Susanna story does not mention any king at all, Babylonian or Judean, and gives no chronological notice to date the story. Thus, it does not appear that Susanna was really concerned to clarify the chronology of MT Dan 1–2. Bel and the Serpent, the last unit in Theodotion, names Daniel as a companion of king Cyrus, who reigned after king Astyages had been “gathered to his fathers” (v. 1). Astyages the Mede was historically usurped by Cyrus the Persian, and this inclusion of Astyages may bring a note of clarification to the MT’s misunderstanding of Darius as a Mede. Because Astyages the Mede (585–550 b.c.e.) was a historical figure, DiTommaso suggests that his appearance here is perhaps an effort by Th to reinforce the “MT statement that the Median kingdom ex474.  DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 63. DiTommaso believes that the medieval Chronicles of Jerahmeel places Susanna between the tale of the false prophets Ahab and Zedekiah (cf. Jer 29:21–23) and the episode of Nebuchadnezzar’s madness (Dan 4) because there was a post-biblical tradition that associated these prophets with the two elders in Susanna. It is also worth noting that there is a relationship between Dan 3 and the Jeremiah tradition of the false prophets in that both involve punishment by fire. 475.  J. W. van Henten, “The Story of Susanna as a Pre-Rabbinic Midrash to Dan. 1:1–2,” 1–14. 476.  DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 60–61.

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isted autonomously.” 477 It is at least an attempt to smooth out the MT problem. Josephus and Jerome go even further. In Josephus, Darius is the son of Astyages and a relative of Cyrus (Antiquities 10.11.4). For his part, Jerome claimed that Cyrus and Darius captured Babylon together, but Darius took the credit because he was older than Cyrus and his kingdom was larger. 478 There also seems to be a rabbinic tradition that Darius-Cyrus was a single person. 479 Th does occasionally have dates different from the MT. Dan 3 is said to take place in the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar, in contrast to Dan 2, where no date is supplied. This feature is something Th shares with the OG witnesses, and the greater length of time between the events of Dan 2 and those of ch. 3 is not a problem. On the other hand, Th does not smooth out the most troublesome internal date, which places ch. 2 in Nebuchadnezzar’s second year. In addition, like the vitae of the European Middle Ages, the placement of Susanna at the beginning of the Th collection of stories and visions may make the Book of Daniel look rather like “a lesson-book of virtue,” as Steussy has pointed out. 480 In its telling of Susanna, Th emphasizes that her faith and righteousness are to be emulated. Furthermore, by placing at the end of the book the story of Daniel in the lions’ pit, where he is aided by Habakkuk, and Cyrus’ acclaim of Daniel’s God, in Th the book begins and ends on an individualizing note instead of the universalizing themes of the apocalyptic visions. Both Daniel and Susanna are pious, attractive characters, and Th focuses on them. In Th Susanna, the angel of the Lord rouses the saintly spirit already present within Daniel (in contrast to the OG, where he is given a spirit of understanding) and Susanna’s family praises her virtues after she has been vindicated. In Th’s final story, Bel and the Serpent, Cyrus praises Daniel’s God. There is no encyclical in Th, however, nor is the world at large meant to be concerned with the small stage of Bel and the Serpent, unless it is to learn from the deaths of those attempting Daniel’s ruin. To begin and end with the Daniel legends rather than with Dan 12, which is an apocalyptic vision of God’s intervention in history to punish and to reward, is to emphasize the worldview of the Daniel narratives. Like the OG, Th places the stories and the visions of Daniel on the same level as episodes in his life. This is a less immediate understanding of the world of faulty but benign foreign powers under which a righteous Jew can succeed if s/he maintains his/her faith in God: “a world in which life goes on and justice, despite temporary setbacks, can 477.  DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 72. Collins suggests instead that it is a correction (Daniel, 412). 478. The Chronicles of Jerahmeel in its Hebrew version of Dan 5 (sourced to Joseph ben Gorion) have Cyrus and Darius initially lose a battle to Belshazzar but then, after Belshazzar is beheaded by a doorkeeper, they defeat Babylon and divide the empire ( Jerahmeel ch. 8, §7; Yassif, Sefer ha-Zikronot, 250–51). 479.  Munnich, “Le cadrage dynastique,” 161–95. 480.  Steussy, Gardens in Babylon, 170.

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be realized.” 481 Because it occurs immediately after ch. 12 in Th, the beginning episode of Bel and the Serpent juxtaposes Daniel’s cleverness with the apocalypses and gives one more example of Daniel’s authority, which was demonstrated at the beginning of the Book of Daniel as well. Moreover, ending Bel and the Serpent with the supernatural intervention of God via an airborne Habakkuk results in a focus once again on God’s protection of the righteous, and as a result there is less attention on the enlightenment of the king. Wills thinks of Th Daniel thus as a novel by agglutination, especially when compared to the Hellenistic Greek novels, which tend to have female characters who are chaste yet seductive in their beauty and manner. The Th Susanna story contains eroticism that is not in the OG: the bath with olive oil and soaps, the suggestion that Susanna might be naked as the elders are viewing her from their hiding place, etc. 482 That Th has made its first story in its Daniel arrangement an erotic one may perhaps suit the fact that Daniel is a young man. One might even be tempted to ask: what does the young Daniel feel toward the beautiful Susanna? He has not seen her bathing, but in v. 32 her accusers force her to be uncovered before the crowd, so he doubtless sees her unclothed beauty along with the others. He even comments on how her beauty has beguiled the elders (v. 56, in both Th and OG); perhaps it has also beguiled him and persuaded him to help. That Daniel sees and hears Susanna in a more focused way in Th than in the OG is demonstrated by the fact that Daniel moves forward to save the heroine only after Susanna cries out in a loud voice to God (which is not in the OG). Also, at the end of OG Susanna (v. 62b), the narrative praises able youths who are beloved because of their single-mindedness, suggesting that in the OG’s presentation Daniel would have seen Susanna unveiled without thinking impure thoughts. There is no similiar praise of “single-minded” young men (implicitly a description of Daniel) in Th. The beautiful and chaste Susanna in both Th and OG thus provides a young female role that is elsewhere missing in the Book of Daniel, and Th heightens her sensuality. One scholar has suggested that, in the context of folklore and fairy tales of world literature in general, it would have been natural for the Daniel of chs. 1–6 to have been rewarded for his achievements with a beautiful princess’s hand in marriage (in addition to wealth and advancement), but the only female role in these chapters is instead that of the wise and perhaps aged queen of Dan 5. 483 Perhaps Susanna provides the “princess” to the Book of Daniel in some way; 481.  Ibid., 167. 482.  Although one must note that OG v. 32 actually has Susanna fully stripped—though probably only to fit a Mishnaic requirement, not primarily to add eroticism to the scene. 483.  Goldingay notes that one aspect of court tales that is not found in the Book of Daniel is the expectation that Daniel would marry the princess; “Story, Vision, Interpretation: Literary Approaches to Daniel,” in A. S. van der Woude, ed., The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings, 295–313, esp. p. 308.

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however, in Th (as in OG) the unappreciative and faithless husband Joakim, who had not realized what a gem of a wife he had, is not removed from the scene. In the last verse of Th Susanna, Susanna’s parents are the first to express praise of Susanna once she has been proved righteous, while Joakim joins them along with “all the relatives.” Susanna remains with her husband, and the story contains only the faintest of hints that the gifted young Daniel, the only one to believe in her, could have been as attracted by Susanna’s physical beauty as everyone else in the story.

4.2.4.3.  Old Greek (OG): Successful Jewish Men and Women of Virtue All three OG witnesses place Susanna and Bel and the Serpent at the end of the book, and Pap967 (the only pre-hexaplaric witness) places Susanna last, in effect opening and closing the book with scenes of virtuous Jewish young people, who are superior in their piety, wisdom, and education. However, ending the book with Daniel as a young man again may seem strange on the part of Pap967, since Pap967 corrects the internal arrangement of the stories by placing the visions set in Belshazzar’s reign (chs. 7–8) before his death in ch. 5 in order to smooth the chronology. One would imagine that if the author-compiler of Pap967 were consistent about chronology, s/he would have placed the young man of Susanna at the beginning of the Book of Daniel and the Daniel who is companion to Cyrus in Bel at the end, as Th does. In addition, Pap967, like the other OG witnesses, corrects other contradictory dating within the individual chapters to make the course of the book chronological. Therefore, it seems that Pap967 made an attempt at ordering its Book of Daniel chronologically but breaks that order at the very end. On the other hand, the fact that Pap967 has a different order for chs. 5–8 (separating ch. 4 from chs. 5–6) makes it seem less plausible that OG’s chs. 4–6 circulated independently as MT’s chs. 4–6 may well have done (contra Wills, Albertz, and McLay above, section 4.2.3.2). Beginning the book with four stories, then placing two visions before two more stories, then two more visions, before ending with a final two stories (chs. 1–4, 7–8, 5–6, 9–12—Bel, Susanna) serves to emphasize the worldview of the court tales and diminish the perspective given by the four apocalyptic visions. Moreover, just as in Th, the OG begins and ends with life in the diaspora as normal, a place where the righteous can indeed flourish, even under foreign rule. This suggests that “the End might not be so very close, after all.” 484 And, in fact, this order lessens the perception of imbalance toward the reign of Nebuchadnezzar: in this scheme, there are four units (stories) in Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, three units (two visions and one story) in Belshazzar’s reign, two units in Darius’ reign (one story and one vision), and a single, but very long, unit (in this 484.  Steussy, Gardens in Babylon, 171.

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case the vision of chs. 10–12) in Cyrus’ reign. The last stories of Bel (in the reign of an unnamed Babylonian king) and Susanna (where no king is mentioned, but the story is set in Babylon) firmly return the setting to a generic daily life in the exile. It is also a return to the beginning, to the Babylonian setting of Dan 1, in a kind of inclusio. The Old Greek often has dates different from the other editions or alters the placement of a story within a king’s reign. Ch. 6 of the OG, the story of Daniel in the lions’ pit, is set when Darius is aged, in contrast to MT and Th, which place the story in his reign but do not date it. OG Pap967 places ch. 2 in the twelfth year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. This is probably to make the chronology of Nebuchadnezzar consistent: in ch. 1 of the MT and both Greek editions, Nebuchadnezzar besieges Jerusalem in the third year of Jehoiakim, but the year of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign is not given. In 1:5, however, Daniel and his friends are trained for three years, and thus OG’s date of the twelfth year in 2:1 makes more sense than the MT’s date. 485 More importantly, in ch. 10, the OG in all three witnesses dates the vision to the first year of Cyrus. In this way, the chronology of 1:21 is maintained, in that it states that Daniel continued at court until the first year of the reign of Cyrus the Persian. 486 The MT and Th instead contradict 1:21 by placing the last vision (chs. 10–12) in the third year of Cyrus. Also, OG ch. 3 is placed in the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar, which matches ch. 4; this and the ordering in Pap967 make chs. 3 and 4 more of a pair than in the MT or Th. Furthermore, the confessional material in OG ch. 4 echoes the Song of the Three Young Men: “heaven and earth and the sea and the rivers and all that are in them (4:37 and 3:59–81); “God of gods” (4:37 and 3:90); “all his holy ones” (4:37 and 3:85–87), etc. 487 Perhaps the confession of the king in ch. 4, placed at the end of the chapter, is the completion of what was only a partial acknowledgment of the Jewish God in ch. 3. 488 Since both OG chs. 3 and 4 are dated to the eighteenth year of Nebuchadnezzar (unlike the MT, which has no date, and Th, which dates only ch. 3—to the eighteenth year), Daniel is located in the “broader boundaries of the historical landmarks furnished by the biblical record,” presuming the regnal year cited in Jer 52:29 as the year in which Jerusalem was destroyed (contra 2 Kgs 25:8). 489 Moreover, Dan 5:31 in Pap967 says that Babylon was conquered by Xerxes (the two other OG witnesses have Artaxerxes). This variation probably was introduced to add additional monarchs in an attempt to fill in the missing years between Belshazzar and the historical Darius the Persian. (The MT also 485.  Josephus, Antiquities 10.10.3, modifies the MT as well. 486.  Collins suggests, however, that OG’s alteration from “third year” to “first year” is possibly accidental: πρώτῳ instead of τρίτῳ (Daniel, 372). 487.  Meadowcroft, Aramaic Daniel and Greek Daniel, 158. 488.  Ibid., 159. 489.  DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 70.

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does this in Dan 9, where it states that Darius the Mede, successor to Belshazzar the Babylonian in the Book of Daniel, was the son of Xerxes/Ahasuerus.) J. Lust has attempted to demonstrate that the connections between chs. 4 and 7, between 8 and 5, and between 6 and 9 demonstrate the priority of chapter order in Pap967. 490 He remarks that “in the LXX the general impression is that of a loose connection between the respective episodes without distinction between biographic stories and autobiographic visions and revelations.” 491 As an example, Daniel says at the end of ch. 8: “I rose and went about the king’s business.” Lust points out that this is slightly ironic in that the business he goes about is the great banquet of ch. 5. He says the two chapters “share the theme of sinful behaviour against the Lord,”just as chs. 6 and 9 share a theme of prayer. 492 Lust’s arguments (like those of Xeravits and Munnich) for the priority of Pap967 were dealt with earlier in this chapter (section 4.2.2.), so I will not return to them here. However, note that these connections between contiguous chapters in the Pap967 order are, as Lust says, “loose.” Nonetheless, although the internal connections may be loose, the OG order is chronological until its very end, when Bel is placed before Susanna. Are the final OG stories merely tacked on, then, without thought? One can argue that they are not. To end with Susanna, as does the main OG witness, Pap967, means a return to the story genre, but it is not exactly a return to precisely the same Babylonian court setting as in chs. 1–6 or in Bel and the Serpent. Susanna is a story about a righteous Jewish woman (Susanna) accused by her own people (the evil elders) in their community court but saved by a young judge (Daniel). This makes the closing story have nothing to do with a struggle between gentiles and Jews or even the conversion of the gentiles but an internal Jewish struggle between good and bad elders. In comparison to the opening of Dan 1, where king Jehoiakim is ruling an independent nation before it is overtaken by the Babylonians, in Susanna we have a man named Joakim, Susanna’s husband, leading a self-ruled Jewish community. 493 With Susanna as the closing narrative of the OG, after the apocalypses’ promises of restored sovereignty to the Jewish people, “the Susanna story rings a sobering note. ‘Take hope,’ its message seems to be, ‘but remember what self-rule can be. The pious can prevail—but life on earth goes on.’” 494 Finally, OG Daniel ends not with the praise of Daniel or Susanna as individuals but with the praise of young people and an exhortation to watch out for or take care of them (Susanna v. 62). Although it returns to the theme of virtue like Th, the OG is oriented more toward social than individualistic virtue. The end result is a ring composition: the collection begins with the education of four Jew490.  Lust, “The Septuagint Version of Daniel 4–5,” 44–48. 491.  Ibid., 46. 492.  Ibid., 45. 493.  Engel suggests that the setting may even be back in Judah, since he thinks that “Babylon” in the OG could be a metaphorical term for evil (Engel, Die Susanna-Erzählung, 89). 494.  Steussy, Gardens in Babylon, 171.

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ish young men in the Babylonian court of Dan 1 and ends with a concern for the education of Jewish young men and women generally. With this last story written in the late second century b.c.e., there is a post-Maccabean deemphasis on the threat of life under foreign rule: Antiochus IV is gone and the Hasmoneans are in control of a semiautonomous Jewish nation, imperfect as it is.

4.2.5.  Duplicate or Variant Stories in the Same Collection In chapter 2 of this study, it was made clear that, in story-collections that are close to orality, such as Alf laylah wa-laylah and Grimms’ Fairy Tales, duplicate stories could appear within the same collection. In the first edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales, the same tale appeared in two or three versions, while in the second edition, 18 texts of the first edition were merged with new variants and revised to such an extent that virtually new texts emerged, while on the other hand, 45 of the texts found in the first edition were revised and incorporated into the collection as completely new texts. 495 M. I. Gerhardt suggests that there are three possibilities for the occurrence of duplicates: (1) the same motif or plot has been treated twice, and the similarities between the two stories are a mere coincidence; (2) there are two different versions of the same story that probably arose in the course of transmission; or, (3) one original story is imitated by another. 496 Unfortunately, it is very difficult to tell the difference between these options. 497 With regard to the Book of Daniel, Lawrence Wills makes a connection between the duplicates in Daniel and their popular nature and possible oral transmission: “duplicate narratives have been included in the corpus of Greek Daniel, a very common phenomenon in popular and oral transmission.” 498 Th has two duplicates, and the OG has three. The duplicate stories are: (1) the fiery furnace prose interlude in OG and Th ch. 3:46–50, placed between the Additions of the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men; (2) the preface to Dan 5 given in the OG but not in the MT or Th; and (3) the variant of Daniel in the lion’s den in MT ch. 6 that is found in both Th and OG’s Bel and the Serpent story. 499 495. Siegfried Neumann, “The Brothers Grimm as Collectors and Editors of German Folktales,” 27–28. 496.  Gerhardt, The Art of Story-Telling: A Literary Study of the Thousand and One Nights, 52ff. 497.  For Aulikki Nahkola, in Double Narratives in the Old Testament: The Foundations of Method in Biblical Criticism, there are three methodologies at work behind the occurrence of doublets in the Bible, they: (1) “indicate use of literary documents in the composition of the Bible”; (2) “witness to the oral origin and transmission of biblical tradition”; and, (3) “are evidence of literary artistry or theological intention in biblical composition.” Nahkola makes no mention of Daniel (Double Narratives in the Old Testament: The Foundations of Method in Biblical Criticism [BZAW 290; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001], 192). 498.  Wills, Jewish Novel, 63. 499.  The multiple doxologies at the end of ch. 4 in the OG are possibly poetic (not narrative) duplicates of each other.

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The MT has occasional doublet phrases but contains no real duplicate or variant narratives in its collection, 500 unless Hartman and Di Lella are right that 2:13–23 are a doublet of the main story of ch. 2. 501 It is mostly in this section of ch. 2 that the three friends of Daniel play a role (vv. 13 and 17–18), 502 and the audience with Arioch (v. 14) and the visit with the king (v. 16) seem to duplicate the audience with Arioch in v. 24 and Arioch’s presentation of Daniel to the king in v. 25. 503 Perhaps “the story once circulated in at least two variant accounts, which have been combined, not very smoothly, in the account as now given in ch. 2.” 504 However, although vv. 13–23, or perhaps only 15–23, might be an insertion with awkward joins that have not been polished, it is not clear that this situation rises to the level of two merged variant accounts. 505

4.2.5.1.  Daniel 3 Prose Addition The Greek Additions to Dan 3 in OG and Th include the Prayer of Azariah, the Song of the Three Young Men, and a prose interlude between them. 506 Both the prayer and song were probably preexistent pieces, originally in Hebrew or perhaps Aramaic, and not composed for their context in Dan 3. 507 They seem to have 500.  McLay’s study of double translations in Daniel is mostly about these occasional doublet phrases, which he says were prepared “on the basis of the relationship of the translation to the source text”; further, doublets in Daniel are completely “independent translations.” See R. Timothy McLay, “Double Translations in the Greek Versions of Daniel,” in Florentino García Martínez et al., eds., Interpreting Translation: Studies on the LXX and Ezekiel in Honour of Johann Lust (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 255–67, esp. pp. 255, 257. 501.  Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 139. In contrast to Hartman and Di Lella, Segal suggests that it is really vv. 15–23 that is at issue, though it is not a variant account (Michael Segal, “From Joseph to Daniel,” 123–49). 502.  In v. 49, they appear, too, but many view this as a secondary insertion. 503.  It seems odd that, in the first audience with the king, Daniel walks in without introduction and asks for time to get the interpretation (v. 16) but then, for the second audience, he requires Arioch to introduce him to the king (v. 25). 504.  Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 139. 505.  Furthermore, it is entirely possible to agree with Segal that v. 14 is the sending of a report to Arioch that is not related until v. 24, at which time Daniel is brought before the king for the first time. Verse 24a is, then, a resumptive repetition of v. 14 (a Wiederaufnahme) in order to pick up the narrative where it had left off (Segal, “From Joseph to Daniel,” 123–49). 506.  For the text, see Ziegler and Munnich, eds., Susanna, Daniel, Bel et Draco, 270–86 (the entire Addition); Koch, Deuterokanonische Zusätze zum Danielbuch, text: 1.63–76; commentary: 2.5–34. For other translations and commentary, see, for instance: W. H. Bennett, “Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Children,” in R. H. Charles, ed., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, 1.625–37; Collins, Daniel, 195–207; Kottsieper, “Zusätze zu Daniel,” 221–47; Moore, The Additions, 39–76 (prose piece, 62–65). 507. The Prayer can be dated to the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes because it mentions “an unjust king, most villainous on the entire earth” (v. 32) and bemoans the absence of prince, prophet, leader, burnt offering, sacrifice, offering, incense, or a place to make an offering (v. 38). The Song could be dated any time in the Second Temple period. Of course, in its present setting, the villainous king is Nebuchadnezzar of the fiery furnace story, and he is said to confess

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been added in order to enhance the idea that God supports those of steadfast faith, but they fit rather awkwardly: the Prayer of Azariah sticks out as especially inappropriate, because it is a communal lament confessing sin, not the prayer of a man facing the flames. 508 With regard to the prose interlude (vv. 46–50), Koch and Kottsieper have suggested that it is an independent story tradition contrasting with the general narrative of Dan 3 without the Additions. 509 First, the Prayer of Azariah is introduced in a single short verse (v. 24): Th: And they were walking around in the midst of the flames, singing hymns to God and blessing the Lord. OG: So therefore, Ananias and Azarias and Misael prayed and sang hymns to the Lord, when the king ordered them to be thrown into the furnace.

The differences between OG and Th in their introduction to the Prayer is that the OG clumsily reminds the reader of the general situation—that the three were thrown into the furnace—whereas the Th text simply carries on the story. The Th thus incorporates the Additions in a way that the OG does not. 510 Another example of Th’s smoothness is the fact that Th omits killing off the executioners in v. 22, saving fiery punishment only for the “Chaldeans who were caught near the furnace” in v. 48. The Th author-compiler seems to have made a judgment about who the malefactors were and who needed to be punished, since it implies that the Chaldeans caught near the furnace might very well be the same Chaldeans who had slandered the Jewish men at the beginning of the ordeal. The Prayer is then followed by the prose interlude (vv. 46–50) inserted between it and the Song: 46: Th: And the kings’ servants who threw them in did not leave off stoking the furnace with naptha, and pitch, and tow, and brushwood.     OG: And when they cast the three at once into the furnace, and the furnace was heated seven times its (usual) heat, and when they threw them in, those who threw them in were above them, and those below them kept on stoking from underneath with naphtha and pitch and tow and brushwood.

the Most High God at the end. See for instance: Collins, Daniel, 198; Kottsieper, “Zusätze zu Daniel,” 219; Koch, “Stages in the Canonization of the Book of Daniel,” 426. 508.  Ibid., 426. 509.  Koch, Deuterokanonische Zusätze zum Danielbuch, 2.32; and Kottsieper, “Zusätze zu Daniel,” 226. 510.  Bogaert, “Relecture et refonte historicisantes du livre de Daniel attestées par la première version grecque (Papyrus 967),” in R. Kuntzmann and J. Schlosser, Études sur le Judaïsme hellénistique: Congrès de Strasbourg (1983) (Lectio Divina 119; Paris: Cerf, 1984), 197–224, esp. pp. 205, 224.

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50 (Th and OG): and made the middle of the furnace as though a moist breeze were whistling through. And the fire did not touch them at all and caused them no pain or distress.

As is readily apparent, in the prose interlude of vv. 46–50, Th and OG scarcely differ in vocabulary or syntax (except in v. 46), indicating a very close relationship of some kind between them. Nonetheless, the prose interlude does not fit easily into the present context, not only because of its relationship to the poetic pieces on either side but because of its place in the narrative before them. It does not make sense after the Prayer of Azariah, because the cooling off of the furnace by the angel in vv. 46–51 should have preceded Azariah’s ability to offer the prayer. 511 Moreover, in the OG, although v. 22 had already killed off the executioners, v. 46 has them still alive, standing above both the men in the flames and the men who are stoking the furnace. 512 Furthermore, in contrast to Th, OG has the fire burn up someone twice: the executioners in v. 22 and those “Chaldeans who were caught near the furnace” in v. 48. (The MT kills off only the executioners in v. 22, but anyone who had slandered the young men seems to go free. Thus, neither the OG or the MT is as equitable as Th.) The most commonly accepted view is that the Prose interlude was composed as the introduction to the Song and then the Prayer was placed before them both. 513 According to Collins, the prose passage “must have been composed as an addition to the Book of Daniel and cannot have circulated in any other context”—that is, it presupposes Dan 3. 514 Furthermore, if the prose interlude was composed for its context, then its original language was probably Greek. 515 However, Moore suggests that the scribe of the prose narrative either elaborated on MT 3:24–28 or may have used a variant form of the story in circulation at the time. He cites Charles Ball with regard to Talmudic and Midrashic refer511.  Moore, The Additions, 65. 512.  Kuhl, Die drei Männer, 163. 513.  Collins, Daniel, 198. 514.  Ibid., 198, 204; see also Kottsieper, “Zusätze,” 219. 515.  By contrast, Moore believes that it was part of an originally Semitic composition (The Additions, 41). The Prayer and the Song are commonly thought to have been translated into Greek from Hebrew or, in the case of the Song, possibly from Aramaic.

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ences to various versions. Some of these references have brief summaries and even some quotations. 516 Kottsieper goes even further and argues that the entire OG addition 3:24–91a (with the exception of redactional additions in vv. 25 and 46) is an independent story tradition from Dan 3. 517 The prose interlude was inserted by a redactor who made superficial additions to make it fit smoothly with the main text. Since Th is almost word for word identical with the OG, it is just making stylistic changes that correspond to what Kottsieper thinks of as the proSadduccean reworking of “Th” that was carried out in Bel and Susanna. Furthermore, Kottsieper suggests that the Greek thus solves a problem about the abruptness of the mention of the fourth figure in MT 3:25 (OG/Th 91). In MT 3:24, the young men have just been thrown into the furnace, and immediately thereafter, in MT 3:25, the king is astonished, rises, and asks everyone if they had indeed thrown in three men. When they answer in the affirmative, he responds that he sees four men, not three, in the flames and that the fourth looks like a divine being. The king’s astonishment introduces a moment of suspense for the reader of the MT; one must wait until the end of the king’s conversation before his astonishment is explained. (Other scholars, however, think this is not precipitate and that the text is not clumsy; this is just suspenseful story-telling on the part of MT. 518) By contrast, in the Greek Additions, with the presence of the prose interlude, there is no suspense about why the king is astonished because the text has already described the angel’s presence and his cooling down of the furnace. In addition, the MT does not explicitly explain that the angel or divine being has saved the men but instead lets the reader assume that they have been saved apart from the activity of the angel, who is merely walking around with them as a sign from God. In the Greek Additions, Azariah’s prayer is the young men’s first reaction to salvation, even before the chilling of the furnace. Kottsieper believes that the Additions have a different theology than MT Dan 3: 519 it is not about the heathen king and his recognition of the true religion but about steadfast obedience to the Torah in the face of danger. Another piece of evidence that the prose interlude of the Addition is independent from the story of Dan 3 is that the three friends are called by their Hebrew names—Hananiah/Ananias, Azariah/Azarias, and Mishael/Misael— instead of their Babylonian names—Shadrach/Sedrach, Meshach/Misach, and Abednego/Abdenago—which are used throughout the MT of Daniel 3. (Th follows MT in its use of the Babylonian names everywhere except in the Addition, vv. 24–90. The OG, however, strangely uses the Babylonian names until v. 18 but 516. Charles James Ball, “The Additions to Daniel II: The History of Susanna,” in H. Wace, ed., The Holy Bible: Apocrypha (London: Murray, 1888), 2.323–43, esp. pp. 305–6. 517.  Kottsieper, “Zusätze,” 219. 518.  See, for instance, Collins, Daniel, 198; Kuhl, Die Drei Männer, 85. 519.  Kottsieper, “Zusätze,” 225–29.

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then starts using the Hebrew name of Azariah/Azarias in vv. 19–23, before the introduction to the Prayer of Azariah begins in v. 24.) Are the OG, Th, and MT editions truly variant story traditions? And is the prose interlude of OG and Th different enough from the earlier story in vv. 1–23 to justify calling them variant editions in each collection? To answer the first question, OG and Th differ from MT in their ch. 3 by both having time for hymn-singing and the angel’s direct help. The main differences between the three versions of ch. 3 revolve around the issue of who is punished with death in the furnace: the MT punishes not the slanderers who set the events in motion but the executioners (those who threw the three men into the fire). Th punishes only Chaldeans who are caught near the furnace by the high flame in v. 46, after the Prayer of Azariah, but does not have anyone die when the men are thrown in initially, in v. 22. This seems to fit the court-conflict genre better, because we can assume that the Chaldeans who slandered the three Jewish men are among those standing around the furnace. The punishment fits the crime: the executioners are merely following directions and are not the rivals of the Jews. OG punishes both the executioners in v. 22 and any of the Chaldeans who are caught near the furnace, but this means that the story in the OG is very awkward. In regard to the differences between the OG and Th, it is possible that Th is smoothing out the narrative. If it is incorporating another version, it has done so with skill—with the exception of the oddness of having Azariah sing in the flames without the cooling benefit of the angel, who only cools the furnace once Azariah’s prayer is finished (unless the cooling is meant to have occurred earlier and is only reported later). As for the OG, it exhibits clumsiness with the Additions in several places (not only in ch. 3) and does not incorporate them nearly as well as Th. The OG may be attempting to fit two stories together—one with the tradition of executioners alone being killed, and the second with the death of all Chaldeans near the furnace, including the executioners—but it is difficult to judge.

4.2.5.2.  The OG Preface to Dan 5 OG Daniel 5 begins with a preface that seems to be a duplicate of sorts to the rest of the chapter in the OG, not merely a synopsis of the chapter’s contents. 520 There is no similar prologue in the MT or Th. The OG preface reads in English: King Baltasar made a great feast on the day of the inauguration of his palace and from his leaders he invited two thousand men. On that day, Baltasar, exalted from the wine and boasting, praised all the molten and graven gods, 521 in his 520.  R. G. Kratz, Translatio imperii, 11–76; idem, “The Visions of Daniel,” in The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, 91–113; Kellenberger, “Textvarianten in den DanielLegenden als Zeugnisse mündlicher Tradierung? ” 222. 521.  Ms88, SyH add: “of the nations.”

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drink, 522 but to the most high God, he did not give praise. In that very night, there appeared fingers like a human’s and they wrote on the plaster of the house, upon the wall opposite the lampstand: “Mane, phares, thekel.” And the interpretation of them is: mane, it has been numbered; phares, it has been taken away; thekel, it has been established (Pap967 “it will be established”).

The preface is not merely a summary of the Dan 5 story, because it does not mention Daniel and his responsibility for the interpretation and has extra details or omissions not found elsewhere: 523 the time of the feast is set at the dedication of the palace; the number of people at the feast is 2,000 (instead of MT’s “thousand” 524 and Th’s “thousands”); the preface does not tell of the theft and desecration of the temple vessels as in 5:2; the precise words of the writing on the wall are recounted here in the preface to the story and not in the body of the story, which has only the interpretation (OG 5:17); and the order of the three words μανε, φαρες, θεκελ, is different from that in Th and MT 5:25 (Th has μανε, θεκελ, φαρες; MT has ‫ )מנא מנא תקל ופרסין‬and different from what is implied by the OG translation in 5:17 (see below). The order of the words, however, as Collins points out, are probably more logical in the OG preface than in the MT/Th, because the terms reflect weights or values in descending order: a mina was a large weight, a pares was a half mina, and a shekel one-fiftieth of a mina. 525 The interpretation of the mysterious words (that is, the riddle) in MT is multi­faceted, and so too in the OG. In the MT, the Aramaic vocalization of the words in 5:25, mĕnēʾ mĕnēʾ tĕkēl ûparsîn, means they are to be understood as Aramaic nouns in the qĕtēl-pattern, with the last noun parsîn in the plural perhaps to make a pun on the “Persians” of Daniel’s interpretation in MT 5:26. 526 Daniel’s interpretation, however, understands the riddle words not as nouns but as passive participles, “numbered,” “weighed,” and “divided.” MT 5:26: “This is the interpretation (pesher) of the writing/word: mĕnēʾ—God has numbered your kingdom and brought it to completion; tĕkēl—you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; pĕrēs—your kingdom has been divided and given to Media and Persia.” 527 This kind of dissonance between the MT riddle and its interpretation has been explained in diverse ways, sometimes by positing that 522.  Pap967 has πότῳ, “drink”; Ms88 and SyH have τόπῳ “place.” 523.  Wills argues that the proem is an older edition of the OG story (Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 121). 524. Literally: ‫“ בלׁשאצר מלכא עבד לחם רב לרברבנוהי אלף ולקבל אלפא חמרא ׁשתה‬Belshazzar the king made a great feast for his thousand nobles, and before the thousand he drank wine.” 525.  Collins, Daniel, 242, 250–52. 526.  Charles, Daniel, 136. 527.  MT’s interpretation does not reflect the dittography of ‫ מנא‬in the mysterious writing itself; it ignores it. For the interpretation that the first ‫ מנא‬is not part of the riddle but is a passive participle of the verb “to count,” see Otto Eissfeldt, “Die Menetekel-Inschrift und ihre Deutung,” ZAW 63 (1951), 109. He reads: “There have been counted: a mina, a shekel and

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the riddle of 5:25 had an original interpretation at variance with the interpretation in MT 5:26 as it stands now. 528 However, perhaps it is better to suppose that the riddle’s interpretation was always intentionally multivalent, even if the dittography of ‫ מנא‬and the incorrect order of metals are problematic. It has long been seen that the nouns of the riddle can be taken as weights—even as weights suggesting the worth of persons, as in the Talmud. 529 Interpreters have seen an echo of this in the great statue comprised of metals of decreasing value in Dan 2, which symbolized Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom of Babylon and its successors. The mina, the shekel, and the half-minas have been taken variously to represent Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, and Media and Persia (the last is actually explicit in the interpretation of 5:26) or as other Babylonian successors of Nebuchadnezzar: Amel-marduk and Neriglissar as minas, the shekel as Labashi-Marduk, and Nabonidus and Belshazzar as half-minas. 530 Collins finds most attractive Cross’s suggestion that ‫מנא‬, ‫פרס‬, and ‫ תקל‬refer to the three Babylonian rulers named in the Danielic traditions that we have: Nebuchadnezzar, Nabonidus (found in the Qumran Prayer of Nabonidus, 4Q242), and Belshazzar. But Collins states that “apparently the author neither knew nor perceived this aspect of the riddle,” and other wordplays probably were readily apparent: ‫ מנא‬can suggest the meaning “fate,” ‫ תקל‬can be understood as the imperfect of ‫קלל‬, “to be light,” and thus contain a play on MT’s “found wanting”; and ‫ פרס‬plays on “divide” and on “Persia.” Haag understands the measurements as indicating the unstoppable depreciation of the Babylonian kingdom’s value. 531 By contrast, in OG v. 17, the mysterious words on the wall are only interpreted, not pronounced as in the MT/Th (or as in the OG preface): “This is the writing: it has been numbered, it has been reckoned, it has been taken away. The hand that wrote ceased, and this is their interpretation.” Moreover, the order of words in v. 17 reflects the order of the riddle in the MT (‫)מנא מנא תקל ופרסין‬, not the order of the OG preface (μανε, φαρες, θεκελ). But when Daniel tells the king his interpretation again (vv. 26–28 in Ziegler/Munnich’s numbering intends to make the OG verses correspond to the MT, but vv. 26–28 are actually only one verse away from OG v. 17), the OG has this: “This is the interpretation of the half-minas.” For the interpretation that originally there was only one ‫מנא‬, see E. Haag, Die Errettung Daniels aus der Löwengrube, 31, 61. 528.  Collins says: “as regards the meaning, there is reason to believe that the interpretation given by Daniel was not that originally envisaged in the riddle” (Daniel, 250). 529. C. Clermont-Ganneau, “Mene, Thecel, et Phares et le festin de Balthasar,” JA 1, ser. 8 (1886), 36–67; English translation: R. W. Rogers, “Mene, Tekel, Peres and the Feast of Belshazzar,” Hebraica (1887), 87–102. Collins notes the Talmud tradition about the worth of people as measured in monetary units (Daniel, 251): b. Taʿanith: “It is good that a mina son of a half-mina come to a mina son of a mina, but not that a mina son of a mina come to a mina son of a half-mina.” 530.  Emil G. Kraeling, “The Handwriting on the Wall,” JBL 63 (1944), 17–18. 531.  Haag, Der Errettung Daniels aus der Löwengrube, 33, 61.

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writing: the time of your kingdom has been numbered, your kingdom has come to an end, it has been cut off and finished, your kingdom has been given to the Medes and the Persians.” The “time of your kingdom has been numbered” corresponds to ‫מנא‬/μανε, and “your kingdom has been given to the Medes and the Persians” to ‫פרס‬/φαρες. The other phrases (“your kingdom has come to an end, it has been cut off and finished”) may or may not correspond to ‫תקל‬/θεκελ. But why was the OG preface placed before OG Dan 5? A few proposals have been offered. Montgomery thought that it was probably included in the OG because the body of the story never reports the mysterious words written by the disembodied hand but merely translates them in 5:17 (“This is the writing: it has been numbered, it has been reckoned, it has been taken away”). 532 Grelot suggests that, because ch. 5 comes after ch. 8 in Pap967, the preface in the OG is an introduction to the second half of the book; however, there is nothing in the preface that presages the contents of chs. 6 and 9–12. 533 Wills proposes that the prologue/preface is a “doublet of vss 1–5 OG, and it is likely a key to the source of the chapter.” 534 He observes that the sin in the prologue is neglecting to praise God Most High in the course of praising the gods made of molten metal or carved by hand, but in the body of the OG story, the sin consists not only of the desecration of the Jerusalem temple vessels but also the praising of idols made with hands and the omission of praising the “God of eternity.” This compares to the MT/Th, which lists the sins of Belshazzar as the desecration of temple vessels and the praise of idols. 535 Wills suggests that the OG preface to Dan 5 is most likely prior to the rest of the OG ch. 5 and MT/Th because it seems unlikely that a redactor would have eliminated the theft and desecration of the vessels from the plot or used the older term “gods of molten metal or carved by hand” found, in the OG translation, only in earlier biblical books. Moreover, it seems more polytheistic than monotheistic to make the king’s sin failure to praise God while praising other gods. On the other hand, Collins believes that perhaps “the Greek interpretation is independent of the Aramaic but not necessarily prior or superior.” 536 What is striking is that the preface seems to be a truncated story, a bare skeleton that leaves many details of plot to the imagination. For instance, what is the reaction of Baltasar or his guests when they see the disembodied hand? Who interprets the writing on the wall left by the hand: the king himself or someone else? What is the king’s reaction to the interpretation? To what does the interpretation refer—that is, what is it that has been numbered, taken away, 532.  Montgomery, The Book of Daniel, 267 533. So Collins, Daniel, 241. See Pierre Grelot, “Le Chapitre V de Daniel dans la Septante,” Semitica 24 (1974), 45–66. 534.  Wills, Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 121. 535.  Ibid., 122–25. 536.  Collins, Daniel, 243.

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and established? Most importantly, does it come to pass? The main body of the OG story, just as in the MT and Th, answers these questions in extremely animated phrases. The king and his guests’ reactions to the hand include incredible amazement: in the OG, the king gets up in shock and cannot stop looking at the writing, which is described as huge; the crowd bursts into loud noise; the king shouts for his specialists, who are unable to decipher the writing; a declaration of a reward is published; the queen is called for, and she tells him about Daniel. Daniel then reads and interprets the writing for the king, specifying exactly what the king has done and how the kingdom will suffer. The king (who has no verbal response) then rewards Daniel, and the interpretation does indeed come to pass. The further detail of drinking from the temple vessels taken from Jerusalem is explained at both the beginning of the story and at its end, when the king is condemned by the interpretation. The even longer story in the MT (and Th) develops in a different direction, as noted earlier in this chapter. Instead of two attempts at decipherment, there is only one (the specialists only enter the room after the declaration of a reward). However, the MT adds a great deal to the queen’s speech about Daniel and heightens the tension and hostility between Daniel and the king. One possible solution to the purpose of the OG preface is that the text is what is called a “prompt text” in the scholarship of The Nights—that is, a written sketch of the basic core of a story on which a storyteller could expound. For the Nights, this was sometimes a bare outline of the story but could also include an appendix with the author/storyteller’s favorite elaborations. 537 The core story of the OG preface presents some key items to be remembered when telling the story but leaves others up to the storyteller. The occasion of the feast is suggested and Baltasar/Belshazzar’s subsequent high spirits are mentioned, as well as the actions of the king that will prompt the mysterious fingers to write the ominous message on the wall. The actual words of the mysterious writing are present, as well as a very brief interpretation, but there is no further elaboration and no concern with their reception and fulfillment. The result is a core story that lacks suspense or any of the details, such as particulars about other characters in addition to the king or any emotions or reactions of those characters or the relationship of the Most High God to the interpretation and its consequences, and so on. What is a most astonishing event—a disembodied hand coming out of nowhere to write a huge inscription on the wall—is left flat in the OG preface, a core plot that is ripe for development and elaboration. The body of the story in the OG fills out the details in a specific way, as do the MT and Th. 537.  See above in chapter 2 of this study. Professional reciters and storytellers were quite common in the Middle East (Duncan Black MacDonald, “The Earlier History of the Arabian Nights,” 370).

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If the OG preface is a prompt text, this explains its truncated nature as well as the details that differentiate it from the more complete versions of the OG body, MT 5, and Th 5. Prompt texts do not need to be a synopsis of all possible versions or editions of a story but a starting point, with basic details to help the storyteller along. Nonetheless, why would a written prompt text remain side by side with a more elaborate version of the story? Once again, this is a feature of story-collections that are closer to orality and performance and more in flux.

4.2.5.3.  The OG and Th Variants of Daniel in the Lions’ Pit Both the OG and Th have two stories about Daniel in the lions’ pit: one in Dan 6 and one in Bel and the Serpent. The differences between their editions of Dan 6 and that of the MT (discussed above) do not concern us here. What is important is the relationship of Th’s duplicates of the core story about the lions’ pit to each other and the relationship of OG’s duplicate stories to each other. Th’s story in Dan 6 is a court conflict in which Daniel is one of three tacticians (τακτικοί) over the satraps of Darius’ kingdom (G just calls them “three men”). By contrast, Th’s Bel and the Serpent is set in the reign of Cyrus, after the death of Astyages. There is no mention of Darius; Th probably adds Astyages as another king between Darius (ch. 12) and Cyrus. Th Bel does not introduce Daniel; it expects the reader to know who he is. The most obvious difference between Th Dan 6 and Th Bel is the Habbakuk episode, the source of which is a matter of much speculation. In terms of the plot, however, his appearance in Th Bel is motivated by the need to feed Daniel. While in Th Dan 6, Daniel has only one night with the lions, in Th Bel, Daniel is there for six days, long enough for him to be quite hungry. The lions’-pit motif in Theodotion is motivated differently in the two duplicates. In Th Dan 6, the pit is a known threat in advance (the king’s decree to pray to no one but him specifies this punishment), but Daniel persists in performing his religious observances in spite of the decree against doing so and in spite of the potential punishment. In Th Bel, Daniel reveals the secret of the statue of Bel and destroys the great serpent (deities to the Babylonians) without being aware of any specific consequence. The king, too, is seemingly unaware of this. However, in both Th Dan 6 and Th Bel, the king is on the side of Daniel and quite dismayed at the prospect of Daniel’s doom. In Th Dan 6, the king is certain that Daniel’s God will save Daniel, although he does spend the night in worry over him. This is in contrast to Th Bel, where nothing is said of the king’s expectation that Daniel will be saved. After Daniel is pulled out of the pit, however, the king in both tales rejoices and praises the God of Daniel. The pit itself has no need for introduction in Th; the men throw Daniel into “the lions’ pit,” as if its existence were known. This may be because Th Bel is placed at the end of the Book of Daniel, and the pit’s existence is presumed to be known from

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the earlier story in Dan 6. The actual punishment in Th Bel is in v. 42: “and he (the king) pulled him (Daniel) out but threw into the pit those responsible for attempting his (Daniel’s) ruin, and they were immediately devoured before him.” The exact number of those who had tried to ruin Daniel is left unclear. In Dan 6, the number of those thrown into the pit is much larger; v. 24: “They brought the men who had slandered Daniel, and they were thrown into the lions’ pit—they and their children and their wives. And before they reached the bottom of the pit the lions overpowered them and crushed all their bones.” This totals 122 men plus their wives and children!—those who had slandered Daniel include the two tacticians and all 120 satraps who had slandered Daniel. The grisly humor of this is clear. As for the Old Greek, the story in OG Dan 6 is much the same as in Th Dan 6 but slightly longer, and the king is portrayed as slightly weaker. Daniel’s two co-leaders over the satraps are the ones who actually make the edict before going to king Darius to get him to establish and confirm it. Daniel is specifically called the king’s “friend” by the two men, and the king (OG Dan 6:14–15) exerts more energy to try to save Daniel from the two men but is unable to do so. OG Dan 6 also explicitly states that one of the reasons for sealing the pit was that Daniel might not be removed by the two men or even pulled up by the king himself (v. 17). Moreover, it says that God shut the mouths of the lions after Daniel was placed in the pit rather than maintaining the suspense until the king’s discovery of this fact. When the king goes to the pit and calls out, he asks not only if Daniel has been saved by God from the lions but if the lions have even injured him. Daniel’s response is a little accusatory: not only has he been saved because he was righteous and has no ignorance or sin but he also charges the king: “you listened to people who mislead kings, and you threw me into the lions’ pit for destruction” (v. 22). All the authorities then gather, and the two men are thrown in with their children and wives (this is different from Th’s huge number of 122 satraps and tacticians with their families). Darius’s circular at the end not only tells all the peoples of his kingdom to worship Daniel’s God but declares that he, Darius, will do so also, because “the handmade idols are not able to save as God redeemed Daniel” (v. 27; perhaps a reference back to the bronze statue of Bel in OG Bel or to the idols of OG Dan 5). In OG Bel and the Serpent, the story is immediately tied to a “prophecy of Hambakoum the son of Iesous of the tribe of Levi.” Daniel is introduced as if he is an unknown in v. 2: “There was a certain person, a priest, whose name was Daniel son of Abal, a companion of the king of Babylon.” The story of the statue occurs in vv. 3–21, followed by the destruction of the great serpent by Daniel in vv. 23–40. In the OG, the king is accused by “all those from the country” of being a Jew, and they unite against him. Unlike Th Bel, the people do not ask for Daniel to be handed over; it is the king himself who without any threats declares that he will give Daniel “over for destruction.” There are seven lions again, fed daily

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two bodies but no sheep, and an explicit reason is given for throwing Daniel in: so that “he might be devoured and not even have a burial” (OG Bel 31–32). The visit by Hambakoum (Habakkuk) occurs on the sixth day, as in Th. The relationship between OG Dan 6 and OG Bel is rather curious. There are some indications that OG Bel is aware of OG Dan 6. Daniel is called a “friend” of the king in OG Dan 6:13 and a “companion” of the king in OG Bel 1. On the other hand, the pit is introduced as if Dan 6 had not preceded it, although this time a reason is expressly given why Daniel is thrown into the pit in Bel—so that he might not even be allowed to be buried! In sum, the duplicate stories in the Greek editions of Daniel (OG/Th prose interlude of ch. 3; OG/Th Bel and the Serpent; and OG’s preface to ch. 5) indicate that the Greek editions are nearer orality or are more fluid, epecially the OG, which has three duplicates to Th’s two. The OG 5 preface seems to be the most basic of texts, a written prompt text on which a storyteller might elaborate. This does not have to indicate that it is the earliest form of the story; there is no way to tell if it is earlier than the main body of OG or MT/Th 5. In general, however, the OG often has less evidence of editing to smooth out or transition into duplicates. By contrast, Th usually shows more awareness of the rest of its collection (for example, the prose addition in ch. 3 is a retelling, but the author-compiler has told the general tale of ch. 3 without punishing anyone until the prose addition, where only one group is punished by burning, instead of OG’s two groups). M. I. Gerhardt proposed three possibilities to explain the presence of duplicates: (1) the same motif or plot has been treated independently twice; (2) there were two different versions of the same story that arose in the course of transmission, or (3) one story was imitated by another, which modified it. In the case of the duplicate lions’ pit narratives, option 1 seems most likely. The basic motif of casting into a lions’ pit a courtier who is then saved by divine intervention is probably unique to the book of Daniel, but the two stories of Dan 6 and Bel are very different outside of this single motif (e.g., it is Daniel’s destruction of the serpent that motivates him being thrown to lions in Bel, not the plotting of rival courtiers who use his religious practices against him). In the case of the OG Dan 5 preface and its relationship to the story that follows in the rest of the chapter, Gerhardt’s option 3 seems preferable. The preface gives a spare telling of the core story, with any number of retellings possible, as exemplified by the lively narrative found in the main part of Dan 5. However, it might not be correct to identify the preface as the original story; instead, it is more of a pattern—that is, a written “prompt text” for oral or written retellings (this presumes that the story was already in existence and already subject to tellings and, thus, it does not represent the original form). As for the prose addition to ch. 3, this seems more likely to be a case of option 2, a duplicate that arose in the course of transmission, whenever the Song and Prayer were included in ch. 3, and which Th more successfully incorporated than OG.

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4.2.6. Open-endedness A final main feature of story-collections that is shared by the Book of Daniel that they are open-ended or incomplete. Any number of stories could have been included in the framework of the Book of Daniel, and they could have been arranged in a different order. (This is no doubt true of the visions as well.) The fixing of the stories to the reign of a specific king or to a particular year is probably due in large degree to the author-compiler of Dan 1–6, and these details were perhaps not part of the stories when they were independent. As far as we can tell, there is nothing to most of the stories that must occur in the reign of a particular king, with the exception of ch. 1, the prologue story, which gives the setting of young Jewish nobles brought to Nebuchadnezzar’s court after the Babylonian king’s siege of Jerusalem. There is nothing that requires that the story about the lions’ pit occur in the reign of Darius. And even if chs. 2–5 are ultimately tied to traditions about the historical last king of Babylon, Nabonidus—in his own accounts a great dreamer, and both according to himself and others an advocate of an alternative Babylonian religion—then why are these traditions here linked specifically to Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, not to other names? 538 Why not more or fewer stories from Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, or more from Belshazzar’s or Darius’s reigns? The latter is a good friend of Daniel in ch. 6, and Daniel is one of his triumvirs. Why no story about Cyrus the Persian in the MT or more stories about him in the Greek editions? Why no stories about Xerxes/Ahasuerus the Mede (father of Darius in 9:1) or Astyages (probably the father of Cyrus in Th Bel v. 1)? The former is said to take the kingdom from Belshazzar the Babylonian in OG Dan at 5:31. Moreover, why not more stories about the three friends? Why not more protagonists—other Jews in the Babylonian exile or the early days of the Persian period? Perhaps Susanna was added to the OG and Th for just this reason, and if Puech is right that the Qumran Tales of the Persian Court actually contains stories of Daniel and his friends under pseudonyms, they could fit here, too. (See section 5.1.1.1.8 below.) The setting allows for any number of stories or visions. 539 Furthermore, the Daniel narrator hints, or allows a character to hint at, other unused tales, just as Ovid did in the Metamorphoses: Ovid often referred in “repeated ‘throw-away’ 538.  DiTommaso has noted that the order of kings in the biblical Daniel court tales permanently linked later traditions about Daniel’s dream interpretation solely to the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. This explains why none of the first-person visions of chs. 7–12 occur in his reign and none of the later Daniel apocrypha from the fourth century c.e. onward have visions set in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar (DiTommaso, “4QPseudo-DanielA-B [4Q243–4Q244],” 108–9). 539.  Nonetheless, note that the OG transposed chs. 5–6 with chs. 7–8 in Pap967 but does not insert any new stories or visions in the middle of those that were in MT. (The OG and Th Additions of Susanna and Bel are appended, not inserted. Only the ch. 3 prose interlude and the hymn and prayer are inserted.) So the MT edition and its order must have quickly gained

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references to stories or variant versions which for one reason or another he did not choose to include or tell in full.” 540 In Dan 5, the queen mother’s speech to Belshazzar refers to Daniel as the one who, in the days of Nebuchadnezzar, was “found to have enlightenment, understanding, and wisdom like the wisdom of the gods.” Furthermore, Nebuchadnezzar had made him “chief of the magicians, enchanters, Chaldeans and diviners, because an excellent spirit, knowledge, and understanding to interpret dreams, explain riddles, and solve problems were found in this Daniel” (MT 5:11–12). The term “chief of the magicians” (‫ )רב חרטמיא‬echoes MT 4:6, where Nebuchadnezzar himself calls Daniel by this term; however, the actual story about the incident in which Nebuchadnezzar had reason to confer the title on Daniel is nowhere told in the biblical Book of Daniel. To attain this title, Daniel must have triumphed over the other courtiers in a smashingly delightful narrative at whose details we can only guess. The existence of other stories illustrating Daniel’s abilities must be presumed as well. Daniel’s dream interpretation is amply illustrated in Dan 2 and 4, but his ability to “explain riddles” and “solve problems” (literally, “untie knots”), the latter a term that has magical connotations, are arguably only illustrated in the Book of Daniel by Dan 5 itself in the events that occur after the queen’s speech (the reading and interpretation of the mysterious writing on the wall that has baffled the Babylonians). Thus, the queen knows of previous occasions on which Daniel displayed his impressive talents to Nebuchadnezzar, resulting in great acclaim and renown. Note, too, that in the Dan 6 story, Daniel is a triumvir, one of three men in charge of the Median kingdom under King Darius. How did this come to be? All previous promotions of Daniel have a back-story, but this one does not. The narrator, much as Ovid was wont to do in the Metamorphoses, hints at material s/he does not include. We are left wondering what marvelous stories about Daniel’s amazing achievements in the ancient Babylonian or Persian courts are lost to us.

4.3. Summary This new perspective on Daniel does not offer simple solutions to old problems but may instead show that those problems are more complex than sometimes assumed. Moreover, there seem to be limitations on our ability to deal with certain problems that are inherent in the material and that are best recognized as such. authority, although the option to append new material was not totally cut off until probably after 70 c.e. 540.  For example: ii, 580–90, iv, 55–168, 276; vii 362, 465, viii, 26, x, 65–71, 729,; xiii, 715, 717; see Melville’s translation of Ovid, Metamorphoses, xiv. Something similar happens in Sethe II, when two magicians meet again after 1500 years and they refer to past episodes in their contentious relationship that are otherwise unknown (col. 6).

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The major result of viewing Daniel against a background of story-collections is a new perspective not only on the narratives (Daniel 1–6) but also on the book of Daniel as a whole, including the Greek versions with Additions. With regard to the text-critical problems of Daniel, the first part of the Daniel story-collection to be gathered, chs. 4–6—which vary so widely between MT/Th and the OG— are best seen as duplicate editions of the same three tales rather than part of a reconstructed stemma. Moreover, these variant editions of core stories interacted with each other, as did the other forms of the book, even the final editions— a fact that sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish the so-called “earlier” or “more original” passages or verses. This is not to say that some passages in one edition have additions or glosses that are influenced or borrowed from another but that in some cases there is no clarity and may never be. Comparison to the story-collection genre and the general principles behind collections has also elucidated aspects of the final Daniel editions. The authorcompiler in each case was concerned with shaping a collection, this time of stories and visions. As a result, MT Daniel concentrates on Daniel, the mantic courtier, and the stories become a frame or launching-point for the visions; Daniel, the interpreter of dreams, becomes a dreamer himself. Th Daniel is an attempt to produce a Daniel biography or vita, since it surveys his career beginning when he was a young man in Susanna and follows him through the reigns of several Near Eastern rulers, then ends with him in the court of Cyrus the Persian in Bel and the Serpent, presumably after decades have passed. For its part, the Old Greek shapes its collection of stories and visions with a beginning and ending that focuses on the superior virtues, piety, wisdom, and education of Jewish young people. But in many ways, all of these collections share a great open-endedness: more stories and more visions could be added to them all. Furthermore, in the final editions of Daniel as well as in any earlier collections of the stories, it is clear that the very gathering and compiling of these items resulted in what Fowler calls a “transformation of genre.” The stories alone are Jewish court tales, but together they repetitively emphasize the ability of Jews to succeed even in the context of a foreign empire because of the combination of their own abilities and God’s aid. The story-collection of MT Dan 1–6 becomes literature of encouragement for Jews in exile in the pre-Maccabean period, a way to succeed as a Jew under foreign rule while also resisting total assimilation to the dominant culture and religion. Finally, when placed alongside the Maccabeanperiod anti-Antiochene visions, the entire MT book becomes part of the macrogenre “apocalypse” and rallies the expectation of an eventual overthrow of foreign empires, a time when there will be no need for Jewish assimilation, even on the mildest of terms. The Greek Daniel editions, by returning to the stories again, take Daniel and the reader back to the world before the terrifying visions, where successful coexistence with empire is possible. Life in the diaspora continues, even after Daniel has concluded his dreaming and sealed the book.

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The Book of Daniel in Light of Ancient Near Eastern Story-Collections and Related Material When Daniel is set against the context of story-collections and related materials from the surrounding ancient Near Eastern literatures, some of the literary traditions and processes from which the Daniel stories arose are clarified. In chapter four, the goal was to view the Book of Daniel, especially chs. 1–6, in the context of a formal definition of story-collection and typology; in this chapter, the objective is to view Daniel as an ancient Near Eastern product that developed under the influences of genre conventions current in the Hellenistic period, using materials or motifs available at the time. In the parlance of scholars of the Medieval story-collection genre, we will attempt to see what ancient “sources and analogues” can be found for the biblical Daniel narratives and, to some extent, for the book as a whole. 1 We will first investigate the group of narrative or apocalyptic compositions from the Second Temple period that have been referred to as the “Daniel pool of traditions” or the “Daniel cycle” to see if any of these can actually be considered sources for the biblical Daniel narratives, as is sometimes claimed. This includes material from Qumran, Josephus, and elsewhere. Then we will look carefully at the ancient Near Eastern court tale, a genre and corpus to which the Daniel stories have often been said to belong, and at ancient Near Eastern story-collections, to see what features Daniel shares. As outlined in chapter three, in addition to several story-collections from around the Mediterranean, there are at least three relevant story-collections from ancient Egypt (Tales from King Cheops’ Court in Papyrus Westcar, The Myth of the Sun’s Eye, and The Stories of Petese) and one from the Hurrian-Hittite sphere (the parable collection that may or may not be part of the Song of Release/Epic of Emancipation). Moreover, there is an entire corpus of 1.  This is not the place to review all of the links that have been suggested—from Mesopotamian, Persian, Egyptian, Canaanite, and Ugaritic sources—but a brief overview will be attempted. Because this study concentrates on the stories, less effort will be made to look again at sources for the apocalyptic visions in Dan 7–12.

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court tales that have largely escaped the attention of most biblical scholars, especially texts in Egyptian or in Aramaic from Egypt. To date, biblical scholars have not much utilized the relevant material from Egypt, other than the story of Aḥiqar and perhaps ʿOnchsheshonqy. After reviewing Daniel’s analogues in the ancient Near Eastern court-tale genre and story-collections from the region, we will then investigate specific parallels to the structure of Daniel and individual court tales, before discussing what these have to say about the origin and development of the biblical Daniel narratives.

5.1.  Sources and Analogues to the Daniel Legenda 5.1.1.  The Pool of Daniel Traditions in the Second Temple Period (The Daniel Cycle) There is evidence of a large pool of Daniel material from which the biblical Daniel story-collections were drawn. 2 Not only are there divergent Semitic and Greek editions of Daniel, but the book was apparently very popular in the last centuries b.c.e. and first century c.e. and was considered quite authoritative at Qumran. 3 Eight manuscripts of the Hebrew-Aramaic Daniel text were found at Qumran (dating from the second century b.c.e. to the mid-first century c.e.), in addition to perhaps seven or more other texts that could be part of the larger Daniel cycle (dating from the first century b.c.e. to the mid-first century c.e.). Moreover, Josephus in his Antiquities (first century c.e.) deals with Daniel at length: he speaks of “books” (plural, βιβλία) written by Daniel (Antiquities 10.267–269), and this may reflect Josephus’ awareness of additional writings that have not survived. 4 Other Daniel material is found in the Lives of the Prophets and the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, two works that date into the Common Era but that might have a much earlier core. After 70 c.e., there was a near hiatus of the production of Danielic material until the fourth century c.e. All three categories of apocryphal Daniel material (legenda, apocalyptic, and prognostic) demonstrate the influence of the biblical Daniel texts from this time onward. 5 This seems to match Talmon’s view that 2.  Wills, Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 76: “There are enough common motifs in the Danielic materials, including Prayer of Nabonidus, to justify the hypothesis of a ‘Danielic school,’ through which these materials have passed.” 3. See Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, appendix 1, 217–43. Both David and Daniel are called “prophets” at Qumran; like the statement in Matt 24:15, this may only mean that they are divinely-inspired, not that they were placed in the Nebiʾim/Prophets section of the Hebrew Bible. 4.  DiTommaso believes that this must refer to something other than the Greek Additions (The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 9 n. 32). 5.  The apocryphal Daniel literature from late antiquity and the Middle Ages has a wide scope: “There are Daniel texts where the action is related in the first person and there are third-

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pluriformity of the biblical text lasted until 70 c.e., after which the biblical texts were essentially fixed. Before 70 c.e., the relationship among the Daniel materials is complicated. As DiTommaso suggests, we can not assume “that the simple biblical/post-biblical relationship characteristic to the Book of Daniel and the later Daniel apocrypha applies also to the early Daniel literature.” 6 These texts may have had a more fluid relationship to each other than is often supposed.

5.1.1.1.  Daniel and Qumran In addition to the eight scrolls of biblical Daniel at Qumran, there are other fragmentary scrolls, all in Aramaic, that may be related to the Book of Daniel in various ways: they explicitly mention the name of Daniel or have similar terminology or expressions, or else they contain similar motifs and themes, such as a court setting and apocalyptic visions. The direction of influence is much debated; some of these works may even be sources of the MT book, but others clearly make use of MT Daniel. Another possibility is that some are parallel, simultaneous developments of a preexisting Daniel tradition. In the early days of Qumran discoveries in the 1950s, the first scrolls thought to be related to the biblical Book of Daniel were 4Q242, the Prayer of Nabonidus (abbreviated as 4QPrNabonidus ar), and the two “Pseudo-Daniel Texts,” 4Q243–244 and 4Q245 (4QpsDaniel a-b ar and 4QpsDaniel c ar), which were at first thought to consist of a single composition. Since then, and especially since the early 1990s, as more and more of the Dead Sea scrolls were published, other materials have come to light. At a 1991 conference, Devorah Dimant presented a list of narratives with visions and forecasts in a court setting that, like Daniel 2, 4, and 5, are court tales in that they “have preserved a narrative about a royal court, referring to a king and his courtiers. In all these texts, the protagonist is a wise courtier and/or dream interpreter who converses with the king.” 7 She person episodes about Daniel’s life and times. There are Daniel apocalypses and apocalyptic oracles, Daniel astronomical and geomantic texts, Daniel mystery plays, and Daniel dream manuals. There are full-blown narratives involving the prophet, poems about him, and shorter traditions, embedded in a variety of formats, that touch on a particular aspect of his life, deeds, or death. There are even tales that revolve around other figures from the Book of Daniel, such as Nebuchadnezzar, the three youths from the fiery furnace, and Susanna” (see DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 12). On the other hand, the three categories of Daniel apocrypha are “extremely rigid” and do not overlap one another in their portrayal of Daniel. 6.  DiTommaso, “4QPseudo-Daniel A–B (4Q243–4Q244) and the Book of Daniel,” 105. 7. D. Dimant, “Apocalyptic Texts at Qumran,” in The Community of the Renewed Covenant: The Notre Dame Symposium on the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. E. Ulrich and J. Vanderkam [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993]), 185. Moreover, in consideration of apocalyptic texts found at Qumran, Dimant suggested that 4Q390 dealt with the motif of 70 years and a chronology of history similarly to Daniel 9 (Dimant, “The Seventy Weeks Chronology [Dan 9,24–27] in the Light of New Qumranic Texts,” in A. S. van der Woude, ed., The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings, 57–76).

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includes the Aramaic Apocalypse (4Q246 or 4QApocalypse ar), the Four Kingdoms apocalypse (4Q552–553 or 4QFour Kingdoms a-b ar), Proto-Esther or Tales of the Persian Court (4Q550), the Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242), and PseudoDaniel (4Q243–244) as all containing this kind of narrative material. In both the Aramaic Apocalypse and the Four Kingdoms, a seer forecasts a succession of kingdoms. In the latter, four kingdoms are apparently represented by four trees in a scheme very like that in Dan 2 and 7. The Prayer of Nabonidus includes a Jewish diviner who heals the Babylonian king Nabonidus and is very reminiscent of story of Nebuchadnezzar’s affliction and the intervention of Daniel in Dan 4. On the other hand, only the Pseudo-Daniel texts (4Q243–244 and 4Q245) actually mention Daniel. 8 The Tales of the Persian Court text involves a Persian court setting, Jewish protagonists—one of whom is in conflict with another (apparently non-Jewish) courtier—and has several themes in common with Dan 1–6. Although this text nowhere mentions Daniel, the editor of the critical edition, Émile Puech, has suggested that either “Bagasraw” or “Patireza” (possibly Bagasraw’s son), Jewish characters with Persian names, might be Daniel under a pseudonym. 9 Furthermore, this fragmentary composition may itself be a cycle of tales if not a small story-collection. Three additional scrolls have been thought to have some connection to the biblical Daniel. In her consideration of possible sources of the Book of Daniel, Esther Eshel added 4Q248 (4QHistorical Text or “Acts of a Greek King”) and 4Q530 (The Book of Giants) col. 2 to the possible list. 10 Since the latter is part of a large body of Enochic traditions, it is not considered here in this discussion of parabiblical Daniel material. Moreover, Eugene Ulrich, the main editor of the Hebrew and Aramaic Daniel scrolls from Qumran, proposed that 4QDaniel e (4Q116), whose fragments preserve two columns of Dan 9:12–17, could have been a source for Daniel rather than the preserved fragments of a manuscript containing the entire biblical book. 4QDaniel e seems to have a small number of lines per column and large letters and was perhaps a shorter manuscript or an excerpt of the biblical text, as was common with some manuscripts of Deuteronomy (4Q37, 4Q41, 4Q44) and Psalms (4Q89, 4Q90, and 5Q5), which preserve prayers or liturgical passages. 11 If it contained only the prayer of 9:4b–19, it is possible, in view of its second century b.c.e. date, “that it is a copy of an originally 8.  Qumran “court tales” that may have contained visions but that are too fragmentary to be sure of this include Aramaic Vision (4Q556, 557, 558), the Elect of God (4Q534), and the so-called Aaronic Text (4Q541) (Dimant, “Apocalyptic Texts at Qumran,” 185–86). 9. É. Puech, Qumrân grotte 4 XXVII: Textes araméens deuxième partie: 4Q550–4Q575a, 4Q580–4Q587 et appendices (DJD 37; Oxford: Clarendon, 2009), 9. 10. Esther Eshel, “Possible Sources of the Book of Daniel,” in The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, vol. 2, 387–94. 11. Eugene Ulrich et al., Qumran Cave 4, XI: Psalms to Chronicles (DJD 16; Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 287; idem, “From Literature to Scripture: Reflections on the Growth of a Text’s Authoritativeness,” DSD 10 (2003), 16–17.

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independent prayer that had been incorporated into the Book of Daniel because of its appropriateness.” 12 Finally, two other extremely fragmentary scrolls, 4Q489 (4QpapApocalypse ar) and 4Q551 (4QDanSuz? ar), have also been connected to the Book of Daniel. The latter, however, is most likely to be associated with Judg 19 instead: 13 Nickelsburg has convincingly demonstrated that the fragments show verbal parallels to the targum of the biblical story of the Levite and his concubine in Judg 19:16–30. 14 Therefore, although scholars such as Peter Flint and others number the parabiblical Daniel tradition at Qumran as nine scrolls comprising seven compositions, 15 our list of scrolls from Qumran to be discussed in connection to Daniel has some slight differences and includes the following: 1.  4QPrNabonidus ar (4Q242) 2.  4QHistorical Text (4Q248), formerly “Acts of a Greek King” or “Pseudo-History” 12. Eugene Ulrich, “Daniel, Book of: Hebrew and Aramaic Text,” in Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. Lawrence H. Schiffman and James C. VanderKam [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 1.171. 13.  It mentions an “old man” in line 2, a gathering of all the men of the city to speak before a house in line 4, and a request from someone (perhaps the old man) in line 5: “My brothers, do not act wickedly.” Very little else is preserved, however, and the name “Daniel” does not appear. If Milik was correct in seeing a court setting with the selection of a judge here, this would be a very significant finding, since none of the Daniel Additions in Greek (the stories of Susanna and Bel and the Serpent or the prayer and hymn of Dan 3), have yet been found in the Qumran library (J. T. Milik, “Daniel et Susanne à Qumrân,” in M. Carrez, J. Doré and Grelot, eds., De la Tôrah au Messie: Mélanges Henri Cazelles [Paris: Desclée, 1981], 337–59). The critical edition of 4Q551 is Émile Puech, Qumrân grotte 4 XXVII: Textes araméens deuxième partie, 47–56. See also García Martínez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated, 289–90; García Martínez and Tigchelaar, eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 2.1103; and K. Beyer, ATTM, 1.224–25. 14.  George W. E. Nickelsburg “4Q551: A Vorlage to the Story of Susanna or a Text Related to Judges 19? ” JJS 48 (1997), 349–51. The Aramaic text of 4Q551 and the targum share the characters of an “old man” and “the men of the city,” and in the targum it is clearly the old man who says to the men of the city, “My brothers, do not act wickedly.” Nickelsburg believes that, although 4Q551 was not part of a targum of Judg 19 nor was it a version of that story, it was at least influenced by Judg 19 (just as Judg 19 is based on the Sodom and Gomorrah story of Gen 19) and is thus not related to Daniel. 15.  Flint’s list includes 4Q551 (4QDanSuz? ar) but not 4Q248. See Peter Flint, “The Daniel Tradition at Qumran,” in John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint, eds., The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, 2.329–67; idem, “Apocrypha, Other Known Writings, and Psesudepigrapha,” in Peter W. Flint and James C. VanderKam, eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 2.24–66, esp. pp. 53–62. (Flint had earlier listed only three texts at Qumran in addition to the biblical Daniel scrolls: the two PseudoDaniel texts and the Prayer of Nabonidus; Flint, “The Daniel Tradition at Qumran,” in Craig A. Evans and Peter W. Flint, eds., Eschatology, Messianism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997], 41–60). George J. Brooke and M. Nel have the same list as Flint (Brooke, “Parabiblical Prophetic Narratives,” in Flint and VanderKam, eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years, 2.271–301, esp. pp. 290–97; Nel, “Contribution of the Dead Sea Scrolls to Textual Criticism and Understanding of the Canonical Book of Daniel,” NGTT 47 [2006], 609–19).

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3.  4QPseudo-Daniel a-b ar (4Q243–244) 4.  4QPseudo-Daniel c ar (4Q245) 5.  4QAramaic Apocalypse ar (4Q246) or “The Son of God Text” 6.  4QFour Kingdoms a-c ar (4Q552, 553, 553a) 7.  4QpapApocalypse ar (4Q489) 8.  possibly 4QDaniel e (4Q116)

Furthermore, 4Q550, Tales of the Persian Court, probably does not belong to the pool of Qumran Danielic literature (pace Puech); however, because it has many themes that connect it to the biblical Daniel and other court tales, it is important for this study and will also be reviewed.

5.1.1.1.1.  The Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242) The so-called Prayer of Nabonidus, an Aramaic Qumran manuscript dating to the second quarter of the first century b.c.e., gives an account of the Babylonian king, Nabonidus (Akkadian Nabû-naʾid, but “Nabunay” in the Prayer), in which he, in the first person, speaks of being afflicted for seven years by a “severe disease” or “inflammation” (šḥnʾ bʾyšʾ ) sent by God because of his devotion to idols during a time when he lived in Tēmān/Teimāʾ; he is healed by God through the advice of an unnamed Jewish diviner. 16 The points of comparison with Dan 4 16.  Critical edition: John J. Collins, “242. 4QPrayer of Nabonidus ar,” in George Brooke et al., Qumran Cave 4.XVII: Parabiblical Texts, Part 3 (DJD 22; Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 83– 93, pl. VI. Other discussion includes: J. T. Milik, “‘Prière de Nabonide’ et autres écrits d’un cycle de Daniel,” RB 63 (1956), 407–15; E. Vogt, “Precatio regis Nabonid in pia narratione iudaica (4Q),” Bib 37 (1956), 532–34; D. N. Freedman, “The Prayer of Nabonidus,” BASOR 145 (1957), 31–32; H. M. I. Gevaryahu, “The Prayer of Nabonidus of the Manuscripts of the Desert of Judah” (Hebrew), in J. Liver, ed., Studies on the Manuscripts of the Desert of Judah (Jerusalem: Israel Society for Biblical Research, 1957), 12–23; A. Dupont-Sommer, “Remarques linguistiques sur un fragment araméen de Qoumrân (Prière de Nabonide),” Compte Rendus de Groupe Linguistique d’Etudes Chamito-Sémitiques 8 (1958–60), 48–56; R. Meyer, Das Gebet des Nabonid: Eine in den Qumran-Handschriften wiederentdeckte Weisheiserzählung (Berlin: Akademie, 1962); J. Carmignac et al., Les textes de Qumrân traduits et annotés (Paris: Letouzey et Ane, 1963), 2.289–94; G. Fohrer, “4QPrNab, 11QTgJob und die Hioblegende,” ZAW 75 (1963), 93–97; W. Dommershausen, Nabonid im Buche Daniel (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1964), 68– 76; M. Delcor, “Le Testament de Job, la Prière de Nabonide et les traditions targoumiques,” in S. Wagner, ed., Bibel und Qumran. Festschrift Bardtke (Berlin: Evangelische Haupt-Bibelgesellschaft, 1968), 57–74; A. Mertens, Das Buch Daniel im Lichte der Texte vom Totem Meer (Würzburg: Echter, 1971), 34–42; B. Jongeling, C. J. Labuschagne, and A. S. van der Woude, Aramaic Texts from Qumran, with Translations and Annotations (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 1.121–31; J. A. Fitzmyer and D. J. Harrington, A Manual of Palestinian Aramaic Texts (Rome: Biblical Institute, 1978), 2–4; Grelot, “La prière de Nabonide (4Q Or Nab): Nouvel Essai de restauration,” RevQ 9 (1978), 483–95; A. S. van der Woude, “Bemerkungen zum Gebet des Nabonid,” in M. Delcore, ed., Qumrân: Sa piété, sa théologie, et son milieu (BETL 46; Paris-Gembloux: Duculot / Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1978), 121–29; ATTM, 1.223–24; F. M. Cross, “Fragments of the Prayer of Nabonidus,” IEJ 34 (1984), 260–64; L. M. Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), 87–113; F. García Martínez, “The Prayer of Nabonidus: A New Synthesis,” in García Martínez, Qumran and Apocalyptic (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 116–36;

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are clear: a Babylonian king speaking in the first person suffers an affliction for “seven” units of time, he recovers by following the counsel of a Jewish exile, and a written proclamation praising God is the result. The differences are that, in Dan 4, the tradition is attached to the more famous king, Nebuchadnezzar; the illness is some kind of madness, not a skin disease; it takes place in Babylon, not Teimāʾ; the time period is seven “times” in Dan 4 and not “years” as in the Prayer of Nabonidus; and the Jewish diviner in the Prayer of Nabonidus is unnamed while the Book of Daniel names Daniel. Four fragments of two columns of the Prayer of Nabonidus were first published by J. T. Milik in 1956 (1, 2a, and 3), 17 and another fragment (fragment 2b) was published by Rudolf Meyer in 1962. 18 Although the basic order of the fragments seems not to be disputed, there are varied interpretations about how large the lacunae are and what to reconstruct, especially in regard to how far apart fragments 1 and 2 (a and b) should be placed. The most important reconstruction, after Milik’s initial publication, is by F. M. Cross (1984), 19 which proposes shorter lacunae than Milik (a proposal followed by Collins in the critical edition in DJD 22), 20 with other scholars contributing minor adjustments. The following reconstruction is based on the work of Collins, who generally follows Cross. 21 Fragments 1, 2a, 2b, and 3: [‫ מלי צ]ל[תא די צלי ⸣נב⸢ני מלך ]בב[ל מל⸣כ⸢]א רבא כדי כתיש הוא‬1. [‫ בשחנא באישא בפתגם ⸣א⸢]לה[א בתימ⸣ן⸢] אנה נבני שחנא באישא‬2. [‫ כתיש הוית שנין שבע ומן ]די[ שוי א]להא עלי אנפוהי ואסא לי‬3. [‫ וחטאי שבק לה גזר והו⸣א⸢ יהודי ⸣מ⸢]ן בני גלותא על לי ואמר‬4. [‫ החו⸣י⸢ וכתב למעבד יקר ו⸣ר⸢]בו[ לשם א]להא עליא וכן כתבת אנה‬5. [‫ כתיש הוית ב⸣ש⸢חנה ב]אישא[ בתימן ]בפתגם אלהא עליא‬6. [‫ שנין שבע מצלא הוי]ת קדם[ ⸣אלהי⸢ כספא ודהבא ]נחשא פרזלא‬7. [    ‫ אעא אבנא חספא מן די ] [ר די אלהין ה]מון‬8. ]̥  [    ‫            או      ד   של‬9a. ⸢ ⸣ [  ]‫  ⸣ת⸢ ] [מי⸣ה⸢ון‬9. ¯

E. Puech, “La Prière de Nabonide (4Q242),” in K. J. Cathcart and M. Maher, eds., Targumic and Cognate Studies: Essays in Honour of Martin McNamara (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996), 208–27; Andrew Steinmann, “The Chicken and the Egg: A New Proposal for the Relationship between the Prayer of Nabonidus and the Book of Daniel,” RevQ 20 (2002), 557–70. 17.  J. T. Milik, “‘Prière de Nabonide’ et autres écrits d’un cycle de Daniel,” 407–15. 18.  Meyer, Das Gebet des Nabonid, 16. 19.  Cross, “Fragments of the Prayer of Nabonidus,” IEJ 34 (1984), 260–64. 20.  John J. Collins, “242. 4QPrayer of Nabonidus ar,” 83–93. See also Collins, “New Light on the Book of Daniel from the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in F. Garcia Martínez and Ed Noort, eds., Perspectives in the Study of the Old Testament and Early Judaism (VTSup 73; Leiden: Brill, 1998), 180–96. 21.  For a full discussion of the proposed placements of the fragments, see Collins, “242. 4QPrayer of Nabonidus ar,” 83–35.

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Fragment 4: ‫             [⸣לב⸢ר המון אחלמת‬1. [‫       [⸣מ⸢נה א⸣ח⸢]ל[⸣ף שלם⸢ של]ותי יתוב עלי‬2. [   ] ‫   [נו רחמי לא יכלת‬3. [ ]̥  ‫   [⸣כ⸢מה דמא אנתה ל‬4. ] ̥ ̥ ̥ [     5. Fragments 1, 2a, 2b, 3: 1.  The words of the p[ra]yer that Nabunay (Nabonidus), king [of Baby]lon, [the great k]ing, prayed [when he was smitten] 2.  with a bad (skin) disease 22 by the decree of [Go]d in Tēmān. [I, Nabonidus, with a bad disease] 3.  was smitten for seven years and wh[en] G[od] 23 set [his face on me, he healed me] 4.  and my sin was forgiven by him. A diviner, who was a Jew fr[om the exiles came to me and said:] 5.  ‘Proclaim and write to give honor and exal[tation] to the name of G[od Most High,’ and I wrote as follows:] 6.  ‘I was smitten with a b[ad] (skin) disease in Tēmān [by the decree of the Most High God.] 7.  For seven years [I] had been praying [to] the gods of silver and gold, [bronze, iron,] 8.  wood, stone and clay because [I thoug]ht that th[ey were] gods 9. ]their[ Fragment 4: 1.  ] apart from them. I was made well (or, had a dream) 24 2.  ] from it he cause[d to p]ass. The peace of [my] repo[se returned to me] 22.  That the word šḥn must refer to some kind of skin disease is evident from its use in Exod 9:8–11 and Deut 28:27 for the boils of the sixth plague of the exodus; its use in Job 2:7 for Job’s boils; and its use in Genesis Rabbah as a designation for skin disease, of which the rabbis in their commentary on Gen 12:17 distinguished 24 kinds. See Collins, “242. 4QPrayer of Nabonidus ar,” 89. 23.  Cross finds room only for ʾ lhʾ, “God,” but following Milik’s placement of fragment 2 a little farther apart, other scholars reconstruct ʾ lhʾ ʿlyʾ, “God Most High.” 24.  Collins suggests that here the Aphel of ḥlm is similar to the Syriac meaning “to heal” and he thus translates the verb as a passive, “I was made strong” (Collins, “New Light on the Book of Daniel from the Dead Sea Scrolls,” 182, 187). Milik and Meyer (Milik, “Prière de Nabonide”; Meyer, Das Gebet des Nabonid, 28) translate “had a dream,” but Steinmann takes the word to be a 2ms Aphel, “You gave me a dream” (Steinmann, “The Prayer of Nabonidus and the Book of Daniel, 568). Collins notes that the Aphel form in the Targum has the meaning “to

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3.  ] . . my friends. I was not able [ 4.  ] thus you are like . . [ 5. ]  [ The most important problems in interpretation are in lines 3 and 4. In line 3, the translation of šwy is at issue. F. M. Cross translated it “like” and restored mn [dy] šwy ʾ [nh lḥywʾ, which he rendered “and from that (time) I was like unto a beast.” 25 Most scholars have not followed his suggestion because there is no mention of a beast elsewhere. In addition, such a reading is overly influenced by the affliction of Nebuchadnezzar reported in Dan 4, which has Nebuchadnezzar growing long hair and fingernails and eating grass like a beast, and by specific wording in the retelling of the story by the queen in Dan 5:21. Milik took šwy in the sense of “put or place” and translated “loin [des hommes j]e fus relégué” (“I was driven out far [from men],” restoring mn [ʾnšyʾ ]), while Meyer understood it similarly but restored mn [krsyy] “und fern von [meinem Throne].” 26 Grelot and Collins considered it a 3ms active Paʿel, translating “God set his face on me”— that is, “paid attention.” 27 Another problem is found in line 4: who is the subject of the verb šbq—that is, who in the text forgives the sins of Nabunay, God or the diviner (gzr)? Collins restores God as the subject of šwy, “(he) set,” in line 3, and takes God then as the subject in line 4. The healing is thus by divine favor alone, not because the king understands or confesses his sins first (otherwise the gzr is unnecessary; Collins suggests that he comes forward to explain how God had healed the king). Milik, however, took the diviner, gzr, as the object: “[Mais, quand j’eus confessé mes péches] et mes fautes, (Dieu) m’accorda un devin.” 28 Van der Woude sees gzr with lh as a nominal phrase, “God had a diviner.” 29 Dupont-Sommer, followed by García Martínez, proposed that the diviner is the subject, with lh as ethical dative: “he (the diviner) remitted for himself my sin.” 30 But why should the diviner remit someone else’s sin “for himself ”? One also wonders whether “exorcist” or “diviner” is the best translation of gzr in this context: an exorcist could heal or remit sin but a diviner is an intercessor and proscribes. The text seems to favor the latter. consult an interpreter of dreams, or a dreamer” (Collins, “4QPrayer of Nabonidus ar,” 92; see also M. Jastrow, Dictionary, 471). 25.  Others follow this reconstruction as well (Puech, “La Prière de Nabonide (4Q242),” 11; Wise et al., The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, 265–66). 26.  Milik, “‘Prière de Nabonide’ et autres écrits d’un cycle de Daniel,” 408; Meyer, Das Gebet des Nabonid, 23. 27.  Grelot, “La prière de Nabonide (4 Q Or Nab),” 485; Collins, “242. 4QPrayer of Nabonidus ar,” 89. 28.  Milik, “‘Prière de Nabonide’ et autres écrits d’un cycle de Daniel,” 408. 29.  Van der Woude, “Bemerkungen zum Gebet zum Nabonid,” 122. 30.  Dupont-Sommer, “Remarques linguistiques,” 48.

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Fragment 4 is small and has no complete lines. No consensus on its interpretation has been reached. The translation of ʾ ḥlmt depends on whether the root meaning of ḥlm here is “to dream” or “to be well, strong,” as in Syriac. Of course, king Nebuchadnezzar in Dan 4 is given a dream, and Daniel interprets it; there is nothing, however, in the Prayer to make the translation “I had a dream” necessary or, alternatively, to read it as “I consulted a dream interpreter” (ḥlm Aphel form). 31 On the other hand, if Collins is willing to restore “the peace of my repose returned to me,” based on Dan 4:33, what is inappropriate about taking ḥlm as a reference to dreaming? Furthermore, according to his own inscriptions, the historical Nabonidus had many frightening night dreams and visited diviners and dream interpreters for answers. 32 Both “I was made well” and “I had a dream” are reasonable. On the other hand, Meyer’s reconstruction of a dream about a cosmic tree seems quite unnecessary and too dependent on Dan 4. 33 Most scholars believe, as does Collins, that “the Prayer preserves some features of an older stage of the tradition that are not preserved in the biblical story.” 34 Recently, however, Andrew Steinmann has suggested that, rather than being older than Dan 4, the Prayer of Nabonidus is based on Dan 4, because it can be shown to borrow language not only from that chapter but also from chs. 2, 3, and 5, and it seems to correct Daniel toward strict monotheism. 35 Steinmann believes the Prayer was composed by a Palestinian Jew as a supplement in an attempt to fill the historical gap left between the events of Dan 4 and those of Dan 5, historically the period between the reign of Nebuchadnezzar and the fall of Babylon. Steinmann finds three “theological hypercorrections”: (1) The decree of the Watchers in Dan 4:14 is made into a “decree (ptgm) of God” in the Prayer section 1, line 2; (2) the use of the phrase “honor and exal[tation]” (yqr wr[bw]) in the Prayer section 1, line 5, indicates qualities of God, but in Dan 4:33 and 5:18, these are qualities given to Nebuchadnezzar by God; and (3) the phrase “gods of silver and gold, [bronze, iron], wood, stone, clay” in section 1, lines 7 and 8 of the Prayer may well be based on the similar phrase about gods of “silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone” in Dan 5:4 and 5:24, with the addition of “clay” in the Prayer’s list borrowed from the kinds of metals comprising the dream statue in Dan 2 (vv. 33, 34, 35, 41, 42, 43, 45).

31.  Jastrow, Dictionary, 471: “to consult an interpreter of dreams, or a dreamer.” 32.  See, for instance, inscription 13, col. iii, 1–3 (Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, 151– 52; Schaudig, Die Inschriften Nabonids von Babylon und Kyros’ des Grossen, 493–94, 498). 33.  Meyer, Das Gebet des Nabonid, 42–51. 34.  Collins, “New Light on the Book of Daniel,” 186. Hartman and Di Lella suggest that the Prayer preserves more faithfully some details of an earlier tale based on Nabonidus’ life (The Book of Daniel, 179). 35. Andrew Steinmann, “The Chicken and the Egg: A New Proposal for the Relationship between the Prayer of Nabonidus and the Book of Daniel,” RevQ 20 (2002), 557–70.

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In addition, Steinmann finds three further points suggesting that the Prayer is based on the Book of Daniel: (1) the use of the uncommon term diviner (gzr) in both the Prayer (section 1, line 4) and Daniel (2:27; 4:4; 5vc:7, 11), a term that would have been uncomfortable for a Jewish audience because divination is normally deplored in the Bible; 36 (2) the use of the term “Judean” (yhwdy) for the diviner in the Prayer fragment 1, line 4, a term used for Daniel’s three friends and similar to the term used for Daniel in the Book of Daniel (Daniel is called “a man from the exiles of Judah” in 2:25; 5:13; 6:14); 37 and the use of “seven years” in column 1, lines 3 and 5, rather than “seven times” (Dan 4) because it is more interpretive than generally predictive. Furthermore, by Steinmann’s reckoning, 36%—20 words out of 56 in the fragments, excluding fragment 4—are shared with Daniel chs. 2–5. (This does not seem to be a significant number of shared words, however.) Steinmann’s analysis is intriguing, and the most persuasive arguments are the three “theological corrections,” especially the suggestion that the Prayer’s list of deities praised by Nabunay is a conflation of the list of the gods praised by Belshazzar in Dan 5 (gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone) and the list of metals in the statue in Dan 2 (gold, silver, bronze, iron, and clay). On the other hand, if Steinmann is right that the Prayer used the Daniel narratives rather than the other way around, it should not be described as a supplement to Daniel that fills out a “perceived embarrassingly wide historical gap” between Nebuchadnezzar’s reign and the fall of Babylon to the Persians, just as Susanna fills in a historical gap by giving evidence of Daniel’s precocious childhood, or the Greek additions of a prayer and song to Dan 3 fill out more details about the three friends in the fiery furnace. The Prayer of Nabonidus cannot really be seen as a supplement in quite the same way because it does more than fill in a gap with a new episode; instead, it reshapes and retells the tradition, which is attached to Nabonidus rather than Nebuchadnezzar. Henze’s explanation of the two texts as “historical recollections of the same event with distinct—and most likely oral—origins” seems more likely. 38 Perhaps these are specifically Jewish recollections or interpretations of traditions about Nabonidus. This does not mean that the Prayer of Nabonidus is unaware of other traditions or stories about a Jewish diviner healing a Babylonian king or even unaware of MT Dan 2, 4, or 5. However, there is still not enough evidence to say that the precise intent of the Prayer was to correct Dan 4 toward better history. Note that the Qumran text, like Dan 4, differs from Babylonian accounts and other ancient traditions of Nabonidus (556–539 b.c.e.). From Nabonidus’ In36.  Note, however, that the term gzr probably also appears in 4Q550, Tales of the Persian Court, frg. D, col. i, in a broken context. 37.  Steinmann proposes the possibility that the Prayer has one of Daniel’s friends as its hero, not Daniel (ibid., 569). 38.  Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 73.

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scription 13, we know of the historical Nabonidus’ ten-year sojourn (not seven) in Teimāʾ/Tēmān, and although the Prayer of Nabonidus gets the place right (unlike Dan 4), neither the Prayer nor Dan 4 have the correct number of years. 39 Moreover, the Babylonian accounts do not cite a particular disease or a Jewish diviner, but the Prayer has both and Dan 4 interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s affliction as a kind of madness. If the Babylonian accounts record grievous affliction during this period, it is that Nabonidus is excessively devoted to the moon-god Sîn. That Nabonidus did get ill in Teimāʾ at least once is shown by a brief mention of illness and recuperation in the Nabonidus Chronicle (col. i, 14). 40 The kind of illness is not detailed, however, and there is no mention of Nabonidus consulting diviners or other professionals for religious or medical advice and no indication that this particular illness was a life-changing event. Thus, the Prayer’s interpretation of an affliction in Teimāʾ as a bad šḥn, “disease” (probably a skin disease), may be tied to some little-known historical illness, but there is no way to be certain. Furthermore, in the Verse Account of Nabonidus, a negative account of Nabonidus by the Babylonian priests he offended, Nabonidus is said to be impious toward the gods of Babylon, but in the Prayer his problem has to do with false gods. 41 (As for Nabonidus’ actual reasons for staying in Teimāʾ for ten years, there probably is not one but many reasons, some of which involve imperial expansion into the west and Arabia, as well as goals related to trade in the region; others may have to do with the particular reverence for the moon-god, his favorite deity, in that region.) 42 While it seems obvious that Dan 4 is somehow related to the same tradition as that behind the Prayer of Nabonidus, it is nonetheless not clear if one influenced the other. It seems most likely that Dan 4 and the Prayer are both Jewish interpretations of traditions about Nabonidus, but there are enough differences between them to indicate that the Prayer is not simply correcting Dan 4. Finally, 39.  For a discussion of the historical Nabonidus’ ten-year sojourn in Teimāʾ, see T. G. Pinches, “On a Cuneiform Inscription Relating to the Capture of Babylon by Cyrus and the Events which Preceded and Led Up to It,” Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 7 (1882), 139–76; Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, 151; Gonzalo Rubio, “Scribal Secrets and Antiquarian Nostalgia: Tradition and Scholarship in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in Diego A. Barreyra Fracaroli and Gregorio del Olmo Lete, eds., Reconstructing a Distant Past: Ancient Near Eastern Essays in Tribute to Jorge R. Silva Castillo (Barcelona: AUSA, 2009), 155–82. 40.  Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles, 234–35; Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles, 105. 41.  In his turn, Nabonidus accuses the citizens of Babylon and other cities of impiety toward the moon-god Sîn in Inscription 13, col. 1, 14ff. (Bealieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, 62–63). 42.  Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, 178–85; Gonzalo Rubio, “Scribal Secrets and Antiquarian Nostalgia,” 161–66. Rubio argues that there were multiple reasons in addition to religion behind Nabonidus’ decision to go to Teimāʾ: there were economic and military advantages to controlling this way-station on the caravan route; he perhaps wished to avoid political conflict in Babylon; etc.

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there is also another analogue to Dan 4 to be noted: the Egyptian Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh story in Demotic from the fourth or third century b.c.e. (see below, section 5.3.4, and chapter three above).

5.1.1.1.2.  Historical Text (4Q248) Broshi and Eshel, the editors of 4Q248 (which is in Hebrew), interpret it as a source for Dan 11 and for Dan 12:7, because it compares to a problematic phrase there. 43 As such, it does not represent a parallel to the court tales of Daniel but to the visions. The copy dates from ca. 30–1 b.c.e., and Broshi and Eshel say it belongs to “the genre of fictional prophecy,” as does Dan 11. The text below follows their critical edition. ] ̥ ̥ [            1 [‫    ומשל ב[⸣מצר⸢ים ו⸣בי⸢ון ו]על אל‬2 [ ‫ אלה[⸣ם ה⸢גד⸣י⸢]ל ו[⸣ב⸢כן יאכלו ] את‬3 [‫ ]בשר בנ[⸣יה⸢ם ובנ⸣ו⸢ת⸣י⸢]ה[ם במצור ב]נא אמון‬4 [‫ רוח] ב[⸣א⸢ר⸣צ⸢ותיהם ו⸣ש⸢]ב מנא‬//// ‫ וה[⸣ע⸢ביר‬5 [‫ ו[⸣ב⸢א למצרים ומכר את עפרה ואת]ה‬6 [‫ אל עיר המקדש ותפשה עם כ]ל אוצרותיה‬7 [‫ ⸣וה⸢פך בארצות גוים ושב למצ⸣רי⸢]ם וככלות‬8 [‫ ⸣נ⸢פץ יד עם ה⸣ק⸢]דש     תכלינה‬9 ‫ כל א⸣לה ישובו בני⸢] ישראל‬10 1.  ] . . [ 2.  and he shall rule ]Egypt and Greece. And [against the God] 3.  of God]s he shall magni[fy] (himself). [And] in thus they shall eat[ the] 4.  flesh of] their [son]s and daughters in siege in[ Alexandria. 5.  [And] the Lord shall cau[se] a spirit to pass [through] their lands. And he shall ret[urn from Alexandria] 6.  [and] come to Egypt and sell its land and he shall com[e] 7.  to the city of the temple and seize it with al[l its treasures] 8.  and he shall overthrow lands of (foreign) nations, then return to Egyp[t] 9.  And when the shattering of the power of the ho[ly] people [    comes to an end] 10.  [then shall] all these things [be fulfilled]. The children of [Israel] shall repent [ 43.  Preliminary edition: Magen Broshi and Esther Eshel, “The Greek King is Antiochus IV (4QHistorical Text=4Q248),” JJS 48 (1997), 120–29; critical edition: Broshi and Eshel, “4QHistorical Text A,” in Stephen J. Pfann et al., Qumran Cave 4.XXVI: Cryptic Texts and Miscellanea, Part 1 (DJD 36; Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 192–200, plate IX. See also Esther Eshel, “Possible Sources of the Book of Daniel,” in Collins and Flint, eds., The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, 2.387–94, esp. 388–90.

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Broshi and Eshel think the event referred to in the first lines is Antiochus IV Epiphanes’ siege of Alexandria in ca. 169 b.c.e., but this interpretation relies on restoring the name Alexandria (nʾ or nʾ ʾmwn) in both lines 4 and 5 and on a “gross exaggeration” of cannabalistic activity during a siege (Antiochus’ two sieges of Alexandria in 169 and 168, historically, were not severe). If they are correct, then it is possible to understand more clearly the order of events during Antiochus’ reign (Jerusalem would have been captured after the first invasion of Egypt and before the second, thus supporting 1 Macc 1:20–24 against 2 Macc 5:1, 11–16) and a new incident is introduced—the selling of Egyptian land by Antiochus IV (found in Porphyry and quoted in Jerome’s commentary on Dan 11:21). In addition, the difficult phrase in Dan 12:7 is cleared up: “And when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end then shall all these things be fulfilled.” This statement has seemed so strange that many scholars have instead read “when the power of the shatterer of the holy people comes to an end,” 44 transposing the words npṣ and yd and reading npṣ as a participle (nōpēṣ) rather than MT’s Piel infinitive (nappēṣ). If 4Q248 was composed just after Antiochus’ second invasion of Egypt in 168 b.c.e., then Dan 12:7, composed after 165 b.c.e., may well have borrowed its phrase from 4Q248. Collins is more skeptical. 45 He says that there is no record of Egyptian land being sold by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and the repentance of the “children of Israel” in line 10 is an unnecessary restoration. But for him, the most serious problem is the parallel to Dan 12:7, npṣ yd ʿm qdš, “the shattering of the power of the holy people.” The nun and peh of npṣ in 4Q248 line 9 are problematic: the nun has to be reconstructed, and other scholars have read the peh as a bet. 46 Michael Wise translates line 9 as: “[The destroyer shall fall] upon the vintage and the sum[mer fruits],” following what was evidently Milik’s transcription: wb] byṣr ʿm hq[yṣ]. Wise posits that, instead of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the king who takes Egypt in 4Q248 is Ptolemy I Soter, who besieged Egypt on four separate occasions. 47 In contrast, Collins thinks that the fourth letter is clearly a daleth, not a resh, so it could read bṣyd, “with provisions.” 48 If there is no npṣ then the text is not directly related to Daniel, but it is merely that both Dan 11 and it “seem to be prophetic or quasi-prophetic texts that deal with Hellenistic prophecy.” 49 44. So Collins, Daniel, 399; Bevan, A Short Commentary on the Book of Daniel, 206; Karl Marti, Das Buch Daniel (HKAT 18; Tübingen: Mohr, 1901), 91; Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel, 335; Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 274. 45.  Collins, “New Light on the Book of Daniel,” 195–96. See also Collins, “PseudoDaniel,” in Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1.178. 46.  Milik’s reading as gleaned from Wacholder and Abegg, A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls, 3.33; and Michael Wise in Wise et al., The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, 271. 47.  Ibid., 270. 48.  Collins, “New Light on the Book of Daniel,” 195. 49.  Ibid., 196.

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5.1.1.1.3.  Pseudo-Daniel a–b (4Q243–244) According to the editors of the critical edition, Collins and Flint, 50 the work called Pseudo-Daniel is probably actually two texts, 4Q243–244 and 4Q245. 51 All three manuscripts date to the early first century c.e., although each seems to come from a different hand. The compositions may have been written as much as a century earlier than the manuscripts, from the mid-second century b.c.e. to the coming of Pompey in 63 b.c.e., according to Collins and Flint, 52 but a date as early as the early second century for 4Q243–244 has been proposed by Lorenzo DiTommaso. 53 Both texts mention the name of Daniel and writings or books, and seem to give an overview of history from the primeval period to an unspecified future time. There are 40 fragments of Pseudo-Daniela and 14 of Pseudo-Danielb. The two documents clearly overlap in one section (fragment 13 of 4Q243 and fragment 12 of 4Q244), making it clear that at least these two manuscripts belong to the same text. Fragment 1 of Pseudo-Danielc published by Eisenman and Wise in 1992 has a list of priests extending from the patriarchal period to the Hellenistic and includes a list of biblical royal names starting from David, all within a relatively short space. This makes it more likely than ever that Pseudo-Danielc is a text separate from Pseudo-Daniela–b, because the latter seems to cover history more 50.  First published by J. T. Milik, “‘Prière de Nabonide’ et autres écrits d’un cycle de Daniel,” RB 63 (1956), 407–15. Critical edition: J. J. Collins and W. Flint, “Pseudo Daniel,” in George Brooke et al., Qumran Cave 4 XVII: Parabiblical Texts, Part 3 (DJD 22; Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 95–151, pls. VII–IX. Other discussion includes: Beyer, ATTM 1.224–25; Ergänzungsband (1994), 105–7; John J. Collins, “Pseudo-Daniel Revisited,” RevQ 17 (1996), 111–35; Eisenman and Wise, The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, 64–68; Fitzmyer and Harrington, A Manual of Palestinian Aramaic Texts, 4–9, 193; W. Flint, “The Daniel Tradition at Qumran,” in Eschatology, Messianism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 46–55; idem, “The Daniel Tradition at Qumran,” in The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, esp. 338–60; García Martínez, “Notas al margen de 4QpsDaniel Arameo,” Aula Orientalis 1 (1983) 193–208 (English translation: “4QPseudo Daniel Aramaic and the Pseudo-Danielic Literature,” in Qumran and Apocalyptic, 137–61); Mertens, Das Buch Daniel, 42–50; and É. Puech, La croyance des Esséniens en la vie future: immortalité, resurrection, vie éternelle (Paris: Gabalda, 1993), 568–70; Lorenzo DiTommaso, “4QPseudo-DanielA-B (4Q243–4Q244) and the Book of Daniel,” DSD 12 (2005), 101–33. 51.  See Peter W. Flint, “4Qpseudo-Daniel arc (4Q245) and the Restoration of the Priesthood,” RevQ 17 (1996), 137–50. The three manuscripts were first published by Milik, who thought they all belonged to the same work, although he did admit some doubts (J. T. Milik, “‘Prière de Nabonide’ et autres écrits d’un cycle de Daniel,” 407–15). 52.  They fix the date of composition to “somewhere between the beginning of the second century bce and the coming of Pompey,” based on the latest historical allusion and identifications of names: Balakros is the only complete name and it is absolutely Hellenistic (see Collins, “Pseudo-Daniel Revisited,” 119). 53.  Collins and Flint, “Pseudo-Daniel,” 137–38; Lorenzo DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 208; and idem, “4QPseudo-DanielA-B (4Q243–4Q244),” 127.

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slowly and in more detail. 54 Moreover, the only common name in the historical overviews of both Pseudo-Daniela–b and Pseudo-Danielc is that of the priest Qahat. Of the combined 54 fragments of Pseudo-Daniela–b, Collins and Flint could not place 20 of them and did not include them in their reconstruction of the text. In the reconstruction of Collins and Flint, there are five distinguishable sections in the document. The first establishes the court setting, in which Daniel seems to be in king Belshazzar’s presence and perhaps “before the nobles of the king and the Assyrians” (4Q243.2 and 4Q244.1–3). Someone (Belshazzar?) asks Daniel something about his God, and there seems to be a reference to a book or writing: “and in it was written” (243.6, line 2). The next sections all review history: first, a primeval history, mentioning Enoch, Noah (said to be from Lubar, a mountain not mentioned in the Genesis account), a city, a tower with a certain height that is inspected, and a people whom “he scattered.” The third section that Collins and Flint isolate recounts the period from the patriarchs to the exile, referring to “his reward,” “the land,” Egypt, a “rule in the land,” 400 years, and coming out of some place, the crossing of the river Jordan, a list of names (Qahath?, Phinehas?, Abishua), the tabernacle, the delivering of the Israelites into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, “the exiles,” and “the Chaldeans.” In the middle of this extensive section, the overlapping fragments 13 of 4Q243 and 12 of 4Q244 preserve a rather long explanation of why God gave the Israelites into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar: “The Israelites chose their presence rather than [the presence of God and they were] sacrificing their children to demons of error, and their God became angry at them and said to give them into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar [king of] Babylon, and to make their land desolate of them, which. . . .” 55 The fourth section as reconstructed by Collins and Flint perhaps reviews the Hellenistic era: the name Balakros, a common Hellenistic name, is preserved in 4Q243.21, as is the end of another Hellenistic or Roman name “-rhus” (4Q243.19, line 2). 56 The section appears to be giving the lengths of reigns for various kings and their sons. The final section of Pseudo-Daniela–b seems to leap forward into a future eschatological period. Here Milik restored “70 years” as the length of an oppression (4Q243.16), and Collins thinks the restoration of 70 is likely, although he does not believe it has to be a reference to the 70 years of Daniel 9. This section also includes other eschatological language: the saving of someone with “his (presumably God’s) great hand,” various kingdoms (one 54.  J. J. Collins and W. Flint, “Pseudo-Daniel,” 95–164; J. J. Collins, “Pseudo-Daniel Revisited,” RevQ 17 (1996), 111–35; and W. Flint, “4Qpseudo-Daniel arc (4Q245) and the Restoration of the Priesthood,” RevQ 17 (1996), 137–50. 55.  Lines 1–4, as translated by Collins, “Pseudo-Daniel Revisited,” 124. 56.  Milik thought Balakros was a nickname for Alexander Balas, but Collins and Flint think that this would be gratuitous because three of Alexander the Great’s officers had the name (“Pseudo-Daniel,” 150).

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of which is either “first” or “holy” depending on what is restored), “decayed carcasses,” someone leading someone astray, and the assembling of the “elect.” 57 Collins suggests that Pseudo-Daniel has four literary affinities: (1) literature set in a royal court; (2) apocalyptic and pseudo-prophetic reviews of Israel’s history; (3) specific connections with the biblical Book of Daniel; and (4) the sectarian literature of Qumran. 58 The biblical examples of the court tale are not at all eschatological with the “outstanding exception” of statue in Dan 2, which represents four kingdoms and a final kingdom set up by God. The “Son of God” text (4Q246) from Qumran (see below) is also set in the royal court and is eschatological. The apocalyptic review of history here is similar to the summary found in Jubilees, which includes a history prior to the text’s main protagonist (Moses) and ex eventu history afterward, presented as prediction. The Hellenistic section predicts length of kings’ reigns. As to whether or not the Pseudo-Daniel texts are apocalyptic, Collins says they are too fragmentary to determine their genre, but they do “bear some relationship to apocalyptic literature.” 59 The key relationships to the Book of Daniel are certainly the mention of a character named Daniel, the setting at a Babyonian court, and the mention of the kings Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, in addition to the eschatological prophecy. (The court in which this composition is set is probably Belshazzar’s, according to DiTommaso, who notes that nowhere in any of the Daniel material in or outside of the Book of Daniel does Daniel interpret the dreams of any king other than Nebuchadnezzar. 60) The eschatological prophecy may include mention of 70 years (according to Milik’s reconstruction) or, less likely, four kingdoms. 61 Collins, however, thinks that the motifs that were thought to be in common with Daniel “disappear on close examination.” 62 For instance, the review of biblical history that includes the prediluvian or patriarchal events is unlike both biblical 57.  The restoration of “fi[rst] kingdom” in frag. 4:4 is dubious because of the context; it does not necessarily follow the “he will save them” line, nor is it usual to begin a fourkingdom sequence after deliverance from exile, since the sequence usually begins with Babylon or Assyria. 58.  Collins, “Pseudo-Daniel Revisited,” 114–15. 59.  Collins, “Apocalypticism and Literary Genre,” 413. 60. See DiTommaso, “4QPseudo-DanielA–B (4Q243–4Q244),” 111. DiTommaso says this indicates that 4Q243–244 was written when there was an authoritative collection of Daniel court tales, “one in which Nebuchadnezzar had gained exclusive conceptual jurisdiction over stories involving dream interpretation.” 61.  DiTommaso believes that the fragment with the reference to 70 years is probably misplaced (4Q243 16), because this number is nothing more than the popular duration of the exile in biblical literature and is not eschatological (DiTommaso, “4QPseudo-DanielA–B [4Q243– 4Q244],” 119–20). 62.  He adds, “It is likely . . . that there were several writings in the name of Daniel circulating in the second century b.c.e., and that only a selection found their way into the biblical book” (Collins, “New Light on the Book of Daniel,” 189).

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Daniel and other Qumran court tales, which often begin in the Assyrian or Babylonian era if they are recounting biblical history. Furthermore, the reference to 70 years (if this reconstruction is correct) does not have to be a reference to the Book of Daniel’s 70 years or even a allusion to the exile. Pseudo-Mosese [4Q390] has two references to 70 years, neither one applied to the length of the exile. DiTommaso views 4Q234–244 as written in the time between the collection of MT Dan 2–6 and the final form of the book around 164 b.c.e. and before the persecutions of Antiochus IV (thus, early second century b.c.e.). 63 This is partly because of the long ex eventu review of history extending from the primeval period through the Hellenistic era (Daniel and apocryphal apocalypses are instead only interested in history from the Babylonian period to the Hellenistic). In addition, this history is presented in a straightforward, non-cryptic manner in a third-person narrative without an angelic mediator, and, since the focus in 4Q243–244 is Israel’s history (not world history, as in Daniel), 4Q243–244 is not really to be called an apocalypse. 64 However, the Deuteronomic theology of history in 4Q243–244 and in the prayer of Dan 9 is rejected in Dan 9:24–27 (and in Dan 2 and 7–12) in favor of a particularly Danielic deterministic ideology of what follows (the fact that God will complete the weeks of years is not conditional on Israel’s behavior). 65 DiTommaso suggests that Dan 9 may have been crafted in response to 4Q243–244, 66 but since 4Q243–244 makes connections to Dan 5 through its emphasis on a particular writing, it was composed after the court tales had become authoritative. 67 DiTommaso concludes: “Its curious meshing of a third-person court-tale setting with an apocalyptic historiography also might 63.  Since nothing in 4Q243–244 “speaks to a specific, intense political oppression that would be addressed by the apocalyptic reassurance, nor is there any sense of urgency or the hint of the cry of a community in distress,” it must date to before the persecutions (DiTommaso, “4QPseudo-DanielA–B [4Q243–4Q244],” 131). 64.  It is a “free, ex eventu retelling of the history of Israel, composed in a non-cryptic, narrative style and communicated in the third person” (ibid., 116). 65.  The rejection of the old Deuteronomistic theology of history in Dan 9 is “one of the most significant events in the history of ideas of early Judaism and perhaps even beyond” (ibid., 132). Contra Boccaccini, who believes Dan 9 is homogenous (Roots of Rabbinic Judaism: An Intellectual History, from Ezekiel to Daniel [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002], 183–84, 186–87). 66.  He claims that, since the action of 4Q243–244 is set in the time of Belshazzar (not Nebuchadnezzar), 4Q243–244 shows reliance on the fixed chronology and associations with the vision interpretation of Dan 5. At that time, Dan (1)2–6 would already have been completed, but not the visions (DiTommaso, “4QPseudo-DanielA–B [4Q243–4Q244],” 127). Dan 9 is set during the time of Darius, not Belshazzar, and shows a temporal aspect to the rejected Deuteronomic theology of history. Belshazzar was overthrown by Darius the Mede, just as the Danielic theology of history superseded the Deuteronomic. 67.  DiTommaso suggests that Adam was the pseudonymous author, and not Daniel or Enoch (ibid., 128–30). This is based on a loose connection found in later Daniel prognostica in which Adam’s last testament is sealed in a cave that Daniel later finds and reads (see especially Malḥamat Dāniyāl in Arabic).

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make 4Q243–244 the missing link in the history of the development of the figure of Daniel from the wise courtier of the court narratives of MT Daniel 1–6 to the recipient of apocalyptic revelation of chapters 7–12.” 68

5.1.1.1.4.  Pseudo-Daniel c (4Q245) There are only four unconnected fragments of 4Q245, a text that was formerly considered part of 4Q243–244. 69 According to Collins and Flint, the copy dates to the early first century c.e., like 4Q243–244, but is written with a larger, clearer hand. 70 However, this document covers a longer span of Israelite history without segmenting it: it reviews the priesthood from Qahat to Jonathan and Simon of the mid-second century b.c.e. and thus does not fit well into 4Q243–244, which spans history in phases or periods at a slower rate. Fragment 28 of 4Q243 does, however, share the name Qahat with 4Q245; both are in lists of priests’ names, although the preserved lists otherwise differ from each other. Flint does not consider the shared name to be decisive, and he judges this to be “too small a fragment on which to base a relationship between the two documents.” 71 Although this document also refers to a book and to Daniel, it seems to have a new or different revelation than that in 4Q243–244. The date of composition is probably the Hasmonean period after Simon’s tenure as high priest (142–135 b.c.e.), even perhaps just shortly after his death, since Onias, Jonathan, and Simon are listed at the end of a sequence of high priests in fragment 1. Collins believes 4Q245 has a different view of Israel than 4Q243–244: the latter views “Israel in the context of universal history and is concerned with the problem of foreign domination; Pseudo-Danielc is focused on the internal history of Israel.” 72 Fragment 1 col. 1 contains references to Daniel and a book or writing that was given (ktb dy yhyb, line 4), and thus fragment 1, line 1 (mostly unpreserved) likely is the beginning of the entire text. Collins and Flint suggest that the book in question might be analogous to “the Book of Truth” in Dan 10:21 whose contents are divulged by the angel Gabriel to Daniel and which seems to be a survey of Hellenistic history that ends with the death of Antiochus Epiphanes and the resurrection of the dead. 73 There follows a list of priests in lines 5–10 and a list of kings in lines 11–13. According to the critical edition, the priests listed include: 68.  Ibid., 131. 69.  P. W. Flint, “4Qpseudo-Daniel arc (4Q245) and the Restoration of the Priesthood,” RevQ 17 (1996), 137–50. The critical edition is in J. J. Collins and P. W. Flint, “Pseudo-Daniel,” in Brooke et al., DJD XXII, 153–64. See also the bibliography listed for Pseudo-Daniela, b above. 70.  Ibid., 154. But Wise dates 4Q245 differently, putting it as early as 100 b.c.e. (Michael O. Wise, “4Q245 [PSDANc AR] and the High Priesthood of Judas Maccabaeus,” DSD 12 [2005], 313–62). 71.  Flint, “4Qpseudo-Daniel arc (4Q245),” 140. 72.  Collins, “Pseudo-Daniel,” in the Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1.176–78, esp. p. 176. 73.  Collins and Flint, “Pseudo-Daniel,” 156.

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[Lev]i?, Qahat, Bukki, Uzzi, [Zado]k?, Abiathar, [Hil]kiah, Onias, [Jona]than, and Simon (a list similar to the one in 1 Chr 5:27–41, but including Abiathar and extending the list down into to the Hellenistic period). The kings listed are at least: David, Solomon, Ahazia[h], and [Joa]sh; the editors suggest that the royal list ended in an unpreserved Zedekiah. Fragment 1 col. 2 contains only three visible letters. Fragment 2 seems eschatological in tone, mentioning the extermination of “wickedness,” two contrasting groups in lines 3–4—“these in blindness,” who “have gone astray,” and “these” who “then will arise”—and finally mentions “the holy [people? kingdom?]” and a return. Fragment 3, in the only two words preserved, refers to the number “35,” perhaps a period of 35 days or years. Fragment 4 preserves only three letters and cannot be placed. In one study, Flint suggests the key to understanding the text is in the relationship between fragments 1 and 2. 74 The list of high priests and kings in fragment 1 are representatives of two offices that were divinely approved originally, the office of priest and king. (There seems to be no evidence of any negative comments about any of the priests, even if it is a “mixed” list of Zadokite and Hasmonean names.) Thus, the two groups in fragment 2 are two kinds of priests, those who have gone astray by usurping the kingly role, as did Simon’s priestly successors (e.g., John Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus) by calling themselves kings or taking on royal characteristics. The Zadokite priests, then, are the ones who return or who will be restored in the eschaton as the true high priests. As an anti-Hasmonean document, Flint suggests that it is very subtle: “the compilers seem to accept the inclusion of non-Zadokite high priests in the divinely ordained list, but once the boundary between priesthood and kingship has been transgressed, they await the restoration of the true priesthood that corresponds to the divine order.” 75 However, rather than contrasting Zadokite priests with Hasmonean, fragment 2 may be contrasting the wicked and the righteous in a more general sense; some scholars have thought there was a reference to resurrection in fragment 2 because of the group that is said to arise in the future (yqwmwn), and they compare this to the phrase in Dan 12:2: “they shall awake” (yqyṣw). 76 Those who “arise” in fragment 2, however, are compared to blind men and those who go astray, so this is probably not a reference to resurrection; thus, the suggestion that this reflects the influence of the Book of Daniel seems to be unlikely. 77

74.  Flint, “4Qpseudo-Daniel arc (4Q245) and the Restoration of the Priesthood,” 142. 75.  Ibid., 143. 76.  García Martínez, Qumran and Apocalyptic, 146; Puech, La croyance des Esséniens, 569. 77.  See also Michael Knibb, “Eschatology and Messianism,” in Peter W. Flint and James C. VanderKam, eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, 2.379– 402, esp. 382–84; John J. Collins, “Apocalypticism and Literary Genre,” in The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment, 2.403–30, esp. p. 412. The repeated ‫אלן‬, ‫ אלן‬in lines 3 and 4 also recall Dan 12:2, without necessitating their borrowing from the biblical book.

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Michael Wise, who dates 4Q245 much earlier than do the others (to about 100 b.c.e.), believes that fragments 1 and 2 are part of the same column and reconstructs the missing parts of that column by inserting names from the biblical source list in 1 Chronicles. 78 He also thinks that Judah Maccabeus is to be included in the list, because he feels that there is no evidence for any negative judgment toward the Hasmoneans and that the list of kings and priests is merely chronological, listing the good alongside the bad. This is a text that seems to refer to a reversal of the course of history, a common theme in apocalyptic texts. 79 However, neither Pseudo-Daniela–b or PseudoDanielc are necessarily influenced by Daniel. 80 Although it is not impossible, the name “Daniel,” the foreign court setting, the mention of Belshazzar in 4Q243 frg 2, and the presence of eschatological prophecy do not support the traditionhistorical priority of the Book of Daniel. The names “Daniel” and “Belshazzar” may simply derive from a common tradition. 81

5.1.1.1.5.  The Aramaic Apocalypse (4Q246) or “The Son of God Text” The Aramaic Apocalypse is preserved on a single fragment that can be dated to the last third of the first century b.c.e. but whose original composition might have been the second century b.c.e. 82 The name of Daniel does not occur, but there is a court setting in which someone (a seer?) utters an interpretation of a vision before a (gentile?) king’s throne. 83 The interpretation includes wars involving Assyria and Egypt and a succession of kings, the final one of which is someone called “son of God” and “son of the Most High.” A certain kingdom lasts only a short time and is full of violence (trampling), until the people of God arise or are raised up and an eternal kingdom emerges, to which all the provinces 78.  Michael O. Wise, “4Q245 (PSDANc AR) and the High Priesthood of Judas Maccabaeus,” 313–62. 79.  Flint, “The Daniel Tradition at Qumran,” 355. 80.  Stuckenbruck suggests that the presence in 4Q245 of metaphors such as “blindness” and “going astray” argue for a time in which boundaries between Danielic and Enochic materials were still fluid (these metaphors occur in the Animal Apocalypse, 1 Enoch 89:32–33, 54); “Daniel and Early Enoch Traditions in the Scrolls,” in Collins and Flint, eds., The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, 2.368–86, esp. p. 377. 81.  Stuckenbruck, “Daniel and Early Enoch Traditions in the Scrolls,” 373. 82.  Preliminary publication by É. Puech, “Fragment d’une apocalypse en araméen (4Q246 = pseudo-Dand) et le ‘royaume de Dieu,’” RB 99 (1992), 98–131; idem, “Notes sur le fragment d’apocalypse 4Q246—‘le fils de Dieu’,” RB 101 (1994), 533–58. Critical edition by Puech, “Apocryphe de Daniel” in George Brooke et al., Qumran Cave 4 XVII: Parabiblical Texts, Part 3 (DJD 22; Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 165–84, pl. XI. For the early bibliography, see Puech, “Apocryphe de Daniel,” 165. J. T. Milik first presented the fragment at a Harvard University conference in 1972 and published it in The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon,1976), 60, 213, 261. 83.  Another possibility is that this takes place before God’s throne.

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will pay homage and to whom God will give dominion. Although there is disagreement over the identity of the son of God figure, many find the court setting, the conflict between nations, and several specific phrases to provide connections with Dan 7. 84 Collins believes that 4Q246 borrowed from Daniel rather than the opposite and is the first messianic interpretation of Daniel, although one must consider it an independent composition. 85 In contrast, Puech thinks it is a contemporaneous parallel to Daniel that shares its language. 86 Each of the two columns has nine lines preserved; however, although the lines in column 2 are probably complete, the beginnings of all nine lines in column 1 have been torn away. In column 1, a man falls before a throne and begins to announce to the king the interpretation of the king’s (“your”) vision, which is soon to come to pass. There is violence and slaughter, a “prince of nations” and “the king of Assyria and Egypt,” and someone will rule over the land and be obeyed by all. Column 2 then picks up with: ‫ ברה די אל יתאמר ובר עליון יקרונה כזיקיא‬1 ‫ די חזותא כן מלכותהן תהוה שני]ן[ ימלכון על‬2 ‫ ארעא וכלא ידשון עם לעם ידוש ומדינה למדי]נ[ה‬3 ‫יח מן חרב‬/‫ים עם אל וכלא ינו‬/‫ עד יקו‬vac 4 [‫ מלכותה מלכות עלם וכל ארחתה בקשוט ידי]ן‬5 ‫ ארעא בקשט וכלא יעבד שלם חרב מן ארעא יסף‬6 ‫ וכל מדינתא לה יסגדון אל רבא באילה‬7 ‫ הוא ועבד לה קרב עממין ינתן בידה וכלהן‬8 ‫ ירמה קדמוהי שלטנה שלטן עלם וכל תהומי‬9 1.  “Son of God” he will be named and “son of the Most High” they will call him. Like the comets 87 2.  of the vision (or which you saw), thus shall be their kingdom; for year[s] they will rule over 84.  Note: “his/its kingdom is an everlasting kingdom” (2:5; cf. Dan 4:3; 7:27); “his sovereignty is an everlasting sovereignty” (2:9; cf. Dan 4:31; 7:14); use of the word “to trample” (dwš, 2:3; cf. Dan 7:7). 85.  John J. Collins, “The Son of God Text from Qumran,” in Martinus C. De Boer, ed., From Jesus to John: Essays on Jesus and New Testament Christology in Honour of Marinus de Jonge (JSOTSup 84; Sheffield: JSOT, 1993), 65–82. 86.  Puech, “Fragment d’une apocalypse en Araméen (4Q246=pseudo-Dand),” 129. 87. Following Puech who has “comètes (/étoiles filantes) bien visibles” (“24.6, 4QApocryphe de Daniel ar,” 170), and Cook has “But like the meteors that you saw in your vision. . . .” (“A Vision of the Son of God, 4Q246,” in Wise et al., The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation 269). Dunn has “spark\s of the vision” (James D. G. Dunn, “‘Son of God’ as ‘Son of Man’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls? A Response to John Collins on 4Q246,” in Stanley E. Porter and Craig A. Evans, eds., The Scrolls and the Scriptures: Qumran Fifty Years After [JSPSup 26; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997], 198–210, esp. p. 203).

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3.  the earth and everything they will trample. People will trample on people, and province on provi[n]ce, 4.  vacat   until the people of God arises, and everyone rests from the sword. 88 5. His/its  89 kingdom will be an eternal kingdom, and all his/its paths will be in truth. He/it will jud[ge] 6.  the earth in truth, and everyone will make peace. The sword will cease from the earth, 7.  and all the cities to him/it will pay homage. The great God is his/its strength. 8.  He/it will make war for himself/it, will give peoples into his/its hand, and all of them 9.  he/it will cast before him/it. His/its dominion will be an eternal dominion, and all the depths of . . . According to Puech, there are four main questions: (1) is the violence historical or is it purely eschatological? (2) is the Son of God or Son of the Most High a historical king or an eschatological one? (3) who is indicated by the 3ms suffix in column two: the son of God figure or the people of God? and (4) who is speaking the interpretation to whom? With regard to the first point, Milik believes that the mention of Egypt and Assyria suggests that the context is actual history during the Seleucid and Ptolemaic period. If the context is eschatological, however, the same pair of countries are used similarly in the War Scroll, 1QM 1:2–4. Brooke suggests that both of these views could be correct if the author of the text understood his own time as the beginning of the eschaton. 90 With regard to the identification of the Son of God or Son of the Most High, some scholars think the terms are being used negatively or polemically in reference to a historical ruler whom the author did not view favorably. Milik understood this figure to be Alexander Balas, while Puech (followed by Steudel and Fabry) posits Antiochus Epiphanes. 91 If these terms refer to an eschatological king, there are 88.  ‫“ יקום‬he/it (the people) will arise” seems more likely than ‫“ יקים‬he will cause to arise” here, although whether it is ‫“ יניח‬he will cause to rest” or ‫“ ינוח‬he/it (the people) will rest” is uncertain (Haphel versus Peʿal in each case). Steudel sees a second vacat at the end of this line matching the one at the beginning of the line; if so, this line would be some kind of heading for all that follows (Annette Steudel, “The Eternal Reign of the People of God—Collective Expectations in Qumran Texts [4Q246 and 1QM],” RevQ 17 [1996], 507–25, esp. 514–15). 89.  In lines 5, 7, 8, and 9, the use of the 3ms suffix is ambiguous, as is the 3ms imperfect of dyn in line 5; the referent is in much dispute and may conceivably be either the people of God (ʿm ʾ l) or the Son of God figure. 90.  George J. Brooke, “Parabiblical Prophetic Narratives,” 295. 91. T. Milik; “Les modèles araméens du livre d’Esther dans la grotte 4 de Qumran,” RevQ 15 (1992), 321–406; Émile Puech, “Some Remarks on 4Q246 and 4Q521 and Qumran Messianism,” in Donald Perry and Eugene C. Ulrich, eds., Provo International Conference on

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a number of options for the Son of God or Son of the Most High in this text: the messiah, 92 the antichrist, 93 the archangel Michael or Melchizedek, 94 a future king of Israel, 95 or a symbolic representative of the people of God (as the Son of Man in Dan 7 has been understood by some). 96 Everything hinges on whether the terms are used in a positive or negative sense in this text; most eschatological interpretations would take the figure positively, whereas if the terms indicate the antichrist or a historical king, the perspective would be negative: for example, the use of the term “son of God” for the antichrist or for Antiochus IV would imply the hubris of these wicked individuals. 97 the Dead Sea Scrolls: Technological Innovations, New Texts and Reformulated Issues (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 545–65, esp. 545–51. See also Annette Steudel, “The Eternal Reign and the People of God,” 509–21; Heinz-Josef Fabry, “Die frühjüdische Apokalyptik als Reaktion auf Fremdherrschaft: Zur Funktion von 4Q246,” in Bernd Kollmann et al., eds., Antikes Judentum und Frühes Christentum: Festschrift für Hartmut Stegemann zum 65. Geburtstag (BZNW 97; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), 84–98. 92.  For this figure as the first interpretation of the “one like a son of man” in Dan 7 as the Davidic Messiah, see John J. Collins, “The Son of God Text from Qumran,” 65–82; idem, “Apocalypticism and Literary Genre,” in Flint and VanderKam, eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years, 2.403–30, esp. 413–15. See also, among others: Frank Moore Cross, “Notes on the Doctrine of the Two Messiahs at Qumran and the Extracanonical Daniel Apocalypse (4Q246),” in Donald W. Parry and Stephen D. Ricks, eds., Current Research and Technological Developments on the Dead Sea Scrolls: Conference on the Texts from the Judean Desert, Jerusalem, 30 April 1995 (STDJ 20; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 1–13; Johannes Zimmerman, “Observations on 4Q246—The ‘Son of God’,” in James H. Charlesworth et al., eds., Qumran-Messianism: Studies on the Messianic Expectations in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998), 175–90; Karl A. Kuhn, “The ‘One like a Son of Man’ Becomes the ‘Son of God’,” CBQ 69 (2007), 22–42; Michael Knibb, “Eschatology and Messianism,” 379–402, esp. 393–96. Knibb is very cautious but does say that “a messianic interpretation makes more sense of the text” (p. 396). 93.  Flusser, “The Hubris of the Antichrist in a Fragment from Qumran,” Immanuel 10 (1980), 31–37. Edward Cook suggests that the historical background to the text is the persecution of Antiochus IV, whose chosen second name after all was “Epiphanes” (Greek for “appearance,” with the understanding that he was God manifest); this villain or “Antichrist” is usurping God and is overthrown by the “people of God” (Cook, “A Vision of the Son of God, 4Q246,” in Wise et al., The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, 269). 94.  García Martínez, Qumran and Apocalyptic, 162–79. 95.  The “one like a son of man” in Dan 7 is a “visionary symbol of the people of the saints of the Most High,” and so the 4Q246 figure is then “a human king . . . one who made claims for himself and who was hailed by others as ‘son of God’ and ‘son of the Most High’” (James D. G. Dunn, “‘Son of God’ as ‘Son of Man’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls? ” 198–210, esp. p. 208). 96. Martin Hengel, The Son of God: The Origin of Christology and the History of JewishHellenistic Religion (trans. John Bowden; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 45. 97.  See especially Steudel concerning Antiochus IV Epiphanes’ self-portrayal as a god on coins, his title Epiphanes (“manifest [as God]” or the like), and how descriptions of Antiochus in texts such as Dan 11:36–37 and 2 Macc 9 portray him as arrogant and blasphemous (Steudel, “The Eternal Reign of the People of God,” 511–14). Flusser notes that the description of the second of two antichrists in the “Oracle of Hystaspes” includes that he will be “a prophet of lies, and he will constitute, and call himself God and will order himself to be worshipped as the Son of God” (Flusser, “The Hubris of the Antichrist,” 36).

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With regard to the 3ms suffix in column two (beginning in line 5), much depends on whether or not the “son of God” is a positive or negative figure. If it is a positive figure, then the roles of the “son of God” figure and the people of God have merged and the eternal kingdom to come belongs to both, or else it is the “son of God” alone that it is meant. If it is a negative figure (the antichrist or a wicked historical king), then his rule in lines 2–4 is to be contrasted with that of the “people of God” in lines 5–8. The latter is the position of Steudel, who suggests that col. 2 line 4 is the turning point in the narrative and that there is a formal break marked in the manuscript itself, since the text of ii, 4 is framed by two vacats at its beginning and end, the latter being ignored by most translators. 98 She proposes that ii, 4 is thus a heading of sorts for what follows. Furthermore, she points out that those who take the “son of God” figure positively must then suppose an awkward sequence in this text: the Messiah appears in col. 1 and ii, 1, but people continue to trample in ii, 1b–3, before line 4 returns to describing the “son of God” and the eternal kingdom that will emerge. 99 Finally, with regard to who is speaking and to whom, most assume that the speaker is a seer in the presence of a gentile king, as in Daniel. However, the text does not preserve the name “Daniel” or other characters from the biblical book, and the interpretation hinges on the diametrically opposed interpretations of the term “Son of God.” At the present time, it is hard to state definitively whether this text was influenced by the Book of Daniel or is simply a contemporaneous parallel with regard to its apocalyptic imagery and court setting.

5.1.1.1.6.  The Four Kingdoms Apocalypse (4Q552, 553, 553a) The Four Kingdoms Apocalypse is found in two or three partially-preserved and overlapping manuscripts in more than one hand: 100 4Q552 in six fragments, 4Q553 in three fragments, and perhaps 4Q553a (in 11 very small fragments that may not even belong to a single manuscript or to this composition). 101 The manuscripts most likely date to the early first century c.e. However, Puech judges that the work itself must have been composed between the end of the fourth century and the middle of the second century b.c.e. 102 In this narrative someone speaks to four talking trees in a vision, one after the other. The trees must symbolize kingdoms because, when asked its name, the first tree replies “Babylon” and the seer 98.  Steudel, “The Eternal Reign of the People of God,” 514–15. 99.  Ibid., 518. 100.  The critical edition is in Émile Puech, Qumrân grotte 4 XXVII: Textes araméens deuxième partie, 57–90. García Martínez and Tigchelaar provide a transliteration of the Aramaic fragments in The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, 1.1102–7. See also Eisenman and Wise, DSSU, 71–73; E. Cook in M. Wise et al., The Dead Sea Scrolls. A New Translation, 439–41; and Beyer, ATTM Ergänzungsband, 108–9. Flint also comments on this text in “The Daniel Tradition at Qumran,” 362–63. He follows Cook’s understanding and translation. 101.  Puech, Qumrân grotte 4 XXVII: Textes araméens deuxième partie, 81. 102.  Ibid., 57.

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replies “you are the one who rules over Persia.” The second tree possibly identifies itself as Media (the beginning mem is partly preserved in 4Q553 frgs. 3 + 2 ii+4, according to Puech) and is said to rule over “the waves of the sea and over the port.” The names of the third and fourth trees are not preserved. Not much remains of the dialogue with the third tree, while the fourth tree has a summit that reaches to the heavens and rules over perhaps “a place of water” and animals such as “calves and lambs” (this section is broken). What remains confusing is the identity of the seer and of those to whom he is speaking. At the beginning of what is preserved in 4Q552 frg. 1 i + 2, angels are present and someone tells a certain “them” that something “shall happen.” It continues with “and the king said to me, ‘Because of. . . .’” Throughout the fragments, the narrative consistently uses the first person. It is possible that it is either the king describing a dream of his to an interpreter, or it is someone else, a seer, who is speaking of his dream. The third person (3ms) is used to indicate each of the trees in many of the fragments but may indicate an angel in 4Q552 frg. 1 i + 2. The fact that there is a seer and a vision of four successive kingdoms symbolized as trees marks some similarities to the book of Daniel (note the statue in Dan 2 whose parts represent four kingdoms and Dan 4, where king Nebuchadnezzar is represented as a tree that reaches into heaven and gives food for all creatures), but the identity of the kingdoms is not likely to be the same. 103 They are nonetheless quite similar, if one follows Puech’s reconstruction: “Four Kingdoms” would include: Babylon-Persia (that is, Babylon, who rules over Persia), Media, Greece, kingdom of God; while Daniel’s order is: Babylon, Media, Persia, Greece, kingdom of God. 104 Moreover, 4Q552 frg. 6 mentions the “Most High God” (line 10) and judges (line 12), from which Puech reconstructs that God will give all the kingdoms to a “just king” who will rule with the help of judges. 105 Nevertheless, the trees here are personified in that they not only dialogue with the seer but are said to move about (to rise up and turn away in 4Q553 col. 2, lines 2 and 3) and are reminiscent of the personified inanimate objects and animals of fables 103.  Flint suggests the sequence Babylon-Persia, Greece, Syria (or Rome), and Rome (or the eschatological kingdom of God), as opposed to the sequence of Babylon, Media, Persia and Greece in Dan 7 (Flint, “The Daniel Tradition at Qumran,” 362–63). Edward M. Cook (in Wise et al., The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation [440–41]) believes that the sequence is Babylon-Persia, Greece, Rome, and finally, either the rule of Israel or the kingdom of God. Differently from others, Collins suggests that Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Syria might be the third and fourth kingdoms, after Greece (John J. Collins, “Apocalypticism and Literary Genre,” 415–17). 104. See Puech, Qumrân grotte 4 XXVII: Textes araméens deuxième partie, 58, for further texts with the theme of four or five kingdoms; e.g., Targum Pseudo-Jonathan in Gen 15:12; The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, Naphtali V 8 (5 kingdoms): Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Chaldeans, Syrians. 105.  Ibid., 71.

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and dialogues (see Judg 9:7–15 for a dialogue between trees about which of them should rule). There is much here that is parallel to the Book of Daniel, especially Dan 1–6: the court setting, the presence of a seer before a king, the motif of a tree standing for a king or kingdom (Dan 2 and 4), the specific number of kingdoms, and possibly the idea that the last of the four kingdoms represents an eschatological kingdom of God (Dan 2). If Puech’s date of the fourth to second century b.c.e. is correct, then this text could arguably have influenced the Book of Daniel. However, the differences (such as the fable-like detail of walking and talking trees in the Four Kingdoms) support indirect influence.

5.1.1.1.7.  4QpapApocalypse ar (4Q489) This text is preserved in eight small fragments from ca. 50 c.e. and was published by M. Baillet, who suggested a relationship with Daniel based on two words in fragment 1, lines 1 and 2. 106 Each could be read either wḥzwth, “and its/her/ his appearance,” or wḥzyth, “and I saw it/her/him” or “you saw (it/her/him).” All other words in the eight fragments (with the possible exception of yḥʾ in fragment 2), are only preserved in part. These readings seem to be related to Dan 2:41 (“as you saw . . .”) and 4:8, 17 (“its appearance,” referring to the tree in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream); however, Baillet also suggests a possible relationship with 1 Enoch 14:18 for wḥzwth and 1 Enoch 25:3, 46:4, and 52:4 for wḥzyth. 107 He concludes “quelle que soit la lecture, ces termes sont caractéristiques des apocalypses.” 108 However, there is far too little preserved to arrive at any firm conclusions about this text’s relationship to Daniel or any other text.

5.1.1.1.8.  Tales of the Persian Court (4Q550) 4Q550 (4QprEstha–f ar), also known as Tales of the Persian Court, was initially published by J. T. Milik in 1992 109 and was thought at first to constitute an Aramaic source for the Book of Esther—a kind of proto-Esther—already known in Hebrew and Greek. 110 Sidnie White Crawford, however, showed that it was 106.  The critical edition was prepared by M. Baillet: Qumrân Grotte 4.III: 4Q482–4Q520 (DJD 7; Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 10–11, pl. II. 107.  See also Flint, “The Daniel Tradition at Qumran,” 361. 108.  Baillet, Qumrân Grotte 4.III, 11. 109.  Milik, “Les modèles araméens du livre d’Esther dans la grotte 4 de Qumrân,” 321–99. The critical edition is Émile Puech, Qumrân grotte 4 XXVII: Textes araméens deuxième partie, 1–46. Other translations include: Edward Cook, “The Tale of Bagasraw,” in Michael Wise et al., eds., The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation, 437–39. 110. So García Martínez (The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated, 507), G. Vermes (The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, 578), and Milik (“Les modèles araméens du livre d’Esther,” 321), among others. Milik even tentatively restored some names from the Book of Esther, such as: ‫אסתר‬, “Esther,” in 4Q550d, col. i, line 5 (Milik’s col. iv, line 5: [‫חמא ;אס]תר‬, “Ḥamaʾ,” in 4Q550c, line 2, as an early form of the name ‫המן‬, “Haman”; ‫ שרהא‬as an early form of Haman’s

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not a direct model for the book, 111 and John J. Collins and Deborah A. Green, as well as Michael G. Wechsler, went even further to demonstrate that the text has nothing more than a fairly loose relationship to Esther. 112 The fragments likely represent part of a cycle of court tales, similar to the Daniel cycle of tales, that were set in the Persian court and might have had a “general circulation in the middle-to-late Second Temple period.” 113 The fragments of three manuscripts date to the first century b.c.e., but the compositions they contain must have been composed earlier. 114 It is, however, now generally accepted that 4Q550f does not belong to the same text or texts as the other fragments. 115 As for 4Q550a–e, Milik already thought that they comprised at least three stories, even if belonging to five different manuscripts, and Wechsler reorganized the manuscript groups into two independent and non­ successive compositions probably derived from just two manuscripts: 4Q550d–e, “4QAramaic Ezra-Nehemiah Sequel,” and 4Q550b–c,a, “4QAramaic Esther Prequel.” 116 These titles suggest a relationship to Esther and to Ezra–Nehemiah in the Bible, and Wechsler identifies the main characters of each story with specific wife ‫ זרש‬in 4Q550c, line 1; and ‫יאיר‬, “Yair? ” in 4Q550b line 3 as the patronymic of Mordecai. See Milik, “Les modéles araméens du livre d’Esther,” 321–99. These onomastic reconstructions have not gained wide acceptance. 111.  Crawford’s chart of the composition of Esther suggests that 4Q550 was part of a larger corpus of Tales of the Persian Court that were a source for both Proto-Esther and the Additions of Esther; see Crawford, “Has Esther been Found at Qumran? 4Qproto-Esther and the Esther corpus,” RevQ 17 (1996), 307–25, esp. p. 325. See also: Crawford, “4QTales of the Persian Court (4Q550a–e) and its Relation to Biblical Royal Courtier Tales, Especially Esther, Daniel and Joseph,” in Edward D. Herbert and Emanuel Tov, eds., The Bible as Book: The Hebrew Bible and the Judaean Desert Discoveries (London: British Library / New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2002), 121–37; and eadem, “Court Tales,” in Schiffman and VanderKam, eds., Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1.149–50. 112. John J. Collins and Deborah A. Green, “The Tales from the Persian Court (4Q550a–e),” in Bernard Kollman et al., eds., Antikes Judentum und Frühes Christentum (BZNW 97; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), 39–50, 2 pls.; Michael G. Wechsler, “Two Para-Biblical Novellae from Qumran Cave 4: A Reevaluation of 4Q550,” DSD 7 (2000), 130–72. Jesper Høgenhaven argues against the views held by Milik and Wechsler (Høgenhaven, “Fortællinger fra det persiske hof [4q550]: En Qumran-udgave af Ester-historien? ” Dansk teologisk tidsskrift 67 [2004], 15–34). 113.  Crawford, “4QTales of the Persian Court,” 121. 114.  About the date of the script, Puech writes, “La graphie peut être qualifiée de semiformelle hasmonéene de la première moitié du 1er siècle avant J.-C. avec quelques influences de l’écriture semi-cursive, au mieux du deuxième quart du siècle ou c. 50 avant notre ère” (Puech, Qumrân grotte 4 XXVII: Textes araméens deuxième partie, 9). As for its composition, Puech suggests that it was written before the end of the third century b.c.e. and after the reign of Xerxes (ibid.). Klaus Beyer suggests that it was composed around 200 b.c.e. (ATTM Ergänzungs­band, 113). 115.  See, for instance, García Martínez, “Las fronteras de lo Biblico,” Scripta theologica 23 (1991–1993), 759–84, esp. p. 774; idem, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated, 507; and Wechsler, “Two Para-Biblical Novellae from Qumran Cave 4,” 143. 116.  Michael G. Wechsler, “Two Para-Biblical Novellae from Qumran Cave 4,” 130–172.

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historical and/or literary figures. Bagoshî (‫ )בגשי‬and his foil the Jewish Bagasraw (‫)בגשרי‬, who are the main characters in 4Q550d–e, are respectively identified with the governor of Judea in the late fifth century b.c.e. known already from Josephus’ Antiquities and Ezra–Nehemiah 117 and the high-ranking Persian official Bagasraw ‫ בגסרו‬found in Aramaic papyri 17, 21, 27, and 30–31. Patireza, the main character in 4Q550b–c,a, is taken as the Persian name of Jair [‫]יאיר‬, the father of Mordecai (Esth 2:5), following Milik. 118 Thus, according to Wechsler, it is Mordecai himself who is addressed in that composition. Crawford is rightly somewhat skeptical of Wechsler’s identifications of the main characters, 119 and she suggests the possibility that the two groups of fragments might represent two different episodes in a single story; if so, Bagasraw could be the son of Patireza. 120 In the official edition of DJD 37, Puech argues that the fragments all represent a single story: “celle du fils juif cherchant à accéder à haute charge du roi, modelée sur celle du père, juif lui aussi, bien que tous les deux portent un nom perse,” and he prefers to call this story, “Juifs à la cour perse,” after Jean Starcky’s “Juif à la cour perse.” 121 He is certain that Bagasraw is the son of Patireza but does not read 4Q550b line 3 that Patireza is himself the son of Jair, father of Mordecai. 122 The readings of Puech are generally followed here, and it seems likely that Puech and others who have said that there is nothing of a Proto-Esther in this text are quite correct. The plot of one of the narratives or episodes, the one in 4Q550a–c, involves the son of a certain Patireza (‫ )פטריזא‬serving in the court of a Persian king whose name is not preserved but who is described as the son of Darius; presumably, this is Xerxes I (486–466 b.c.e.). In the time of this king, the son of Patireza (possibly Bagasraw, whose name is not preserved in 4Q550a–c) is given the office of his father, who apparently had served Darius loyally as one of the servants of the royal wardrobe (frg. 1, 2: ) ‫]ו[בעבדי לבוש מלכותא‬. 123 In 4Q550b, someone is said to have “the terror of the house of [the] scri[be]” fall upon him and to be given 117.  Josephus’ Βαγώσης; ‫בגוהי‬/ ‫ בגוי‬of Elephantine papyrus AP 30 and Ezra 2:2, 14; 8:14; Neh 7:7, 19; 10:17. 118.  Much as Daniel is known as Belteshazzar or Hadassah as Esther, etc. See Milik, “Les modèles araméens du livre d’Esther,” 326; Wechsler, “Two Para-biblical Novellae from Qumran Cave 4,” 163. Puech does not read ‫ יאיר‬here but [‫ י⸣א⸢]ה‬and, because it appears after ‫בר‬, he translates both together as “un fils bea[u/bie[n,” a handsome or good son (Puech, Qumrân grotte 4 XXVII: Textes araméens deuxième partie, 18). 119.  Crawford, “4QTales of the Persian Court,” 136 n. 7. 120.  Ibid., 131. 121.  Puech, Qumrân grotte 4 XXVII: Textes araméens deuxième partie, 7. 122.  Some of the previously-aired suggestions for various place- or personal names in the text are rejected by Puech: Zeresh and a princesss in frg. 4,1, Hama in frg. 4, 2; a king Ushay of Tamar in frg. 4, 1, a clan of Safra in frg. 2, 4; a Cuthean fellow in frg. 5, 5; someone from the tribe of Benjamin in frg. 5, 3; etc. See Puech, Qumrân grotte 4 XXVII: Textes araméens deuxième partie, 6–7. 123.  Probably a high function in the royal court; Puech, Qumrân grotte 4 XXVII: Textes araméens deuxième partie, 14.

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the house and property of whoever is speaking, in addition to the function of the addressee’s father (presumably the father is Patireza). In fragment 4Q550c, Patireza is praised for his honesty and fidelity, and purple (the color of honorable robes in several court tales) is mentioned. As for 4Q550a, which Beyer and Wechsler place after fragments 4Q550b and 4Q550c, instead of before (Milik, Puech, and others), the king is said to have the books of his father read to him one day when he was bored (literally, “the spirit of the king was long,” ‫ארכת רוחא‬ ‫)די מלכא‬. 124 One of the books is a scroll sealed with the seven seals of the king’s father, Darius, which contains a subject heading as well as the beginning of the text of a decree that starts with a greeting. The decree begins: “Let it be known to you that any oppressor or deceiver. . . ,” before the text disappears. Wechsler thinks that 4Q550a belongs after 4Q550b and 4Q550c because he reads 4Q550b line 3 as a question: the king asks if Patireza has a son (‫)איתי לפריזא בר‬. Since in 4Q550a the king presumably already knows a character who is the son of Patireza, it follows that 4Q550a must follow fragment 4Q550b, if not 4Q550c. However, this line does not have to be a question; it could be a statement, as Puech takes it. 125 It is thus not clear that 4Q550a (Puech’s fragment 1) ought to be after 4Q550c (Puech’s fragment 4). 126 The plot of the second narrative or episode, 4Q550d–e, seems to concern a conflict between a Jewish man with the Persian name of Bagasraw and another courtier named Bagoshî. 4Q550d has the largest amount of text: 22 partiallypreserved lines over three columns. In column 1, someone mentions the “sins of my fathers,” and a Jewish man who is among the nobles of the king is introduced. Someone speaks, asking “what can I do for you? ” adding that the addressee will be given what they desire and, when they die, they will be buried presumably in an honorable fashion or place. Column two (Puech’s frg. 6 +6a +6b + 6c) must be the culmination of the conflict between Bagasraw and Bagoshî; however, it is not clear exactly what the conflict was. In lines 1–4, seven groups of people or seven periods of time pass by, after which someone is given the silver, gold, and possessions of Bagoshî. Bagasraw is said to enter the royal court in peace in line 6. Someone is put to death (Bagoshî?) in line 7, and then Bagasraw (again?) enters the court of the king and is greeted enthusiastically. Apparently, Bagasraw has triumphed 124.  Reading books when the king is sleepless and in need of amusement is a motif also found in Esth 6:1, and in 1 Esdras 3. In the latter, the three young men write down their answers to the riddle “what thing is strongest? ” and place them under the pillow of King Darius, who suffers from insomnia; when the king next wakes up, he finds the writings and has them read to him. The theme of the bored or sick king who cannot sleep at night is also found in other court tales, e.g., Merire and Sisobek, Tales from King Cheops’ Court, and ʿOnchsheshonqy. 125.  Puech, Qumrân grotte 4 XXVII: Textes araméens deuxième partie, 17–18. 126.  Puech’s examination yields that 4Q550b (his fragments 2 + 3; fragment 3 was formerly Milik’s unplaced 4Q550d, fragment 5) was preceded by at least one leaf and thus cannot be the beginning of the story (Qumrân grotte 4 XXVII: Textes araméens deuxième partie, 4).

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over his adversary. In column three (Puech’s frg. 7 +7a), the king, speaking to someone (probably Bagasraw), confesses that the Most High “whom you fear and [w]orship, rules over [all the ea]rth. All that he desires is within his po[wer] to d[o].” This conclusion is reminiscent of Daniel’s praise of the Most High and the confessions of the kings in the Daniel court stories. 127 Line two preserves a kind of proclamation: “Any man who says an [evi]l word against Bagasraw [ . . . will be put ]to death” (‫ ית[קטל‬. . . ]‫)כול אנׁש די ימר מלה] בא[יׁשה על בגסרו נ‬. In the last lines, the king commands that someone write something down and mentions a book that those who arise after Bagasraw will read. Perhaps some account of Bagasraw’s deeds are recorded for posterity. The final piece, 4Q550e, which seems to be the end of the tale, preserves very little except Bagasraw’s name and perhaps an audience before the king. As Puech notes, the tale or tales of 4Q550 are reminiscent not only of the Daniel tales and both Hebrew and Greek Esther but also of Aḥiqar. In Aḥiqar, Aḥiqar’s high position as seal-bearer and royal adviser is passed on to his adopted son, Nadin. However, 4Q550 stresses loyalty and other qualities, not necessarily a hereditary status. Puech also speculates that, since the Jewish names of the protagonists are unknown, might it not be that either Patireza or Bagasraw is the Persian pseudonym for Daniel? 128 If this were true, then this composition preserves further adventures of Daniel and enlarges the cycle of Second Temple Daniel traditions. Even if this is not the case, it seems clear that these texts relate legends of Jewish exiles in the Eastern courts that were part of the common pool from which the Daniel court tales were taken. Perhaps in some tellings of these stories, the persons named in these fragments were friends of Daniel, along with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Furthermore, if 4Q550 represents multiple stories collected together, then it provides another example of the impulse to collect specifically court tales in the ANE. However, 4Q550 is too fragmentary to know how many stories its manuscripts contained or if there was any linking material or frame.

5.1.1.1.9.  Other Texts from Qumran Daniel’s relationship to other kinds of Qumran texts, such as Enoch, have been amply explored elsewhere. 129 Briefly, D. Diamant noted that the Hebrew 127.  For instance, Dan 4 and 5 remark several times that God will “give” the Babylonian kingdom to “whom he wills”; Dan 4:22 and 29 hope that Nebuchadnezzar learns that “the rule of the Most High is over the kingdom of humans” (‫ ;)ׁשליט עליא במלכות אנׁשא‬and in Dan 6 King Darius prays for Daniel, “May your God, whom you serve, deliver you!” (v. 17). 128.  Puech, Qumrân grotte 4 XXVII: Textes araméens deuxième partie, 9. 129.  See, for instance, several contributions in Gabriele Boccaccini, ed., Enoch and Qumran Origins: New Light on Forgotten Connections (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “Daniel and Early Enoch Traditions in the Scrolls,” in Collins and Flint, eds., The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, 2.368–86, esp. p. 377. Note 4Q530 (The Book of Giants) col. 2 and 1Q20 (The Genesis Apocryphon) cols.13–14 for parallels to Daniel’s throneroom theophany (Dan 7) and the dream of a great tree (Dan 4).

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text 4Q390 was similar to Dan 9:24–27 in that it had a motif of 70 years, jubilees, and a chronology of history. 130 Moreover, Michael Knibb has noted that some Qumran texts of the sapiential genre have parallels to Daniel, 131 including 4QInstruction 132 and 4QMysteries, 133 both of which mention “mysteries” (‫ )רזים‬several times and emphasize the coming end of the age. Knibb also cites 4Q300 1a ii–b as a comparison to certain passages in Daniel. 134 In line 1, there seems to be a challenge to some magicians (restored: ‫ )]החר[טמים‬who teach transgression, and who “utter the parable (‫ )המשל‬and relate the riddle (‫ )⸣ה⸢חידה‬before it is discussed.” Compare this to Dan 1:20 and 2:2, in which the wisemen are expected (but unable) to tell either the king’s dream or its interpretation when asked. Knibb finds further parallels to Danielic language in 4Q300 1aii–b line 2 in which “the [s]eal of the vision is sealed from you” and “you have not come to understand wisdom.” The use of phrases in 4Q299 such as “pursue knowledge” and the continued use of the term “mystery” (‫ )רז‬also demonstrate connections to Daniel. Before leaving the Qumran texts as a body of material in which several parallels and possibly some sources to Daniel have been found, we should note the prevalence of Aramaic as the language of Jewish apocalyptic texts, both those treated briefly here and other texts such as Enoch. 135 It is appropriate that Aramaic is the language used for many court tales as well—such as Aḥiqar, the Qumran tales, the Daniel tales, and Ḥor bar Punesh (but not Joseph, Esther, or 1 Esdras)—because this was a rich international language used by empires throughout the ancient Near East from 600 b.c.e. to about 700 c.e. Literary portrayals of sages and court professionals going about the business of the empire acquire greater realism by using the official language of the realm. Polak argues that tales in praise of the Persians and hailing the fall of the Babylonians (as in Dan 5 and 6) are especially suited to Aramaic: “It appears, then, that in the Persian period Judean exiles applied Aramaic propaganda tales to their own situation, and created an Aramaic Daniel corpus, which magnified the collapse of the Babylonian empire as the work of God (Dan 2; 4–5).” 136 130.  See D. Dimant, “The Seventy Weeks Chronology (Dan 9,24–27) in the Light of New Qumranic Texts,” in A. S. van der Woude, ed., The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings, 57–76. 131.  Michael A. Knibb, “The Book of Daniel in Its Context,” in John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint, eds., The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, 1.16–35. 132.  The text is preserved in 1Q26, 4Q415–418a, and 4Q423; see John Strugnell et al., Qumran Cave 4.XXXIV: Sapiential Texts, Part 2: 4QInstruction (Mûsār lĕ Mēbîn): 4Q415ff. (DJD 34; Oxford: Clarendon, 1999). 133.  The text is preserved in 1Q27, 4Q299, and 4Q300; see J. T. Milik, “27. ‘Livre des mystères’,” in Barthélemy and Milik, Qumran Cave 1, 102–7, pls. XXI–XXII; and L. Schiffman, “299–301. 4QMysteriesa–b,c?,” in Torleif Elgvin et al., Qumran Cave 4.XV: Sapiential Texts, Part 1 (DJD 20; Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 31–123, pls. III–IX. 134. Michael Knibb, “The Book of Daniel in Its Context,” 33. 135. See Collins, “Apocalypticism and Literary Genre,” 12–29. 136.  F. H. Polak, “The Daniel Tales in their Aramaic Literary Milieu,” in van der Woude, ed., The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings, 249–65.

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5.1.1.2.  Daniel Traditions in Josephus Flavius Josephus wrote his history of the Jewish people, Antiquities of the Jews, for the most part as a retelling or rewriting of the Jewish Bible. In book 10, where Josephus recounts the exile after the destruction of the temple by Nebuchadnezzar, he uses material from Daniel to fill the gap between the conclusion of his Kings/Chronicles material and the period of Ezra. 137 In this rather long section, he paraphrases Daniel chs. 1–6 and 8 but seems to leave out any reference to chs. 7, 9–12, or the Additions. 138 Perhaps there is no reference to the Additions because, as Josephus says, he is translating the “books of the Hebrews” into Greek, and the Additions were already in Greek. 139 The Antiquities’ retelling of these sections of Daniel has many details that are not found in either the Semitic or the Greek editions of the text, one of the most notable additions being the tradition about Daniel building a fortress (βάρις) at Ecbatana in Media in which the kings of Media, Persia, and Parthia were henceforth buried and which was watched over by a Jewish priest (Antiquities 10.269). While many of the divergences and elaborations were probably shaped by his purposes for writing the history (to successfully defend the Jews in the face of negative Roman stereotypes, to illustrate the place of providence and prophecy in history, etc.), certain others can be traced back to his sources or were his own innovation. 140 Sometimes, it is difficult to tell the difference between the two. In his retelling of Daniel, Josephus shortens chs. 3 and 4, enlarges chs. 1 and 5, is careful with the vision in ch. 2 because it could be offensive to the Romans (he tells his audience to read the actual chapter in Daniel in order to get the interpretation), and renders ch. 8 quite closely, although he adds in the summary 137. Ralph Marcus, Josephus VIII: Jewish Antiquities, Books IX–XI (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/London: Heinemann, 1961), 260–313. 138.  Josephus may also have used Dan 9 or at least its prophecy of the 70 weeks of years elsewhere in the Antiquities; Bruce, “Josephus and Daniel,” 152–53. 139.  Feldman suggests that Josephus was only interested in the parts of the Book of Daniel that clarify Josephus’ purpose for writing history (“Josephus’ Portrait of Daniel,” Henoch 14 [1992], 37–96). Vermes says: “the most likely explanation is that these passages did not serve Josephus’ purpose” (“Josephus’ Treatment of the Book of Daniel,” JJS 42 [1991], 149–66, 152). Note that DiTommaso wonders if Josephus’ reference to the “books,” βιβλία, in 10.267–269, indicates that Josephus understood chs. 1–6 (the tales) and 7–12 (the visions) as separate books (DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 9 n. 32). 140.  F. F. Bruce, “Josephus and Daniel,” Annual of the Swedish Theological Institute 4 (1965), 148–62; A. Paul, “Le concept de prophétie biblique: Flavius Josèphus et Daniel,” Recherches de Science Religieuse 63 (1975), 367–84; Vermes, “Josephus’ Treatment of the Book of Daniel,” 149–66; Steve Mason, “Josephus, Daniel, and the Flavian House,” in Fausto Parente and Joseph Sievers, eds., Josephus and the History of the Greco-Roman Period: Essays in Memory of Morton Smith (Studia Post-Biblica 41; Leiden: Brill, 1994), 161–91; Louis H. Feldman, “Josephus’ Portrait of Daniel,” Henoch 14 (1992): 37–96, later reprinted as ch. 17 “Daniel,” in idem, Josephus’s Interpretation of the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 629–57; and Christopher T. Begg, “Daniel and Josephus: Tracing Connections,” in A. S. van der Woude, ed., The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings, 539–45.

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that Daniel predicted the destruction of the temple by the Romans (10.276). Christopher Begg, among others, believes that Josephus is reworking Daniel’s career in light of his own, and certain things that might be objectionable to the Romans are omitted by Josephus: anti-empire statements, excessive miracles, etc. 141 If Josephus’ statements about Daniel are compared with his own autobiographical comments, shared features appear: Josephus seems to see himself in some respects as another Daniel. 142 He is a successful and noble Jewish courtier in a foreign court who knows the languages of that court (Latin and Greek in his case) and contends with detractors but remains pacifistic. Josephus portrays himself almost as a biblical prophet; he uses dream reports to show that a true prophet predicts the future as received in revelation from God, and then “writes a ‘history’ which interprets the events of human experience.” 143 Like Daniel, Josephus has a noble birth, a relation to the royal family, great learning and application, austere training and living, and the ability to interpret dreams (e.g., Antiquities 10.194; The Jewish War 3.352). Both are men of prayer, integrity, and good fortune, and both are authors; their rivals are motivated by envy, and each of them receives “special divine illumination.” 144 Although Josephus stresses the similarities between himself and Daniel, there are also differences: Josephus is a priest and general, with a wife and children, and he does not convert Roman rulers, unlike Daniel, who converts Mesopotamian or Persian kings. While a very systematic examination of Josephus’ sources is still a desideratum, Vermes’ study of Josephus’ treatment of the Book of Daniel observes three kinds of Jewish sources behind Josephus’ account (in addition to non-Jewish sources used to bridge the gap between the last years of Nebuchadnezzar and the beginning of Belshazzar’s reign in Antiquities 10.219–232). 145 First, he used 141.  See D. Daube, “Typology in Josephus,” JJS 31 (1980), 18–36, and Gary L. Johnson, “Josephus: Heir Apparent to the Prophetic Tradition? ” in Kent H. Richards, ed., SBLSP 22 (1983), 337–46. For Josephus’ somewhat sympathetic portraits of Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, and Darius, see Louis H. Feldman, Studies in Josephus’ Rewritten Bible (SJSJ 58; Leiden: Brill, 1998), 74–75, 452–55. 142.  In many of his adaptations of biblical characters, especially Joseph, Daniel, Esther and Mordecai, Josephus adds experiences from his own life. Feldman notes that the “chief common denominators” of these particular characters have to do with their dealings with rulers, sufferings because of jealousy, and their rise to prominence. The ratio of Josephus’s use of Daniel in Hebrew and Greek is high in each case. Daniel is very important to Josephus, but the Josephus text on Joseph is 23% longer than that on Daniel; this is perhaps because Daniel disobeyed the king and prophesied the overthrow of the Romans and also was rescued miraculously: these are all uncomfortable matters for Josephus in his position with the Romans. See also Mason, “Josephus, Daniel, and the Flavian House”, 176–77. 143.  Robert Karl Gnuse, Dreams and Dream Reports in the Writings of Josephus: A TraditioHistorical Analysis (Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums 36; Leiden: Brill, 1996), 269. 144.  Begg, “Daniel and Josephus: Tracing Connections,” 544. 145.  These are all cited by Josephus (Antiquities 10.219): Berossus’ History of Chaldaea, Megasthenes’ History of India, Diocles’ History of Persia, and Philostratos’ History of India and Phoenicia.

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the biblical text in Greek (both versions) but also possibly in Hebrew-Aramaic (proto-MT). Second, he included “midrashic supplements” derived from postbiblical Jewish literature. 146 Finally, certain discrepancies are most probably due to Josephus’ own judgment, although it is still possible that some of these may have come from preexisting narratives. To adapt all these sources, Josephus utilized various literary devices and historico-exegetical principles. 147 The identity of the Semitic or Greek editions of the Hebrew Bible upon which Josephus based his retelling of the Bible is much debated, and although many assertions have been made about what Josephus used, few systematic studies of Josephus’ biblical Vorlage have yet been undertaken. 148 Josephus himself says he is translating from Hebrew into Greek and, moreover, not altering the original: But let no one reproach me for recording in my work each of these events as I have found them in the ancient books, for at the very beginning of my History I safeguarded myself against those who might find something wanting in my narrative or find fault with it, and said that I was only translating the books of the Hebrews into the Greek tongue, promising to report their contents without adding anything of my own to the narrative or omitting anything therefrom. (Antiquities 10.218) 149

Most scholars agree, however, that far from sticking to a mere translation of a Hebrew original, Josephus probably also had access to the biblical text in more than one Greek tradition, as well as in Aramaic; moreover, his use of these sources varies from book to book, and Josephus does not merely translate, as he claims, but paraphrases and expounds. 150 As Steve Mason notes, “although internally consistent, his biblical paraphrase does not consistently coincide with any known version of the text or rabbinic halakah or haggadah; he parallels all of these from 146.  Vermes believes it unlikely that these supplements were from Josephus’ own pen or that it was really the rabbis who adopted them from Josephus (“Josephus’ Treatment of the Book of Daniel,” 161). 147.  In general, Vermes finds nine discrepancies between Josephus’ Antiquities and Dan 1; eleven in ch. 2; at least three in ch. 3; two in ch. 4; five in ch. 5; five in ch. 6; and three in ch. 8. 148.  For an example, see Eugene Ulrich, The Qumran Text of Samuel and Josephus (HSM 19; Misoula, MT,: Scholars Press, 1978); idem, “Josephus’ Biblical Text for the Books of Samuel,” in Louis H. Feldman and G. Hata, eds., Josephus, the Bible, and History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 81–96, reprinted in The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible (Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans / Leiden: Brill, 1999), 184–201. Scholars have also turned to Josephus for a variant edition of Esther: see Charles V. Dorothy, The Books of Esther: Structure, Genre and Textual Integrity (JSOTSup 187; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997). 149. Marcus, Josephus VIII, 279. 150.  As an example of Josephus’ access to the OG, note that, in his retelling of Dan 5, the magicians of Babylon fail twice, instead of once, to explain the writing on the wall (AJ 10.235–236; cf. OG Dan 5:7).

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time to time but often goes his own way.” 151 What seems likely is that Josephus had access to divergent texts in each version, a fact to which the pluriformity of the Dead Sea Scrolls testify. Feldman notes that this has “made us realize that what we had thought were changes instituted by Josephus more likely derive from a different text, which he had before him.” 152 Julio Trebolle Barrera suggests that Josephus knew a Hebrew tradition that was not dependent on the MT or the OG. 153 Feldman also posits a Semitic source, adding that perhaps the author only later began to use the Greek. 154 On the other hand, several brief studies demonstrate that Josephus’ use of Daniel shows some familiarity with a Greek version. Vermes proposes that Josephus’ “immediate source was a Greek Bible and when the old LXX differs from ‘Theodotion,’ JA [Antiquities] is more often dependent on the former than on the latter.” 155 At least once, the Antiquities seems to have followed Symmachus. For his part, Charles thought that Josephus had access to the original form of the OG, which is no longer extant. 156 On the other hand, agreement with MT or Septuagint does not necessarily prove dependence, because he might have chosen to omit a portion or solve an apparent problem in his own manner. Of the additions to the Antiquities that are found in other late Jewish texts and therefore probably derive from other post-biblical literature already circulating in Josephus’ time, the following are most notable. 157 First, some of the Jewish youths who were deported were made eunuchs. This, as scholars have suggested, is taken from Isa 39:7 and 2 Kgs 20:18; the tradition is also found in the Lives of the Prophets and in y. Shabbat 6, 8d (in the latter, Daniel and his companions’ virility is miraculously restored). 158 Next, the names of the chief eunuch and the steward must reflect divergent traditions; the Antiquities have only a eunuch named Aschanes, while OG has a chief eunuch named Abiesdri (and no steward), and Th manuscripts have both a chief eunuch Asphanez and a name for the 151. Steve Mason, “Josephus and His Twenty-Two Book Canon,” in Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders, eds., The Canon Debate: On the Origins and Formation of the Bible (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2002), 120. 152.  Feldman, Josephus’ Interpretation of the Bible, 24. 153.  Trebolle Barrera, The Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible: An Introduction to the History of the Bible (trans. W. G. E. Watson (Leiden: Brill / Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 466. 154.  Feldman, “Use, Authority and Exegesis of Mikra in the Writings of Josephus,” in Martin Jan Mulder and Harry Sysling, eds., Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity (Compendium rerum judaicarum ad novum testamentum 2/1; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), 455–66. 155.  Vermes, “Josephus’ Treatment of the Book of Daniel,” 161. 156.  Robert H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel, 34. 157.  Vermes does not believe that Josephus created the midrash but that these traditions were already in circulation at his time (Vermes, “Josephus’ Treatment of the Book of Daniel,” 162). 158. See Vermes, “Josephus’ Treatment of the Book of Daniel,” 153, 162; but also S. Krauss, “The Jews in the Works on the Church Fathers,” JQR 5 (1893), 122–57; 6 (1894), 82–99, 225–61; Braverman, Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel, 53–71.

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steward that is basically a transliteration of the Hebrew term ‫( המלצר‬Amelsad, Amalsad, Amelsar, or Amellasar). 159 That Daniel is a prophet and that his vision is a prophecy (e.g., Antiquities 10.249, 266–269, 280) not only comes from the OG tradition of placing Daniel in the Prophets section but is a claim also found in the Lives of the Prophets, 4QFlorilegium, and the New Testament. 160 The feeding of the lions before the enemies of Daniel are thrown to them may be from prior midrash as well. 161 This is necessary in order to show to detractors and the king that God had truly intervened in the case of Daniel rather than that the beasts were merely not hungry. Finally, there is the tradition that Daniel built a fortress-tomb for the Persian-Parthian kings in Ecbatana that was overseen by a Jewish priest up until Josephus’ day (Antiquities 10.265). 162 In comparison, note that, in the Lives of the Prophets 4.18, Daniel is buried in the royal sepulchre of the Persian kings. Vermes believes that the many minor additions or omissions that come from Josephus’ pen and are not drawn from his sources produce a “more detailed and coherent Daniel account which at the same time is smoother and more logical than the biblical story.” 163 However, it is probably impossible to be certain that some of the additions or omissions are not borrowed. It is necessary to only name a few of these here. For example, Josephus makes all four of the Judahite youths in Daniel 1 into relatives of King Zedekiah and, thus, relatives of each other. Moreover, King Nebuchadnezzar takes more of an active interest in the youths in Josephus’ retelling; Nebuchadnezzar himself makes the decision to change their names and selects their new Babylonian ones. There are also changes in dates, such as in the beginning of Dan 2, which is said to occur “two years after the sacking of Egypt” rather than in Nebuchadnezzar’s second regnal year. Other changes smooth out the stories. In his retelling of Dan 2, Josephus gives Nebuchadnezzar a reason for asking his courtiers to tell him not only his dream’s interpretation but the dream itself (it was no cruel test—he had forgotten them when he awoke), and the fourth kingdom of the statue is Rome in Josephus’ view. In his abbreviated iteration of Dan 3, Josephus omits several details of the 159.  In the MT, the chief of the king’s eunuchs is called ‫ אׁשפנז‬in 1:3: either a proper name or an Old Persian term for innkeeper (see Collins, Daniel, 127). 160.  4QFlorilegium, which dates to the second half of the first century b.c.e., cites Daniel as a prophet: “It is written in the book of the prophet Daniel. . .” (4Q174 1–3 ii 3–4), as does Matt 24:15 in the NT. Vermes notes that this is contradicted by the Babylonian Talmud (b. Meg. 3a; b. Sanh. 93b–941; Vermes, “Josephus’ Treatment of the book of Daniel,” 158, 162). 161.  Midrash on Ps 64:1. See Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1913–1928), 4.349; Vermes, “Josephus’ Treatment of the Book of Daniel,” 162. 162.  On Jewish tomb veneration, see Pieter W. van der Horst, Japheth in the Tents of Shem: Studies on Jewish Hellenism in Antiquity (Contributions to Biblical Exegesis & Theology 32; Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 119–37. For other traditions about Daniel’s death, see DiTommaso, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature, 76ff. 163.  Vermes, “Josephus’ Treatment of the Book of Daniel,” 163.

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biblical story (of the musical instruments, he mentions only a trumpet; the death of the executioners is accidental; etc.) but adds others, most especially the note that the miraculous deliverance of Daniel’s friends from the fire was due to divine providence, “in consideration of their being thrown into it without having done any wrong that it did not touch them, and it was powerless to burn the youths when it held them, for God made their bodies too strong to be consumed by the fire” (10.214–215). 164 In Dan 4, the story is changed to give the dream and its interpretation together, and Josephus also states baldly that no one tried to usurp the king’s power while he was absent. 165 This last comment may be a reaction to the OG, since the OG 4:28 has a voice from heaven tell king Nebuchadnezzar that someone, “a despised man” from within his own household, would be given his throne. For Dan 5, Josephus has Babylon conquered by both Darius and Cyrus (Antiquities 10.248), which may smooth out Daniel’s problems with history (by connecting the book’s Median “empire” under the fictional Darius to historical Persian activity). Moreover, Josephus’ retelling of Dan 6 ends with a transition to the story of Dan 8, since Josephus skips Dan 7. Finally, Josephus embellishes the vision of Dan 8: for example, before his vision, he is surrounded by his friends who run when an earthquake occurs, and the interpretation is given to him not by the angel Gabriel but by God himself. Josephus also states that Daniel foretold Roman rule and the fall of Jerusalem and the temple (Antiquities 10.276).

5.1.1.3.  The Vita Danielis (Life of Daniel) in the Lives of the Prophets, as Well as Traditions in Josippon and the Chronicle of Jerahmeel The Vita Danielis is one of 23 vitae in the Lives of the Prophets, each consisting of a prophet’s tribe and place of birth followed by his death and burial. Some vitae have narrative material between, and others have narrative material in addition to the description of a particular prophecy. 166 The Vita of Daniel utilizes only ch. 4 of the biblical Daniel, and this it does with Byzantine-era modifications. Although the common understanding is that the Lives of the Prophets is a late Second Temple Jewish document composed in Palestine, perhaps in the first century c.e., 167 the originally Jewish traditions have been thoroughly altered by fourth164.  Marcus’ translation, Josephus VIII, 276–77. 165.  Vermes, “Josephus’ Treatment of the Book of Daniel,” 156. 166.  It has been suggested that, because the birth, burial, and geographical information is so complete, these elements may be their prime feature; the vitae could possibly have served as a pilgrim’s guide of sorts. 167. David Satran, Biblical Prophets in Byzantine Palestine: Reassessing the Lives of the Prophets (SVTP 11; Leiden: Brill, 1995), 1. See also Charles Cutler Torrey, The Lives of the Prophets: Greek Text and Translation (SBLMS 1; Philadelphia: Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, 1946), 11–12; David Satran, “Daniel: Seer, Philosopher, Holy Man,” in John J. Collins and George W. E. Nickelsburg, eds., Ideal Figures in Ancient Judaism: Profiles and Paradigms (SBL Septuagint and Cognate Studies 12; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1980), 33–48.

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century Christian interpretation. 168 Whether it was first written in Hebrew or Greek has been disputed. 169 In the Vita of Daniel, Daniel is portrayed as a properly Byzantine holy man who fasts from desirable food and was withered in appearance (“but comely in the grace of the Most High”). 170 King Nebuchadnezzar becomes a composite beast, his upper half like an ox and his lower half like a lion; however, after digesting his daily meal of grass, he would take on a human heart and pray in distress, before “Behemoth” would take control of him again. Like Josephus’ Daniel in his retelling of Dan 1, in the Vita of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar is expected to eat only pulse and herbs. 171 Similarly, the Vita of Habakkuk in the Lives of the Prophets also transformed a biblical prophet into a Byzantine holy man and it includes the tradition from Bel and the Serpent that Habakkuk brought food to Daniel in the lions’ pit. However, according to Satran, the Habakkuk story in the Lives of the Prophets “is not simply an alternate version of the well-known tale from the Greek addition to the book of Daniel known as Bel and the Dragon.” 172 It seems instead to be a reflection on the earlier Jewish traditions behind that work. 173 When it comes to considering the age of the sources of the Danielic material in the Lives of the Prophets, there seems to be no definitive criterion for determining what is of very early and Jewish origin and what is later Christian. The difficulty of identifying early material is true as well for the medieval work called Josippon, which at one time was accepted as the Hebrew version of Josephus covering Jewish history from Adam to the age of Titus. The identification with Josephus is now disputed, and it has been dated from the third or early fourth century to the ninth or tenth century c.e., with a few scholars arguing that it is 168. “The fascination with the symbolic nature of Nebuchadnezzar’s punishment and emphasis on the providential character of his chastisement establish the text firmly within the framework of fourth century Christian interpretation. The account of Nebuchadnezzar’s penitential behavior and the unique role assigned Daniel lend a monastic coloring to the narrative. While it is likely that traditions (whether oral or written) of early Jewish origin underlie the narrative of the vita of Daniel, it is no less certain that the legend before us represents a thoroughly altered indubitably Christian stage of development. The biblical chapter [ch. 4] has been transformed into a fine expression of early Byzantine piety” (Satran, Biblical Prophets in Byzantine Palestine, 96). 169.  The text used as the base of Satran’s translation is the sixth- or seventh-century Greek text of Codex Marchalianus (Q), which is the earliest documented form of the Lives. 170.  Satran’s translation (Biblical Prophets in Byzantine Palestine, 124). 171. David Satran looks at Dan 4 traditions from the Bible to Josephus to Vitae Prophetarum (“Daniel: Seer, Philosopher, Holy Man,” 33–48). He finds that Daniel’s asceticism—not only his eating habits but his harsh educational regimen—emulates the practice of a Pythagorean philosopher. 172.  Satran, Biblical Prophets in Byzantine Palestine, 62. 173.  Ibid., 61–62, 101–2. Habakkuk is changed from the unenthusiastic prophet who has to be dragged by the hair through the air to the lions’ pit into someone who prophesies to his family what he is going to do.

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even earlier. 174 In Josippon, there are no parallels to Susanna or to the Additions of Dan 3, but there are parallels for Bel and the Serpent. There are two manuscripts of Josippon (the Mantua edition of 1480 and the Constantinople dated to 1510), and portions of the text were also copied in the medieval Jewish Chronicle of Jerahmeel (Megillat Yeraḥmeʾel or Meliẓat Yeraḥmeʾel or Sefer ha-Yeraḥmeʾeli), which was discovered by M. Gaster. 175 This chronicle contains, among other things, a history from the creation of the world until the destruction of the Second Temple and was originally compiled by Jerahmeel ben Solomon in Southern Italy in the twelfth century; it was copied and expanded by Eleazar ben Asher ha-Levi in the Rhine provinces in 1325, as part of his Book of Recollections (Sefer ha-Zikronot; MS Bod. Oxf. heb.d.11). Jacob Reiner has suggested that the Chronicle of Jerahmeel preserves an “untampered text of the Yosippon” and that Josephus, referred to as Joseph ben Gorion in this work, was a primary source for the author of Josippon (but not the author), whom Jerahmeel and the copyist Eleazar faithfully cite. 176 Until recently, the Bodleian Jerahmeel was only partially published but had been translated in part by Gaster. 177 However, Eli Yassif has now provided a critical edition of the entirety of the Chronicle of Jerahmeel from the Bodleian manuscript. 178 174.  For instance, David Flusser believes it was written in 953 c.e. (Flusser, “Josippon, a Medieval Hebrew Version of Josephus,” in Louis H. Feldman and Gohei Hata, eds., Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity [Detroit: Wayne State University, 1987], 386–97). A late ninth-century date has been proposed by S. Bowman (“Sefer Josippon: History and Midrash,” in M. Fishbane, ed., The Midrashic Imagination: Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History [Albany: State University of New York, 1993], 280–94). However, Neuman and others have pushed the date much farther back. Neuman suggests that its material may come from a time “when Jewish sources different from and, in some instances, older than the Apocrypha and Josephus were still available and could be freely used by an independent author. . . .” (Abraham A. Neuman, “Josippon and the Apocrypha,” JQR 43 [1952–53], 1–26, esp. pp. 1–2). Furthermore, Solomon Zeitlin proposed that Josippon was familiar with tannaitic and early patristic material, but not amoraic (Zeitlin, “Josippon,” JQR 53 [1962–63], 277–97). However, Feldman wonders if even this is insufficiently early (Louis H. Feldman, “A Selective Bibliography of Josephus,” in Louis H. Feldman and Gohei Hata, eds., Josephus, the Bible, and History [Leiden: Brill, 1989], 330–448, esp. p. 336. 175. Jacob Reiner, “The Original Hebrew Yosippon in the Chronicle of Jerahmeel,” JQR 60 (1969–70), 128–46, esp. pp. 134–35. 176.  Ibid., 146. 177.  Gaster translated Jerahmeel’s Hebrew version of Dan 4–6 and Susanna and Bel but skipped chs. 2–5 and 7, and he published the Jerahmeel Aramaic text and a translation of the ch. 3 additions and Bel. See: M. Gaster, The Chronicles of Jerahmeel; or, The Hebrew Bible Historiale: Being a Collection of Apocryphal and Pseudo-Epigraphical Books Dealing with the History of the World from the Creation to the Death of Judas Maccabeus (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1899); and Gaster, “The Unknown Aramaic Original of Theodotion’s Additions to the Book of Daniel,” PSBA 16 (1894), 280–90, 312–17; 17 (1895), 75–94 (reprinted in idem, ed., Studies and Texts [London: Maggs Brothers, 1925–28), 1.39–68; text in 3.18–23). See also, Koch, Deuterokanonische Zusätze zum Danielbuch, 1.20. 178.  Sefer ha-Zikronot huʾ Divrey ha-Yamim le-Yerahmeʾel (‫ספר הזקרונות הוא דברי הימים‬ ‫ ;לירחמאל‬Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2001), esp. 231–60.

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The coverage of Daniel in the Chronicle of Jerahmeel appears in ch. 8 on the Babylonian and Persian exile (‫)בגלות בבל ופרס‬, sections 1–7, and probably utilized a variety of sources besides Josippon. The Chronicle of Jerahmeel contains, in this order: a Hebrew text of the Aramaic chapters of Dan 2–7 (‫ספר דניאל‬, section 1); 179 an Aramaic text of all the Additions to ch. 3 and of the second half of Bel and the Serpent (the episode of the serpent, complete with the lions’ pit ending and the Habakkuk episode; ‫ תפילת שלושת רעי דניאל‬and ‫דניאל והתנין‬, sections 2 and 3), 180 Susanna in Hebrew text (‫מעשה שושנה‬, section 5; preceded by the story of the false prophets Ahab and Zedekiah also in Hebrew—‫מעשה אחאב בן קוליה‬ ‫וצדקיה בן מעשיה‬, section 4), 181 a description of Nebuchadnezzar that assumes but does not retell Dan 4 (in Hebrew; ‫אחרית נבוכדנצר‬, section 6), 182 and, finally, another version in Hebrew of Dan 5 and Bel and the Serpent (with great expansions about the fall of the Babylonian kingdom; ‫אגדות דניאל‬, section 7) that is attributed to Joseph son of Gorion ( Josippon). 183 This version of Bel includes both the statue and serpent episodes but omits the lions’ pit ending; the conspirators seek Daniel’s life by sword instead. The long Jerahmeel section on Daniel ends with Daniel, in the face of this threat, asking permission to go home to Shushan in Elam. He is allowed to go only after he picks the wise Zerubbabel, son of Shealtiel, son of Jechoniah/Jehoiachin, king of Judah, to serve in his stead before Darius. The story then transitions into a version of the “Three Pages” in 3 Ezra (1 Esdras) 3–4 (‫מעשה זרובבל‬, section 8). Several items are of interest in Jerahmeel’s version of Daniel events in both Hebrew and Aramaic, but only a few will be mentioned here. First, the author is content to have two versions of Daniel in the lions’ pit in which Daniel is fed miraculously by Habakkuk (Hebrew Dan 6 and Aramaic Bel). Second, there are two versions of Bel, one in Aramaic without the statue episode and including the Habakkuk visit, and the other (attributed to Joseph ben Gorion) with both the statue and snake episodes but no Habakkuk visit. These kinds of duplicates echo the similar situation in the OG and Th editions of biblical Daniel in which there are duplicate lions’ pit stories. The story of Dan 6 in Hebrew has the two officers write the decree that forbids worshiping anyone other than the king, and the king seals it innocently after they produce it. They then catch Daniel praying, not by observing him themselves, as in MT/OG/Th, but because they ask a little girl, who informs them. Moreover, the king contends with them regarding throwing Daniel into the pit, but no one supports him because everyone wishes for Daniel’s downfall. Furthermore, the ten lions in the pit have been intentionally starved, yet when 179.  Ibid., 231–42. 180.  Ibid., 243–44 and 245–46. 181.  Ibid., 246–47 (section 4), 247–49 (section 5). 182.  Ibid., 249–50. 183.  Ibid., 250–60 (the Joseph ben Gorion notice is at the end of section 6).

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Daniel arrives they lick him and wag their tails like dogs. Oddly enough, the Habakkuk episode of Bel is placed in the middle of Dan 6, providing sustenance for Daniel. This telling of Dan 6 concludes with what seems to be an episode in the Book of Ezra in which Darius issues a decree allowing the Jews to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple (ch. 1), but they are blocked by a letter sent from their enemies (ch. 4). The Aramaic translation of the Additions to Dan 3 and the legend of the snake (the second part of Bel and the Serpent) are assigned to Thodos, or Theodotion. (Gaster believed that the Aramaic version of the Addition proved the Semitic original of Theodotion. 184) These segments are placed in Jerahmeel after the Hebrew version of chs. 2–7 and before the Ahab and Zedekiah story in Hebrew. Jerahmeel’s Aramaic text of Bel and the Serpent only has the serpent episode, complete with the lions’ pit and the Habakkuk visit. Like the Hebrew of this in Jerahmeel, the serpent is killed by feeding it iron objects rolled in pitch and fat (iron hatchets in the Aramaic, combs in the Hebrew). 185 Furthermore, Habbakuk places his bread in a sack rather than in a bowl, leaving his hands free for the pottage. The story of Susanna follows Theodotion-Daniel quite closely but is immediately preceded by the story of Ahab and Zedekiah, the false prophets, who are thrown into the fiery furnace with Joshua the high priest, who is the only one to survive. This provides a significant lead-in to the story of Susanna and the two false elders who accuse her, although Ahab and Zedekiah are not identified with the elders. The story of Susanna also includes the erotic report of Susanna’s bath in the presence of the hidden elders, just as in Th Daniel, but goes even further to state that she had actually stripped herself of clothing when they come out of hiding to accost her. Her father is said to be Shealtiel (perhaps hinting at a relationship to the Zerubbabel who is chosen to take Daniel’s place at the end of Jerahmeel  ’s Hebrew account of Bel), and Daniel is referred to as a young man but already identified as a chamberlain in the king’s palace. After the Susanna story in Jerahmeel, there is a short passage describing Nebuchadnezzar as a beast (section 6), but this passage is not a story so much as allusions to a story—that is, the story in Dan 4—which is presented with some modifications. 186 As in the depiction in the Daniel Vita in the Lives of the Prophets, Nebuchadnezzar’s upper part is described as that of an ox, while below his navel his form was that of a lion. He ate grass but killed the wicked. The account says that Daniel never went out to see him, as did the others, but prayed for him, and thus his sentence of seven years was shortened to seven months. After seven

ibid.

184.  Gaster, “The Unknown Aramaic Original,” 47. 185.  This tradition is also found in Midrash Rabba on Genesis 68, f. 77 c, d. So Gaster, 186.  Yassif, Sefer ha-Zikronot, 249–50.

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months, he was restored to his human form, but for the rest of the seven years he ruled alongside seven judges, and he ate only herbs and seeds. The Jerahmeel Hebrew version of Dan 5 that is sourced to Joseph ben Gorion begins with a description of a joint attack by Darius the Mede and Cyrus the Persian against Belshazzar in Babylon, a battle that Belshazzar wins. 187 It is at the victory celebration, complete with the temple vessels taken from Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, that a scribe is sent from God to write “he thought, he weighed, he separated” (‫)חשב שקל והפריש‬, using Hebrew characters but Aramaic language, on the wall in red ink. Belshazzar sees only the hand; the body (‫)הגולם‬ is not visible. The queen does not appear in the scene. Daniel is brought in to read and interpret, but the reading seems to be given twice, differently each time. At first, Daniel says only, “Shekel: the enemies of the Lord have been weighed in the balance and been found wanting. And Hiphrîsh: Our God has separated/torn the kingdom from His enemy, and given it to Darius and Cyrus, who have been battling you. Between them the kingdom shall be divided.” Then follows a very long speech by Daniel, which he concludes with another reading and interpretation of the writing: And behold the writing is written (in) Hebrew signs with its decree (in) Aramaic: Their words (‫ )מיליהום‬188 are “Mĕnē, mĕnē, tĕqēl (‫ )תקיל‬ûparsîn.” And this is the interpretation for you: Mĕnē—God has numbered the years of your kingdom, which are completed, the seventy years of Babylon having come to an end. Tĕqēl (‫ )תקל‬and ûparsîn—You have been weighed and found wanting. Your kingdom shall be taken away and given to the Medes and Persians.” 189

Belshazzar is killed that night in his sleep by a trusted old doorkeeper who recalls Daniel’s interpretations of Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams and then beheads Belshazzar with a sword he finds under the king’s pillows. He brings the head to Darius and Cyrus in the morning, with a speech about the writing on the wall and Daniel’s interpretation. The frightened kings pay homage to the God of heaven, promising to release his people from captivity, rebuild their temple, and bring together all the outcasts of his people from across the world, if only God will give them victory over the Babylonians. After a devastatingly brutal and successful campaign, Darius takes Babylon and Media for himself, while Cyrus takes Chaldea, 187.  Ch. 8, section 7; Yassif, Sefer ha-Zikronot, 250f. In contrast, the other Hebrew version of Dan 5 in section 1 does not diverge much from the Aramaic Dan 5 in the Bible. 188.  This is the only word in this passage that is in Aramaic, outside of “Mĕnē, mĕnē, tĕkēl, ûparsîn.” 189.  This is close to MT Dan 5:25–27; note that the Aramaic words are used here (instead of, for example, Hebrew “shekel” as in Daniel’s first reading of the writing). There are two important differences: the fulfillment of the years of the kingdom is explicitly defined as “the seventy years of Babylon,” which have come to an end; and ûparsîn is understood in the MT as “your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.”

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Assyria, and Persia. Darius is introduced to Daniel, from whom he asks counsel regarding how to rule in his tired old age. Upon Daniel’s advice to appoint three officers to do the strenuous labor of the king, he selects two princes and places Daniel over them. Darius issues a decree to all the people, commanding them to obey Daniel and to worship his God. In the Hebrew version of Bel attributed to Joseph ben Gorion, the statue episode appears much as in OG Dan and Th Dan until the point when the footprints are discovered in the temple. 190 Unlike OG Dan and Th Dan, the serpent (‫ )תנין‬is killed with iron combs bound back-to-back and covered with poisonous fat. The combs are fed to the serpent, who then dies when the fat melts away in his stomach, exposing the spikes. The handlers discover him dead in the cave a few days later. They seek to kill Daniel with a sword, and it is at this point that Daniel asks to go home to Shushan. Because a full edition of the Daniel sections of Jerahmeel has only recently become available, previous scholars have generally made judgments based only on its Aramaic version of the Additions to ch. 3 and Bel and the Serpent, because Gaster claimed he had found the original versions of these when he published them in the Aramaic (with an English translation) in 1894 and 1895. 191 A full study of Jerahmeel remains a desideratum and is not within the scope of this study. However, in his judgment about the Aramaic version of both the Additions and Bel, Collins says, “The Aramaic text is likely to be old and not a medieval composition.” 192 But opinion is divided about their relationship to the biblical Book of Daniel in either the MT or the Greek editions. Gaster thought the existence of the Aramaic version of the Additions and Bel proved the Semitic original of Theodotion’s version of them. 193 Koch, a scholar who has revived Gaster’s views, is of the opinion that the Jerahmeel of the Additions to ch. 3 and Bel is the Vorlage of the Theodotion, Old Greek, and the Syriac versions. 194 On the other hand, Davies and Collins argue that the Aramaic Jerahmeel version of Bel is a translation from a Hebrew original; and Kuhl thinks that the same is true for the Additions to Dan 3. 195 Kottsieper’s explanation is that the Jerahmeel text of both the Additions to ch. 3 and Bel clearly follows Th, which itself is based on the OG. 196 Moreover, for Kottsieper, Jerahmeel is not a witness to a Semitic 190.  The end of the statue episode is missing, as well as the very beginning of the dragon/ serpent episode. 191.  The story of Susanna in the Chronicles of Jerahmeel is in Hebrew and follows Th. For the Hebrew of all of the Additions in Jerahmeel, see Koch, Deuterokanonische Zusätze, vol. 1. 192.  Collins, Daniel, 410. 193.  Gaster, “The Unknown Aramaic Original,” 47. 194.  Koch, Deuterokanonische Zusätze, 1.61. Kuhl believes this to be true about the Additions to Dan 3 (Kuhl, Die drei Männer, 150–61). 195.  T. Witton Davies, “Bel and the Dragon,” in Charles, ed., Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, 1.652–64; Collins, Daniel, 410–11. 196.  Kottsieper, “Zusätze,” 220.

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Vorlage of the Additions; there are many places where the Th tradition in the form of the Vulgate lies behind the Jerahmeel text. In sum, scholars seem to agree that the versions of Daniel in the Chronicles of Jerahmeel contain older material but disagree significantly about how old it is and what it means for Daniel studies.

5.1.1.4.  Conclusions about the Pool of Second Temple Daniel Literature Having reviewed the Qumran material and the Daniel traditions or retellings in Josephus’ Antiquities and Jerahmeel, what can be said about a pool of Second Temple Daniel literature? There seem to be two texts from Qumran that could have served as sources for Daniel, both as sources for visions: the Historical Text (Acts of a Greek King) and 4Q116 (4QDaniel e). The text of the first is late (30–1 b.c.e.), although its composition could be much earlier (perhaps as early as the time of Antiochus Epiphanes), and the most important section that could be linked to biblical Daniel (the phrase “shattering the power of the holy ones”) is in dispute. If the text is not read as Esther Eshel reads it, the possibility that it is related to Daniel, let alone a source for Daniel, falls away. The second text, according to Ulrich, probably originally contained the prayer in Dan 9:4b–19 (the fragment itself preserves just 9:12–17) and may well have been utilized as a source for Dan 9. The text dates to the second century b.c.e. The prayer has a very Deuteronomistic theology that the rest of Dan 9 seems to reject. 197 Perhaps the independent prayer from 4Q116 was incorporated into Dan 9 precisely to be a counterpoint to the author’s thought. The other Danielic texts from Qumran seem to form a kind of broad pool of analogues to the biblical Daniel stories (chs. 1–6, but not Bel and Susanna). Texts such as 4Q242, 4Q243–44, 4Q245, and possibly 4Q246 “represent a continuation of the tradition according to which Daniel was a mantic attached to the royal court, the mediator of divine revelations, just as he is in Daniel 2, 4, and 5,” and perhaps they are dependent on Daniel. 198 On the other hand, some scholars have argued that a text such as the Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242) is a source, or at least a middle point, between Mesopotamian or other traditions and the Book of Daniel. The Prayer’s plot connections with Dan 4 (the prayer of a Babylonian king relating an affliction in the wilderness that is healed by a Jewish diviner) are very strong, and it is my opinion that the Prayer and Dan 4 are separate Jewish interpretations or tellings of traditions about the Babylonian king Nabonidus and his sojourns in Teimāʾ/Tēmān. Moreover, a text such as Pseudo-Daniel a–b may represent a link or middle stage between the earlier stories of Daniel (chs. 1–6) and the visions of Daniel (chs. 7–12), as DiTommaso suggests. On the other hand, there is no firm evidence that Pseudo-Daniel a–b or Pseudo-Daniel c had to 197. See DiTommaso, “4QPseudo-Daniel  A–B (4Q243–4Q244),” 132. 198.  Knibb, “The Book of Daniel in Its Context,” 31.

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have been influenced by the Book of Daniel. Although it is not impossible, the name “Daniel,” the foreign court setting, the mention of Belshazzar, and the presence of eschatological prophecy may all derive from common traditions. 4Q246, the Aramaic Apocalypse, however, despite its court setting and prophecy, is unlikely to have direct connections to Daniel. The same is true for the Four Kingdoms Apocalypse (4Q551), which has a compelling parallel to Daniel in its sequence of kingdoms represented by trees and dates to the mid-second century b.c.e. (at the latest), but its fable-like description of walking and talking trees is not taken up in biblical Daniel at all. Neither one in their extant text mentions Daniel. Finally, 4Q550, Tales of the Persian Court, is set in a Persian court and recounts Jewish courtiers at odds with at least one rival. The Tales may contain stories about Daniel under a Persian pseudonym (either Patireza or Bagasraw), as Puech posited. Nonetheless, it might be more accurate to say that the story or stories formed part of a large pool of Jewish court tales set in foreign lands to which the Daniel tales also belonged. These Jewish court tales, in turn, were a sub-set of the ancient Near Eastern court tale genre in general. That there might be multiple stories in 4Q550 demonstrates the impetus to collect court tales in one place. Material from Josephus at most is a witness to the variety of traditions surrounding Daniel that might have been extant in the first century c.e., but we can not always tell which of Josephus’ enlargements or additions were in sources previous to him nor which could have been options available to the author-compiler of the biblical Daniel narratives. Josephus certainly seems to have created new material as well as utilized previous traditions. On the other hand, the Lives of the Prophets seems to have fully modifed Dan 4 in terms of Byzantine Christian needs, and distinctively Jewish material of a much earlier date has been well obscured. The Chronicle of Jerahmeel also may be much older than its medieval text or at least could rely on very old traditions. It is impossible to reach a conclusion, however, and a critical study of its contents remains a desideratum. In sum, the Daniel stories and traditions discussed here comprise a kind of Daniel “cycle” along with the biblical stories in Aramaic and Greek. 199 The relationship of the parabiblical material to the biblical is often hard to pin down. Loren Stuckenbruck has suggested that ancient authors selected items from the cycle to suit their own purposes even before the biblical Daniel was finalized. 200 For example, the Lives of the Prophets utilized only Dan 4; the Greek lectionar199.  “It is likely . . . that there were several writings in the name of Daniel circulating in the second century b.c.e., and that only a selection found their way into the biblical book” (Collins, “New Light on the Book of Daniel,” 189). 200.  Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “The Formation and Re-formation of Daniel in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” in James H. Charlesworth, eds., The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The Princeton Symposium on the Dead Sea Scrolls (Scripture and the Scrolls; Waco, TX: Baylor Unversity Press, 2006), 101–30.

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ies picked up only chs. 3–6 in Greek; 1 Macc 1 refers briefly to chs. 3 and 6 as examples of martyrdom, and Josephus only included versions of chs. 1–6 and 8 but not the other vision chapters or anything from the Greek Additions.

5.1.2.  The Ancient Near Eastern “Court Tale” Genre In chapter four of this study, the context of Dan 1–6 (and Susanna and Bel, to some extent) within the ancient Near Eastern court tale genre was surveyed. We noted there that many efforts to place the Daniel stories within a broad literary tradition of Near Eastern court tales have not utilized much evidence from Egyptian literature. In his comprehensive study of the Jewish “court tale,” a label that he narrows to “wisdom court legend,” Lawrence Wills includes the following as examples of the ancient Near Eastern genre. From the Bible, there is Esther; the Daniel stories; 1 Esdras 3–4; and some others (“disguised parables” such as the parable Nathan delivers to David in 2 Sam 12:1–14; the wise woman of Tekoa in 2 Sam 14:1–17; and the unnamed prophet who appears before Ahab in 1 Kgs 20:39–43; there are also less structured narratives from Solomon’s court). Wills spends some time as well analyzing the tale of Aḥiqar and some court tales in Herodotus’ Histories, such as the stories about three of the seven sages: Solon, Thales, and Bias; and the Croesus cycle in (mostly) book 1. He discusses in less detail Persian court tales from the Shāh-Nāma, the “Epic of Kings” (such as ShāhNāma 29:1, which has a story involving the courtier Mazdak) and the “Oracle of Vishtaspa/Hystaspes.” Wills does not include the fragmentary court tales from Qumran (neither the parabiblical Daniel stories nor the Tales of the Persian Court), and the one Egyptian story that Wills sees as relevant to Daniel, the Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy from the Ptolemaic period, is attributed by Wills to Persian influence and not to native Egyptian literary traditions. 201 Wills does not consider any other court tales from Egypt, and he finds no reason to give more space to Egyptian material, since “every post-exilic Jewish court legend is set in the Persian court, or its predecessor, the Neo-Babylonian (Esther, Daniel cycle, 1 Esdras 3–4), and the nonJewish Story of Ahikar is set in the Assyrian Empire.” 202 Wills maintains that, in general, the court tale “had little currency outside of Asia Minor and Persia,” 203 because Herodotus’ Histories contains court legends only in the sections that involve Asia Minor and Persia, not in those involving Egypt or western Greece. 204 201.  Note that the single papyrus is late Ptolemaic and a firm date can not be given for the composition of the text; Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 3, 159. Wills does not include autobiographies of courtiers, such as the Story of Sinuhe, Autobiography of Weni, and the Journey of Wenamun, because they do not include wisdom motifs and the “stock plot elements” of the Jewish examples; Wills, Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 43. Wills judges The Eloquent Peasant to approximate a court legend, but the protagonist is a peasant, not a courtier, and the tale is humorous and satirical; loc. cit. 202.  Ibid., 39. 203.  Ibid., 55. 204. Ibid.

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However, Herodotus does not include any court legends set in Mesopotamia either, and although Jewish court tales and Aḥiqar may be set in that region, there is not much evidence that the court tale was a productive native Mesopotamian genre, as Paul-Alain Beaulieu has noted. 205 Looking more closely at his study, it becomes clear that Wills omits consideration of two Jewish court tales from the Hebrew Bible that are set in Egypt, the story of Joseph (Gen 37–50) and the story of Moses’ and Aaron’s contests with the pharaoh’s magicians in the book of Exodus (chs. 7–9). 206 Wills consciously omits the first because its date is problematic—it has been assigned both preexilic and post-exilic dates 207—and because the basic court legend pattern has been expanded into two complicated episodes of Joseph’s fall and rise at the Egyptian court, rather than one overarching pattern. 208 It is likely that Wills omits the story of Moses’ and Aaron’s contests because it falls outside his category of “wisdom court legend” because neither Joseph nor Moses are members of pharaoh’s court—although the Egyptian magicians presumably are—and there is no conspicuous connection to wisdom. Although the last point may be correct, the former objection does not hold. The story is set in the royal court of pharaoh and includes a contest between the two teams of wonder-workers, in much the same vein as the magician contests in Egyptian literature. (But only the Egyptians are called “magicians,” ḥarṭummîm; Aaron and Moses are not.) When Aaron casts down his staff, the Egyptian sorcerers do the same. When water is turned to blood, the magicians use their magic arts and duplicate the act. In the first plague, the plague of the frogs, the magicians are able to bring frogs onto the land too, but they are unable to duplicate any of the remaining nine plagues produced by the Hebrew men (see 8:14–18, where they tell the pharaoh: ‫אצבע אלהים הוא‬, “This is the finger of God!”). When he wrote, in 1990, Wills had several Egyptian court stories at his disposal, although many of them were not well known. Of those that were well known, he may have dismissed the court tales in the mid-second millennium Tales from King Cheops’ Court (Papyrus Westcar) as part of a story-telling contest, and they and the Ptolemaic-period Setne stories may have seemed to be too concerned with magic—although Egyptian courtiers were often priests or prophets (ritual specialists who worked in medicine, religion, and magic), in addition to 205.  Beaulieu, “Official and Vernacular Languages,” 195. There is certainly an abundance of court activity reported from Mesopotamia, and there are sages and professional scholars with varying specialties and jobs in Mesopotamian courts; but the court tale is not a productive Mesopotamian genre, as noted in ch. 3. 206.  See also John Van Seters, “A Contest of Magicians? The Plague Stories in P,” in David Wright, David Noel Freedman, and Avi Hurvitz, eds., Pomegranates and Golden Bells: Studies in Biblical, Jewish, and Near Eastern Ritual, Law, and Literature in Honor of Jacob Milgrom (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1995), 569–80. 207.  See D. Redford, Joseph, 32–33, 65, 251–53; and above, chapter three. 208.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 52–54.

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being political advisers. Lesser-known court tales such as Merire and Sisobek in Papyrus Vandier from the Persian period, the story of Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh (P. Dem. Saqqāra 2 verso) from the fourth or third century b.c.e., and the disgraced courtier stories of Ḥi-Ḥor and Ḥenenu from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods were available as well, as was AP71 (the Ḥor-barPunesh/Pawenesh texts) in Aramaic from the Persian period. If the fifth century AP71 is admitted as evidence for an early tradition of the Egyptian Ḥor-sonof-Paneshy (Horus-son-of-the-Wolf), the magician who is involved in a court contest in Setne II, then we have further testimony to the court tale in Egypt besides Aḥiqar, in more than one language (Demotic and Aramaic). It thus seems essential that Egyptian material be added to the evidence.

5.1.2.1.  Court Conflicts and Contests Just as in the Story of Aḥiqar and in biblical Daniel, one of the main themes in Egyptian court tales is the rivalry and conflicts in courts of the past. Papyrus Westcar is set in the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt but written much later in the mid-second millennium b.c.e. The Setne Khamwas tales were composed in the Ptole­maic and Roman periods but set in the New Kingdom: Setne I dates specifically to the third century b.c.e., while Setne II dates to the first century c.e.; however, the setting for all of the tales is the New Kingdom reigns of Thutmosis III and Ramses II. The Merib story on Dem. Saqqāra 2 (verso) is possibly set in the reign of a First (or perhaps Second) dynasty king Badja but dates to the fourth or third century b.c.e. The setting of Merire and Sisobek may well be the late New Kingdom, although it was composed in the sixth or fifth century b.c.e. The main characters of the Life of Imhotep, Pharaoh Djoser and his vizier Imhotep, are historical figures from the Third dynasty of the Old Kingdom; however, the story reflects the political upsets of the seventh century b.c.e. (when Egypt was invaded by Assryia), although the text itself actually dates to the first or second century c.e. Egyptian magicians attempt to out-perform each other and thereby win the favor of the king, but it is the exceptionally skilled and wise magician who is marked to succeed. In Papyrus Vandier’s Merire and Sisobek, there is an account of magicians in a jealous rivalry with the skillful Merire. This is reminiscent of the court contests of Dan 2, 4, and 5 but especially the jealousy expressly exhibited by the Median courtiers of Dan 6. In Dan 6, the ministers and satraps produce an accusation against Daniel to force the king into throwing Daniel into the lions’ pit; in the end, Daniel survives the lions and is thus vindicated, and the ministers and satraps are tossed to the lions. In Papyrus Vandier, the young magician is able to succeed where the others have failed, and they persuade the king to break a vow and harm his family. Eventually, however, Merire the magician cleverly is able to wreak his revenge, and the magicians are punished by their death and burning in the “furnace of Mut.” This last detail provides a suggestive analogy to Dan 3, in which the friends of Daniel are thrown into a fiery furnace for failing to obey

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the king; the friends survive this test of faith miraculously, and it is Chaldeans who end up getting burned. In 4Q550, Tales of the Persian Court, there is some kind of contest between the Jewish courtier Bagasraw and his opponent Bagoshî. Other contests can be found in the magician stories in the Life of Imhotep and Naneferkasokar. The Egyptian court tales also involve court conflicts in which a courtier may solve a variety of the king’s problems. In the late versions of Aḥiqar, Aḥiqar is saved from death and produced alive to help the king in a battle of wits with the Egyptians. Other conflicts include saving the king from mortal illness, such as in Merire and Sisobek and perhaps the “Boy at Court Who Is asked About the King’s Health” (Pap. Wien D 62, verso). In Merire and Sisobek, Merire saves king Sisobek from dying by taking his place in the underworld. Moreover, the courtier Merib must recover a sick, cursed (abandoned by Hathor), and lost or kidnapped king in Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh (P. Demotic Saqqāra 2, verso). This is similar to the Prayer of Nabonidus, the variant on the story of Dan 4 about a Babylonian king’s madness; the Jewish diviner of the Prayer is apparently responsible for curing the king of his skin disease. In addition, part of the theme of ʿOnchsheshonqy is that ʿOnchsheshonqy fails to inform on his friend who is a conspirator in a plot against the king’s life. Furthermore, Si-Osire (Ḥor-sonof-Paneshy, Horus-son-of-the-Wolf, in disguise) in Setne II is required to save a former king (Thutmosis III) from a nightly kidnapping and beating in Nubia by a magician and years later to recognize the same threat to another king (Ramses II) from the same Nubian magician. Mordecai’s uncovering of the plot to kill king Ahasuerus in the book of Esther (2:21–23) also fits this pattern. With regard to Daniel, attemps to save the king from a mortal threat occur in chs. 2, 4, and 5, when the king is terrified by dreams or mysterious writing. Of course, in Daniel, Daniel’s riddle-solving does not really do more than satisfy the king’s horrifyingly immediate need for an interpretation, an identification of what danger is threatening, but the king or the kingdom’s eventual downfall is not to be averted. More trivial problems involve such things as finding a solution for the boredom or sleeplessness of the king (Papyrus Westcar, Esther, Tales of the Persian Court, 1 Esdras 3–4, the Prophecies of Neferti, and even ʿOnchsheshonqy, in that the king’s insomnia causes him to call for assistance and leads him to the discovery that his life is in danger). As Collins understood, the common motif of the hidden or forgotten wiseman in court tales is traditional (cf. Dan 2 and 5). The story of Aḥiqar includes not only the hiding of Aḥiqar from the king who wanted him killed but, in the later versions, the king of Assyria has to be told by his advisers about the sage Aḥiqar who had served his father. 209 Collins also finds a parallel in Herodotus’ tale of Croesus, who only on the pyre recalls the warning of the wise Solon. In 209.  Collins, Daniel, 248–49.

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the Egyptian court tales, there are several analogues to this. In Merire and Sisobek, Merire, the young scribe, is produced for king Sisobek only when the older scribes have failed to save the king. Si-Osire in Setne II is disguised as a magician of the past who has to tell his own ancient story to the contemporary king and court, who do not know the tale of his having saved Egypt once before. It is also possible that the two tales of the “Imprisoned Magician” (Ḥi-Ḥor and Ḥenenu) may have included the retrieval of the magician from his prison when the king has need of his help. Court tales also include other wise characters in addition to the hero. In Dan 5, the queen is a royal wise woman providing counsel to the king. In Setne I, it is the wife of Naneferkaptaḥ and the pharaoh who are wiser than her husband and Setne Khamwas, the two magicians who are beguiled with the thought of possessing the book of Thoth. Moreover, Naneferkaptaḥ’s wife is able to persuade Pharaoh to marry her to the man she loves rather than a general by making a witty remark, while pharaoh warns Setne not to go after the book of Thoth. In the story-collection called the Stories of Petese, 70 entertaining stories are written down by baboons, who are to tell them one a day to Petese’s wife after he is buried. Presumably these are not only meant to be amusing but instructive, and they may have something of wisdom in them intended to persuade Petese’s wife to perform the right offerings and correct prayers in order that Petese may return from the netherworld. The character of the king and rival courtiers in these tales is also worth mentioning. In general, the king in a “court tale” may be capricious and even cruel, having the power of life and death over his subjects, but he is gullible, sometimes foolish, and easily swayed by courtiers who are much smarter than he (cf. Dan 6), in addition to being devious, malicious, and jealous. Kings are easy to mock in a court tale. Sisobek is kept in the dark by his court magicians about the young, skilled Merire, and when Merire has saved his life and gone into the netherworld in his stead, the courtiers persuade him to break his vows to Merire to care for his wife, son, and estate. In Esther, Xerxes is notoriously portrayed as drunken, oafish, and susceptible to the bad influences around him (his drunken officials at the feast, and then Haman). In the same story, not only is Haman jealous of Mordecai but other officials—more marginal to the story but often given names—seem to be jockeying for position (for instance, Memucan in 1:16; Hegai in 2:15; the traitors Bithan and Teresh in 2:21; Haman’s “friends” in 6:13; etc.). Kings are also bored, have too much time on their hands, and require constant entertainment (e.g., Darius in1 Esdras 3–4, Cheops in the Tales from King Cheops’ Court, and Xerxes in the book of Esther).

5.1.2.2.  Marvelous Deeds and Dream Interpretation A theme prevalent in many (but not all) Egyptian court tales is the performance of marvels or wonder-working. The Egyptian narratives set at court

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possess a recurrent motif of marvelous deeds performed by a magician. The Egyptian “magician” is a court official whose duties are religious and political, and sometimes medical (as outlined in secion 3.3.2.2 above). The ḥr(y)-tp/tb, “lector priest,” in particular is a renowned ritual expert and, as part of his profession, can do magic. In Papyrus Westcar, the magician Djedi reattaches the head of an ox onto its body, and the magician Djadjaemankh retrieves a lost broach from the bottom of a lake by placing one side of the lake on top of the other. In the “Imprisoned Magician” tales (Ḥi-Ḥor and Ḥenenu), the magician animates birds from clay or some other substance and can speak to animals, and in Merire and Sisobek, in the underworld Merire animates a golem from soil in order to send him to earth and inform the king of new dangers from his untrustworthy courtiers. Djoser and Imhotep and possibly Naneferkasokar and the Babylonians each have a magician contest. The magician-king Nectanebo is able to perform many divinatory or magical activities himself. The wonder-working Ḥor bar Pawenesh/Punesh in the Aramaic AP 71 casts spells upon boats (so too in the unpublished Demotic texts featuring him). In the Daniel stories, however, the wonders performed by Daniel and his friends may be done with the aid of their God, who reveals solutions and interpretations, but they can still be termed marvelous: the three friends are able to survive a fiery furnace in ch. 3, Daniel is able to read and interpret the mysterious writing on the wall in ch. 5, and Daniel is able to survive for some time in the lions’ pit in ch. 6 and in Bel and the Serpent. One notes also that his skills specifically include untying “knots” (‫ )קטרין‬in Dan 5:12, a term that clearly has magical connotations, even if they are not further developed in the biblical Daniel stories. The queen hints at untold exploits of magic and riddle-solving in her speech recommending Daniel to Belshazzar in Dan 5, tantalizing the reader with lost accounts of exactly how the mantic Daniel gained the title “chief of magicians” (‫ ;)רב חרטמין‬the queen knows, but we can only speculate. Dan 1–6 thus combines the wise courtier theme of Aḥiqar with a less overt version of Ḥor-bar-Punesh/ Pawenesh’s (AP 71) ease with magical spells. Finally, Dan 2 and 4 (like the Joseph story in Gen 40–41) include dream interpretation by the courtier. Although some recent scholars (for instance, Goedicke and Szpakowska) have argued that the biblical context has forced the understanding of the ḥarṭummîm as dream-interpreters, 210 it is quite likely that this function was part of the original sphere of skills connoted by the Egyptian term ḥry-tp when it was borrowed into Hebrew, Aramaic, and perhaps Akkadian. Not only do we have various Egyptian texts from the Late Period on that testify to dream interpretation not only by the ḥry-tp figure but also by other priests, we have some late court tales that demonstrate that Egyptian courtier-magicians, those trained in the House of Life, had this function (see above, section 3.3.2.2). 210. H. Goedicke, “ḥarṭummîm,” 24–30; Kasia Szpakowska, Behind Closed Eyes, 65.

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Tales of this sort include an episode from the Life of Imhotep (Djoser and Imhotep) in which Pharaoh Djoser consults a magician about a dream he has had and the unpublished papyrus from Tebtunis (P. Carlsberg 465) announced by Ryholt “in which we find the first explicit reference to the ḥry-tp, ‘chief ritualist’ (Biblical hartummīm), as an interpreter of dreams at the royal court, just as in the Biblical stories of Joseph (Gen. 41:8, 24) and of Daniel (Dan. 1:20; 2:2).” 211 Both of these texts date to around the first century c.e., but there is a long-standing tradition that the revered scribe and magician Imhotep was associated with the interpretation of dreams. 212 Furthermore, the Tanutamani Dream Stele tells of a priest of Amun who may have interpreted a dream for this pharaoh of the Twentyfifth Dynasty, and the magician king Nectanebo was also a dream-interpreter not to mention a sender of dreams in the Alexander Romance (of much later date). Therefore, it is possible to be more positive about the influence of other court tales, especially those from Egypt, on the biblical stories involving ḥarṭummîm.

5.1.2.3.  Books and Deciphering Secret Texts That royal courtiers would be connected to wisdom, learning, and books is a given, since they were of the (small) literate class and served at court, where education was both valued and required. In stories about courtiers, books are often mentioned. Books are read at night to cure sleeplessness or boredom, as in Esther, 1 Esdras, and Tales of the Persian Court from Qumran (4Q550). In Egypt, sacred knowledge is gleaned from texts that are written by the gods, especially the god of writing, Thoth. In the story of Merire, the magicians consult their books in an attempt to understand the king’s malady and in Setne II a special Book of Thoth is used to protect the king from spells. Books feature in the Stories of Petese; there are hidden books in the temple that Petese apparently offers to reveal and read (‘3’, 7–8). There is a secret Book of Thoth hidden at the bottom of the Sea of Coptos in Setne I, a book that is not to be seen by human eyes and requires incredible feats of magic to acquire. Once it is stolen, first by Naneferkaptaḥ and then by Setne from Naneferkaptaḥ’s ghost, it is too much for humans to handle and brings tragedy or near-tragedy. There is a sealed book bound to the body of the Nubian magician in Setne II, and it must be read to avert danger. So, too, are books important in Daniel; books are mentioned twice in Dan 1 (1:4, 1:17) and several times elsewhere (7:10; 9:2; 10:21; 12:1, 12:4). In nonbiblical texts about Daniel, they are important as well. Daniel and books appear in a court setting in 211.  Ryholt, “A Parallel to the Inaros Story of Krall,” 152. The papyrus is known as Carlsberg 465 (Kim Ryholt, personal communication). 212.  See the Ḥor of Sebennytos dream interpretation archive of the Ptolemaic era; the dream of Tayimhotep in a funerary stele dated to 42 b.c.e. (BM EA147); the Famine Stela, in which Djoser receives a dream from the god Khnum, and he summons Imhotep to look at his books; and perhaps the incubation dream of Setne Khamwas’ wife in Setne II, which also involved Imhotep.

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the Pseudo-Daniel tales, and Josephus has a tradition that Daniel wrote “books” (plural: βιβλία, Antiquities 10.267–269). Courtiers receive training in books, and the successful courtier often has achieved superiority at a young age or in intriguing ways. In Spiegelberg jartext A.1, the young Si-Osire is said to be exceptional from birth and a good student. Si-Osire, Setne Khamwas’s son in Setne II, surpasses all students and even the scribe who teaches him. He is soon reciting writings with the scribes in the House of Life. In ʿOnchsheshonqy, he and his friend Harsiese are depicted as having gone to school together and succeeding beyond their peers. Moreover, Harsiese has to prevail in three interviews to enter the service of the chief physician and to become chief physician to the pharaoh himself. In one of the inset stories of the Stories of Petese, we also find a precocious student (col. ‘8’, the “Story of a Prodigy Child”). In Daniel, the Judeans have been trained in Babylonian literature and sciences, and their colleagues are ‫ן‬/‫חרטמים‬, “magicians”; ‫ן‬/‫אׁשפים‬, “exorcists/enchanters”; ‫ן‬/‫מכׁשפים‬, “sorcerers”; ‫ן‬/‫כׂשדים‬, “Chaldeans”; ‫ן‬/‫חכימים‬, “wisemen”; and ‫ן‬/‫גזרים‬, “diviners.” Daniel is called the “chief ” of all these in both chs. 4 and 5 (Dan 4:6 and 5:11–12), but his three friends excel, too. The act of writing is important. The famed Egyptian Imhotep, an architect and a vizier in addition to being a magician, was renowned as a writer of certain treatises. Petese, the priest of Re at Heliopolis, has baboons write down his 70 stories in the Stories of Petese, some of which are tales of the court, to read to his wife after he is dead. Kings in court tales also issue proclamations and decrees, which some courtier has to copy down (cf. decrees in Esther, Daniel, the Joseph story, etc.). Daniel reads and writes: in Dan 5, he reads the writing on the wall; in Dan 7:1, he writes down his dream; and in Dan 9, he reads books in order to find Jeremiah’s prediction of 70 weeks (70 years) for the devastation of Jerusalem. Daniel is a model of the true maskîl. The angel Gabriel reads or recites from a book, too (the Book of Truth, in Dan 10:21). Furthermore, writing is a means of resistance to the foreign empire in the book of Daniel (the writing on the wall, Daniel’s own recording of events, etc.). 213 As Davies notes, “It is unmistakable that we are in a world in which writing, reading and deciphering (reading is deciphering!) are key symbols.” 214 Secret books and secret writings must, of course, be deciphered. In Egypt, sacred knowledge arrives in the form of texts from the gods, especially Thoth. In Setne I, when Setne retrieves and opens the stolen book of Thoth, he recites formulas from it that enable him to hear the speech of all animals and to see the gods and the constellations. Once he burns a copy of it and dissolves the ashes in water, he drinks the draught and is filled with the knowledge of all things. Of 213.  Polaski, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin: Writing and Resistance in Daniel 5 and 6,” 649–69; Portier-Young, Apocalypse Against Empire, 223–79. 214.  Davies, “Reading Daniel Sociologically,” in van der Woude, ed., The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings, 354; see also idem, Scribes and Schools, 142–45.

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course, this is not acceptable to Thoth, and Setne is eventually forced to return the book to the bottom of the sea from which he had taken it. Decipherment is required in Setne II, where Si-Osire must read a bound scroll without opening it. In Daniel, there is great emphasis on mantic culture in that the “secrets of the universe are encoded in written signs” in chs. 5, 9, and 12. 215 Moreover, at the end of the book of Daniel, Daniel is himself revealed as the author of that very book, which he is told to keep secret; he is commanded to “keep the words secret and the book sealed until the time of the end” (12:4, 9). 216 Secrecy is a central motif not only at the end of Dan 12 but in Dan 2, where the word ‫ רז‬, “mystery,” appears often. Daniel’s knowledge of secrets establishes his supremacy and that of his God over the Babylonian colleagues and their gods. 217 The very act of reading can have immense significance, too, sometimes for an entire nation. The failure of King Belshazzar and the Babylonians to read the writing on the wall in Dan 5, and Daniel’s success at doing so, brings about the downfall of the entire Babylonian empire and the king’s immediate death. In Esther, the reading of chronicles to King Ahasuerus one sleepless night leads to the discovery that Mordecai remains unrewarded for saving that king’s life; all other main events in Esther flow from this event (the anger of Haman against the Jewish Mordecai, Haman’s trickery in getting Ahasuerus to sign a decree allowing Persians to kill Jews, and Esther’s intervention to save her people from the decree). So, too, in Setne II, the reading of the contents of the sealed book bound to the body of the Nubian magician is of national importance. That same magician once humiliated and tortured a former Egyptian king, threatening not only his life but his control over Egypt, but he was defeated by the Egyptian magician, Horus-son-of-the-Wolf. The ancient story of these events is on the scroll, and the Nubian magician is ready to threaten Egypt and harm pharaoh again unless there is someone who can do the impossible task of reading it without opening it. Once Si-Osire, son of Khamwas (in reality the same ancient Egyptian magician who defeated the Nubian once before), is able to tell the contents of the scroll and challenge the Nubian magician, he is able to defeat a foreign infiltration again.

5.1.2.4.  Nationalism and the Ethnic Minority The key to many court tales for Wills (in his important study, The Jew in the Court of the King) is that they contain a “ruled ethnic perspective”—that is, the perspective of a conquered ethnic population that they are ultimately superior to their conquerors. For example, the underdogs of the book of Esther are the Jewish Esther and Mordecai, who defeat Haman’s plan to allow Persians to kill their 215.  Ibid., 144. 216. Alan Lenzi, “Secrecy, Textual Legitimation, and Intercultural Polemics in the Book of Daniel,” CBQ 71 (2009), 330–48. 217.  Lenzi has explored the Babylonian court scholars’ practice of consulting works of secrecy: exorcism, medicine divination, ritual lamentation, astrology—all secret documents (ibid.).

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people. Moreover, Daniel’s stories portray Daniel and his three friends, exiled to Babylon and trained in the foreign court, as wiser and more accomplished than their Babylonian colleagues, so much so that they are able to convince foreign kings that their God is superior, too, and most worthy of worship. Wills does not notice the presence of a “ruled ethnic perspective” in Aḥiqar; however, Beaulieu has demonstrated that there probably is something of a minority background to the text. 218 The Story of Aḥiqar, an Aramaic tale, was perhaps produced by Arameans from around Nippur, where they were a political and ethnic minority. Beaulieu notes that there are no cuneiform parallels to the story of the successful courtier, but this theme nonetheless “suits very well the position of a cultural minority” held by the Arameans (the Aḫlawû) in Nippur, despite their long history in Mesopotamia. 219 The Uruk text from about 165 b.c.e. (W 20030,7: 19–20) that mentions an Aḥiqar the Aramean who served under Esarhaddon is witness to the the ongoing tension between groups in the region. There is an ethnic component in some, but not all, Egyptian courtier narratives. It most often appears in magician contests. Dieleman notes that in Setne II, in the story of the Egyptian magician Horus-son-of-the-Wolf versus the Nubian shaman, “magic operates even as a category to construct a national priestly identity in response to foreign intrusion.” 220 After Horus-son-of-the-Wolf correctly relates the contents of the unopened scroll that is bound to Horus-son-of-theNubian-Woman’s body, the two magicians participate in a magic contest in order to keep the Nubian from harming the pharaoh. The story reflects unease with the Twenty-Fifth Nubian dynasty, when Nubian rulers held power in Egypt (during the seventh century b.c.e.). In Naneferkasokar and the Babylonians, Naneferkasokar demonstrates Egyptian superiority over Babylonians. The Assyrians are the enemies in the Life of Imhotep, as they are in the epic material about the Egyptian hero Inaros (not a court tale), tales about whom are recorded in both Aramaic and Egyptian. Much of this is common to the period; Ryholt believes that Egyptian narratives—not just magician stories—dating from the Persian period generally have a strong element of national inspiration. But the situation is definitely echoed in the biblical court tales as well as the court tales in Herodotus, Aḥiqar, and possibly some of the parabiblical Qumran material that have a court setting.

5.1.2.5.  The Intersection of Court Tales and Prophecy In the court-tale setting, the wise courtier may utter a variety of wisdom sayings (proverbs, fables, etc.), some of which may be predictions of future events. A good example of this is in the Tales from King Cheops’ Court in Papyrus Westcar, which uses a series of stories about famous magicians of the past to launch some predictions about the coming of the next dynasty, the Fifth. Its themes of court218.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 68. 219.  Beaulieu, “Official and Vernacular Languages,” 195. See also section 3.3.1.3.1 above. 220.  Priests, Tongues, and Rites, 238.

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iers who predict the future survive in Late Period and Demotic literature that is closer to or contemporary with the Daniel stories; for example, Merire knows that king Sisobek is doomed to die in seven days, and the magician king Nectanebo divines the fall of Egypt to the Greeks. Imhotep traditions may also reflect a bent for foretelling. And if the recto and verso of the Ḥor bar Punesh text (AP 71) are part of the same narrative (the story of the magician and a prophecy Porten calls “The Demise of Righteousness”), we have an Aramaic text found in Egypt and dating to the fifth century b.c.e. that possibly recounts a royal courtier predicting future events. Most of the parabiblical Daniel literature from Qumran, some of which may have been composed before Daniel or is contemporary with it, also has rehearsals of past history and predictions of future events. Elsewhere in the Bible, Joseph interprets pharaoh’s dreams of coming events (and Joseph later is said to own a divining cup as well, hinting at his further mantic abilities). In the book of Daniel, there are three stories in which the future is foretold: Daniel interprets two of Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams in Dan 2 and 4 as having to do with negative events that will specifically befall Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, and Daniel reads the writing on the wall in Dan 5 that predicts the downfall of Belshazzar’s kingdom to the Medes. Dan 2 is even widely regarded by scholars as somewhat apocalyptic and eschatological in scope, since the dream foretells the divine destruction of a series of historical kings or kingdoms followed by an ultimate universal kingdom established by God, thereby moving the future Heils­ zeit outside of the realm of human history into the divine sphere, as full-fledged apocalypses tend to do. Moreover, the apocalyptic visions of Dan 7–12 were most likely attached to the court tales in the Maccabean period because of the very appropriateness of the court setting and the establishment of Daniel’s capabilities in the court tales of Dan 1–6. The aspect of foretelling in Daniel has often been closely associated with apocalyptic literature in Israel and its neighbors. Several Akkadian, Egyptian, Greek, and Persian examples of pseudo-prophecy or proto-apocalypse have been deemed relevant. Scholars have mostly connected these to the visions section of Daniel (chs. 7–12), however, and rarely to the court tales (chs. 1–6). The court setting of many of these predictive texts advocates a second look at their connection to court tales.

5.1.2.5.1.  Akkadian Pseudo-Prophecies or Proto-Apocalypses There are five main literary texts related to prophecy recognized among Akkadian texts: Text A; the Dynastic Prophecy; the Uruk Prophecy; the Marduk Prophecy; and the Shulgi Prophecy. 221 The literary associations of Text A are more 221.  Of the four texts published as Texts A–D in A. K. Grayson and W. G. Lambert, “Akkadian Prophecies,” Text B is generally no longer considered part of this genre (it is often classified as omen literature) (see Grayson, Babylonian Historical-Literary Texts, 15). Text C is now recognized as the Shulgi Prophecy and Text D as the Marduk Prophecy (R. Borger, “Gott

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connected to astrological omens than those of the others; 222 however, all these Akkadian compositions are predominantly predictions after the event (vaticinia ex eventu) concerning kings and kingdoms that are to succeed one another until a final “savior” king arises. 223 A. K. Grayson, in Babylonian Historical-Literary Texts, defines the genre thus: An Akkadian prophecy is a prose composition consisting in the main of a number of ‘predictions’ of past events. It then concludes either with a ‘prediction’ of phenomena in the writer’s day or with a genuine attempt to forecast future events. The author, in other words, uses vaticinia ex eventu to establish his credibility and then proceeds to his real purpose, which might be to justify a current idea or institution or, as it appears in the Dynastic prophecy, to forecast future doom for a hated enemy. 224

Although no kings are explicitly named, there is often enough historical detail to hazard a guess at the identity of a particular king or reign. Like some of the relevant Egyptian texts, the Akkadian texts may contain phrases such as “a prince will arise.” Grayson already claimed some years ago that these texts were similar to passages in Daniel, specifically to Dan 8:23–25 and 11:3–45. 225 Marduk und Gott-König Šulgi als Propheten,” BiOr 28 (1971), 3–24. For a recent discussion of four of these texts, see Matthijs J. de Jong, Isaiah Among the Ancient Near Eastern Prophets: A Comparative Study of the Earliest Stages of the Isaiah Tradition and the Neo-Assyrian Prophecies (VTSup 117; Leiden: Brill, 2007), 186–88, 420–36. De Jong does not include Text A in his discussion. For discussions of other non-literary texts in connection to apocalypses, see ibid., 395–437; and Daniel Bodi, “Les apocalypses akkadiennes et bibliques: quelques points communes,” Revue des études juives 169 (2010), 13–36, esp. pp. 17–20. [See now Matthew Neujahr, Predicting the Past in the Ancient Near East: Mantic Historiography in Ancient Mesopotamia, Judah, and the Mediterranean World (Brown Judaic Studies 354; Providence, RI: Brown University, 2012), which appeared too late to be taken into account in this monograph. He sees no direct influence of the Akkadian ex eventu compositions upon Daniel.] 222.  Text A has the phraseology of astrological, rather than other kinds of, omens, and Biggs has concluded that it stands apart from the other four main literary-predictive texts (Robert D. Biggs, “Babylonian Prophecies, Astrology, and a New Source for ‘Prophecy Text B’,” in Francesca Rochberg-Halton, ed., Language, Literature, and History: Philological and Historical Studies Presented to Erica Reiner [AOS 67; New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1987], 1–14, esp. p. 3); idem, “The Babylonian Prophecies and the Astrological Traditions of Mesopotamia,” JCS 37 (1985), 86–90. 223. Helmer Ringgren, “Akkadian Apocalypses,” in Hellholm, ed., Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Ancient Near East, 379–86. 224.  A. K. Grayson, Babylonian Historical-Literary Texts (Toronto Semitic Texts and Studies 3; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 6. 225.  Ibid., 21; A. K. Grayson and W. G. Lambert, “Akkadian Prophecies,” JCS 18 (1964), 7–30, esp. p. 10. See, more recently, E. C. Lucas, “Daniel: Resolving the Enigma,” VT 50 (2000), 66–80. For example, Text A, col. ii, 9–15 reads: A prince will arise and rule for thirteen years. There will be an Elamite attack on Akkad and the booty of Akkad will be carried off. The shrines of the great gods will be destroyed. Akkad will suffer a defeat. There will be confusion, disturbance, and disorder in the land. The nobility will lose prestige. Another man who is unknown

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Hallo, too, says that the closest biblical parallels are in the apocalyptic sections of the Book of Daniel; he even proposes renaming “Akkadian prophecies” (what Assryiologists have called these texts) “Akkadian apocalypses” because of this. 226 However, Akkadian texts of this kind are not really apocalyptic in the accepted sense; they are at a state preliminary to this and can at most be called proto-apocalypses. 227 VanderKam suggests that overall the similarities in form and purpose between the Akkadian Prophecies and the Jewish historical apocalypses, especially those in Daniel, are greater than the differences. They provide evidence that texts like these, or the traditions that lie behind them, may well have influenced the developing Jewish apocalyptic tradition, which, through Daniel and Enoch, has strong associations with Mesopotamia. These documents also show that in assessing lines of influence, prophecy and mantic wisdom should not be distinguished very rigidly from one another. 228

Furthermore, in his critical assessment of Hallo’s use of the term “apocalypses” for the five Akkadian prophecies, VanderKam proposes that the Akkadian works differ from Jewish apocalyptic by not having any reference to a “final and permanent Heilzeit” or a savior-king. 229 However, outside of this eschatological dimension, both prophecies and apocalypses utilize vaticinia ex eventu, pseudonymity, and restrict the prediction to an inner circle. 230 Recent scholars Maria de Jong Ellis and Martti Nissinen have promoted the use of the term “literary predictive texts” for the Akkadian texts in order to demonstrate that, although these works are neither prophecies nor apocalypses, they are still related to them. 231 will arise, seize the throne as king, and put his grandees to the sword. (Grayson and Lambert, “Akkadian Prophecies,” 14.) Compare this to Dan 11: 3–4: A mighty king will arise, who will rule a great empire and do as he pleases. And when he arises, his kingdom shall be broken, and divided to the four winds of heaven, but not to his posterity, nor according to his rule when he ruled himself. For his kingdom will be uprooted and pass to others besides these. 226. W. Hallo, “Akkadian Apocalypses,” IEJ 16 (1966), 231–42, esp. p. 240. 227.  Ringgren, “Akkadian Apocalypses,” 386. 228. James C. VanderKam, From Revelation to Canon: Studies in the Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 255–75, esp. p. 274. Reprinted from James C. VanderKam, “Prophecy and Apocalyptics in the Ancient Near East,” in Jack Sasson, ed., Civilizations of the Ancient Near East (New York: Scribners, 1995), 3.2083–94. See also idem, “The Prophetic-Sapiential Origins of Apocalyptic Thought,” in Martin and Davies, eds., A Word in Season, 163–76. 229.  VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition (CBQMS 16; Washington, D.C.: The Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1984), 62–71. 230.  VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition, 67. 231.  Ellis, “Observations on Mesopotamian Oracles and Prophetic Texts: Literary and Historiographic Considerations,” JCS 41 (1989), 126–86, esp. pp. 146–48; Nissinen, “Neither Prophecies nor Apocalypses: The Akkadian Literary Predictive Texts,” in Lester L. Grabbe and

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Although we know very well that prophecy and oracles from Mesopotamia had a courtly background in which diviners interacted with the king, 232 it is difficult to know if the Akkadian literary predictive texts have a narrative court setting like the Egyptian proto-apocalypses. Since the beginnings and endings are often missing, it is hard to determine what kind of frame most of them have. However, the Marduk Prophecy and the Shulgi Prophecy both have as their firstperson narrator a god, and they are spoken before the divine council. The other prophecies are in the third-person, and their narrative setting is unclear, but they nonetheless provide significant parallels to the court tales and possibly the character of Daniel.

5.1.2.5.1.1.  Text A The first of the Akkadian proto-apocalypses or pseudo-prophecies to appear was the badly preserved Text A found at Assur (modern Qalʿat Širqāṭ) in 1923; it dates no later than 614 b.c.e. 233 None of the kings that are predicted are named. Column i of the obverse is too broken for translation but perhaps has a mythological introduction, because it mentions Ishtar and Anu in the first broken lines. Col. ii, 2 then starts with: “[A prince will arise] and rule for eighteen years.” 234 During this unnamed prince’s reign, the land and people fare well. However, “that prince will be put to the sword” (ii, 8). He is followed by another prince, who will rule for 13 years and in whose reign the Elamites will attack and carry off the booty of Akkad: “The shrines of the great gods will be destroyed. Akkad will suffer a defeat. There will be confusion, disturbance, and disorder in the land. The nobility will lose prestige. Another man who is unknown will arise, seize the throne as king, and put his grandees to the sword” (obverse ii, 12–15). 235 After him will arise another prince, whose reign “will be short and he will not be master of the land” (obverse ii, 19). The next prince will rule for three years. This pattern continues throughout the text on both obverse and reverse, through as many as a total of 12 unnamed kings’ reigns (there are lacunae at the beginning Robert D. Haak, eds., Knowing the End From the Beginning: The Prophetic, the Apocalyptic, and Their Relationships (JSP 46; London: T. & T. Clark, 2003), 134–48. De Jong prefers this as well (Isaiah Among the Ancient Near Eastern Prophets, 187). 232.  See, for instance, David Brown, Mesopotamian Planetary Astronomy-Astrology (Cuneiform Monographs 18; Groningen: Styx, 2000), esp. p. 15. 233. W. G. Lambert, The Background of Jewish Apocalyptic: The Ethel M. Wood Lecture Delivered before the University of London on 22 February 1977 (London: Athlone, 1978), 10. The text was known as VAT 10179 and was first published by Ebeling as KAR 421 and translated by Ebeling in AOTAT, 283–84. It was also translated into English by Pfeiffer in ANET, 451– 52. For a list of further translations and commentary, see A. K. Grayson and W. G. Lambert, “Akkadian Prophecies,” JCS 18 (1964), 7–30; William W. Hallo, “Akkadian Apocalypses,” IEJ 16 (1966), 231–42; Tremper Longman III, Fictional Akkadian Autobiography, esp. pp. 152–63. 234.  Grayson and Lambert’s translation, “Akkadian Prophecies,” 14. 235. Ibid.

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and end of every column and, as with the obverse, column i of the reverse is also too broken for translation), with possibly an alternation between good and bad effects for the land and people. This alternation between good and bad reigns seems to have no regular pattern. 236 Each king’s rule is marked by a dividing line on the tablet. The formula used at the beginning of each section is: “A prince will arise and rule for X years.” Various interpretations of the veiled references to kings have been proposed, based on the number of years they are said to rule and the events said to take place in their reign. No thoroughly convincing identifications have been made; however, Hallo identified kings three and four of Text A as Marduk-nādin-aḫḫē (1099–1082 b.c.e.) and Marduk-šāpik-zēri (ca. 1130–1046 b.c.e.), the sixth and seventh kings of the Second Dynasty of Isin, because the first reigned 18 years and the second 13 years (cf. obverse ii, 2 and ii, 9 of Text A). 237 Marduk-nādinaḫḫē historically was a successful king who battled with Assyria in Tiglath-Pileser I’s day. The Assyrian Chronicle 4 describes his downfall, which seems to have something to do with incursions by Arameans. 238 Of Marduk-šāpik-zēri’s reign little is known, and it is not clear whether or not an Elamite attack can be dated to his reign (as in obverse ii, 10–11). The next historical king after Mardukšāpik-zēri was Adad-apla-iddina, who was an Aramean usurper; he thus could match the king of Text A who follows the king with the 13-year reign but is not described any further. Hallo states: “the subsequent allusions on this side of Text A are somewhat less readily identified, yet there is no particular difficulty in equating them with the remaining kings of the Second Dynasty of Isin.” 239 Lambert prefers the Babylonian kings Meli-Šipak, Marduk-apla-iddina I, Zabab-šuma-iddina, and Enlil-nādin-aḫi as four rulers of this sequence. 240 These four ruled during the first half of the twelfth century b.c.e. and, other than appearing on the only surviving king-list for the period, there is little known about them. 241 At any rate, no one disputes that these are predictions of kings’ reigns long after the fact and are perhaps propaganda for a last king’s beneficent and 236.  VanderKam, From Revelation to Canon, 270; Helmer Ringgren, “Akkadian Apocalypses,” 380. Biggs does not think it is clear that the reigns are strictly either good or bad, although some lines give this impression (Biggs, “Babylonian Prophecies, Astrology, and a New Source for ‘Prophecy Text B’,” 2). 237.  Hallo, “Akkadian Apocalypses,” 235–39. He is followed by Longman in this (Fictional Akkadian Autobiography, 155–62). 238.  Ibid., 157. 239.  Hallo, “Akkadian Apocalypses,” 239. 240.  Lambert, “The Background of Jewish Apocalyptic,” 10 n. 13. Lambert disagrees with Hallo’s suggestion that these are rulers in the Second Dynasty of Isin and agrees instead with J. A. Brinkman, A Political History of Post-Kassite Babylonia, 129 n. 762. 241.  See J. A. Brinkman, Materials and Studies for Kassite History, Vol. 1: A Catalogue of Cuneiform Sources Pertaining to Specific Monarchs of the Kassite Dynasty (Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1976), 122–24, 247–52, 253–59, and 321–22.

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positive rule, but the text as it is preserved breaks off in the middle of another chaotic, or bad, reign.

5.1.2.5.1.2.  The Dynastic Prophecy The Dynastic Prophecy, a Late Babylonian text, was first published by Grayson in Babylonian Historical-Literary Texts (1975). 242 None of the lines are complete, perhaps at least the entire upper half of the tablet is lost, and only portions of two columns on each side are preserved (only columns i, ii, v, and vi are partially preserved). 243 The text dates to the period of Persian or Seleucid control of Babylonia and was probably from the city of Babylon. 244 Its allusions to kings are mostly quite decipherable, although no kings’ names are given. The columns seem to be listing rulers through the change or fall of several dynasties from the Neo-Babylonian empire to the Hellenistic period: column i has the fall of Assyria and rise of Babylonia; column ii has the fall of Babylonia and the rise of Persia; column v has the fall of Persia and the rise of Macedonia. In column i, the Babylonian king who brings extensive booty into Babylonia must be identified as Nabopolassar, the destroyer of Assyria. In column ii, the five Babylonian kings are also easily identified by their regnal years and descriptions, ending with Nabonidus, who is alluded to here as a “rebel prince” who establishes a dynasty of Ḫarrān (ii, 11–16). At the end of column ii (ii, 19–21), a “king of Elam”—who must be identified as the Persian Cyrus—removes the previous king (Nabonidus) and exiles him (a tradition found only here and in Berossus). After the missing columns iii and iv, column v has references to kings, which Grayson takes to be Arses and Darius III. This column ends with an attack on the king by the “Hanaeans,” but in the next column, the king is able to refit his army and overthrow them. The Hanaeans are to be understood as a designation of Alexander the Great’s troops (Ḫanû, which in earlier texts was the name of an Amorite tribe of the Old Babylonian period, designates Thrace in later cuneiform texts). If the king first defeated by and then victorious over the Greeks 242.  BM 40623; it arrived in the British Museum in 1881 but was overlooked. See Grayson, Babylonian Historical-Literary Texts, ch. 3, esp. 28–29, 30–37. For other translations, see Susan Sherwin-White, “Seleucid Babylonia: A Case-Study for the Installation and Development of Greek Rule,” in Amélie Kuhrt and Susan Sherwin-White, eds., Hellenism in the East: The Interaction of Geek and Non-Greek Civilizations from Syria to Central Asia after Alexander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 1–31, esp. pp. 12–14; Robartus J. van der Spek, “Darius III, Alexander the Great and Babylonian Scholarship,” in A Persian Perspective: Essays in Memory of Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg, ed. Wouter Henkelman and Amélie Kuhrt (Achaemenid History 13; Leiden: Nederlands instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2003), 289– 346, esp. pp. 311ff. 243.  Lambert recognized that one column is missing on each side, meaning that columns iii and iv are lacking, explaining why the text goes from Cyrus at the bottom of column ii to Arses at the top of Grayson’s column iii (= Lambert’s column v), skipping kings. See Lambert, “The Background of Jewish Apocalyptic,” 13. 244.  Grayson, Babylonian Historical-Literary Texts, 9.

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is meant to be Darius III, then this contradicts the historical fact that Alexander solidly defeated Darius III at Gaugamela in 331 b.c.e., after which Darius went into exile in Gutium until his death (something for which Grayson said he had no answer). 245 The sixth and last preserved column may contain mention of one to three more reigns 246 and may concern the capture of Babylon by Seleucus I. 247 The text ends with the statement that the tablet belongs to the “great gods” and must not be shown to the uninitiated. The colophon names the scribe as Munnabtum. Grayson suggests, on analogy with the Sibylline oracles as well as internal evidence, that the text predicts the downfall of the Hellenistic kings and the Seleucid empire and that there is a real prophecy after the vaticinium ex eventu. 248 Thus, the entire composition is anti-Seleucid propaganda. 249 However, the identity of the successful king who is first defeated and then victorious is a problem, one that Grayson could not solve. Ringgren suggests that this is some future Seleucid king who will restore order. 250 By contrast, the solution proposed by Robartus van der Spek is that either the subject of v, 13–19 (the successful king) is not Darius III but Alexander, or else a real prediction begins in line 13. 251 He seems to prefer the former option and notes four other cuneiform texts that record a positive opinion of Alexander the Great, who is viewed as a foreign conqueror, but one who respects Babylonian rights and cults. This makes the overall prophecy positive, yet it ends in a warning. Van der Spek dates the text to ca. 331 to 323 b.c.e. The argument of Matthijs de Jong, however, supports Grayson’s initial reading that Alexander is defeated by a prior king. Predictive prophecy does begin in line 13, but this anticipation of a prior king who comes back to defeat the Hanaeans was written by an author who was a supporter of Darius III, expressing the desire that Darius return from Gutium, the place to which he had fled after his defeat at Gaugamela, and defeat Alexander. If this was so, it was written between 331 and 330 b.c.e., shortly after Darius’ defeat and his escape to Gutium and before his death. 252 245.  Ibid., 26. 246.  Grayson suggested there were three kings, while van der Spek says there is only one mentioned in the preserved section of col. vi (Robartus van der Spek, “Darius III, Alexander the Great and Babylonian Scholarship,” 332). 247.  Col. vi, 12 contains only the word ibellu (⸢i-be-el-lu⸣), which is either “they will rule” (from bêlu) or “they will be extinguished” (from balû) (ibid., 322). It is more likely to be “they will rule,” from bêlu, since the l is geminated (second-weak verbs will double the final radical in the G Durative plural; Huehnergard, A Grammar of Akkadian, 121–22). 248.  Grayson, Babylonian Historical-Literary Texts, 21. 249.  Ringgren agrees (“Akkadian Apocalypses,” 383). 250.  Ibid., 385; Sherwin-White, “Seleucid Babylonia,” 9. 251. Van der Spek, “Darius III, Alexander the Great and Babylonian Scholarship,” 311–46. 252. De Jong, Isaiah Among the Ancient Near Eastern Prophets, 433.

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This prophecy has been related to the Book of Daniel especially because of its sequence of four kingdoms—Assyria, Babylon, Persia, and Greece—although it is debatable whether the specific number of kingdoms is significant. 253 Dan 2 and 7 both make the Greeks the final kingdom out of four (although they do not have Assyria in the schema and they place Media between Babylon and Persia), and Dan 12, like the Dynastic Prophecy, asks that the text be kept secret or sealed. There is also the strong possibility that the ex eventu prophecy in the Dynastic Prophecy is followed by a predictive prophecy (as in Dan 11:40–12:13, from the predictions about the last days of Antiochus IV, “king of the north,” onward). In addition to the four kingdoms, Kvanvig also notes that the “rebel kings” in the Dynastic Prophecy are Nabonidus and kings from the Macedonian empire. He compares them to the “(mighty) king” who arises in Dan 8:23 and 11:3 and to the traditions behind the king Nebuchadnezzar in Dan 4. 254 Kvanvig further proposes that traditions about Nabonidus were utilized for both Nebuchadnezzar in Dan 4 and Antiochus Epiphanes in chs. 7–11. 255 Finally, Van der Spek finds the name of the scribe, Munnabtum, extremely important. A certain historical Munnabitum was a Babylonian foreign astrologer in the seventh-century Assyrian court who interpreted celestial omens, and the texts of these omens are still extant. Thus, the real author of these omen texts that perhaps date to the fourth century has chosen a pseudonym from the past in much the same fashion as the author of Daniel. “Just as Daniel was a Jewish foreign diviner at the court of Babylonian and Persian kings, Munnabtum was a Babylonian foreign diviner at the Assyrian court.” 256 Van der Spek also argues that Daniel might have known of the Dynastic Prophecy and that it “has a closer link with Daniel 11 than with the other Akkadian prophecies.” 257

5.1.2.5.1.3.  The Uruk Prophecy This text was found at Uruk (modern Warka) in 1969, published in 1975, and possibly dates from the Seleucid period. 258 The recto is badly damaged but seems to “consist of some sort of a first person commentary (the first line ends with 253.  Collins says that this is not a four-kingdom schema because there “is no significance to the number” (Daniel, 168). 254.  Helge S. Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic: The Mesopotamian Background of the Enoch Figure and of the Son of Man (WMANT 61; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1988), 460–502. Note Lebram’s idea that the evilness of Antiochus is a tradition from Egyptian concerns about the Persian Cambyses (Jürgen C. H. Lebram, “König Antiochus im Buch Daniel,” VT 25 [1975], 737–72, esp. 769–70). 255.  Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic, 475. 256.  Van der Spek, “Darius III, Alexander the Great and Babylonian Scholarship,” 323. 257.  Ibid., 324. 258.  Published by H. Hunger and S. A. Kaufman, “A New Akkadian Prophecy Text,” JAOS 95 (1975), 371–75.

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the word ittātūa, ‘my omens’) interspersed with omen protases and apodoses.” 259 The Uruk Prophecy is a vaticinium ex eventu that clearly praises a final king who will bring about a lasting kingdom of justice and will restore the shrines of Uruk. The two parts of the text emphasize a “bad” time (verso lines 3–10) and a “good” time (verso lines 11–19). The bad time describes a king who will remove the lamassu (protective goddess) of Uruk to Babylon—probably Erība-Marduk (ca. 770 b.c.e.). Additional bad kings appear to follow (five ditto signs seem to indicate this, as well as a brief reference to another bad king after these five). 260 In the good time, a “king will arise in Uruk” who will return the lamassu, do justice, and make right decisions. This king appears to be Nebuchadnezzar II, who boasted of having restored the deities of Uruk (the šēdu of Uruk and the lamassu of Eanna) in his own texts. 261 This king’s dynasty “will stand forever,” and his son will “rule the entire world”: the “kings of Uruk will exercise authority like the gods.” 262 The text ends with the prediction of this king’s son and thus moves into real prophecy. As Collins notes, “here the everlasting kingship is apparently in continuity with that already in power—closer to 2 Samuel 7 than to Daniel in that respect. It does, however, attest the hope for an everlasting Babylonian kingdom, which is a relevant counterpoint to the kingdom predicted [in Daniel 2:44].” 263 Furthermore, Beaulieu has successfully demonstrated that the text was edited for propagandistic purposes in the third century in an effort to encourage rulers to support the Anu cult in Uruk during the Seleucid period, just as Nebuchadnezzar II had supported the cult in Uruk. 264

5.1.2.5.1.4.  The Marduk Prophecy The Marduk Prophecy and the Shulgi Prophecy are written in the first-person under the pseudonym of their respective gods. 265 Before the prophetic section in 259.  Stephen A. Kaufman, “Prediction, Prophecy, and Apocalypse in the Light of New Akkadian Texts,” in Avigdor Shinan, ed., Proceedings of the Sixth World Congress of Jewish Studies, 13–19 August 1973 (Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1977), 221–28, esp. p. 223. 260. JoAnn Scurlock provides a chart of the Uruk Prophecy’s interpretations of kings: “Whose Truth and Whose Justice: The Uruk and Other Late Akkadian Prophecies ReRevisited,” in Steven W. Holloway, ed. Orientalism, Assyriology and the Bible (Hebrew Bible Monographs 10; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2006), 449–67, esp. p. 463. 261.  Ringgren, “Akkadian Apocalypses,” 381. 262.  Recto lines 16–18; translation by Kaufman, “Prediction, Prophecy, and Apocalypse,” 224. 263.  Collins, Daniel, 170. This is also discussed by Stephen A. Kaufman, “Prediction, Prophecy, and Apocalypse,” 221–28; Peter Höffken, “Heilszeitherrschererwartung im babylonischen Raum,” WO 9 (1977), 47–71. 264.  Beaulieu, “The Historical Background of the Uruk Prophecy,” in M. E. Cohen et al., eds., The Tablet and the Scroll: Near Eastern Studies in Honor of William W. Hallo (Bethesda, MD: CDL, 1993), 41–52. 265.  The primary edition is by R. Borger, “Gott Marduk und Gott-König Šulgi als Propheten,” BiOr 28 (1971), 3–24. A recent translation of both the Marduk Prophecy and the Shulgi

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the Marduk Prophecy, there is a kind of historical overview (reported as historical fact, not as prediction), including the three times Marduk abandoned Babylon (first to Ḫatti ca. 1595 b.c.e., then to Assyria ca. 1225 b.c.e.., then to Elam) and the two times he returned. The periods of abandonment are portrayed as Marduk’s choice but historically reflect the occasions on which the statue of Marduk was taken away by foreigners to their lands. The section preceding the prophetic section (i, 22–ii, 18) indicates that, when the god is gone from Babylon, chaos reigns: the land is sick, there are corpses everywhere, brother “eats” brother, the wealthy go begging to the poor. The prophecy (beginning in ii, 19) starts with “A king of Babylon will arise.” The new king will reinstitute order, refurbish the Ekur-Sagil temple (i.e., Esagila), and will destroy Elam. 266 A reversal of all the former chaos will ensue. The historical setting can be determined with near certainty: it was in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I (1125–1104 b.c.e.), fourth king of the Isin II dynasty, that Elam was defeated and the Marduk statue recovered. 267 The text was probably originally composed then, as the colophon states, and was meant to show the superiority of Nebuchadnezzar I. However, Neo-Assyrian kings such as Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal may have elaborated it into its present form in a desire to glorify themselves as kings of Babylon as well. Their wish was perhaps to persuade Babylonians to not ally with their enemy Elam, by promoting their own support of the Marduk cult and temple. 268

5.1.2.5.1.5.  The Shulgi Prophecy The Shulgi Prophecy is set after the Marduk Prophecy, which ends with “I am Shulgi.” 269 Thus, the two prophecies together are a series, but because of heavy damage to the text, no one can know if the series contained more than two. As with the Marduk Prophecy, the implied author is a deity (Shulgi, second king of the Third Dynasty of Ur, 2094–2047 b.c.e., who in this composition is considered Prophecy is by Karl Hecker in TUAT II/1 (2005), 65–68. Another translation and short discussion of the Marduk Prophecy is by Brent A. Strawn, “88. Marduk Prophecy,” in Mark W. Chavalas, ed., The Ancient Near East: Historical Sources in Translation (Blackwell Sourcebooks in Ancient History; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 168–74. The texts were first called narû-texts (H. G. Güterbock, “Die historische Tradition und ihre literarische Gestaltung bei Babyloniern und Hethitern bis 1200,” ZA 42 [1934], 1–91). 266. The temple Esagila is meant—the main temple of Marduk in Babylon (Hecker, TUAT II/1, 67; de Jong, Isaiah Among the Ancient Near Eastern Prophets, 421). 267.  Ibid., 422–23. See also Grant Frame, Rulers of Babylonia from the Second Dynasty of Isin to the End of Assyrian Domination (1157–612 bc) (RIMB 2; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 11–35. 268.  In his inscriptions, Esarhaddon mentions his own return of the Marduk statue to Babylon in 668 b.c.e. (De Jong, Isaiah Among the Ancient Near Eastern Prophets, 424). 269.  This was edited by Borger with the Marduk Prophecy, in “Gott Marduk und GottKönig Šulgi als Propheten,” 13–15.

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a deity), and he identifies himself before making prophetic statements. The text may date from the twelfth century, like the Marduk Prophecy. The prophecy in this case is rather general, and its tone is very similar to the language of chaos and crisis in the Marduk Prophecy (ii, 1–11). It is hard to tell which historical events are being described. The prophetic section iii, 1′–v, 15 is a vaticinum ex eventu referring to events in the second millennium. The next section of the prophecy speaks of a savior-king who will restore Babylon: this king will renew Girsu and Lagash, construct sanctuaries, establish the nindabûofferings, etc. The text was probably composed with a specific king in mind, but his identity is unknown to us. Borger thought the reference in iv, 16′–19′ was to the sack of Babylon by the Hittites (1595 b.c.e.), 270 but Longman believes it is an allusion to the defeat of Kaštiliašu IV by Tukulti-Ninurta I of Assyria in 1225 b.c.e. and the subsequent Assyrian removal of gods from the Babylonian palace to Assyria. 271 But there were other occasions when Assyria took the gods of Babylon and, like the Marduk Prophecy, this prophecy could well have been of great interest and use to Neo-Assyrian kings, too. 272 Akkadian proto-apocalypses or pseudo-prophecies, like the Egyptian examples, have a great deal in common with the visions portion of Daniel and with Dan 2, in which a series of kingdoms is foretold, and possibly with Dan 4 and 5, in which a king or kingdom’s change in circumstances is predicted ex eventu. It is impossible to know, however, whether the Akkadian literary predictive texts have a court setting like the Egyptian ones. Still, one important parallel to Daniel is noted by van der Spek: the fourth-century scribe of the Dynastic Prophecy may have taken as a pseudonym the name of a foreign diviner, Munnabitum, who was a Babylonian astrologer in the seventh-century Assyrian court. The Maccabean Book of Daniel also takes as its main protagonist and later visionary narrator (in chs. 7–12) a person who is a foreign diviner in the courts in which he serves.

5.1.2.5.2.  Egyptian Pseudo-Prophecies or Proto-Apocalypses With regard to Egypt, Montgomery in his 1927 Daniel commentary said that “the closest examples of prophetic apocalyptic pseudographs like those of the Jews in the 2d cent. are found in Egyptian literature,” and of these, he saw the Demotic Chronicle as the most striking. 273 Moreover, in a 1925 article, “Hebrew and Egyptian Apocalyptic Literature,” C. C. McCown optimistically discussed the influences on Israelite literature of several Egyptian pseudo-prophecies, such as Admonitions of Ipuwer and the Prophecies of Neferti, as well as the Hellenistic period Demotic Chronicle, the Oracle of the Lamb in Demotic, and the Oracle of the Potter 270.  Longman, Fictional Akkadian Autobiography, 23. 271.  Ibid., 145. 272. De Jong, Isaiah Among the Ancient Near Eastern Prophets, 426. 273.  Montgomery, The Book of Daniel, 77.

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and the Dream of Nectanebo in Greek (the last now known in Demotic, too). 274 McCown suggested that the so-called Demotic Chronicle was written about half a century before Daniel, just before the great period of Israelite apocalypses, so “the possibilities of mutual borrowing become undeniable.” 275 With regard to the book of Daniel, the author “represents his prophecies as delivered long years before his time in order that their fulfillment may encourage his readers to believe in the happy outcome of their uprising against the ungodly barbarians who are oppressing them.” 276 Daniel reads all history as “a succession of rewards for the righteous and punishments for the wicked, eventuating in a final period of glory, power, and prosperity for his righteous nation,” as do Egyptian prophecies. 277 McCown did not claim direct influence on Jewish apocalypses and prophecy or direct copying but at least some borrowing from the far older traditions of Egypt. 278 More recent scholars, such as Dieter Bauer, have also thought Jewish apocalyptic literature to have originated as an Egyptian phenomenon. 279 Not only is the rule of GrecoMacedonian tyrants decried as a time of political and natural chaos in Egyptian texts but these late texts also predict a king of the East who will usher in a new and holy period characterized by divine law and the resurrection of the dead. One especially relevant facet of the “proto-apocalyptic” literature of Egypt is its court setting. Scholars such as J. C. H. Lebram, Robert R. Wilson, and H-P. Müller have most clearly noticed this. 280 Lebram in his commentary on Daniel explains Aramaic as the appropriate language for a book set in the Diaspora in a foreign court; this is even more true for the Semitic-Syrian minority in Egypt (more appropriate than Greek or Egyptian). 281 He also suggests that the special form of apocalyptic wisdom sayings go back to Egyptian prophecies that appeared as early as 1200 b.c.e. 282 The Aramaic chapters are international and universal, and their origin in the work of internationally oriented wisdom teachers, who had a relationship to the Jewish (probably Egyptian) Diaspora, can be traced. 283 274.  McCown, “Hebrew and Egyptian Apocalyptic Literature,” HTR 18 (1925), 357–411. 275.  Ibid., 391. 276.  Ibid., 391–92. 277.  McCown, however, claimed that the Jewish apocalypses were superior. 278.  His definition of “apocalypse” included both prophecy and prediction, so it included both the Egyptian admonitions as well as compositions with predictions. 279. Dieter Bauer, Das Buch Daniel (Neuer Stuttgarter Kommentar, Altes Testament 22; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1996), 49–51. 280.  Lebram, Das Daniel Buch (Zürcher Bibelkommentare AT 23; Zürich: Theologische Verlag, 1984), 20; Wilson, “From Prophecy to Apocalyptic: Reflections on the Shape of Israelite Religion,” Semeia 21 (1982), 79–95; Müller, “Mantische Weisheit und Apokalyptik,” 268–93, esp. p. 291. 281.  Lebram, Das Daniel Buch, 19. 282.  Ibid., 20. 283.  See also Lebram, “The Piety of Jewish Apocalyptists,” in Hellholm, ed., Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Ancient Near East, 171–210. For the idea that the portrait of Antiochus in Daniel was modeled on Egyptian ideas; see idem, “König Antiochus im Buch Daniel.” VT 25 (1975), 737–72.

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Müller thought Dan 2, 4, and 5 demonstrated mantic wisdom par excellence, as does the Prayer of Nabonidus from Qumran, and suggested that the Hellenistic period was a time of ecumenical syncretism across the Near East in which apocalypticism was on the rise. Wilson suggests that precisely six Egyptian prophecies follow a pattern similar to Dan 2, 4, and 5, in that “all of the texts picture a wise speaker standing in the presence of the king and delivering messages dealing with present and future social and political conditions.” 284 He cites Papyrus Westcar, the Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage (Ipuwer), Prophecies of Neferti, Prophecy of the Lamb, Oracle of the Potter, and the Demotic Chronicle. The last four are the most explicit in their details regarding the political and social chaos to come, followed by the good ruler. The stress which the Egyptian texts place on wisdom and perception, the court setting of the speaker’s activities, and the predominant political concerns of the texts all suggest that this material was produced by scribes or other members of the Egyptian royal court. It is therefore precisely the sort of material that Israelite scribes and bureaucrats might have known, so it would not be surprising if the writers of Daniel were influenced by it when they produced Daniel 2, 4, and 5. 285

Chs. 1–6 of Daniel are not readily recognized as apocalyptic in their own right, without the attachment of the visions, but Dan 2, 4, and 5 all have predictions. On the other hand, only Dan 2 is concerned with eschatology, although it is deferred eschatology. 286 The statue composed of four metals representing either individual kings or the rule of successive kingdoms (Babylonian, Median, Persian, and Greek), followed by the rule of God’s kingdom, is not immanent. Nebuchadnezzar himself is not being destroyed any time soon, in the perspective of Dan 2. Nonetheless, just as with similar Akkadian texts, there has been much discussion about whether any of the Egyptian compositions can really be called apocalyptic, at least in the same sense as this label is used for some biblical texts such as the Daniel visions. 287 If “apocalyptic” means not only a few motifs con284.  Wilson, “From Prophecy to Apocalyptic: Reflections on the Shape of Israelite Religion,” 79–95, esp. p. 91. See also idem, Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 124–28. 285.  Wilson, “From Prophecy to Apocalyptic,” 91. 286.  Collins, Daniel, 175; see also Collins, “Nebuchadnezzar and the Kingdom of God: Deferred Eschatology in the Jewish Diaspora,” in Christoph Elsas and Hans G. Kippenberg, eds., Loyalitätskonflikte in der Religionsgeschichte: Festschrift Carsten Colpe (Würzburg: Königs­ hausen & Neumann, 1990), 252–57. 287.  See here especially the conclusions of A. Blasius and B. U. Schipper, “Apocalyptik und Ägypten? Erkenntnisse und Perspektiven,” in Blasius and Schipper, eds., Apokalyptik und Ägypten: Eine kritische Analyse der relevanten Texte aus dem griechisch-römischen Ägypten (OLA 107; Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 277–302. For explanations of ancient Egyptian prophecy, see Günter Lanczkowski, Altägyptischer Prophetismus (Ägyptologische Abhandlungen 4; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1960); Werner Huss, Der makedonische König und die ägyptischen Priester: Studien zur Geschichte des ptolemaiischen Ägypten (Historia: Einzelschriften 85; Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994);

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cerning chaos but also a mindset that there is to be a future transcendent world, then Blasius and Schipper, editors of a recent work on apocalyptic and Egypt, argue that Egyptian literature is not apocalyptic until the Apocalypse of Asclepius in the Christian era. In fact, in their view, “apocalyptic” literature in Egypt develops steadily from Neferti to the Apocalypse of Asclepius. The anticipated kingdom is usually in this world, not in the next. Nevertheless, there are a few individual points of contact, such as the connection of the motif with a setting in the royal court. 288 The main characteristics of Egyptian prophecies thus include: (1) typically, a frame story in court setting, usually of the past; (2) predictions of chaos followed by a restoration of order by a savior-king; thus, there is prophecy or foretelling of the future (ex eventu prophecy followed sometimes by predictive prophecy); (3) messianism, but a kind of messianism well within Egyptian tradition: the future king is in the typical mold of pharaoh, and the prediction is for the nation, not the universe or with any broader eschatological view; and finally, (4) no apocalyptic-eschatological outlook, no Heilszeit outside of human history or beyond the nation of Egypt (there is, however, a slow and almost indefinable yet progressive transformation of native ideas that culminate in the Apocalypse of Asclepius). 289 Thus, the term “apocalyptic” for these Egyptian texts does not seem appropriate any longer, but there is little opposition to calling them “proto-apocalyptic.” 290 Nili Shupak, “Egyptian ‘Prophecy’ and Biblical Prophecy. Did the Phenomenon of Prophecy, in the Biblical Sense, Exist in Ancient Egypt? ” JEOL 31 (1989–90), 5–35; Robert Meyer, “Die eschatalogische Wende des politischen Messianismus im Ägypten der Spätzeit: Historischcritische Bemerkungen zu einer spätägyptischen Prophetie,” Saeculum 48 (1997), 177–212. 288.  “Gleichwohl gibt es einzelne Berührungspunkte, wie z.B. die Verbindung der Motive mit einer Rahmenerzählung, die an einem Königshof spielt und bei der die Ereignisse in eine ferne Vergangenheit verlagert werden (Lamm unter König Bokchoris: 24. Dynastie, Töpfer unter Amenophis: 18. Dynastie, Neferti unter König Snofru: 4. Dynastie, vgl. die Hofererzählungen über Daniel und Nebukadnezar, Dan 1–6)” (Blasius and Schipper, Apokalyptik und Ägypten, 298–99). The authors say that it is especially in this way that Egyptian prophecies can be compared to the court tales of Daniel 1–6. 289.  Blasius and Schipper have three findings with regard to the relationship between the Greco-Roman Egyptian material and the Jewish apocalyptic question: (1) there was no pan-oriental anti-hellenism, but (2) there was a transformation or eschatologization of expectations due either to a historical or intellectual-historical crisis, and (3) perhaps the case of prophecy and apocalyptic material in the ancient Jewish tradition is analogous to the Egyptian material, in that the Egyptian material comprised a transformation of traditional elements that was both influenced by a multicultural environment as well as oriented to classical indigenous predispositions for eschatological-apocalyptic thought. See Blasius and Schipper, Apokalyptik und Ägypten, 302. 290. See, for instance, Jan Bergman, “Introductory Remarks on Apocalypticism in Egypt,” in Hellholm, ed., Apocalyptism in the Mediterranean World and the Ancient Near East, 51–60, esp. p. 55.

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There are at least six relevant Egyptian prophecies, five with a court setting (only the text of the Demotic Chronicle does not preserve its setting or motivation for a prophetic utterance), in addition to Papyrus Westcar (Tales from King Cheop’s Court), which we will not review again here (see chapter three, section 3.3.2.3.1). Papyrus Westcar is different from the “proto-apocalypses” in that it does not have the chaos theme before a restoration of order.

5.1.2.5.2.1.  The Prophecies of Neferti The text of the Prophecies of Neferti, Papyrus St. Petersburg 1116B, dates from the Eighteenth Dynasty but was composed during or immediately after the reign of Amenemhet I of the Twelfth Dynasty (the beginning of the Middle Kingdom) as a propagandistic work justifying the historical Amenemhet I’s actions at the beginning of the second millennium b.c.e. 291 As partly discussed above, the setting of the composition is the court of King Snefru, the first king of the Fourth Dynasty. In the frame story, the king asks that his Court of the Residence be summoned to appear before him. Then he asks them to search out someone who is wise and outstanding and who has done a noble deed in order to give the monarch “a few fine words and elegant phrases so that my Majesty may be pleased by listening to them”—in short, for amusement! 292 The court suggests that the person summoned be the lector-priest of Bastet named Neferti, and the king has him brought in. When Neferti is asked for fine words and elegant phrases, he asks whether the king wants them to be “about what has come to pass, or about what will come to pass,” and the king chooses the latter. The king himself then takes up writing materials in order to record the words of Neferti. Neferti proceeds eloquently to foretell the future of Egypt and lament its coming woes. The composition culminates with the foretelling of the rise of Amenemhet I, who will return order to Egypt and drive out chaos. The Prophecies of Neferti describe a land in utter distress, in which social and natural order has been overthrown. It is a land in which the opposite of all that is proper has come to pass: the diligent have nothing while the lazy are satiated, a nobleman works while slaves are exalted, etc.—all themes common to the nationalcalamity genre.

291.  Text: W. Helck, Die Prophezeiung des Nfr.tj (2nd ed., Kleine Ägyptische Texte 2; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992). See also: Elke Blumenthal, “Neferti, Prophezeiung des,” LÄ IV (1982), 380–81; eadem, “Die Prophezeiung des Neferti,” ZÄS 109 (1982), 1–27. Translations: Vincent A. Tobin, in Simpson, AEL, 214–20; F. Kammerzell, “Die Prophezeihung des Neferti,” in TUAT II/1 (1986), 102–10; Parkinson, “The Words of Neferti,” in idem, The Tale of Sinuhe, 131–43; Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 1.139–45; Bresciani, Letteratura, 122–28. 292.  Vincent A. Tobin, “The Prophecies of Neferty,” in LAE, 214–20, esp. p. 215.

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5.1.2.5.2.2.  Admonitions of Ipuwer The text of Ipuwer, Papyrus Leiden 344, dates from the Nineteenth Dynasty but Ipuwer must have been composed earlier, perhaps during the late Middle Kingdom. 293 The beginning and ending are not preserved, but the main body involves a dialogue between a king (who is not named in what is extant) and a sage named Ipuwer. One assumes the conversation is placed in a court setting. Like the Prophecies of Neferti, this text also falls “into the general category of ‘national calamity’ literature, a format based on a reflection of the postulated upheaval which took place during the First Intermediate Period. In all likelihood, however, the setting is used here as a literary device in order to present a treatise describing the dramatic contrast between a situation of order and one of disorder, Maʿat as opposed to Isfet.” 294 Ipuwer describes a situation of chaos in Egypt following the typical reversal pattern: the nobles and wealthy are usurped by the paupers, those who had property now have none, people are going hungry, and so on. The sage urges the king to restore social and religious order.

5.1.2.5.2.3.  The Demotic Chronicle The Demotic Chronicle, on the recto of Bibliothèque Nationale 215 (Paris), consists of a series of chapters containing oracular statements accompanied by their interpretations. 295 They are explained with reference to Egyptian history in the Persian and Greek eras; the oracles refer to Egyptian kings from Amyrtaeus (ca. 404–398) to the last native king, Nectanebo II (ca. 358–341). 296 Most of these kings (except for Nephorites I) are portrayed negatively, and Nectanebo’s reign is especially derided (the king himself is described as a “scabbard”—i.e., “vagina,” in iv, 3). It is thus probably not actually a chronicle and most likely dates to the second half of the third century b.c.e., perhaps in the reign of Ptol293.  Editio princeps: Alan H. Gardiner, The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage, from a Hieratic Papyrus in Leiden (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1909), 1–95. See also Wolfgang Helck, Die “Admonitions” Pap. Leiden I 344 Recto (Kleine Ägyptische Texte 11; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995). Translations include: R. O. Faulkner, “The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage,” JEA 51 (1965), 53–62 (see also idem, “Notes on ‘The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage,’” JEA 50 [1964], 24– 36); Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 1.149–63; Vincent A. Tobin, “The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage,” in Simpson, ed., LAE, 188–210; Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe, 166–99; Bresciani, Letteratura, 102–17. 294.  Tobin, “The Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage,” in LAE, 188. 295.  Editio princeps: W. Spiegelberg, Die sogenannte demotische Chronik des Pap. 215 der Bibliothèque Nationale zu Paris (Demotische Studien 7; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1914). Translations: G. Roeder, Altägyptische Erzählungen und Märchen (Jena: Diederichs, 1927), 238–49; E. Bresciani, Letteratura, 803–14; D. Devauchelle, “Les prophéties en Égypte ancienne,” in Jesús Asurmendi et al., Prophéties et oracles 2: En Égypte et en Grèce (Supplément au Cahier Evangile 89; Paris: Cerf, 1994), 6–30, esp. pp. 18–27; Heinz Felber, “Die Demotische Chronik,” in Blasius and Schipper, eds., Apokalyptik und Ägypten, 65–111, esp. pp. 75–90. 296.  Alan B. Lloyd, “Nationalist Propaganda in Ptolemaic Egypt,” Historia 31 (1982), 33–55, esp. 41.

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emy III Euergetes II (246–221 b.c.e.). 297 The beginning and end of the text are missing (only the end of ch. 6 and all of chs. 7–13 are preserved), and so it is likely but not certain there was a frame story of some kind; no dialogue between king and courtier has been preserved. The chapters can not be assumed to be in chronological order, however, nor can the political history of one chapter be explained in terms of another, even if they sometimes contain common themes. 298 It is not clear if the oracles come from different periods or if they all belong to one series of the Ptolemaic period. 299 The prophecies are all ex eventu, with the possible exception of ch. 9 (according to some interpretations), in which a native dynasty is said to arise from Heracleopolis, aided by the god Harsaphes, bringing an end to foreign rule. The prophecies were probably recorded because they “were regarded as being directly relevant to a contemporary situation in the reign of Ptolemy III.” 300 Before Felber’s 2002 study, most scholars seemed to consider the Demotic Chronicle to be anti-Greek propagandistic literature of the “national calamity” variety. For instance, Alan Lloyd suggested that the oracle perhaps originated with a local aristocratic family, “quite possibly descendants of the Heracleopolitan dynasts who are known to have dominated the area during the Ethiopian and Saïte Periods and certainly remained a power in the land as late as the early Ptolemaic Period.” 301 The main theme of the composition is that the only lasting kings are the kings who obey the gods. One punishment for not obeying the gods is to be invaded by foreigners: Persians (“Medes” in iv, 22–23; v, 15ff.) and Greeks. There are code names or name substitutions for groups or specific people in the oracle: in vi, 21 one of the foreigners who will rule (probably Alexander the Great) is called the “Great Hound,” and there are veiled references to periods of time (one time, two times, etc.) and set days of the month. The enemy in general is designated “herds of the wild game” (v, 15): a symbol of chaos or Typhonic forces. 302 In ii, 25, deliverance will come from a “man of Heracleopolis” who will open temples and cause offerings to be brought. 303 According to this view, the oracle is thus political propaganda promulgated by a family of Heracleopolitan dynasts who are bolstering their political qualifications. If the entire text were preserved, the oracles would perhaps be said to be from the temple of the 297.  Spiegelberg, Die sogenannte demotische Chronik, 4; Kaplony, “Demotische Chronik,” in LÄ 1 (1975), 1056–60, esp. p. 1056. 298. Janet Johnson, “Is the Demotic Chronicle an Anti-Greek Tract? ” 109. 299.  Spiegelberg believed the latter (Die sogenannte demotische Chronik, 6ff.). 300.  Lloyd, “Nationalist Propaganda in Ptolemaic Egypt,” 41. 301. Ibid. 302.  The symbolism of sacrifice in ancient Egypt seems to indicate this; see also ibid., 44 n. 35. 303.  Lloyd notes several passages that are reminiscent of language in Judges, Kings, and Chronicles but says that the concepts and terminology are native Egyptian: “the laws of maʿat,” etc. (ibid., 42–43).

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ram-headed god Harsaphes/Herishef himself at Heracleopolis in Middle Egypt, especially since after the “man of Heracleopolis” begins to rule, the prophet of Harsaphes is said to rejoice and that great blessings are to be upon Heracleopolis (iii, 1). In contrast to previous scholars, Heinz Felber believes that the Demotic Chronicle was a pro-Hellenistic tract, with negative comments about the Persians and native Egyptian rulers. 304 It is pro-Ptolemaic in outlook, especially toward Alexander III, Philip III, and Alexander IV, who are to be identified with three anonymous but positively-described kings in ii, 19–21 (ch. 8). The positive rule of the Greeks is contrasted with the time of chaos under Nectanebo I, and the ruler from Heracleopolis is to be identified with Ptolemy I Soter (ca. 367–283 b.c.e.), under whose reign Egypt was quite prosperous. Thus, the text is a collection of solely ex eventu prophecies portraying most Egyptian kings in a negative light, and apart from a few individual motifs, Felber believes that it is not apocalyptic. Ptolemy I is not a messiah or national Egyptian royal figure who is a native of Heracleopolis but a monarch who is granted power by the god Harsaphes. Ptolemaic rule is described positively in typical Egyptian “königstheologisch orientierte Geschichtsschreibung.” 305 In addition, the term “Great Hound” used of Alexander the Great is not pejorative but laudatory, indicating a strong and courageous warrior. 306 The author was probably from priestly circles in Memphis or Heracleopolis and had a good standing with the new ruling family in the days of Ptolemy II or Ptolemy III (in the second half of the third century b.c.e.). Thus, there is disagreement over whether the text is anti-Greek or proGreek propaganda. But its style has been viewed as relevant for understanding Daniel. Montgomery saw the Demotic Chronicle in general as very relevant to Dan 10–11, 307 while both McCown and Wilson viewed it as important for Dan 2, 4, and 5 as well. McCown argued that “the whole of this Egyptian apocalypse is constructed on the plan of the incident in which Daniel interprets the handwriting on the wall”: the author of Daniel has the same presuppositions about literary artifices and history outlines. 308 Both authors present their predictions as having been fulfilled in the distant past, so their readers may trust in a good outcome in the face of their contemporary oppression.

5.1.2.5.2.4.  The Oracle of the Lamb, aka The Lamb of Bocchoris The beginning of the Demotic text (P. Vienna D 10,000) is not preserved, but based on the narrative at the end of the composition, there was most likely a 304. Heinz Felber, “Die Demotische Chronik,” in Apokalyptik und Ägypten, 65–111; contra Janet Johnson, “Is the Demotic Chronicle an Anti-Greek Tract? ” 107–24. 305.  Felber, “Die Demotische Chronik,” 110. 306.  Ibid., 106. 307.  Montgomery, The Book of Daniel, 77–78. 308.  McCown, “Hebrew and Egyptian Apocalyptic Literature, 391.

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complete frame story. 309 Its colophon states that it was copied in 7–8 c.e. under Augustus Caesar (“year 33 of Caesar, month 4 of Summer, day 8”); however, the setting is the time of the king Bakenrenef (Bocchoris) of the Twenty-Fourth Dynasty (718–712 b.c.e.). 310 A lamb seems to be pronouncing a series of curses and predictions about chaos in Egypt before someone named Pasaenhor (although that it is a lamb speaking is not clear until the end of the preserved column ii). The chaos described utilizes traditional Egyptian imagery: social and political reversals (the poor man becomes rich, the gods abandon the land), as well as cataclysms in the natural world: a river of blood, and so on. The lamb foretells the overthrow of king Bocchoris before his death and describes the coming dominion of Assyrians, Medes (Persians), and Greeks. After them, someone will reign for two years as a “curse,” and then someone who is called “our founder” will reign for 55 years. When asked when this will happen, the lamb says that the events will happen only when the lamb itself is “the uraeus upon the head of Pharaoh,” something that will occur at the end of 900 years, when the lamb is in control of Egypt after the time of the Medes. In the middle of these predictions, the lamb chants a list of curses against Egyptians and cities of Egypt in a style that is reminiscent of biblical oracles: “woe and abomination for the youth, small in age!” and “weep Bubastis!” 311 Finally, the lamb predicts that, at the predicted future time, Egypt will be restored to order. Egyptians will retaliate against Syria and be restored to happiness. After these predictions, the lamb dies and Pasaenhor goes before Pharaoh Bocchoris to read the scroll of the lamb’s prophecy; in the last lines of the composition, the prophecy is called “the curse that Pre made against Egypt from the sixth regnal year of Pharaoh Bakenrenef.” (The term “curse” actually appears in several other lines: i, 19–20; ii, 4, 14, 19.) The king is told that all these things will come to pass before his death. The king then commands that the lamb be placed in a golden shrine and buried as if he were a god.

309. Text: Zauzich, “Das Lamm des Bokchoris,” in Papyrus Erzherzog Rainer (P. Rainer Cent.): Festschrift zum 100-jährigen Bestehen der Papyrussammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek (Vienna: Brüder Hollinek, 1983), 1.165–74, pl. 2; J. M. Janssen, “Over Farao Bocchoris,” Varia Historica aangeboden aan Professor Doctor A. W. Byvanck (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1954), 17–29. See also Karl-Theodor Zauzich,“Lamm des Bokchoris,” LÄ III (1980), 912–13. Translations: R. K. Ritner, “The Prophecy of the Lamb (P. Vienna D. 10,000),” in LAE, 445–49; Bresciani, Letteratura, 815–18; Heinz Josef Thissen, “Das Lamm des Bokchoris,” in Blasius and Schipper, eds., Apokalyptik und Ägypten, 113–38. 310.  The author of the text may have an Aramaic name, Khetba, the same name as his mother; he is Khetba son of Herieu the Younger, and his mother is Khetba the Elder. On the name, see Karl-Theodor Zauzich, “Der Schreiber der Weissagung des Lammes,” Enchoria 6 (1976), 127–28. Thissen, however, reads the name as “Satabus” (Thissen, “Das Lamm des Bokchoris,” 119). 311.  For examples of oracles against Egypt, see Ezek 30:13–19 and Isa 19:11–14; Ritner, “The Prophecy of the Lamb,” in LAE, 446; the translation of woes is on pp. 447–48.

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That there was a popular tradition in Egypt of a lamb speaking prophecy is clear from Manetho and other ancient scholars who write that, in the reign of Bocchoris of Saïs, “a lamb spoke.” 312 Apparently, this prophecy was also a source for the Alexandrian proverb, “The lamb has spoken to you.” 313 In later tradition, the lamb is endowed with some fantastic features: eight legs, two tails, two heads, and four horns. 314 It seems likely that the two kings mentioned in ii, 5—one of whom reigns for 2 years and the other for 55—are meant to be interpreted as Ptolemy VII Euergetes II (170–116 b.c.e.) and the rebel king Harsiese (131/130 b.c.e.). Heinz Josef Thissen believes that, therefore, the Oracle of the Lamb had to have been composed after the end of the sixth Syrian war against Antiochus IV (after 168 b.c.e.) or soon after the interregnum under Harsiese. 315 (The author picked up the association with a lamb in the time of Bocchoris for his prophecy from Manetho’s proverb of the third century b.c.e.) The text was then updated in the Augustan period in 4 b.c.e., a happier time, when Caesar Augustus seemed to be sustaining the world order and, at the same time, when the end of Roman rule over Egypt seemed near. The text is prophecy ex eventu in the tradition of the Prophecies of Neferti, but here the savior-king is only mentioned incidentally (ii, 20). In addition, the Oracle of the Lamb, set during the events of Antiochus IV, was meant to be “nationaler Zukunftshoffnung,” which, unlike Jewish apocalyptic texts, expects the replacement of the old order, not the beginning of a new age. 316 The text shares elements with the Oracle of the Potter. First, the lamb is a messenger of the god Khnum, the potter-god with a ram’s head, who fashioned humankind on a potter’s wheel in Egyptian texts and iconography. 317 Next, the plot is very similar: a prophet prophesies, his prophecy is brought before a king and written down (the preserved opening lines of the Oracle of the Lamb mention a book—probably one prepared by Pasaenhor after hearing the lamb’s words), the prophet dies, and is buried. Moreover, the kings who reign 2 and 55 years, respec312.  For Manetho, see the edition by W. G. Waddell, 164. See Thissen, “Das Lamm des Bokchoris,” 137–38, for his appendix containing various quotations from ancient authors involving the speaking of a lamb during the reign of Bocchoris (Manetho, Synkellos, Eusebius, etc.). 313.  Ritner, “The Prophecy of the Lamb,” in LAE, 445. 314.  J. Gwyn Griffiths, “Apocalyptic in the Hellenistic Era,” in D. Hellholm, ed., Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East, 273–93, esp. p. 286. 315.  Thissen, “Das Lamm des Bokchoris,” 136. See, in contrast, Robert Meyer, who reconstructs the textual history and finds three redactions: “Proto-Lamb” from the period of Psammetichus I (664–609 b.c.e.), who had a reign of 55 years like the king in col. ii, 5; “Deutero-Lamb” from the fifth century, an oral and very free version; and “Trito-Lamb” from around 130–80 b.c.e. (“Die eschatologische Wende des politischen Messianismus im Ägypten der Spätzeit,” 200). 316.  Thissen, “Das Lamm des Bokchoris,” 136. 317.  See K. Kakosy, “Prophecies of Ram Gods,” Studia Aegyptiaca 7 (1981), 139–54.

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tively, are also mentioned in recensions of the Oracle of the Potter. Furthermore, line 34 of the Oxyrhynchus version of the Oracle of the Potter refers to “the evils that the lamb announced to Bocchoris.”

5.1.2.5.2.5.  The Oracle of the Potter The Oracle of the Potter is found on five fragmentary papyri in Greek. Three have been classified as part of an anti-Alexandrian recension: P. Graf (G. 29787), from the second century c.e.; P. Rainer (G. 19813), from the third century c.e., perhaps originally composed around 129 b.c.e.; and P. Oxy. 2332, from the late third century c.e., perhaps originally written soon after 116 b.c.e. 318 The other, earlier two have been called pro-Heliopolitan by Koenen: PSI 982 (CPJ III 520), from the beginning of the third or the end of the second century b.c.e., and Oxy. [26] 3B.52.B (13) (a), dating to the second century b.c.e. 319 All versions of the two recensions are written in Greek, but the composition is dominated by an Egyptian worldview, so the nationality of the author is difficult to determine and possibly irrelevant. 320 In the colophon, the author claims to have translated the work “as far as possible.” In the multicultural milieu of the the third or second century b.c.e., the borders between Greeks, Egyptians, and others were beginning to blur. The frame narrative describes a potter going about his business of making pots on the Island of Helios, where temples to Isis and Osiris were also located. This activity is interpreted as blasphemous by the people, and the pots are pulled out of the kiln and broken. The potter then goes into a trance and prophesies the doom of Egypt, after which he is brought before Pharaoh Amenhotep of the Eighteenth Dynasty and repeats the prophecy. The disquieted king has the potter’s words written down in a book. The potter then dies and is buried in Heliopolis, and the book is placed in the royal treasury. The prophecies themselves concern bad things that will come upon Egypt: first, a bad king will rule in a new city, just being founded on the shores of the Mediterranean. The unnamed king (who comes from Syria and Ethiopia) must 318. L. Koenen, “Die Prophezeiungen des ‘Töpfers’,” ZPE 2 (1968), 178–209, pls. III–IV; idem, “Bemerkungen zum Text des Töpferorakels und zu dem Akaziensymbol,” ZPE 13 (1974), 313–19. See also U. Wilcken, “Zur aegyptischen Prophetie,” Hermes 40 (1905), 544–60; E. Lobel and C. H. Roberts, Oxyrhynchus Papyri, XXII (London: The Egypt Exploration Society, 1954), 93; Koenen, “The Prophecies of a Potter: A Prophecy of World Renewal Becomes an Apocalypse,” in D. H. Samuel, ed., Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress of Papyrology (American Studies in papyrology 7; Toronto: A. M. Hakkert, 1970), 249–54; see Lloyd, “Nationalist Propaganda in Ptolemaic Egypt,” 50. 319.  A reedition of the previously published papyri as well as an edition of the fifth papyrus is found in Koenen, “Die Apologie des Töpfers an König Amenophis oder das Töpfer­ orakel,” in Apokalyptik und Ägypten, 139–87, pls. i–iii. 320.  Blasius and Schipper, “Apokalyptik und Ägypten? Erkenntnisse und Perspektiven,” in Apokalyptik und Ägypten, 277–302, esp. p. 279.

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be interpreted as Alexander and the city as Alexandria, the “town of the foreigners” that the author bitterly opposes. The inhabitants of the city are called “Typhonians”—that is, followers of the god Seth—and nicknamed “girdle-wearers” after their dress. The disasters that will occur involve the usual reversal motifs: the sun will grow dim, slaughter and death will increase, and so on. Afterward will arise a new, friendly king who will reign for 55 years from Helios/Heliopolis, aided by Isis (the text specifically says that this is the king about whom the Lamb in the reign of Bocchoris had prophesied). The oracle looks forward to a time when the city of the girdle-wearers will be abandoned and become a place for drying fish and when Agathos Daimon (an alias for the snake-god Knephis) returns to Memphis, the former capital of Egypt. The temples of the gods will also return to Egypt. The pro-Heliopolitan recension, represented by two fragmentary papyri dating to the mid-second century b.c.e., indicates reworking of the core story and prophecy in the direction of anti-Jewish propaganda. The Jews are portrayed as threatening Heliopolis. PSI 982, 4–11 explicitly states: “Attack the Jews!” and asks Egyptians not to abandon their city (Heliopolis) or temple. The Jews might be identified with the Typhonians because they are said to work injustice. Since the text also refers to the great temple being turned into an exercise ground for cavalry, Koenen connects it to the historical situation of the dynastic struggle between Ptolemy VI Philometor (186–145 b.c.e.) and Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II (ca. 182–116 b.c.e.) in the mid-second century b.c.e. 321 The Oracle of the Potter was thus a fluid text and, like many prophecies, could be adapted to different situations. Koenen calls the text a “prophetische Königsnovelle” in general, in that a court tale provides the frame for a prophecy, like the Prophecy of Neferti, although there is also a connection to Greek historiography. 322 In contrast to the Prophecy of Neferti, however, the expected king is not a historical native ruler but only a symbolic, ideal figure. This transforms the traditional motifs of a Königs­novelle and edges the genre closer to apocalyptic (whose most fully-formed example in Egypt is the Apocalypse of Asclepius, in which the world is destroyed by fire and flood and then restored). No longer an anti-hellenistic piece, the text expresses 321.  Koenen, “Die Apologie des Töpfers,” 185. The two were in competition with each other from 170 through 145 b.c.e. due to various events after Antiochus IV’s invasion of Egypt in 170. Earlier commentators suggested that the anti-Jewish recension was composed in response to the Jewish Revolt of 115/116–117 c.e. (Koenen himself, in “The Ptolemaic King as a Religious Figure,” in A. Bulloch et al., eds., Images and Ideologies: Self-Definition in the Hellenistic World [Hellenistic Culture and Society 12; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], 25–115, esp. pp. 83–84; D. Frankfurter, “Lest Egypt’s City Be Deserted. Religion and Ideology in the Egyptian Reponse to the Jewish Revolt [116–117 c.e.],” JJS 43 [1992], 203–20, esp. pp. 208–12). 322.  “Die Apologie des Töpfers an König Amenophis oder das Töpferorakel,” in Apokalyptik und Ägypten, 139–87, pls. i–iii.

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a conflict between different social groups, and the pro-Heliopolitan recension is full of anti-Jewish sentiment. In the case of Daniel, of course, pro-Jewish prophecy was written for a Jewish audience; however, the tendency of propagandistic writers to update older prophetic texts for new historical situations may be evident in Daniel as well (for example, especially in Dan 2, where specific features may have been added to the dream about the statue of Nebuchadnezzar in order to reflect anti-Hellenistic or anti-Maccabean sentiment). Furthermore, the death of the prophet in Egyptian prophetic texts seems to secure the prophecies. This may be true for the final form of the book of Daniel as well, in that in the last verse Daniel is commanded “But you, go your way, and rest; you shall rise for your reward at the end of the days” (12:13). In fact, the prophet falls dead in both the Oracle of the Lamb and the Potter, and possibly also in Nectanebo’s Dream. 323

5.1.2.5.2.6.  Nectanebo’s Dream (The Prophecy of Petesis) 324 This work has already been discussed in chapter three above (section 3.3.2.5.6), in connection to the various traditions surrounding Nectanebo (who ruled from 360 to 343 b.c.e.), who was the last native king of Egypt and whose posthumous reputation included facility with magic and divination. The unfinished Nectanebo’s Dream was first known in Greek but now is also known from a Demotic fragment of the story published by Kim Ryholt, in addition to a sequel. 325 In the story, Nectanebo asks the gods to reveal the future to him, and they send him a dream in which Onuris complains to Isis that his sanctuary in Sebennytos is unfinished. The king awakens, calls the priests of Onuris to court, and they tell him that only the hieroglyphs remain unfinished. The hieroglyphcutters are assembled, and all agree that Petesis is the best one to complete the job. The story breaks off abruptly with Petesis being distracted by drink and a woman. The newly-discovered Demotic fragment does not add anything new; however, the new Demotic sequel seems to give some indication of the further contents of the story. Ludwig Koenen argues that, as a consequence of Petesis’ neglect of his work, the gods would neglect Egypt; then, enemies would invade the land, and finally 323.  Ryholt, “Nectanebo’s Dream,” 233. 324.  Editio princeps of the Greek: C. J. C. Reuvens, Lettres à M. Letronne sur les Papyrus bilingues et grecs et sur quelques autres monuments gréco-égyptiens du Musée d’antiquités de Leyde, troisième lettere (Leiden: Luchtmans, 1830), 76–79. See also Jörg-Dieter Gauger, “Der ‘Traum des Nektanebos’: Die griechische Fassung,” in Blasius and Schipper, eds., Apokalyptik und Ägypten, 189–219. For the Demotic fragment and sequel, see Kim Ryholt, “Nectanebo’s Dream or the Prophecy of Petesis,” in Blasius and Schipper, eds., Apokalyptik und Ägypten, 221–41, pls. iv–viii. 325. Kim Ryholt, “A Demotic Version of Nectanebo’s Dream (P. Carlsberg 562),” 197– 200; idem, “Nectanebo’s Dream or the Prophecy of Petesis,” in A. Blasius and B. U. Schipper, eds., Apokalyptik und Ägypten, 221–41.

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a king of the end-times would reverse the situation. 326 The basis of Koenen’s reconstruction are the motifs from the Prophecy of the Lamb and the Potter’s Oracle, as well as the Nectanebo episode in the Alexander Romance. Ryholt concludes a similar sequence of events: the dream of Nectanebo follows a chaos period, in which Egypt is subjugated by a foreign power—that is, the Persians. 327 This chaos period is ended by a redeemer who restores the former situation. The original version of the dream written by priests in Demotic is dated by Ryholt to the second Persian period. The sequel of the story, then, was written shortly after the invasion of Egypt by Alexander the Great and is connected with the goal of introducing the new invader as the son of Nectanebo II and redeemer of Egypt. Both texts, the dream and its sequel, form the basis for the Nectanebo episode in the Alexander Romance.

5.1.2.5.2.7.  Other Egyptian Prophecies Two other texts from Egypt have been proposed as relevant. The first is ostracon 59 from the Archive of Ḥor (mentioned in chapter three, section 3.3.2.2, above, most of which dates to 168/160 b.c.e. in the time of Antiochus IV). 328 In it, the pastophorus Ḥor has two dream revelations. One involves Imhotep, son of Ptah, the god, while the second, according to J. Gwyn Griffiths, is a “little apocalypse.” 329 Line 8 includes a great destruction, and in line 10, Thoth holds court. Joachim Friedrich Quack, however, does not think the work is an example of an Egyptian apocalyptic text. 330 The statement that “no district exists and no one withstands” (line 11), could be adduced as merely the expression of the uselessness of human effort (lines 16f.) instead of depicting a chaotic future. It is nonetheless a unique text, since the rest of the Ḥor archive contains only salvation, not disaster, pronouncements. In addition, a paradigm change in connection with the events after Antiochus IV does seem to indicate movement in the direction of apocalyptic: because of the historical situation and oppressive conditions, Ḥor no longer expects anything from men but everything from God. Another prophetic text to consider is from Tebtunis and was published by Joachim Friedrich Quack. 331 This text is composed of six fragments from three different papyri: Carlsberg 399; PSI Inv. D. 17; and Tebtunis Tait 13 Verso. Fragment A contains a typical chaos description: the gods have left their temples 326.  Koenen, “The Dream of Nektanebos,” 171–94. 327.  Ryholt, “Nectanebo’s Dream,” 235. 328.  Ray, The Archive of Ḥor, 167–69; see also Ray, “Observations on the Archive of Ḥor,” JEA 64 (1978), 113–20; Joachim Friedrich Quack, “Zu einer angeblich Apokalyptischen Passage in den Ostraka des Hor,” in Apokalyptik und Ägypten, 243–52. Ostracon 59 itself dates to 155 b.c.e. 329.  J. Gwyn Griffiths, “Apocalyptic in the Hellenistic Era,” 284–85. 330.  Quack, “Zu einer angeblich Apokalyptischen Passage in den Ostraka des Hor,” 252. 331.  Joachim Friedrich Quack, “Ein neuer prophetischer Text aus Tebtynis,” in Blasius and Schipper, eds., Apokalyptik und Ägypten, 253–73, pls. ix–xvi.

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and cities because humans are sinful, resulting in various social and natural catastrophes. Fragment B includes the destruction of some cities (Memphis and Alexandria) and of the Greeks. Fragments C–F seem to depict a reversal of this chaos. Fragments C and D describe the (re)construction of an ideal temple in Memphis. Fragment E concerns the establishment of pylons and the rule over all lands: social order is reestablished and Maʿat returns. Evil-doers are punished. These changes seem to be connected to a new ruler who is to reign as a world ruler. In Fragment F, instead of the invasion by foreigners, Egyptians make campaigns into Syria. Because Memphis and the temple have a prominent place in this text, Quack places its composition in a Memphis priestly setting during the Ptolemaic period. Unfortunately, the historical context for the composition is entirely missing due to the fragmentary nature of the text, as is any indication that the prophecy was spoken in a court setting.

5.1.2.5.3.  Other Ancient Apocalyptic Literature Several other apocalypses have been connected to Daniel, but, like Book 3 of the Sibylline Oracles, they have mostly been compared to the visions section of Daniel and so we will give them only brief mention here. 332 Book 3 is a collection of predictions that is supposed to be by a Babylonian Sibyl and predicts the Macedonian conquest, reconstruction of Babylon, and then the Macedonian collapse. It has a Jewish origin in the first century b.c.e., before the Roman annexation of Judea in 31 b.c.e. 333 Moreover, Qumran apocalypses without a court setting, such as the “Instruction on the Two Spirits” in the Community Rule (1QS 3–4), the War Scroll, and 11QMelchisedek, may also be significant for the Daniel visions. 334 A late-first-century b.c.e. text called the “Gabriel Revelation” also has affinities to Daniel in that it is an apocalyptic text featuring the angel Gabriel. 335 Furthermore, the great influence of Enoch on Daniel and the intellectual traditions that formed them both has been well discussed elsewhere. 336 332.  Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (2nd ed.; The Biblical Resource Series; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), esp. pp. 83–97. Marcel Simon, “Sur quelques aspects des Oracles Sibyllins juifs,” in Hellholm, ed., Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East, 219–33. 333. Rieuwerd Buitenwerf, Book III of the Sibylline Oracles and Its Social Setting with an Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (SVTP 17; Leiden: Brill, 2003). 334. Marc Philonenko, “L’apocalyptique quomrânienne,” in Hellholm, ed., Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East, 211–18. 335.  See now, Matthias Henze, ed., Hazon Gabriel: New Readings of the Gabriel Revelation (Early Judaism and Its Literature 29; Atlanta: SBL, 2011), especially the contribution by Daewoong Kim, “The Use of Daniel in the Gabriel Revelation,” 153–71. 336.  See among others, Gabriele Boccaccini, Beyond the Essene Hypothesis: The Parting of the Ways between Qumran and Enochic Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998); idem, Roots of Rabbinic Judaism; idem, ed., Enoch and Qumran Origins: New Light on a Forgotten Connection (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), especially part one, “Dream Visions and Daniel”;

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There are also some Iranian apocalypses that have been brought to bear on apocalyptic literature and the book of Daniel in particular: Zand-ī Vohuman Yasn (Bahman Yasht). 337 This Pahlavi work is later than Daniel; however, it may rely on an older source, perhaps in Avestan. 338 Both share the notion of four ages represented by four metals, as in Dan 4; in Bahman Yasht, this is in chs. 1 and 3, wherein Ahura Mazda sends Zoroaster a dream about the root of a tree with four branches of metal: gold, silver, steel, and mixed with iron. In addition, ch. 2 includes a tree with seven branches that symbolize periods to come. Many scholars argue, however, that Bahman Yasht is hardly the source of this motif, since it is also found in Hesiod and Herodotus and there are phenomenological parallels in further removed cultures. 339 Bahman Yasht and the Jāmāsp Nāmag, also a late text, both have a court setting, however. 340 The Oracle of Hystaspes, which may date to just before the Christian era and whose text is only represented in Greek and Latin descriptions, is the report of a dream by Vištāspa/Hystaspes, a (likely historical) king and patron of Zoroaster, which is interpreted by a “prophesying boy” (Lactantius’ Divinae institutiones 7.15, from the early fourth century c.e.). 341 The Oracle “shows that political oracles in the form of dreams had a broader context in the Hellenistic Near East.” 342 Paul Niskanen has noted the influence of Herodotus’ Histories upon Daniel’s history, especially in the scheme of successive kingdoms in Dan 2 and 7 VanderKam, Enoch and the Growth of an Apocalyptic Tradition; Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “Daniel and Early Enoch Traditions in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” 368–86. 337.  See especially Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, “Apocalypse juive et apocalypse iranienne,” in Ugo Bianchi and Maarten J. Vermaseren, eds., La soteriologia dei culti orientali nell’ Impero Romano: Atti del Colloquio Internazionale su la soteriologia dei culti orientali nell’ Impero Romano, Roma 24–28 Settembre 1979 (Leiden: Brill, 1982), 753–61; Anders Hultgård, “Persian Apocalypticism,” in John J. Collins, ed., The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, 1.39–83. 338. Tord Olsson overviews the main reasons some scholars have suggested influence from Bahman Yasht on Daniel (Olsson, “The Apocalyptic Activity: The Case of Jāmāsp Nāmag,” in Hellholm, ed., Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East, 21–49, esp. 26–27). 339.  Such as the Mayas and the Aztecs (Olsson, “The Apocalyptic Activity,” 28). 340. Other Iranian apocalypses of possible relevance include Ardā Wīrāz-nāmag and Bundahishn. 341.  Other than the remark that Hystaspes’ dream was interpreted by a prophesying lad, no further notice about the boy is related. However, some apocalyptic events described in Lactantius’ work may stem from the lost oracles; see, for instance, Franz Cumont, “La fin du monde selon les mages occidentaux,” RHR 52 (1931), 29–96, esp. pp. 64–96; Hans Gerhard Kippenberg, “Die Geschichte der mittelpersischen apokalyptischen Traditionen,” Studia Iranica 7 (1978), 49–80; David Flusser, “Hystaspes and John of Patmos,” in S. Shaked, ed., Irano-Judaica: Studies Relating to Jewish Contacts with Persian Culture throughout the Ages (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 1982), 12–75. 342.  Collins, Daniel, 173. See also: John R. Hinnells, “The Zoroastrian Doctrine of Salvation in the Roman World: A Study of the Oracle of Hystaspes,” in Eric J. Sharpe and John R. Hinnells, eds., Man and His Salvation: Studies in Memory of S. G. F. Brandon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 125–48.

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and also ch. 11. 343 The succession of empires is a Greek idea (perhaps based on Persian concepts), but Niskanen believes Daniel added the metals as universal empires and he added their opposition to the kingdom of God. 344 It was Arnaldo Momigliano who first noticed that the theory of a succession of world empires originally appears in Herodotus: 345 Herodotus says that the Medes succeeded the Assyrians (1.95), and the Persians succeeded the Medes in domination of the world (1.130). 346 The Persika of Ctesias uses the same pattern in the fifth century b.c.e., and Demetrius of Phalerum at the end of the fourth century says that the Macedonians succeeded the Persians. The idea of imperial succession is used again and again by Greek and Roman historians from that point on. The Baalam texts from Deir ʿAllah must be mentioned here, too, because they contain a narrative about a prophet who is visited at night by the gods, sees a vision, and is given an oracle. 347 These plaster texts were found at Tell Deir ʿAllah in Jordan and are in a Transjordanian dialect of Northwest Semitic that has affinities to Aramaic as well as Canaanite. 348 They date to the eighth century b.c.e. and relate to the biblical tradition of Baalam found in Num 22–24. Balaam son of Beor is described as a “seer of the gods”; the gods come to him at night (perhaps via incubation, since the inscription was on the plaster walls of a building that has been interpreted as a temple), and give him an oracle of El. He is distraught the next day, and his people ask him what is disturbing him. He describes the acts of the gods (ʾ lhn and šdyn) who, in a divine assembly, have asked a creature to bring chaos to earth; the world is turned upside-down in disorder as creatures and humans do the opposite of what they normally do and celestial events reverse creation. 349 In Ringgren’s interpretation, this is an apocalyptic 343.  Niskanen, The Human and the Divine in History: Herodotus and the Book of Daniel (JSOTSup 396; London: T. & T. Clark, 2004). 344.  Niskanen believes that this scheme is more likely to be based on the Herodotean tradition of universal history than on the Persian Bahman Yast, the Denkard, or the Babylonian Dynastic Prophecy (ibid., 27ff.). 345. Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism (ed. Silvia Berti; trans. Maura Masella-Gayley; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 29–35. 346.  Niskanen, The Human and the Divine in History, 7–8. See also David Flusser, “The Four Empires in the Fouth Sibyl and in the Book of Daniel,” IOS 2 (1972), 155–59; Willis, Dissonance and the Drama of Divine Sovereignty, 38–39. 347.  For this perspective, see A. Caquot and A. Lemaire, “Les textes araméens de Deir ʿAllah,” Syria 54 (1977), 189–208; and H. Ringgren, “Bileam och inskriften från Deir Alla,” Religion och Bibel 36 (1977), 85–89. 348.  Jo Ann Hackett, The Balaam Text from Deir ʿAllā (HSM 31; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1980); J. Hoftijzer and G. van der Kooij, eds., Aramaic Texts from Deir ʿAlla (Documenta et Monumenta Orientis Antiqui 19; Leiden: Brill, 1976); J. Hoftijzer and G. van der Kooij, eds., The Balaam Text from Deir ʿAllah Re-Evaluated: Proceedings of the International Symposium Held at Leiden, 21–24 August 1989 (Leiden: Brill, 1991). 349.  A goddesss whose name begins with a š- is asked by the gods to cover the heavens with a cloud forever; Hackett, “Deir ʿAllah, Tell: Texts,” in ABD, 2.129–30, esp. p. 129.

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oracle that ends with the coming of a savior. In this vision of chaotic conditions, the birth of a “shoot” (nqr ; cf. Hebrew nṣr) is predicted, as well as the restoration of happy times. Ringgren is tempted to conclude that this is prophecy ex eventu in support of a new ruler. 350 The historical or other context of the narrative is unknown, however. In conclusion, suggestions for parallels to and influences on the biblical book of Daniel from apocalyptic literature across the ancient Near East abound. Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Persian texts provide parallels and potential sources especially for the apocalyptic visions of Daniel and, to a lesser extent, for the court tales of Daniel. The natural interaction between a court setting and the production of prophetic and apocalyptic announcements regarding a future king or kingdoms is especially exploited in Egyptian and, to some degree, Persian texts. In Mesopotamia, although historical prophets are known to have reported to the king, the literary predictive texts in Akkadian do not preserve much of a court setting. Their main similarity to Daniel lies in their use of prophecy ex eventu. Only circumstances behind the Dynastic Prophecy, whose fourth-century scribe may have chosen Munnabtum as a pseudonym to reflect the situation of a foreign diviner in a royal court (in this case, a Babylonian diviner in an Assyrian court), may give some indication of a setting in the court. On the other hand, Egyptian proto-apocalypses especially tend to include a court setting in their literary frame, as well as predictions of chaos, followed by the restoration of order by a saviorking. In addition to the Tales from King Cheops’ Court in Papyrus Westcar, they include: the Prophecies of Neferti, probably the Admonitions of Ipuwer, the Oracle of the Lamb, the Oracle of the Potter, and Nectanebo’s Dream (the Demotic Chronicle does not have any preserved frame). However, any messianism in these texts is well within the Egyptian tradition, and these texts are only proto-apocalyptic (not apocalyptic) in that they envision a savior-king within Egyptian history but no ultimate or universal Heilszeit. This tradition of a court tale with a connection to prophecy may also be found in Aramaic in the Ḥor-bar-Pawenesh/Punesh texts from fifth-century Egypt. Having thus far surveyed some rather broad corpora to which the Book of Daniel has been compared, I now turn to considering specific sources and analogues not only to the biblical Daniel stories but the structure of Daniel as well.

5.2.  Sources and Analogues to Daniel Structure It is useful to recall Peter Beidler’s work on the Decameron: a “source” is a work that is known as such with certainty “because of external evidence or 350.  Ringgren, “Akkadian Apocalypses,” 386. For more on the Balaam inscription’s possible place within Aramaic literature, see Andre Lemaire, “Aramaic Literature and Hebrew Literature: Contacts and Influences in the First Millennium b.c.e.,” in Moshe Bar-Asher, ed., Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, August 4–12, 1985: Panel Sessions: Hebrew and Aramaic (Jerusalem: Magness, 1988), 9–24.

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because of the closeness of narrative or verbal parallels,” and “hard” and “soft” analogues are judged by their similarities to the story in question, in addition to how likely it is that the author would have been aware of or had access to them. 351 A “hard analogue” has “near-source status” if the work would have been available to the author of the story and has striking narrative resemblances, and a “soft analogue” denotes a work that could scarcely have been known because of remoteness of date or remoteness of parallels. The task now is thus somewhat similar to that undertaken in research on the sources and analogues of story-collections such as the Canterbury Tales or the Decameron. 352 In no way can an overview or examination claim to be exhaustive; many commentaries and studies on the book of Daniel in the course of hundreds of years have suggested far too many parallels to a variety of aspects of the narratives. This section will instead focus on proposals for the most conspicuous or noteworthy parallels and on anything new that has been suggested by the ground already covered in this study. In the MT’s final form, the book of Daniel is comprised of six stories of more or less equal length and four visions of differing length. As an early form of the (macro-genre) “apocalypse,” the book is quite composite. In this study, the goal has mostly been to analyze Daniel’s first half, chs. 1–6, as a pre-Maccabean story-collection that formed the basis for the visions that were added later, in the Maccabean period, around the time of Antiochus’ persecution (167–164 b.c.e.). The selection of stories in the Dan 1–6 collection was based around a common theme and a common genre. All are stories that take place in foreign Eastern courts and are focused on Judean exiles, especially one who, at least by the time of the collection of chs. 1–6, has the Hebrew name “Daniel” and the Babylonian name “Belteshazzar.” A chronological order based on a series of kings and empires has been imposed to provide a basic framework, starting with Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, followed by Belshazzar of the same empire (although historically he never ruled independently as king), then Darius the Mede (a fictional character or a confusion of several Persian leaders), and ending with a statement in 6:21 that Daniel’s activities carried into the first year of Cyrus the Persian. The collection is open-ended, in that many more stories could have been placed into this framework. Helen Cooper’s definition of story-collection maintains that, if categorized by structure, there are three kinds. The simplest may have no enclosing material but does have some structure imposed by the selection of stories and sometimes an ordering principle, such as chronology. In the case of Daniel, the possibly earliest collection of Daniel stories, MT Dan 4–6, is framed by doxologies as prologue 351.  Peter G. Beidler, “Just Say Yes, Chaucer Knew the Decameron: Or, Bringing the Shipman’s Tale Out of Limbo,” 41–42. 352.  For example, Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, eds., Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (2 vols.; Chaucer Studies 28; Cambridge: Brewer, 2002).

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and epilogue, as many have noted. At the beginning of ch. 4 (marked as the end of ch. 3 in MT: 3:31–33), Nebuchadnezzar addresses the peoples of the world, extolling the Most High God, and then telling his story until 4:18, in the first person, after which the story shifts to the third person until 4:33, when it returns to Nebuchadnezzar in the first person again. Ch. 5 has no doxology and remains in the third person, while the story of Daniel in the lions’ pit in ch. 6 is in the third person as well, until its conclusion (6:26–28), where King Darius speaks in the first person, proclaiming an announcement to all the peoples of the world. 353 As noted in chapter four above, the doxologies at beginning and end function similarly to the moralizations of medieval story-collections. In addition, if chs. 4–6 formed an early collection, they are a well-balanced set in that each is a story connected to a different king. In the case of the pre-Maccabean collection of Dan 1–6, the prologue (1:1– 7) and epilogue (6:29, if this epilogue was part of the original Dan 1–6) are by an omniscient narrator who is not a character in the work. This is unlike, for instance, the prologue of the Legend of Good Women or the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, in which the narrator is a character who describes the occasion for the stories to follow and relates them. In the case of Daniel, there is no overt narrator until Dan 1–6 is connected to the apocalyptic visions of Dan 7–12, and the story-collection genre has been incorporated into the apocalyptic. Daniel in the first person relates his visions and encounters with angels and indirectly addresses the reader, reporting that the angel tells Daniel “to keep the words secret and the book sealed until the time of the end” (Dan 12:4a). From this perspective, Dan 1–6 may be a simple collection, but when joined with the rest of the book, it is no longer simple at all; the story-collection is a sub-genre of the macro-genre “apocalypse.” Furthermore, one notes that the author-compiler who added the visions took advantage of the collective and episodic nature of the story-collection by attaching the visions in like format. The final book remains episodic throughout, with 10 discrete units (6 stories and 4 visions). The closest analogue to the loose overall structure of the Book of Daniel is the Tales from King Cheops’ Court in Papyrus Westcar. The most conspicuous similarity is that Papyrus Westcar also uses a series of stories about great courtier figures of the past to prompt a prophecy—in particular, a prophecy ex eventu. The setting of the frame story is the Fourth Dynasty of the Egyptian Old Kingdom (ca. 2575–2467 b.c.e.), and the prophecy that is prompted by the telling of stories is an ex eventu prediction about the coming Fifth Dynasty, while Papyrus Westcar itself actually dates to the Hyksos period in the mid-second millennium b.c.e. The stories provide a frame for the prophecy, just as in Daniel the stories provide a frame for the prophetic and apocalyptic visions. 353.  MT 6:29 returns briefly to the third-person narrator, who remarks on the length of Daniel’s career, which continues until the reign of Cyrus the Persian; this was mostly likely not part of the MT Dan 4–6 in its earliest version but was added by the author-compiler of Dan 1–6.

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The unwieldiness of this structure is conspicuous in both Daniel and Papyrus Westcar. In Papyrus Westcar, the prophecy of the three kings who will found the Fifth Dynasty is told by the final magician produced by the story-telling contest, Djedi, but the “story of their actual birth is presented as a sort of annex.” 354 King Kufu asks this magician a question, and the answer can only be found in a secret chest in a secret chamber in Heliopolis; Djedi tells the king this and predicts the birth of the three kings, the eldest of which can open the chest. Kufu is sad, because this entails an end to his own family line; Kufu responds that these events will only occur after the reign of his son and grandson, after which Kufu commissions offerings and gifts for Djedi. Then a third-person narrative initiates the story of the three kings’ birth, before the papyrus breaks off. In comparison, the third-person stories about Daniel are a build-up to the moment when Daniel himself speaks, describing his frightening visions, but up until that point there is no hint that Daniel himself was a dreamer, and no angels have been required for any of the interpretations of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams. Just as in Papyrus Westcar, the stories have ceased for something new (the prophecy of the last magician, and then a new story describing the fulfillment of that prophecy), so too in Daniel. The hinge between the two ends of each composition is the prophet. Papyrus Westcar’s outlook is not eschatological, however, in that the coming events remain within the realm of human history, and there is no transcendant future as in the case of Daniel’s visions. A further difference between the two is that the Tales from King Cheops’ Court in Papyrus Westcar has a frame narrative that includes the story-tellers as characters (although the narrator of the frame narrative is omniscient), while Daniel’s stories have only an omniscient narrator and no real story-tellers. With the exclusion of parts of Dan 4 where Nebuchadnezzar is a character-narrator (or a few verses at the end of Dan 6, where Darius speaks), only the visions of Daniel have a story-teller—namely, Daniel himself. The Tales from King Cheops’ Court thus is a soft, not a hard, analogue to Daniel, in that it was almost certainly not accessible to the author-compiler. Papyrus Westcar was written at least twelve centuries earlier, there are no known copies of it in later periods, and there is otherwise no evidence for the author-compiler’s utilization of it as a model. One must ask, then, if any of the other ancient story-collections could have been available as a model to the author-compiler of Daniel. The Aetia or Causes was written by Callimachus in the third century b.c.e. in Egypt. Many other Greek works were known in Egypt as well, based on the existence of papyri with abbreviated forms and on catalogues of Greek literature from the first to the fifth century c.e. 355 The Life of Aesop provides a frame for the Fables, just as Daniel’s stories are a frame for the visions, and it seems to have as its forerunner the Story 354.  Simpson, “King Cheops and the Magicians,” in LAE, 13. 355.  Monique van Rossum-Steenbeek, Greek Readers’ Digests? Studies on a Selection of Subliterary Papyri (Mnemosyne, bibliotheca classica Batava 175; Leiden: Brill, 1998).

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of Aḥiqar, which includes mostly proverbs but a few fables too. The manuscripts of the Stories of Petese date from the fourth century b.c.e. (the Saqqāra manuscript) through the first century b.c.e. (the Tebtunis manuscripts), but Ryholt suggests that the actual collection of the stories and their framing be dated more precisely to the Hellenistic period, since the Saqqāra manuscript only preserves an episode of the frame story, not the tales. Like Daniel, the frame story is narrated by an omniscient narrator, but the story-tellers (the baboons that Petese charged with writing down the stories of women’s virtues and vices) are characters in that frame. Most of these collections seem more likely to be soft analogues to Daniel, however. A direct model or source for the structure of Daniel may not be required. We have already seen that collecting can be a sui-generis event, and the ancient Near East, as everywhere else, had the inclination to bring together the wise words (fables, proverbs, etc.) of its sages under an umbrella or a frame (cf. the Story and Proverbs of Aḥiqar, the Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy, etc.). Nonetheless, with respect to its third-person narration (instead of first-person) on the first level, Daniel is actually closer to Near Eastern story-collections than to the medieval European collections. Note, too, the Tales of the Persian Court (4Q550), which is in Aramaic, like Daniel, and also uses the third person. If it were not so fragmentary, there might be more to say about its composite structure as a possible model or analogue to Daniel. Story-collections also borrow from one another and incorporate stories and other material from cycles or a larger pool. This is true of the ancient storycollections as well. Ancient fables in particular may be traced through several literatures across the Mediterranean, especially in story-collections, although scholars may disagree about the direction of influence. 356 For example, the Greek fable by Archilochus about the eagle and the fox (ca. 650 b.c.e.), in which an eagle cheats on an agreement with a fox not to harm the fox’s young, can be found as early as the “The Eagle and the Serpent” in the Akkadian epic of Etana (where, instead of a fox, there is a serpent whose young are eaten by the eagle), the oldest copy of which dates to the Old Babylonian period (early second millennium b.c.e.). 357 The same motif is found again in the Fables of Aesop, 358 two stories in 356.  About the relationship between fables found in both Greek and Egyptian literature, Adrados writes: “It is clear, then, that Greek fables, either in the form that we know them there, or in an archaic form, or in another form unknown to us (the fable of the swallow), were introduced into the Egyptian literary world. There they coexisted with Egyptian fables, some of which had undoubtedly already been introduced into Greece in ancient times. Of course, the intimate relationship between Greeks and Egyptians in the Hellenistic Age makes it possible that further Egyptian fables were introduced into the Greek collections then too” (History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.713). 357.  See R. J. Williams, “The Literary History of a Mesopotamian Fable,” Phoenix 10 (1956), 70–77; Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.291ff.; Karl Hecker, “Etana’s Himmelsflug,” TUAT Ergänzerung, 34–51. 358.  B. E. Perry, Aesopica, 1.321, no. 1.

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the Indian Pañcatantra, 359 and in Syriac collections; a variant of the story in one of the latter was retranslated into Greek and became part of Syntipas—that is, the Greek version of the Seven Sages. On the other hand, it is unclear whether the appearance of the fable in the Egyptian Myth of the Sun’s Eye—with different animals: a vulture and a cat—is derived from the Greek fable or whether it was through Egypt that that fable arrived in Greece. 360 The famous Aesopic fable of the grateful mouse who frees a lion (Λέων καί μῦς ἀντευεργέτης, no. 150 in the Aesopica), 361 is found in an Egyptian version, “The Lion in Search of Man” (the Myth of the Sun’s Eye xviii,8–xix,10), and in the Pañcatantra, where the role of the lion is taken by an elephant. 362 The fable of “The Sea and the Swallow” (the swallow who tries to dry up the sea because it had not protected her young) is found on a Demotic jar-text, ostensibly as a letter from an Arab prince to a pharaoh, as an illustration of how fruitless it would be for the pharaoh to try to conquer Arabia (Arabia is like the sea in this analogy). 363 It also appears in the Pañcatantra, 364 in a haggadic text from the third century c.e., and perhaps can be traced in Plutarch’s “Septem sapientium convivium” (“Banquet of the Seven Sages”), 365 where it is the pharaoh Amasis—the historical Egyptian king of common origins with a bit of a reputation for imbibing—who tries to drink up the 359.  One concerns a cobra who keeps eating the young of a pair of crows, and a friendly jackal tells the crows how to get the cobra killed. The other concerns a snake who steals the young of a pair of herons, and it is a crab who tells the herons how to get the snake killed. See Edgerton, The Pañchatantra Reconstructed, 1.64–66, 72–74, and 2.323–24. 360.  Adrados says the Greek was first (History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.34ff. and 62ff.), but Brunner-Traut thinks that the Egyptian was, on the basis that both the vulture and the cat are mother-deities in Egypt (Emma Brunner-Traut, Altägyptische Tiergeschichte und Fabel, 52–53). 361.  B. E. Perry, Aesopica, 379, no. 150. 362. Again, Adrados believes that the Egyptian version (History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.712) is derived from the Greek, but Brunner-Traut says the opposite (Altägyptische Tier­ geschichte und Fabel, 54). Adrados’ idea that there is ultimately a Mesopotamian source for the mouse-and-lion story seems to be based on iconographical depictions of lions as the king of the animals in Mesopotamia, with the assumption that no other region had indigenous lions. But it is not based on any Mesopotamian literary or iconographical depiction of a lion being freed by a mouse. 363.  Robert K. Ritner, “The Fable of the Swallow and the Sea,” in LAE, 494–96. 364.  Book 1, story 8, “The Sandpiper and the Ocean,” following Edgerton’s reconstruction (F. Edgerton, The Panchatantra Reconstructed, 1.145). In this version, the sandpiper advises his wife to lay her eggs on the seashore; she warns him with proverbs and stories that the ocean will wash them away, but he convinces her. The ocean overhears the conversation and abducts the eggs. The sandpiper goes to the celestial king of birds, Gáruda, who becomes enraged. The god Naráyana comes to his aid and chastizes the ocean, who then gives back the eggs. 365.  In ch. 7, a letter from Amasis arrives for Bias, one of the seven sages of the banquet, asking his help with a conundrum posed him by the king of the Ethiopians. The Ethiopian has challenged him to drink up the ocean in return for some Ethiopian villages and cities; if he does not, then Amasis is to give him some towns around Elephantine. Bias suggests that he tell the Ethiopians to stop the rivers immediately, because the wager concerns the present not the future level of the ocean. See Plutarch, Plutarch’s Moralia II (trans. Frank Cole Babbitt; The Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928).

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sea. 366 In the Nights, the main characters are a crow and a serpent. 367 But even apart from the fables, there is evidence of constant borrowing. The tale about a courtier who is betrayed and usurped by a nephew and the proverbs connected with the tale are found in an Assyrian setting in the originally Aramaic Aḥiqar from Egypt, which was then incorporated into the Greek Life of Aesop. The use of older stories can be seen in the Stories of Petese as well: the Pheros story is also found in Herodotus, and the motif of the doomed prince is known from elsewhere in Egypt, too. The Myth of the Sun’s Eye uses fables that are found elsewhere and that may or may not have existed previous to the collection. Daniel also utilized older stories or was influenced by them, in addition to other kinds of material. We will discuss the question of borrowing and influence below. Just as there was a Daniel cycle of material (as mentioned above: the Qumran parabiblical tales; perhaps Josephus and other Second Temple works), Anton Scholz proposed that there was a “Habakkuk collection” that included Bel and the Serpent, Susanna, other stories about the two elders, Esther, the Midrashim of Daniel, Judith, Tobit, Habakkuk, and perhaps other texts. 368

5.3.  Sources and Analogues to Specific Daniel Stories 5.3.1.  Arrival at Court: Daniel 1 Dan 1 serves not only as an introduction to Dan 1–6 but also to the entire book (Dan 1:21 takes Daniel’s career into the reign of Cyrus, the monarch of the final vision in Dan 10–12). 369 It was probably written by the editor of Dan 2–6, with some additional redaction when that collection was attached to the visions. Vv. 8–16, however, seem to be a self-contained story about Daniel and his friends surpassing their compatriots who eat the meat of the king instead of remaining dietarily strict, and thus could have been an earlier, independent story that was not composed merely as part of the introduction to the collection or book. 370 366.  The Greek fable H. 25, “The Halycon” has this theme as well (Adrados, The History of the Graeco-Latin Fable, 1.699). The Demotic jar-text is Berlin 12345; see W. Spiegelberg, Demotische Texte auf Krügen, 16–17, 50–51, pls. I–IV; and for a revised reading, Collombert, “Le conte de l’hirondelle et de la mer,” 59–76. For an English translation, see Ritner, “The Fable of the Swallow and the Sea,” in LAE, 494–96. 367.  No. 240 in the Calcutta II edition (see Marzolph and van Leeuwen, The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 1.162). In Egypt, the sea is depicted as a snake (Brunner-Traut, Altägyptische Tiergeschichte und Fabel, 53). 368.  Scholz, Commentar über das Buch “Esther” mit seinen Zusätzen und über “Susanna” (Würzburg: Leo Woerl, 1892), 136. 369.  Note, however, that this is most true for the MT and OG, whose chapter arrangements begin with ch. 1. Th Daniel, however, begins with the story of Susanna and so ch. 1, which follows that story, must be seen as a kind of flashback detailing exactly how Daniel got to Babylon in the first place. 370.  Collins, Daniel, 129–30.

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This narrative is not really a court contest like chs. 2, 4, and 5, but it shares with them the motif of the successful courtier who outperforms the other sages. 371 The theme of youths without blemish and the education of scribes has been discussed by Karel van der Toorn, who has looked at the Mesopotamian analogues to Daniel as a scholar at court, especially cuneiform correspondence that reports Neo-Assyrian court sages competing before the king. 372 He also demonstrates that the idea of a professional class of court scholars is clearly present in the Mesopotamian tradition; some of these scholars are called chiefs of exorcists, or diviners, etc. One specific chief is clad in a purple garment. 373 Shalom M. Paul has examined the evidence from Syria, specifically the Mari letters of Šibtu, the wife of king Zimrilim, which depict the induction of women into court service. 374 In the case of ARM X, 126, the women in question are weavers (probably chosen from among the war captives taken as booty; see ARM X, 125) who are being selected for service as musicians. 375 Paul isolates eight features in letter 126 concerning the selection and induction into court service that share points in common with the selection and induction of Daniel and his three friends in the Book of Daniel: 376 1.  In both texts, the candidates are selected from war captives taken as booty to the capital city (Mari or Babylon). 2.  The candidates in each already had their own specific skills. 3.  In each text, the superiority of candidates is also physical: the weavers are “beautiful women who, from the tip of their toe to the hair on their head, 371.  W. Lee Humphreys, who first coined the terms “court conflict” and “court contest,” relegates ch. 1 to being nothing more than an introduction and does not classify it under either label (Humphreys, “A Life-Style for Diaspora,” 219). 372.  Karel van der Toorn, “Scholars at the Oriental Court: The Figure of Daniel against its Mesopotamian Background,” in John J. Collins and Peter W. Flint, eds., The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception 1.37–54; and idem, “In the Lions’ Den: The Babylonian Background of a Biblical Motif,” CBQ 60 (1998), 626–40. One significant difference between Daniel and the historical Neo-Assyrian or Babylonian court sages that van der Toorn discusses is that they are not specialists in oneiromancy, as Daniel seems to be. 373.  See Simo Parpola, Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars (SAA 10; Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1993), no. 182:12 rev. 5. 374.  Shalom M. Paul, “The Mesopotamian Background of Daniel 1–6,” in The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, 1.56–68; and in Hebrew, Shalom M. Paul, “From Mari to Daniel: Instructions for the Acceptance of Servants into the Royal Court,” ErIsr 24 (Abraham Malamat Volume, ed. S. Aḥituv and B. A. Levine; Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 1993), 161–63. 375. G. Dossin, Archives royales de Mari: La correspondance féminine (= ARM X; Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1967), texts 125 and 126; and for texts and translations, see G. Dossin and A. Finet, Correspondance féminine (Paris: Geuthner, 1978), 184–87. For a recent translation, see Jean-Marie Durand, Les documents épistolaires du palais de Mari,vol. III (Littératures anciennes du Proche-Orient; Paris: Cerf, 2000), 349–51. 376.  Paul, “Mesopotamian Background of Daniel 1–6,” 62–63.

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have no blemish,” like the youths in Daniel, who are “without blemish and handsome.” 4.  The names of the officials supervising each group are given: in the Mari letter, it is first Wardilišum and then Mukannišum, while in Daniel it is Ashpenaz and then Hammalṣar. 5.  The candidates are selected to be instructed into a new profession: Šubarean music at Mari and “the writings and language of the Chaldeans” in Daniel. 6.  The status is officially changed once they have completed their training. 7.  Specific food portions to be given during training are mentioned: at Mari, overseers are told to “pay heed to their food allotment,” and in Daniel the youths are first apportioned a daily ration from the king’s food, and they later request pulse. 8.  The purpose of the food allocation is to keep the candidates healthy in appearance: at Mari, “so that their countenance does not change,” and in Daniel, the youths are healthier after ten days than their counterparts, who continued with the royal rations.

The youths are educated in the language and literature of the Chaldeans or Babylonians (probably Aramaic, not Akkadian). 377 After their trial period, the four Judeans prove to have wisdom and understanding ten times that of the magicians and enchanters of the king’s court (1:19), and Daniel, in addition to the divine gift of knowledge and skill in literature and wisdom that is provided to his three friends, is given insight into all visions and dreams (1:17). In the rest of Dan 2–6, additional skills are given to Daniel: the ability to read mysterious/secret writing (Dan 5) and solving riddles and untying knots (Dan 5:12, 16). The last two abilities are rather general and not specific, although the second has magical connotations. The Mesopotamian parallels to the education of scribes seem to be found in documentary texts. However, within the court-tale genre, training of scribes or youths is generally important, too. Egyptian court tales contain even more instructive parallels to training and examination. For instance, in the Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy, the children of two priests of Re, ʿOnchsheshonqy and his childhood friend Harsiese, are raised together and are sent to the same school, where they both outperform their colleagues. Another example of special schooling and out-performance of one’s peers is found in the case of Si-Osire, son of Setne Khamwas, in Setne II and in the Spiegelberg Jar-text B.1 (Jar Strassburg lines 1–9). After his miraculous birth to childless parents, Si-Osire is described as precocious: those seeing him at one year old thought he was two, those seeing him at two thought he was three. In school, he surpasses the scribe who had been 377.  The term “Chaldean” has two usages in the Book of Daniel. One is as an ethnic label and is synonymous with “Babylonian,” but the other usage is as a category of mantic. The Chaldeans were an Aramaic tribe in Babylonia, but the term “Chaldea/n” could be used to label Babylonia and Babylonians as a whole. On Chaldeans and Arameans, see E. Lipiński, The Arameans: Their Ancient History, Culture, Religion (OLA 100; Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 416–22.

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training him, and soon he is reciting writings with the scribes in the House of Life, to the wonderment of all who hear him. By the age of twelve, no scribe in Memphis could surpass him in reciting protective spells. The diet trial and concerns about food in Dan 1:8–16 are reflected elsewhere in the Bible, especially in the Apocrypha, in OG Esther 14:17 and Judith 12:1–4. The young men find vegetables fine to eat but not the meat of the king’s table; according to kašrût laws, the latter could be prepared in an “unclean” way. Daniel and his three friends also abstain from wine, something not forbidden in Jewish law. This recalls the Nazirite practice of abstaining from strong drink, as outlined in Num 6:1–21 and found in the examples of Samson and Samuel. 378 Josephus, too, gives Daniel a preference for pulse and dates and other non-animal food (Antiquities 10.190). 379 With regard to terminology, R. Glenn Wooden argues that the OG translation of MT terms for the diviners and the education of the youths in Dan 1 indicates a shift in focus from “learning to be a diviner, to studying to become a student of good literature.” 380 He reviews the use of σοφιστής (a designation for a tertiary-level teacher in the Hellenistic period) and the hapax legomenon φιλόλογος “scholar” in OG 1:20 (τῶν σοφιστῶν καὶ φιλολόγων) used to render MT’s ‫( כל־החרטמים האשפים‬cf. Th 1:20: τοὺς παοιδοὺς καὶ τοὺς μάγους) and the use of terms like γραμματικοί (“scholars,” specifically “teachers of literature and literary criticism”), γράμματα (“literature” in the Hellenistic period), and γραμματική τέχνη (“literary skill”), for ‫ידעי דעת‬, ‫ספר‬, and ‫ספר וחבמה‬, respectively. Wooden believes that this terminology was chosen to reflect “the Alexandrian milieu, especially the community of scholars at the Museion,” where the scholars called themselves γραμματικοί and φιλόλογοι. 381 The OG author from the late second century or early first century b.c.e., familiar with the famous library and Museion at Alexandria established by Ptolemy I, wished to communicate the excellence of Jewish youths in comparison with their Babylonian peers in the Daniel story by relating it to his view in his time that Jewish culture was superior to that of the Greeks. Alexandria was a milieu that made one particular Jew long to make it known that his texts, which were studied by Daniel before he was captured, and his God, produced better teachers and scholars than even the pinnacle of the 378.  Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 133. 379.  See David Satran, “Daniel: Seer, Philosopher, Holy Man,” 33–48. In the Byzantineera Vita of Daniel in the Lives of the Prophets, it is Nebuchadnezzar who eats “soaked pulse and herbs,” making Daniel his spiritual adviser and Nebuchadnezzar the picture of a holy penitent. 380. R. Glenn Wooden, “The Recontextualization of Old Greek Daniel 1,” in Craig A. Evans, Of Scribes and Sages: Early Jewish Interpretation and Transmission of Scripture (London: T. & T. Clark, 2004), 1.48. 381.  The usual term for a literary scholar in the Hellenistic period was κριτικός ; however, although the Alexandrian scholars continued the same kind of work on Greek literature, they preferred to term themselves γραμματικοί and φιλόλογοι.

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Wooden follows the suggestion of McCrystall that the OG translator was imposing the Hellenistic system of school onto the Babylonian context. 383 While Wooden’s suggestions are valuable, the Greek translator is not so precise elsewhere. The term φάρμακοι, “magicians” or “sorcerers,” is used as the Greek rendering of ‫ מכׁשפים‬in Dan 2:2, of ‫ חרטמין‬in 2:27, and of ‫ כׂשדין‬in 5:7 (ms 88 and Syh). The Greek author is not following the MT text very closely and is mostly concerned with getting across the concept of a broad variety of experts. At any rate, the Old Greek and MT stories of ch. 1 may well have different emphases.

5.3.2.  Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream of the Great Statue: Daniel 2 Dan 2 is a court contest in which Daniel, alone of all the wise men at court, is able to tell to king Nebuchadnezzar the contents and the interpretation of a dream that Nebuchadnezzar has had. The dream has either been forgotten by the king (as Josephus claims, Antiquities 10.10.3) or the king is testing his courtiers and the reliability of any proposed interpretation by first asking that they relate the dream itself. The “court contest” motif is found not only in Dan 2, 4, and 5 but in the biblical tales of Joseph and in 1 Esdras 3–4; in the second episode of the Qumran Tales of the Persian Court (4Q550), as well as the Egyptian stories of the Tales from King Cheops’ Court; Merire and Sisobek; Setne II; and various magic contests such as those in the stories of the Life of Imhotep (= Djoser and Imhotep), Naneferkasokar, and the story of Moses and Aaron competing with the Egyptian magicians (Exod 7–9). The influences on Dan 2 that have been proposed are varied; they include, for example, court tales with prophecies of future kingdoms or ages (especially those numbering four); the Joseph story in Gen 41; reports of statues in the ancient Near East; and accounts of royal dreams or other dream reports. Of these, the most common suggestion for an analogue, perhaps even a source, is the Joseph story. F. Bleek was probably the first to claim that Dan 2 was patterned after Gen 41, while Michael Segal is one of the more recent. 384 E. W. Heaton called it “a new version of the story of Joseph.” 385 Mastin thinks that it, as well as Dan 4 and 5, were directly modeled on Gen 41. 386 Philip R. Davies notes the following simi382.  Wooden, “Recontextualization,” 61. Wooden connects this translator specifically to the time of Ptolemy I (ca. 304–384 b.c.e.), when Jews were taken as captives to Alexandria (Josephus, War 2.18.7; Against Apion 2.4). 383.  McCrystall, “Studies in the Old Greek,” 98–100. 384.  Bleek, “Über Verfasser und Zweck des Buches Daniel; Revision der in neuerer Zeit darüber geführten Untersuchungen,” ThZ 3 (1822), 280; Michael Segal, “From Joseph to Daniel: The Literary Development of the Narrative in Daniel 2,” VT 59 (2009), 142–43. 385.  Heaton, The Book of Daniel, 122. 386.  Mastin, “Wisdom and Daniel,” 167.

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larities: (1) The king has a dream; (2) the dream disturbs the king; (3) the sages of the king are not able to interpret the dream; (4) a member of the court presents an unknown Hebrew captive; (5) the hero trusts that God will reveal the meaning of the dream; (6) the hero affirms that God has revealed the future to the king; and (7) the hero succeeds and is promoted. 387 Labonté adds two further points of comparison: (1) both Gen 41 and Dan 2 begin with a similar temporal notice (“at the end of two years” in the Joseph story, and “the second year of the reign” in Daniel); and, (2) not only are the heroes in each story promoted but there is a recognition of God’s presence with the hero. 388 Labonté dates the two stories to the same period—the end of the sixth century b.c.e. or the beginning of the fifth—but does not think that Dan 2 has to be a copy of Gen 41. Instead, both are influenced by the same contemporary literature and a similar historical situation. 389 On the other hand, Matthew Rindge has argued that Daniel in Dan 2 is a “new and improved Joseph,” motivated by a desire to create a character superior to Joseph who could be for Jews a model of “moderate resistance” to foreign power. 390 He finds 18 similarities in the plot structure between Dan 2 and the Joseph story (an expansion of Labonté’s 9) 391 but argues that the differences between the plots are illustrative of how Dan 2 “reconfigured” Joseph, especially to emphasize three ways in which Daniel is consistently superior: he is a better dream interpreter, he is more pious (and humble), and he is less assimilationist in terms of his relationship to the foreign power. Daniel is a better dream interpreter than Joseph because, among other reasons, he is able to tell the dream as well as the interpretation when it is required of him, and the story’s drama is heightened due to how much is at stake if he can not succeed (Daniel will be dismembered, while Joseph has nothing to lose). Daniel is more pious than Joseph in that he prays to God for the interpretation while Joseph (strangely) never prays in his story, 387.  Davies, “Daniel. Chapter Two,” JTS (1976), 392–401. 388.  G. G. Labonté, “Genèse 41 et Daniel 2: Question d’origine,” in van der Woude, ed., The Book of Daniel in the Light of New Findings, 271–84, esp. p. 277. See also Robert Gnuse, “The Jewish Dream Interpreter in a Foreign Court: The Recurring Use of a Theme in Jewish Literature,” JSP 7 (1990), 29–53. 389.  Labonté, “Genèse 41 et Daniel 2,” 284: “Après l’exil, les Juifs, qu’ils vivent en Égypte, à Babylone ou même en Palestine, sont suffisamment conscients de la présence païenne autour d’eux pour avoir intérêt à produire une littérature qui puisse être lue par Juifs et païens également.” 390.  Rindge, “Jewish Identity under Foreign Rule: Daniel 2 as a Reconfiguration of Genesis 41,” JBL 129 (2010), 85–104, esp. p. 90. 391.  But most of these are not really new; they merely represent a division of the plot into more incremental steps than those described by Davies or Labonté. For instance, Labonté’s similarity no. 4 (a member of the court presents an unknown Hebrew captive) is made into three separate steps by Rindge: a new character is produced, his ethnicity is announced, and he is then brought before the ruler. However, Rindge does note that the dream in each case is a symbolic dream.

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and he is arguably more humble than Joseph, who only slowly gains humility regarding his dreams and his abilities to interpret. Finally, Daniel is portrayed as an example of moderate resistance to foreign power, whereas Joseph is a model of assimilation. Pharaoh’s right to rule is never challenged in the Joseph story, while that of Nebuchadnezzar is, and Joseph helps further the goals of the Egyptian kingdom, whereas Daniel predicts the end of the Babylonian. Furthermore, on a personal level, one is more willing than the other to conform to political expectations. Joseph marries the daughter of an Egyptian priest, takes gifts such as pharaoh’s very own signet ring, and becomes second in the land after pharaoh; in contrast, Daniel will not eat non-Jewish food or marry, but he will take gifts, and although he does rise within the Babylonian empire, he only becomes the ruler of a single province. Rindge’s arguments that the author of Dan 2 was aware of Gen 41 are strong. He dispenses with some of the main objections posed by others 392 and explains why there are some significant differences between the two stories in spite of many similarities. For instance, his line of reasoning resolves the problem of why the request in Dan 2 is of an impossible nature (the king demands not only the interpretation, but the dream itself), in contrast to Gen 41, and why Nebuchadnezzar’s dream has a more universal significance than the dream of pharaoh. Both are symptoms of reworking the previous story to show the superiority of Daniel in order to highlight a proper way for Jews in exile. Righteous Jews are not to reject foreign rule outright (an option Rindge says 1 Maccabees, Esther, and Exodus advocate) or to be assimilationist (Joseph) or to withdraw from it (like the separatist Qumran sect) but to be models of “moderate resistance.” 393 On the other hand, perhaps Rindge has ignored some major differences or not given enough weight to others. For instance, it seems odd to argue that Daniel is more humble than Joseph and accepts fewer rewards, when Daniel is actually worshiped by the king and offered incense and a sacrifice in Dan 2:46! Furthermore, perhaps Rindge has not fully appreciated the court-contest elements in MT Dan 2: the agony of the wise men takes place over several verses as the king presses his demands and the tension builds; they are asked three times to reveal the dream and its interpretation; their punishment for failure is extremely severe; and, finally, they respond in a long speech with great emotion, declaring that no one can solve the conundrum, that no king has ever asked such a thing, and that only the gods can reveal it. It is into this situation that Daniel, the forgotten wise man, enters, to succeed where the others have given up. By contrast, Joseph is brought from prison to interpret pharaoh’s dream after the ḥarṭummîm have failed; but the tension of the story is provided by whether or not Joseph will be remembered by his ex-fellow prisoner, pharaoh’s reinstated cup-bearer. 392.  See, for instance, Collins, Daniel, 173. 393.  Rindge, “Jewish Identity under Foreign Rule,” 99–104.

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Was the Joseph story “reconfigured” by the Daniel author to make Daniel a better model for Jewish emulation than Joseph? Rindge makes a good case for this, but big differences between the two stories may still permit us to describe the relationship as very loose. It could well be that the author of Daniel “knew and was influenced by the Joseph story, but both stories belong to a broad genre of Near Eastern court tales and an even broader genre of folktales,” such as folktale type 922. 394 In this folktale type, a person of high social status demands that a person of lower status answer difficult questions within a certain period of time. The person of lower status or his/her representative produces the solution and is rewarded. 395 Other aspects of Dan 2 find broad parallels to other court tales too. For instance, the arrival of a previously unknown or forgotten hero who enters the situation to save the day is found not only in Dan 2 and the Joseph story but in several other courtier narratives. In Aḥiqar, Aḥiqar is presumed dead and his reappearance alive, to aid the Assyrian king in answering the Egyptian king’s riddles, is a surprise. In Merire and Sisobek, Merire is a young, skilled magician, hidden from king Sisobek by his peers, until they are forced to produce him to solve the king’s mortal illness, after they have failed. In Setne II, the young boy Si-Osire is really an ancient magician (Ḥor-son-of-Paneshy) in disguise who had saved the kingdom hundreds of years earlier and who is brought before the contemporary king (Ramses II) to read a bound scroll without opening it. He reveals his true identity at the end of the tale. The motif of a king’s disturbance at night is also common to the court-tale genre. In Merire and Sisobek, Sisobek calls for his courtiers in the middle of the night when he falls ill after he has eaten his nightly repast. In the Esther story, Ahasuerus calls for someone to read to him when he has insomnia (6:1). In 4Q550, Tales of the Persian Court, the king is bored during the day, not insomniac at night. In 1 Esdras 3–4, the reason behind the contest of the three bodyguards is that the king is unable to sleep, and the purpose of the contest to name the strongest thing is to while away the time. The pharaoh in the Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy is also awakened in the middle of the night in alarm, crying out to be saved from his distress (2/21ff.). On the other hand, this is not the case for pharaoh in the Joseph story of Genesis: he waits until the morning after his dream to call for interpreters. Dream reports from the ancient Near East are also informative for understanding Dan 2. The dreams of the Joseph story in Gen 40–41 have the same procedure for interpretation as those in Dan 2: the dream is recounted, and then individual items are identified and interpreted formally (although in Dan 2, the second through fourth metals are not explicitly decoded). This procedure is also 394.  Collins, Daniel, 173. See also Uther, The Types of International Folktales, 1.552–55. 395.  The story of Aḥiqar is a sub-type (922A) of folktale type 922 (Uther, The Types of International Folktales, 1.554).

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followed in Egyptian sources such as The Book of the Dead and the Demotic Chronicle, as well as in Mesopotamian sources, such as the dreams of Gudea and Gilgamesh. 396 The Oracle of Hystaspes provides an interesting parallel to Dan 2 as well. It contains a report of a dream experienced by Vištāspa/Hystaspes, a (likely historical) king and patron of Zoroaster, which is interpreted by a “prophesying boy” (Lactantius’ Divinae institutiones 7.15). 397 The oracle divides history into seven periods and predicts the fall of Rome. Professional oneirocritics were often consulted in the ancient Near East and occasionally in court tales as well. The Hebrew-Aramaic term ḥarṭummîm/n, “magicians,” which occurs in biblical court tales set in foreign courts (Egypt: Gen 41:8, 24; Exod 7:11, 22; 8:3, 14, 15; and 9:11; Mesopotamia: Dan 2:10, 27; 4:4, 6; and 5:11), is from the Egyptian term ḥry-tb/tp. As noted above and in chapter three (section 3.3.2.2 and Excursus), the motif of the interpretation of dreams for a king by professional interpreters is found in an Egyptian court tale in the as-yetunpublished Carlsberg 465. Another instance of counseling over a dream (but not an interpretation of its meaning, which seems to be understood) is in the Life of Imhotep, when Djoser tells his dream to and takes counsel from a ḥry-tb. The biblical tales of Joseph in Gen 40–41 and Daniel in Dan 2 and 4 were probably influenced by this Egyptian tradition, although it is possible that they incorporated it independently. 398 Collins has argued that the original oracle of Dan 2 prophesied the “future restoration of a Babylonian kingdom by a god (presumably Marduk).” 399 Thus, the story was not at first a Jewish story with Jewish concerns. It was very common for prophecies to be reused or updated; for instance, the Oracle of the Lamb and the Demotic Chronicle originally alluded to the Persians as the evil foreigners but were updated later by interpolating mentions of the Greeks. That there were insertions from a later editor in Dan 2 is accepted by many scholars, 400 although not everything that is eschatological in the chapter has to have been from a redactor. 401 The date of Dan 2, with its current four-kingdom outline, must be Hellenistic, since Greece has to be the fourth kingdom. The reference to 396.  Collins, Daniel, 165. 397. Franz Cumont, “La fin du monde selon les mages occidentaux,” 64–96; Hans Gerhard Kippenberg, “Die Geschichte der mittelpersischen apokalyptischen Traditionen,” 49–80. 398.  In my opinion, none of the stories from the three biblical books that use the term ḥarṭummîm (Gen 40–41; Exod 7–9; and Dan 2, 4, and 5) is directly dependent on the other, and they each incorporated the term as well as some functions of the Egyptian ḥry-tp somewhat independently. The miracle competition between Moses, Aaron, and the Egyptian ḥarṭummîm presents the magician function; Gen 40–41 includes dream interpretation and administrative abilities; and the Book of Daniel has all three of these functions. 399.  Collins, The Apocalyptic Vision of the Book of Daniel, 42. 400.  Vv. 13–23 seem conspicuously awkward: vv. 13–16 possibly are a doublet; and vv. 28 and 29, plus 41 and 42 contain redundancies. Hartman and Di Lella see vv. 13–23 as secondary (The Book of Daniel, 144). See also section 4.2.5 above. 401. Contra Kratz, Translatio Imperii, 48–70.

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dynastic intermarriage in 2:43 may date this after 252 b.c.e. (a marriage between Antiochus II and Berenice), although the possibility that it refers to a dynastic intermarriage between Cleopatra, a daughter of Antiochus III, and Ptolemy Epiphanes in 193–192 b.c.e. “cannot be ruled out.” 402 Perhaps the dream of four kingdoms was originally meant as (Babylonian?) political propaganda, as were Egyptian and Akkadian pseudo-prophecies—that is, as an apology in defense of a contemporary king or kingdom. Dan 2 is distinct from the other biblical Daniel narratives in that it is a court tale with an eschatological outlook. Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of four successively deteriorating kings or kingdoms ends with their destruction by the kingdom of God, which appears as a great stone cut from a mountain without human hands. 403 The disintegration of the statue into chaff recalls biblical imagery from Second Isaiah (cf. Isa 41:15–16; 46:1; 41:22–23; 43:9; 48:5–6 for polemics against idols). This is a shift away from the human history of kings and earthly powers into a divine eschatological realm, where God alone acts, destroying the past, reversing ill rule and restoring order. Parallels to this kind of apocalypticism can be found at Qumran: for example, the Aramaic Apocalypse or “Son of God” text, the Four Kingdoms text, and the Pseudo-Daniel texts. The latter has a court setting that involves Daniel, a series of kingdoms, 70 years, and holy ones, but, as noted above, it is more than likely dependent on the book of Daniel instead of vice versa. The Four Kingdoms text, also with a court setting (but no mention of Daniel), seems to have four trees personifying four kingdoms, because the first is, specifically, Babylon. 404 The Akkadian Dynastic Prophecy has a series of four kingdoms, but the number 4 is not emphasized. Hesiod’s Works and Days, Herodotus’ Histories, and Bahman Yasht all emphasize the four ages of the world, and a “three kingdom sequence” (Assyria–Media–Persia) was a tradition found in the writings of Herodotus (ca. 450–425 b.c.e.) and Ctesias (399–375 b.c.e.) and probably is reflected in Achaemenid perspectives of themselves as heirs to earlier empires. 405 An extension from three or four empires to five appears in Hellenistic and Roman times (Assyria–Media–Persia–Macedonia/Greece–Rome). 406 Of course, the kingdom sequence in Daniel begins with Babylon, not Assyria, since Nebuchadnezzar is specifically told that he is the head of gold.

402.  Collins, Daniel, 174. 403.  Seow believes that the different metals are not four kingdoms but the four kings of the Book of Daniel: Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Darius, and Cyrus (Daniel, 45–46). 404.  For trees associated with various metals, see 1Q20 The Genesis Apocryphon col. 13, also from Qumran. 405. David Flusser, “The Four Empires in the Fouth Sibyl and in the Book of Daniel,” IOS 2 (1972), 155–59; Willis, Dissonance and the Drama of Divine Sovereignty, 38–39. 406.  Collins, Daniel, 166–67. The three- or four-kingdom series may have developed in the east, while the five-kingdom series is from the west and is pro-Roman. See also Doron Mendels, “The Five Empires: A Note on a Propagandistic Topos,” AJP 102 (1981), 330–37.

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The Akkadian Uruk Prophecy and the Dynastic Prophecy are significant parallels, along with the Egyptian Oracle of the Lamb, in that they all move from ex eventu prophecy into predictive prophecy. In the Uruk Prophecy, the dynasty of the last king in the list (probably to be interpreted as Nebuchadnezzar II) “will stand forever,” in that his son will “rule the entire world” and the “kings of Uruk will exercise authority like the gods.” 407 The anti-Hellenistic Dynastic Prophecy also contains predictive prophecy about either some future Seleucid king (unknown at the time) or perhaps Darius. In Matthias de Jong’s interpretation, the author is writing after the defeat of Darius at Gaugamela but before Darius’ death (between 331 and 330 b.c.e.), expressing the hope that Darius would return from exile in Gutium and defeat Alexander. 408 The Oracle of the Lamb (2, 20) predicts a future savior-king who will restore order after periods of great chaos. Set in the reign of Bocchoris, it (like other Akkadian or Egyptian proto-apocalypses or pseudo-prophecies) was updated in later times, perhaps even more than once, to make the prophecy relevant to changing historical situations and crises. Dan 2 may have had an updating or two before it arrived at its present form, as noted above. 409 The statue in Dan 2 is 60 cubits high and 6 cubits wide in the MT; however, the Old Greek witness Papyrus 967 provides the statue with more stability by making the width 12 cubits. There are several reports of colossal statues from the ancient Mediterranean. Montgomery and Kuhl have noted that Herodotus (1.183) described “a sitting figure of Zeus, all of gold,” in the temple of Bel in Babylon and “a figure of a man, twelve cubits high, entirely of solid gold,” in the same temple of Babylon during the reign of Cyrus. Diodorus reported the presence of three statues on the temple of Bel, one of which was 40 feet high. 410 Also, “in the Seleucid period there was a huge statue in the temple of Apollo at Daphnae that was a copy of Phidias’s statue of Zeus at Olympia”; this temple was, according to Ammianus Marcellinus, a fourth-century Roman historian, built by Antiochus IV. 411 Both E. Nestle and Montgomery thought that this statue was significant for understanding Dan 3 as well. 412 However, this statue may not be more relevant 224.

407.  Recto lines 16–18; translation Kaufman, “Prediction, Prophecy, and Apocalypse,”

408. De Jong, Isaiah Among the Ancient Near Eastern Prophets, 433. 409.  Kratz, Translatio Imperii, 197–222; idem, “Visions of Daniel,” 98–99. The story may have originally had a pre-Hellenistic version with only three metals in the statue, perhaps representing three Babylonian kings. It was then updated in conjunction with the addition of ch. 7 at some time in the Hellenistic period by adding a fourth metal and the stone. All four metals were then taken to represent kingdoms of the world (Babylonia–Media–Persia–Greece), and the stone represented the eschatological kingdom of God. The ten toes in 2:41–43, illustrating the crumbling of Alexander’s empire, were even later additions. 410.  Montgomery, The Book of Daniel, 193–94; Kuhl, Die Drei Männer, 6–7. 411.  Collins, Daniel, 180. 412. E. Nestle, Marginalien und Materialien (Tübingen: Heckenhauer, 1893), 35; Montgomery, The Book of Daniel, 194.

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than the others that have been adduced, nor is it clear that the statue was really built by Antiochus. 413 A legend attributed to Eupolemus (a second-century b.c.e. Jewish historian) and collected by Eusebius in his Praeparatio evangelica 9.39.1–5 includes an account of a golden image of Baal. 414 Eupolemus says, “Then Jonacheim [Jehoiakim?]: at this time Jeremiah the prophet prophesied. He was sent by God, and found the Jews sacrificing to a golden image, whose name was Baal. And he made known to them the misfortune to come. Jonacheim then sought to burn him alive. . . .” 415 In addition, the fragmentary first column of the Verse Account (i 20–26) seems to report that Nabonidus placed an image of the moon-god that no one had seen before on a pedestal in a temple (in Ḫarrān). 416 With regard to the stone that demolishes the statue/kingdoms, Roy Gane finds a parallel in the Song of Ullikummi. 417 In this Hittite text, the god Kumarbi impregnates a huge rock that subsequently gives birth to Kumarbi’s son Ullikummi, who is made of basalt stone. Ullikummi the stone is planted on the right shoulder of the deity, who holds up the earth, Ubelluri. Ullikummi grows out of the sea and shakes the sky, before reaching up to heaven and the gates of the god Tessub’s city, Kummiya. In the myth, Ea tells the gods about Kumarbi’s son and advises them to separate Ullikummi from Ubelluri using the Primeval coppercutting tool (the text breaks off here). Although this is interesting, the closer motivation for the stone imagery is found in the Bible. Seow argues that the stone was originally intended to refer to the Jewish exilic community, as in Isa 51:1–2, where the exiles are told to remember “the stone from which they were hewn.” 418 413.  Collins, Daniel, 180. Bevan remarks that Malalas attributed the statue to Diocletian (E. R. Bevan, The House of Seleucus [London: Edward Arnold, 1902], 2.150), and John C. Rolfe suggests that Antiochus may only have expanded the building because other sources say that the actual builder was Seleucus Nicator (Ammianus Marcellinus [LCL; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961]). 414.  Montgomery, Daniel, 194–95. The legend was abstracted by Eusebius from Polyhistor’s On the Jews, a work that included stories from Eupolemus. 415.  My translation. See Eusebius of Caesarea, La préparation évangélique (trans. Édouard des Places; Paris: Les éditions du Cerf, 1991), 330–33; and also Carl R. Holladay, Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors, I: Historians (Chico, CA: Society of Biblical Literature, 1983), 110, 132–35, 152–54. Holladay notes that events from the three kings Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah are conflated under one character here, Jonacheim (p. 153). 416.  See Hanspeter Schaudig, Die Inschriften Nabonids von Babylon und Kyros’ des Grossen, 566, 573 (see p. 473, for reference to various statues in Ḫarrān). For the cultic nature of commanding the crowd to bow to the statue of gold, see Ernst Haag, Daniel (Die Neue Echter Bibel; Würzburg: Echter, 1993), 35–34. 417.  Roy E. Gane, “Hurrian Ullikummi and Daniel’s ‘Little Horn’,” in Chaim Cohen et al., eds., Birkat Shalom: Studies in the Bible, Ancient Near Eastern Literature, and Postbiblical Judaism Presented to Shalom M. Paul on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008), 1.485–98. 418.  Seow, “From Mountain to Mountain: The Reign of God in Daniel 2,” in Brent A. Strawn and Nancy R. Bowen, eds., A God So Near: Essays on Old Testament Theology (Winona Lake, IN,: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 359.

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One final motif to consider is the worship of Daniel at the end of the story. In Dan 2:46, King Nebuchadnezzar is said to worship Daniel after Daniel had revealed and interpreted Nebuchadnezzar’s alarming dream of kingdoms to come. The verse reads: Then King Nebuchadnezzar fell on his face (‫ )נפל על־אנפוהי‬and worshiped Daniel (‫)ולדניל סגד‬, and ordered that a meal offering (‫ )מנחה‬and incense (‫ )ניחחין‬be offered to him (‫)לנסכה לה‬.

These actions clearly reflect a religious veneration at odds with the normative Judaism portrayed not only in the book of Daniel but elsewhere in the Bible. Commentators have long been uneasy with the thought that Daniel would accept this worship. It seems particularly odd in view of the succeeding story—the fiery furnace—in Dan 3, in which the three friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, refuse to worship the statue Nebuchadnezzar had erected, proclaiming that they will worship their God alone. Why, then, does Daniel, a pious Jew, accept the offerings and religious homage of Nebuchadnezzar in ch. 2? Several solutions have been proposed. Jerome’s explanation was that the king was worshiping God, not Daniel, especially since v. 47 follows with Nebuchadnezzar’s pronouncement that, “Truly your God is God of gods and Lord of kings and revealer of mysteries.” In support of this, he cites Josephus’ account of Alexander the Great’s entry into Jerusalem in which Alexander prostrates himself before the Jewish high priest outside the city. Josephus’ explanation for this action is that Alexander was in reality not worshiping the high priest but the God who had given the priest his priesthood and whose name was inscribed on the mitre that the priest was wearing. 419 Other suggestions have been to view this part of the Daniel story as the author’s intentionally humorous fantasy “of having the tables turned on occasion.” 420 Collins compares this element to the claim of Artapanus that Moses had founded the Egyptian animal cults, in that Hellenistic Jewish writers had the propensity to “attribute to Israelite heroes whatever would redound to their glory in a pagan context, without regard for orthodoxy.” 421 Another option, suggested by Wills, is that the adulation of Daniel was, in the original Babylonian oracle, adulation for the Babylonian seer. 422 This idea removes 419.  Josephus, Antiquities, 11.331–33. 420.  N. W. Porteous, Daniel, 51. See also David M. Valeta, Lions and Ovens and Visions, 77–78. 421.  Collins, Daniel, 172; see also idem, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 40–43. 422.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 82. Wills follows Collins (“Vision,” 42, 44) in considering the original oracle to be Babylonian, predicting the restoration of the kingdom by a god. The addition of the stone destroying the statue symbolizing the four kingdoms is a result of Jewish redaction. See also Gustav Hölscher, “Die Entstehung des Buches Daniel,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 92 (1912), 117–18; and Otto Plöger, Theocracy and Eschatology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), 12. For a Babylonian background to the use of incense

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responsibility for accepting the adulation from the Jewish Daniel and places it in the realm of an alleged original core derived from a different culture in which consenting to the veneration was more acceptable. B. A. Mastin has suggested that Dan 2:46 can best be understood against a background of the Hellenistic benefactor cult, which involved the honoring of a city’s founder or benefactor through sacrifices and the construction of a magnificent tomb and altar. 423 The cult was most often begun after the hero’s death but could at times be performed for the living as well. Mastin quotes Charlesworth as speculating that “we can understand how cities and peoples who had passed through great and agonizing crises might well render to a benefactor and deliverer, even in his lifetime, the honors they would have certainly decreed him had he died in the moment of achievement.” 424 In this connection, Mastin cites occasions from Plutarch’s writings in which offerings were made to living humans. With regard to Daniel, he suggests that the author was taking a practice from his own time and casting it back into a Babylonian setting of the past; Mastin concludes, “in the world in which the author of Daniel lived a benefactor could be treated like this without impiety, and Nebuchadnezzar is simply expressing in an extravagant way his great gratitude.” 425 Daniel, however, is not portrayed as the benefactor of a city, and Mastin’s answer to the problem of Dan 2:46 does not adequately take into account the genre of the story. A (tentative) possible explanation that has the advantage of arising from within the “court tale” context might be found within Egyptian magician stories, where the practice is to offer food and incense to magicians who had performed marvels or foretold the future. In Papyrus Westcar, after each of the sons of King Khufu tells a story about the wonders performed by lector-priests of the past, Khufu orders that an offering be made to the royal predecessor during whose reign the marvel was performed, as well as that an offering be made to the magician who performed it. These offerings include “one loaf, one jug of beer, and one measure of incense.” The contemporary magician of the last-preserved story, Djedi, who performs miracles as well as predicts the future for Khufu, also gets a royal grant provisioning him with rations of bread and beer for the rest of his life and is taken to live in the house of Prince Hardedef. The grants are given in spite of the fact that his prediction foretells the end Khufu’s family line and the here, see Alan Millard, “Incense—The Ancient Room Freshener: The Exegesis of Daniel 2:46,” in James Aitken et al., eds., On Stone and Scroll: Essays in Honor of Graham Ivor Davies (BZAW 420; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011), 111–22. Millard notes the frequent use of incense burners as the normal furniture of daily life by Babylonian and Persian elite and thinks that Nebuchadnezzar is promoting Daniel not to divine but to quasi-royal status. 423.  B. A. Mastin, “Daniel 2:46 and the Hellenistic World,” ZAW 85 (1973), 80–93, esp. p. 80. 424. Martin Percival Charlesworth, “Some Observations on Ruler-Cult Especially in Rome,” HTR 28 (1935), 5–44, esp. p. 11. 425.  Mastin, “Daniel 2:46 and the Hellenistic World,” 85.

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beginning of a new dynasty—a very clear parallel to the Daniel stories in Dan 2, 4, and 5, in which Daniel’s interpretations and revelations always mean bad news for the king, but in Dan 2 he is rewarded in spite of his dire predictions. In the second Setne Khamwas story, written in Demotic Egyptian and dating to the Roman period, after Horus-son-of-the-Wolf (Ḥr-sꜢ-pꜢ-nšy) saves the Egyptian pharaoh from the evil Nubian sorcerer and his mother, the text says that Setne “never failed to make burnt offerings and libations to the spirit of Horusson-of-the-Wolf at all times.” Here, Horus-son-of-the-Wolf is a great magician of the past who has returned from the dead to take on the form of a living human in order to save the kingdom from the Nubians. In what is preserved of Merire and Sisobek in the Papryus Vandier—another story in which the king or kingdom is saved—Merire is promised a perpetual mortuary cult in return for his going to the Netherworld in place of King Sisobek. In the Prophecies of Neferti, an Egyptian prophetic text set in the context of the royal court, the lector-priest/magician Neferti is summoned before King Snefru to entertain him with fine speeches. When asked to speak of the future, he predicts the coming destruction of Egypt through civil war and then predicts the rise of a great king, Ameny (Amenemhet I), who will save the land. Afterward, Neferti states that he will be libated by future generations when his words come true: Joyful will he be who will see (these things), He who will serve the king. The wise man will pour water for me (at my tomb), When he sees my prophecies fulfilled. 426 Posthumous veneration is also found in the Oracle of the Lamb. In it, the lamb dies after he prophesies chaos and doom for Bocchoris, and because of his prophecies, is literally treated “as a god.” As in Papryus Westcar, the person (or animal) that makes a prophecy is rewarded, even if it is a prophecy of doom for the current king. So, too, in Dan 2, when Daniel predicts future doom for the kingdom of Babylon, King Nebuchadnezzar responds with adoration and offerings. In these examples, the line between the living and the dead magician who is worthy of honor is not entirely clear. Neferti predicts that it will be after his death that he will be libated, while the Lamb is definitely dead when it is venerated. However, both Djedi in the Westcar Papyrus and Si-Osire in Setne II, are considered “figure[s] of the past although still alive,” to use Dieleman’s words. 427 In Dan 2, the hero is, of course, alive when he is worshiped, but he is an ancient hero from the sixth century from the perspective of the author-compiler who wrote in the Maccabean period. 426.  Lines 68–69; Vincent A. Tobin, “The Prophecies of Neferty,” in LAE, 220. 427.  Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites, 225 n. 96.

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The possibility that there was an earlier Egyptian form of this story or that an Egyptian theme was transferred into a Babylonian story written by Jews must remain undecided. Some facts speak against borrowing in this direction: the offerings made to the dead or living magicians in the Egyptian texts are not made by the king, who in Egyptian literature is not usually portrayed as debasing himself before or to his subjects. In Egyptian texts, the offerings are made by officials of the mortuary cult on behalf of the king or, as in the case of Setne II, by the magician’s “father,” unlike the offering to Daniel, which is made by king Nebuchadnezzar himself. Note, too, that the sacrifice of a meal offering and incense is known elsewhere in the Bible, although it was possibly a foreign practice originally. Lev 2 describes an offering of frankincense accompanied by a meal offering called ʾazkārâ (see also Jer 41:5). The cereal and incense offering could be offered anywhere (not in the Temple alone) because they were bloodless sacrifices. 428 The practice can probably “be traced to [a] widespread older practice of burning both incense and cereal offerings on private altars,” according to Milgrom, and the requirement that only a small portion be burned and the remainder be given to the priests is “evidence of a polemic against a popular folk practice of burning cereal offerings to the gods of the heavens.” 429 (He suggests that it was an Assyrian, perhaps even Hittite, practice that made its way into Israel.) Nevertheless, the possibility that has arisen from this study has several advantages over Mastin’s proposal, namely, the genre and court setting of the story, not to mention the kind of deed being rewarded. Mastin draws his evidence from the Hellenistic world, and, although Daniel 2 may possibly date from that period, the story is about a court professional who has provided an interpretation of a royal dream that foretells the future (sometimes even forecasting doom for the king or kingdom); the story is not about a hero who has just saved a city. Perhaps an Egyptian background for Dan 2:46 is more plausible because it is in keeping with the general themes and motifs of the story. Like Djedi and Si-Osire, Daniel is a “figure of the past although still alive,” in terms of the story’s plot. Ultimately, however, the answer to why Daniel is worshiped by Nebuchadnezzar in 2:46 must be found in the realm of the story. Perhaps the image to retain is that the “head of gold”—that is, the Babylonian king in prostration before Daniel—is now on the ground, just as predicted in the dream. 430 The Jewish author, who did not have Daniel protest his transformation into a skilled 428. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 3; New York: Doubleday, 1991), 199. Note that the Jews of Elephantine asked permission to rebuild the temple and to offer “cereal offering, incense, and burnt offering” (TAD A 4.7 [= AP 30], 25–26; TAD A 4.8 [= AP 31], 24–25). They were, however, only allowed to offer the cereal offering and incense, not a burnt offering (TAD A 4.9 [=AP 32], 9–10), which they agree to do (TAD A 4.10[= AP 33], 10–11). 429.  Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, 201, 202. 430.  Seow, Daniel, 48–49. For Seow, the head of gold is not the Babylonian kingdom but Nebuchadnezzar himself (pp. 45–46).

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practitioner of Babylonian magic, would not have him protest at the foreign practice of honoring his abilities. On the other hand, this evidence from Egyptian literature does permit the possibility that a prior form of the story was not Jewish.

5.3.3.  The Three Friends in the Fiery Furnace: Daniel 3 The story of the three friends who are thrown into Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace in Dan 3 displays the court conflict motif—that is, what in folklore is known as the “disgrace and rehabilitation of a minister.” In this, it is like Dan 6, as well as the Joseph, Esther, and Aḥiqar stories and even the Egyptian stories of Merib (Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh in Saqqara Demotic 2, verso); the “Imprisoned Magician,” in which a magician (Ḥi-Ḥor or Ḥenenu) is imprisoned presumably for something he has done to pharaoh; the Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy; and Merire and Sisobek in Papyrus Vandier. As noted above in the case of Dan 2, there are several reports from the ancient Mediterranean of large statues in the writings of Herodotus, Diodorus, Ammianus Marcellinus, and others. 431 Of the most important to be mentioned in connection with the story of the fiery furnace, the first would be the account of a golden image worshiped by Jews in the days of Jeremiah. Montgomery pointed out in 1927 that the legend attributed to Eupolemus (mentioned above) and collected by Eusebius (Praeparatio evangelica 9.39.1–5) shares specific features with Dan 3. 432 Eupolemus relates that, in the time of a certain king Jonacheim (perhaps meaning Jehoiakim), Jeremiah found the Jews sacrificing to a golden image of Baal. After he made known to them “the misfortune to come,” the king sought to have him burned alive. 433 However, while the Eupolemus legend of a golden image is obviously set in the Babylonian period, there is no foreign king, the Jewish worshipers are not compelled to worship, the idol is of the Canaanite deity Baal, and it is a Judahite king rather than a Babylonian monarch who endeavors to burn Jeremiah alive. The Eupolemus story is perhaps best explained as being inspired by the same tradition that influenced the no doubt earlier story of Dan 3. 434 Another suggestion has been that here, as in ch. 4, traditions origi431.  The statue in Dan 3 is said to be erected in the plain or valley of Dura. Since dūru is a common enough part of Mesopotamian place names and means “city wall, fortification wall” (CAD D, “dūru,” 192), it has been suggested by Edward M. Cook that the “plain of the wall” is between the outer wall of Babylon, Nīmit-Enlil, and the city itself (“In the Plain of the Wall [Dan 3:1],” JBL 108 [1989], 115–16). For more on Nīmit-Enlil’s history, see A. R. George, Babylonian Topographical Texts (OLA 40; Leuven: Peeters, 1992), 344–51. 432.  Montgomery, Daniel, 194–95. 433.  Jonacheim is here a conflation of the names of all three of the last kings of Judah: Jehoiakim, Jehoiachin, and Zedekiah. 434.  Montgomery says “it looks as if [Eupolemus] were following some Jewish legend based on the same theme as that used by the Danielic narrator” (Daniel, 194). Perhaps the legend also arose under influence of the punishment of the false prophets Zedekiah and Ahab by Nebuchadnezzar recorded in Jer 29:22.

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nally about the Babylonian king Nabonidus, a follower of the moon-god, have been ascribed to Nebuchadnezzar. According to the tendentious Verse Account of Nabonidus, recorded by Cyrus after Babylon had fallen, Nabonidus built an image of a deity that he called by the name of Nanna, whose appearance was that of the “eclipsed moon” and which he placed on a pedestal in a temple (probably the Temple of Eḫulḫul at Ḫarrān). 435 Probably the strongest case for direct knowledge of Egyptian literary and perhaps iconographical motifs in the book of Daniel is to be found in the form of punishment meted out to courtiers: burning in a furnace. As Karel van der Toorn has noted, Otto Plöger’s judgment regarding the lively story in Dan 3 many years ago is still true: the “punishing by burning remains unusual.” 436 It is not that burning as a capital penalty in the ancient Near East was unknown; far from it. Burning as punishment for crime is found especially in historical inscriptions and legal documents throughout the Near East, as well as in metaphorical references and as an eschatological punishment in specifically Israelite and Egyptian literature. 437 However, the use of a furnace in these instances is much more rare. In fact, the evidence seems to be that, in spite of the Mesopotamian setting of Dan 3, the nearest parallels to the story are found in Egyptian literature, especially in Late Egyptian or Demotic tales with a court setting in which it is courtiers who displease a king who are condemned to death by burning in a furnace. 438 In the Bible, several parallels to Dan 3 have been suggested. Legal punishment of death by immolation is found several texts: in Gen 38:24, burning is the suggested punishment for Tamar’s presumed adultery; in Lev 20:14, burning is the punishment for a man who marries both a mother and daughter; and Lev 21:9 prescribes immolation for the daughter of a priest who prostitutes herself. In addition, “burning became the eschatological punishment par excellence in postexilic prophecy and apocalyptic literature”; Collins cites Isa 26:11; Dan 7:11; 435.  Smith, Babylonian Historical Texts, 51; W. von Soden, “Eine babylonische Volks­ überlieferung von Nabonid in den Danielerzählungen,” ZAW 53 (1935), 81–89, esp. pp. 85–86; McNamara, “Nabonidus,” 144–48; P.-R. Berger, “Der Kyros-Zylinder mit dem Zusatzfragment BIN II Nr. 32 und die akkadischen Personennamen im Danielbuch,” ZA 64 (1975), 193–234, esp. pp. 221–22. 436.  Karel van der Toorn, “Scholars at the Oriental Court: The Figure of Daniel against its Mesopotamian Background,” 53; idem, “In the Lions’ Den: The Babylonian Background of a Biblical Motif,” 639; Plöger, Das Buch Daniel, 63 (“diese Strafe durch Verbrennen bleibt ungewöhnlich”). 437. Note that some Mediterranean parallels have also been suggested. For instance, Klaus Koch cites a story by Polybius (12.25) about the tyrant of Sicily, Phalaris, who broiled offending subjects within a brazen bull (Koch, Daniel, 1. Teilband Dan 1–4, 270–71). Polybius also claims that the bull was later brought as booty to Carthage by the Carthaginians (see also Diodorus Siculus 13.90.5). 438.  For a fuller treatment of this argument, see Holm, “The Fiery Furnace in the Book of Daniel and the Ancient Near East,” 85–104.

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1 Enoch 18:9–16; and 1QS 4:13. 439 However, because none of these specifically refers to a fiery furnace, some have suggested that the Daniel reference is a parallel to the metaphorical use of burning in a furnace for purification or refining, as found in the biblical psalms and in biblical descriptions of Israel’s suffering in the exodus or exile. 440 The fiery furnace of Dan 3 has also been connected with Persian methods of execution. Herodotus claimed that Cyrus of Persia put Croesus of Lydia on a burning pyre but released him before he was actually burned alive (Herodotus 1.86). 441 Also thought to be a Persian method of execution is the practice of condemning prisoners to fall into towers of ash, as described in, for example, 2 Macc 13:4–8; Ctesias’s Persica (fifth century b.c.e.); 442 and Valerius Maximus, a first-century c.e. writer of historical anecdotes (9.2.ext.6). 443 Burning of the victim is not necessarily part of the punishment, however, because the ash may serve merely to suffocate. Thus, Persian practices are not a direct parallel to the furnace reported in Dan 3. Since the setting of Dan 3 is Mesopotamia, several have turned to Mesopotamia or Persia for a background for the fiery furnace. Montgomery in his Daniel commentary believed that the furnace “must have been similar to our common lime-kiln, with a perpendicular shaft from the top and an opening at the bottom for extracting the fused lime,” and he cited oriental and Persian examples. 444 Other scholars suggest, probably correctly, that burning of humans in ancient 439.  Collins, Daniel, 185. 440.  For example: Deut 4:20, 1 Kgs 8:51, and Jer 11:4, where Egypt is metaphorically described as an “iron blast furnace”; and Ps 21:10 and Isa 31:9, in which Yahweh’s wrath is a fire or furnace. 441. Curt Kuhl suggested that the Croesus story as well as an Iranian tale influenced Dan 3 (Kuhl, Die drei Männer im Feuer, 35–36). Elias Bickerman compared the situation in Dan 3 to the fact that fire was used in Persia to test the truth of a religion and its followers, as in Zoroaster’s walk through fire (Bickerman, Four Strange Books of the Bible, 95–110). 442.  For example, the death of Sekyndianos/Sogdianos in Persica 50 (Dominique Lenfant, Ctésias de Cnide: La Perse, l’Inde, autres fragments [Paris: Les belles lettres, 2004], 136). See also Collins (Daniel, 185), who cites Friedrich Wilhelm König, Die Persika des Ktesias vom Knidos (Graz: Weidner, 1972), 81–88. 443.  Valerius Maximus describes: “In fact, he (Ochus) filled a high-walled enclosure with ash; on a beam protruding over it, he placed those who had been drawn out with generous food and drink; and overcome by sleep, from this (beam) they fell into that treacherous pile” (saeptum enim altis parietibus locum cinere conpleuit superpositoque tigno prominente benigne cibo et potione exceptos in eo conlocabat, e quo somno sopiti in illam insidiosam congeriem decidebant) [My translation]. 444.  Montgomery, The Book of Daniel, 202. Hartman also understands this as something “in the nature of a limekiln; the three men were carried up and thrown into the fire at the top of the furnace (vss. 20–22); and there must have been an opening at the lower part of the furnace, where the king could see them in the fire (vss. 24–26)” (see Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 161). For examples of Mesopotamian furnaces, see A. Salonen’s “Die Öfen der alten Mesopotamier,” Baghdader Mitteilungen 3 (1964), 100–124 (for illustrations of a smelting furnace, see pp. 116–17).

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Mesopotamia was actually rather rare. 445 In fact, death by fire in Mesopotamia seems to be a penalty particularly suitable for crimes against a hierarchical superior (especially a king or a god), but whether it was regularly applied or not is impossible to know. 446 Moreover, the textual examples of death by burning from Mesopotamia do not usually include a furnace. There are perhaps only three instances of burning in a furnace in Mesopotamia. In a 2008 article, I mention two of them. 447 The first example is mentioned in an Old Babylonian letter in which a king (Rīm-Sîn) decreed that a murderer be thrown into a brick kiln (utūnu) because he had killed his victim by throwing him into an oven (tinūru) (BIN 7 10). 448 In 1950, John B. Alexander connected this example to Dan 3, 449 but he does not seem to have understood that the manner of death was chosen by the king as a talionic gesture to make the execution fit the crime and thus probably does not indicate a wider practice of immolation in a furnace. 450 A second example of throwing someone into a furnace in Mesopotamia is in the Middle Assyrian edicts concerning the regulation of the harem (Middle Assyrian Palace Decrees). Edict 19 from the time of Aššur-rēša-iši (ca. 1132–1115 b.c.e.) threatens witnesses to some incident (unpreserved) of rule-breaking in the harem with being thrown into an oven: lū sinnilta lū aʾ īla āmerāna ana libbi utūne ikarrurūšunu: “whether a woman or a man, they shall throw the eyewitness into the oven.” 451 There seem to be no other instances of this punishment in the Palace Decrees. 445.  Bauer, Das Buch Daniel, 97; Lacocque, Daniel in His Time, 69. 446.  For an extensive overview of burning humans in Mesopotamia, see Holm, “The Fiery Furnace in the Book of Daniel and the Ancient Near East,” 88–91. Note, for instance: the Code of Hammurabi nos. 25, 110, 157; immolation for treason at Mari (ARM 3 73:15); for false accusation at Mari (ARM 28 20); a Neo-Babylonian text with subaquatic fire for a false accuser (CT 46: 45, col. iv, lines 17–19; Paul-Alain Beaulieu’s transliteration and translation; “A Note on the River Ordeal in the Literary Text ‘Nebuchadnezzar King of Justice’,” N.A.B.U.: Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires 1992, no. 77); death by immolation as a penalty in Neo-Assyrian treaties (see Karen Radner, Die neuassyrischen Privatrechtsurkunden als Quelle für Mensch und Umwelt [SAAS 6; Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 1997], 211–19 [esp. pp. 211–12]), etc. 447. See Holm, “The Fiery Furnace in the Book of Daniel and the Ancient Near East,” 91. 448. T. Fish, “Letters of the First Babylonian Dynasty (BIN VII, nos. 10–29),” Manchester Cuneiform Studies 1 (1951), 12. 449.  Alexander, “New Light on the Fiery Furnace,” JBL 69 (1950), 375–76. See also G. R. Driver, “ana utūnim nadû,” AfO 18 (1957–58), 129. 450.  See Raymond Westbrook, “Introduction: The Character of Ancient Near Eastern Law,” in A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law, 1.74. 451.  See E. Weidner, “Hof- und Harems-Erlasse assyrischer Könige aus dem 2. Jahrtausend v. Chr.,” AfO 17 (1954–56), 257–93, esp. pp. 285–86; G. Cardascia, “Gesetze B: Assyrien,” RlA 3 (1971), 279–87; Martha Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (2nd ed.; SBLWAW; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), 205. See also Sophie Lafont, “Mesopotamia: Middle Assyrian Period,” in Westbrook, ed., A History of Ancient Near Eastern Law, 1.535. Lafont interprets this as burning at the stake.

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A third Mesopotamian example of burning in a furnace, much closer in time to the Book of Daniel and explored in great detail by Paul-Alain Beaulieu recently, is a Neo-Babylonian school text from the Sippar temple library, dating to the first half of the sixth century (from the time of Nebuchadnezzar II and Nabonidus), although it purports to be a letter from the Old Babylonian king Samsuiluna (1750–1712), son of Hammurabi, to a governor Enlil-nādin-šumi. 452 The governor is told to write on a stela a condemnation of various cult personnel: (Concerning) all the cult centers of the land of Akkad, all of those from east to west [which] I have given entirely into your control, I have heard (reports) that the temple officials, the collegium, the nešakku-priests, the pašīšu-priests and the dingirgubbû-priests of the cult centers of the land of Akkad, as many as there are, have taken to falsehood, committed an abomination, been stained with blood, spoken untruths. Inwardly they profane and desecrate their gods, they prattle and cavort about. Things that their gods did not command they establish for their gods. 453

The king then commands Enlil-nādin-šumi: “You now, destroy them, burn them, roast them, . . . to the cook’s oven [a-na ki-ri lúmuḫaldim] . . . make their smoke billow, bring about their fiery end with the fierce flame of the boxthorn!” 454 The word for oven is kīru, which is a lime-kiln, not an oven regularly used for baking or cooking. The text closes with the expectation that, once the priests have read the stela, they will be chastised and will speak to the king. This text is the closest Mesopotamian parallel to Dan 3. The king chastises officials with regard to cultic actions, and because of their sacrilegious behavior, commands that they be burned in an oven. Moreover, the letter is in the form of an encyclical, addressed from the king to the governor, with orders to put it on a stela. Something similar is found at the end of Dan 3, where the king publishes a decree that “any people, nation, or language” should not blaspheme the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego or they will be punished (3:29–30). In contrast to Dan 3, however, the king’s command to “destroy . . . burn . . . roast them” and take them “to the cook’s oven” in the school text (expressed in repetitious, over-the-top language) is a literary pretense on the part of the scribe, a jest mockingly deriding a king’s grand rhetoric. The implication is that this “letter” from the school room in the first half of the sixth century b.c.e., which purports to go back to an Old Babylonian context, really reflects the chastisement of administrators of cult centers in Babylonia by a king of a later time. The 452. Paul-Alain Beaulieu, “The Babylonian Background of the Motif of the Fiery Furnace in Daniel 3,” JBL 128 (2009), 273–90. 453.  Lines 1–12, Beaulieu’s translation, “The Babylonian Background of the Motif of the Fiery Furnace,” 284; see also Farouk N. H. al-Rawi and Andrew R. George, “Tablets from the Sippar Library III: Two Royal Counterfeits,” Iraq 56 (1994), 135–48, esp. pp. 135–38. 454.  Beaulieu’s translation; brackets mine.

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editors, Farouk al-Rawi and Andrew George, suggest this king is Nebuchadnezzar I (ca. 1125–1103 b.c.e.), but Beaulieu prefers a king from the writer’s own period, Nabonidus (556–539 b.c.e.), because its castigation of cult officials is very similar to the condemnation expressed by Nabonidus in the contemporaneous Ḫarrān Stela. In this way, Beaulieu further connects the text to Dan 3: interpretations of the deeds of the historical Nabonidus are in Daniel often applied to Nebuchadnezzar II. Moreover, in the Ḫarrān inscriptions, Nabonidus is told in a dream from the moon-god Sîn to build the Eḫulḫul (the temple of Sîn) in Ḫarrān, and, in the Verse Account, one of the religious reforms of Nabonidus is to make a new cult image of Sîn in the Eḫulḫul. This context certainly brings to mind the great statue and the refusal of the three administrators, friends of Daniel, to bow to it in Dan 3. There are, however, some differences between the letter and Daniel. The fictional letter is concerned with the offensive behavior of various priests in the cult centers of Akkad, whose functions have been assigned by the gods, whereas in the court tale of Dan 3, the friends of Daniel are administrators over the province of Babylon but are not said to be religious officials of any kind (nor have they spoken untruths, been stained with blood, desecrated or established anything, etc., as the priests in the letter are accused of doing). Moreover, the description of burning the disobedient officials in a “cook’s kiln” fits the spirit of an ad hoc jest, adding to the over-the-top punishments of the criminals accumulated by the mocking students in their pseudo-historical letter. Was Nabonidus (if indeed the letter really has him in mind instead of another king) actually known for throwing, or threatening to throw, people in the fire or, if not, was this a common caricature of his rage toward opponents? In either case, is the motif something that would be known to the author of Dan 3, presumably writing at a somewhat later date (the Persian or the Hellenistic period)? The two second-millennium texts and this Neo-Babylonian fictional letter are not enough evidence to suggest that execution by fire was a well-known customary punishment in any period of Mesopotamian history. We must, of course, leave open the possibility that the fictional letter is evidence of threats by Nabonidus to burn priests in an oven and that this influenced the author of Dan 3. However, Beaulieu himself observes that “the possibility of an Egyptian influence on the elaboration of Daniel 3 cannot be dismissed offhand. Egypt housed a substantial Jewish population during the Persian and Hellenistic-Roman periods, and some learned Jews could have introduced motifs from the Egyptian literary heritage into their own tradition”; but, he concludes “although the hypothesis of Egyptian influence in the elaboration of the motif cannot be discounted, the Babylonian setting of the tale induces us to seek preferably Mesopotamian antecedents.” 455 However, I suggest that the Babylonian setting of Daniel has 455.  Beaulieu, “The Babylonian Background of the Motif of the Fiery Furnace,” 284, 290. The only Egyptian court tale he mentions is ʿOnchsheshonqy (pp. 279–80).

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blinded scholars to non-Mesopotamian influences, especially Egyptian, even though it is quite evident that authors west of Mesopotamia, particularly Palestine and Egypt, very often set their compositions in Mesopotamia and utilized Mesopotamian motifs. 456 In Egyptian texts and iconography, references to and depictions of punishment by burning and, particularly, burning in a furnace are quite common. 457 Nonetheless, rarely do biblical scholars cite an Egyptian example for the furnace of Dan 3. 458 In contrast with Mesopotamia and Persia, in Egypt, burning was often done in a furnace; one of the most commonly used Egyptian words for this is ʿḫ, variously translated in English as “furnace,” “oven,” or “brazier.” 459 In J. Zandee’s work, Death as an Enemy, he states that “being burnt in an oven was also a form of capital punishment in the administration of justice,” and that the frequent “use of the article pꜢ before ʿḫ suggests . . . that ‘the furnace’ was a recognised form of punishment.” 460 As a punishment for enemies, the Middle Kingdom Tod inscription of Sesostris I (col. x+30) stipulates: “the enemy from ⸢the terraces(?) were placed on the brazier, it was (death by) fire because of what they did against him/it⸣.” 461 In the New Kingdom temple at Philae, an address to Osiris depicts the punishment of rebels after their defeat: “May you place the rebels, the king’s anath456.  Holm, “The Fiery Furnace in the Book of Daniel and the Ancient Near East,” 100– 104; and see below, section 5.4.2. 457.  See here especially: Anthony Leahy, “Death by Fire in Ancient Egypt,” JESHO 27 (1984), 199–206; Erik Hornung, Altägyptische Höllenvorstellungen (Berlin: Akademie, 1968), 21–29; J. Zandee, Death as an Enemy: According to Ancient Egyptian Conceptions (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 133–46; H. de Meulenaere, “La Légende de Phéros d’après Hérodote (II, 111),” Chronique d’Égypte 55 (1953), 248–60; Jean Yoyotte, “Héra d’Héliopolis et le sacrifice humain,” Annuaire de l’École Pratique 89 (1980), 31–102. 458.  Of the few who do, see: Curt Kuhl, Die drei Männer im Feuer, 34–39; Kuhl cites Diodorus’ mentions of this kind of death in Egypt (Diodorus 1.59, 1.77) and Plutarch’s references to human offerings at the tomb of Osiris (Isis and Osiris 73; also Diodorus 1.88). In addition, Ingo Kottsieper in his commentary on the Additions to Daniel cites a Middle Egyptian depiction of a pottery-making scene from Biblisch-Historisches Handwörterbuch (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1966; vol. 3, 2007); “Zusätze zu Daniel,” 227–28 n. 66. Dieter Bauer mentions Plutarch’s comment that followers of the evil god Seth-Typhon were burned in Egypt (see Bauer, Das Buch Daniel, 97). 459.  “Feuerbecken, als Gerät zum Brandopfer,” or in the Greek period “auch vom Opferfeuer, das die Böses verbrennt” (Adolf Erman and Hermann Grapow, Wörterbuch der Aegyp­ tischen Sprache [Berlin: Akademie, 1926–63], 1.223); and “ustensile sur lequel on faisait du feu, sorte de brasero ou de foyer mobile” (G. Jéquier, Matériaux pour servir à l’établissement d’un dictionnaire d’archéologie égyptienne [Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1922], 88–90). 460.  Zandee, Death as an Enemy, 143. 461.  Donald B. Redford’s translation in “The Tod Inscription of Senwosret I and Early 12th Dynasty Involvement in Nubia and the South,” JSSEA 17 (1987), 36–55, esp. p. 39, translation on pp. 42–43. See also C. Barbotin and J.-J. Clère, “L’inscription de Sésostris Ier à Tôd,” BIFAO 91 (1991), 1–32, esp. pp. 9, 22, and fig. 3.

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ema, on the brazier of Mut, who is under her brother, after you have overthrown the enemies of His Majesty.” 462 In the inscription of Prince Osorkon from the eighth century b.c.e, Osorkon tells of his suppression of a revolt at Thebes in which prisoners are bound and “carried like goats the night of the feast of the Evening Sacrifice in which braziers are kindled” and are then burned with fire because of their crime (A, 35–36). 463 Anthony Leahy, in his article “Death by Fire in Ancient Egypt,” says the crime is “ostensibly or theologically against Amun . . . the fact that the [criminal] was also High Priest of Amun doubtless facilitated representation of the resistance as opposition to the god.” 464 In Papyrus Rylands IX, the “Petition of Petiese,” a long Demotic text recounting the actions of priests of the temple of Teuzoi against Petiese, prophet of Amun at that temple, dated to the reign of Darius I, certain two-faced priests express the wish that those who killed Petiese’s two grandsons should be put into a furnace, when they also had persecuted the same Petiese (col. 13, 11). 465 What must this ʿḫ have looked like? The only place where it is described is in the Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy 4, 3–5, and there it seems to be of metal, erected on a mound of earth. Otherwise, portable braziers for cooking food are known from funerary architecture; the ʿḫ from Thutmosis II’s tomb looks like a basin with legs or a kind of tripod. 466 The determinatives for ʿḫ are also varied, but an Edfu scene has the king causing four bound prisoners to be burned in a “box.” 467 For this reason, the translation “furnace” or “oven” might be preferred over 462.  Leahy’s translation (“Death by Fire in Ancient Egypt,” 200). See Georges Bénédite, Le temple de Philae (Paris: Leroux, 1893), 116; translated by Vernus, Athribis: Textes de documents relatifs à la géographie, aux cultes, et à l’histoire d’une ville du delta égyptien à l’époque pharaonique (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1978), docs. 201–2, 240–43, pl. xli. “The fiery Mut is a relatively rare figure of retribution . . . but she is occasionally identified with the destructive Sekhmet, and as a symbol of kingship is an entirely appropriate protector of the royal position and avenger of assaults upon it” (Leahy, “Death by Fire in Ancient Egypt,” 201). 463.  It is only implied but not stated that the rebels are placed onto the braziers; see Ricardo A. Caminos, The Chronicle of Prince Osorkon (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1958), 48. However, note that while Caminos translated, “Everyone was burned with fire in the place of [his] crime,” Vittmann corrects this, citing Redford’s translation of a similar phrase in the Tod inscription: “m st” meaning “as payment for” rather than literally “in the place of ”; see Günter Vittmann, Der demotische Papyrus Rylands 9 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998), 2.618, citing Redford’s translation, “The Tod Inscription of Senwosret I,” 42–43. 464.  Leahy, “Death by Fire in Ancient Egypt,” 201. 465.  Francis Llewellyn Griffith, Catalogue of the Demotic Papyri in the John Rylands Library (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1909), text: 3.236, trans.: 3.91, fasc. and handcopy: vol. 1/2, pl. 30; Günter Vittmann, Der demotische Papyrus Rylands 9, vol. 1, text and translation: 158–59; vol. 2, commentary: 494–95. See also: M. Chauveau, “Violence et repression dans la ‘Chronique de Peteise’,” Égypte Pharaonique: Pouvoir, société 6/7 (1996), 233–46. 466. See Jéquier, Matériaux pour servir à l’établissement d’un dictionnaire d’archéologie égyptienne, 88–90. 467. E. Chassinat, Le temple d’Edfou (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1897–; revised by S. Cauville and D. Devanchelle, 1984–90), pl. 82.

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“brazier.” 468 Moreover, in spell 479 in the Coffin texts, according to Faulkner, “the determinative of ʿḫ looks like a chest but is probably intended for a rectangular brazier on feet.” 469 The working of this mechanism is never clear, but Leahy believes that the “victims must have been exposed directly to the flames.” 470 For other means of burning in addition to the ʿḫ, also note the large ovens and cauldrons of various names in which the damned in the netherworld are punished (see discussion below). What was an actual practice as well as a mythological concept was also symbolized by the ritual burning of wax figurines of the enemy. 471 The burning of figurines was “a cultic analog to executions on earth and in the underworld . . . permanent furnaces attached to temples for this purpose have been excavated at Tanis and possibly at Bubastis.” 472 This practice reinforces the great mythological and religious significance of the act of burning. The gods may enforce what human jurisdiction cannot; it is the divine world that is called upon to mete out justice via burning for crimes that cannot be punished on earth. 473 In addition, from a theological perspective, rebellion against the political order is rebellion against Maʿat and reflects the rebellion of Seth against Osiris; in late texts, the “Ba” of Seth is placed by the gods on “the great brazier of the rebellious” (ʿḫ ʿꜢ n sbı͗w). 474 Egyptian eschatological texts and scenes thus relate an understanding that the godless are “cooked” in the hereafter. Punishing prisoners or others by burning them to death had the purpose of completely annihilating them both in the present and in the hereafter, because their bodies were needed in the afterlife 468.  Papyrus Salt 825 also has a section headed tꜢ 4 ʿḫw that depicts two men tied backto-back in a container surmounted by four determinatives of the brazier with flame (Derchain, Le papyrus Salt 825 [B.M. 10051], rituel pour la conservation de la vie en Égypte [Brussels: Palais des académies, 1965], fasc. 1, 59). 469.  R. O. Faulkner, Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, Volume II Spells 355–787 (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1977), 124 n. 28. 470.  Leahy, “Death by Fire in Ancient Egypt,” 202. For a discussion and archaeological examples of kilns and furnaces from Egypt, see Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw, eds., Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); for pottery kilns: pp. 121–28, fig. 5.2; for faience or glass: p. 180, fig. 7.2 and p. 201, figs. 8.2–3. 471.  This is illustrated in a scene from the Gate of Montu at Karnak. Two tiny figures bound back-to-back are in a brazier on a pedestal, with the king on one side and the ithyphallic god Min on the other. It is likely that the victims in the small brazier are merely wax figurines symbolic of the king’s enemies mentioned in the accompanying inscription. Because the figures in the brazier were so tiny, the later Christians in the region misunderstood the scene as one demonstrating that the ancient inhabitants practiced child sacrifice. See Serge Sauneron, Villes et légendes d’Égypte (2nd ed.; Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1983), 163, fig. 15. 472.  Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 158. 473. Jan Assmann, “When Justice Fails: Jurisdiction and Imprecation in Ancient Egypt and the Near East,” JEA 78 (1992), 149–62. Compare this to the burning of images in Mesopotamian rituals such as Maqlû. 474.  Leahy, “Death by Fire in Ancient Egypt,” 201. Dieter Bauer had previously noted this in connection to Daniel (Das Buch Daniel, 97).

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for judgment. 475 Without a body, there was no judgment. In Hornung’s Altägyptische Höllenvorstellungen, among many depictions of the condemned in hell from the New Kingdom onward, there are several striking scenes of the damned in ovens or braziers. For instance, a piece of the fifth register of the Book of Gates from Seti I’s tomb (Nineteenth Dynasty, thirteenth-century b.c.e.) depicts large, rounded ovens or pits called ḥꜢdw in which the damned are being punished. 476 A section from the fourth hour of the Book of Caverns from the tomb of Rameses VI (Twentieth Dynasty, twelfth-century b.c.e.) depicts an enormous cauldron (wḥꜢt) in which the souls and flesh of the damned are cooking. 477 This cauldron is shaped like the examples of braziers from funerary architecture in that it seems to be composed of a basin balanced on legs. From the Roman period at Akhmim comes a more Dantesque depiction of a cauldron for roasting people in the netherworld: the pot has handles and contains a human figure who appears to leap around in it. 478 Furthermore, the Prophecy of the Lamb in its ex eventu predictions mentions a brazier along with heat, inflammation, and a fire of papyrus as an eschatological judgment against the Medes and Greeks (1,24–2,1). In Egyptian court and other tales, burning is often a punishment as well. 479 In the Pheros story in Herodotus book 2, after Pheros is told that his blindness can only be healed by the urine of a chaste woman, he has all the unchaste women—including his own wife—burned to death. 480 There are also several 133.

475. See Leahy, “Death by Fire in Ancient Egypt,” 201; an d Zandee, Death as an Enemy,

476.  Hornung, Altägyptische Höllenvorstellungen, 24, pl. V b; Erman and Grapow, Wörterbuch der Ägyptischen Sprache, Bd. 3, 36. 477.  Hornung, Altägyptische Höllenvorstellungen, 24, pl. II; Erman and Grapow, Wörterbuch der Ägyptischen Sprache, 1.347. For more examples of vessels in which the damned are cooked, see Hornung, Altägyptische Höllenvorstellungen, 25. 478.  See F. W. von Bissing, “Tombeaux d’époque romaine à Akhmîm,” Annales du service des antiquités de l’Egypte 50 (1950), 557, pl. I. I am grateful to Donald Redford for this reference. 479.  For example, the adulterous woman in Papyrus Westcar (col. 4, 9–10) from the Hyksos period is set on fire, as is the Nubian shaman in the Roman period Demotic Setne Khamwas II, where fire is cast down by the Egyptian magician Si-Osire. In Setne I, Setne wakes from his dream just when he has reached out to touch the mysterious woman Tabubu and finds himself without any clothes on, in a s.t ḫr Ꜣ.t, “a furnace” (literally “a place of heating”), with his phallus caught in a šḫyꜢ. Richard Jasnow has suggested that “the mysterious šḫyꜢ wherein poor Setne has caught his phallus (5/30) is in fact a term for the clay tapering cylindrical tips of the blow-pipes (“tuyère”) or bellows providing oxygen to the smelting fire” (Jasnow, “‘And Pharaoh laughed . . .’: Reflections on Humor in Setne 1 and Late Period Egyptian Literature,” Enchoria 27 [2001], 79–80). 480.  See H. de Meulenaere, “La Légende de Phéros d’après Hérodote (II, 111),” Chronique d’Égypte 55 (1953), 248–60. Presumably the name “Pheros” (φερῶς) is a Graecized form of Egyptian pr-ʿꜢ, “pharaoh,” and thus there is no way to imagine which, if any, historical king Herodotus intends to be the subject of this story. A slightly different version appears in Diodorus 1.59 (the only chaste woman is the wife of a gardener), and Pliny the Elder alludes to the story of a blind pharaoh saved by an oracle in Hist. Nat. 36.74. Note that urine was used in Egyptian remedies; see Wolfhart Westendorf, Handbuch der altägyptischen Medizin, I–II (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 377, 414, 431, 518, 528.

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references in antiquity to the legendary Egyptian king Busiris, who was said to offer strangers in a burnt sacrifice regularly. 481 But what is most conspicuous is the motif of the brazier (specifically the ʿḫ) in four Egyptian narratives set in the royal court, three in which it is courtiers who displease a king who are condemned to death: the Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy, Merire and Sisobek, and Djedseshep, Nanoufesakhme, and Ḥarmakhroou in Papyrus Demotic Saqqara 1; and a fourth story in which a reversal in the motif illustrates the exception that proves the rule: the Demotic version of the Pheros story in The Stories of Petese. All of these Egyptian tales with a court setting were discussed above in chapter three. In the Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy (late Ptolemaic Period), unlike Aḥiqar to which the story is often compared, the main character ʿOnchsheshonqy is genuinely at fault because he did not inform pharaoh of a palace plot against his life. He is sent to prison, where he writes instructions for his young son (the proverbs that are appended to the tale). 482 This is in contrast to his friend from childhood, the chief physician Harsiese son of Ramose, who had conspired against the king, and his co-conspirators; they are all sentenced to death by burning. It is in col. 4, 3–5 that the description of the brazier or furnace built outside the palace in Memphis is given: “Pharaoh caused an altar of earth to be built at the door of the royal palace. He caused Harsiese, son of Ramose, to be placed in the furnace (ʿḫ) together with all the conspirators.” 483 As H. S. Smith notes, the door of the palace is often the place for the execution of justice. 484 The earth in this case seems to be the basis of support for the furnace/brazier of metal. 485 In Merire and Sisobek (late sixth, possibly fifth century b.c.e.), a story with many themes in common with the biblical Daniel narratives, Merire’s rival courtiers are somehow responsible for the king Sisobek’s reversal of his promises to Merire. In return for saving the king’s life and dying in his place, Merire asked the king to care of his wife, son, and estate and not to allow his wife to marry another. 481.  See J. Gwyn Griffiths; “Human Sacrifices in Egypt: The Classical Evidence,” Annales du service des antiquités de l’Egypte 48 (1948), 409. 482.  The text ends with a final, rather hopeful proverb (“Do not be weary of calling to god. He has his hour for listening to the scribe”), which may hint at a positive end to story— that is, the final release of ʿOnchsheshonqy; see Robert K. Ritner’s translation, “The Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy (P. British Museum 10508),” in LAE, 497–529. 483.  Ritner’s translation, “The Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy (P. British Museum 10508),” 503; brackets mine. Glanville translates “furnace of copper,” reading the sign after ʿḫ as a logogram and not as a metal determinative (S. R. K. Glanville, Catalogue of Demotic Papyri in the British Museum: Volume II, The Instructions of ʿOnchsheshonqy [British Museum Papyrus 10508] [London: British Museum, 1955], 13). For examples of the orthography of ʿḫ in Demotic, see W. Erichsen, Demotisches Glossar (Kopenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1954), 69; and Chicago Demotic Dictionary = CDD ʿ (03.1), 125–26. 484.  Smith, “The Story of Onchsheshonqy,” 156 n. 19. 485.  Even if you eliminate “copper” (so Stricker, “De Wijsheid van Anchsjesjonq,” 59 n. 25), the sign after ʿḫ is still a metal determinative, so it is some kind of brazier made of metal.

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However, the rival lector-priest/magicians urge the king to kill Merire’s son, steal his estate, and take Merire’s wife as his own. Once Merire finds this out in the netherworld, he sends the golem up to earth to recommend to the king that the rivals of Merire be thrown into the furnace of Mut, which the king does. In Djedseshep, Nanoufesakhme, and Ḥarmakhroou from Saqqāra Demotic 1 (fourth century b.c.e.), a very poorly preserved text, some other courtiers are burned in a furnace. The story is too fragmentary to describe accurately in detail (perhaps only fragments of four columns out of sixteen are preserved), but it seems to involve intrigue at court, murder, and the execution of priests (a prophet of Horus, Lord of Letopolis and his family, and fellow priests) in an ʿḫ in front of the palace at Memphis at the command of pharaoh (cols. 14, 3–4 and 35–36). 486 The final court tale in which a furnace is mentioned is the Demotic version of the Pheros story embedded in the fragmentary Stories of Petese. In this story, which differs from the version of the “Blinding of Pharaoh” in Herodotus Book 2 in some details, someone in the first preserved line of the story says to (presumably) pharaoh, “you yourself, they would have placed you in the furnace” (col. 1, 1). 487 In response, pharaoh becomes enraged and throws an object that pierces the man’s chest and kills him. The man’s wife is then taken into the royal harem, but pharaoh promises to bury her husband. After a break of some lines in the story, somehow the king has become blind, and he searches and finds a chaste woman to heal him, much as in the Herodotus version of the story (with the exception that it is the tears, not the urine, of a chaste woman that will heal him). As noted in chapter three above (section 3.3.2.4.3), the editor of The Stories of Petese, Ryholt, suggests that the divine blinding of pharaoh is possibly due to the fact that he had coveted the wife of the man who chastized him. Perhaps this is why the preserved story begins with the man declaring that pharaoh himself (if things were at all fair), should be placed in a furnace. Furthermore, perhaps the reason for the blinding of pharaoh by the gods is that the wife whom he stole subsequently dies of grief in his harem. 488 (The earlier Herodotus version of the Pheros story has the king struck blind for defiantly throwing his spear into the heart of the river at the height of its flood, an action even more clearly rebellious against the gods.) Thus, the humor of the story would be that the king, who wanted to cuckold someone else, finds out in his search for a chaste woman that he himself has been cuckolded (none of his own harem is able to heal him, 486.  Smith and Tait, Saqqâra Demotic Papyri I, 60. 487.  ḥty[=k wn]-nꜢw ı͗w=w dı͗.t⸢=k⸣ r pꜢ ʿš (Ryholt’s translation; The Petese Stories II, 34). Note that ʿš is used here, a late variant of ʿḫ (cf. Coptic ⲁϣ), and it appears here with both the fire and metal determinatives. Erichsen lists one other example of this orthography in Demotic, but with the determinatives reversed (Demotisches Glossar, 69). The Chicago Demotic Dictionary, however, lists several Ptolemaic and Roman occurrences, in addition to other variants Ꜣš and ʿše; see CDD ʿ (03.1), 125–26. 488.  Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 45.

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implying that they were not chaste). 489 Nonetheless, the Demotic version of the Pheros story illustrates how an Egyptian audience would have understood the man’s speech to pharaoh: “placing someone in a furnace” is an execution reserved for traitors and rebels against kings and gods, but here it is the king himself whom an offended party believes deserving of this kind of death. Such a reversal of the usual motif, as well as the king’s reaction, underscore how powerful its connotations were. Thus, the furnace in Dan 3 may have more in common with Egyptian texts and iconography depicting human incineration in a brazier or furnace than with any of the other parallels adduced from elsewhere in the Bible or the ancient Near East. The pertinent biblical references to a fiery furnace are metaphorical, and the Persian practice of condemning prisoners to die in towers of ash is not a precise parallel to Dan 3. In the Mesopotamian examples, the punishment of burning with or without mention of a furnace was often reserved for crimes against a hierarchical superior (especially against the king or the gods), and death by immolation in a furnace appears to be very rare. There is not enough evidence to suggest that this kind of execution was regularly employed in any period, in contrast to the situation in Egypt. Furthermore, none of the three known Mesopotamian texts that include a command to burn someone in a furnace or oven is a court tale, but in Egypt there are at least four court tales with this motif and with other motifs in common with Daniel narratives, all from the Persian and Hellenistic periods. Although there seem to be no Egyptian sources or analogues that match this tale in all details (nor is there a parallel to the worship of a statue in the Egyptian court tales), the motif of execution in a fiery furnace may have Egyptian literary texts (and possibly iconography) as a source of some kind. At the very least, the Daniel story is a hard (rather than soft) analogue to the Egyptian court tales, even if there was also some Mesopotamian influence from traditions about the extent of Nabonidus’ anger toward rebellious priests.

5.3.4.  Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream of the Great Tree: Daniel 4 The story of the dream of the world tree and the madness of Nebuchadnezzar who becomes like a beast is heir to many diverse traditions. Among the most important are ancient Near Eastern reports about the Babylonian king Nabonidus (Nabû-nāʾid, 556–539 b.c.e.), the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, who worshiped the moon-god Sîn and abandoned Babylon to live at Teimāʾ, an oasis in the Arabian desert, for at least ten years. 490 The suggestion that Nabonidus 489.  Note that, in contrast to the Herodotus version, the unchaste women here are executed but not specifically by burning; instead, “they made the abomination of the 40 women [of the royal harem]” (ii 10). The phrase ı͗r btw PN mean, literally, “make PN’s abomination,” and “usually refers to capital punishment” (Ryholt, The Petese Stories II, 33, 39). 490. M. McNamara proposed that Dan 2–5 were all originally connected to historical events in the reign of Nabonidus, although characteristics of the historical Nebuchadnezzar

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was the historical figure behind the story of exile and madness in Dan 4 and that the name of the more famous Nebuchadnezzar was secondarily attached is more than a century old. 491 Not only do we have information about Nabonidus from historical texts such as the Ḫarrān Inscriptions of Nabonidus and of his mother Adad-Guppi but also polemical writings from others, especially Cyrus the Persian, after the deposition of Nabonidus and the end of the Babylonian empire: the so-called Nabonidus Chronicle, the Persian Verse Account, and the Cyrus Cylinder. 492 All of these sources provide evidence for a self-imposed exile of Nabonidus in Teimāʾ for a period of about ten years and for his great reverence for the moongod Sîn, in place of Marduk, the god of Babylon. The anti-Nabonidus sources portray Nabonidus as a very odd fellow whose own people and gods (especially Marduk) consider disturbed. Accordingly, the end of the Babylonian Empire was brought about by a Cyrus who was only acting in the best interests of the Babylonians; they needed relief from Nabonidus. Furthermore, Beaulieu also observes that Nabonidus is the only Neo-Babylonian ruler who “reports dreams in his inscriptions and who claims to have made important decisions based on their ominous content.” 493 In addition, the Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242), the fragmentary Qumran literary text in Aramaic discussed at the beginning of this chapter (section 5.1.1.1.1), provides a rendering of this tradition from the second quarter of the first century b.c.e. that many scholars view as, if not the link between the Babylonian materials and Dan 4, at least another important Jewish perspective on Nabonidus. The partially preserved Prayer relates Nabonidus/Nabunay’s worship of idols (gods of silver, gold, wood, etc.), his affliction with an illness that lasts seven years, his appeal to God Most High, and, finally, his healing by an unnamed Jewish diviner. The points of similarity with Dan 4 are very clear: most importantly, unlike the Babylonian materials that portray Nabonidus’ exile as self-imposed, the Prayer has him afflicted by some malady sent by God, as in Dan 4. The proposal that the “Prayer of Nabonidus” is a source for Dan 4 has had many proponents. 494 On the other hand, Haag and Steinmann argue that the may still be found here and there in chs. 2–4 (e.g., Dan 2:38) (“Nabonidus and the Book of Daniel,” ITQ 37 [1970], 131–49). 491.  Henze (The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 52) credits Paul Riessler and F. Hommel as being two of the earliest scholars to suggest this (Riessler, Das Buch Daniel, 43; Hommel, “Die Abfassungszeit des Buches Daniel und der Wahnsinn Nabonids,” Theologisches Literatur­ blatt 23 (1902), 145–50). 492.  For the inscriptions of Nabonidus and Cyrus, see now Hanspeter Schaudig, Die Inschriften Nabonids von Babylon und Kyros’ des Grossen samt den in ihrem Umfeld entstandenen Tendenzschriften (AOAT 256; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2001). 493.  Beaulieu, The Reign of King Nabonidus, 218. 494.  For the view that the Prayer is based on Daniel, see, for instance, Eshel, “Possible Sources of the Book of Daniel,” 393.

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Prayer is based on Dan 4. 495 Hartman and Di Lella as well as Collins believe that there is no direct literary relationship between the two; however, they think that the Prayer more faithfully preserves certain details of an earlier tale based on Nabonidus’ life. 496 Dommershausen takes a middle position. 497 Matthias Henze in his excellent study of Dan 4, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, maintains that “the literary history of the legend is pluriform, not linear . . . both originated as oral recollections of a particular historical incident: Nabonidus’ retreat to the oasis of Teimāʾ on the Arabian peninsula.” 498 This seems most reasonable (see above, section 5.1.1.1.1). The many accounts describing Nabonidus’ exile were written from different perspectives, especially pro- and anti-Nabonidus. Henze believes that the Prayer and Dan 4 are so divergent that it is difficult to understand how they could ever derive from a single written source. 499 Some scholars divide Dan 4 into specific core story sources. Haag argues that there were originally two stories, one about Nebuchadnezzar and his son Belshazzar but with no mention of Daniel (MT Dan 4:25–30, Nebuchadnezzar’s pronouncement on the palace wall) that was later combined with a second story, the wise courtier Daniel legend about the dream interpretation for Nebuchadnezzar (Dan 4:1–23). Lawrence Wills goes further: he believes there were three source stories: the “Bull Sojourn” (4:30a–36/33, 34b with excisions, in which the OG ch. 4 is parallel to 4QPrNab); the “Wall Pronouncement” (4:25–30 MT; 4:29/26–33/30 OG), which utilized Abydenus as recorded in Eusebius Praep.ev. 9.41.456d–457b, to which the OG is closer); and the “Dream Interpretation Account” (consisting of the beginning of the chapter: approximately OG 4:4–28, MT 4:1–25, with excisions). Only in the latter is Daniel identified. The motif of Nebuchadnezzar’s loss of kingship in Dan 4 does have a traditiohistorical parallel tied to the historical king of that name instead of to the historical Nabonidus. Eusebius, the church historian, recounts a story from Abydenus’ Concerning the Assyrians regarding something said by Megasthenes the Ionian historian (ca. 300 b.c.e.) (Praeparatio evangelia 9.41). In it, Nebuchadnezzar goes to the roof of his palace and proclaims his own downfall. He claims that a “Persian Mule” will ally with Babylonian deities to bring slavery upon the people and that his cohort is “of a Median woman.” After pronouncing this prophecy, Nebuchadnezzar then expresses the wish that the Persian Mule would be extinguished before this can occur or that he would “be driven across the desert, where 495.  Haag, Die Errettung Daniels, 62–73; Steinmann, “The Chicken and the Egg,” 557–70. 496.  Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 179; Collins, Daniel, 218. See also L. F. Hartman, “The Great Tree and Nabuchodonosor’s Madness,” in J. L. McKenzie, ed., The Bible in Current Catholic Thought (New York: Herder & Herder, 1962), 75–82. 497.  Dommershausen, Nabonid im Buche Daniel, 85. 498.  Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 69. 499.  Ibid., 73.

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there are neither cities nor track of man, but where wild beasts have their pasture and birds do roam, and that among rocks and ravines he might wander alone.” 500 It is not certain whether Abydenus preserves a folk legend about Nebuchadnezzar that is older than Dan 4 or if it is dependent on Dan 4, however. 501 On the other hand, the tendentious Verse Account (vv. 8–13), written in praise of Cyrus after his conquest of Babylon, describes Nabonidus (not Nebuchadnezzar) as full of hubris and as a seer of visions sent by the moon-god (here called Ilteri): He would stand up in the assembly (and) praise him[self]: “I am wise. I am knowledgeable. I have seen hid[den things]. (Although) I do not know the art of writing, I have seen se[cret things]. The god Ilteri has made me see (dreams), he has made everything kno[wn to me]. I surpass in all (kinds of ) wisdom (even the series) uskar-Anum-Enlilla, which Adap[a] composed [ . . .]” 502

Column v continues on to complain that, in spite of all his claims to knowledge, Nabonidus would “mix up the rites, confuse the omens,” and would argue with the priests of the Esagila temple in Babylon. There are other broad parallels to a seven-year affliction, such as that in the so-called Famine Stela from Egypt. 503 The seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine in the Joseph story in Gen 41 is also quite familiar, and there are other ancient Near Eastern stories with this motif. 504 The term for the being that calls from heaven to cut down the tree in the dream is “watcher” (‫עיר‬, ִ MT Dan 4:10, 14, 20; this figure is called an “angel,” ἄγγελος, in the OG). 505 The term is common enough in Jewish literature from the Hellenistic and early Roman periods, with the best-known occurence in the “Book of the Watchers,” 1 Enoch 1–36. 506 The wish that the dream and its interpretation might be favorable to the king’s enemies could be a “substitute for an apotropaic procedure,” in that the very expression of the desire might constitute a means of dispelling the bad effects of both. 507 Note that in the courtier story Merire and Sisobek (Papyrus Van­ dier), the same apotropaic device is used by the narrator: every time something 500.  Satran, “Early Jewish and Christian Interpretation,” 36. His translation. 501.  Collins, Daniel, 219. 502.  Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, 215. On the name Ilteri, see Rubio, “Scribal Secrets and Antiquarian Nostalgia,” 161–66. 503.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 90. 504. Donald Redford notes that famines of seven years’ duration are a common motif rooted in fertility myths (cf. Aqhat III, i, 43; Gilgamesh vi, 104) (Redford, A Study of the Biblical Story of Joseph [Genesis 37–50], 98–100). 505.  Th Daniel simply transliterates the Aramaic word as ιρ. 506. See Collins, Daniel, 224–26, for a thorough overview of attestations of this term. 507.  Ibid., 228.

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bad is said to happen to pharaoh, the narrator/author inserts “the enemies of ” before the word “pharaoh” (nꜢ ḫry.w n pr-ʿꜢ). For example, after the pharaoh displays his symptoms and summons the magicians, they wail, “My great lord, this condition which has happened to the enemies of the pharaoh (life, prosperity, health), it happened to Menkare” (1, 7). And when the pharaoh is upset at their prognosis of seven days yet to live, the text says, “It happened that the enemies of pharaoh (life, prosperity, health) were very devastated” (1, 10)—to avoid referring to the pharaoh himself. 508 The motif of a world tree is commonplace among world literatures. 509 Scholars of the book of Daniel often point to Herodotus for visions of a great tree. For example, Astyages dreams of a vine proceeding out of his daughter’s loins to cover all Asia—that is, the birth of the baby Cyrus (1.108)—and Xerxes has a vision of being crowned with an olive bough whose shoots spread over the earth (7.19). Xerxes’ vision even refers to the punishment of pride in a close parallel to Dan 4. Other examples that can be mentioned include the trees of the visions of Noah and Abram in the Qumran Genesis Apocryphon (cols. 13–14 and col. 19); and in 4Q552–553, the Four Kingdoms Apocalypse, there are four speaking trees that seem to represent four kingdoms in a vision by a seer who is in a royal court (the first of the trees is Babylon). There are also angels present in this last text. The Bible also contains allegories involving cedar trees in Ezek 17 and 31 and there are several other mentions of trees of life, such as the tree in Gen 2 and 3. 510 Carla Sulzbach sees very close connections between Ezek 28 and 31 and Dan 4, all of which rely to some extent on the trees of Gen 2 and 3. 511 However, whereas Donald E. Gowan saw hubris as the connecting theme between these passages, 512 Sulzbach views the garden theme as being central to the rich tapesty of metaphors found in both Ezekiel and Daniel: the authors of both were faced with an acute Temple crisis; both are oracles against nations; and both castigate a 508.  Note elsewhere in the Bible the practice of avoiding blasphemy by euphemistic substitution; cf. Job 2:5 where the śāṭān tells Yahweh that if he strikes Job with physical misery, Job will “bless him to his face,” when surely this is a scribal circumlocution for “curse him to his face” (see also Job 1:5, 11, 2:9; 1 Kgs 21:10, 13; Ps 10:3). In 1 Kgs 21:101 Kings13, the substitution of “bless” (‫ )ברך‬for “curse” is used in the trumped-up charges against Naboth, accusing him of cursing of both God and King Ahab. 509.  For this motif in the ancient Near East, see Geo Widengren, The King and the Tree of Life in Ancient Near Eastern Religion (King and Saviour IV) (Uppsala Universitets Arsskrift 4; Uppsala: Lundequist, 1951). 510.  Peter W. Coxon, “The Great Tree of Daniel 4,” in James D. Martin and Philip R. Davies, eds., A Word in Season: Essays in Honour of William McKane (JSOTSup 42; Sheffield: JSOT, 1986), 91–111. 511.  “Nebuchadnezzar in Eden? Daniel 4 and Ezekiel 28,” in Hermann Michael Niemann and Matthias Augustin, eds., Stimulation from Leiden: Collected Communications to the XVIIIth Congress of the International Organization for the Study of the Old Testament, Leiden 2004 (BEAT 54; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006), 125–36. 512.  Donald E. Gowan, When Man Becomes God: Humanism and Hybris in the Old Testament (Pittsburgh: Pickwick, 1975).

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famous foreign ruler as a literary type (Hiram or other princes of Tyre in Ezekiel, and Nebuchadnezzar as well as Antiochus, perhaps, in Daniel). Imagery in Mesopotamian art, iconography, and writing also often utilizes a tree of life or world tree. The king himself is portrayed as a tree in Neo-Assyrian reliefs, and an Assyrian letter describes Assurbanipal as a sheltering tree. 513 Nevertheless, one especially difficult feature of the tree as described in OG Dan 4 is the presence of the sun and moon in its branches, which lends this description more mythological content. 514 Proposals for the source of this motif are few, as Matthias Henze notes. 515 Eugene Ulrich has suggested that the sheltering of the moon in the tree must reflect a Babylonian astrological motif, although he does not propose any concrete Babylonian image. 516 Lawrence Wills suggests parallels in Jewish and Christian mythological descriptions in which a cosmic figure (the redeemer or the law) eclipses the sun and moon, as in Ignatius Ephesians 19, where the redeemer is portrayed as a great star that is surrounded by the sun, moon, and all the stars. 517 Henze himself postulates that the winged disc that hovers over the Mesopotamian sacred tree in Neo-Assyrian iconography supplies the closest parallel. He further argues that the motif of sheltering the moon fits well with Nabonidus’ preoccupation with the moon-god and his erection of several temples for Sîn. 518 However, Henze freely admits that this does not provide for the inclusion of the sun in the tree in OG Dan 4 nor do any Nabonidus inscriptions mention a tree sheltering the moon and sun. Finally, Fröhlich notes that Oppenheim’s Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East includes a short Babylonian account of a dream during the reign of Nabonidus about stars, sun, and moon that is interpreted as favorable to Nabonidus and his son Belshazzar. 519 This Babylonian dream makes no mention of a tree, however. For the odd image of the sun, mooon, and stars chopping down a tree or trees, see col. 13 of the Genesis Apocryphon. There may be a parallel to the sun and moon motif in OG Dan 4:8 in the “Oracle of Sun and Moon” in the Greek Alexander Romance. The Alexander Romance 3.17 concerns legendary accounts of Alexander in India and was written in Egypt; the earliest extant version is from around 300 c.e. but it has been suggested that it was already in some form as early as the third or second century b.c.e. 520 513.  Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 80–81. 514. Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 106. 515.  Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 81. 516.  Ulrich, “Double Literary Editions,” 107–8. 517.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 106. He also cites Testament of Levi 18 and Baruch 3:33–4:3. 518.  Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 82–83. 519.  YOS I, no. 39; Oppenheim, The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East, 205; Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, 192. See also Fröhlich, Time and Times and Half a Time, 75. The stars referred to are a meteor (literally “great star”), Venus, and Sirius. 520. Richard Stoneman, “The Alexander Romance: From History to Fiction,” in J. R. Morgan and Richard Stoneman, eds., Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context (London: Routledge, 1994), 117–29, esp. p. 122.

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In this legend, Alexander is brought to a sanctuary in which there are two oracle trees called Sun and Moon, male and female, that have no “iron, bronze or tin, not even potter’s clay” near them (apparently nothing manufactured by humans). Alexander and his men are asked to leave their iron swords outside the perimeter. Each tree is surrounded by the skins of lions and panthers. At sunset, the Sun tree, speaking in an Indian language that has to be translated, predicts Alexander’s death at the hand of one of his companions. Alexander then inquires of the oracle if he might be able to embrace his mother Olympias once more. A reply comes from the Moon Tree at moonrise, this time in Greek: “King Alexander, you are to die in Babylon, by the hand of one of your companions, and you will not be able to return to your mother, Olympias.” 521 Alexander is saddened, and at dawn the next day he returns to the sanctuary one last time. After praying, he lays his hands on the Sun tree and asks the tree directly if he will live a full span of life. The Sun tree tells him that his lifespan is now completed, that he will not return to his mother but will die in Babylon, and that even his wife and mother will be murdered by his own people. Of significance to OG Dan 4 is the connection of the sun and moon to a tree or trees and to the pronouncement of oracles. Although the trees in the Greek Alexander Romance number two, the image of an oracle tree or trees appears in Iranian iconography even in ancient Harappa, where some illustrations have a single speaking tree, sprouting all kinds of animal heads. 522 The trees are occasionally portrayed as two trunks of the same tree twisted together. It is possible that the OG is utilizing this Iranian imagery, either directly or indirectly (as transmitted through other sources, such as some early form of the Greek Alexander Romance). Of course, in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Dan 4, the great tree that sustains and nourishes the world symbolizes Nebuchadnezzar, the one against whom the oracle is given, and thus the tree is not itself explicitly the source of the oracle. However, perhaps placing the “sun and moon” in the tree seemed an appropriately ominous description for the OG author. In addition, the trees in the oracle announce Alexander’s death as coming at the hand of a traitor from within the king’s personal retinue. OG’s usurper is specifically a “worthless” man (ἐξουθενημένος ἀνθρώπος) from within Nebuchadnezzar’s own household (OG 4:28). Since OG Daniel was probably composed in Egypt in the late second century b.c.e., possibly in Alexandria, it seems possible that aspects of this tradition of oracle trees symbolized by the sun and moon would have been available to the OG author-compiler, and by mentioning the sun and moon in the telling of Dan 4, a haunting resonance was added. Note that the trees in the Alexander Ro521.  See Richard Stoneman, Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 187–91, esp. p. 188. 522.  On trees of life and death in folklore, see Claire Russell, “The Life Tree and the Death Tree,” Folklore 92 (1981), 56–66.

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mance are not to be touched by iron, and in Dan 4 (MT, Th, and OG) the fetters of iron and bronze around the tree stump may symbolize a further punishment of the tree—that is, Nebuchadnezzar. Certainly the imagery used in Dan 4 is a composite from several sources. There are several possible sources from Mesopotamian iconography and archaeology for the imagery of metallic fetters or manacles in Dan 4. In MT, the fetters are put around the tree, whereas in the OG, the tree transforms into Nebuchadnezzar and the fetters are put around the mad king (OG Dan 4:14a), who eats grass with the beasts. While the action of putting manacles on a madman may make sense, binding a stump is less comprehensible. Matthias Henze and other scholars have found several interesting parallels for both a madman motif and stump-binding in Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian texts, iconography, and even archaeological evidence. With regard to the motif of the madman or wild man, Henze looks to several literary texts from the ancient Near East: for example, the Marriage of the God Martu, which satirizes the uncivilized Amorites; Berossus’ tradition about primordial Babylonians who live without laws like animals; the Dispute between Cattle and Grain (a Sumerian description of primordial times); and especially the tradition about Enkidu, the wild man who is civilized by a prostitute in the Epic of Gilgamesh. 523 For Henze, the Enkidu tradition seems to be the best parallel to the madness of Nebuchadnezzar in Dan 4, although it is a parallel in reverse: instead of a primitive man who is humanized and made into the companion of a king (Gilgamesh), as in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the king in Dan 4 is animalized. The Syriac version of the Story of Aḥiqar also has details that are similar to Dan 4 (although it likely borrowed them): the appearance of Aḥiqar after his long stay in a hiding place, in which he is described as having long hair and nails like a bird’s nails, matches Dan 4:30. 524 Aḥiqar 5:11b has: The hair of my head had grown onto my shoulders, my beard reached my chest, my body was foul with the dust, and my nails were long like an eagles’ (or vulture’s). 525

Note the evocation of the underworld in the description of both Nebuchadnezzar’s transformation and of Aḥiqar’s appearance upon release. Christopher B. Hays suggests that the animal images in Dan 4:30 (eating grass like oxen, having hair long as an eagle’s and nails like a bird’s) and Aḥiqar 5:11b (covered in dust, long hair, nails like an eagle’s) are traditional tropes in ancient Near Eastern 523.  Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 93–99. 524.  There are several parallels between the Story of Aḥiqar in Syriac and Aramaic Daniel (Conybeare et al., The Story of Aḥikar, lx–lxii). 525.  cd sʿrʾ dršy rmʾ ʿl ktpty wdqny mṭʾ lḥdyy wgwšmy mḥbl bʿprʾ wṭpry ʿrykyn ʿyk dnšrʾ (5:12; Conybeare et al., The Story of Aḥiḳar, 47 in the Syriac text). See also M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, ed., The Wisdom of Aḥiqar: Syriac and Aramaic (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University, 1965), 36.

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literature for expressing immense suffering by invoking ancient ideas about the underworld and its inhabitants. 526 The animals of Dan 4:30 (bull, eagle, and songbird) can each symbolize demons and the dead (or the nearly dead) in ancient Near Eastern texts of various genres. . . . In the Mesopotamian and Israelite prayer traditions, such demonic figures were frequently depicted as assaulting a sick or afflicted person. Indeed, death was seen as a force that could break into a human life and begin to take it over. As the sufferer was overwhelmed by the forces of the underworld, he or she often was portrayed as taking on the characteristics of the dead, both naturalistic (medical) and mythological. 527

The dead in the Mesopotamian underworld are clothed in feathers and surrounded by dust, which they eat, in famous compositions such as the Descent of Ishtar, Nergal and Ereshkigal, and the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the Bible, ghosts “chirp” out of the dust (Isa 29:4), and the suffering pronounced in judgment oracles is associated with wild animals, including birds such as owls and buzzards, living in wastelands (Isa 34:10–15). The placing of metallic rings on a tree or stump appears in several relevant examples in Mesopotamian art, as noted especially by Koch, Henze, and Helge Kvanvig. The palace of Assurnasirpal II at Nimrud seems to have possessed an alabaster mural relief containing “trees of life” with bands of some kind around them. 528 Rows of palm trees with four rings on each are found on the facade of Nebuchadnezzar’s throne-room in Babylon. 529 Two stelae from Ḫarrān (H2.A and H2.B) and one from Teimāʾ (#90837) portray Nabonidus holding sceptres with metalic bands or rings. 530 Henze draws attention to the other ornaments on these same stelae: divine emblems of the moon-god Sin, the sun-god Shamash, and Ishtar/Venus. These emblems recall the image of the tree sheltering the sun and moon in the OG. Helga Kvanvig noted that archaeology has also produced examples of trees bound with bands of metal. Cedar trees with naked trunks surrounded by embossed bronze bands were found outside temples of the moongod Sîn and the sun-god Shamash in excavations at Dur Sharrukin (modern Khorsabad). 531 Henze suggests that Smith’s description of the Babylonian akītu 526.  Christopher B. Hays, “Chirps from the Dust: The Affliction of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4:30 in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context,” JBL 126 (2007), 305–25. 527. Ibid.,324. 528. A. Moortgat, The Art of Ancient Mesopotamia: The Classical Art of the Near East (London: Phaidon, 1969), pls. 257 and 258; Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 85. 529. E. Strommenger and M. Hirmer, The Art of Mesopotamia (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964), pl. 278 and pp. 462–63; Moortgat, The Art of Ancient Mesopotamia, pl. 292 and p. 161; Koch, “ Gottes Herrschaft,” 104; Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 85. 530.  C. J. Gadd, “The Harran Inscriptions of Nabonidus,” Anatolian Studies 8 (1958), pls. IIa and IIb and IIIa. 531.  Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic, 479–80. For a report of the excavations, see Gordon Loud, Khorsabad I: Excavations in the Palace and at a City Gate (OIP 38; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), 94, 104.

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(New Year’s) festival can be brought into play here as well. Smith observed that the New Year’s ritual involved removing old fillets of green leaves and bands of metal in order to put new ones on. 532 Thus, as a symbol of fertility, the decoration of bronze bands promotes the rejuvenation of nature in the upcoming year. The leaving of the tree’s stump and a metal band in Dan 4 signifies the “future restitution of Nebuchadnezzar.” 533 A final analogue to mention is a court tale that reveals plot parallels to Dan 4 (and to the Prayer of Nabonidus), namely, the Egyptian Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh story (P. Demotic Saqqāra 2 verso) in Demotic from the fourth or third century b.c.e. 534 In this story recounted in chapter three above (section 3.3.2.4.1.3), a certain king Badja (possibly a historical king of the Old Kingdom) is somehow sequestered in a desert wilderness far away from civilization (perhaps Amurru or Assyria), where he lives surrounded by exotic animals and guarded by a lion. The story depicts the king’s forced exile as being brought on not only by the High Steward, who may have usurped and kidnapped the king, but also by the king’s rejection of the goddess Hathor, who strikes him with some kind of illness. Back at court, another courtier named Merib is accused of the crime and has a conflict with the High Steward and his ally the letter-scribe. The missing king is only found when Merib is sent a dream by Hathor, revealing the king’s location, after which Merib rides out to recover the king on a horse that is miraculously guided by the goddess. The parallels between Merib and Dan 4 are striking. First, the stories are both about kings who are forced into exile for a time, where they live among the animals. Second, each king requires the aid of a courtier who has special connections to a deity and who urges the king to revere that deity. Each king does this at different points in each story: in Dan 4, this is at the end, after the king has recovered from his transformation; in Merib, this is at some point before the king rejects Hathor, but it is safe to assume that, after the king is recovered from his exile and saved by Merib through Hathor’s guidance, he returns to venerating her again. Third, the exile involves an illness or malady sent by a deity because of the king’s rejection of that deity (in Dan 4, it is madness, and in Merib, it is some unnamed illness). Other similarities are impressive as well. Each is a tale involving rival courtiers in a court setting: Merib is accused of wrongdoing by the entire court, and his rival the High Steward, who has taken the king’s place, dares him to find the pharaoh before he does, and in (MT) Dan 4 there is a contest between courtiers about who is able to interpret the king’s dream. In addition, in each story, the king is “sought out” by his courtiers in order to be returned to his throne (Dan 4:36). Prayer and dreams are involved in each (a dream and prayer 532.  Henze, The Madness of King Nebuchadnezzar, 88; S. Smith, “ Notes on ‘The Assyrian Tree’,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 4 (1926), 69–76. 533.  Kvanvig, Roots of Apocalyptic, 480. 534.  Joachim Friedrich Quack notes this in passing in his Einführung in die altägyptische Literaturgeschichte III (p. 27).

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of both Merib and probably Badja as well, although Badja’s dream is mostly unpreserved, whereas in Dan 4 the dream is Nebuchadnezzar’s and Daniel interprets it). In addition, the theme of a usurper—someone who takes away the kingdom while the king is in exile—is prominent, especially in OG Dan 4 and Merib. This is in contrast to MT and Th Daniel, where the threat of a usurper is almost nonexistent: Nebuchadnezzar is to be in exile “until [he] has learned that the Most High has sovereignty over the kingdom of mortals, and gives it to whom he will” (MT Dan 4:25, 32). Similarities to the Prayer of Nabonidus are clear as well: both Pharaoh Badja and King Nabonidus suffer an illness, both are isolated in a desert location, and both contain prayer (and even perhaps a dream; see Prayer frg. 4:1). However, the Prayer as preserved has no other courtiers or officials of the king beside the unnamed diviner (gzr); thus, there is no courtier rivalry as in the MT. Of course, the differences between Dan 4, the Prayer, and Merib are not insubstantial. Paramount among them are the ethnicities of the main characters in each: Dan 4, just like the Prayer of Nabonidus, concerns a Babylonian king, not an Egyptian one, and the diviner or courtier is Jewish in each case as well. In the Prayer of Nabonidus, the king has sinned by worshiping false gods, and he has to confess this before he is healed. In contrast, in Dan 4 the king’s sin is hubris, and once his reason returns to him after his exile, he confesses the power of the God of Heaven. Also, the Babylonian king in each is faulted for not following the Jewish god. In Merib, however, the only hint of hubris is that Pharaoh Badja has been taught to revere Hathor by Merib, but he has since rejected her: hence, his kidnapping and illness as punishment. Nevertheless, as far as we can tell, there is no ethnic component in the Merib story, although there is a religious one: Merib is a follower of Hathor, and his enemies revere Isis. Pharaoh Badja does not pray to or confess Hathor’s power in the part that is preserved, but Merib states that it is because of him (Merib) that the king has come to revere Hathor. In addition, Merib does pray for guidance, and he receives a dream. No length for pharaoh’s exile in Merib is mentioned, whereas seven is an important number for the length of the exile in both Dan 4 and the Prayer of Nabonidus. Differently from the Prayer of Nabonidus and Dan 4, the Merib story also contains the theme of courtier rehabilitation: Merib is suspected by the court of being the one who abducted the king, but it is another courtier (the High Steward) who has performed magic against the king or is somehow behind the abduction. By finding the king before the other courtier is able to do so, Merib presumably reestablishes his good name, because the king is able to expose the High Steward as the cause of his disappearance. (The manuscript breaks off just when the king denounces the chamberlain, so we do not get to know how the story really ends.) In this respect, the story of Merib is more like the conflict stories of Dan 3 and 6 than the contest story of MT Dan 4 or the Prayer of Nabonidus, although there is

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a slight contest element in Merib’s rivalry with the High Steward and the letterscribe and Merib’s race to get to the king before the High Steward. It is significant that there are features that the Merib story shares most closely with the OG of Dan 4 and perhaps with the Prayer of Nabonidus, rather than with the MT. First, Nebuchadnezzar is led to a deserted place (εἰς τ´οπον ἔρημον, v. 22), just as Badja is held in the dw.w “desert wastes” or “mountains” (possibly Syria or Assyria?), and in the Prayer of Nabonidus, Nabonidus’ exile takes place in Arabia, in Teimāʾ/Tēmān. Most importantly, however, both OG Dan 4 and Merib share the idea that, while the king is in exile, the kingdom is in danger from someone within the king’s own house. In the case of OG Dan 4, it is a matter of a “worthless man” in his household, who is established by God as king in place of Nebuchadnezzar. In the Merib story, it is the High Steward whom Hathor possibly has allowed to abduct the king and take charge (if not quite the throne) in his absence, aided by sympathetic underlings. It is possible that both the Aramaic story and the Greek story of Dan 4 are influenced by Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh, but that the OG is even more so. Often, Egyptian stories set in the past (and Merib possibly is set in the Old Kingdom) have some referent based in the time of their composition and sometimes propagandistic elements meant to persuade attitudes about the writer’s present. But it is not clear what the referent would be in Merib or exactly when the story would have been composed. The copy dates to the end of the fourth or beginning of the third century b.c.e. (the very beginning of the Hellenistic period). If it is propagandistic, it is not clear to whom the main characters or the plot are meant to refer. A further complication is that perhaps the text was composed in one period and then updated in a later period, as often occurs with literature that is popular and has a long life. How shall we account for the similarities between Merib, Dan 4, and the Prayer of Nabonidus? Although we decided above that Dan 4 and the Prayer of Nabonidus are heirs of a long-standing tradition about Nabonidus and his selfimposed exile (and neither has to be the source for the other), is there any influence from the Egyptian story of Merib? Is this a case similar to the situation in Dan 3, where the setting is Mesopotamia but the motif of capital punishment in a furnace could have been borrowed from Egyptian iconography and literature? It seems most likely that the Merib story is a “hard analogue,” not a source for MT Dan 4. The narrative resemblances are certainly striking enough, and the Merib story dates to the very beginning of the Hellenistic period (perhaps the end of the fourth century b.c.e.). There is at least a possibility that the Egyptian story was available to the author of an early form of MT Dan 4. On the other hand, a different judgment for the relationship of OG Dan 4 to Merib could be made. Given that the theme of usurper from within is prominent in both Merib and OG Dan 4, and that the king in each is placed specifically in a wilderness, Merib is a

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clearly a closer analogue to OG Dan 4 than it is to MT Dan 4. Perhaps OG Dan, with Egypt almost certainly its place of composition, was influenced by traditions about Alexander as well, such as those in the Alexander Romance.

5.3.5.  The Writing on the Wall and the Fall of Babylon: Daniel 5 The story about the feast of Belshazzar and the ominous writing on the wall in Dan 5 relies much on ancient accounts of the fall of Babylon. However, Belshazzar was not the last king of Babylon. In fact, he was never a king of Babylon at all, nor was he a son of Nebuchadnezzar as the Book of Daniel presents him; he was instead the son of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, and he served as Nabonidus’ vice-regent when his father was in absentia but never ruled independently. This tradition in Daniel has been transposed from Nabonidus to Nebuchadnezzar, much as traditions about Nabonidus’ self-imposed exile in Teimāʾ are behind part of the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s madness in Dan 4. Collins believes that attempts to find the sources behind the entire story of Belshazzar’s feast and to recover “the pre-Danielic story are highly conjectural and warrant little confidence.” 535 Nonetheless, a few historical or other traditions about the fall of Babylon may well have influenced it, even if no single tradition is a direct source for Dan 5. There are several ancient accounts about a feast that supposedly occurred at the time of Babylon’s fall in 539 b.c.e. We know from the Nabonidus Chronicle (iii, 7) that an akītu festival was observed in the same year. Moreover, the city of Babylon was taken on the sixteenth of Tašrītu, the day before the beginning of the festival in Ḫarrān, a festival that may have been transplanted to Babylon by Nabonidus in his zealous devotion to the moon-god Sîn. 536 However, both the Chronicle (iii, 12–22) and the Cyrus cylinder (lines 14–17) report that Babylon fell without a battle. 537 This contrasts with the accounts of the later Greek historians, Herodotus (1.191) and Xenophon (Cyropaedia 7.5.15), who both claim that the city was taken by surprise while the Babylonians were drinking and celebrating through the night. As Beaulieu notes, these divergent stories “may constitute an aggregate of various folk tales and legends which came to be associated with the fall of Babylon,” but the tradition of festivities at the fall may well reflect a historical fact, too. 538 In addition to Dan 5, the Bible also records a tradition about a feast at the time of Babylon’s fall in Isa 21:5 (which describes the preparation of table and rugs before drinking and eating) and Jer 51:39 (which depicts the Babylonians before their slaughter as being full of drunken 535.  Collins, Daniel, 243. 536. Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, 220–24. See also Al Wolters, “Belshazzar’s Feast and the Cult of the Moon,” Bulletin for Biblical Research 5 (1995), 199–206. 537.  Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, 224–26; Schaudig, Die Inschriften Nabonaids von Babylon und Kyros’ des Grossen, 550–556 (Cyrus Cylinder); Glassner, Mesopotamian Chronicles, 236–37 (Nabonidus Chronicle). 538.  Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, 226.

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merriment). Another proposal by Al Wolters is that the use of “scales” in Dan 5 is an astrological reference related to the historical date of the fall of Babylon: the annual rising of the constellation Libra (which the Mesopotamians knew regularly occurred on the fifteenth of Tašrītu), may have actually happened a day before Babylon’s fall to the Persians on the sixteenth of Tašrītu (October 12) in 539 b.c.e. 539 The author of Dan 5 would thus have known this tradition and utilized the astrological information to good advantage in the riddle. A point of connection between the feast in Dan 5, the Nabonidus Chronicle, and the Prayer of Nabonidus is the mention of gods or statues of gods at the festivities. Dan 5:4 notes that the king, his lords, his wives, and his concubines drank from vessels of gold and silver taken from the Jerusalem temple and that they “praised the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone.” 540 The Chronicle states that statues of the gods of several cities were brought to Babylon (the gods of Marad, Zabab, Kish, Ninlil, Ḫursagkalamma, Akkad, etc.), perhaps to pervent them from being carried off by the enemy. 541 As for the queen and only woman in MT Daniel, she is not only taking on the role of the wise woman of folklore but the creation of her character might have been inspired by knowledge of one or more of the many renowned Mesopotamian queens, famed for their wisdom and greatness. Collins notes that Nitocris, wife of Nebuchadnezzar, is praised by Herodotus (1.185–187), and Adda-Guppi, mother of Nabonidus, was very active in her son’s career, as a Ḫarrān inscription indicates. 542 Other active, strong Mesopotamian women include the Assyrian queen Sammu-ramat (= Semiramis), wife of Shamshi-Adad V and mother of Adadnirari III, in the late ninth and early eighth century, whose autobiographical stela uses the first-person, indicating that the text was her own composition. Sennacherib’s wife Tashmetu-sharrat was conflated with the probably better-known Semiramis, as was Naqia, wife of Sennacherib and mother of Esarhaddon, a powerful queen who also wrote under her own name. The sister of Shamash-shum-ukin of Babylon and Assurbanipal of Assyria, Sherua-eterat (Šērūʾa-ēṭirat), is also known from the Aramaic “Revolt of Babylon” (= the “Story of Two Brothers”) in Papyrus Amherst 63. There she takes on the role of mediator between her brothers, Assurbanipal and Shamash-shum-ukin, with instructions from Assurbanipal, the dominant king, to go to Babylon and counsel her brother to go to Nineveh and submit to his brother. 539. Al Wolters, “An Allusion to Libra in Daniel 5? ” in Hannes D. Galter, ed., Die Rolle der Astronomie in den Kulturen Mesopotamiens: Beiträge zum 3 Grazer Morgenländischen Symposium (23–27 September 1991) (Graz, Austria, 1993), 291–306; idem, “Riddle of the Scales in Daniel 5,” HUCA 62 (1991), 155–77. The astrological series MUL.APIN records that the heliaical rising of Libra regularly occurred around the fifteenth of the month of Tašrītu. 540. The Prayer of Nabonidus also mentions various idols: “gods of silver and gold, [bronze, iron], wood, stone, clay, because [. . . . . . .] that [. . .] were gods” (lines 7–8). 541.  Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, 223. 542.  Collins, Daniel, 248; on Adda-Guppi, see Beaulieu, The Reign of Nabonidus, 68–79.

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Some scholars have also suggested the influence of the book of Esther on the portrayal of the queen. 543 In Dan 5, the queen has a long memory of the affairs of the kingdom and expresses wisdom with the intent of easing the terrible agitation of King Belshazzar (either her son, grandson, or husband). In MT, she enters independently to counsel the king, whereas in the OG, the king sends for her. Although the OG might be portraying Belshazzar as somewhat dictatorial toward his wife or mother, it might also reflect knowledge of the book of Esther, which claims that a queen should not enter the Persian throne-room without a royal summons. In any case, the scene still demonstrates Belshazzar’s recognition that a wise woman’s counsel in the matter is desirable. A central motif in Dan 5 is that of reading and interpreting a secret writing, the writing of God via a disembodied hand. In MT, the magicians are not even able to read the writing on the wall. In contrast, in the OG, although they might be able to read it, they are not able to interpret it. The problem in the MT is along the lines of an impossible task, similarly to the situation in MT Dan 2, which includes Nebuchadnezzar’s expectation that the courtiers will tell him the contents of his dream and the interpretation, rather than just the interpretation. Dan 5 stresses the power of writing; as David Valeta notes, in this story, writing kills. 544 Moreover, the fact that the king is unable to read the writing, but Daniel is, destabilizes imperial power and causes the downfall of Babylon, not just the death of the king. In some of the Egyptian tales with court contests already outlined above, reading divine writing that the king or other courtiers are not able to read is part of the hero’s skills, too. In Setne II, Setne Khamwas returns home from the court of Ramses II, dismayed that no one is able to read the sealed writing bound to the Nubian magician’s body. The national implications for the Egyptians’ inability to comprehend the Nubian’s puzzle must be considered astounding. When his son Si-Osire (the disguised Ḥor-son-of-Paneshy or Horusson-of-the-Wolf) discovers the reason for his father’s crestfallen demeanor, the young Si-Osire then proposes to go to court to read the writing without unsealing it. The importance of divine writing is also found in Setne I ’s special Book of Thoth, which is stolen first by Naneferkaptaḥ and then by Setne Khamwas. Finally, with regard to the phenomenon of writing appearing where there was none before, note that in an Assurbanipal inscription, a Neo-Assyrian king reports an oracle that appeared to him in a dream, on the pedestal of a statue of Sîn, the moon-god. 545 This is divine writing appearing in a dream, however, not a narrative about an awake king. 543.  On Assyrian heroines and Esther, see Dalley, Esther’s Revenge at Susa, 112–36. 544.  Valeta, Lions, Ovens, and Visions, 95–103. See also Donald C. Polaski, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin: Writing and Resistance in Daniel 5 and 6,” 649–69. The author of Dan 5 is negative about the empire and has his own political stance. 545.  Oppenheim, The Interpretation of Dreams in the Ancient Near East, 249. See also Ida Fröhlich, Time and Times and Half a Time, 43.

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The motif of the forgotten or unknown wise man who is produced to great acclaim before the king is also found in other court tales: Dan 2; the Joseph story; the Esther story; the Story of Aḥiqar; Merire and Sisobek, Papyrus Westcar, Setne II, and perhaps the “Imprisoned Magician” story in Ḥi-Ḥor and Ḥenenu (although in the case of this Egyptian story, the ending is not preserved in either of its two versions). The motif of using a riddle to test a sage is found in the biblical story of Solomon (especially 1 Kgs 10:1, the visit of the Queen of Sheba) 546 but also in examples of the court-tale genre, such as the contests between Aḥiqar and the Egyptian pharaoh in the Syriac and later versions of the Story of Aḥiqar 547 and in the incident of Setne II, in which the king requires someone to read the sealed scroll bound to the Nubian magician’s body to prevent Egypt’s being shamed.

5.3.6.  Daniel in the Lions’ Pit: Daniel 6 The tale of Daniel in the lions’ pit or den is unique and has no exact parallels in the ancient Near East. The story is subject to hyperbole at some points: the stone that covers the opening of the pit/den is sealed with the king and his officials’ signet rings (if this is indeed hyperbole; perhaps the seal is meant to be an official mark only and not intended to lock the pit physically); and the men who had slandered Daniel as well as their entire families are thrown into the lions’ pit and are killed immediately by the lions (a gruesome abundance of flesh in MT and Th). There is also much irony, especially in the MT version: the play on the word ‫דת‬, “law,” to contrast the law of the Medes and Persians versus God’s law; the use of the idiom ‫אכל קרצין‬, “eat the pieces,” for the slander of the conspirators against Daniel (when it is they who will be eaten by lions); etc. 548 But it is a tale of court conflict like Dan 3; Bel and the Serpent; Esther; Joseph; the rivalry between Bagasraw and Bagoshî in Tales of the Persian Court (4Q550d–e), the Story of Aḥiqar; Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh; Merire and Sisobek in Papyrus Vandier; the Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy; the “Imprisoned Magician” texts; and others. There is some influence on small details from elsewhere in the Bible; for instance, 1 Esdras and Esther may have affected the OG in the count of Persian satraps (127) and 1 Esdras in the term “young men” for the three ministers. 549 Any historical Persian background to this story set in Cyrus’ reign is slight; for example, the historical Persian satrapies numbered anywhere from 20 to 30, but the OG and MT have increased this number by 100 (127 in the OG and 120 in 546.  Collins, Daniel, 253–54. 547.  The Seqenenre parallel to the Egyptian episode in Aḥiqar also has a contest of wits between kings (see section 3.3.1.3.1 above). 548.  On this point, see especially Meadowcroft, Aramaic Daniel and Greek Daniel, 98–100. For more wordplay, see Valeta, Lions and Ovens and Visions, 103–9. 549.  James A. Montgomery, “The ‘Two Youths’ in the LXX to Dan. 6,” JAOS 41 (1921), 316–17.

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the MT and TH). The report that the laws of a Persian king are immutable may be found in some literary traditions, such as in Esth 1:19 and 8:8 and Diodorus Siculus 17.30. 550 In addition, Daniel’s practice of praying three times a day as described in Dan 6 was no doubt a Jewish custom that influenced early Christianity but was not fixed before the first century b.c.e. 551 The lions’ pit (‫ ּגֻּבָא‬in Aramaic; λάκκος in OG), the main motif of the story, has no parallels in the ancient Near East: there is no evidence of containment of lions in a pit whose opening (‫ ;ּפּום‬στόμα) could be shut with a stone. However, there are mentions of a lion’s den or pit elsewhere in the Bible and in at least one Mesopotamian literary text, and there is iconographical evidence from Mesopotamia and Egypt for the display of lions in parks or pens. In the Bible, in Ezek 19:4, 8–9 the image of a lion captured in a pit-trap is used as an allegory for the deportation to Babylon. 552 Metaphorical usage of this image also occurs in the Psalms (57:5; 22:14; 91:13) and at Qumran (1QH 5:6–7, the Hôdāyôt or Thanksgiving Hymns). Another suggestion has been that the Greek Bel and the Serpent was an earlier version on which Dan 6 relied. 553 Karl van der Toorn considers the composition called Ludlul bēl nēmeqi to be a Mesopotamian prototype for the tale in Dan 6. 554 The poem Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, “I shall praise the Lord of Wisdom,” is more often compared to the book of Job because it is a poem that portrays a prosperous person at court reduced to disgrace and disease by the god Marduk and subsequently rehabilitated. 555 In the first of four tablets, the sufferer (later identified as someone named Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan, perhaps the author of the poem; III 43) depicts his misery at being disgraced at court, losing favor with the king, and being harassed by a gang of seven colleagues who have conspired against him. In tablet II, the speaker sinks into various illnesses and afflictions, in tablet III he has dreams of rehabilitation sent by the god 550. But Collins notes that Herodotus 3.31 includes the verdict of a judge that Cambyses as king of the Persians is allowed to do “whatever he pleased” (in this case, to marry his sister) (Collins, Daniel, 268). 551.  Ibid., 269. 552.  On the fighting of warriors with lions as a motif in the Bible, see Christophe Lemardelé, “Asiatic Lions versus Warriors: Archaic Motifs in Biblical Texts,” Semitica et classica 3 (2010), 223–27. 553.  Montgomery, Daniel, 270; Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 134–38. See also section 4.2.5.3 above. 554.  Karel van der Toorn, “Scholars at the Oriental Court: The Figure of Daniel against its Mesopotamian Background,” in The Book of Daniel: Composition and Reception, 1.37–54; and idem, “In the Lions’ Den: The Babylonian Background of a Biblical Motif,” 626–40. 555. First edition: W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960), 21–62, 343–45. Additional texts of the poem are found in D. J. Wiseman, “A New Text of the Babylonian Poem of the Righteous Sufferer,” Anatolian Studies 30 (1980), 101–7; A. R. George and F. N. H. al-Rawi, “Tablets from the Sippar Library, VII: Three Wisdom Texts,” Iraq 60 (1998), 187–206. For an excellent recent translation in English, see B. R. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature (Bethesda, MD: CDL, 1993), 1.308–25.

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Marduk, and in tablet IV he recovers after surviving a river ordeal that proves his innocence and praises Marduk for healing him. In a section reconstructed by von Soden, the protagonist of Ludlul depicts Marduk as putting “a muzzle on the mouth of the lion that was devouring me,” 556 probably imagery conveying the protagonist’s triumph over the other courtiers, who, like a devouring lion, had been slandering him. Van der Toorn says Dan 6 used Ludlul’s plot, with its competing-scholars motif, vindicated courtier and metaphorical mention of a lion, 557 and then also took literally a further leonine metaphor, this time the only Akkadian literary mention of a lions’ pit, from a Neo-Assyrian letter of Urad-Gula dated to about 664 b.c.e. 558 Urad-Gula is known from many sources: he began his career as a deputy of the chief physician in Sennacherib’s reign, was a court exorcist in Esarhaddon’s time, but was removed from the court when Assurbanipal’s acceded to the throne in 668. In spite of at least two petitions on his behalf by his father in 667–66 b.c.e. and several attempts of his own, in which he claims that the king is greatly indebted to him, he seems not to have been restored to the court, perhaps because of some personal grudge between Assurbanipal and Urad-Gula. (Parpola speculates on the basis of certain other letters that Assurbanipal holds Urad-Gula responsible for his wife’s miscarriage when he was a crown prince 559). In the letter SAA 10 294, Urad-Gula is upset but no longer asking for his position back—only that he be granteded two draft animals and spare clothing and perhaps other equipment with which to farm. Van der Toorn finds the following lines depicting Urad-Gula’s persecution by his fellow scribes interesting: 39 [. . . UD]-mu ù MI ina IGI! gab-ʾi ša UR.MAḪ ⸢LUGAL! ú⸣-ṣal-[la] 560 40 ina ŠÀ ú-ka-la-a-ti la sa-am-mu-ú-n[i!. . . ] 41 [. . .] . ŠÀ!-bi bir-ti mi-iḫ-ri-⸢ia!⸣ 556. Wolfram von Soden, “‘Weisheitstexte’ in akkadischer Sprache,” in TUAT III.1, 110–88, esp. p. 134; also in Wolfram von Soden, “Das Fragen nach der Gerechtigkeit Gottes im Alten Orient,” MDOG 96 (1965), 41–59, but without discussion. 557.  Van der Toorn, “Scholars at the Oriental Court,” 52. 558. Simo Parpola, Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars (SAA 10; Helsinki: Helsinki University Press, 1993) no. 294, obverse 39–41 (p. 232). This text was also edited by Parpola in “The Forlorn Scholar,” in Francesca Rochberg-Halton, ed., Language, Literature, and History: Philological and Historical Studies presented to Erica Reiner (AOS 67; New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1987), 257–78. 559.  Parpola, “The Forlorn Scholar,” 269–71. 560.  Line 39. Note that gabʾu “pit” is a hapax legomenon in Akkadian, used nowhere else but in this text (see Parpola, “The Forlorn Scholar,” 276); more expected would have been the common term gubbu with the similar meaning “well,” cognate with Hebrew geb “pit, ditch,” Ethiopic gəbb “pit, ditch, cave,” etc., Arabic ğubb “well, pit,” and Aramaic-Syriac gōb/gubbāʾ “pit.” On gubbu, see CAD G 117; and von Soden, AHw, 1.295. The root of gabʾu must not be gbb but gbʾ “to collect” and cognate to Hebrew gebeʾ “cistern,” and Ethiopic gəbʾ   “cave” (contra Parpola’s suggested cognates, which all have the root gbb; note

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[. . . ] Day and night I pray to the king in front of the lion’s pit [ . . . which . . .] are not . . . with morsels [ . . .] my heart amidst my colleagues [ . . . ] 561

Once again, the same metaphorical connection exists between competing scholars’ actions and the behavior of lions, as in Ludlul. Although van der Toorn says that the images of lions attacking and the lions’ pit are taken over literally by the Daniel author-compiler in Dan 6, there is no firm evidence of this. 562 On the other hand, leaving the mention of “shutting the mouth of the lion” aside, Ludlul is a good parallel or analogue to more than one of the Daniel conflict-stories in its depiction of rival courtiers, albeit in poetic, highly stylized form. Nonetheless, the pit with a stone to close its entrance is hard to imagine. According to Hartman and Di Lella, there is “no ancient evidence for the keeping of lions in underground pits, apart from the present story and perhaps its variant in 14:28–42 [Bel and the Serpent].” 563 Charles claimed that “in such pits animals could not have lived save for a very short time.” 564 Most of the time, commentators merely state that since it is known from texts and iconography that lions were kept in captivity in Babylon, the author and his audience must have been familiar with the pit as a means to keep them. 565 On the other hand, it is possible that commentators have unnecessarily thought of the pit as a hole in the ground or a cave, rather than a sunken pen. Zoological gardens and hunting parks were known throughout the ancient Near East (Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt), and the keeping of lions as pets in the palace or on the palace grounds is found as well. 566 The Neo-Assyrian king Assuralso von Soden, AHw, 1.272, who hesitantly puts our text under gabʾu “Gipfel” and says it is unclear). See Wolf Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez (Classical Ethiopic): Geʿez-English / English-Geʿez with an index of the Semitic roots (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991), 176–77. The two roots gbb and gbʾ seem to exhibit semantic mixing in some nominal forms. 561.  Parpola does not translate sa-am-mu-ú-n[i and speculates that it may be from samû, “to hesitate, to slacken” (Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars, p. 356). In “The Forlorn Scholar” published six years previously, he tentatively translates it “languished” (p. 263). 562.  Van der Toorn also says that the author of Daniel took the fiery furnace imagery concerning the exodus literally for his ch. 3 story of three companions. 563.  Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 199; brackets mine. They also compare the lions’ pit of Daniel to the hypogeum of the Roman Colosseum of a much later period, the hypogeum being the place in which lions were held before being brought up to the arena. 564.  Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel, 156. 565.  Kottsieper, Zusätze zu Ester und Daniel, 268. 566.  On Mesopotamian and Persian parks and zoos, among others see Bejamin Foster, “Animals in Mesopotamian Literature,” in A History of the Animal World in the Ancient Near East, 271–88, esp. p. 286; Wolfgang Fauth, “Der königliche Gärtner und Jäger im Paradeisos: Beobachtungen zur Rolle des Herrschers in der vorderasiatischen Hortikulture,” Persica 8 (1979), 1–53; D. J. Wiseman, “Mesopotamian Gardens,” Anatolian Studies 33 (1983), 137–44; Jean-Jacques Glassner, “A propos des jardins mésopotamiens,” Res orientales 3 (1991), 9–17, esp. p. 10. On lions in captivity in Mesopotamia: see W. Heimpel, “Löwe. A. I. Mesopota-

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nasirpal II (884–859 b.c.e.) captured 15 lions together with 50 lion cubs that he raised and kept in his residences in Kalah and elsewhere (AKA 202 iv 24–28). 567 Lions were sometimes released from cages and hunted in a special garden (ambassu) at the bottom of a hill that allowed for public viewing: Room C of Assurnasirpal’s palace in Nineveh has a depiction of this scene in a relief, and rooms from the palace probably led out to the garden. 568 In Egypt, Rameses II famously kept lions in a zoo at Qantir, and he and other pharaohs had war lions and tame lions. 569 The tomb of First Dynasty King Hor Aha at Abydos contains the bones of young lions, and a lion-breeding station was located at Abusir in the Ptolemaic period, both demonstrating the raising of lions in captivity. 570 A stone block from the Aten temple at Karnak in Egypt (probably dating to the beginning of the Amarna period) provides some iconographical help for picturing sunken pens for lions. This block has a relief of a garden on it containing many animals, including lions, in pens that can be overlooked from terraces or balconies at various points and from a large pavilion in the center, with a second-floor viewing area. 571 On this carved block, the perspective of the mien,” RlA 7 (1987–90), 80–85, esp. 81–82. On lions and parks in Egypt, see Renate MüllerWollermann, “‘Zoologische Gärten’ als Mittel der Herrschaftslegitimation im Alten Ägypten,” WdO 33 (2003), 31–43. For lions as a companion of the Egyptian pharaoh while hunting, see Douglas Brewer, “Hunting, Husbandry and Diet in Ancient Egypt,” in Billie Jean Collins, ed., A History of the Animal World in the Ancient Near East (HdO 64; Leiden: Brill, 2002), 427–56, esp. p. 454; during battle, see Eric Van Essche, “Les félins à la guerre,” in Luc Delvaux and Eugène Warmenbol, eds., Les divins chats d’Égypte: un air subtil, un dangereux parfum (Leuven: Peeters, 1991), 31–48, esp. p. 35. Müller-Wollermann describes four types of zoological gardens in Egypt: hunting parks or enclosures for hunting; animal zoos for the pleasure of observers; menageries of predominantly exotic animals held in a confined space for the edification of the observer; and, the collection of animals in iconography or texts but not in nature (depicting a scientific or prescientific compilation). 567.  As in Egypt, the hunting and killing of lions was in earlier Mesopotamia the prerogative of the king alone: Chikako E. Watanabe, Animal Symbolism in Mesopotamia: A Contextual Approach (Wiener Offene Orientalistik 1; Vienna: Institut für Orientalistik, Universität Wien, 2002), 83–88. On the lion hunt, see Michael B. Dick, “The Neo-Assyrian Royal Lion Hunt and Yahweh’s Answer to Job,” JBL 125 (2006), 243–70. Assurnasirpal’s palace iconography depicts the lion being released from a cage: R. D. Barnett, Sculptures from the North Palace of Assurbanipal at Nineveh (668–627 b.c.) (London: British Museum, 1976), pl. lvii. 568.  Dick, “The Neo-Assyrian Royal Lion Hunt, 255. 569.  Ramses II and III both had war lions, and both Tutankhamun and Ramses VI kept a tame lion: Dagmar Kleinsgütl, Feliden in Altägypten (Veröffentlichungen der Institut für Afrikanistik un Ägyptologie der Universität Wien 80; Beiträge zur Ägyptologie 14; Vienna: Institut für Afrikanistik und Ägyptologie der Universität Wien, 1997), 45. 570.  Müller-Wollermann, “Zoologische Gärten,” 39; Dorothea Arnold, An Egyptian Bestiary (The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 52; New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 17. 571. Pierre Anus, “Un domaine thébain d’époque ‘amarnienne’ sur quelques blocs de remploi trouvés à Karnak,” BIFAO 69 (1971), 69–88. This block was also studied by M. Hammad and Hans F. Werkmeister, “Haus und Garten im alten Ägypten,” ZÄS 79 (1954), 104.

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artist is as if looking down at the garden from above but with certain features in profile (people, animals, trees, but also architectural elements such as columns, stairs, or windows). Outside the enclosure wall, perhaps near the entrance, there are two domed pens touching each other, one with a male lion below and a lioness above (although only her feet are preserved), and the other pen with either one or two felines (the preserved figure is probably female, and there is perhaps space enough above her for another animal that is not preserved). There is a flight of stairs of different lengths for each pen, one outside the enclosure wall and the other inside it, leading to what is interpreted as wooden doors in each pen and to what is probably a high, raised balcony of lattice-work for viewing the beasts. 572 In the depiction, the pens are made to look like domed houses, but this may be a stylization for either sunken cages or pits. In the analysis of Egyptologists Rosalind and Jack Janssen, the depiction of the pens on the block is “reminiscent of the bear pits at Berne.” 573 Thus, texts and iconography from across the ancient Near East show that royalty had a strong interest in game parks and in keeping animals in captivity. Furthermore, rulers wanted to show off these beasts and events to an appreciative public. In iconography, lions are shown in pens below viewing terraces and hills, balconies, or pavilions, as depicted in the relief from Assurnasirpal’s Nineveh palace and the stone block from Karnak. The artists portray these installations and features without modern artistic perspective, so it is often difficult to determine the depth of a pen or the height of a viewing area. At any rate, it might be better to broaden our understanding of what an ancient Near Eastern “pit” for lions might be, even if the matter of the stone cover or door that can be sealed by a signet ring still remains awkward to envisage in Dan 6.

5.3.7.  Susanna and Bel and the Serpent Since we have already discussed many aspects of the two narrative additions to Greek Daniel, it seems appropriate also to consider their potential analogues or sources. There are some biblical analogues and parallels to Susanna. Most obviously, the bathing scene is reminiscent of the setting in the David and Bathsheba story in 2 Sam 11; there, too, the woman bathes in her garden and is overseen by a lustful man or men who seek to take advantage of her. 574 In the 572.  Anus, “Un domaine thébain d’époque ‘amarnienne’ sur quelques blocs de remploi trouvés à Karnak,” 74–75, fig. 3 and pl. 15. Within the boundary wall are other enclosures with cattle and other animals. The park is perhaps meant to be viewed by king as well as subjects, because of the central pavilion with a viewing terrace (Müller-Wollermann, “‘Zoologische Gärten’ als Mittel der Herrschaftslegitimation im Alten Ägypten,” 36). 573. Rosalind and Jack Janssen, Egyptian Household Animals (Aylesbury: Shire, 1989), 57. 574.  Collins notes that “erotic motifs became more commonplace in the Hellenistic period”; in Jubilees 33:1–9a and the Testament of Reuben 3:11, Reuben sees Bilhah bathing and desires her, while in The Shepherd of Hermas: Visions 1.1.1–9, Hermas sees Rhoda bathing and sins in his heart (Collins, Daniel, 431).

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Deuterocanon, Judith is also known for bathing (outside the Assyrian camp, for the purpose of purification), however, this titillating information in a story that gravitates around Judith’s sensuality is not further developed in the narrative ( Judith 12:7–8). Elders or elders as judges are mentioned in the Bible as well (e.g., Deut 21:18–21; Ruth 4; Ezek 8:1, 14:1, 20:1; and Jer 29:1). The Jewish community in Babylon is illuminated by a few cuneiform texts with prosopographic and other information, such as the fifth century Murašû archives from Nippur, which contain many Jewish names belonging to the Murashû business family. 575 Moreover, the Weidner Tablets from the sixth century give the information that King Jehoiachin and his five sons in exile received rations while in capitivity. 576 Furthermore, cuneiform tablets record a “city of Judah” or “Judah-ville” (āl-Yāhūdu) in Babylonia in 498 b.c.e. (probably located around the Babylon-Borsippa area), providing evidence that even after the Babylonian period, Jews remained in Mesopotamia. 577 Finally, the story of Susanna appears in Alf laylah wa-laylah and other Arabic works; its literary parallels in Arab Muslim tradition have been well explored by Fabrizio A. Pennacchietti in two monographs. 578 Pennacchietti examines an anonymous, undated Arabic manuscript called Ḥadīṯ al-jum-jumah maʿa al-malik (“The Story of the Skull and the King”) and suggests that an Indo-European myth (via Iranian folklore) was the source of the earliest Jewish and Islamic versions of Susanna. The story of Susanna is also found in the tale of Sukanyā in the Mahābhārata, 579 in which an old sage marries the king’s daughter Sukanyā. 580 575.  For the Murashû texts, see A. T. Clay, Business Documents of Murashu Sons of Nippur Dated in the Reign of Darius II (Philadelphia: University Museum, 1912). On Akkadian documents regarding Jews in the Eastern exile, among others, see Bob Becking, “‘We All Returned as One!’ Critical Notes on the Myth of the Mass Return,” in Oded Lipschits and Manfred Oeming, Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006), 3–18. Laurie Pearce mentions additional texts that she is publishing; “New Evidence for Judeans in Babylonia,” in Lipschits and Oeming, Judah and the Judeans in the Persian Period, 399–411. 576.  E. F. Weidner, “Jojachin, König von Juda, in babylonischen Keilschrifttexten,” in Mélanges Syriens offerts à Monsieur René Dussaud, secrétaire perpétuel de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (Bibliothèque archéologique et historique; Paris: Geuthner, 1939), 2.923–25; A. Leo Oppenheim in ANET, 308. 577. See Becking, “‘We All Returned as One!” 11–12; F. Joannès and A. Lemaire, “Trois tablettes cunéiformes à onomastique ouest-sémitique,” Transeuphratène 17 (1999), 17–34. Laurie Pearce, “New Evidence for Judeans in Babylonia,” 399–411, esp. pp. 401ff. 578.  Fabrizio A. Pennacchietti, Susanna nel deserto: Riflessi di un racconto biblico nella cultura arabo-islamica (Turin: Silvio Zamorani, 1998); idem, Three Mirrors for Two Biblical Ladies: Susanna and the Queen of Sheba in the Eyes of Jews, Christians, and Muslims (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias, 2006). See also the penetrating review of the first book by Brannon Wheeler in the Journal of Arabic Literature 30 (1999), 195–97. 579.  Mahābhārata 3(33.d), 121–25, the Sukanyā story in Book 3, “The Book of the Forest”; see J. A. B. van Buitenen, The Mahābhārata (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975), 456–62. 580.  The old sage meets Sukanyā one day when he is standing at a lake to which the king and his entourage come to amuse themselves. The sage falls in love with the king’s daughter, but

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The girl is a good wife, but at one point two aśvins from among the gods see her bathing and lust after her. Coming to her, they tell her to cast off her husband. She declines, and they propose that they turn her husband into a young man, after which she may choose among the three. When they carry out their threat, she chooses her husband. This is the same beginning preserved in the al-Jumjumah, but the al-Jum-jumah names the woman who is propositioned Sausana and describes her birth. It is a detective story like the biblical story, and the two important elders are caught. Pennachietti thinks that the biblical and Ethiopic versions derive from a common Iranian source and influenced the Samaritan version, the story of Susanna in the Ḥadīṯ Dāwūd, in the al-Jum-jumah, and as a story in Alf laylah wa-laylah. With regard to Bel and the Serpent, several influences or parallels have been proposed, in addition to Dan 6. Herodotus 1.183 mentions a statue in the temple of Bel of which the author of Bel may have known. There has also been a suggestion that the story was influenced by the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish’s portrayal of Tiamat, the premordial goddess of the ocean. 581 Kottsieper links the Bel episode to a controversy in Babylonian religion (dating this part of Bel and the Serpent to the end of sixth or beginning of the fifth century, while he would place the rest as coming from Palestine a little later). 582 He cites the killing of a dragon in the tradition of Lu-Nanna, the fourth apkallu after the flood, who in the bīt mēseri series drives a dragon out of an Ishtar temple. In a further connection to OG Bel, Kottsieper notes that in some dialects of Aramaic apkallu does not mean simply “sage” but “priest.” However, there is no evidence that live snakes were worshiped in Babylon. Knibb finds the worship of live snakes in the Greek world or possibly Palestine, and less likely Egypt, to be more convincing. 583 Those who say the location of the story is Egypt include Moore, Wysny, and Roth. 584 Wysny thinks that Bel and the Serpent was composed in Alexandria in the third century b.c.e., modeled on a cult known as Agathos Daimon, which commemorated the encounter of Alexander the Great with a snake at a shrine in honor of the animal. The stories circulated orally until 145–88 b.c.e., at which time they were written down. Roth argues that the polemic against zoolatry newhen he tries to speak, he is too hoarse to be heard. Sukanyā pokes the old sage in the eyes out of curiosity because he is standing so still and had turned into an anthill overgrown with vines. In retaliation, the sage causes one of the entourage to become constipated, and the king knows that someone has annoyed the old sage. The daughter comes forward, the king asks the sage to forgive her, and the sage says he will if he can marry the girl. 581.  Among others, see F. Zimmermann, “Bel and the Dragon,” VT 8 (1958), 438–40. For objections, see Collins, Daniel, 415. 582.  Kottsieper, “Zusätze,” 252ff. 583.  Knibb, “The Book of Daniel in Its Context,” 30. 584.  Moore, Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah: The Additions, 127–28; Andreas Wysny (Die Erzählung von Bel und dem Drachen: Untersuchungen zu Dan 14 (SBB 33; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1996), 200–211; Wolfgang M. W. Roth, “For Life, He Appeals to Death (Wis. 13:18): A Study of Old Testament Idol Parodies,” CBQ 37 (1975), 21–47.

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cessitates the composition of the story in first-century b.c.e. Egypt. 585 On the other hand, Collins thinks that the story was unlikely to have had its origin in the Egyptian diaspora during the Hellenistic period “because there is no clear example of Egyptian-Jewish literature from this period in a Semitic language.” 586 He favors a composition in Jerusalem and notes that the story “makes little attempt to be fair to Babylonian religion.” However, note that Daniel is described in OG Bel v. 2 as both “priest” (ἱερεύς) and “companion/confidant of the king of Babylon” (συμβιωτὴς τοῦ βασιλέως βαβυλώνος), something that has troubled some commentators, may be perfectly reasonable in an Alexandrian setting. If the OG edition is to be placed in Alexandria, as most scholars do, then perhaps the Egyptian understanding of priests is applicable. As we have seen, Egyptian priests of most kinds—not only the ḥry-tb, “lector-priest,” but others from the “House of Life”—were not only religious officials but were advisers to the king and common players at court. The Greek term ἱερεύς in the trilingual decrees (the Memphis Decree of March 27, 196 b.c.e.; the Canopus Decree of March 7, 238 b.c.e.), which lists the ranks of Egyptian priests hierarchically, is a generic term for “priest,” corresponding to the Egyptian wʿb. 587 Thus, the term ἱερεύς in Bel may not be any particular kind of priest but someone serving a king: in the Egyptian mind he would be thought to have the royal court as his “arena of display and conflict.” 588 The idol parody within Bel and the Serpent has parallels in other biblical literature, such as Isa 44:9–20; Hab 2:18–19; Jer 10:1–16; Ps 115, 135; and the Letter of Jeremiah in the Deuterocanon. But the biblical examples are not narratives, and they do not refer to the destruction of the idols, as Collins notes. 589 Moore compares Bel to Jer 51:34–35 and 51:44: “Nebuchadrezzar, the king of Babylon, has devoured me . . . he has swallowed me like a monster. . . ,” and “I will punish Bel in Babylon and take out of his mouth what he has swallowed.” Still, such parallels “are apt, but they are by no means adequate to generate the story.” 590 The better parallels are with Jubilees 12 and with Josephus’ Against Apion 1.22.201–204. In Jubilees 12, Abraham and his father debate the efficacy of idols, and Abraham gets up in the night to burn the house in which they are kept (see also the Apocalypse of Abraham 5 for other traditions about Abraham destroying idols). The tradition of Abraham’s destruction of the idols also became part of 585.  Roth, “For Life, He Appeals to Death (Wis. 13:18),” 43. 586.  Collins, Daniel, 418. However, some of the texts on Papyrus Amherst 63, written in Aramaic language but Demotic script in the Hellenistic period, might qualify. 587.  Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites, 207–8. See the Greek titles and their corresponding Egyptian terms in François Daumas, Les moyens d’expression du grec et de l’égyptien comparés dans les décrets de Canope et de Memphis, 179–85. 588.  Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites, 223. 589.  Collins, Daniel, 417. 590.  Moore, Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah: The Additions Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah: The Additions, 122–23.

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the Islamic tradition behind the Kaʿba at Mecca: after destroying the false idols at the site in the days of his father, Abraham returns with his son Ishmael to rebuild it (Qurʾan 21:57–58). Lawrence Wills finds a parallel in Josephus’ Against Apion 1.22.201–204: the story of Mosollamus, the Jewish archer, which Josephus attributes to Hecataeus of Abdera (fourth century b.c.e.). 591 Mosollamus shoots a bird being observed for augury by some pagan soldiers who are hoping for a sign of a good outcome for their military campaign. In so doing, he demonstrates to the soldiers that the bird could not have had any foresight: if it had, it would not have been at the wrong spot at the wrong time.

5.4.  New Insights on the Composition of the Book of Daniel 5.4.1.  Interrelationships of Hellenistic Literatures One value of this study is to urge the inclusion of Egyptian material in the discussion of the sources, analogues or parallels, influences, and development of Daniel—especially the Daniel narratives—in a more comprehensive manner than has been done previously. As noted above, while the Daniel visions have prompted several comparisons with Egyptian proto-apocalypses, only a few scholars, such as Lebram, Müller, Wilson, and Collins, have argued for parallels between the Daniel stories and Egyptian literature. 592 Collins has objected, however, to the suggestion that the tales are primarily connected with the Egyptian, rather than the eastern, diaspora. He concludes that “none of the analogies, however, is so close as to require Egyptian provenance, and there is no apparent reason why tales composed in Egypt should be set in Babylon.” 593 Nevertheless, we are continually gaining more evidence that in fact writers in first-millennium Egypt, whether they were native Egyptians or Aramaic-speakers displaced from Syria-Palestine or Mesopotamia, sometimes did choose to place their compositions in Mesopotamia or the east, and they knew enough about eastern traditions to aspire to verisimilitude in their fiction. The reverse is not true; Mesopotamians seem not to have chosen western settings for their literature. 591.  Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 132. 592. See Lebram, Das Buch Daniel, 10, 20; Müller, “Mantische Weisheit und Apokalyptik,” 291; Collins, The Apocalyptic Vision of the Book of Daniel, 33; and Wilson, “From Prophecy to Apocalyptic,” 91. The connections made are usually to the Egyptian texts in which a sage predicts the future before a king, such as the Prophecies of Neferti or Papyrus Westcar, but the Demotic Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy is also sometimes mentioned in passing because of its “court conflict” and wisdom motifs; see Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 42–44, who proposes (inaccurately) that ʿOnchsheshonqy’s similarities to court legends are only due to Persian influence. 593.  Collins, Daniel, 50 n. 417.

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Among other fictional works in the Egyptian language, we have the Late Period story on the Bentresh stela, which is set in Bakhtan (possibly Bactria), a place to be located somewhere in Mitanni. 594 The New Kingdom Doomed Prince also takes place in Mitanni. Works in Aramaic from Egypt that are set in Mesopotamia include the story of Aḥiqar and “The Revolt of Babylon” (= “The Tale of Two Brothers”) on Papyrus Amherst 63 (see below in this section) from the fifth and possibly third century b.c.e., respectively. 595 Furthermore, observes Donald Redford, “the authors of Demotic texts are evidently aware of a wide range of foreign literatures—at the least of Babylonian, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, although not necessarily at firsthand—and adopted and adapted themes, stories, and structures from them.” 596 Several Demotic stories from the beginning of the era have Egyptians going to Assyria, Babylon, and even India (Djoser and Imhotep; Naneferkasokar; the Egyptians and the Amazons from the Inaros cycle; etc.). As noted elsewhere, without disputing the many literary parallels that scholars have made between Daniel and Mesopotamian literature, the historical inaccuracies in the portrayal of the Babylonian and Persian setting of the Daniel stories (such as the confusion of Nebuchadnezzar with Nabonidus in Dan 4, the title of “king” given to Belshazzar, the statement that Darius was a Mede, etc.) may argue for greater distance between the author and the East. In fact, there is growing evidence for an international Aramaic literary continuum in the first millennium b.c.e., a continuum that incorporated and bridged cultural traditions from Mesopotamia to Egypt. André Lemaire has shown how influential Aramaic Tobit, Aḥiqar, and traditions about Daniel, Noah, and Enoch were on Hebrew literature. 597 Even before the Aramaic story of Aḥiqar was found in Egypt, Nöldeke suggested in 1879 that Egypt was Tobit’s place of composition (Tobit, which mentions Aḥiqar, is set in Assyria and may have originally been written in Aramaic, given the Qumran texts of Tobit in that language). 598 Moreover, Sara Raup Johnson sees the Hebrew Esther as coming from a Persian matrix 594.  The stela dates to the Persian or Ptolemaic period, but the story is antedated to the reign of Ramses II (Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, 3.90). 595.  For examples of Canaanite influence on Egyptian literature and vice versa, see Donald Redford, “Ancient Egyptian Literature: An Overview,” in CANE, 2231. He notes Canaanite deities and motifs in Astarte and the Sea (even in a Hurrian version); the Tale of Two Brothers; The Prince and His Fates = The Doomed Prince; and Truth and Falsehood, which mirrors the Hurrian tale Good and Bad. 596.  Redford, “Ancient Egyptian Literature: An Overview,” 2240. 597. André Lemaire, “Aramaic Literature and Hebrew Literature: Contacts and Influences in the First Millennium b.c.e.,” 9–24. 598. T. Nöldeke, “Die Texte des Buches Tobit,” Monatsberichte der königlich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (1869), 49–69, esp. pp. 54–59. Others have since followed him, but Fitzmyer says, “None of the reasons given for this provenience of the Book of Tobit is really convincing, because they do not adequately explain the Assyrian setting of the events or the connection with Palestine in the book” (Joseph A. Fitzmyer, Tobit [Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003], 50–54, esp. p. 54.

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born in a newly “open” society. 599 One must also consider the many Aramaic texts from Qumran that seem to incorporate material from beyond Judea or Palestine (e.g., the Tales of the Persian Court, in addition to Babylonian traditions found in a text like the Prayer of Nabonidus). Furthermore, if one turns to the Aramaic texts in Egypt from the Persian and Hellenistic periods, the transcultural nature of Aramaic literature is even more readily apparent. Based on themes originating in their homelands (Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia), 600 compositions from Arameans and Aramaic-speaking Jews interact with and incorporate new motifs, characters, and other elements from Egyptian literature. 601 An Aramean and Aramaic-speaking Jewish presence in Egypt is known from perhaps the eighthcentury b.c.e. onward, especially from the Syene and Elephantine colonies. The cross-cultural genres represented in Aramaic texts from Egypt include the wise courtier or magician tale (the “court tale”), pseudo-prophecy, proverb, epic, and poetry. In addition, there are at least three Aramaic compositions that have Demotic as well as Aramaic witnesses: the Story of Aḥiqar; the Ḥor bar Punesh/Pawenesh tales; and the Inaros stories, preserved in Aramaic in the Sheikh Faḍl inscription and in a Demotic story cycle from the late Ptolemaic and Roman periods. As noted above in section 3.3.1.3, the fifth-century Aramaic version of the Assyrian story and proverbs of Aḥiqar found in Egypt is the first extant textual incarnation of what became a popular tale across the Mediterranean and the Near East. In between the fifth-century Aramaic composition and the medieval versions in Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, and other languages, at least two Demotic fragments from the first century c.e. can be identified, testifying to the continuing popularity in Egypt of this story with a Mesopotamian setting. The narrative about the rise and fall of an Assyrian counselor at the royal courts of Sennacherib and Esarhaddon in the seventh century b.c.e. has long been considered a “court tale.” In this, it shares the motif of the wise courtier who succeeds where others fail (see also the stories of Joseph, Esther, and Daniel in the Hebrew 599.  Sara R. Johnson, “Novelistic Elements in Esther: Persian or Hellenistic, Jewish or Greek? ” CBQ 67 (2005), 571–89. 600.  See Bezalel Porten, “Settlement of Jews at Elephantine and Arameans at Syene,” in Oded Lipschits and Joseph Blenkinsopp, eds., Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 451–70. According to Porten, the Jews had come from Judah, while the Arameans had come most immediately from the region around Samaria in Israel but were ultimately from Aramean communities in Syria (perhaps from Arpad) and from Mesopotamia (probably the land of Rāšu/Arāšu between Babylonia and Elam) as indicated by Papyrus Amherst 63; see Richard C. Steiner, “The Aramaic Text in Demotic Script,” in COS, 1.309–27. In contrast, note that Vleeming and Wesselius believe the Rash/Arash of the papyrus to be in southern Lebanon or northern Israel instead: S. P. Vleeming and J. W. Wesselius, Studies in Papyrus Amherst 63: Essays on the Aramaic texts in Aramaic/demotic Papyrus Amherst 63 (2 vols.; Amsterdam: Juda Palache Instituut, 1985–1990), 1.9. 601.  See, for instance: Bezalel Porten, “The Prophecy of or bar Punesh and the Demise of Righteousness,” 427–66, pls. 35–36; and Holm, “Daniel 1–6: A Biblical Story-Collection,” 149–66.

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Bible; in various tales in Herodotus; in 1 Esdras 3–4; and in several texts from Egypt). On the other hand, the Ḥor-son-of-Punesh/Pawenesh (ḥwr br pwnš  ) tales, attested both in a fifth-century b.c.e. Aramaic version (TAD C1.2 recto) and in later Demotic traditions, describe a royal wise man and magician who is capable of reading secret writings, animating wax figures, etc. This figure is not the wise courtier of Aḥiqar but someone who fits into the Egyptian tradition of the wonder-working professional found in such Egyptian compositions as the Tales from King Cheops’ Court (Papyrus Westcar) and Setne I and II. On the recto of the fragmentary Aramaic papyrus TAD C1.2, Ḥor bar-Punesh (Horus-son-ofthe-Wolf) casts spells on the boats of pharaoh after making a prophecy. 602 The prophecy, either good or bad for the pharaoh, is that his “bones will not go down to Sheol.” This biblical term must have found its way into the Egyptian text from Syria–Palestine. On the verso of this same Aramaic papyrus, there is a pseudo-prophecy or proto-apocalypse that Porten calls “The Demise of Righteousness” (TAD C1.2 verso). As in the case of Egyptian pseudo-prophecies, such as the Prophecies of Neferti and others, this one seems to depict a time of chaos when people will go hungry, the righteous perish, and slaves will kill their masters. Then, a “man of Zoan (Tanis)” is to appear and a child is to be born; perhaps, as in the Prophecies of Neferti, this is a prediction of a new king who will set Egypt right. If the pseudo-prophecy is at all connected to the Ḥor-son-of-Punesh magician tale on the recto of the papyrus, it continues a tradition of associating a courtier to prophecy, found in many Egyptian compositions and in the Daniel stories. In his most recent edition of the Ḥor-son-of-Punesh texts in 2004, Porten concluded that they have much in common with Egyptian magician and pseudo-prophetic literature, as well as the book of Daniel in the Bible. 603 Another Aramaic text from Egypt is the Sheikh Faḍl Cave inscription (TAD D23.1) from the fifth century b.c.e. It is probably to be identified as the earliest version of a tale or tales about Inaros (Ynḥrw in Aramaic, ı͗r.t-ḥr-r.r=w in Demotic), the Egyptian hero who lies at the center of an extensive epic cycle in Demotic from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. 604 This hero and other members of his family take part in the revolts against the Assyrians by the Nubian Taharqa of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty and Necho I of the Twenty-Sixth. 602.  In line 13 of the unpublished Demotic text (Pap. Berlin 30023 [+ 23725 + 15675]), Ḥr son of PꜢ-wnš uses a magic formula (hp-n-sh) to animate a ship of wax; see R. K. Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, 70–71. 603.  This point was also made in my 1996 Ph.D. dissertation, A Biblical Story-Collection: Daniel 1–6 (Johns Hopkins University); but see Porten, “The Prophecy of Ḥor bar Punesh and the Demise of Righteousness,” 427–33; and Holm, Daniel 1–6, 149–66. 604. Thus identified by Günter Vittmann and Kim Ryholt independently, Vittmann without reference to the stories of Inaros (Vittmann, “Ägyptische Onomastik der Spätzeit,” 92; and Ryholt, “The Assyrian Invasion of Egypt,” 496). See also Holm, “The Sheikh Faḍl Inscription in Its Literary and Historical Context,” 193–224.

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Finally, we have the Aramaic Papyrus Amherst 63 in Demotic script from Egypt dating to the early Hellenistic period. 605 The twelve-foot-long papyrus written on both sides contains a sizeable collection of poems, hymns, and rituals associated with a New Year’s festival and concludes with an Aramaic version of the seventh-century rivalry between the two royal brothers, Assurbanipal of Assyria and Shamash-shum-ukin in Babylon (cols. 18–23), called the “Revolt of Babylon” or “Tale of Two Brothers.” 606 Full comprehension of this difficult papyrus is still in the early stages, but it represents a unique amalgam of religious concepts from Syria–Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. There is a prayer for the rising of the Nile next to hymns to Mesopotamian and Syrian-Aramean deities. It also includes a sacred marriage ritual, laments over the destruction of Rash/ Arash (the original home of the Arameans who produced the text), and many other texts of typically Mesopotamian genres. The papyrus even contains psalms in cols. 12–13 that are most likely Syrian renditions of psalms from the Hebrew Bible (Psalm 20 and perhaps others). 607 The Aramaic literary corpus of Egypt thus constitutes a rich international literature that transcends and bridges different cultural traditions in various languages, in a cross-pollination of genres and motifs. The resulting Aramaic literature both reshaped the preexisting Syro-Mesopotamian traditions and enriched the local Egyptian realm.

5.4.2.  The Provenance of the Daniel Stories: Eastern or Western Diaspora? Within the Book of Daniel are various Mesopotamian themes, in addition to the Mesopotamian setting. It seems that some traditions about Nabonidus have been transferred to Nebuchadnezzar, the king better known to Judeans because of his destruction of Jerusalem in 586 b.c.e.: the concentration on dreams in Dan 2 605.  Vleeming and Wesselius date the papyrus to the fourth century b.c.e., and Steiner dates it to the third or second century b.c.e. See Vleeming and Wesselius, Studies in Papyrus Amherst 63, vol. 1; Richard C. Steiner, “Papyrus Amherst 63: A New Source for the Language, Literature, Religion, and History of the Arameans,” in Studia aramaica: New Sources and New Approaches, 199–207; Richard C. Steiner, “The Aramaic Text in Demotic Script,” in COS 1.309–27. 606.  Richard C. Steiner and Charles F. Nims, “Ashurbanipal and Shamash-shum-ukin: A Tale of Two Brothers from the Aramaic Text in Demotic Script, Part 1,” RB 92 (1985), 60–81; Vleeming and Wesselius, Studies in Papyrus Amherst 63, 1.31–37. 607.  See, for instance: S. P. Vleeming and J. W. Wesselius, “An Aramaic Hymn from the Fourth Century b.c.” BiOr 39 (1982), 501–9; Richard C. Steiner, and Charles F. Nims, “A Paganized Version of Psalm 20:2–6 from the Aramaic Text in Demotic Script,” JAOS 103 (1983), 261–74; Ingo Kottsieper, “Anmerkungen zu Pap. Amherst 63: I: 12,11–19: Eine ara­mäische Version von Ps 20,” ZAW 100 (1988), 217–44; K. A. D. Smelik, “The Origin of Psalm 20,” JSOT 31 (1985), 75–81; Ziony Zevit, “The Common Origin of the Aramaicized Prayer to Horus and of Psalm 20,” JAOS 110 (1990), 213–28; Martin Rösel, “Israels Psalmen in Ägypten? Papyrus Amherst 63 und die Psalmen XX und LXXV,” VT 50 (2000), 81–99.

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and 4 (Nabonidus was historically a great dreamer); and the sojourn in Teimāʾ (Dan 4). In addition, the fall of Babylon in Dan 5, which is said to occur during the reign of Belshazzar, may well go back to Nabonidus, the last historical king of Babylon. There are other motifs drawn from sources throughout the ancient Near East: the sentence to death by fire (although death in a furnace appears in Egyptian texts and iconography much more frequently than elsewhere); the importance of dreams, generally; the keeping of lions. On the other hand, with regard to genre, although Mesopotamia has abundant evidence of court professionals at work in a royal setting, it has not written them down in court tales, as Beaulieu has noted. 608 The Aramaic Story of Aḥiqar in part has a Mesopotamian setting and may or may not go back to a historical Mesopotamian courtier, but it was part of the literary corpus at Elephantine in Egypt and may well have been composed there. (It also has an Egyptian episode in the later versions, which may also have been part of the fifth-century Aramaic version.) Even though most scholars have considered Palestine or Mesopotamia to be the place of composition of Daniel, some scholars, such as Leo Purdue and others, have suggested that the Book of Daniel arose in Egypt. Purdue believes that [T]he book in its various stages of development emerged in a sapiential community located in Egypt in the early second century and made its way to Judea, probably Jerusalem, no later than the reign of Antiochus IV. In Judea the collected narratives were taken up by an apocalyptic community in which wisdom continued to play an important role in shaping their worldview, which is expressed in a series of eschatological visions concerning the future. 609

Jürgen C. H. Lebram argues that one can trace the origin of the Daniel stories in the work of internationally oriented wisdom teachers who had a relationship to the Jewish Diaspora, probably the Diaspora in Egypt. 610 The Aramaic chapters are international and universal and correspond to the work of wisdom teachers. Aramaic is the appropriate language for a book set in the Diaspora in a foreign court; this is even more true if the audience were the Semitic-Syrian minority in Egypt (Aramaic would be more appropriate than either Greek or Egyptian). 611 Rainer Albertz (who claims that the earliest form of these chapters was in Greek) has suggested that Dan 4–6 originated among the Alexandrian upper class at the time of Ptolemy II 285–246 b.c.e. Dan 2–7 then was produced during a revolt against the Ptolemies ca. 200 b.c.e., and, finally, the rest of the book of Daniel in Maccabean times. 612 Authentic Babylonian details in Daniel “attest to the 608.  Beaulieu, “Official and Vernacular Languages,” 195. 609.  Leo G. Perdue, The Sword and the Stylus: An Introduction to Wisdom in the Age of Empires (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 361. 610.  See also Lebram, “The Piety of the Jewish Apocalyptists,” 171–210. 611.  Lebram, Das Daniel Buch, 19. 612. Albertz, Der Gott des Daniel, 161

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persistent cultural legacy of Assyria and Babylon in the Hellenistic period,” but the book does not have to have been written in the Babylonian exile. 613 The Daniel stories arose in some region where access to both Mesopotamian and Egyptian traditions was possible. That region is less likely to have been Mesopotamia than Egypt or Palestine, since it is literature from Egypt and Palestine that utilizes Mesopotamian or Eastern themes and settings, rather than vice versa. The social setting of Daniel remains murky, but the final MT form of the book is tied to the identity of the maśkîlîm who are so positively viewed in Dan 1 and 12. Contra Plöger, Hengel, and Haag, they are probably not the ḥasidîm of the Maccabees but scribes from the upper class who were well-educated Jews trained in mantic wisdom in Palestine. 614 Dan 1 introduces the maśkîl (“the wise”) and helps identify who are maśkîlîm; it suggests that even some unfaithful Israelites had śēkel (“insight”), but only the true maśkîlîm like Daniel and his friends have the true śēkel. 615 However, earlier stages of the book, especially the stories, may or may not have originated in Palestine or have been composed there.

5.5. Summary The provenance of the Daniel tales may still be an open question, but there was likely more influence from Egypt than has previously been supposed. It seems unwise to limit research to Mesopotamia for sources and analogues, especially now that it seems clear that there are court tales, cycles of court tales, and even story-collections to be found in Egypt. It is even possible that, when the Daniel stories (or at least some of them) were independent, they were composed along the lines of “The Revolt of Babylon” in Papyrus Amherst 63 or Aḥiqar: stories set in Babylon based on some distant Babylonian traditions but written down in Egypt by Arameans or Aramaic speakers. Ida Fröhlich even sees Daniel as a kind of Aḥiqar and suggests that Daniel’s Babylonian name, Belteshazzar, might be the orginal name of that character. 616 As noted above, court tales were composed in Asia Minor, Persia, Judea, and Egypt, but they do not seem to have been a productive genre in Mesopotamia, even if they were given that setting by authors outside the region. Moreover, there was a vibrant new internationalism in the late Persian and Hellenistic period, especially in Egyptian and Palestinian literature. Egyptians themselves were writing stories in their own language but setting them elsewhere. 613.  Collins, “Current Issues in the Study of Daniel,” 6. 614.  Wooden, “The Book of Daniel and Manticism,” 200. 615.  According to Boccaccini, the Daniel group was one of two branches of the Zadokites, along with the Sadducees; the Danielic group had a third way of being Jewish that lay between that of the Zadokites and the Enochic priests (Boccaccini, Roots of Rabbinic Judaism, 151–201). 616.  Fröhlich, ‘Time and Times and Half a Time’, 20.

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Daniel chs. 2, 3, 4, and 5 are especially good candidates for having had an earlier stage of composition in Egypt. Dan 2, 4, and 5 portray Daniel as one of the ḥarṭummîm, a term derived from Egyptian ḥry-tp, “lector-priest” or “magician,” whose functional sphere specifically included administrative duties, knowledge of ritual texts and secret writings, dream interpretation, and wonder-working. Moreover, although Dan 2 and 4 are probably tied to Nabonidus (instead of Nebuchadnezzar), the last historical king of Babylon who exiled himself to Teimāʾ and was known for his dreaming, they also reveal specifically Egyptian aspects: the offering of sacrifices to a courtier who has predicted the future or performed a wonder (Dan 2:46); and the traditions of oracles and royal usurpation found in the Alexander Romance and Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh. The story of the three friends in the fiery furnace in Dan 3 in its turn may have been greatly influenced by the Egyptian court tales in which this motif occurs (throwing courtiers into a furnace), in addition to the abundant other texts and iconography in Egypt that display this theme.

C

h a p t e r

S

i x

Conclusions This study took as its starting point the words of Alexander Di Lella concerning the structure of Daniel, with its discrete units: “The Book of Daniel . . . is unique among all the books of the Bible, Old and New Testament, in that each of these sections forms a distinct unit separable from the rest. . . . Yet there are certain features in the book that seem to point to one author or at most two for the whole work.” 1 The much over-looked episodic nature of Daniel has lent itself to analysis of the book, especially the court tales of Dan 1–6, in terms of the story-collection, a genre best-known from medieval European literature but with ancient roots. As a protean genre that compounds and subordinates others, it is found as early as the ancient Egyptian Tales from King Cheops’ Court in Papyrus Westcar of the mid-second millennium b.c.e. Moreover, the need to frame the words of the wise, to collect stories, fables, and proverbs, is a standard feature in story-collections of any period, not just the ancient world. Story-collections are meant to be viewed on their own generic terms, as the product of a compiler who is also an author, whose vision and message shapes the individual stories and arranges them with purpose in a conscious process.

6.1.  Daniel Set Against a Story-Collection Typology Structurally speaking, the parts that make up story-collections fit together because of genre, theme, organizing principles, and framing material, such as links between stories, or a frame narrative into which the stories have been embedded. Dan 1–6 as a story-collection belongs to one of Helen Cooper’s simplest kinds: primarily single-genre, having no frame narrative, and a limited epilogue, prologue, and linking between stories. 2 However, doxologies open or close some of the stories. These elements seem to be independent of the function of the whole book, and the doxologies at the end of chs. 3 and 6 are likely part of the framing material for an independent collection of MT 4–6. The placement of 1.  Hartman and Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, 9. 2.  Cooper, Structure, pp. 9ff.

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the doxologies seems significant for determining that some form of MT Dan 4–6 once circulated independently of the book, either as an earlier collection or as an apocopated edition of Daniel. This early collection is balanced in that each of the three stories contained in it take place in the reign of a different king (Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, and Darius) and explore different varieties of royal hubris. Moreover, as confessions, the doxologies provide for their audience something similar to the moralizations of some medieval story-collections. The royal statements of Nebuchadnezzar at the beginning and Darius at the end praise the God of Daniel after they have each learned a lesson: just as arrogant, weak kings have turned toward the Most High, so too should the reader. Furthermore, the middle story of Belshazzar’s refusal to praise God in Dan 5 and his subsequent death when Babylon is overthrown supplies a stark, cautionary contrast to the two stories on either side. The beginning and ending stories help to form a ring composition with their more positive portrayal of those kings’ attitudes in this small collection. A longer collection, Daniel (1)2–6, adds more courtiers, more Nebuchadnezzar stories, and more foretelling. The new courtiers are the three friends of Daniel: Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. The additional Nebuchadnezzar stories in chs. 2 and 3 reveal a far more capricious and cruel king than the Nebuchadnezzar of ch. 4. The new foretelling in ch. 2 comes in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, and it is apocalyptic or eschatological in outlook (although before this story was shaped by the collection, it may have been less so), in contrast to the foretelling in chs. 4 and 5. In addition, chs. 1 and 6 form a kind of inclusio in that both have to do with holding fast to Jewish religious practices in the face of opposition, not giving in to foreign power and its dominant culture. Minimal narrative links between the stories of Dan 1–6 are provided by the regnal years or simply the names of three different kings placed at the beginning of the stories. Chronological ordering adds a semblance of historical authenticity to the stories and is frequently used in story-collections to provide structure to the work as a whole. The cross-references between the stories in MT are minimal, as is often true among the narratives within a story-collection. For example, ch. 1 mentions the three friends taken into exile with Daniel, and ch. 2 incorporates them into the story to some degree: they are told by Daniel to “seek mercy from God” concerning the intended annihilation of all the Babylonian wise men. These references to the friends pave the way for ch. 3, in which they are the featured characters: there is no mention of Daniel in the story of the fiery furnace. In chs. 4–6, the opposite is true: Daniel is the protagonist and there is no hint of the three friends. Other cross-references are provided in shared phrases such as the terms for the court professionals between the stories (‫חרטמין‬, “magicians”; ‫אׁשפין‬, “exorcists/enchanters”; ‫מכׁשפין‬, “sorcerers”; ‫כׂשדין‬, “Chaldeans”; ‫חכימין‬, “wisemen”; and ‫גרזין‬, “diviners”). More linking material is provided by chs. 4 and 5 in that the queen enters the presence of the king Belshazzar in ch. 5 to tell him

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of the wise man Daniel, who had been able to prevail over various difficulties and problems in the days of his father, Nebuchadnezzar (ch. 4). Cross-references in the Th edition of Daniel tend to be the same as in the MT, but OG’s crossreferences are very different. In the latter, there are only limited connections between chs. 4 and 5 (in contrast to MT Daniel) but many small connections between the other chapters. 3 Open-endedness is another feature that Dan 1–6 shares with the storycollection genre. Each of the six episodes has a closed structure and is complete in itself, but there is nothing in the prologue or linking material that necessarily limits the number of possible stories. Any number of stories (or visions, if one thinks of the entire book) could have been fit into the chronological sequence. Four Daniel stories, including ch. 1, occur during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, but the stories of Dan 5 and 6 take place in the reigns of Belshazzar and Darius the Mede, respectively, and Th Bel and the Serpent adds a Cyrus story with two episodes (in OG Bel, the king is not named). Other kings are named but have no story (or vision) in the book: MT/Th/OG Dan 9:1 includes in the royal line-up a certain Ahasuerus/Xerxes, the father of Darius the Mede; Th’s Bel and the Serpent adds a king Astyages before Cyrus the Persian. 4 The interest of the reader is justifiably piqued and intrigued about the potential for more edifying and diverting stories about the great Daniel’s experiences in the eastern Diaspora. That more stories could have been included is especially apparent from the queen’s speech to Belshazzar about Daniel in ch. 5. The queen describes a time when Belshazzar’s father, Nebuchadnezzar, had occasion to name Daniel “chief of the magicians” (‫ )רב חרטמיא‬and we realize that a fascinating story (or stories) about the incident has not been included in the biblical Daniel collection. She further alludes to Daniel’s proven abilities in dream interpretation, riddle explaining, and “knot untying” (mēšārē qiṭrîn, usually translated as “problem solving” but indicating some ability in magic). Up to this point in the book of Daniel, only the first talent has been demonstrated, so the narrator is allowing the queen to hint at other episodes or stories in the Daniel cycle, perhaps some of which the ancient audience would have known. Alluding to other stories that remain untold or are told elsewhere is well-known feature from not only an ancient classical collection such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses but also the mature medieval storycollections of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccacio’s Decameron. The stories are permanently set in the exile, however, and the return of the Jews is not mentioned. Therefore, Daniel and his friends could potentially outwit the Babylonians, the Medes, and the Persians indefinitely. 3.  However, there are not enough connections to justify the priority of the Pap 967 order of chapters; pace Lust, “Septuagint Version of Daniel 4–5,” 40–46. 4.  OG witnesses Syh and ms 88 add Artaxerxes in 5:31 (he receives the kingdom after Belshazzar).

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The popular and entertaining Daniel tales when joined together are thus transformed into a story-collection that is encouragement literature for Jews in the exile, examples of how to succeed under foreign rule while also resisting total assimilation to the dominant culture and religion. When they are later placed alongside the visions, they are transformed again into the foundation and frame for the somber and apocalyptic visions of Dan 7–12. The dual functions of almost all story-collections—instruction and entertainment—are at work here, too. The tales give hope and demonstrate that a righteous Jew can survive the exile, like Daniel, but they are also extremely entertaining compositions in which the audience can enjoy Daniel’s consistent superiority over gullible, capricious foreign kings and their skilled but ineffectual royal courtiers. Another conclusion of this study is that wide divergences between the OG (on one hand) and the MT and Th Dan (on the other hand) in chs. 4–6 are examples of multiple literary editions, alternate tellings of the same core story (section 4.2.2). This conclusion supports other scholars who have recently argued this (e.g., Ulrich, Koch, Henze, Wenthe, Kellenberger), with evidence from the story-collection genre, especially collections that have more fluid or unfixed texts. Rather than seeing the relationships between the main Daniel editions as a clearly drawn genealogical tree with stemma, a synoptic model is more useful. The MT and OG represent parallel literary developments, neither of which can be considered the Urtext or origin of the other. Furthermore, as with other preprint manuscripts, it is incorrect always to imagine that variant editions must be “fallen” or somehow corrupted from an author’s original. In addition, it is likely that the arrangement of the final forms of the main Aramaic-Hebrew and Greek editions—the MT, the OG, and Th—is also meant to convey meaning by their author-compilers. In their final forms, these editions have become a collection of both stories and visions and are thus transformed into the macro-genre “apocalypse” to some extent (a genre that compounds other genres), but their ordering makes for specific diachronic effects that are important. MT’s arrangement takes the form of stories as a frame for the visions, as Henze has noted, which focuses on Daniel as a mantic courtier. The older stories of “serious entertainment” (so called by Philip Davies) are gathered together and the visions are appended, transforming the entertainment into a prelude and foundation for apocalyptic. Genre takes priority over chronology and the stories of chs. 1–6 remain tightly bound together, and no vision interrupts them; the setting of the first visions, chs. 7 and 8, is allowed to return to the days of Belshazzar (whose reign ended in ch. 5), and the vision of ch. 9 is a flashback to the reign of Darius (ch. 6), while the final vision of chs. 10–12 occurs in the reign of Cyrus the Persian (who has no story but whose reign is mentioned in 1:21 and 5:29 [OG 5:28]). The emphasis throughout is on Daniel as a mantic courtier, an inspired interpreter of dreams and solver of riddles and mysteries, who then begins to dream his own unsettling dreams that require an angel’s interpretation.

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On the other hand, both Th and the OG diminish the focus on the apocalyptic visions by beginning and ending their editions with stories. Most Th manuscripts take the form of a Daniel vita, since they begin with Daniel as a young man in Susanna, progress with Daniel through the courts of Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Darius, and Cyrus (chs. 1–12) and end with Daniel as an aged companion to Cyrus in Bel and the Serpent. There are two chronological disorders in Th, however. The first is in Dan 1 where, since Th Daniel began with Susanna, ch. 1 appears as a flashback describing how Daniel got to Babylon. The second is in the middle of the book, when the stories set in Belshazzar and Darius’ reigns (chs. 5–6) are out of order with the first two visions (chs. 7–8), which take place solely in Belshazzar’s reign before his downfall, which is related in ch. 5. In the case of the unchronological chs. 7–8, Th corresponds to MT Daniel and is likely an emulation of that edition. However, in terms of its arrangement of stories, visions, and then a return to stories (Bel and the Serpent), Th Daniel lightens the message of the book, and it keeps its units on the same level—as episodes in the life of Daniel. In his old age, apparently after following the angel’s command in ch. 12 to “keep his visions secret and go on his way,” he returns to being a detective again, a role he played in his youth when he aided the falsely-accused Susanna. It also means a return to the Babylonian setting and moves away from the universalist message of the visions. The OG, as found in its oldest witness Pap967, displays less connection between episodes and more independence of the stories and visions: its compiler felt free to interrupt the stories and insert two visions set in the reign of Belshazzar (chs. 7–8) between chs. 4 and 5. This keeps the settings of the stories and visions in chronological order, and corrects MT’s chronology. On the other hand, the concern for chronological order shown for chs. 1–12 is not a concern for Pap967 in its conclusion. The OG places both Bel and the Serpent, where Daniel is an old man in an unnamed king’s reign, and Susanna, where Daniel is just a young man, at the end of chs. 1–12. (However, the hexaplaric witnesses to the OG, Syh and Ms88, place Susanna before Bel and the Serpent and unlike Pap967 they do not arrange chs. 1–12 in chronological order.) For the OG, this serves to return the book to the mundane life of exile, existence under foreign rule, in a ring composition. This “psychologically distances the reader from the crisis tone of the apocalypse and suggests that the End might not be so very close, after all.” 5 Furthermore, just as the beginning of the book in Dan 1 was set in king Jehoiakim’s reign and a self-ruled Jewish community in Judah, Pap967 (the oldest OG witness) ends with Joakim (Susanna’s husband and an elder) in a self-ruled Jewish community in Babylon. Since Susanna criticizes the Jewish elders in the Babylonian community, it is a reminder that self-rule can have its problems. Finally, the OG edition emphasizes the education of young people at its beginning 5.  Steussy, Gardens in Babylon, 171.

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and end. Dan 1 traces the training and formation of Daniel and his three friends in the Babylonian court of exile, and Susanna (OG’s final unit) praises youths because of their single-mindedness and claims that they are pious, with an eternal spirit of knowledge and understanding. These virtuous young people are said to be beloved by Jacob (i.e., the Jewish community at large), and the reader is encouraged to “watch out for” or “look after” them. The fact that duplicate narratives show up in the OG and Th (the prose addition of ch. 3 in both OG and Th; the prologue to OG Dan 5; and the duplicate lions’ pit stories in both OG and Th) but not in the MT may reflect something specific about the composition history of the Greek editions. Duplicate narratives tend to occur in story-collections with a less-fixed text that has not edited out duplicates (for example, the Grimms’ Fairy Tales and the Nights). In addition, at least one duplicate narrative in the Greek Daniel editions, the prologue to OG Dan 5, is best described as a “written prompt text” (in the style of Medieval sermon exempla or the abbreviated texts that story-tellers used for the Arabian Nights) in that it is not merely a variant of a story but a brief, unornamented narrative that served as a pattern for other tellings of the same tale. It is a story with the basic details or core of a plot, but without the suspense, characters’ reactions, or any of the other elaboration found in the main text of OG Dan 5 or even in MT/Th Dan 5.

6.2.  Daniel Set Against the Background of Ancient Near Eastern Story-Collections and Related Material In addition to story-collections from other areas around the Mediterranean, there are at least three from ancient Egypt (Tales from King Cheops’ Court in Papyrus Westcar, The Myth of the Sun’s Eye, and The Stories of Petese) and one from the Hurrian-Hittite sphere (the fable collection that was perhaps part of the HurrianHittite Song of Release/Epic of Emancipation). Moreover, the building blocks of Daniel’s story-collection, the generic conventions and stylistic devices, are evident in the many Near Eastern court tales and cycles of court tales, in addition to the story-collections. The fact that the same characters, themes, and sometimes whole stories appear in both independent tales as well as story-collections demonstrates the existence of a large common well of traditions and sources from which an ancient author-compiler could work. In the case of the main Daniel editions, the material appears in the biblical editions but also in the parabiblical Daniel traditions at Qumran and perhaps elsewhere, such as Josephus’ Antiquities and later works that have an earlier core (the Lives of the Prophets or the Chronicle of Jerahmeel). One important conclusion of this study is that Egypt, because it has an abundance of court tales that have often been overlooked, ought to be included in

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the search for sources for and analogues to Daniel. Previous commentators have looked primarily to Persia and Mesopotamia because of the setting of the Daniel narratives and have made few connections to court tales, themes, plots, etc., from Egypt, with the exception of the Instructions of ʿOnchsheshonqy and Aḥiqar. 6 Perhaps part of the reason for the neglect of the Egyptian tales is that Egyptian courtiers are usually priests and prophets, such as the ḥry-tb/tp, the “lector priest” or “magician,” and the stories about them are sometimes (but not always) tales of magic, while the Daniel stories portray a divinely inspired mantic whose abilities with magic are downplayed. However, the Egyptian professionals in fact were wise scribes and learned advisers par excellence who counseled the pharaoh on all kinds of matters and were themselves often viziers or princes. In that world, proficiency in rituals and magic made such a scholar also an expert in other matters such as medicine, politics, and international affairs. Aside from some very Egyptian topics such as wax animation, speaking with birds and animals, or descents into the Netherworld, Egyptian stories of successful courtiers otherwise share much with the non-Egyptian court tales such as Joseph, Esther, 1 Esdras 3–4, Aḥiqar, 4Q550 (Tales of the Persian Court), the Qumran Pseudo-Daniel texts, and Daniel 1–6. The courtiers participate in contests with others and their reputation is at stake (e.g., Papyrus Westcar; Setne II; Djoser and Imhotep/Life of Imhotep; Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh; perhaps Naneferkasokar). They save the king or his family, sometimes being called upon in the middle of the night to sort out the distress of a sleepless or otherwise afflicted king (e.g., Merire and Sisobek; Setne II; Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh). They cure the king of maladies (e.g., Merire and Sisobek, and possibly the story about a youth at the royal court in Papyrus Wien D 62, verso). They receive dreams (Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh, and Setne II) or they interpret dreams (Life of Imhotep = Djoser and Imhotep; and an unpublished Tebtunis text P. Carlsberg 465). They read sealed writings or are otherwise concerned with divine books (books written by Thoth in Setne I and in traditions about Imhotep and Petese; a bound scroll in Setne II). They perform wonders (Tales from King Cheops’ Court in Papyrus Westcar; Setne II; the imprisoned magician stories Ḥenenu and Ḥi-Ḥor; the Horus(-son-of)-theWolf texts in Aramaic and Demotic). The Egyptian court tales often recount the education of the successful courtier who excels beyond his peers (ʿOnchsheshonqy and traditions about Si-Osire). They sometimes portray him as forgotten, hidden, or imprisoned, only to be brought out when all the other courtiers fail to solve the problem (ʿOnchsheshonqy; Merire and Sisobek; the imprisoned magician stories). They foretell the future or utter prophecy ex eventu (Papyrus Westcar; Djoser and Imhotep; and the various proto-apocalypses with a court setting such as the Prophecies of Neferti, or perhaps the Horus-the-son-of-the-Wolf texts in Aramaic). 6.  See, for instance, Wills’ The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, 42–49.

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In the biblical stories that use the term *ḥarṭōm (the Joseph story, the Moses and Aaron magician contests of Exodus, and the Daniel stories), Daniel carries the most functions from that term’s original Egyptian sphere (ḥry-tb) and is the only Jewish person explicitly referred to as one of the ḥarṭummîn—in fact, he is their chief in Dan 4 and 5. Dream interpretation is central in both the Joseph and the Daniel stories, as is political advising. Magic and divination appear in the Moses and Aaron contests in Exodus and in the Daniel stories (but is only hinted at in the Joseph narrative, where Joseph is said to possess a divining cup). Moreover, the collection of the six Daniel tales finds a soft analogue with regard to structure in the Tales from King Cheops Court from the mid-second millennium b.c.e. in that both use a series of tales about ḥry.w tb to launch a foretelling of future kings or kingdoms. Certain of the stories in Dan 1–6 have been shown in this study to have closer specific connections to Egyptian motifs than has been previously recognized (see section 5.3 above). The strongest of these is the motif of the fiery furnace in Dan 3. Whereas other parts of the story are more generally Near Eastern and not specific to any region’s traditions or literature (building a great statue, etc.), the punishment of courtiers in a furnace as commanded by a king is a motif found in abundance only in Egypt. Although this motif appears in three Mesopotamian texts (two with a legal context and one fictional letter from a school exercise), the sheer quantity of its occurrences in Egyptian texts of all varieties (legal, historical, literary) and in iconography as well (especially in scenes of the roasting of the damned in the netherworld) is impressive. Most notable is the motif of burning in a furnace as it appears in stories that are of the same genre as the Daniel stories, four Egyptian court tales from the last half of the first millennium b.c.e.: the Instruction of ʿOnchsheshonqy, Merire and Sisobek in Papyrus Vandier, the Djedseshep story in P. Demotic Saqqāra 2, recto, and the embedded Pheros story in the Stories of Petese. There are other parallel motifs in the Daniel stories as well. The phrase “may this be for your enemies and not for you” in Dan 4:16, an apotropaic statement meant to will evil away from the king, can be compared to the insertion of nꜢ ḫryw n (“the enemies of ”) before pr-ʿꜢ (“pharaoh”) in Merire every time the story requires a description of something bad happening to Pharaoh. Moreover, a hard or soft analogue to Dan 4 can be found in Merib, the High Steward, and the Captive Pharaoh’s story of the kidnapped king from the fourth or third century b.c.e. King Badja is held in the wilderness against his will by the High Steward, who has taken over in his absence, and has become ill because he has rejected his deity. The king is ultimately saved by Merib, his only trustworthy courtier. (This story may even be a hard analogue to OG Dan 4, which emphasizes the usurper tradition more than MT Dan 4 and which also contains parallels to an episode in the Greek Alexander Romance.) Furthermore, the offerings to and worship of Daniel by Nebuchadnezzar after Daniel interprets his dream in Dan 2:46 might

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be explained as the customary honors given a wise courtier after the performance of a marvel or the foretelling of a prophecy such as those given Egyptian sages (in Papyrus Westcar, Setne II, Merire, the Prophecies of Neferti, among others). The honors are given even when the prediction is not favorable to the king in question. The stories in the Daniel Greek editions are very different, however. The courtly elements are much reduced, especially in Susanna (where the “court” is one of judgment by elders of the exilic community, not a royal court), and in both Susanna and Bel, Daniel is more of a detective, which “recalls the practical wisdom of Ahikar rather than the mantic wisdom of Daniel or Joseph.” 7 This may help to explain why the Greek stories are not part of MT Dan 1–6.

6.3.  Stages of the Book of Daniel One result of this study is the demonstration that discerning every step in the composition history of the Book of Daniel may not be an attainable goal. Although the OG and Th editions of Daniel are not uniform in their relation to MT (Th is close to MT in chs. 4–6 but less so outside of these chapters), they probably came in contact with MT more than once and, until their separate editions became more-or-less authorized and fixed, these editions were continually corrected toward each other in slight ways. As a result, Daniel’s text-critical and literary-critical issues are very complex and make for limitations in our ability to deal with certain problems that are inherent in the material. The core legends of chs. 2–6 (and perhaps the pith of ch. 1) originated in the late Persian and Hellenistic period and may have circulated independently. 8 At this early stage, the names of the heroes may not have been the names that became attached to them later. Some or all of them may have been preexisting stories about an unnamed court diviner; perhaps some of the stories were not really “Jewish” at first. They may well have been part of a much larger cycle of court tales circulating in the Near East in the last half of the first millennium b.c.e. in many languages: Aramaic, the language of diplomatic and literary communication of the day, but also Egyptian, Hebrew, and Greek in a newly international literary milieu. Evidence for the Jewish sub-set of this court-tale pool is found not only in the Greek Daniel editions but in the Qumran court tales, especially the parabiblical Daniel material, as well as 4Q550, Tales of the Persian Court (in which there are Jewish courtiers—Bagasraw, Patireza—with Persian names living in Persia), and perhaps Josephus and medieval Jewish compositions such as Jerahmeel, which may have Second Temple material. 7.  Collins, Daniel, 417. 8.  Only parts of ch. 2 must be as late as the Hellenistic period, possibly even the Maccabean. These sections may or may not have been part of the original story: 2:13–23[24], 29–30, [40]41–43, 47, 49.

Conclusions

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The name of Daniel was attached to the stories, probably because two traditions merged: (1) the Daniel of a pre-Israelite mantic, such as the Ugaritic Daniel who is reflected in Ezek 14:14, 20 and 28:3, and (2) the Daniel who was a priest in Ezra and Nehemiah. The story about the furnace became a story about three companions of Daniel, whose names were selected from Ezra–Nehemiah. In turn, the main connection between the stories and the visions of Daniel is the mantic nature of the hero—the hero who, in addition to other divinely aided wonders, interprets dreams and then begins to have his own. The hero of the Daniel stories that became chs. 2, 4, and 5 has much in common with the non-Jewish Egyptian courtiers. The portrayal of Daniel as a magician, as presented in chs. 4 and 5, likely shows influence from the Egyptian concept of the ḥry-tp. Despite the Mesopotamian setting, these chapters and ch. 3 may have originated in Egypt (see Perdue and others) or Palestine, but probably not Mesopotamia, created by Jews under the influence of cycles of stories about courtiers in Aramaic and Demotic. Albertz believes that the origin of chs. 4–6 was in Egypt (originally in Greek—that is, the OG edition). It probably was in Palestine or even in Egypt where all these influences could interact. (Egyptian literary compositions, like Hebrew and Aramaic ones, are often set in Mesopotamia or points east, whereas Mesopotamian literature did not often utilize Egyptian themes and motifs nor, as Paul-Alain Beaulieu has shown, is the “court tale” a Mesopotamian genre.) At some time, perhaps in the early Hellenistic period, wherever they originated, the gathering of these stories began and they were attached to the Jewish figure Daniel. While it is most likely that the stories in chs. 4–6 were a short, early, Aramaic collection (set off by a doxology at the beginning and at the end) as most scholars believe, it is also possible that chs. (1)2–6 were a first collection from which chs. 4–6 were selected later to form a tight, three-story ring composition in which the two kings in the outer stories (Nebuchadnezzar and Darius) are portrayed positively, while the middle, unrepentant king (Belshazzar) provides their contrast. If, however, Dan 4–6 was not a later, abbreviated collection but the first collection of stories, then we have to account for the collection’s expansion. The collection of three tales would have drawn two other tales about sages already in existence (chs. 2 and 3, without the prayers) to itself, and these were linked to the other Aramaic stories. The story about the three young courtiers thrown into a furnace became a story about three friends of Daniel who had also been taken captive to Babylon. Then ch. 2, which possibly was about an unnamed youth originally or a conscious adaptation of the Joseph story, also became attached, and the three friends were added to the plot in a few places to pave the way for the story in Dan 3. Although ch. 1 may have already been in existence as an independent story, it was made over as an introduction to the proto-MT collection, and then there were six narratives. Ch. 6 may well have ended at

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this time with a statement about the extent of Daniel’s career into Cyrus’ reign (6:29; although it may not have mentioned Cyrus until the visions were added, since the stories do not mention him). The core of ch. 7 may have been added soon after, shortly before the other visions, in that it makes explicit connections to chs. 2 (the dream of four kingdoms followed by a divine kingdom) and ch. 4 (the beast imagery) and because it is in Aramaic. Additional visions were added shortly thereafter, forming the MT final edition of Daniel. The story-collection about Daniel had become a frame to attach the wise words of Daniel himself; the Maccabean-era author-compiler saw Daniel as the perfect authority for (ex eventu) visions predicting the horrors of Antiochus IV that were happening in his or her own day in the early and mid 160s b.c.e. The author-compiler took his/her cue in format from the story units, and the book as a whole remained episodic, now with 10 units instead of 6. It is even possible, according to Ulrich, that more than one abridged collection of Daniel remained in circulation simultaneously with some form of MT Daniel throughout the last half of the second century b.c.e., each representing a different edition of Daniel. The so-called “Little Daniel” of Ebed-Jesu could refer to an early smaller collection of Daniel (among other options). Perhaps this accounts for the OG tales in Dan 4–6, which diverge widely from MT and Th, while also accounting for the little evidence that there was ever an independently circulating OG Dan 4–6. The OG tales were written down as a fresh telling of three stories that were already known and then they were very quickly incorporated into a larger OG Daniel book. Furthermore, perhaps part of the fiddling with chronology in OG Daniel and thus its insertion of visions (chs. 7–8) between ch. 4 and chs. 5–6 (in its pre-hexaplaric witness, Pap967) is a response to the multiple editions in existence; stories and visions were pulled together in a specific order in an attempt to make the book chronological. In general, the tales and visions in the OG edition are less integrated than in the MT or Th. On a related note, Loren Stuckenbruck has suggested that ancient authors selected items from the Daniel cycle to suit their own purposes even before the biblical Daniel was finalized. 9 For example, the Lives of the Prophets utilized only Dan 4; the Greek lectionaries picked up only chs. 3–6 in Greek; 1 Macc 1 refers briefly only to chs. 3 and 6 as examples of martyrdom, and Josephus only included versions of chs. 1–6 and 8. At some point, Bel and the Serpent and Susanna were attracted to the Daniel collection, apparently after having circulated independently in some form. Bel and the Serpent may have always featured the figure Daniel, whereas Susanna was drawn in only incidentally, and the name of Daniel was applied to its young judge at that point. Although the OG edition probably originated in Egypt sometime 9.  Loren T. Stuckenbruck, “The Formation and Re-formation of Daniel in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” 101–30.

Conclusions

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in the second half of the second century b.c.e., most scholars think that Th was produced independently but with an eye on both the MT and the OG in Palestine at a later date, perhaps the first century b.c.e. Both of the Greek editions share not only Bel and Susanna (in variant editions) but insert additions into ch. 3 (the Prayer of Azariah, a prose interlude, and the Song of the Three Young Men, in similar versions). In conclusion, the story-collection of MT Daniel as well as the book of Daniel as a whole should be placed within a broad international and transcultural literary milieu. Biblical Daniel utilized material from across the Near East, from Mesopotamia and Persia to Egypt, in the course of its development. Furthermore, stories of kings and their courtiers were a popular genre, and it is no surprise that the words of the wise—their prophecies, sayings, and visions—were part of or attached to court tales.

Bibliography Aarne, A. Verzeichnis der Märchentypen. Folklore Fellows Communications 3. Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1911. _______ .  The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography, translated and enlarged by S. Thompson. Folklore Fellows Communications 184. Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1961. Abbott, Nabia: “A Ninth-Century Fragment of the ‘Thousand Nights’: New Light on the Early History of the Arabian Nights.” JNES 8 (1949), 129–64. Abegg, Martin, Jr., et al., The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: The Oldest Known Bible Translated for the First Time into English. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1999. Adrados, Francisco Rodríguez. Estudios de forma y contenido sobre los géneros literarios griegos. Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 1982. _______ .  History of the Graeco-Latin Fable. 3 vols. Trans. Leslie A. Ray. Mnemosyne: bibliotheca classica Batava, Supplementum 201, 207, 236. Leiden: Brill, 1999. Albertz, Rainer. “Bekehrung von oben als ‘messianisches Programm’: Die Sonderüberlieferung der Septuaginta in Daniel 4–6.” Pp. 46–62 in Theologische Probleme der Septuaginta und der Hellenistischen Hermeneutik, ed. H. Graf Reventlow. Veröffent­ lichungen der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft für Theologie 11. Munich: Kaiser, 1997. _______ .  Der Gott des Daniel: Untersuchungen zu Daniel 4–6 in der Septuagintafassung sowie zu Komposition und Theologie des aramäischen Danielbuches. SBS 131. Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1988. Albrektson, B. “Reflections on the Emergence of a Standard Text of the Hebrew Bible.” Pp. 49–65 in Congress Volume 1977, ed. J. A. Emerton. VTSup 29. Leiden: Brill, 1978. Albright, W. F. “New Light on Early Recensions of the Bible.” BASOR 140 (1955), 27–33. Alderson, Brian. “The Spoken and the Read: German Popular Stories and English Popular Diction.” Pp. 59–77 in The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions, ed. Donald Haase. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Alexander, John B. “New Light on the Fiery Furnace,” JBL 69 (1950), 375–76. Alexander, P. A. “Retelling the Old Testament.” Pp. 99–121 in It is Written: Scripture Citing Scripture: Essays in Honour of Barnabas Lindars, SSF, ed. D. A. Carson and Hugh Godfrey Maturin Williamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Alfonsi, Petrus. La Discipline de Clergie: Disciplina clericalis, trans. Jacqueline-Lise GenotBismuth. Saint Petersburg: Evropeïski Dom / Éditions de Paris, 2001. Allen, J. and T. Moritz. A Distinction of Stories: The Medieval Unity of Chaucer’s Fair Chain of Narratives for Canterbury. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1981. Allen, James P. “A Monument of Khaemwaset Honoring Imhotep.” Pp. 1–10 in Gold of Praise: Studies on Ancient Egypt in Honor of Edward F. Wente, ed. Emily Teeter and

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John A. Larson. SAOC 58. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1999. Allen, T. G. The Book of the Dead. SAOC 37. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1974. Alster, Bendt. “Early Dynastic Proverbs and other Contributions to the Study of Literary Texts from Abū Ṣalābīkh,” AfO 38/39 (1991/92), 1–51. _______ .  Proverbs of Ancient Sumer: The World’s Earliest Proverb Collections. 2 vols. Bethesda, MD: CDL, 1997. _______ .  Studies in Sumerian Proverbs. Mesopotamia 3. Copenhagen: Akademisk, 1975. _______ .  “Sumerian Proverb Collection Seven.” RA 72 (1978), 97–112. _______ . “Sumerian Proverb Collection XXIV.” Assyriological Miscellanies I (1980), 33–50. _______ .  Sumerian Proverbs in the Schøyen Collection. CUSAS 2. Bethesda, MD: CDL, 2007. _______ .  Wisdom of Ancient Sumer. Bethesda, MD: CDL, 2005. Alster, Bendt, and Takayoshi Oshima. “A Sumerian Proverb Tablet in Geneva With Some Thoughts on Sumerian Proverb Collections,” Orientalia 75 (2006), 31–72, pl. iii. Alta Silva, Johannes de. Dolopathos. Trans. and ed. Brady B. Gilleland. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1981. Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 1981. Andreasen, Niels-Erik A. “The Role of the Queen Mother in Israelite Society.” CBQ 45 (1983), 179–94. Anus, Pierre. “Un domaine thébain d’époque ‘amarnienne’ sur quelques blocs de remploi trouvés à Karnak.” BIFAO 69 (1971), 69–88. Archer, Gleason L., Jr., trans. Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1958. Arnold, Dorothea. An Egyptian Bestiary. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 52. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995. Artola, George T. Pañcatantra Manuscripts from South India. Madras: Adyar, 1957. Asper, Markus. Kallimachos Werke: Griechisch und deutsch. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004. Asquith, Helen. “From Genealogy to Catalogue: The Hellenistic Adaptation of the Hesiodic Catalogue Form.” Pp. 266–86 in The Hesiodic Catologue of Women: Constructions and Reconstructions, ed. Richard Hunter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Assmann, Jan. Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt. Trans. David Lorton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. _______ .  “When Justice Fails: Jurisdiction and Imprecation in Ancient Egypt and the Near East.” JEA 78 (1992), 149–62. Avalos, Hector. “The Comedic Function of the Enumerations of Officials and Instruments in Daniel 3.” CBQ 53 (1991), 580–88. _______ .  “Daniel 9:24–25 and Mesopotamian Temple Rededications.” JBL 117 (1998), 507–11. Bahnām, Ghrīghūryūs Būlus. Aḥīqār al-ḥakīm. Baghdad: Majmaʿ al-Lughah al-Suryaniyah, 1976.

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Index of Authors

Pre-Modern Authors Aesop  4, 5, 9, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49,50, 51, 52, 53, 58, 59, 79, 81, 82, 94, 122, 198, 417, 418, 420 Boccaccio, G.  3, 9, 11, 14, 15, 18, 20, 24, 29, 31, 33, 34, 41, 42, 78, 218 Callimachus  46, 47, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 417 Chaucer, G.  3, 9, 11, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 26, 30, 32, 33, 34, 40, 42, 58, 219, 416, 482 Democritus  49 Diodorus Siculus  152, 437, 464, 560 Diogenes Laertius  49 Eusebius  406, 431, 436, 450 Geoffrey of Monmouth  19 Gower, J.  3, 11, 20, 32, 33 Herodotus  2, 47, 49, 50, 92, 123, 130, 131, 137, 152, 195, 198, 377, 378, 380, 386, 412, 413, 420, 429, 430, 436, 438, 445, 447, 448, 452, 460, 461, 464, 470, 475

Hesiod  46, 47, 54, 55, 412, 429 Jerome  260 John of Capua  22, 24 John of Ephesus  69 Josephus  6, 37, 53, 188, 216, 217, 244, 249, 260, 298, 304, 305, 310, 313, 331, 332, 359, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 375, 376, 377, 384, 420, 423, 424, 432, 471, 472, 485, 488, 490 Josippon  368, 369, 370, 371 Mâr Gregory John Bar-Hebraeus  76 Marie de France  19 Ovid  4, 5, 9, 19, 26, 31, 33, 40, 46, 55, 56, 57, 58, 328, 329, 482 Petrarca, F.  18 Pizan, C. de  18 Plutarch  419, 433, 442 Strabo  132 Valerius Maximus  438

Modern Authors Aarne, A.  195, 196, 197 Abbott, N.  25, 67 Abegg Jr., M.  221, 344 Adrados, F. R.  47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 60, 75, 418, 419, 420 Albertz, R. G.  2, 226, 227, 228, 231, 234, 241, 264, 266, 271, 312 Albrektson, B.  231, 232 Albright, W. F.  231 Alderson, B.  26 Alexander, J. B.  439 Allen, J. P.  100 Allen, J. T.  30 Allen, T. G.  138

Alster, B.  73, 74, 75 Alta Silva, J. de  20 Alter, R.  28, 274, 558 Andreasen, N.-E. A.  260 Anus, P.  467 Artola, G. T.  61 Asquith, H.  47 Assmann, J.  154, 444 Avalos, H.  24, 269 Baillet, M.  357 Baines, J.  160 Baker, S. W.  13, 260 Baldwin, J. G.  190

558

Index of Authors Ball, C. J.  204, 319 Barbotin, C.  442 Barguet, P.  164 Barnett, R. D.  467 Barns, J. W. B.  165 Bar, S.  110 Battaglia, S.  25 Bauer, D.  398, 439 Bauer, H.  105 Baumgartner, W.  193, 195, 204 Beaulieu, P.-A.  64, 75, 85, 86, 87, 88, 215, 251, 340, 342, 378, 386, 395, 439, 440, 441, 449, 451, 453, 460, 461, 477, 489 Becking, B.  469 Beckman, G.  71 Bedenbender, A.  200 Behrmann, G.  248 Beidler, P. G.  32, 134, 414, 415 Bénédite, G.  443 Benson, L. D.  40, 42 Bergman, J.  400 Bergmann, C.  203, 288 Bertholdt, L.  190, 231 Besançon, E. de  18 Betrò, M.  87, 88, 94, 166, 167, 168 Bevan, A. A.  109, 226, 344 Bevan, E. R.  431 Beyer, K.  84, 358 Bickerman  69 Bickerman, E.  2, 30, 41, 69, 438, 558 Biggs, R. D.  388 Bissing, F. W. von  445 Blackman, A. M.  114 Blasius, A.  399, 400, 407, 409 Blecua, J. M.  20, 22, 43 Bleek, F.  424 Bludau, A.  222, 227, 231, 237, 239, 286 Blumenthal, E.  93, 95, 178, 401 Blumenthal, F.  15 Blum, R.  53 Boccaccini, G.  348, 361, 411, 478 Bodi, D.  388 Bogaert, P.-M.  228, 279, 317 Boitani, P.  11, 25 Bondanella, P.  29 Borger, R.  108, 387, 395, 396, 397 Bottigheimer, R. B.  26 Bowman, S.  370

559

Branca, V.  32, 42 Braun, L.  58 Brenner, A.  25, 260 Bresciani, E.  93, 95, 102, 104, 106, 120, 130, 135, 136, 138, 147, 160, 168, 178, 179, 401, 402, 405 Brinkman, J. A.  391 Brockelmann, C.  21, 53, 61 Brock, S. P.  69 Brooke, G.  335, 336, 345, 349, 351, 353 Broshi, M.  343 Brown, D.  390 Brown-Grant, R.  19 Broze, M.  104 Brunner, H.  82, 103, 118 Brunner-Traut, E.  104, 120, 122, 128, 130, 154, 166 Bryan, W. F.  34 Buber, M.  28 Buck, A. de  104 Buitenen, J. A. B. van  469 Buitenwerf, R.  411 Butler, S. A. L.  108 Calvino, I.  9 Caminos, R. A.  155, 443 Campbell, K.  32, 65 Caporello-Szykman, C.  14 Cardascia, G.  439 Carmignac, J.  336 Carr, D. M.  28 Cassel, P.  65 Catsanicos, J.  70 Cenival, F. de  96, 119, 120, 122 Ceriani, A. M.  223 Černý, J.  101 Chaitanya, K.  60 Charles, R. H.  78, 109, 190, 227, 286, 292, 316, 321, 344, 366, 374, 466 Charlesworth, J. H.  80, 289, 354, 376 Charlesworth, M. P.  433 Chassinat, E.  443 Chauveau, M.  179, 443 Clanton Jr., D. W.  299 Clawson, R.  19, 95, 96, 123 Clay, A. T.  469 Clère, J. J.  442 Clermont-Ganneau, C.  322 Clines, D. J. A.  112

560

Index of Authors

Coats, G. W.  193, 194 Cochavi-Rainey, Z.  107 Collins, J. J.  1, 2, 3, 4, 16, 22, 29, 76, 185, 188, 190, 191, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 213, 214, 216, 217, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227, 231, 241, 245, 248, 249, 250, 252, 256, 257, 258, 260, 264, 266, 272, 273, 275, 281, 283, 285, 286, 287, 289, 291, 292, 295, 296, 298, 299, 305, 306, 307, 310, 313, 316, 317, 318, 319, 321, 322, 323, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 349, 350, 351, 352, 354, 356, 358, 361, 362, 367, 368, 374, 376, 380, 394, 395, 399, 411, 412, 420, 421, 426, 427, 428, 429, 430, 431, 432, 438, 450, 451, 460, 461, 463, 464, 467, 468, 470, 471, 472, 478, 488 Collombert, P.  120, 135, 146, 166, 420 Condren, E. I.  40 Contini, R.  80, 83, 87 Conybeare, F. C.  78, 455 Cook, E. M.  354, 355, 356, 357, 436 Cook, S. L.  282 Cooper, H.  3, 4, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 30, 31, 34, 40, 45, 95, 96, 186, 187, 188, 218, 220, 415, 480, 11 Coote, R.  28 Correale, R. M.  3, 32, 34, 415 Cousland, J. R. C.  79 Cowell, E. B.  60 Cowley, A.  78, 89 Coxon, P. W.  211, 212, 249, 306, 452 Crawford, S. W.  357, 358, 359 Crenshaw, J. L.  198, 199, 231 Cross, F. M.  221, 231, 232, 322, 336, 337, 338, 339, 354, 482 Crum, W. E.  103, 148 Cuddon, J. A.  13 Culley, R. C.  28 Cumont, F.  412, 428 Curnow, M. C.  18 Dagenais, J.  43 Dalley, S.  76, 86, 462 Darrow, W. R.  63

Dassow, E. von  72 Daube, D.  364 Daumas, F.  287, 471 Davenport, A.  3, 12 David, P. S.  229 Davies, P. R.  114, 200, 209, 245, 277, 284, 285, 286, 374, 384, 389, 424, 425, 452, 483 Day, J.  85, 201, 246, 247 Deborah, A. D.  358 Delcor, M.  193, 204, 248, 285, 292, 336 Dempster, G.  34 DePauw, M.  92, 93, 97, 121, 123, 134, 135, 138, 151, 166, 179 Derchain, P.  444 Derenbourg, J.  22, 24 Devauchelle, D.  102, 120, 402 Deventer, H. J. M. van  260, 306 Dick, M. B.  63, 467 Diebner, B. J.  108 Dieleman, J.  97, 98, 113, 115, 116, 138, 157, 286, 287, 386, 434, 471 Dietrich, M.  165, 247 Dihle, A.  54 Dijk, J. van  85 Di Lella, A.  1, 4, 41, 189, 190, 193, 195, 225, 227, 243, 277, 278, 305, 316, 340, 344, 423, 428, 438, 450, 466, 480 Dimant, D.  333, 334, 362 DiTommaso, L.  5, 37, 45, 191, 203, 204, 213, 234, 235, 243, 244, 251, 252, 257, 298, 309, 310, 313, 328, 332, 333, 345, 347, 348, 363, 367, 375 Dolce, L.  29 Dommershausen, W.  336, 450 Doran, R.  2, 29, 193, 196, 197 Dorival, G.  226 Dorothy, C. V.  365 Dossin, G.  421 Dressler, H. H. P.  245, 246 Driver, G. R.  439 Duchesne-Guillemin, J.  412 Dunn, J. D. G.  352, 354 Dupont-Sommer, A.  336, 339 Durand, J.-M.  421 Dussaud, R.  245 Ebeling, E.  75, 390

Index of Authors Edel, E.  108 Edgerton, F.  60, 419 Eichhorn, J. G.  231 Eichler, B. L.  71 Eisenman, R. H.  345, 355 Eissfeldt, O.  217, 321 Eitrem, S.  113 Elgvin, T.  362 Ellis, J. M.  26, 389 Engel, H.  2, 204, 292, 299, 314 Epstein, M.  65, 66 Erichsen, W.  103, 148, 154, 446, 447 Erman, A.  114, 115, 118, 154, 442, 445 Eshel, E.  334, 343, 449 Evans, C. A.  335 d’Evelyn, C.  18 Eyre, C. J.  117 Fabry, H.-J.  353, 354 Fales, F. M.  78, 81, 86, 108 Falk, H.  61 Falkowitz, R. S.  73, 74, 75 Fantuzzi, M.  54, 55 Farrell, A. J.  20 Faulkner, R. O.  93, 402, 444 Fauth, W.  466 Fecht, G.  93 Felber, H.  402, 403, 404 Feldman, L. H.  363, 364, 365, 366, 370 Ferdowsi, A.  63 Ferguson, J.  55 Ferrer, J.  79 Fewell, D. N.  194, 213, 260, 276 Finet, A.  421 Fischer-Elfert, H.-W.  150, 151, 152, 160 Fish, T.  439 Fitzmyer, J. A.  79, 336, 345, 473 Flint, P. W.  2, 3, 76, 185, 206, 232, 244, 285, 335, 343, 345, 346, 349, 350, 351, 354, 355, 356, 357, 361, 362, 421 Flusser, D.  354, 370, 412, 413, 429 Fohrer, G.  195, 336 Foley, J. M.  28 Foster, B. R.  464, 466 Fowler, A.  14, 205, 206, 330 Fox, M. V.  75, 77, 95, 200 Frame, G.  396 Frankfurter, D.  408

561

Franzow, G.  121 Freedman, D. N.  215, 336, 378 Fröhlich, I.  453, 462, 478 Frye, N.  13, 14 Furayḥah, A.  78 Gadd, C. J.  456 Gaide, C.  193 Galland, A.  67, 68 Gammie, J. G.  15, 16, 193, 205 Gane, R. E.  431 García Martínez, F.  316, 335, 336, 339, 345, 350, 354, 355, 357, 358 Gardiner, A. H.  82, 93, 99, 100, 101, 104, 106, 130, 402 Gaster, M.  286, 370, 372, 374 Gauger, J.-D.  172, 176, 409 Geissen, A.  223, 292 Geller, M. J.  109, 136 George, A. R.  436, 440, 441, 464 Gerhardt, M. I.  37, 38, 41, 42, 67, 315, 327 Gevaryahu, H. M. I.  336 Gianto, A.  91, 277 Gibson, J. C.  245 Ginsberg, H. L.  4, 80, 185, 190, 193, 195, 284 Ginzberg, L.  367 Gittes, K. S.  3, 12, 15, 20, 31, 40, 41, 60, 62, 68 Glanville, S. R. K.  94, 160, 179, 446 Glassner, J.-J.  216, 342, 460, 466 Gnuse, R. K.  364, 425 Goedicke, H.  82, 105, 106, 111, 112, 113, 118, 178, 382 Goldingay, J. E.  197, 227, 311 González-Llubera, I.  10 Good, E. M.  24, 124, 194 Good, R. M.  246 Gordon, C. H.  73, 109, 110, 201, 247, 456 Görg, M.  109 Goshen-Gottstein, M. H.  455 Gowan, D. E.  452 Grabbe, L. L.  215, 282, 389 Graefe, E.  115 Grapow, H.  154, 442, 445 Grayson, A. K.  342, 387, 388, 389, 390, 392, 393

562

Index of Authors

Greenfield, J. C.  83, 85, 136 Greenspoon, L.  229 Grelot, P.  80, 88, 225, 226, 227, 250, 323, 335, 336, 339 Griffith, F. L.  93, 97, 100, 137, 138, 139, 174, 179, 443 Griffiths, J. G.  406, 410, 446 Grimal, N. C.  101, 141 Grimm, J. and W.  26, 38, 39, 235, 236, 255, 315 Grottanelli, C.  51, 80, 83, 87, 194 Grotzfeld, H. and S.  38 Grubmüller, K.  31 Gruen, E.  79 Gunkel, H.  1, 2, 7, 193 Güterbock, H. G.  396 Haag, E.  193, 227, 228, 322, 431, 449, 450, 478 Haase, D.  26, 98 Haas, V.  70, 72 Habachi, L.  100 Hackett, J. A.  413 Haddawy, H.  21, 67, 68, 236 Hall, L. B.  18 Hallo, W. W.  389, 390, 391, 395 Hals, R. M.  193 Hamel, M.  3, 32, 34, 415 Hammad, M.  467 Hammer, J.  19 Hamm, W.  76, 223 Hansen, W.  48 Harder, M. A.  55 Harmon, W.  13, 14 Harrington, D. J.  336, 345 Harris, J. R.  78, 95, 106 Hartman, L. F.  1, 41, 189, 190, 193, 195, 225, 227, 243, 277, 305, 316, 340, 344, 423, 428, 438, 450, 466, 480 Harvey, S. A.  69 Haslam, M. W.  159 Hata, G.  370 Hauff, W.  7 Hausrath, A.  61 Hays, C. B.  455, 456 Heaton, E. W.  30, 193, 195, 424 Hecker, K.  396 Heffernan, C. F.  9 Heimpel, W.  466

Heinze, R.  57 Helck, W.  93, 95, 134, 178, 401, 402 Heller, B.  2 Hellholm, D.  388, 398, 400, 406, 411, 412 Hengel, M.  354, 478 Henten, J. W. van  193, 204, 309 Henze, M.  2, 23, 59, 88, 186, 187, 231, 233, 234, 239, 254, 255, 332, 341, 411, 449, 450, 453, 455, 456, 457, 483 Hertel, J.  60 Hervieux, L.  19 Hilka, A.  9 Hinnells, J. R.  412 Hirmer, M.  456 Hoch, J.  107, 169 Höffken, P.  395 Hoffmann, F.  6, 92, 120, 125, 135, 136, 138, 150, 155, 161, 172, 177, 178 Hoffner Jr., H. A.  70, 71, 72 Hoftijzer, J.  413 Høgenhaven, J.  358 Holkot, R.  18 Holladay, C. R.  431 Holman, H.  13, 14 Holm, T. L.  6, 92, 136, 156, 437, 439, 442, 474, 475 Hölscher, G.  432 Holzberg, N.  48, 51, 52, 73 Hommel, F.  449 Hornung, E.  442, 445 Horst, P. W. van der  367 Huehnergard, J.  393 Huet, G.  2, 204 Hultgård, A.  412 Humphreys, W. L.  2, 29, 188, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 207, 421 Hunger, H.  394 Hunter, R.  47, 54, 55 Hurvitz, A.  378 Huss, W.  399 Ilan, T.  298, 299 Irwin, R.  27, 35, 68 Isaac, E.  205 Isbell, C. D.  247 Jahn, G.  226, 227

Index of Authors Janssen, J.  468 Janssen, J. M.  95, 405, 468 Janssen, R.  468 Jasnow, R.  127, 132, 139, 141, 152, 173, 445 Jastrow, M.  339, 340 Jeansonne, S. P.  233 Jeffers, A.  111 Jeffrey, A.  195 Jéquier, G.  154, 442, 443 Joannès, F.  85, 469 Johns, C. H. W.  6, 80, 107, 178 Johnson, G. L.  364 Johnson, J.  403, 404 Johnson, J. J.  15 Johnson, S. R.  217, 473, 474 Jones, J. R.  9, 35 Jongeling, B.  336 Jong, M. J. de  388, 389, 390, 393, 396, 397, 430 Kakosy, K.  406 Kammerzell, F.  150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 401 Kaplony, P.  403 Kaufman, S. A.  394, 395, 430 Kay, D. M.  292 Keating, L. C.  48 Kees, H.  99, 100, 105 Kelber, W. H.  28 Kellenberger, E.  28, 212, 234, 238, 239, 320, 483 Keller, J. E.  9, 35, 48 Kellermann, U.  193 Kenney, E. J.  56, 57 Kenyon, F. G.  223 Kermode, F.  30, 274 Khaleghi-Motlagh, D.  63 Kim, D.  411 Kippenberg, H. G.  399, 412, 428 Kirkpatrick, S.  213 Kitchen, K. A.  104, 134 Kleinsgütl, D.  467 Knibb, M. A.  199, 202, 285, 287, 292, 350, 354, 362, 375, 470 Koch, K.  16, 29, 188, 193, 205, 215, 216, 220, 222, 226, 227, 231, 285, 286, 292, 306, 316, 317, 370, 374, 437, 456, 483

563

Koenen, K.  2, 299 Koenen, L.  93, 95, 175, 176, 407, 408, 409, 410 Koff, L. M.  26, 32, 33 König, F. W.  93, 236, 394, 395, 396, 398, 399, 438 Kooij, G. van der  413 Kottsieper, I.  80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 202, 204, 225, 285, 286, 292, 299, 316, 317, 318, 319, 374, 442, 466, 470, 476 Kraeling, E. G.  322 Kraft, R. A.  222, 231, 244 Krappe, A. H.  64, 196 Kratz, R. G.  1, 4, 185, 281, 282, 284, 306, 320, 428, 430 Krauss, S.  366 Küchler, M.  80, 87, 199 Kuhl, C.  2, 318, 319, 374, 430, 438, 442 Kuhn, K. A.  354 Kuhrt, A.  392 Kurke, L.  51 Kutscher, E. Y.  83 Kvanvig, H. S.  394, 456, 457 Labonté, G. G.  425 Labuschagne, C. J.  336 Lacarra, M. J.  21, 22 Lacocque, A.  249, 250, 283, 439 Lafont, S.  439 Lambdin, T. O.  105 Lambert, W. G.  74, 76, 86, 387, 388, 389, 390, 391, 392, 464 Lanckau, J.  105, 112 Lanczkowski, G.  399 Landgráfová, R.  95 Lane, E. W.  25, 26 Lange, H.  106 La Penna, A.  51 Larkin, K. J. A.  284 Lasine, S.  204 Latham, J. D.  67, 68 Lattimore, R.  50, 195 Lawson, J. N.  201 Leahy, A.  442, 443, 444, 445 Leander, P.  105 Lebram, J. C. H.  193, 299, 394, 398, 472, 477 Lee, A. C.  32

564

Index of Authors

Leeuwen, R. van  67, 68, 420 Lefebvre, G.  104, 114, 130 Lefevre, B.  53 Lehnus, L.  53, 55 Lemaire, A.  85, 136, 413, 414, 469, 473 Lemardelé, C.  464 Lenfant, D.  438 Lenglet, A.  191, 229, 280 Lenzi, A.  76, 385 Lepper, V. M.  114, 118 Leslau, W.  466 Lewis, A. S.  19, 78 Lichtheim, M.  91, 93, 94, 104, 114, 115, 118, 122, 130, 135, 137, 138, 141, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 178, 377, 401, 402, 473 Lieven, A. von  120 Lindenberger, J. M.  79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 87 Lipiński, E.  249, 250, 422 Littmann, E.  2, 25 Lloyd, A. B.  177, 402, 403, 407 Lobel, E.  407 Longman III, T.  390, 397 Loprieno, A.  116, 120, 122, 151, 155 Lord, A. B.  27, 28 Loretz, O.  247 Loud, G.  456 Lucas, E. C.  388 Luddeckens, E.  139 Lundberg, M.  221 Lust, J.  227, 228, 229, 230, 238, 314, 316, 482 Luzzatto, M. J.  86 Lyons, M.  67, 298 MacDonald, D. B.  25, 324 MacKenzie, R. A. F.  204 Mack, S.  56, 57 Mahdi, M.  21, 67 Makujina, J.  250 Mallinson, J.  60 Manning, J. G.  125 Marcus, R.  363 Margalit, B.  245, 246 Marshall, J. T.  290 Marti, K.  5, 285, 292, 300, 344 Martínez Borobio, E.  80 Marzolph, U.  38, 66, 67, 68, 420 Mason, S.  232, 363, 364, 365, 366

Mastin, B. A.  200, 201, 246, 424, 433, 435 Mathieu, B.  95, 132 McCown, C. C.  397, 398, 404 McCrystall, A.  233, 424 McDonald, L. M.  366 McLay, R. T.  224, 225, 228, 230, 231, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 273, 284, 292, 312, 316 McNamara, M.  337, 437, 448 Meadowcroft, T. J.  192, 231, 238, 256, 257, 259, 260, 269, 275, 277, 279, 280, 313, 463 Meltzer, E. S.  118 Melville, A. D.  56, 329 Menocal, M. R.  9 Mertens, A.  336, 345 Metzliki, D.  34, 35 Meulenaere, H.  442, 445 Meyer, R.  336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 400, 406 Meyers, C. L.  215 Michaelis, J. D.  227, 231 Michel, D.  134, 141, 200 Milgrom, J.  378, 435 Milik, T.  218, 221, 298, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 344, 345, 346, 347, 351, 353, 357, 358, 359, 360, 362 Mill, A. J.  18 Millard, A.  433 Miller, J. E.  283 Miller, J. F.  57, 58 Mills, M. E.  275 Milne, P. J.  29, 196, 197 Miner, E.  9 Momigliano, A.  413 Monferrer, J. P.  79 Montanari, F.  53, 55 Montgomery, J. A.  4, 185, 223, 227, 237, 256, 260, 266, 323, 397, 404, 430, 431, 436, 438, 463, 464 Moore, C. A.  2, 249, 285, 286, 289, 292, 298, 299, 316, 318, 470, 471 Moortgat, A.  456 Morgan, J. R.  92, 172, 453 Moritz, T.  30 Morris, R.  15 Most, G. W.  46 Muchiki, Y.  106, 107, 249

Index of Authors Müller, H.-P.  2, 105, 110, 119, 144, 180, 190, 193, 198, 199, 200, 246, 273, 398, 399, 467, 468, 472 Munnich, O.  41, 187, 223, 224, 226, 228, 229, 230, 250, 251, 265, 285, 292, 305, 310, 314, 316, 322 Murphy, R.  198 Musa, M.  29 Myers, K. S.  56, 57 Näf, B.  110 Nahkola, A.  315 Navrátilová, H.  95 Neef, H.-D.  240 Negri Scafa, P.  166 Nel, M.  194, 335 Nestle, E.  430 Neu, E.  70, 71, 72, 114 Neujahr, M.  388 Neuman, A.  370 Neumann, S.  26, 38, 39, 235, 236, 315, 399 Newlands, C. E.  57 Nicholson, P. T.  444 Nickelsburg, G. W. E.  287, 298, 335, 368 Niditch, S.  2, 28, 29, 193, 196, 197, 210, 211, 263 Niehr, H.  80 Nims, C. F.  476 Niskanen, P.  412, 413 Nissinen, M.  389 Noegel, S. B.  110, 119, 180 Nöldeke, T.  172, 473 Nordh, K.  101 Noth, M.  245 O’Connor, D.  114 O’Connor, M. P.  215, 244, 248 Oesterley, H.  17 Oettinger, N.  73 Olivelle, P.  60, 61, 62 Olmo Lete, G. del  247, 342 Olrik, A.  211 Olsson, T.  412 Oppenheim, A. L.  108, 110, 111, 453, 462, 469 Oshima, T.  74 Osing, J.  106 Otten, H.  70, 72

565

Otto, E.  71, 72 Pabst, W.  14 Pace, S.  16, 163, 206, 243, 275 Parkinson, R. B.  92, 93, 114, 116, 118, 119, 401, 402 Parpola, S.  83, 85, 107, 421, 465, 466 Parry, M.  27, 28, 231, 354 Paul, A.  363 Paul, S. M.  110, 421 Pearce, L.  469 Pecchioli Daddi, F.  70 Peck, R. A.  32 Peet, E. T.  130 Pennacchietti, F. A.  80, 469 Perdue, L. G.  83, 200, 477, 489 Perkins, G.  13 Perry, B. E.  20, 48, 49, 51, 52, 61, 75, 174, 353, 418, 419 Pervo, R. I.  49, 52, 194 Peters, D. M.  28 Peust, C.  113 Pfann, S. J.  220, 343 Pfeiffer, R.  54, 223, 226, 390 Philonenko, M.  411 Piccione, P. A.  140 Pieper, M.  130 Pinault, D.  27, 32, 36, 37, 63, 68, 212 Pinches, T. G.  342 Pinette, B.  199 Plöger, O.  190, 285, 292, 432, 437, 478 Polak, F. H.  362 Polaski, D. C.  209, 384, 462 Porten, B.  6, 78, 82, 83, 89, 92, 136, 158, 387, 474, 475 Porteous, N. W.  109, 190, 432 Porter, P. A.  201 Portier-Young, A. E.  210, 213, 307, 384 Posener, G.  130, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156 Postgate, J. N.  108 Pratt, R. A.  34, 69 Preust, C.  106 Propp, V.  29, 197 Propp, W. H. C.  144 Puech, E.  328, 334, 335, 336, 337, 339, 345, 350, 351, 352, 353, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 376

566

Index of Authors

Qāšā, S.  80 Quack, J. F.  120, 132, 134, 135, 136, 138, 144, 147, 149, 150, 151, 155, 161, 172, 179, 410, 411, 457 Quaegebeur, J.  106 Quirke, S. G.  155 Rabābiʿah, Ḥ. M.  80 Radday, Y. T.  25 Rad, G. von  198 Radner, K.  107, 439 Ranke, H.  107, 169 Rawi, F. N. H. al-  440, 441, 464 Ray, J. D.  101, 102, 111, 410 Redditt, P. L.  250, 306 Redford, D. B.  98, 99, 104, 108, 109, 164, 378, 442, 443, 445, 451, 473 Regalado, F. O.  276 Reid, S. B.  200 Reiner, E.  85 Reiner, J.  370 Reuvens, C. J. C.  409 Reventlow, H. G.  2 Reymond, E. A. E.  113, 121, 177 Richter, H.-F.  290 Ricks, S. D.  231 Riessler, P.  195, 227, 449 Rindge, M.  208, 425, 426, 427 Ringgren, H.  388, 389, 391, 393, 395, 413, 414 Ritner, R. K.  88, 92, 94, 95, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 137, 140, 141, 143, 146, 147, 156, 158, 160, 163, 164, 166, 167, 174, 405, 406, 419, 420, 444, 446, 475 Roberts, C. H.  407 Roca-Puig, R.  223 Roeder, G.  166, 402 Rogers, R. W.  322 Rolfe, J. C.  431 Römer, T. C.  109, 180 Rosati, G.  56 Rösel, M.  476 Rosenthal, F.  68 Rosenthal, L. A.  195 Rosenzweig, F.  28 Rossum-Steenbeek, M. van  417 Roth, M.  439 Roth, W. M. W.  203, 470, 471 Rowley, H. H.  190, 215

Rubio, G.  74, 342, 451 Runte, H. R.  20 Russell, C.  454 Rüster, C.  70, 72 Rutherford, I.  129 Ryholt, K.  66, 87, 88, 94, 96, 97, 102, 103, 112, 113, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 144, 145, 146, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 173, 175, 176, 179, 180, 214, 250, 383, 386, 409, 410, 418, 447, 448, 475 Ryholt, R.  475 Sacchi, P.  80 Sachau, E.  78 Sallūm, D.  80 Salonen, A.  438 Sánchez de Valdera, C.  36 Sanders, T. T.  64, 366 Sarna, N. M.  144 Satran, D.  227, 230, 254, 368, 369, 423, 451, 570 Sauneron, S.  151, 444 Schäfer, H.  101, 234 Schaudig, H.  215, 251, 340, 431, 449, 460 Schiffman, L. H.  221, 232, 335, 358, 362 Schildgen, B. D.  32, 33 Schipper, B. U.  399, 400, 407, 409 Schlüter, M.  289 Schmitt, A.  222 Schmitt, R.  250 Scholz, A.  202, 420 Schuol, M.  70 Schüpphaus, J.  224, 225, 285, 292, 299 Schwab, M.  247 Schwarzbaum, H.  32, 35, 36 Scurlock, J.  395 Sebbane, M.  140 Segal, D. S.  10 Segal, M.  277, 316, 424 Seow, C. L.  195, 250, 429, 431, 435 Sercambi, G.  34, 36 Serjeantson, M. S.  18 Settembrini, M.  199 Sharpe, E. J.  412

Index of Authors Shaw, I.  444 Sherwin-White, S.  392, 393 Shisha-Halevy, A.  151 Shupak, N.  400 Silverman, D. P.  114, 140 Simon, M.  245, 349, 350, 411 Simpson, W. K.  92, 95, 96, 104, 114, 115, 401, 402, 417 Sivan, D.  107 Smelik, K. A. D.  476 Smith-Christopher, D.  206 Smith, H. S.  124, 147, 148, 149, 160, 170, 172, 446, 447, 456 Smith, M. J.  96, 119, 121, 123 Smith, S.  437, 457 Sobhy, G. P. G.  87 Soden, Wolfram von  437, 465, 466 Söderhjelm, W.  9 Spek, R. van der  392, 393, 394, 397 Spiegelberg, W.  87, 92, 95, 96, 97, 99, 104, 105, 119, 135, 136, 137, 138, 145, 146, 147, 157, 159, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 179, 180, 384, 402, 403, 420, 422 Spiegel, J.  93 Spolsky, E.  294 Stefanovic, Z.  306 Steiner, R. C.  77, 78, 399, 474, 476 Steinmann, A.  284, 307, 337, 338, 340, 341, 450 Steinmann, J.  109 Stengel, E.  35 Stephens, S. A.  53 Steudel, A.  353, 354, 355 Steussy, M. J.  5, 203, 225, 285, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 299, 300, 308, 310, 312, 314, 484 Stoneman, R.  92, 172, 173, 177, 453, 454 Strauss, H.  198 Strawn, B. A.  396, 431 Streck, M. P.  136 Stricker, B. H.  94, 104, 106, 160, 446 Strommenger, E.  456 Strugnell, J.  2, 50, 81, 82, 83, 362 Stuckenbruck, L. T.  351, 361, 376, 412, 490 Stummer, F.  78 Sulzbach, C.  452 Swan, C.  17, 34

567

Szpakowska, K.  101, 102, 111, 112, 113, 382 Tait, W. J.  92, 93, 96, 97, 120, 122, 124, 135, 136, 138, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 160, 170, 171, 410, 447 Talay, S.  79 Talmon, S.  198, 231, 232, 274, 332 Taylor, R. A.  225 Thissen, H. J.  6, 160, 177, 405, 406 Thomas, C. M.  43, 44 Thompson, H.  174 Thompson, S.  196, 197, 204 Tigchelaar, E. J. C.  335, 355 Tinney, S.  74 Tobin, V. A.  93, 178, 401, 402, 434 Toorn, K. van der  76, 421, 437, 464, 465, 466 Torrey, C. C.  280, 368 Tov, E.  222, 231, 232, 238, 239, 358 Tower Hollis, S.  104 Towner, W. S.  2, 252 Traunecker, C.  135 Trebolle Barrera, J.  102, 226, 366 Trever, J. C.  221 Ulmer, R.  109 Ulrich, E. C.  38, 188, 190, 191, 220, 221, 226, 229, 231, 232, 233, 238, 241, 244, 252, 255, 258, 334, 335, 353, 365, 375, 453, 483, 490 Ümal, A.  72 Ungnad, A.  78 Uther, H.-J.  195, 197, 204, 427 Valeta, D. M.  24, 190, 194, 208, 209, 213, 432, 462, 463 VanderKam, J. C.  200, 221, 232, 335, 350, 354, 358, 389, 391, 412 Van Essche, E.  467 Van Seters, J.  108, 378 Vegas Montaner, L.  226 Veldhuis, N.  74 Vergote, J.  104, 106, 108 Vermes, G.  357, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368 Vinson, S.  139, 141 Vittmann, G.  127, 136, 443, 475

568

Index of Authors

Vleeming, S. P.  77, 111, 135, 169, 474, 476 Vogt, E.  336 Volten, A.  101, 102, 134, 135, 159 Vriezen, T. C.  185, 243 Vycichl, W.  103 Wacholder, B. Z.  344 Wacks, D. A.  10 Waddell, W. G.  406 Wahl, H. M.  246 Waller, M. S.  34 Warnke, K.  19 Watanabe, C. E.  467 Watson, W. G. E.  245 Weber, M.  99 Wechsler, M. G.  358, 359, 360 Wegner, I.  70, 72 Weiden Boyd, B.  56, 57 Weidner, E.  108, 439, 469 Weigl, M.  80, 83, 84, 85 Weitzman, S.  136 Weninger, S.  136 Wente, E. F.  82, 100, 101, 130 Wenthe, D. O.  231, 232, 233, 238, 239, 483 Werkmeister, H. F.  467 Wesselius, J.-W.  77, 169, 185, 190, 307, 474, 476 Westbrook, R.  439 Westendorf, W.  445 Westermann, A.  49 West, M. L.  46, 47 West, S.  96, 120, 121 Widengren, G.  452 Widmer, G.  102, 120 Wikeley, J. K.  20 Wilcken, U.  407 Wildung, D.  100, 113, 164, 165 Wilhelm, G.  70, 72 Williams, R. J.  418 Willis, A. C. M.  277, 413, 429 Wills, L.  2, 30, 37, 41, 49, 50, 63, 64, 79, 82, 86, 88, 163, 181, 186, 187, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 210, 211, 213, 214, 217, 218, 227, 228, 241, 247, 269, 285, 286, 291, 295, 298, 300, 301, 305, 308, 311, 312, 315, 321,

Wills, L. (cont.)  323, 332, 336, 377, 378, 385, 386, 432, 450, 451, 453, 464, 472, 486 Wilson, P.  103 Wilson, R. R.  193, 246, 398, 399, 404, 472 Winckler, H.  108 Winnicki, J. K.  165 Wise, M.  2, 29, 50, 64, 77, 193, 195, 196, 251, 260, 339, 344, 345, 349, 351, 352, 354, 355, 356, 357 Wiseman, D. J.  216, 464, 466 Wolters, A.  110, 119, 247, 460, 461 Wooden, R. G.  201, 242, 247, 248, 274, 423, 424, 478 Woude, A. S. van der  2, 3, 185, 197, 199, 200, 209, 227, 243, 279, 307, 311, 333, 336, 339, 362, 363, 384, 425 Wright, A. G.  193 Wright, D.  378 Wright, G. E.  221 Wright, T.  20 Wright, W.  53 Wyatt, N.  245 Wysny, A.  285, 292, 470 Xeravits, G. G.  228, 230, 314 Yamamoto, K.  27, 28, 63 Yardeni, A.  78, 82, 83, 89, 136 Yassif, E.  203, 286, 310, 370, 372, 373 Young, K.  34, 69 Yoyotte, J.  170, 442 Zadok, R.  250 Zandee, J.  442, 445 Zauzich, K.-T.  6, 87, 88, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 103, 134, 138, 139, 145, 158, 169, 177, 179, 405 Zeitlin, S.  370 Zevit, Z.  476 Zibelius-Chen, K.  110 Ziegler, J.  223, 255, 265, 285, 292, 293, 316, 322 Zimmerman, F.  295, 470 Zimmerman, J.  354 Zuckerman, B.  221

Index of Scripture Genesis 2  452 5:21–24  246 12:17  338 15:12  356 19  335 31:47  184 37–50  99, 108, 164, 185, 198, 378, 451 38:24  437 38–44  185 40:8  200 40–41  195, 382, 427, 428 41  197, 208, 424, 425, 426, 451 41:8  102, 108, 112, 113, 198, 383, 428 41:24  102, 112, 113, 383, 428 41:39  198 41:45  249 44  51 44:5  109, 201 68  372 Exodus 7–9  109, 119, 180, 424, 428 7:11  108, 428 7:20–22  144 7:22  108, 428 8:3  108, 428 8:14  108, 428 8:15  108, 428 9:8–11  338 9:11  108, 428 10:21–29  180 10:23  144 14  119 Leviticus 1–16  435

Leviticus (cont.) 2  435 20:14  437 21:9  437

2 Kings (cont.) 20:18  366 24:1  215, 216, 305 25:8  313

Numbers 6:1–21  423 22–24  413 23:23  200

1 Chronicles 3:1  244 5:27–41  350 24:1–18  244

Deuteronomy 1:13  198 4:20  438 18:10  200 21:18–21  469 28:27  338

2 Chronicles 36:5–8  215, 216, 305 36:6–7  307 36:21  216, 217

Judges 9:7–15  357 19  335 19:16–30  335 Ruth 4  469 2 Samuel 3:3  244 7  395 11  468 12:1–14  377 14:1–17  377 14:2  198 20:16  198 1 Kings 8:51  438 10:1  463 20:39–43  377 21:10  452 21:13  452 2 Kings 19  137

569

Ezra 2:2  359 2:14  359 4:8–6  184 6:18  184 7:12–26  184 8:2  244, 245, 248 8:14  359 Nehemiah 2:6  260 7:7  359 7:19  359 8:4  248, 249 8:7  248 10:2  248 10:7  244, 248, 249 10:17  359 10:23  248 Esther 1  266 1–2  223 1:13  198 1:19  464 2:5  359 2:21–23  380 6:1  360

570 Esther (cont.) 8:8  464 14:17  423 Job 1:5  452 1:11  452 2:5  452 2:7  338 2:9  452 4:10  289 Psalms 10:3  452 20  476 20:2–6  476 21:10  438 21.:13  452 22:14  464 57:5  464 64:1  367 91:13  464 115  203, 471 Proverbs 1–9  77 10:1–22:16  77 22:17–24:22  77 24:23–34  77 25:1–29:27  77

Index of Scripture Isaiah 8:1  105 19:11  198 19:11–14  405 21:5  460 26:11  437 29:4  456 29:14  198 31:9  438 32:5  280 34:10–15  456 39:7  366 41:15–16  429 41:22–23  429 43:9  429 44:9–20  203, 471 46:1  429 48:5  429 51:1–2  431 52:13  283 Jeremiah 10:1–16  203, 471 10:11  184 11:4  438 18:18  198 25:1  215, 216, 305 25:11  216 29:1  469 29:10  216 29:21–23  309

Jeremiah (cont.) 29:21–32  203, 297 29:22  436 41:5  435 46:2  216, 305 50:8  289 50:35  198 51:34–35  471 51:39  460 51:44  471 51:57  198 52:29  255, 313 Ezekiel 8:1  469 14:1  469 14:14  244, 245, 248 14:14–20  246 14:20  244, 245 16:39  295 17  452 19:4  464 20:1  469 28  246, 452 28:3  244, 246 30:13–19  405 Hosea 13:7–8  282 Habakkuk 2:18–19  203, 471

New Testament Matthew 24:15  332, 367

Deuterocanonical Literature 1 Esdras 3  2, 156, 266, 360 3:1–4  195 3–4  377, 380, 381 4:63  195 4 Ezra 12:10–11  245 Judith 12:1–4  423

1 Maccabees 1  377 1:5  217 1:20–24  344 2:14  283 2:59–60  210 2 Maccabees 5:1  344 6:5  217 9  354

2 Maccabees (cont.) 13:4–8  438 Sirach 36:1–17  199 Tobit 1  80, 84

Index of Subjects Abednego  157, 211, 248–50, 271, 273, 278, 279, 319, 361, 440 Admonitions of Ipuwer  93, 397, 399, 402, 414 Aesopets  19, 31 Aetia (Callimachus)  4, 46, 47, 53–55, 56 n 54, 57–58, 417 Ahasuerus  214, 215 n 130, 303–4, 314, 328, 380, 385, 427, 482 Aḥiqar  2, 41 n 121, 49–51, 53, 58, 73, 75, 77, 78–88, 94, 97 n 226, 150, 163, 166 n 523, 168–70, 180 n 574, 181, 194 n 33, 195–98, 202 n 74, 214, 284, 332, 361, 362, 377–80, 382, 386, 418, 420, 427, 436, 446, 455, 463, 473, 474, 475, 478, 486 Alexander the Great  172–74, 176, 242, 346 n 56, 392–94, 403, 404, 410, 432, 470 Alexander Romance  172–74, 176, 177 n 560, 237 n 233, 383, 410, 453, 454, 460, 479, 487 Alphabet of Tales  11, 18 Ameto (Boccaccio)  3, 15 Antiochus IV Epiphanes  4–5, 188, 191, 205, 207–8, 217, 230, 241–42, 257, 260 n 321, 281, 283, 284, 291, 303, 315, 316, 344, 348, 349, 353–54, 375, 394, 398 n 283, 406, 410, 415, 429–31, 453, 477, 490 apocalyptic/apocalypse  5, 15–16, 23, 88, 91, 94, 178, 184, 186, 188, 191 n 23, 198, 199, 200, 205, 207, 208, 213, 217, 244 n 259, 249, 271, 280, 282, 283, 301, 308, 310, 311, 312, 314, 330, 331, 332, 333, 347, 348, 349, 351, 355, 362, 387–414, 415, 437, 477, 481, 483–84 apocalypticism  399, 429 Aqhat epic  164 n 517, 245–48, 451 n 504

571

Arabian Nights   2, 7, 21, 25–27, 32, 35–38, 41, 63 n 86, 66–69, 96, 118, 123, 133, 204, 210–12, 236, 324, 420, 485 Aramaic Apocalypse (4Q246)  196, 282, 334, 336, 351–55, 376, 429 Arameans  7, 85, 87, 386, 391, 422 n 377, 474, 476, 478 Astyages  59 n 68, 215 n 127, 287, 303, 304 n 449, 309–310, 325, 328, 452, 482 author-compiler  13, 184, 188, 190 n 20, 208, 220, 273 n 343, 284, 285, 286, 300, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 312, 317, 327, 328, 376, 416 n 353, 417, 434, 454, 466, 483, 485, 490 Bahman Yasht  412, 429 Balaam texts from Deir ʿAllah  413–414 Bel and the Serpent  16, 39, 59 n 68, 150 n 463, 188, 195, 202–203, 208, 222, 224–26, 229, 244, 285–92, 300–301, 303, 309, 310–12, 314–15, 325–27, 330, 335 n 13, 369, 370–72, 374, 382, 420, 463, 464, 466, 468, 470–72, 482, 484, 490 Belshazzar  16, 22, 33, 59, 104, 119 n 328, 156, 187–89, 206–208, 215, 227 n 186, 228, 230, 251–53, 257–63, 265, 270, 272, 273, 281, 302, 304, 308–10, 312–14, 321–24, 328, 329, 341, 346–48, 351, 364, 373, 376, 382, 385, 387, 415, 429 n 403, 450, 453, 460, 462, 473, 477, 481–84, 489 Belteshazzar  15, 31, 187 n 11, 243, 249, 251, 256, 259, 261, 270, 359 n 118, 415, 478 Book of Sindibad  4, 11, 20, 21 n 45, 23, 32 n 88, 35, 36 n 106, 53, 64–65, 67–69, 96, 209

572

Index of Subjects

Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry 20 Book of Thoth  138–41, 144, 145, 158, 168 n 529, 282, 381, 383, 384, 462 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer)  3, 9, 11–13, 17 n 29, 20–21, 26, 29, 31, 32–34, 40–42, 58, 60, 69, 96, 129, 210, 220, 415, 416, 482 De casibus virorum illustrium (Boccaccio) ​ 18, 33, 219

Cycle of Inaros  134–137, 179, 250 n 292 Cyrus II (the Great)  16, 50 n 20, 59 n 66, 65, 188, 189, 195, 202, 208, 215, 216 n 135, 228, 253 n 300, 269, 273–276, 287, 291, 300, 303–5, 308–10, 312, 313, 325, 328, 330, 368, 373, 392, 415, 416 n 353, 420, 429 n 403, 430, 437, 438, 449, 451, 452, 460, 463, 482–84, 490

Catalogue of Women (Hesiod)  46, 47 Chaldean/s  39, 64, 109, 111 n 295, 157, 189, 199, 209, 215 n 127, 252, 259, 261, 272–74, 276 n 355, 278–80, 302, 304, 317, 318, 320, 329, 346, 356, 380, 384, 422, 481 chief lector priest  see ḥry-tb/tp chief of the magicians  92, 183, 201, 209, 270, 329, 482 Chronicle of Jerahmeel  203 n 82, 258 n 313, 286, 290 n 407, 297 n 428, 298–99, 309 n 474, 310 n 478, 332, 368, 370–76, 485, 488 De claris mulieribus (Boccaccio)  18, 31, 33, 219 comedy  24 n 55, 79 n 153, 159 n 496, 194, 269 n 338 El Conde Lucanor (Juan Manuel)   20, 36 n 106, 53 Confessio amantis (John Gower)  3, 11, 13, 20, 33 court conflict tales  2 n 4, 6, 196, 203, 253, 270, 281, 320, 325, 379–81 court contest tales  2 n 4, 6, 29, 39, 77, 196, 270, 379–81 court tale  2, 3, 6, 7, 29, 31, 37, 46, 49 n 17, 40, 63, 64, 69, 75, 77, 83, 86, 88, 97, 98, 102, 134, 137, 139, 156, 160, 163, 178, 180–82, 184, 188, 192–96, 197–99, 201–3, 206, 208, 210, 244, 281, 282, 298, 301, 309, 311 n 483, 312, 328 n 538, 330, 331–35, 336, 343, 347, 348, 358, 360–62, 376–88, 390, 400 n 288, 408, 414, 422, 424, 427–29, 433, 441, 447, 448, 457, 463, 474, 477–80, 485–89, 491 Cursor mundi 15

Daniel vita  16, 37, 45 n 1, 208, 219, 300, 308–12, 330, 368, 484 Darius the Mede  22 n 50, 39, 41 n 121, 59, 110, 119 n 328, 180, 188, 189, 195, 215, 228, 249 n 286, 250, 251– 53, 264–70, 272, 281, 287, 302–304, 308–10, 312–14, 325, 326, 328, 329, 348 n 66, 359–61, 364, 368, 371–74, 381, 415–17, 429 n 403, 473, 481–84, 489 Decameron (Boccaccio)  ix, 3, 7, 9, 11, 14, 15, 20, 24, 29, 31, 32, 34, 36 n 106, 41, 42, 58, 69, 96, 129 n 379, 210, 414, 415, 482 Demotic Chronicle  92 n 201, 95, 176, 397, 398, 399, 401–404, 414, 428 didactic/didacticism  15, 17, 23–24, 29, 31, 44, 47, 62, 193–94, 198, 200, 208–10 Directorium vitae humanae (John of Capua) ​ 10, 24 Disciplina clericalis (Petrus Alfonsi)  9, 10 n 4, 12, 19, 20, 23, 32–36, 53, 76, 94, 209 diviners  81, 108, 109, 189, 201, 251, 252, 261, 329, 334, 336–42, 342, 375, 380, 384, 390, 394, 397, 414, 421, 423, 449, 458, 481, 488 Djedseshep, Nanoufesakhme, and Ḥarmakhroou  170–71, 446, 447, 487 Djoser  99, 103, 113, 115, 144, 164–166, 170, 180–182, 250 n 292, 379, 382, 383, 424, 428, 473, 486 dream interpretation  6, 15, 59 n 69, 98, 101–3, 107–13, 119, 165 n 520, 166, 174, 183, 190, 199, 200–201, 217, 247–48, 251–59, 261, 271–73, 276, 281–83, 305, 328 n 538, 329–30,

Index of Subjects dream interpretation (cont.) 333, 338 n 24, 340, 347 n 60, 356, 362, 364, 367, 381–83, 387, 412, 417, 422, 424–28, 435, 448, 450–52, 462, 479, 482–83, 486–87, 489 duplicate narratives  37–39, 211, 234, 255, 264, 315–327, 371, 485 Dynastic Prophecy  387–88, 392–94, 397, 413 n 344, 414, 429–30 Epic of Emancipation  see Song of Release exemplum  14, 24, 25 n 56, 35 exorcist  104, 108, 127 n 369, 189, 252, 261, 275, 339, 384, 421, 465, 481 fable  4, 5, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16 n 26, 19, 21, 31, 46–53, 58, 59–62, 69, 70, 73–75, 77, 82, 88, 96, 119–23, 132, 146 n 450, 169, 181, 182, 192, 356, 386, 417–20, 480, 485 Fables of Bidpai see Kalilah wa-Dimnah Fasti (Ovid)  46, 57–58 fiery furnace  6, 33, 39, 131, 154, 155, 157, 163, 181, 183, 187, 106, 211–12, 249, 272, 278–80, 315, 316–20, 332 n 5, 341, 372, 379, 382, 432, 436–48, 459, 466 n 562, 477, 479, 481, 487, 489 Four Kingdoms Apocalypse (4Q552–553) ​ 196, 282, 334, 336, 355–57, 376, 429, 452 frame narrative  5, 9–12, 15, 17–23, 25 n 58, 31, 34, 36, 40, 45, 47, 49 n 19, 51, 56, 58–63, 65, 67–69, 72–73, 75, 77, 87 n 189, 88, 92–96, 114, 116–19, 121, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131–34, 144, 155, 166, 181, 182, 186, 187, 191, 198, 218, 241, 251–52, 270, 328, 361, 390, 400, 401, 403, 405–8, 414–18, 480, 483 Gesta romanorum  11, 13, 17, 24, 31, 34, 35, 36 n 106, 219 Ḥadīṯ al-jum-jumah maʿa al-malik (The Story of the Cross and the Skull) 469–70 hard analogue  32, 170, 415, 448, 487

573

Hardedef  94 n 211, 115, 116, 164, 433 ḫarṭibi  104, 106–8 *ḥarṭōm or plural ḥarṭummîm/n  98, 102, 104–14, 182, 252, 378, 382, 383, 426, 428, 429, 487 Ḥenenu  103, 166, 168–170, 180, 181, 196, 379, 381, 382, 436, 463, 486 Ḥi-ḥor  103, 166–170, 180, 181, 196, 379, 381, 382, 436, 463, 486 Historical Text (4Q248)  334–35, 343–44 Ḥor-bar-Pawenesh/Punesh  77, 88–92, 146, 157–58, 379, 382, 414 Ḥor of Sebennytos  101 n 247, 102, 112, 113, 175, 383 n 212, 409 Horus(-son-of)-the-Wolf ​77, 88–92, 103, 142–46, 157–58, 180–81, 379, 380, 385–86, 434 House of Life  99–104, 106 n 271, 111, 113, 141, 164, 382, 384, 423, 471 ḥr(y)-tb/tp  102–14, 131, 137, 158, 164–68, 182, 382, 428, 471, 486, 487 Imhotep  99, 102–103, 112, 113, 115, 126 n 367, 132, 133, 144, 147, 164–66, 170, 180–82, 250 n 292, 379, 380, 382–84, 386, 387, 410, 424, 428, 473, 486 imprisoned magician stories  154 n 477, 166–70, 180, 181, 196, 381, 382, 436, 463, 486 inclusio  190, 256, 270, 273, 280, 282, 283, 308, 313, 481 Jehoiakim  204, 216–17, 273–74, 276 n 354, 302, 304, 305, 309, 313, 314, 431, 436, 484 Joseph  2, 51, 58, 86, 98, 107–114, 150, 164 n 517, 174, 185, 187 n 11, 193, 194 n 33, 195, 198–201, 213, 249, 282, 286, 362, 378, 382–84, 387, 424–28, 436, 451, 463, 474, 486, 487, 489 Kalilah wa-Dimnah  10, 21, 22, 24, 36 n 106, 53, 61, 62, 209 legenda  5, 18, 22, 40, 186, 244 n 259, 332

574

Index of Subjects

Legend of Good Women (Chaucer)  18– 19, 40, 219 n 144, 416 Lehrerzählung  193, 198, 204 Libro de buen amor (Juan Ruiz)   10, 42, 43 Life and Fables (Aesop)  4, 5, 9, 45, 46, 47–53, 58, 59, 73, 79, 81 n 158, 82, 94 n 213, 122, 198, 417, 418, 419, 420 Life of Daniel  368–69, 372, 423 n 379, more Life of Imhotep  102, 103, 112, 144, 165, 379, 380, 383, 386, 424, 428, 486 linear literary dossier  185, 307 lions’ pit  39, 150 n 463, 202 n 75, 212, 252, 253, 264, 266–69, 285, 287, 290, 310, 313, 325–28, 369, 371–72, 379, 382, 416, 463–68, 485 literariness  25, 29, 45, 210 Lives of the Prophets  37, 244, 322, 366– 69, 372, 376, 423 n 379, 485, 490 Llibre de los Dones (Jaume Roig)  10 macro-genre  14, 15, 184, 192, 205, 415, 416, 483 magic  66, 68, 92, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 108–10, 116, 122, 126, 129, 133, 139, 141, 142, 148, 158, 165, 166, 167, 170, 173, 174, 180, 181, 182, 247, 289 n 406, 378, 382, 383, 386, 409, 424, 436, 458, 475 n 602, 482, 486, 487 magician  6 n 14, 64, 77, 88, 91, 92, 96–105, 107–12, 114–19, 127, 131, 133–34, 136–37, 139–46, 148, 151–56, 158, 164–70, 172, 177–83, 189, 196, 199, 201, 209, 252, 256, 257, 261, 262, 270, 272, 275, 282, 289 n 406, 329, 362, 365 n 150, 378–87, 417, 422, 424, 427, 428, 433–36, 445 n 479, 447, 452, 462, 463, 474–75, 479, 481–82, 486–87, 489 mantic wisdom  190, 198 n 53, 199–200, 202 n 74, 246, 247, 273, 286, 298, 301, 389, 399, 478, 488 maqāma genre  10 Märchen  7, 29, 193, 194 Marduk Prophecy  387, 390, 395–97

maśkîlîm  23, 219, 283 Merib  6, 95 n 218, 97 n 227, 103, 137, 139, 140, 147–50, 166, 181, 182, 196, 343, 379, 380, 436, 457–59, 463, 479, 486, 487 Merire  6, 103, 105 n 268, 137, 148 n 456, 150–57, 168, 178, 181, 182, 196, 360 n 124, 379–83, 387, 424, 427, 434, 436, 446–47, 451, 463, 486–88 Meshach  157, 211, 248–50, 271, 273, 278, 279, 319, 361, 432, 440 Metamorphoses (Ovid)  4, 9, 19, 26, 31, 33, 40 n 118, 46, 55–58, 329 midrash  29, 109 n 289, 193, 203–204, 233, 318, 365, 366 n 157, 367, 420 multiple literary editions  225–40, 483 Myth of the Sun’s Eye  45, 95, 96, 119–123, 126, 128, 132 n 393, 181, 331, 419, 420, 485 Nabonidus  59 n 66, 149, 196, 215, 251, 253, 282, 322, 328, 332–43, 375, 380, 392, 394, 399, 431, 437, 440, 441, 448–51, 453, 456, 457–61, 473, 474, 476, 477, 479 Naneferkasokar  103, 144, 179–182, 250 n 292, 380, 382, 386, 424, 473, 486 Nebuchadnezzar (Nebuchadnezzar II)   22, 33, 41, 50, 59, 69, 81 n 159, 110, 119 n 328, 134 n 396, 149, 156, 157, 187, 188, 189, 196, 203, 206, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 227 n 186, 228, 230, 242, 249 n 283, 250–62, 270, 271–77, 278, 280, 302, 304–5, 308–10, 312–14, 316 n 507, 322, 328–29, 333 n 5, 34, 337, 339–41, 346–48, 356–57, 361 n 127, 363–64, 367–69, 371–73, 387, 394–95, 399, 409, 415–17, 423 n 379, 424, 426, 429–30, 432–37, 448–62, 473, 476, 479, 481–82, 484, 487, 489 Nectanebo  49, 50, 79, 81 n158, 172–177, 180, 285 n 386, 382, 383, 387, 398, 402, 404, 409–10, 414 Nectanebo’s Dream  172–73, 175–77, 285 n 386, 409–10, 414

Index of Subjects novel  53, 186, 194, 204 n 90, 214, 218, 300, 311 novella  14, 43, 108 n 287, 109, 204, 275 n 350, 298 Novelle (Sercambi)  34, 36 n 106 ʿOnchsheshonqy  75, 94, 128 n 372, 130 n 384, 157, 160–63, 167, 168, 171, 181, 196, 198, 285, 332, 360 n 124, 377, 380, 384, 418, 422, 427, 436, 441 n 455, 443, 446, 463, 472 n 592, 486, 487 open-endedness  5, 40–41, 44, 46, 58, 68, 182, 185, 189, 192, 328–29, 330, 415, 482 Oracle of Hystaspes  354 n 97, 412, 428 Oracle of the Lamb  91, 95, 175, 176, 198, 219 n 145, 285 n 386, 397, 399, 404–7, 409, 414, 428, 430, 434 Oracle of the Potter  91, 93, 95, 175, 219 n 145, 285 n 386, 397, 399, 406–9, 414 orality  5, 25–30, 32, 37, 41, 44, 45, 69, 210–12, 220, 315, 325, 327 Pañcatantra  4, 5, 11, 21–23, 31, 53, 60–63, 76, 122, 146 n 450, 182, 419 Pap967  16, 208, 219, 223, 224, 228–30, 243, 254, 274, 275, 278 n 361, 279, 280, 290, 292, 300–303, 305, 308, 312–14, 321 n 522, 323, 328 n 539, 484, 490 Papyrus Vandier  see Merire Papyrus Westcar  see Tales from King Cheops’ Court pluriformity  232, 254, 333, 366 Prayer of Azariah  16, 39, 188, 222, 224, 242, 244, 277, 285, 315–20, 327 Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242)   149, 196, 251, 282, 322, 332 n 2, 333–43, 375, 380, 399, 449, 457–59, 461 n 540, 474 Prophecies of Neferti  91, 93, 95, 104 n 264, 115 n 312, 116 n 318, 178–79, 198, 380, 397, 399, 401, 402, 406, 408, 414, 434, 472 n 592, 475, 486, 488 prophecy ex eventu  16 n 26, 91, 95, 178, 192, 205, 207, 283, 285, 301, 347,

575

prophecy ex eventu (cont.)  348, 388, 389, 393–95, 397, 400, 403, 404, 406, 414, 416, 430, 445, 486, 490 proto-apocalypse  282, 387–414, 430, 472 Pseudo-Daniel a–b (4Q243–244)   196, 257 n 313, 282, 333–36, 345–49, 375, 384, 429, 486 Pseudo-Daniel c (4Q245)  196, 282, 333–36, 345, 349–51, 375, 384, 429, 486 pseudo-prophecy  see proto-apocalypse ring composition  16, 55, 251, 284, 314, 481, 484, 489 romance  3, 12, 13, 29, 30, 68, 146, 159, 172, 175 n 553, 193–94, 204 saints’ lives (vitae)  18, 76, 31, 310, 368 Shadrach  157, 211, 248–50, 271, 273, 278, 279, 319, 361, 432, 440 Sheikh Faḍl inscription  77, 136, 180 n 574, 474, 475 Setne Khamwas  6, 92, 97, 100 n 239, 129, 137–48, 151, 152 n 470, 154 n 477, 157, 158, 171, 172, 178, 180, 196, 379, 381, 383 n 212, 384, 385, 422, 434, 462 Setne I  92, 97, 103, 106 n 272, 138–46, 148, 167, 168, 379, 381, 383, 384, 445 n 479, 462, 463, 486 Setne II  88, 91, 92, 95 n 218, 97, 102, 103, 105 n 268, 113, 116 n 320, 137, 138–46, 147, 148, 155, 157, 158, 167, 177, 178, 181, 379, 380, 381, 383, 384, 385, 386, 422, 424, 427, 434, 435, 445 n 479, 462, 463, 486, 488 Seven Sages of Rome  11, 20, 23, 32 n 88, 65, 209, 419 Shāh-Nāma  63–64, 377 short story  194, 204, 298 Shulgi Prophecy  387, 390, 395–97 Si-Osire  88, 97 n 227, 116 n 320, 137, 138, 141–48, 157, 178, 180, 380, 381, 384, 385, 422, 427, 434, 435, 445 n 479, 462, 486 soft analogue  32, 134, 170, 415, 418, 448, 487

576

Index of Subjects

“Son of God” text  see Aramaic Apocalypse (4Q246) Song of Release  70–73, 331, 485 Song of the Three Young Men  16, 39, 188, 222, 244, 278, 285, 313, 315, 316, 491 South English Legendary  19, 218 Spill (Jaume Roig)  see Llibre de les Dones Stories of Petese  4, 66 n 100, 95–97, 103, 123–33, 139, 154 n 477, 155 n 480, 156, 157, 159, 160, 168, 181, 331, 381, 383, 384, 418, 420, 446, 447, 485, 487 story-cycle   6, 8, 13, 68, 113, 134, 171, 474 Śukasaptati  60, 62–64, 96 Susanna  2, 16, 17, 186, 188, 194 n 30, 195, 202–204, 208, 219, 222, 224–26, 229, 242, 244, 280, 285–87, 292–303, 308–14, 319, 328, 330, 333 n 5, 335 n 13, 341, 370 n 177, 371–72, 374–75, 377, 420, 468–70, 484–85, 488, 490–91 Tales from King Cheops’ Court (Papyrus Westcar)  3, 4, 6, 45, 69, 95–97, 102–4, 114–19, 133–34, 181–82, 282, 331, 360 n 124, 378, 381, 386, 414, 416, 417, 424, 475, 480, 485, 486

Tales of Sendebar  21 n 45, 35, 65, 66, 219 Tales of the Persian Court (4Q550)  77, 196, 282, 328, 334, 336, 341 n 36, 357–61, 376, 377, 380, 383, 418, 424, 427, 463, 474, 486, 488 Tendenz  233, 239 Text A   387–88, 390–92 transformation of genre   5, 12, 14, 15, 31, 62, 192, 205–7, 301, 330 Ṭūṭī-Nāma  35, 62, 65 Uruk Prophecy  387, 394–95, 430 De viris illustribus vitae (Petrarch)  18, 218 Vengeance of Isis  95 n 218, 147, 166 Vita Danielis see Life of Daniel wisdom literature  16 n 26, 21, 23, 29, 71, 74 n 136, 75, 82, 104, 164, 190, 192, 193–95, 198–200, 202–4, 210, 213, 214 n 125, 286, 377–78, 386, 398, 472 n 592, 477 Zardusht-Nāma 63–64