Aramaic Daniel and Greek Daniel: A Literary Comparison.

• Author: Wevers, John Wm.

The volume under review is substantially the text of a dissertation, only slightly revised with a view to publication. It consists of a detailed comparison of the Aramaic text of Daniel 2-7 and the Septuagint (LXX) version. The choice of these six chapters was made for linguistic reasons; they were written in Aramaic, whereas the remainder of Daniel is in Hebrew.

As is well known, the text of LXX barely survived, it being almost completely replaced in the Christian Church by the version known as Theodotion. The latter is a much more literal rendering of the parent text, and Meadowcroft has therefore focused on the LXX as presenting many more differences from the Aramaic text than does Theodotion.

Meadowcroft's approach is that of literary criticism. More specifically, narrative features such as "the use of dialogue, the stance of the narrator, manipulation of perspective, and the employment of phrases, words or syntactic structures for thematic purposes" (p. 17) are regularly discussed, as well as possible differences in content, treatment of genre, theological emphases, parody, irony, and so on. The order of chapters is rearranged for legitimate form-critical purposes in the order: 4, 5, 6,3,2,7.

The Greek text used is that of Rahlfs, which seems to me unwise, since a critical edition in the Gottingen Septuaginta, edited by Joseph Ziegler, appeared in 1954, and is readily available. Since the analysis of LXX is determined by the text edition chosen, I am surprised that the supervisors of this dissertation should have permitted the author to use a Handausgabe, intended by Rahlfs only as an interim text, a Nothilfe to serve only until a critical text could be prepared. Incidentally, a new edition of the LXX text which is to incorporate all the exemplars discovered since the 1954 edition, as well as a reassessment of the critical text in the light of this early text, is being prepared by Olivier Munnich of Paris. This is to be included in a second edition.

After each chapter has been analyzed, a concluding chapter detailing differences in...