Daniel.

• Author: Holm, Tawny L.
• Position: Book review

Daniel. By C. L. SEOW. Westminster Bible Companion. Louisville: WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS, 2003. Pp. xiii + 198. $29.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper).

The Westminster Bible Companion series consists of non-technical commentaries intended for Protestant Christian ministry and laity that do not include footnotes, scholarly citations, or much bibliography. However, the author of this volume, Leong Seow, uses modern critical scholarship on Daniel in a clear and judicious fashion, as one would expect from the author of the highly regarded commentary on Ecclesiastes in the Anchor Bible series. As befits the persuasion of the series, the volume does not contain the Daniel Additions (Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Jews in ch. 3) found in the Greek editions of the Bible which are part of the Orthodox/Catholic canon.

In the introduction, Seow discusses the book's place in the canon, the Ugaritic background to the character "Daniel," the origin of the book, its composition history, its literary genres, the occasion of the book's writing, and its theological perspective. The twelve chapters of the volume each begin with the presentation of the NRSV translation of either an entire chapter of Daniel or a significant portion thereof, followed by Seow's learned explication. A select bibliography of about one and a half pages concludes the book.

There is very little here that is idiosyncratic. Seow follows the interpretative strategies of historical and literary criticism, with the intention of elucidating what the text meant to the original audience. Seow dates the final form of the book to late 164 or early 163 B.C.E., that is, slightly before the death of Antiochus Epiphanes. The third-person tales of chapters 2-6, however, were probably composed as early as the late fourth or early third century. The bilingual (Hebrew-Aramaic) nature of the book is concisely explained, and Seow advances the theory that the...