Redrafting the Architecture of Daniel Traditions in the Hebrew Scriptures and Dead Sea Scrolls

Abstract

Abstract For all the qualities that make the book of Daniel an odd fit in the Hebrew Bible—it is a bilingual hybrid of Aramaic and Hebrew traditions, has demonstrable compositional roots in the Second Temple period, and is attributed to a character of more recent ancestral memory—the book fits exceptionally well within a broader set of now-known Aramaic writings in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The texts and contexts of Daniel in view of these new discoveries, however, demand that we rethink the formation of Daniel traditions and transformations of Daniel as an emerging authoritative figure in ancient Jewish scribal culture. In this article, I apply a material philological approach to 4QDaniela–b (4Q112–4Q113), two Daniel manuscripts from Qumran that preserve the linguistic juncture between Dan. 7:28 and 8:1. I argue that the varied uses of physical space between these sections indicates a scribal understanding not necessarily of a unified book but of an early collection of Daniel traditions. In view of this possibility, the later Hebrew materials of Daniel 8–12 are then re-characterized as our earliest demonstrable Danielic pseudepigraphon in view of their documented redactional relationship to the foregoing Aramaic chapters. This, in turn, provides a fresh way of approaching the so-called Aramaic Pseudo-Daniel (4Q243–4Q245) fragments among the Qumran Aramaic texts simply as Danielic traditions in their own integrity.