Aramaic of Daniel. An unusual feature of the Book of Daniel is
that part of it is written in Hebrew, and part (a little over half) is in
Aramaic. Driver argued that the Aramaic of Daniel “is a Western Aramaic
dialect, of the type spoken near Palestine,” (Driver, Literature,
502-4) and inferred that the book must have been written in Palestine. This
idea has now been totally discredited by recent discoveries of fifth-century
Aramaic texts that demonstrate that both Daniel and Ezra were “written in a
form of Imperial Aramaic (Reichsaramaisch), an official or literary
dialect which had currency in all parts of the Near East.” (Aracher, Survey,
397) Even though the type of Aramaic used in the book does not indicate a late
date, Rowley argued that certain features of Daniel’s Aramaic supported a time
of composition not earlier than the fourth century B.C. (Rowley, Aramaic,
16, 153-56) Yet reevaluation of the data in light of newer materials have not
sustained Rowley’s conclusion. Moreover, the Aramaic of Daniel and Ezra exhibit
striking parallels with early examples of the language found in such documents
as the Elephantine Papyri, also written in Imperial Aramaic and dated to the
fifth century B.C. As a matter of fact, Kraeling, who published many of the
Elephantine Papyri, maintains: “There is no very great difference between the
language of the [fifth century B.C. Elephantine] papyri and the so-called
Biblical Aramaic.” (Kraeling, Aramaic Papyri, 4) E. Yamauchi adds,
“Discoveries, such as Adon’s letter in Aramaic (sixth cent. B.C.), have
confirmed the fact that the Aramaic of Ezra and of Daniel is basically the same
as the Aramaic of the sixth-fifth centuries as we know it from contemporary
evidence.” (Yamauchi, Greece and Babylon, 91)
On the other hand, the Aramaic of the
book does not confirm to later samples of the language. Archer compared the
Aramaic of Daniel to that of the Genesis Apocryphon, a first century
B.C. copy from Qumran of a document originally composed probably in the third
century B.C. and concluded on the basis of the language that the Apocryphon
must have been written considerably later than Daniel, Ezra, and the
Elephantine Papyri. (G. L. Archer, Jr., “The Aramaic of the ‘Genesis
Apocryphon’ Compared with the Aramaic of Daniel,” New Perspectives on the
Old Testament, ed. J. B. Payne [Waco: Word, 1970], 160-69; cf. Archer, Survey,
400-401) According to Kutscher, “it can be stated with confidence that the
language of the Scroll [the Genesis Apocryphon] is of a later type than
Biblical Aramaic.” (E. Y. Kutscher, “Dating the Language of the Genesis
Apocryphon,” JBL 76 [1957]: 289) Thus, the Aramaic portions of Daniel
must have been written at an early date. Hasel concluded: “On the basis of
presently available evidence, the Aramaic of Daniel belongs to Official Aramaic
and can have been written as early as the later part of the sixth century B.C.;
linguistic evidence is clearly against a date in the second century B.C.”
(Hasel, “The Book of Daniel and Matters of Language,” 255) (Stephen R. Miller, Daniel:
An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture [The New
American Commentary 18; Broadman and Holman Publishers, 1994], 30-31)
