The Septuagint wishes to identify
the ‘son of man’ with the ‘Ancient of Days’. Since the latter is God, it thus
presents him as riding ‘on the clouds’, the clouds being known as a vehicle of
the gods. . . . the Septuagint may present us with a correction of the MT and Theodotion,
a correction that may have had a theological intention. The translator could not
accept the messianic character of the ‘one like a son of man’ in the MT and Theodotion.
He therefore translated the ‘one like a son of man’ into the ‘Ancient of Days’.
. . . Daniel’s description of the throne (7, 10 certainly recalls Ezekiel’s merkaba
with its flames and wheels (see, for example, Ezek 10,2.36). Most important
is that Ezekiel in his vision sees God as a one ‘in the likeness of man’ (Ezek
1, 26) sitting on the description of the one ‘like a son of man’. This evidence
is often discarded for the simple reason that the MT of Daniel puts the ‘Ancient
of days’ on the throne and not the ‘Son of Man’. In the Septuagint, however,
the ‘Son of Man’ and the ‘Ancient of Days’ are the same. This definitely
suggests that the Septuagint preserved an older text form in which the sources
of Daniel’s inspiration can still be discovered. (Johan Lust, “Daniel 7,13 and
the Septuagint,” in Messianism and the Septuagint: Collected Essays by J.
Lust, ed. K. Hauspie [Bibliotheca Ephemeridium Theologicarum
Lovaniensium CLXXVIII; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2004], 4, 5, 8)
