Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Johan Lust: The LXX of Daniel 7 Identifies the "Son of Man" with the "Ancient of Days"

  

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)