[10] But J.T. Marshall (Hastings' D.B. IV. 755), "The hymn is modelled after Ps. 136, and has equal claim to be considered poetical."
Whoever the author may have been, he was evidently strictly orthodox, and quite in sympathy with his three heroes, in whose mouths he placed this lively, agreeable, and most religious Song. He has added a much appreciated treasure, at least among Christians, to the ecclesiastical hooks; a most serviceable form of utterance for the Church's praiseful voice. But the nature of the piece does not afford much scope for display of the character or personality of the writer. He effaces himself while extolling devotion to Jehovah, and, if he be Daniel, while recording the faithfulness of the blessed friends of his youth. What subject more likely to excite his enthusiastic sympathy? Honour to the martyrs who endured, praise to the Lord who delivered, it was plainly a pleasure to him to give.
Date and Place.
Date.
Almost everything, excepting its absence from the original, points to the Song having been from the beginning a part of the LXX text of Daniel. Its date therefore in this case would be the date of that text. The way in which it is worked into the canonical Daniel narrative suggests that, if there be any variation as to date in the three additions, this is seemingly the earliest.
That the LXX translator invented this enlargement out of his own genius seems highly improbable; nor, were it not for its absence from the original Daniel, few would have doubted that he obtained the whole of his material from the same quarter. In such case our 'apocryphon' would obviously ante-date the LXX text.
It is not unlikely that the Alexandrian translator worked up certain traditions (J.M. Fuller, S.P.C.K. Comm.; see also Bevan, Dan. Camb. 1892, p. 45), or, if Gaster's discovery be what he thinks, written narratives. What sources, however, were used in preparing its LXX Greek form can only be conjectured, and that on very slender data.
Rothstein in Kautzsch (I. 176) deems it to have been imported into the text of Daniel before the LXX translation, which he dates at latest in the first quarter of the last century B.C.
How an interpolation of this kind came to be admitted into the original of Daniel is a difficult matter to explain. Even on the supposition that the כתובים were less rigidly fixed than the Law or even the Prophets, the insertion or omission of such a section as this seems a very bold step. Ewald (Hist. Israel, v. 86, 87, Eng. Tr.) thinks these additions to be fragments of an enlarged Daniel based on the older book, which was composed one or two centuries earlier.[[11]] Some later writer must have compared this new book, which was originally written in Greek, with the translation of the older book of Daniel, and transferred whatever he thought proper from the former into the latter. The work, thus compiled afresh, has been preserved in Greek shape, while the intervening book, whose former existence is proved by clearest traces, is now lost. It is only in this way, Ewald thinks, that we can explain the origin and preservation of the portions which are not contained in the Hebrew.
[11] He appears, on p. 303, to date Daniel between 160 and 170 B.C.