The Hellenistic World and Rome
is /..There are no known fragments from Qumran, making this the
only book of the Hebrew Bible not represented there.^15
The establishment of the feast of Purim thus was, or was made into, the
central point of this vivid court narrative, and this feature is reflected clearly
in Maccabees, surely written in the second half of the second century..
This book ends with the defeat of the Seleucid general Nicanor in ..,
and the decision to celebrate the ‘‘day of Nicanor’’ on the thirteenth of Adar,
on the day before ‘‘the day of Mordechai’’: ‘‘the thirteenth day of the twelfth
month—it is called Adar in the Syrian language—one day before the day
of Mordechai.’’^16 Purim was thus already established as a festival and was al-
ready associated with the story of Esther, Haman, and Mordechai. Esther is
thus (perhaps) roughly contemporary with Daniel, or might be as much as
a couple of centuries earlier. It shares with Daniel the use of history, and
the deployment of an alien court as a stage for the demonstration of Jewish
piety.
The Book of Daniel
These varied works, for all the problems of date, authorship, intention, and
original language which they present, are enough to set the framework for
Daniel, and to suggest the way in which the successive Near Eastern em-
pires, and the relationship of the Jewish community to them, could be used
in Jewish historical and semi-historical works of the late Achaemenid and
earlier Hellenistic period, in ways which ranged from sequential narratives
of events to colourful and improving historical novels.
As will be obvious, this paper will make no attempt even to indicate all
the problems which surround Daniel: the question, for instance, of whether
there had been earlier versions before the (indisputable) redaction of the ca-
nonical Hebrew and Aramaic text in the s..; the meanings intended
by the anonymous author to be attachedto the symbols incorporated in the
dreams and visions which it recounts; whether even after the s variant
‘‘Daniel’’ texts were in circulation; the dates and origins of the two estab-
lished Greek versions; and the interpretation of the text in the New Tes-
tament, in Josephus, by Christian commentators, such as Hippolytus and
Jerome, or by Daniel’s brilliant pagan commentator, Porphyry. All that is in-
tended here is to set out the most elementary facts, and then to present an
. For Esther, see Eissfeldt,The Old Testament, –, and – (the additions). For
the additions, see also Schürer, Vermes, and Millar,HistoryIII., –.
. Macc. :.