Daniel 11:22: "prince of the covenant"

[I Beleive]

Is there any historical support for a belief that the "Prince of the covenant" in Daniel 11:22 was Onias iII, High Priest of Israel ? Was this term used of the High Priest ?

[kwrandolph]

Is there any historical support for a belief that the "Prince of the covenant" in Daniel 11:22 was Onias iII, High Priest of Israel ? Was this term used of the High Priest ?

Are you sure that נגיד is a noun, and not a verb?

Karl W. Randolph.

[S_Walch]

FWIW, the LXX completely omits וגם נגיד ברית.

The DSS don't have the verse extant.

I can find no reference to a high priest being referred to as the "leader of the covenant".

[SteveMiller]

Ste,
The phrase is there in LXX.

[S_Walch]

Dan 11:22, LXX (Swete):
καὶ τοὺς βραχίονας τοὺς συντριβέντας συντρίψει ἀπὸ προσώπου αὐτοῦ.

The translation of Theodotion includes the phrase - but Theodotion isn't the LXX

Dan 11:22, Theodotion
καὶ βραχίονες τοῦ κατακλύζοντος κατακλυσθήσονται ἀπὸ προσώπου αὐτοῦ καὶ συντριβήσονται, καὶ ἡγούμενος διαθήκης·

[SteveMiller]

Thanks Ste. Now I know what BibleWorks means when it adds (TH) next to the LXX.

Theodotion's Gk translation including the phrase does give more credence to the phrase being there in the original.

[S_Walch]

Thanks Ste. Now I know what BibleWorks means when it adds (TH) next to the LXX.

My pleasure

You may find the NETS Online Septuagint Translation quite helpful too. Unless there's also a version in Bibleworks?

Theodotion's Gk translation including the phrase does give more credence to the phrase being there in the original.

Not necessarily. It just means that by the 2nd Century CE, the phrase had appeared in the Hebrew manuscript(s?) that Theodotion worked from.

Too bad the verses (18-24) aren't accounted for among the DSS manuscripts.

[SteveMiller]

You may find the NETS Online Septuagint Translation quite helpful too. Unless there's also a version in Bibleworks?

NETS is very useful. Thanks! BW only has Brenton's LXX English translation, which I just found out from you is actually a translation of TH for Daniel and probably others books. I see there are a lot of requests for NETS for BW10 on the BW website.

Theodotion's Gk translation including the phrase does give more credence to the phrase being there in the original.

Not necessarily. It just means that by the 2nd Century CE, the phrase had appeared in the Hebrew manuscript(s?) that Theodotion worked from.

Too bad the verses (18-24) aren't accounted for among the DSS manuscripts.

Yes, it means the phrase was there in ~150 AD, which is a lot earlier than the MT, which I think gives credence, but not proof, to the phrase being there in the original.

I was surprised at how different the NETS Old Gk was from TH for Daniel. Daniel's 70 weeks are not 70 weeks in NETS OG, but something very different.

Though DSS does not have these verses, the ones it does have for Daniel match the MT closely and not the LXX OG. This tells me that the MT Daniel is much more accurate than the LXX OG.

[S_Walch]

Yes, it means the phrase was there in ~150 AD, which is a lot earlier than the MT, which I think gives credence, but not proof, to the phrase being there in the original.

Agreed.

Though DSS does not have these verses, the ones it does have for Daniel match the MT closely and not the LXX OG. This tells me that the MT Daniel is much more accurate than the LXX OG.

After reading this, I thought it might be good to go and check the notes in the DSS Bible, to see what they bring up.

There are 72 footnotes in the DSS bible for Daniel. After a tally, 3 of these notes are just explanations of translation, so don't really bare much on the differences.

There are 47 unique readings in the DSS that disagree with the MT text.
Of these 47 unique readings in the DSS, 23 readings the MT and LXX agree against the DSS; 16 readings are different in all three; and the final 8 it is unable to determine whether the LXX agrees with the MT or the DSS due to the difference not being translatable.

There are 20 readings in the DSS that agree with the LXX against the MT.

There is 1 reading that is in the DSS that agrees with the LXX, but also the Qere reading seen in MT notes.

The final reading is that the DSS has the different form of a word compared to the MT.

From a quick over-reading of the LXX and MT Daniels, it's more common for the LXX to include words, rather than omit them.

A more thorough study would be required, of course. However I do notice that most of the differences between the Hebrew and the Greek appear in the earlier chapters, rather than the later ones.

Anyone know of someone who's produced some sort of Hebrew/Greek comparison of the Book of Daniel? It would make for some interesting reading...

Edit:
I did find a quick overview type article produced by Emmanuel Tov: http://www.emanueltov.info/docs/varia/2 ... -books.pdf

Footnote 75 states this: It remains puzzling why the two sources are so divergent in chapters 3 and 4–6, and not in the remainder of the book. J.A. MONTGOMERY, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel (ICC), Edinburgh 1964, 36 and J. COLLINS, A Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Hermeneia), Minneapolis 1994, 7 suggested that these chapters may have circulated separately.

[SteveMiller]

Ste,
Very interesting stats.
Basically, in the differences between DSS and MT for Daniel, LXX sides with both sides about equally: 23 with DSS vs 20 for MT.
This says that MT and DSS are about equally accurate for Daniel.

This stat doesn't say anything about the accuracy of LXX compared to MT or DSS because we have not collected data on differences between DSS and LXX or between MT and LXX. If the differences were counted, they would be much greater than the differences between DSS and MT for the book of Daniel. There is also much more to compare because LXX is basically complete but DSS just has fragments, but the differences between LXX Daniel and MT Daniel are appear to be much greater.

When DSS Bible says LXX, it means either LXX or TH. For example footnote 32 on 5:17 gives the TH reading but says LXX. The LXX verse is very different.

In footnote 43 it seems to call TH the LXX and refs the NETS OG LXX as LXXmss. This, incidentally, is the biggest difference between DSS and MT in Daniel. MT has the extra phrase at the end, which doesn't seem to make sense. The phrase is not in DSS nor TH. But it is in the NETS LXX OG.

Footnote 44 calls TH as TH.
Footnote 49 also seems to be TH but says LXX.

The reason I said that the DSS agrees with MT much more than the LXX for Daniel is because the DSS Bible intro to Daniel says that DSS matches the MT pretty closely, but when I read LXX Daniel, I find it is very different from MT or TH. NETS intro to the book says, as you said, the main differences are in 4-6, but the prophecy in chapter 9 is completely different also.