Why Daniel was
not in the plain of Dura in Daniel 3
It may
rightfully be asked why Daniel was not one of the nobles collected to be in the
plain of Dura in Daniel 3 to bow down before the image? Why was it only
Sadrach, Mesach and Abednego that were standing in the plain that day with the
allegiance test of Nebuchadnezzar? Where was the prophet Daniel. Did he not
have to be part of this test? The detail with which Daniel is describing it
gives evidence that he knew the ins and outs of this case very well. There was an
Arabic-Jew in the Middle Ages with the name of Yaphet ibn Ali-Halevi who lived
around 970 CE and he wrote an Arabic commentary on Daniel. Of course a
contemporary of his also wrote a commentary on Daniel, namely, Saadya Gaon. Gaon’s
Daniel Commentary was written 30 years before Yahphet ibn Ali-Halevi’s
commentary. What were the
differences between these two Jews? Saadya Gaon was translating more idiomatic
and not so literal but Yaphet ibn Ali-Halevi was more literal in his
translations. Where was
Daniel in Daniel 3? Ali-Halevi answered “As for the case of Daniel, he was not required
to bow down to the image because his station was too high; he occupied the
place of a god with the king (2:46)”. This answered
is correct since if the king bowed down to Daniel and worshipped him, as he did
in 2:46, he cannot and will not expect Daniel to bow down and pay allegiance to
him Nebuchadnezzar, sensitive minority complex or not. The megalomania
of Nebuchadnezzar reveals actually just the opposite psychology of
Nebuchadnezzar. He tries to make himself bigger than he really is because he
had a minority complex that others thinks he is not able, not good enough, not equipped
enough to be king or in that high position. Whether it is his upbringing as a
child or the family politics or palace parties, regardless of the source, the
damage was done and the psychological health of the king was not stable enough.
Daniel had to be serving a ruler with distrust and mistrust around every
corner.
More on Yaphet
ibn Ali-Halevi the Karaite and Saadya Gaon the champion of Judiasm
In his book
Jewish Philosophers by S. T. Katz (1975), 32, he mentioned that in the tenth
century CE, Judaism was threatened by two streams, namely Islam and Karaism.
Saadya Gaon’s philosophy responded to the challenge to answer these two. Karaism
(explains Katz 1975: 39-40), was a Jewish sect founded in Babylon about 750 CE
by Anan ben David. The original aim of the sect was to base itself on Scripture
instead of the Talmud and Rabbinic Judaism. That explains Ali-Halevi and it
also explains Gaon as well as Seventh-day Adventist stand on this issue. Although
Judaism is uplifting Saadya Gaon as a champion of their faith, the karaite Jew
Yaphet ibn Ali-Halevi who lived in Jerusalem in the same time, was as far as
the translation of the Book of Daniel is concerned more literal. To see the
differences between Gaon and Ali-Halevi’s translations the words GRAMMAR and
GRANDMOTHER can illustrate this well. If someone is
to ask me to copy the word GRAMMAR and I wrote GRANDMOTHER, is this a
paraphrase of GRAMMAR, permutation of letters of GRAMMAR or an acoustic
misperception of the phonics of the word GRAMMAR? To use the
words of Maariv Perez, an expert on Saadya Gaon, the translation method of Gaon
is that of metamorphosis-translation or transformational translation. A paraphrase
is a recasting translation (Bodenheimer’s view is under correction here). A
defective translation is one that is using a defective original. Although
transformational is present in the translation method of Gaon, my finding was
on Daniel 11:6 that Gaon employed a defective copy with corrections, a kind of
notebook copy of an Arabic translation that was very close to that of Yaphet
ibn Ali-Halevi thirty years later. It appears to me that Gaon was not deforming
a Hebrew text but an Arabic one since the problems lies not only on a
translational level. They are also on a copy-level. It appears for
me that they had trouble reading an illegible notebook and that dictating the
text by memory after misreading and memorizing the text with errors and
corrections in supralinear position, dictated both these in-text and out-text
sentences in a one-line procedure or same-line procedure. The copyist actually
placed both text and supralinear corrections in-text. Double reading abounds
with Saadya Gaon in every verse and it supports my conclusion that slips of the
eye and entry of errors together with the corrections were made. The errors are
made in an Arabic text and not in a Hebrew text so that I rule out the
possibility that Saadya Gaon was using a Hebrew text at all. Misreadings on an
Arabic orthographical level is the strongest evidence I found with Saadya Gaon.
Saadya need glasses and a good memory! Another finding
is that one should not take D. S. Margoliouth (1889) too seriously on the
omissions of Yaphet unless proven so. One should not get the impression for
example, in Daniel 11:6 that certain words were absent in the text of Yaphet
because one cannot see it in the Arabic. They appear in his commentary below!
He worked with them. Maybe it is not in the translation but one do find it in the
commentary. They are just not translated in the Arabic. In the same
century of these two Jews was Dunash ben Librat who complained about the text
of Saadya Gaon. If one
considers the possibility that what we are working with today and is called the
text of Saadya is actually the corrupt duplicate of some incompetent copyist
and that it means that the originals of Saadya Gaon disappeared, one can cancel
this option because Dunash ben Librat did not say that they originals of Gaon
were hard to come by. My conclusion is that Gaon made these errors himself.