Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Uri Hurwitz <uhurwitz AT yahoo.com>]

  Dear Rolf,
   
    You wrote, inter alia:
   
   
    
---------------------------------
    
  ....."In Hebrew thought the NP$ dies and and go down to $)WL, to the grave, 
  
where there is no life. So any "afterlife" in the sense that man
  
continues to live after the body dies, is not found in the Tanakh 
  
(including Daniel)."....
   
    How do you interpret the bringing forth of the dead Samuel through the 
witch of Ein
   Dor in I Samuel 28? Here it appears that lady managed to raise the late 
prophet both
   in body and in mind.
   
     While this is rather rare in the HB, it seems to indicate belief in 
survival in the after-
   life.
   
     Best,
   
     Uri
  
 


                
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>From leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il  Thu Mar 16 02:04:15 2006
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Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 09:03:23 +0200
From: Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>
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Subject: [b-hebrew] Daniel
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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>
> The name, or one similar to it (it's actually dn'il, without the yod in 
> the
> middle) is in the Ugaritic texts; we have no real clue whether there's any
> actual relationship between that character and the one in the biblical 
> book,
> but considering that on your own dating there's some 1200 years between 
> them,
> I find it doubtful.  Using Ugaritic as a tool for explaining the book of
> Daniel (especially dating it) is leaning on a broken reed, as my dad used 
> to
> say.
>

While you are correct in that there is no way to know whether the author of 
Daniel had any knowledge of the Ugaritic Dan'il (or a similar tradition), 
and there does not seem to be any connection, Ezekiel seems to be a 
different story. Ezekiel 14:14 and 20 mentions three "righteous men of old": 
Noah, Daniel and Job. Ez. 28:3 asks the ruler of Tyre "are you wiser than 
Daniel?". EVEN if the Daniel of the book of Daniel was a historic 
personality who lived during the 6th century BCE, he would have hardly have 
had the stature to be compared with Noah and Job as ancient righteous men, 
and of course he was never a ruler of anything. However, in all three cases, 
the MT spells "Dan(i)el" without a yod: that is, Dan'el. The masoretes 
thankfully preserved this spelling, only adding the hiriq in the Qere.
In this case, it is perfectly reasonable to think that Ezekiel, living in 
Babylon, could have been familiar with a tradition similar to that preserved 
at Ugarit. Not that he knew OF Ugarit itself, but similar traditions, of an 
ancient wise king - maybe even a Phoenician king (hence the reference to 
Tyre), could have been known in mid first millennium Mesopotamia. And if so, 
the author of the book of Daniel (or Daniel's parents if he was a "real" 
person) could have picked up on the same tradition and used it as a name for 
the wise youth.

Yigal Levin