Five Kingdoms, and Talking Beasts: Some Old Greek Variants in Relation to Daniel’s Four Kingdoms

Abstract

Textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible has often been conceived as having a narrow focus on evaluating variant readings in order to establish the earlier, or in fact, the original text of the Bible. However, current mainstream scholarship on the textual history of the Hebrew Bible has abandoned the claim that we are in a position to arrive at the original text of the Bible. For example, the standard handbook by Emanuel Tov states that “the textual evidence does not point to a single ‘original’ text, but a series of subsequent authoritative texts produced by the same or different authors ... the original text is far removed and can never be reconstructed.”1 This does not mean that scholars have abandoned the quest to evaluate variant readings and to attempt to build a case for whether readings are earlier or later. But it means that they are much more aware that establishing what is an earlier reading is not necessarily the same thing as discovering the original reading. Study of the evidence has further demonstrated that a high percentage of variant readings are not due to “errors” as was common language in many older approaches to textual criticism. Instead, it is accepted that variants were often created intentionally, due to the different conception of books held in those ancient cultures.2 First, evidence suggests that for ancient people, an “exact” copy of a text did not usually involve what we would describe as word for word accuracy, as long as what was understood to be the essential message was conveyed. This makes the concept of an original text even more problematic, since this mindset would not lead to even two contemporary “original”