And Daniel continued even unto the first year of King Cyrus. The Septuagint supplies περσῶν. Theodotion and the Peshitta agree with the Massoretic. It has been objected by Canon Driver that the natural classical order of the latter two words should have been hammelek Koresh, not, as it is in the Massoretic, Koresh hammelek. The Septuagint text seems to have had parseem, which would make the order perfectly classical. A greater difficulty is to explain how it is said that Daniel "continued," or, if we take the Hebrew literally "was," until the first year of "Cyrus the king," when in the tenth chapter the third year of Cyrus is referred to. There are several ways of getting over this difficulty. The first way is to suppose that some words have dropped out of the text. There are, however, different ideas as to the words so lost. Thus Bleak would supply "in high respect in Babylon." Earlier commentators would supply "in Babylon," thinking that not impossibly he returned to Palestine. Jerome—one of these—does not, however, intrude his suggestion into the text, as does Ewald. His suggestion is that the omitted words are "in the king's court," which is much the same as Delitzsch's "at the court." Hitzig is credited by Kranichfeld with asserting that the author did not intend to make his hero live beyond the year he refers to—the first year of Cyrus. In his commentary, however, Hitzig suggests that be'sha‛ar hammelek, "in the gate of the king," has dropped out. He does certainly hint that the sentence, to be complete, would need ḥayah ( חָיָה), not hayah ( חָיָה). Zöckler would supply the same word. There is certainly this to be said for the above theory—that the sentence as it stands is incomplete. The verb hayah is never used instead of ḥayah. At the same time, there is no trace in any of the versions of any difficulty in regard to the text. Another method of meeting the difficulty is that adopted by Hengstenberg, followed by Havernick, but suggested in the eleventh century by Jephet-ibn-Ali. It is this—that as the first year of Cyrus was the year when he allowed the Jews to return to their own laud, that the attainment of this annus mirabilis was an element in his wonderful prosperity, that he who had mourned for the sins of his people, who had been one of the earliest to feel the woes of captivity, should live to see the curse removed, and Judah permitted to return to their city and temple. The objection to this view, urged by Professor Bevan, is that the author elsewhere "never alludes to the event save indirectly (Daniel 9:25)." To this it may be answered that the whole ninth chapter goes on the assumption that the seventy years are now all but over, and therefore that the return cannot be long delayed. We regard this silence of Daniel in respect to the return from Babylon as one of the strongest evidences of the authenticity of the book. Everybody knows how largely it bulks in preceding prophecy, and how important it is in after-days. No one writing a religious romance could have failed to have laid great prominence on this event, and introduced Daniel as inducing Cyrus to issue the decree. On the contrary, he does not even mention it. Tide is precisely the conduct that would be followed by a contemporary at the present time. In religious biographies of the past generation that involve the year 1832, when the Reform Act was passed—the greatest political change of this century—we find that most of them never once refer to it. If any one should take Cowper's 'Letters,' written during the American War, he will find comparatively few references to the whole matter, although from, at all events, 1780 to 1783, we have letters for nearly every week, and they occupy nearly three hundred pages. Now, if a person were condensing these and selecting passages from them, he might easily make such a selection as would contain not a single reference to that war or to any political event whatever. Yet Cowper was interested in the struggle that was going on. The main objection to Hengstenberg's view is the grammatical one that it implies that we should read יחי instead of יהי, and there is no trace in the versions of this various reading The LXX. has ἦν; Theodotion has ἐγένετο; the Peshitta has (see word) (hu); Jerome has fuit. It is somewhat difficult to come to any conclusion, but there are certain things we must bear in mind. In the first place, an author does not usually contradict his statements elsewhere directly. He may implicitly do so, but not when direct dates are given. If he should fail to put the matter right, some other will be sure to do so, if his work attains sufficient popularity to be commented upon. We may thus be sure that there is some solution of the apparent contradiction between the verse before us and Daniel 10:1-21. In the next place, we must note that this verse is the work of the editor, probably also the translator and condenser, of this earlier part of Daniel. Therefore the difference may be found quite explicable could we go back to the Aramaic original. If ‛ad represented ‛ad di (Daniel 6:24) in the Aramaic, and the two latter clauses were transposed, we should translate, "And Daniel was for Cyrus the king even before his first year." The connection is somewhat violent; but if we regard the redactor as thinking of the success of Daniel, this might be a thought which suggested itself to his mind—he was with Nebuchadnezzar, and he was with Cyrus. The difficulty of the date is not of importance. That might be got over in several ways. Either by adopting in Daniel 10:1 the reading of the Septuagint, which is πρώτῳ, instead of τρίτῳ—the only objection to this is that it is a correction that might easily be made by a would-be harmonist; but, on the other hand, the "third" year of Belshazzar being mentioned in the eighth chapter may have occasioned the insertion of "third" in the tenth. Or, since we know that, though in his proclamation Cyrus styles himself "King of Babil," yet in some of the contract tables of the flint two years of his reign he is not called "King of Babil," but only "king of nations," and there are contract tables of those years that are even dated by the years of Nabunahid, is it not, then, possible that the third year of Cyrus as "king of nations" might coincide with the first year of his reign as "King of Babil"? Yet further, we must remember that the reign of Cyrus could be reckoned from several different starting-points. He first appears as King of Ansan, then he becomes King of the Persians, and as such he conquers Babylon. His first year as King of Babylon may have been his third year as King of Persia. Thus it would be equally true to say that the Emperor William I. of Germany died in the seventeenth and in the twenty-eighth year of his reign—the one statement reckoning his reign as emperor, the other as king. No solution seems absolutely satisfactory. The difficulty presses equally on the critics and those who maintain the traditional opinion.
HOMILETICS.
National retribution.
I. HE WHO KNOWS NOTHING OF GOD MAY BE THE UNCONSCIOUS INSTRUMENT OF THE DIVINE WILL. Nebuchadnezzar, who has never heard of the Hebrew prophecies, fulfils their solemn predictions. This throws some light on God's providential relations to evil.
1. The motives which prompt a bad man to an action may be different from the motives which incline God to permit it. God may permit the action of selfish cruelty because he sees it will issue in righteous chastisement.
2. A man who ignores the Divine guidance can still go no farther than God permits him. Jerusalem was delivered into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, and only because this was the case was the King of Babylon able to take it.
3. There is a twofold Divine permission—the moral permission, which sanctions conduct; the material permission, which does not visibly restrain it. We see here that when the latter is accorded, though it does not justify the morality of the agent, it indicates the ultimate working of all things together for God's will (Psalms 76:10).
II. NATIONAL SIN INCURS NATIONAL RETRIBUTION. Though guilt is personal, and though national actions can only be the outcome of individual actions, it often happens that men do in their public capacity what they would shrink from doing in private life. The resultant, too, of the individual actions of all the members of the community may not be a mere multiplication of those actions, but, owing to their mutual interaction, it may be something quite different, and thus characteristic of the nation rather than of the individual. Now, these national actions, when wrong, become distinctly national sins, and incur national retribution, one great characteristic of which is that it happens in this world The retribution for individuals is largely postponed to the next life, perhaps because earthly life is too short for conduct to ripen all its fruits. But we have no reason to believe that the national entity is perpetuated in the next life. On the other hand, the nation survives its individual members on the earth, and lives on from age to age, and thus gives time for the harvest of its conduct to come in. It is one special design of the histories in the Bible to trace this process out. The fate of the Jews is just an instance of it. The same principles apply to all nations.
III. THE EARTHLY GROUND OF CONFIDENCE WHICH TAKES THE PLACE OF GOD IN OUR FAITH MAY BECOME THE VERY SOURCE OF OUR RUIN. Against the advice of their prophets, the Jews had weakly entered into an alliance with Babylon. Thus they were drawn into the quarrel of Babylon with Egypt. Pharaoh-Necho had deposed Jehcahaz, the son of Josiah, for his Babylonian alliance, and set up Jehoiakim in his place. It was natural that Nebuchadnezzar should aim a blow at Pharaoh through his weak vassal, and at the same time reduce to a state of harmless helplessness the people who had been transferred from the protection of Babylon to that of Egypt. If The Jews had been true to their destiny of isolation and simple trust in God, the political cause of their overthrow might never have existed. No foe is more dangerous than the friend who has taken the place of God in our trust.
IV. WHEN THE SPIRITUAL TREASURE OF TRUE RELIGION IS LOST, THE LOSS OF ITS MATERIAL TREASURES MAY FOLLOW AS A WHOLESOME CHASTISEMENT. Nebuchadnezzar carried away part of the sacred vessels of the temple and offered them as booty to his god. No miracle rebuked him as when, in an earlier age, the image of Dagon was found fallen and broken before the ark (1 Samuel 5:4). [Now there was little spirituality left among the Jews to render their sacred vessels of any real use. They had been already desecrated by the wickedness of the nation. True sacrilege is not pagan pillage, but the association of an immoral character with the observance of religious rites. When the soul has gone out of our religion, it may be well if the external ordinances are disturbed,
HOMILIES BY H.T. ROBJOHNS