Hello brothers and sisters,
We have walked all the way through.
If you missed any of the earlier posts, you can get caught up HERE
Twelve Hebrew and Aramaic chapters with two Greek counterparts each. Two additions unique to the Greek versions.
Seventeen posts, three witnesses at a time, verse by verse, from a boy refusing the king’s food to a dragon bursting in a Babylonian temple. Along the way we have watched a furnace, a wall, a den, a river, four beasts, a ram, a goat, a horn, seventy weeks, an archangel, an army of kings, and a resurrection.
And now I want to do something I have not done in any of the previous posts. I want to stop looking at the trees and describe the forest.
Because here is the thing about a series like this.
Each post asked a narrow question: what do the three traditions do with this chapter? But underneath those seventeen narrow questions, patterns kept surfacing, the same handful of phenomena appearing again and again in different clothes. I would notice one in chapter 8 and then meet it again in chapter 10 and again in chapter 11. Those patterns are what this series actually discovered, and no single post could show them to you, because you can only see them by standing back.
So this post is not a recap. I’m not going to march through the chapters again.
What I’m going to do is name the six things that kept happening, show you the sharpest example of each, and then, at the end, I am going to do the thing I have been deferring for seventeen posts:
I’m going to take up the hardest challenges to the way I read the Bible, including one from a first-rate scholar whose argument, if he is right, would require me to rebuild my entire framework.
I promised you all series that I would not straw-man anyone and would not pretend to certainty I do not have. This is where I make good on that, on the questions that cost me something. And just might force me to rethink some of my positions.
Let’s dig in.
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What We Were Actually Doing
A word first about the method, since it’s the thing being tested.
The premise of this series has been what I call the both/and. It’s my theory that the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint are both authoritative. That both were preserved by God on purpose.
That where they differ, the differences are usually not errors to be adjudicated but complementary angles on one truth, and that a fuller picture emerges when you hold them together rather than picking a winner.
That is a claim, not a mood. And claims can be tested. Seventeen posts of side-by-side reading is a fairly rigorous test, especially because Daniel is the hardest possible case. It survives in three ancient editions that diverge more sharply than almost any other book in the Bible.
If the both/and were going to break anywhere, it would break here.
So we now have to ask the question: did it hold?
The truth is that mostly it did, and beautifully so. But not everywhere, and I am going to show you exactly where it strained, because a framework that has never been pressed is not a conviction.
It’s an untested claim. It’s an assertion that hasn’t been argued. It’s little more than a slogan. So let’s have a look.
Pattern One: Different Source Text, or Different Translator?
This is the question that sat underneath every single post, and it is the one that took me the longest to learn to hold properly.
When the Old Greek says something the Hebrew does not, there are two very different explanations. Either the translator was looking at a different Hebrew or Aramaic manuscript than the one that became our Masoretic Text, or he was looking at the same text and rendering it interpretively; expanding, smoothing, or explaining.
Scholars call the underlying source text the vorlage, and the difference between these two explanations is enormous. A different vorlage means the Greek is a witness to a genuinely different ancient text. An interpretive translation means the Greek is a witness to how ancient readers understood the text we already have.
My default through this series has been vorlage-first. When the Greek diverges substantially, I have leaned toward suspecting a different source. And that default is not arbitrary. It rests on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which proved beyond argument that multiple textual forms of biblical books circulated side by side in the Second Temple period.
Before Qumran, you could believe the Hebrew Bible existed in essentially one form and every divergence was a translator’s liberty. And that was exactly how almost all scholars read the Septuagint through the early 20th century. However, the fact that must be reckoned with is that after Qumran, you simply cannot hold that view.
A default is not a doctrine, however, and I want to point to the place where I had to set mine down because the evidence didn’t support it.
At Daniel 8:10, the Masoretic Text has the little horn grow up to the host of heaven, throw stars to the ground, and trample them. The Old Greek reverses the whole scene: the horn is raised toward the stars and then thrown down and trampled by them. The horn does not win. It loses. Immediately.
My instinct said different vorlage.
The evidence said otherwise.
Michael Segal points out that you could just about revocalize the first two Hebrew verbs to read passively, but you cannot do it to the third one, the trampling. The Greek is not reading different letters. It is making a decision. And Segal suggests the translator is reading this horn through Isaiah 14, where the shining one who says “I will ascend into heaven” is brought down to Sheol. Raised toward the stars, thrown to the earth. That is Isaiah’s arc laid deliberately over Daniel’s horn.
So in Part 11, I said out loud that I was declining my own default, and I want to repeat it here because it is the most important methodological thing this series taught me.
The vorlage-first instinct has proved right far more often than not. It is still an instinct, however, and instincts have to answer to evidence. When I read the Old Greek of Daniel 8:10, I am not looking at a lost Hebrew manuscript. I am looking at an ancient believer using Scripture to interpret Scripture, just as we do today. And he was doing it well.
Hold onto that, because the final section of this post is going to ask a related question that is of vital importance.
Pattern Two: When the Greek and the Scrolls Kept the Older Reading
Here is the pattern that should change how you think about your English Bible, because it happened repeatedly. And the more books we go through, the more we see this pattern holding.
We are trained, most of us without ever being told, to treat the Hebrew as the original and the Greek as the translation. Original means earlier. Translation means derivative. So when they disagree, the Hebrew wins by default.
This series ran into case after case where that is simply not what the evidence shows.
Start with Daniel 8:4. The Hebrew has the ram charging west, north, and south, three directions. The Old Greek has four, adding east. And when I went looking for which manuscripts supported which reading, here is what I found:
The Old Greek reading is in Papyrus 967, the second-century papyrus that is the oldest witness we have to the Greek Daniel and the only one that predates Origen.
It is in the Syro-Hexaplar. It is in Codex Chisianus. There is not a Greek witness anywhere that lacks it. The bracket you see around it in your N.E.T.S. is a modern editorial judgment that the original translator could not have written what every surviving copy of his work says he wrote.
But the manuscripts are unanimous.
The bracket stands against them.
Then Daniel 10:16. The Masoretic Text says “one in human form” touched Daniel’s lips. Theodotion says “the likeness of a son of man.” The Old Greek says “a likeness of a human hand.” And that Old Greek reading has support from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it fits the passage better than the Hebrew does, because a hand touches Daniel two verses earlier and a human figure touches him two verses later.
The scene is a sequence of a hand reaching into a man’s collapse. The Greek and the oldest Hebrew scrolls agree, and the Masoretic is the reading that drifted.
Then the sharpest case, Daniel 8:9. The Hebrew calls the horn “small.” Both Greek versions call it “strong.” Everyone assumes the Hebrew is original, because “small” matches the little horn of chapter 7 and welds the two visions together.
Segal noticed the problem with that assumption, and his argument is elegant enough that it should alter our Hebrew-first assumption. The Old Greek translator is a compulsive harmonizer, and Segal proves it inside these very verses, in both directions: at 8:9 he borrows a verb from 7:8, and at 7:8 he borrows a word from 8:9. He is stitching the two visions together with both hands. So if his Hebrew had said “small,” he had every motive to keep it, because it would have completed the harmony he was building.
Instead, he wrote “strong” and wrecked his own connection. A harmonizer does not manufacture a discord. Which suggests his Hebrew did not say “small,” and that the Masoretic “small,” matching chapter 7 so tidily, is exactly what harmonizing produces.
Ian Young, working from the manuscripts rather than the translation technique, reached the same conclusion in a published study and calls the Masoretic “little horn” at 8:9 a secondary reading.
Three cases, one lesson. Sometimes the Greek is not the derivative text. Sometimes the Greek, standing alongside the oldest Hebrew scrolls we possess, kept the earlier reading, and the Masoretic Text is the one that moved.
This is the strongest evidence the series produced for the both/and, and notice why. It is not a theological preference. It is textual evidence from the manuscripts themselves.
From where I’m standing, it’s virtually indisputable.
Pattern Three: When the Greek Unmasked the Code
Different pattern, and this one is a delight every time it happens.
Sometimes the Hebrew says something in code, and the Greek, standing centuries downstream with the answer in hand, simply tells you what it meant.
The showpiece is Daniel 11:30. The Hebrew says that “ships of Kittim” will come against the king and turn him back. Kittim is an ancient, elastic word, originally for the people of Cyprus and then for the seafaring powers of the far west. Brenton’s Theodotion keeps the mystery too, calling them “the Citians.”
But the Old Greek says: “the Romans will come and will expel him.”
Rome. By name. In a prophecy about the Seleucid king Antiochus IV, describing the moment in 168 B.C. when a single Roman envoy drew a circle in the sand around him and told him to decide before stepping out of it whether he would leave Egypt or fight Rome.
He left. And then he took his humiliation out on Jerusalem.
The Hebrew preserved the riddle, spoken before anyone knew who the ships from the west would turn out to be. The Greek, translating on the far side of the event, wrote down the answer. Neither is wrong. Together you get to watch a prophecy given in code and then decoded by history, on the page, in two languages.
The same thing happens at Daniel 9:25. The Hebrew says the weeks run until “an anointed prince,” mashiach nagid.
Theodotion renders that phrase with the ordinary Greek equivalent, and the ordinary Greek word for “anointed one” is Christos. So Brenton’s Theodotion reads “until Christ the prince.”
That is not the Greek smuggling Jesus into the Old Testament. It is the Greek translating the word in front of it. But it means the Bible the early church actually carried said “Christ” in Daniel 9, on the surface of the page, in a prophecy about someone coming after a fixed count of weeks and then being cut off.
The connection the church would later draw was not something they had to argue their way into against the text. It was sitting there in plain sight.
And it happens quietly all through chapter 11, where the Hebrew keeps saying “the king of the south” and the Old Greek keeps saying “the king of Egypt.”
No mystery.
Just the answer.
Pattern Four: When the Traditions Traded Places
Now a pattern that complicates any simple story you might have been building.
If you read only the first half of this series, you might conclude that the Greek is the theologically adventurous tradition and the Hebrew is the reserved one. The Greek expands, heightens, dramatizes. The Hebrew trusts silence.
And then you hit Daniel 8:25, and the whole thing inverts.
All through chapter 8 the Greek does the heavy theological lifting. It throws the horn down from the stars. It introduces a commander in chief who delivers the captives. It reads the horn through Isaiah 14.
Then comes the climax, the moment the willful king reaches the summit of his blasphemy, and it is the Hebrew alone that dares to say it: he “shall even rise up against the Prince of princes,” and “he shall be broken, and not by human hands” (NRSVUE).
Neither Greek witness carries that collision. Theodotion turns the phrase toward the horn crushing men like eggs. The Old Greek turns it toward his thought against the holy ones.
The single most breathtaking sentence in the chapter, a mere king setting himself against the Prince of princes and being shattered by a hand that is not human, is unique to the Hebrew.
The traditions trade places. And once you see it there, you find it elsewhere. At Daniel 3:25, the Aramaic has Nebuchadnezzar say the fourth figure in the furnace looks like “a son of the gods,” which is exactly what a pagan king would say, and Theodotion sharpens it to “the Son of God,” which is what the church would hear.
At Daniel 12:13, the personal promise to Daniel himself, that he will rest and rise for his reward at the end of the days, stands firm in the Hebrew and in Theodotion, while the Old Greek’s version of that final clause sits in brackets, textually uncertain.
This is why I distrust any tidy formula about which tradition is “better.” There isn’t one. There are two witnesses with different strengths, and which one carries the freight changes from verse to verse.
That is not a weakness in the both/and. That is the entire point of it.
Pattern Five: Where the Both/And Genuinely Strained
Now the teeth.
I could have written a capstone that only celebrated the wins. It would have been easy enough to sidestep the places where my default was challenged. To straw-man the evidence and only see the places where my own view is supported.
But that would be intellectually dishonest.
And worse, it would be boring, because a framework that fits everything comfortably has usually stopped being a framework and become a habit. And, I would contend, a lazy one at that. So here are the two places where my own approach was under real pressure, described as plainly as I can.
The wreck of the Seventy Weeks.
The Old Greek of Daniel 9:24-27 is not a complementary witness.
It is damaged.
Look at the numbers. The Old Greek reads “after seven and seventy and sixty-two weeks” (N.E.T.S.). Add them: one hundred and thirty-nine. In a prophecy about seventy weeks.
That is not a variant tradition.
That is an arithmetic impossibility, produced somewhere in transmission when the seventy from the opening collided with the seven and sixty-two from the timeline and nobody sorted it out.
And in verse 27 the N.E.T.S. prints three clauses in brackets, one after another, competing versions of the same chronological statement stacked on top of each other like sediment.
Tim McLay, who translated Daniel for the N.E.T.S. and knows this text as well as anyone alive, says flatly of this passage that it is “obviously corrupt.”
I am not going to dress that up. When you want the shape of the Seventy Weeks in focus, you go to the Hebrew and to Theodotion. The Old Greek of these verses simply cannot carry the weight.
Saying “both traditions are complementary here” would be not only false but also a ridiculously dishonest statement.
So what does the both/and do with a text that is simply broken?
Here is the honest answer I arrived at, and I still find it moving. Look at where the damage fell. It fell on the arithmetic, the weeks, the counting. And now read verse 24 in the Old Greek, the purpose statement, and compare it with the Hebrew. Sin consummated. Iniquities blotted out. Everlasting righteousness given. A holy of holies gladdened.
Intact.
Every one of the six great purposes survives in the very manuscript that lost the ability to count.
The corruption reached the numbers. It could not reach the atonement.
That is not a rescue of the both/and by clever framing. The both/and cannot be honestly applied to those verses, and I said so in Part 12.
What the passage gives us instead is something arguably better: a demonstration that the message God put in this chapter proved more durable than the manuscript carrying it. Scribes did their worst right here, and the gospel walked out without a scratch. Because let’s face it, the timing and dating of the seventy weeks prophecy is one of the most hotly debated issues in all of Scripture anyway. Almost no one actually agrees on what it means. So if we stop worrying about the timing and just look at the atonement, all three traditions agree.
But let’s be clear about the cost. On this passage, my framework does not describe the evidence and I had to be honest about that.
The third destiny.
Smaller, and harder to tidy. At Daniel 12:2, the Hebrew and Theodotion give two destinies for the resurrected: everlasting life, and shame and everlasting contempt. The Old Greek gives three, adding “dispersion” as its own category between them.
I do not know what to do with that, and I said so in Part 15. It is not obviously a complementary angle on a two-fold resurrection. It looks like a third thing.
I declined to build any doctrine on it, and I decline again here. Sometimes the honest position is that a divergence is genuinely open and you file it rather than resolve it. Because here’s the thing: I don’t know of any scholar or theologian who has a convincing argument about what to do with this or how to interpret it. And the text just doesn’t give me enough to form an opinion about it.
Two strains, then. One where the framework does not apply, and one where I do not know. If you have read seventeen posts of me finding harmony, you deserve to know exactly where I could not. And why.
Pattern Six: The Two Additions, on Opposite Sides of the Same Question
And then the final two posts gave us a gift, in the form of a puzzle that cuts both ways.
Susanna and Bel and the Dragon are both Greek-only. Neither has a Hebrew or Aramaic text. So both raise the same challenge: are these real Scripture, or late Greek inventions dressed up as Daniel?
And they answer that challenge in opposite directions.
Susanna’s whole climax turns on two puns that only work in Greek. The elder says the couple was under a mastic tree, a schinos, and Daniel says the angel will schisei, split him. The second says an evergreen oak, a prinos, and Daniel says the angel will prisei, saw him.
Around A.D. 240, Julius Africanus threw exactly this at Origen as proof that Susanna was a forgery: those puns cannot survive translation from Hebrew, because they could not have existed in Hebrew, so the story was composed in Greek, so it is not part of the real Daniel.
Origen wrote back at length and could not actually rebut the linguistics. He admitted he had consulted Jewish scholars about the underlying Hebrew and come away still in doubt.
Bel and the Dragon points the other way. The scholars behind the N.E.T.S. observe that Theodotion’s version reads like a formal translation of a Semitic source, with Semitic idioms scattered through it, and that one strange phrase, the angel setting Habakkuk down “in a rush of his spirit,” is best explained as a garble out of Hebrew or Aramaic. Fingerprints of a Semitic original, in the same collection of additions.
Two texts. Same corpus. Same canonical status. One looks born in Greek and the other looks translated from a Semitic source, and the early church received both as part of Daniel.
Which should tell you that the neat frame most of us inherited, Hebrew equals authentic and Greek equals derivative, is far too blunt an instrument for the actual evidence.
And it sets up the argument I have been deferring since Part 1.
The Reckoning
Everything above is textual. Now the questions underneath the questions, the ones I kept promising to take up later.
Later is now.
Was Daniel written in the second century?
The critical consensus says Daniel was composed around 165 B.C., during the persecution under Antiochus IV, and that its stunningly accurate “prophecy” of Hellenistic history in chapter 11 is history written after the fact and disguised as prediction.
I gave that case its strongest form in Part 14 and I will not repeat all of it, but here is the spine of my answer, because it matters for how you read everything else I’ve presented here.
The argument’s load-bearing beam is not evidence. It is a premise.
The reason chapter 11’s precision “must” be history rather than prophecy is that prophecy this detailed is assumed impossible. Strip that assumption away and the precision stops being suspicious and becomes exactly what you would expect from the God who, through Isaiah, stakes His claim to deity on declaring the end from the beginning.
A biblical worldview is supernatural from the floor up. If God exists and angels exist and one of them stood by the Tigris and told Daniel what was written in the book of truth, genuine prediction is not an embarrassment to explain. It is the native language of that world.
Then the evidence, which runs awkwardly for the late date.
The Qumran copies of Daniel are dated by the paleographers to the late second century B.C., leaving almost no room for a book supposedly written around 165 to be composed, circulated, embraced as sacred, and copied by a separatist community.
In 2025, researchers combining radiocarbon dating with a new handwriting model redated one of those copies, 4QDan-c, into a range of roughly 230 to 160 B.C. That is a probability range and not a fixed year, and the method is new and will be refined. But most of that range falls before the crisis the book is supposed to be describing after the fact.
And the mismatch at the end of chapter 11 cuts against the theory rather than for it.
Antiochus died in Persia in late 164. The text has the willful king die between the seas and the holy mountain, near Jerusalem. A writer in 165 could not have known how Antiochus would die, so a wrong guess is not by itself suspicious. What is strange is that the guess was never corrected.
The war ground on for another twenty years with scribes copying these texts, everyone knowing exactly where Antiochus had died, and the ending stands uncorrected in every surviving witness.
A skeptic can answer that a book already passing as ancient could not be edited without exposing the fraud, and that is fair. But then you are left with a fresh forgery whose own first readers, the people who had just buried Antiochus, swallowed a visibly wrong ending and enshrined it as Scripture without a murmur.
I hold the accuracy and the sixth-century Daniel together, and I do not find it a strain.
Are the additions Scripture?
I laid the history out fully in Part 16, so I’ll only summarize here.
The early church, reading its Old Testament in Greek, received Susanna and Bel and the Dragon as part of Daniel. Jerome, translating from the Hebrew around A.D. 400, set them apart with a note that they are not found in the Hebrew. That fault line still runs through the church: Catholic and Orthodox Christians read them as Daniel 13 and 14, Protestants place them in the Apocrypha, which means a very large portion of the global church has always said yes they are Scripture.
Where I land:
I lean toward receiving them. I have read both closely in both Greek versions, and I find nothing in their content unworthy of Scripture. Susanna enforces the ninth commandment and applies the Mosaic law of false witness exactly as Deuteronomy prescribes. Bel and the Dragon dramatizes the idol-polemic that Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Psalms had been preaching for centuries. Neither teaches anything strange. Both look like what they claim to be.
But notice that my leaning has a price, and I want to name it rather than hide it. If Susanna was composed in Greek, and Africanus’s linguistics are probably right that it was, then receiving it as Scripture means accepting that God inspired a text directly in Greek rather than merely permitting a Hebrew text to be translated into Greek.
That is a bigger claim than most Protestants have ever had to face, and it is a bigger claim than “the Septuagint is a faithful translation.”
Africanus proved Greek composition (perhaps not definitively, but it’s strong enough to be reasonable) and then assumed Greek composition meant forgery. The second half does not follow from the first unless you have already decided God does not inspire in Greek. I do not accept that premise. But I want you to see clearly that rejecting it commits me to something substantial.
And now the hardest one: McLay
Which brings me to the challenge I have been circling since the beginning, and the reason I wanted this capstone to have teeth.
Tim McLay is not a critic of the Septuagint. He is one of its most serious modern advocates. He translated Daniel for the New English Translation of the Septuagint, the very edition I have quoted in every post of this series. He wrote his doctoral work on the translation technique of the two Greek versions of Daniel. If you have read this series, you have been reading his labor on nearly every page.
And his mature position, if correct, would knock the legs out from under my vorlage-first default.
Let me give it to you at full strength, because it deserves that.
McLay ran the numbers on the two Greek versions where they overlap. What he found is genuinely strange. The Old Greek and Theodotion share readings less than 20 percent of the time overall. They mostly tell the stories differently. But when they do agree, roughly 83 percent of those agreements are verbatim, word for word.
Sit with how odd that is. Two independent translators working from similar Semitic sources would produce moderate, scattered resemblance spread throughout. What you would not get is two mostly different texts punctuated by patches that match exactly.
That is not the signature of translation. That is the signature of contamination, of one text being corrected toward the other by later scribes. In his introduction to Daniel in the N.E.T.S., McLay concludes that the only reasonable explanation for this pattern is “textual corruption of the OG with TH readings.”
Then he found the fingerprints. In multiple places the Old Greek manuscripts carry both their own rendering and Theodotion’s, sitting side by side as doublets. You can see the splice.
And here is the move that matters. Strip all of those Theodotion-ward corrections out of the Old Greek of chapters 4 through 6, and what remains is a coherent, entirely distinct telling of the same stories. McLay says that residue shows no evidence of being Semitic at all.
His conclusion is that these were “composed in Greek in Alexandria,” not translated from anything.
His retrospective account of how he got there is the part that should give us pause. He says the belief and assumption of a Hebrew vorlage was interfering with how the text could properly be understood. He is not claiming the evidence disproved a Semitic source.
He is saying he had been importing the vorlage as a premise and reading the data through it, and that once he set the premise down, the text looked different.
Read that again and notice what it does to me. My vorlage-first default is exactly the assumption he is describing. If he is right, I have spent seventeen posts asking “which Hebrew text was the translator looking at?” about passages where the honest answer is that there was no Hebrew text, because the Greek Daniel of those chapters is not a translation at all. It is its own composition.
So let me answer, and let me do it without flinching and without pretending this costs nothing.
First, on the state of the field. McLay knows he is in the minority and says so. The majority position remains that Theodotion is a revision of the Old Greek.
Alexander Di Lella states it about as strongly as scholarship states anything: OG Daniel is prior to Theodotion, “for the latter presupposes the former.”
John Collins holds a version of the same. And the newest sustained work runs against McLay too: a 2023 Brill monograph, developed from a Hebrew University dissertation supervised by Emanuel Tov and Michael Segal, argues in detail that Theodotion is a recension with a genuine Semitic source, on the strength of rare words and unique equivalents shared with the Old Greek.
Being in the minority does not make McLay wrong. Minorities in textual criticism have been right before, and spectacularly. But you should know that the field has not gone his way, and that the disagreement is live rather than settled.
Second, and sharper: the two best scholars on this question disagree at the same verse. Daniel 8:11, which we worked through in Part 11. Segal argues that Theodotion at that verse depends on the Old Greek, and specifically on an Old Greek that already had its glosses in it, and he shows Theodotion combining a word from the original translation with a word from the glosses.
McLay looks at the same extensive verbatim agreement in that same passage and argues the opposite, that it indicates Theodotion corruption of the Old Greek.
Same verse, same data, opposite conclusions from two first-rate specialists. That is worth knowing before anyone tells you this question is closed.
Third, on scope, and this one matters most for our series. McLay’s hard evidence is chapters 4 through 6. That is where the two versions diverge most wildly, where the doublets are thickest, where his stripping exercise produces a distinct Greek narrative.
He extends the argument outward, and he is candid that the later chapters look different: correspondence between the versions is closer in chapters 7 through 12, with more verbatim agreement and closer formal equivalence to the Hebrew, and he allows that the sources for the Greek versions may simply have been more similar in those chapters.
Segal makes the same observation from the other direction, noting that in the apocalyptic section all three versions reflect the same literary edition with much less textual variation.
Which means the challenge is weakest precisely where this series did its heaviest lifting. The four directions, the strong horn, the hand at the lips, Rome for Kittim, Christ the prince, the Prince of princes: every one of those is in chapters 8 through 12, in the section where even McLay grants that the texts likely go back to similar Semitic sources.
His argument does not touch them.
Fourth, and here is where I concede something real. For chapters 4 through 6, I think McLay may well be right, and I said as much in Part 7 without fully realizing I was agreeing with him.
Anyone who reads the Old Greek of chapter 4 next to the Aramaic can feel that something more than translation is happening. The Old Greek of that chapter has a first-person account of Nebuchadnezzar’s madness that exists in no other tradition and a doxology expanded into a theological manifesto.
I have been calling that a different source text. McLay would call it a different composition. And I have to admit that his account explains the phenomena at least as well as mine does, and possibly better. I’m not conceding that he’s right, but it is something that I have to consider.
So what happens to the both/and if he is right?
It does not break. It grows, and I want to be precise about how, because the growth is not free.
If the Old Greek of chapters 4 through 6 is an original Greek composition rather than a translation, then for those chapters my framework can no longer be described as “two witnesses to one original.”
It has to become something larger: that God preserved two distinct compositions telling the same divinely superintended stories, and that both were received as Scripture by the people of God.
That is a bigger claim.
It is also, I notice, exactly the claim I was already forced to make about Susanna two posts ago. If I can say that a Greek composition can be Scripture when the church received it as Scripture, I have already crossed the bridge McLay is asking me to cross. I just crossed it in a different chapter.
And there is something almost funny in the shape of this. McLay’s critique of the field is that scholars assume a Hebrew original and then read every divergence as deviation from a Hebrew norm.
That critique, aimed at the academy, is aimed at exactly the reflex this publication exists to fight: the reflex that treats Hebrew as real Scripture and Greek as its echo.
He is arguing, from the manuscripts, that the Greek Daniel of those chapters is not a degraded copy of something Hebrew but a text in its own right. I have been arguing, from theology, that the Greek is not a second-class witness. We arrived at neighboring conclusions from opposite directions, and his happens to dissolve one of my working assumptions along the way.
I would rather have a framework that can absorb that than one that has to duck it.
So here is where I actually land, and it is a change from where I started.
My default going forward is not vorlage-first. It is evidence-first, with vorlage as the most common answer rather than the presumed one.
Sometimes the divergence points to a different Semitic source, and Qumran proves that happened.
Sometimes it points to an interpretive translator reading Scripture by Scripture, as at Daniel 8:10.
And sometimes, particularly in chapters 4 through 6, it may point to a distinct composition in Greek.
Three explanations, decided case by case, with the manuscripts getting a vote before my instinct does.
That is a smaller claim than I started with.
But I also think it is a truer one. A more honest one. A more intellectually defensible one.
If you’ve found this work insightful or enlightening, share it with a friend who needs to see the power of reading this incredible story in multiple traditions and recognizing that they can all be authoritative.
My Take
Seventeen posts. Here is what I actually believe now that I did not believe as firmly when we began.
The Septuagint is not a translation of the Bible. In places, it is a witness to a Bible we would otherwise have lost, and occasionally the better witness. Papyrus 967 at Daniel 8:4 and the Scrolls at Daniel 10:16 are not curiosities. They are evidence that the Greek preserved readings the Hebrew tradition let go of, and that any account of “the original text” that starts by assuming the Masoretic Text is the standard has smuggled in its conclusion.
The both/and held up better than I expected under a harder test than I anticipated, and it failed exactly where an honest framework should fail: on a passage that is genuinely damaged. I would rather tell you that the Old Greek of the Seventy Weeks is a wreck than pretend a corruption is a complementary perspective. A method that cannot say “this one is broken” cannot be trusted when it says “these two are complementary.”
I have less certainty about the mechanics than I did, and more confidence in the practice. I no longer think I can always tell you why the Greek differs. But I am more sure than ever that you should read it.
And I want to say one more thing about scholarship, because this series has been an education in it. Every single sharp insight in this capstone came from someone who spent a career on a problem I have spent a year on.
Segal on the harmonizing translator. Young on the secondary reading. McLay on the verbatim agreements. Africanus on the puns.
I have disagreed with several of them in these posts, and I hope I have disagreed the way you would want to be disagreed with: by stating their case at its strongest first, and then saying plainly where I part company and why.
If you found a place in this series where I did not do that, you would be doing me a kindness to tell me.
Why This Matters for Your Walk With God
Let me finish where the whole series was always heading.
You might reasonably ask what any of this is for. You are not going to consult Papyrus 967 this week. So what changes on Monday morning when you open your Bible?
Three things.
You have more Bible than you thought. Most of us read one English translation of one textual tradition and quietly assume we have seen the text. You have seen a text, faithfully rendered, and it is trustworthy. But there is a second ancient witness sitting right there, the Bible the apostles quoted, the Bible the early church read, the Bible in which Daniel 9 says “Christ the prince” out loud. Reading it will not undermine your confidence. It will widen your view. The ram charging in four directions instead of three does not threaten anything. It shows you a fuller picture.
Differences are not a threat. Some of you were taught, implicitly, that if two manuscripts differ, one of them must be an attack on Scripture and somebody must be lying. Seventeen posts should have cured that. The differences are mostly the texture of how God actually preserved His word through human hands across centuries, and the overwhelming majority of them enrich rather than endanger. Even the genuinely damaged passage, the Seventy Weeks in the Old Greek, turned out to prove the point in reverse: the numbers were scrambled and yet the atonement stood. If a corrupted manuscript cannot lose the gospel, your faith does not need to be protected from a footnote.
And the God in all three voices is the same God. This is the thing I keep coming back to. Across three ancient editions, in two languages, through centuries of scribes and translators and editors, the portrait never wavers. The God who shuts the mouths of lions. The God who walks in the furnace. The God who numbers, weighs, and divides the kingdoms of proud men. The God who sends an archangel into a twenty-one day war because one old man was praying. The God who tells a tired prophet at the end of everything to go his way and rest, and rise for his reward at the end of the days.
The manuscripts vary. He does not.
That is what walking with Daniel in three voices finally taught me, and it is the last thing I want to leave with you. Not a theory about textual transmission. A conviction about the One the texts are pointing at, who was faithful to Daniel in Babylon and is faithful to you now, and who has never once been lost in translation.
Rest, and rise.
And do not fear.
A Final Note
Earlier this week I started the first LXX Scrolls chat!
If Substack didn’t notify you, consider this your official invitation to come and chat with me and the community! You can find the chat HERE.
I decided to start with something simple. It’s just an invitation to ask questions about anything you feel I ought to have addressed in this study of Daniel as well as talking a bit about what the next series is going to be and an invitation to suggest any topics you’d like me to cover before that series starts.
And do remember than any subscriber can start a new chat thread, so if you’ve been sitting on something that you’d like to chat with me or the community about, now’s your chance. Get into the chat. Let’s talk!
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Thankyou! I have thoroughly enjoyed following this series, and have learned much from it.
Excellent stuff!