Page 101 - Daniel

commanders or military chiefs. The “governors” seemed to refer to
presidents or governors of civil government. The “counselors” were of
the government or chief arbitrators. The “treasurers” were
superintendents of the public treasury. The “justices” were lawyers or
guardians of the law. The “magistrates” were judges in a stricter sense of

the term, that is, those who gave a just sentence. The summons also
went out to “all the officials,” governors of the provinces subordinate to
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the chief governor. This list of officers is repeated in verse 3 and some
are repeated in verse 27.

According to verse 3, they were assembled before the image, awaiting
the call to universal worship signaled by the cry of the herald. The word
for herald (kārôz), because it closely resembles the Greek word kērux,
introduces the interesting problem of Greek words in Daniel. Archer and
others have challenged whether these words are actually Greek words,

pointing out that karoz (herald, classified as a Greek word by Brown,
Driver, and Briggs Lexicon) has in works like Koehler-Baumgartner’s
Hebrew Lexicon been traced to the Old Persian khrausa, meaning
“caller.” 21

Several of the instruments listed in verse 5 also seem to be of Greek
origin. This has been claimed as confirmation that Daniel wrote during
the period of Greek dominance of Western Asia—in the second rather
than sixth century B.C., in other words.

But Edwin Yamauchi notes that it was not uncommon for monarchs to
have foreign musicians and musical instruments in their royal court. 22

Robert Dick Wilson points out that the argument actually boomerangs
since, if Daniel was written in a Greek period, there would be many
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more Greek words than the few that occur here and there. The fact is
that there is nothing strange about some amount of Greek influence in
Babylonian culture in view of the contact between Babylonians and
Greeks. Greek traders were common in Egypt and western Asia from the
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seventh century B.C. onward. Greek mercenaries who served as soldiers
for various countries are found more than one hundred years before
Daniel, as in the Assyrian army of Esarhaddon (682 B.C.) and even in the

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Babylonian army of Nebuchadnezzar. Not only did the Greeks affect
the Semitic world, but Assyrian and Babylonian influences appear in the
Greek language as well. 26