Page:06.CBOT.KD.PropheticalBooks.B.vol.6.LesserProphets.djvu/50

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the prophecies of Daniel, but even Ezekiel names Daniel as a bright pattern of righteousness and wisdom.
If we now turn our attention to the internal evidences alleged against the genuineness of the book, the circumstance that the opponents place the Greek names of certain musical instruments mentioned in Daniel 3 in the front, awakens certainly no prejudice favourable to the strength of their argument.
In the list of the instruments of music which were played upon at the inauguration of Nebuchadnezzar's golden image, three names are found of Grecian origin: קיתרס = κίθαρις, סוּמפּניה (סיפניא) = συμτηωνία, and פסנתּרין ()פסנטרין = ψαλτήριον (Dan 3:5, Dan 3:7, Dan 3:10, Dan 3:15). To these there has also been added סבּכאa = σαμβύκη, but unwarrantably; for the σαμβύκη σάμβυξ ζαμβίκη is, according to the testimony of Athen. and Strabo, of foreign of Syrian, i.e., of Semitic origin, and the word σαμβύκη is without any etymon in Greek (cf. Ges. Thes. p. 935). Of the other three names, it is undoubted that they have a Grecian origin; but “no one can maintain that such instruments could not at the time of the Chaldean supremacy have found their way from the Greek West into Upper Asia, who takes into view the historical facts” (Kran.). At the time of Nebuchadnezzar, not only was “there intercourse between the inhabitants of Upper Asia and the Ionians of Asia Minor,” as Bleek thinks, but according to Strabo (xiii. 2, 3) there was in the army of Nebuchadnezzar, Antimenidas, the brother of the poet Alcaeus, fighting victoriously for the Babylonians, apparently, as M. v. Nieb. in his Gesch. Assurs, p. 206, remarks, at the head of a warlike troop, as chief of a band of fuorusciti who had bound themselves to the king of Babylon. According to the testimony of Abydenus, quoted in Eusebius, Chr. Arm. ed. Aucher, i. 53, Greek soldiers followed the Assyrian Esarhaddon (Axerdis) on his march through Asia; and according to Berosus (Fragm. hist. Graec. ed. Müller, ii. 504), Sennacherib had already conducted a successful war against a Greek army that had invaded Cilicia. And the recent excavations in Nineveh confirm more and more the fact that there was extensive intercourse between the inhabitants of Upper Asia and Greece, extending to a period long before the time of Daniel, so that the importation of Greek instruments into Nineveh was no by means a strange thing, much less could it be so during the time of the Chaldean supremacy in Babylon, the merchant-city, as Ezekiel (Eze 17:4, Eze 17:19) calls it, from which even in Joshua's time a Babylonish garment had