Abstract
Scholarship on Daniel’s Greek loanwords exhibits two significant trends. Many scholars since S. R. Driver have expressed agnosticism toward the loanwords’ significance for dating the traditions of Daniel, and most scholars have not investigated the dialectal features of the loanwords. In this article, I argue that at least four of the Greek loans found in the book of Daniel (קִיתָרוֹס, שַׂבְּכָא, פְּסַנְתֵּרִין, and כָּרוֹז) exhibit non-Attic features. Because Greeks speaking dialects other than Attic had the most influence linguistically in the ancient Near East prior to the Hellenistic era, and because Attic increasingly came to supplant the non-Attic dialects beginning with the fifth century BC, Daniel’s Greek loanwords were probably borrowed earlier rather than later. This, in turn, supports an early date for the traditions in Dan 3, an important conclusion to be considered in discussions of the book’s composition.
