John2 wrote:Spin,
I appreciate your response.
Regarding what you wrote about the brackets in the Nahum Pesher I cited:
"The text actually looks like this:
'[Interpreted, this concerns Deme]trius king of Javan who sought, on the counsel of those who seek smooth things, to enter Jerusalem. [But God did not permit the city to be delivered] into the hands of the kings of Greece, from the time of Antiochus until the coming of the rulers of the Kittim [...]'
The material in the brackets represents lacunae in the text and is reconstructed according to the way one understands the context of the pesher."
I understand that, and the brackets are in the link I provided.
It sounds like you have given the issue of the identity of the Kittim in the Scrolls a lot of thought, and you've given me plenty to chew on. While I give what you've said some thought, I'm wondering what you make of the reference to the Kittim in Daniel 11:30. I'm not suggesting that it is a certain reference to Romans, I'm only curious how you look at it considering your point of view on the Kittim.
It is certainly a reference to the Romans, to a specific well-known event mentioned by Polybius, when Antiochus IV had entered Egypt for the second time and the Romans sent G. Popillius Laenas to order him to leave. But the reference to the Kittim there is quite obscure.
It has been a while since I followed the trail of evidence relating to the Kittim reference in Dan 11:30, so I no longer have the range of evidence at hand. However, the starting point is the LXX which does not have Kittim, but Romans. You'll note that at the beginning of the chapter the writer has no interest in disguising the names of Persia and Greece, so the reference to Kittim in 11:30 needs explanation. Why would the LXX—and the Latin Vulgate—have the more obvious "Romans" while the Hebrew "ships of the Kittim"? The Jubilees, a text of a similar age, refers to the Kittim a few times, though it certainly does not point to the Romans.
If for a moment we work on the notion that at the time of the Hellenistic crisis, the "Kittim" were in fact ethnic Cypriots used by the Seleucids or at least Seleucid forces that included them, how would Daniel come to represent the Romans as the Kittim? Working on the notion that the LXX and the Vulgate reflect the original text of Daniel, we have little problem. There is sense for worried Jews to disguise the mention of Romans if they were frightened of the Romans. If so, the LXX and Vulgate translations are straightforward renderings of the original, which is easier to surmise than thinking that independent translations in different languages would both render "Kittim" as Romans—though the LXX may easily have been at hand when the Vulgate was translated, the translator had to make the decision not to translate the Hebrew.
But why would anyone during the Hellenistic crisis want to disguise a reference to the Romans? As indicated, the writer did not hide the Greeks and the Persians. So why "Kittim"? 1 Maccabees, a text that reflects Hasmonean propaganda of the time of John Hyrcanus, refers to Alexander the Great as coming "from the land of the Kittim" (1:1) and this text makes no attempts to be cryptic, so the land of the Kittim should be taken at face value as a straight reference. This would follow if the Kittim were at first Cypriot forces fighting for the Seleucids, then generalized to indicate any Macedonian forces and the Macedonians came from the west, hence the land of the Kittim. Conquerors from the west and Rome was soon to become one, bear the label "Kittim" and the term became available to a later editor of Daniel after the time of John Hyrcanus and probably after 63 BCE when Pompey laid siege to the temple and the Romans replaced all earlier foreign conquerors.
Dan 11:30 doesn't just say "Kittim", but "
ships of the Kittim", which is a strange addition if "Romans" was replaced. Why "
ships of the Kittim"? It seems to be a reference to Num 24:24, which talks of ships coming from the hand of Kittim afflicting Asshur and Eber (the land of the Hebrews). Strangely, or perhaps not, Targums Onqelos and Pseudo-Jonathan replace the Kittim with Romans! (Dating of these targums is difficult, but Pseudo-Jonathan is definitely post-Arab conquest.)
We can see the reference to the Romans in Dan 11:30 as "Kittim" to be a scribal intervention based on Num 24:24 and its ships from Kittim. Once that is said, be aware that there will probably be no published scholars who hold such a position. So, do not just be aware, but beware.
