Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith by James K. Hoffmeier and Dennis R. Magary

Author:James K. Hoffmeier and Dennis R. Magary
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Good News Publishers
Published: 2012-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

The Chaldeans

Use of Chaldean for a special class of learned men in Daniel is an “undoubted anachronism” for the time of Nebuchadnezzar.16 The word in Daniel 5:30, “Belshazzar the Chaldean king,” and in 9:1, “the realm of the Chaldeans,” has an ethnic connotation, and that may be true of the phrase “the letters and language of the Chaldeans” in 1:4. Every other occurrence in Daniel carries the specialized sense of a category among the wise men, sometimes standing for the whole body (cf. 2:2, 4, 10, etc.). The same restricted meaning occurs in Herodotus, Histories 1.181f., where the Chaldeans are priests of Bel. This limited meaning, it is argued, could have developed only after the Chaldeans had ceased to have any significance as a people or a power, that is, when the Persian Empire was fully established. Admittedly, the ethnic use did continue to be current for a long while, preserved in the Old Testament writings and used by historians such as Strabo at the end of the first century BC. Were Chaldean a normal gentilic in sixth-century-BC Babylonia, attested in contemporary documents, with no trace of the specialized use, Daniel’s mode of employing it might be considered anachronistic. But beside the fact that there is no evidence for Chaldean as a professional name in Babylonian texts, we should note the complete absence of the word as an ethnic term from the royal inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar, his father, and his successors. In Assyrian records of the eighth and seventh centuries it is used as the overall name for a group of tribes often mentioned separately. In this situation it is as improper to label the professional sense of Chaldean a sixth-century usage as it is to call it an anachronism.

A possible analogy can be found among the Medes. According to Herodotus, there was a group of six tribes (Histories 1.101). One of the tribes was called the Magi. Now the Magi are well known as religious functionaries in the Persian Empire and as the eponyms of all magicians. Their early history is obscure. R. N. Frye wrote, “One may tentatively suggest that the Magi were a ‘tribe’ of the Medes who exercised sacerdotal functions. During the supremacy of the Medes they expanded over the Median empire as a priesthood since the priestly trade was kept, so to speak, ‘in the family.’”17 Perhaps something similar was true of the Chaldeans. Chaldean has passed into English from Greek and Latin, the Greek being a correct transliteration of the Babylonian *kaldāyu. In Hebrew the form differs: kaśdim. The variation is explicable in the light of historical development within Babylonian and Assyrian. From the mid-second millennium BC onward the combination of sibilant + dental was often written as 1 + dental, revealing a phonetic shift probably universal in the spoken language, though concealed by scribal conservatism in many of the texts that survive.18 This shift accounts well for the difference between the Akkadian and Greek forms and the Hebrew, which was unaffected by it, deriving from the Chaldeans themselves or from a time before the shift had occurred.

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