stephan huller

Why is Daniel written in two different languages.

God and the angels speak Hebrew.

sotto voce

stephan, the angel, speaks from heaven.

Clivedurdle

It seems Hebrew only became a heavenly language much much later...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septuagint

(And btw the true answer is Welsh!)

Clivedurdle

http://www.fedegarcia.net/writings/baudolino.pdf

stephan huller

really? this is a serious debate? when god's finger inscribed the ten utterances with fire on the tablets, what language was God using? Polish?

Clivedurdle

Maybe words do not exist until spoken, text until written?

DCHindley

It has an Aramaic section (Ch 2.4b through 7.28) that starts in an odd part of the otherwise Hebrew narrative. There is even a kind of note in the text announcing that a stretch of Aramaic text follows.

ESV Daniel 2:4 Then the Chaldeans said to the king in Aramaic, "O king, live forever! Tell your servants the dream, and we will show the interpretation." The part highlighted in Red is still in Hebrew, everything that follows to the end of chapter 7 is in Aramaic. It is untranslated in the RSV, as the editors interpreted it as a note to the reader.

Chapter seven describes a vision that Daniel had in which he conversed with angels, who apparently spoke in Aramaic. In the later visions, the text and the heavenly communications are in Hebrew.

I'm pretty sure Stephan is referring to the "descents" (actually ascents) to the merkabah (God's throne in the 7th heaven) where various classes of angels attended him, singing praises and carrying on sacred worship in a heavenly temple. These ascents where the mystic, in a complete state of ritual purity, puts himself into a trance by repeating and recombining various passages from Hebrew scripture over and over until he chances upon the combination that lets him ascend heaven to heaven.

As he ascends, he gives the appropriate pass signals to the angels guarding the gates to these heavens, and asks questions of the angels going about tending to whatever business belongs in each heaven. Each heaven has meaner and more insulting guard angels at the gates. If he does not give the proper responses, a large number of iron bars fall upon him, and so on. Usually somewhere along this process he gets an angelic guide, who ushers him into the 7th heaven, where he sees myriads upon myriads of angels singing praise to god on his throne, which is so bright and colorful that it hides God's face from the mystics view, so he doesn't drop dead. There is the ark of the covenant along with the kine (water buffalos) that hauled it, all singing away. This is preserved in texts known as hechaloth books and 3rd Enoch, all in Hebrew. which you can read in P. Alexander's English translation in the first volume of Charlesworth's Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (or via: amazon.co.uk) (2 volume set is only US $44 at Amazon, which is essential for anyone who seeks to get a feel for ancient Jewish Pseudepigrapha and Hellenized literature).

This kind of ascent must have been practiced even in the 3rd century BCE as Enoch has a vision of the divine palace, where the floors were tessellated with stones polished so fine that one might think it is water and fear for his life. Gershom Scholem notes rabbinical discussions about the danger of misinterpreting these stones as water, in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (or via: amazon.co.uk). (This one is only US $12). Unfortunately for Stephan, this tradition, which may be of Israelite or Iturean origin, is related in Aramaic in the DSS fragments of the Book of Watchers.

DCH

DCHindley

Reformed Egyptian Heiroglyphics, no doubt (a wink and a nod to Mitt Romney).

DCH

DCHindley

I prefer to think of them as bi-lingual.

DCH

Clivedurdle

Does anyone know much about the history of tessellation?

Justinian in St Sophia has the most sophisticated example with gold leaf on glass, but it would be interesting how sophisticated artists were in 300 BCE.

Hmm - walking on water....