The writing and publication of this book were most graciously funded by NWO (the Dutch Research Council) as part of a postdoctoral project at Leiden University (VI.Veni.191T.023). The idea, however, sprang from my ongoing research on Biblical Aramaic at KU Leuven, funded by FWO (Research Foundation—Flanders, project number 1231920N). In the course of describing the grammar of Biblical Aramaic, I frequently found myself noting that some unique linguistic form was limited to a verse or passage in Daniel that was missing from the Old Greek or otherwise textually difficult. To avoid circularity, it became necessary to investigate the textual history of Aramaic Daniel in its own right. Bénédicte Lemmelijn’s chapter in Person & Rezetko’s Empirical Models Challenging Biblical Criticism and Michael Segal’s many different works on Daniel, both of which I only became familiar with in the first half of 2021, were inspirational in this regard, as was Juha Pakkala’s Ezra the Scribe, BZAW 347 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004).
I am accordingly very grateful for Prof. Lemmelijn’s willingness to provide an earlier draft of this work with helpful comments and corrections and Prof. Segal’s friendly encouragement. Thank you, too, to Harald Samuel, Maarten Kossmann, Marijn van Putten, and everyone else who showed interest in this project. On the publishing side, I sincerely thank the anonymous reviewer, who read and commented on this work in record time, and my former student at Leiden and former colleague at Brill, Elisa Perotti, for her excellent work both on this book and on my first one (for which I forgot to supply a preface). The errors that remain in this work are, of course, all my own. Final thanks for their loving support are due to my parents, to Hilde, and to David,
Leiden, Adar II 5782