Daniel After Babylon: The Additions in the History of Interpretation

The biblical book of Daniel was known to Jewish and Christian antiquity in its longer versions, preserved for us in the Greek textual tradition. Those Additions, as they came to be called (the tale of Susanna and the legends of Bel and the Dragon, the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Hebrews in the fiery furnace), have travelled on through languages and cultures and have generated long trails of interpretation, from commentary and religious iconography to fine art and domestic interiors.

This book follows three particular trails in the reception of the longer Daniel-book, tracing the themes of martyrdom, afterlife worlds, and the act of seeing beauty. Recovering and documenting the voices of ancient, medieval, and modern interpreters, we meet an assembled cast of Jewish and Christian martyrs, liturgical subjects facing purgatory or paradise, and women resisting voyeuristic viewing. All this reception, though, is a route to reading the text of Greek Daniel itself: these later interpreters move this study towards exegetical conclusions about the Jewish roots of ancient martyrdom, the importance of the book of Daniel to the expansion of afterlife spaces within Second Temple Judaism, and a defense of the ethics of narration in the text of Susanna.

Drawing on methods of material philology, Jennie Grillo argues for the central place of the Additions in the readerly history of the book of Daniel, and for this longer Daniel-book’s abiding significance for theology.

Jennie Grillo, Tisch Family Associate Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame

Jennie Grillo completed her doctoral study at the Oriental Institute, Oxford, after an undergraduate degree in English, and has taught at Harvard, UMass Amherst, Duke, and now the University of Notre Dame. She has published on Ecclesiastes, wisdom literature, early Christian biblical interpretation, Isaiah, Daniel, kingship, memory, idolatry, deification, and apophatic theology. Her research has been supported by the National Humanities Center, the Louisville Institute, and the American Council of Learned Societies.