13. Why Are Persian Words Missing in Critic-Belated Bible Books?

Why Are Persian Words Missing in Critic-Belated Bible Books? So of the Persian words. They are found especially in Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and Daniel, all ostensibly from the Persian period of world domination. According to analogy, this Persian domination accounts for their presence in these books. But how about their absence from Jonah, Joel, Job, the Psalms, the Song of Songs, the so-called Priest-Code of the Pentateuch and other writings which the critics place in the Persian period? Why especially should the Priest-Code have no Persian, and probably no Aramaic, words, if it were written between 500 and 300 B.C., in the very age and, as some affirm, by the very author of the book of Ezra? And why should the only demonstrably Babylonian words in this part of the Pentateuch be found in the accounts of the Creation and the Flood, which may so well have come with Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees? And how could the word for “kind” (min), an Egyptian word, have come to be used by the man who is supposed to have written this latest part of the Pentateuch in Babylon in the fifth century B.C.?

These and other similar questions that ought to be asked we may leave to the critics of the Old Testament to attempt to answer. They dare not deny the facts without laying themselves open to the charge of ignorance. They dare not ignore them without submitting to the charge of wilful suppression of the facts in evidence. But someone will say: How about the Greek words in Daniel? No one claims that there are any Greek words in the Hebrew of Daniel. In the Aramaic parts of Daniel there are three words, all names of musical instruments, which are alleged, not proved, to be Greek. It is more likely than not, I think, that they are of Greek origin, though no one of them is exactly transliterated. Assuming, however, that they are Greek, and waiving the question as to whether this part of the book was originally written in Hebrew, or Babylonian, and afterwards translated into Aramaic, there is no good reason for supposing that Greek musical instruments, retaining their original names though in a somewhat perverted form, may not have been used at the court of Nebuchadnezzar.