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George J. Brooke, The Book of Daniel and the Apocryphal Daniel Literature. By Lorenzo DiTommaso. Pp. xx + 547. (Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha, 20.) Leiden: Brill, 2005. €125/$169, The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 57, Issue 1, April 2006, Pages 208–211, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/flj015
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Extract
Lorenzo DiTommaso has become well known for his very useful work, A Bibliography of Pseudepigrapha Research 1850–1999 (Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series, 39; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001). In that book he included thirty pages of bibliography on the Daniel pseudepigrapha under the two headings of ‘Aramaic Pseudo-Daniel Texts from Qumran’ and ‘Pseudo-Daniel Literature from Late Antiquity and Mediaeval Times’. He has now enjoyed a two-year fellowship associated with Yale and working with John J. Collins, whose Hermeneia commentary on Daniel has become a standard reference work. The fruits of DiTommaso's time there and at several other libraries and archives around the world are the subject of this book.
To start at the end: the thirty pages of Daniel bibliography in his 2001 volume are here expanded into a chapter of nearly two hundred pages (pp. 316–508). This includes detailed annotated lists of the manuscript evidence for the primary sources in Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Ethiopic, Coptic, Hebrew, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Old and Middle English, Irish, Icelandic, Mediaeval German, French, Armenian, and Slavonic. No scholar can be an expert in all these languages nor have time to read all these sources, so DiTommaso has rightly been dependent on the assistance of numerous experts and librarians around the world, making the book in several respects the result of very significant international collaboration. For some categories of the Daniel apocrypha, such as for some of the prognostica, DiTommaso claims to offer the most complete word on the subject, but for others he acknowledges that the work is ongoing. So, for example, given that the index of the manuscripts listed and often briefly commented upon runs to thirteen pages, with reference to libraries from Aberystwyth to the Zentralbibliothek in Zürich, it seems almost churlish to point out that a random search for Gotha A 2756, fos. 30a–44b, which contains an Arabic version of the story of Susanna, possibly from the ninth century, drew a blank. That manuscript has been transcribed and translated by Fabrizio A. Pennacchietti, Susanna nel deserto: Riflessi di un racconto biblico nella cultura arabo-islamica (Turin: Silvio Zamorani editore, 1998).
