The Fiery Furnace in the Book of Danieland the Ancient Near East

摘要

The court tales of Daniel 1-6 are all set in the Eastern diaspora. Daniel and his threefriends, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, are four Jewish youths taken to Babylon byNebuchadnezzar to serve at his court and in the subsequent courts of various Babylonian,Median, and Persian kings. These folkloric stories were probably composed in the latePersian or Hellenistic period, and may have circulated together as a unit for a time beforethey were joined with the visions of Daniel, chapters 7-12, which were themselves written inaround 164 B.C.E. ~1As in the case of tales Joseph, Esther, Ahiqar, and certain storiesfrom Herodotus or Alf laylah wa-laylah (the Arabian Nights), the Daniel stories can becategorized loosely as court tales.2 In the terms of W. Lee Humphreys, these can be furtherdivided into tales of either "court conflict"—in which a courtier is disgraced or endangered,often because of a conspiracy, and is then rehabilitated—or "court contest," wherein acourtier succeeds at a task at which his or her rivals fail.3