LAUSR

Early Jewish and early Christian readers found resurrection from the dead in the tales of Daniel; this article suggests that those readings may uncover real roots of the later theological idea within the earlier texts. The lions’ den of chs. 6 and 14 in the Greek texts and their daughter versions has intertextual connections with the pit which figures death in the Psalms, in Jeremiah, and in ancient Near Eastern iconography, and the dew which cools the furnace in the Greek versions of ch. 3 ties that chapter into a network of mythological allusions to the resurrecting power of dew. The Additions to Daniel and their early reception thus create a trajectory towards the later ideas which rabbinic and patristic readers built upon the substratum of these texts; in turn, those later ideas can be shown to have organic antecedents within the book of Daniel.