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The Fundamentals. and two ladies had lost their purses. The empty purses were afterwards found in the pocket of the Bishop of the Diocese! On the evidence of the two purses the Bishop should be con victed as a thief, and on the evidence of the two words the book of Daniel should be convicted as a forgery! h is t o r ic a l b l u n d e r . Here is another typical item in the Critics’ indictment of Daniel. The book opens by recording Nebuchadnezzar’s siege of Jerusalem in the third year of Jehoiakim, a statement the correctness of which is confirmed by history, sacred and secu lar. Berosus, the Chaldean historian, tells us that during this expedition Nebuchadnezzar received tidings of his father’s death, and that, committing to others the care of his army and of his Jewish and other prisoners, “he himself hastened home across the desert.” But the German skeptics, having decided that Daniel was a forgery, had to find evidence to support their verdict. And so they made the brilliant discovery that Berosus was here referring to the expedition of the following year, when Nebuchadnezzar won the battle of Carchemish against the army of the king of Egypt, and that he had not at that time invaded Judea at all. But Carchemish is on the Euphrates, and the idea of “hastening home” from there to Babylon across the desert is worthy of a schoolboy’s essay! That he crossed the desert is proof that he set out from Judea; and his Jewish captives were, of course, Daniel and his com panion princes. His invasion of Judea took place before his accession, in Jehoiakam’s third year, whereas the battle of Car chemish was fought after his accession, in the king of Judah’s fourth year, as the biblical books record. But this grotesque blunder of Bertholdt’s “Book of Daniel” in the beginning of the nineteenth century is gravely reproduced in Professor Driver’s “Book of Daniel” at the beginning of the twentieth century.
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