Many causal readers of the Bible are unaware of what their teachers are using for their teaching text. Most congregates never consider the language. If they even read their Bibles they only look at an English translation. However the Bible was not written in English. It was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and many passages lose a lot in translation. Most translators favor simple messages of salvation or grace, over the technical, historic, or the cultural significants of a passage.

The Old Testament

In the 2nd and 3rd century BC a group of Jews in Alexandria Egypt translated the Old Testament into Greek, this translation is called the Septuagint or the LXX and if favored by many scholars. (The term LXX comes from a tradition that 70 Jews worked on this translation.)

However the Septuagint version of Daniel that most of us have access to, is not really the original Septuagint version, but rather one made in the 2nd century AD by Theodosius. This is because the Septuagint version is so full of fanciful Rabbinic interpretive translations from the 3rd or 2nd century BC that it is useless to those who believed that Yeshua/Jesus is the Messiah. They wrote what they thought the passages meant or would mean, rather than a more useful wooden translation.

There are several verses in Daniel where it is extremely hard to figure out the meaning therefore they are almost impossible to translate. (Dan 8:12 comes to mind.) If one doesn’t know what was meant it is really hard to put it into another language. Then of course there are the verses where the translator was sure what it means and translates the verse accordingly, only to be shown later to have been seriously biased in their thinking.

The only real solution is to read the original Hebrew and Aramaic, because things are not so clear and settled as the English translations make them out to be.