Abstract
Jennie Grillo’s Daniel after Babylon offers a comprehensive and insightful examination of the reception history of the Additions to the book of Daniel. This meticulously researched monograph makes a significant contribution to reception history and the book of Daniel as well. G.’s major claim is that the Additions are an integral part of the book of Daniel, and that the reception history of the Additions generally works carefully and closely with the text of the Additions themselves.
The preface highlights the central shared image of the orans pose that links Susanna, Daniel, and the stories of the Three Youths: they all pray in a place of danger. This motif, G. argues, provides one of the unifying threads throughout diverse interpretations across time and cultures.
In the first chapter, G. presents a meticulous material history of the Additions to Daniel, tracing their presence in Greek, Latin, and Syriac biblical manuscripts from antiquity through the medieval period and into the age of printing. Her analysis reveals that for the majority of their history, the Additions were consistently included as integral parts of the book of Daniel. G.’s research extends beyond traditional biblical manuscripts: she demonstrates the widespread circulation of the Additions in various formats. Of particular note is their frequent inclusion in collections of Odes or Canticles appended to Psalters, highlighting their liturgical significance. She also examines medieval picture Bibles and paraphrases, such as Peter Comestor’s influential Historia scholastica, which gave the Additions a prominent place in biblical retellings. The Additions enjoyed a textual afterlife in the Jewish manuscript traditions of the Middle Ages as well, such as the Chronicle of Yerachmeel. In the Early Modern period, however, the Additions were excised from Reformed printed Bibles, and thus played an increasingly smaller role in Protestant culture of that era. G. attributes this shift to the delayed influence of Jerome’s precedent and the growing authority of the Masoretic Hebrew text. However, this excision did not signify the end of the Additions’ influence, as they exhibited a stubborn persistence, with traces remaining even in Bibles that ostensibly excluded them.
In chapter 2, G. explores how the heroes of Daniel and the Additions came to be celebrated as martyrs in the history of interpretation, even though they are not actually killed for their faith in the narratives. The chapter identifies six key motifs in the Greek textual tradition of Daniel that align closely with later discourses of martyrdom, including the image of “prayer in a place of danger,” sacrificial language in the Prayer of Azariah, the confessions of faith uttered by Daniel and the Three Youths, supernatural properties in the stories such as fire that does not burn, a mysterious divine presence in the furnace and the lions’ den, and the eroticized affects and passions attributed to the characters and later martyrs. G.’s innovative argument is that these martyrological motifs were already embryonically present in the Additions, which intensified the “martyrological sensibility” of the wider Daniel tradition, and became an integral part of the emerging theology of martyrdom in Hellenistic Judaism (66).
Chapter 4 traces how the story of Susanna has invited artistic depictions focusing on themes of seeing and being seen, shame and beauty. Tracing Susanna’s treatment in the painting tradition from the Renaissance through modernity, G. argues that, while voyeuristic elements are undeniably present, the best painters have managed to capture the story’s own complex presentation of sight, exposure, and beauty. Key paintings analyzed include works by Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Rubens, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Thomas Hart Benton. G. argues that these artists illuminate the text by foregrounding Susanna’s subjectivity, the domestic context of married love, the horror and shame of sexual assault, and the realism of the naked (rather than idealized nude) female body. Two rare early Christian depictions of a nude Susanna on Roman glass bowls are also highlighted as showing the possibility of celebrating Susanna’s beauty in a way that preserves her saintly status. The themes of shame and beauty are, G. argues, central to the ancient text. Susanna rushes toward public exposure at key moments in the narrative, simultaneously acknowledging and transfiguring shame. And her physical beauty, while a source of danger, also becomes a point of connection to righteous figures like the Virgin Mary in the history of interpretation.
The postscript reflects on the theoretical underpinnings of the book, drawing on George Steiner’s After Babel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Two key principles are highlighted: first, interpretation represents the ongoing life of the original work, enabling it to persist and “survive altered but also strengthened” (137). Second, successful interpretation can bring out things already latent in the original, “detailing, illumining and bodying forth” potentialities formerly unrealized. G. sees the various modes of reception discussed throughout the book––translation, visual art, liturgy––as “translations out of time” that allow the Additions to Daniel to transcend their ancient setting and speak anew (138). In doing so, they enrich the source text while drawing out what was already implicit within it. The study demonstrates attentiveness to both the constraints and openness of the Additions as they cross linguistic and medial boundaries. G. shows how distinctive features of the Greek text leave a deep imprint on later developments, while also highlighting the Additions’ capacities to accrue new meanings.