Daniel
DANIEL AS SEEN BY A MERE OBSERVER [I gratefully acknowledge my debt to my Goddaughter, Cathrine A. Zuzak, whose searching comments on the penultimate draft helped me to finalise this Dialogue. I have used ChatGPT (OpenAI) as a tool for discussion, language refinement, and structural feedback during the preparation of this work. I am grateful to them.] I. GETTING STARTED As often before, the Book of Daniel kept puzzling me. Its author had taken liberties with the history of the Levant. I was also thinking about the patterns of the Hebrew poetry of the Bible. I knew that this poetry was magnificent: rhythmic without rhyme, incantatory without meter. But I was also aware that poetic structures and idioms had changed over the long span of antiquity. I was about to close the book and arrange lunch with a former colleague, when ...