The Tale of Daniel
hillelwayne.com
hillelwayne.com
I think I agree with the comment in the conclusion that Torah names are used by non-Jews when a Christian comes across the name. But I don't think in this case it's because of the supposed prophecies about Jesus but because the stories about Daniel in the Book of Daniel are memorable. I remember hearing about "Daniel in the Lion's Den" and Daniel sitting in flames in church and in my Children's Bible stories.
But I chose the name for my son not (directly) because of its religious significance but because it's a normal, known name, in both English and Spanish. That is, neither a WASP American or a Mexican will really bat an eye at it. As a Hispanic American, that's something I've appreciated about my own name, Gabriel (and would love a historical deep dive on that name!). I couldn't really find any other names like that.
Minor nitpick, but it was Daniel's three friends who were thrown into the furnace, not Daniel himself.
They are both indeed memorable stories.
Is Michael (or it s cognate) at all common as a name in Mexico? That's a figure that is at least as prominent as Gabriel across the Abrahamic religions (in particular the prominent inclusion in the Leonine Prayers keep it a popular name in many Roman Catholic regions).
That would be Miguel.
Unlike Gabriel or Daniel it's spelled differently. This removes the "resume friendly" aspect of the name that those have.
There was a line in To Kill a Mockingbird about being named for a Confederate general leading to slow, steady, drinking, but when I looked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_Civil_War_gen... they have the WASP standards: British kings, Other kings, Biblical.
(they also don't [from looking at A-C] seem to have the <ancestral name> <everyday name> <family name> triad that was common in certain parts of the US during my youth)
P.S. A bit of noise in the data too, some names in Polish/English pairs are not really good.
There’s a third volume, too. Nb they were released far enough apart that later volumes contain errata for earlier ones (like calling out fraudulent or mistaken dates on some of the works, which errors weren’t discovered until after the volume was printed)
I’ve read them cover to cover. Tried that with single-volume collections of Akkadian and Sumerian literature, but they were way harder to follow—too fragmentary, too little context. Didn’t finish either.
Gilgamesh is amazing though, and easily the best pre-Homeric work I’ve read, zero competitors are even close.
Wikipedia says
> The bulk of the Mahābhārata was probably compiled between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE, with the oldest preserved parts not much older than around 400 BCE. [1]
The actual events that it was based on are older. The same article says that the Kurukshetra war was probably around 1000 BCE, and that there may have been events referenced that are older than that.
I don't know that there is accepted evidence that it was written much before 400 BCE, though.
I have read a lot more literature from before 1000 BC than most people have, though. That’s just one big blind spot for me, so far.
I think a more probable understanding of the "Daniel" reference in Ezekiel is that it is same Daniel from the book of Daniel.
Even if you assume that the prophecies in the book of Daniel were written retroactively 600 years later (given the accuracy of described events) it does not preclude an actual powerful person of that name being alive at same time as Ezekiel, and being the basis for later attribution.
Both Ezekiel and Daniel are written covering a similar set of years. Both refer to a person named Daniel widely famous for his "righteousness". It would seem improbable that they were talking about entirely different people.
Again, had a lot of fun reading that.
On the contrary, based on the linked article, it seems that there are several works of literature from the time referencing Daniel. In fact, for some languages, it appears that close to 100% of known writing samples reference Daniel (because there are only one or two examples).
Sometimes, it's also interesting to get to know the story of how someone got their name. When my mum was younger, there was a really cute little boy my mum really liked when she was on vacation with my grandparents. Not in a romantic way, as he was, like, still a small kid. And she then decided that, when I was born in '86, I should receive his name. I found this super cute, and It's one of those stories that will always remind me of my mum.
Just another Daniel born in '86 sharing an interesting name origin story. (My own isn't as wild -- my mother loved the Elton John song.)
I really like both stories! :)
In South Slavic languages it's spelled Danijel as well (same pronunciation).
I live in Mexico and it's Dani here and in many Spanish speaking countries. I go by Dan and that form is pretty much never used so it causes a lot of confusion.
Cool post regardless.
For example my birth certificate had a typo in my dad's last name and when I was getting my first ID card I had to go to the notary to get the birth certificate typo fixed before getting the ID card issued. Took half a day of work...
> In the Torah, both Noah and Job are treated as pious men, but critically, neither are Israelites. Making Daniel part of the trio implies he was also a righteous non-Jew.
Doesn't this confuse being Israelite with being Jewish? IIRC, the kingdom of Israel predates the Jewish religion by a few hundred years, based on older archaeological references to the kingdom's name from neighboring kingdoms.
A more slavic spelling of this is Danilo but it was even less popular than Daniel.
I knew only one other Daniel and he was a son of family's friends and apparently named after me. I didn't much care for him, but that's beside the point.
Coming to USA and it was a bit sad to no longer have a very unique name. It's okay though, my last name is very unique...
https://americansongwriter.com/daniel-by-elton-john-and-bern...
I suppose that Daniel O'Connell's fame could have accounted for the popularity of the name among the Irish.
20 years after her name changed, they both had issues with messed up records. It got bad when insurance carriers got it jumbled up.
[edit] I actually think a lot of “bad” celebrity kid names are a ton better than that crap. At least with “Apple” and “Rocket” folks can guess the correct spelling nearly 100% of the time.
Also if your name gets autocorrected maybe it’ll throw the data aggregators off your scent.
Even Harry’s birth name is “Henry” — Archie’s middle name “Harrison” is clever though.
That's not the first time I hear that. Still can't figure out why it was true.
Clay tablets were not expensive- all you had to do was walk down to the riverbank and grab some clay. What may have been expensive was the services of scribes to write and read those clay tablets- and as they were heavier than papyrus or vellum, moving and storing them was also expensive.
So there was no mass-market literature- that had to wait for printing. What survives are sacred texts, administrative records, and letters related to government or business (like the infamous complaint letter to Ea-Nasir).
But because clay is much cheaper than parchment or even papyrus, what also survives- which doesn't survive in anything like as similar numbers from cultures that wrote on parchment/papyrus AFAIK- is scribal students' exercises, because clay was so easy to get that they would just throw away their completed exercises and pick up a new tablet rather than recycle them.
(One important exception here is birchbark- at Novgorod, in the middle of a vast birch forest, birchbark was almost as cheap as clay in Mesopotamia. So medieval children's doodles [0] on it have survived. Another is papyrus written by the Jewish community of Cairo, who had a religiously-motivated aversion to throwing away or erasing anything written. [1])
This means that we have a lot of copies of the beginning of texts written on clay, as students would copy them out for practice. In contrast, if a text was written on parchment, the middle is more likely to survive as it was less exposed to pests and the elements.
[0] https://lithub.com/onfim-wuz-here-on-the-unlikely-art-of-a-m...