Name Ferdinand Hitzig | ||
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Died January 22, 1875, Heidelberg, Germany | ||
Publications
Belshazzar and his historicity
It has been charged that certain “fundamentalists” were wrong in citing Hitzig as an example of those who denied the historicity of Belshazzar. But Hitzig really did hold the erroneous position ascribed to him by conservative scholars, as shown by what he wrote in his commentary on the Book of Daniel.
Contents
Selbst den Fall gesetzt, dass der fragliche Koenig Mediens existiert habe, wurde der Name, unter welchen er bei Daniel auftritt, zu beanstanden sein. Jene zweiheit in Nabonned = Baltasar wiederholt sich in Cyaxares = Darius, und wieder zu Daniels nachteil.
Translation:
One could wish that German scholars would learn from the French how to express things with clarity and elegance. Nevertheless, what can be extracted from this quote is that Hitzig thought that, historically, there was no such person as Belshazzar, or alternately, that the deluded author of the book of Daniel made two mistakes: he gave Nabonidus the name Belshazzar and Cyraxares the name Darius. Hitzig’s position logically followed from his presupposition that the book of Daniel was a fraud perpetrated by a nameless author in Maccabean times. Such a deceiver could not have known a genuine name of Belshazzar from the sixth century BC, because at the time Hitzig wrote, all resources available to him outside of the Bible and texts derived from the Bible named Nabonidus as the last king of Babylon, without any mention of Belshazzar. This conclusion was therefore a natural consequence of the starting assumptions, which were the presuppositions accepted by the radical criticism of the day. As the Jewish Encyclopedia explains:
The name “Belshazzar” was previously held to have been invented by the author of the Book of Daniel, which has long been recognized as a Maccabean production (see DANIEL). Since the discovery and decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, however, “Belshazzar” is now generally admitted to be the Hebrew-Aramaic equivalent of the Babylonian form ‘Belsharuṣur’ (Bel preserve the king), which has been found in the cuneiform documents as the name of the eldest son of Nabonidus (Nabuna'id), the last native king of Babylon (555-538 B.C.).
A modern evaluation of Hitzig’s scholarship should take into consideration not only his starting presuppositions, but also how the deductions from those presuppositions have led to numerous errors in judgment that have later proved to be unsustainable.