Daniel 3:5

5. Prince gives the names of these musical instruments as “the horn, syrinx, lyre, triangular harp, upright harp, bagpipe (?).” (See also Hebraica, Daniel 4:7.) There can be little doubt that he is correct as to the first three instruments, but as to the “triangular harp” there may be a difference of opinion. The only thing certainly known is that it was not a sackbut (trombone). The “upright harp” (A.V., psaltery) must also remain only a probability, as the term used was a general name for several kinds of instruments, especially for such stringed instruments as were played upon by the fingers of both hands. (See Hastings’s Dictionary of the Bible, under “Music,” vol. 3:1900.) The last instrument is mentioned nowhere else in the Bible and has provoked much discussion. It, like the “psaltery” ( psanterim), is certainly a Greek loan word. “The Greek συμφωνια , from which the word is derived, did not originally denote an instrument but a concordant interval. Tradition applies it to the bagpipe. Originally the form of this instrument may have been developed from the double flute, one of the pipes being shorter and being used for the melody while the longer furnished a droning bass accompaniment. We are told by Athenaeus (Lib. X, p. 439) that Antiochus Epiphanes used to dance to the sound of the symphonia. To this day the Italians have a bagpipe called zampugna or sampogna, and a chifonie or symphonie was an instrument of the same class used in the Middle Ages. In Rome this instrument was introduced in the time of the empire under the name of tibia utricularis or chorus, and soon became highly popular” ( ibid.). Too much stress has been laid by most modern scholars upon the modern form of these Greek names, together with the fact that they never appear on the Babylonian monuments and never in Greek literature until a very late period. It is natural for an editor or translator to modernize obsolete terms. As Francis Brown has said in another connection, “It is one thing to argue that a document is late because it contains words not found in old documents, and quite another thing to argue that words are new because they occur only in a late document.” That the Babylonians and the Greeks were in close touch toward the end of the sixth century B.C. cannot be rationally denied. (See Introduction, III, 2, and compare Margoliouth, Expository Times, February, 1901.) While Driver makes the Greek words the chief proof of late date, Meinhold considers this proof rather weak and thinks the presence of Persian words is most significant; while the word which Kautzsch declares to be of all others the one which dates Daniel linguistically as a late production Behrmann shows is not a Greek word at all, but pure Aramaic. It has even been argued with some force that these particular terms are interpolations and were not a part of the original Daniel text (Thomson). But all such discussion is now obsolete. The argument as to the date of this book no longer centers upon the decision of such questions (Introduction, II, 4-7).