This is one of the most often quoted commentaries on the Book of Daniel. It has less information than Montgomery's commentary, but is more readable. Hartman and DiLella are often quoted in Bible dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other commentaries.

They include an unusual new translation of Daniel influenced by H. L. Ginsberg. Ginsberg believed strongly that Daniel was originally written entirely in Aramaic, and that this fact is betrayed by confused translation from Aramaic to Hebrew in the Hebrew portions of the book. Hartman and DiLella try to reconstruct the original Aramaic meaning by stripping away errors in translation.

The commentary has a lot of discussion of the "son of man" (or "one in human likeness.") It comes to the conclusion that the "son of man" originally referred to faithful Israel and didn't have a messianic meaning. The authors believe the messianic connotation derived from later apocalyptic literature (the Parables of Enoch and II Esdras.)

The commentary frequently cites Jerome's Commentary and Porphyry. They seem to be at ease with Latin, which isn't surprising for Catholic scholars.

Aside from the examples above, most of the explanations in the commentary are reminiscent of earlier commentaries like Driver's and Montgomery's.

Besides the fact that it's respected among scholars and frequently quoted, I think this is a good deal for the price.

I like it more that Di Lella's more recent commentary.

Alexander Di Lella is a famous Bible scholar. He co-authored the often-quoted Anchor Bible Commentary on Daniel with Louis Hartman. I'm sorry to write an unkind review, but this book is a big disappointment after reading the excellent Anchor Bible Commentary.

He advises the reader on page 12 that the book of Daniel is pseudonymously written in a fictional time-frame and full of forged "prophecies after the event." Elsewhere he calls the book a work of fiction and says a certain passage is "naive." He compares the book to a "fairy tale" on page 26. This is not surprising in itself since most of modern Bible scholarship has similar views.

But Di Lella wants to show the nonscholar how to apply the spiritual truths in the forged book to their lives, and that's where he has trouble every step of the way.

He says on page 12 that the forged prophecies were "not used to deceive but rather to add authority to the work and to affirm the author's conviction that God is in control of human history." The statement is nonsense. Regardless of any higher motive, for anybody to pretend he discovered a long-lost prophecy written by an ancient worthy would be deception. If he told his audience that he made up the whole story, no "authority would be added to the work."

He insists on pages 14 and 15 that he will not "read into" the text (like commentators he disagrees with) but will "read out of" the text what is significant for us today. The themes of the Book of Daniel are faithfulness to Yahweh in the face of death, that God will ultimately triumph, and that martyrs will be resurrected. Faithful Jews in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes followed Daniel's teachings, thousands becoming martyrs (as reported in 1 and 2 Maccabees.) When I read the allusions to Daniel in the Books of the Maccabees, I can easily follow the Jewish martyrs' reasoning.

But I can't follow Di Lella's. He sees the book as inspiring us to "protect the rights of the poor and helpless," to oppose "institutional sins like consumerism and militarism, nationalism and racism, and laws justifying the exploitation of third world nations..." On the same page he sees "Babylon's evil hand at work in the systematic exploitation of the poor by rich and powerful transnational corportations as well as in the corruption of judges and other government officials." These are typical applications repeated throughout the book. My objection to all this is that even if Di Lella is right about every point, he is "reading into" the text, exactly what he promised not to do.

He brings up on page 53 the fact that Hitler demanded absolute obedience "even when the orders contained actions forbidden by the moral law." Unquestioning obedience, he says, is why the Third Reich could commit dreadful atrocities against Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others. On page 54 he says that the proper course for a Christian to follow is that of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in civil disobedience.

Di Lella is Catholic. Some of his readers include the groups that suffered under Hitler. Jewish, Gypsy, homosexual, and Polish readers might think that this would be an obvious time to point out what they already know: Mussolini would have had no army and Hitler would have had only sixty percent of an army if German and Italian Catholics had followed the example of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego during the thirties and forties. Di Lella ignores the sensitive point he stumbled into and exhorts the reader to follow the example of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The ony example he can think of who was martyred by the Nazis was the Lutheran, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

These objections only scratch the surface.

Some other Catholic scholar would have done a better job. Di Lella was trying to do a task he wasn't cut out for.

I suggest you read "The Book of Daniel" that he co-authored with Louis Hartman. It doesn't try so hard to apply the book to modern life.