GENERAL ARTICLES

 

Daniel and friends at the Carlisle Indian School

 

 

Robert D. Miller II OFS

The Catholic University of America, Washington D.C., USA, niversity of Pretoria, South Africa. millerb@cua.edu

 

 

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ABSTRACT

This essay explores the first chapter of the Book of Daniel as an example of resistance against an empire. Using the experience of Native Americans, especially children at the Carlisle Residential Indian School, the tropes of naming, diet, and the body in Daniel 1 are read as a call to resistance and gamesmanship in the narrative environment of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and the authorial context of the Selucid Hellenistic Empire. With reference to similar situations in South Africa and elsewhere, this reading of the story in Daniel 1 sees a promise of God's support in religious fidelity accompanied by cultural code switching.

Keywords: Book of Daniel; postcolonial criticism; Shadrach; Meshach; and Abednego; Antiochus' persecution; Code switching

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Introduction

As theologians and philosophers address the legacies of imperialism and colonialism, the biblical text - much as it has been wielded in support of empire¹ - can provide a basis for constructive thought. The Old Testament book of Daniel stands out as a unique instance of resistance against empire, written in response to the Selucid Empire that dominated Western Asia in the 3^rd to 1^st centuries BCE.² Daniel's first chapter, C. L. Seow suggests, serves as an introduction to the entire book, "set[ting] the stage for the narrator to begin addressing the question of how God may continue to function in and through history, even though history seems to have failed as the obvious arena of divine activity."³ In this essay, I will argue that the chapter also introduces the book by addressing how the Israelites are to navigate empire, to employ code switching and gamesmanship to survive and remain faithful to God. I will illustrate this via a Fourth-World lens, through the experiences of modern indigenous peoples, primarily in North America with reference to other parts of the word.⁴

 

Narrative and historical context

The genre of the book of Daniel differs markedly from other books of the Minor Prophets, and instead alternates apocalyptic material with narratives: six stories, one each in chapters 1-2; 3; 4-5; 6; 13; and 14. The book is late, as is evident simply from linguistic dating: much of Daniel is in Aramaic, and many Persian and even Greek loan words appear. Dates usually given by scholars range from 300 to 150 BCE, which is not to say there might not be older material included, particularly in chapters 4-5. The narrative context, the setting of the story world, is the aftermath of the Fall of Jerusalem - the first fall of the city to Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, which occurred historically in 597 and led to the deportation of some 10,000 captives to Babylon, primarily the upper echelons of society. At least two centuries separates the narrative from the narration, therefore, and it will be important to read the text in both worlds, although the story world will be the first framework explored.⁵ We will return to the world of the text's author shortly, but already should point out one shared feature of both worlds, the 6th century Babylon and the 3rd century Seleucid Empire: the Jewish people immersed in a more intellectually prosperous and "civilized" society with overt and covert challenges to perseverance in the Israelite faith.

The story in Daniel chapter 1 presents the narrative context in which it and all of the stories are envisioned.

In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon came and laid siege to Jerusalem. The Lord handed over to him Jehoiakim king of Judah, and some of the vessels of the temple of God, which he carried off to the land of Shinar and placed in the temple treasury of his god. (Dan 1:1-2; New American Bible Revised Edition [henceforth, NABRE])

This is the fall of Jerusalem, and among those exiled are Daniel and his friends, Hannaiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Verse two is explicit that it was the Lord (Adonai, not the Tetragrammaton) who handed all of Judah over to Nebuchadnezzar. In the following verses, the royal servant Ashpenaz refers to Nebuchadnezzar as his "Lord." This episode, then, is in part about which "lord" one ought to serve.⁶

 

Civilizing the savages

The king told Ashpenaz, his chief chamberlain, to bring in some of the Israelites, some of the royal line and of the nobility. They should be young men without any defect, handsome, proficient in wisdom, well-informed, and insightful, such as could take their place in the king's palace; he was to teach them the language and literature of the Chaldeans. (Dan 1:3-4; NABRE)

Note that the criteria for selection prioritize the physical body - handsome and without defect - over the intellectual potential, a point to which will we return.

The Jews were not only militarily overwhelmed by Babylon; they were surely culturally overwhelmed. Much like their emersion in Hellenistic culture three centuries later, they had gone from a cultural backwater of the hills of Judah to a society that had known literature for millennia, laws like Hammurabi's Code, science that could predict eclipses and comets, and medical, geographic, and mathematical knowledge beyond anything Judah ever imagined. The co-occurrence in Dan 1:2 of "Babylon" and the unusual "Shinar," i.e. Sumer, recalls the indictment of "civilization" in Genesis' Tower of Babel story.⁷

The apparent cultural hegemony of Babylon and Persia in Daniel is analogous to that of Hellenism in the 4^th-3^rd centuries.⁸ The Seleucids augmented empire with the "power of the uniform": a streamlined government, "uniform predictable temporality extended over a defined, linearized space. The combination of date-wearing officials, date-stamped documents, and dated built infrastructure."⁹

A similar regime also confronted Native Americans. As Scott Momaday writes, "The Indian can recognize and understand malice, and he can bear pain with legendary self-possession. What he can neither recognize nor understand is that particular atmosphere of moral and ideological ambiguity in which the white main prevails, a traditional milieu which is characterized in part by a sense of finality in thought, an immediacy in judgment, and a general preoccupation with efficiency."¹⁰

The Daniel narrative presents the Babylonian king setting about to remove these young men's native culture and make wise men out of them.¹¹ The assumption behind such an action is actually that the Jews were at least in some sense equal to the Babylonians, and that by immersing the young men into the mainstream Babylonian culture, they might advance themselves and thrive in the dominant society. In many ways, this is the same philosophy and policies used in the Indian Boarding Schools in America, particularly the Carlisle Indian School outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.¹² Founded in 1879 by Richard Henry Pratt, it depended on the belief of nurture over nature, that American Indians were not inherently savage in comparison to European Americans.¹³ The problem was not race or some defect in the blood, but environment. The Indian, said Pratt, "is born a blank, like the rest of us."¹⁴ Carlisle immersed some 10,000 students from 104 Western tribes into Anglo-American culture, as far from their homes as possible, while removing Native culture to make "wise men."¹⁵

Pratt's detractors averred that a savage would always be a savage, and in some ways Pratt's endeavour marked a turn from the preference for extermination.¹⁶ On the other hand, Pratt's views were not novel. George Washington had already believed in the potential for Indians to become civilized, based on a six-point plan he devised with Henry Knox.¹⁷ Pratt was himself a former officer who had both fought Indians and overseen the Fort Marion Prison for Indians in St. Augustine Florida.¹⁸ And the forced removal of children to the schools would not have been possible without the "amalgam of militarism and social theory that allowed North America to mount [such] a series of benevolent assaults."¹⁹ It is noteworthy that both Pratt and Nebuchadnezzar chose children to "educate"; there was no hope of indoctrinating those E. F. Wilson, founder of the similar Shingwauk Residential School in Ontario, called "the old unimproved people."²⁰

Nevertheless, Pratt's (and Nebuchadnezzar's) "equality" was hardly equality. What Thomas Jefferson had called their "ferocious barbarities" had to be eradicated.²¹ "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man," was Pratt's exact phrase.²² As Njabulo Ndebele points out with similar "good native" narratives in Africa:

The liberal ideology displayed ... ascribes to itself a false universal validity ... to domesticate its potential allies by defining them in its own image ... This liberal ideology is caught in the trap of language: it has not really freed itself from a language the vocabulary of which reflexively describes the prejudices of the time ... If we define success, for example, according to the standards and formulations of the oppressor ... we have, in a very fundamental manner, become the oppressor. He can even give us independence.²³

We shall see that Daniel and his friends do and do not define success according to the standards of the oppressor, inviting the Judean reader to similarly navigate their status adroitly.²⁴

 

Naming and renaming

What happens next in Daniel 1 is exactly what happened at the Carlisle Indian School: "The Chief Chamberlain changed their names: Daniel to Belteshazzar, Hannaiah to Shadrach, Mishael to Meshach, and Azariah to Abednego" (Dan 1:7; NABRE). These are not meaningless names: Belteshazzar means "May Marduk Guard his Life," Abednego means "Servant of Nabu" - the two most important Neo-Babylonian gods.²⁵Considering the importance of naming and renaming in the Old Testament, the intention is to create new men, Babylonian men.²⁶

The Carlisle Indian School required students to take English names, technically by either choice or assignment, although the names from which they chose had no meaning for them.²⁷ Thus, Plenty Kill (Ota Kte), son of Standing Bear, one of first at Carlisle when it opened, when asked to choose name from list on the blackboard randomly pointed, re-naming himself Luther, and father's name became his (and his future family's) surname:

Luther Standing Bear.²⁸ The names were then sewn on the backs of their shirts.²⁹

Daniel 1:7 states that the chamberlain "determined" [yasem] their names. It is not the normal idiom for naming people, but the word reappears in the next verse, where "Daniel determined not to defile himself with the king's food."³⁰ So again, for the reader the point is to contrast two fundamental options: in the narrative, the Babylonian, and the Israelite; for the reader, the Gentile and the Jewish.

 

Colonizing the diet

Following on the change of names is the change of diet, as it was at Carlisle. Carlisle's food was described as a grey, tasteless porridge, hardly what the Indian children were used to in the West.³¹ Why the Babylonian king's food should be a problem for Daniel is not actually clear.³² Most foods would be edible by the Pentateuchal dietary laws unless they were offered to idols, but the vegetables, which Daniel says are acceptable, would also have been offered to those idols.³³ Nor can the issue be simply who will provide: king or God; which patron will Daniel choose?³⁴ After all, it is the Babylonians who supply all the vegetable food the lads will eat.³⁵

The issue is rather identity, what Ndukwe Egbuonu calls "government attempts to deculturize and denationalize members of another race."³⁶Food is tied up with ethnicity.³⁷ Part of the way to indoctrinate someone in a new culture is to force them to change their diet, just as the British fed local recruits in the Indian Army bacon, ham, and sausages at breakfast and roast beef for dinner, in order to deculturize both Hindu and Muslim.³⁸In India, as at Carlisle, the colonizer's goal was cultural erasure. As Steve Biko wrote about Christian missionaries in Africa, "The basic intention went much further than merely spreading the word. Their arrogance and their monopoly on truth, beauty and moral judgment taught them to despise native customs and traditions and to seek to infuse their own new values into these societies."³⁹

While such motivation does not fit the historical Neo-Babylonian conquest, it well describes Hellenism in Judah.⁴⁰ Thus, we can easily juxtapose Biko with 2 Maccabees description of the Selucid cultural influence. Here is Biko:

Children were taught, under the pretext of hygiene, ... to despise their mode of upbringing at home and to question the values and customs of their society. The result was the expected one - children and parents saw life differently and the former lost respect for the latter . Who can resist losing respect for his tradition when in school his whole cultural background is summed up in one word -barbarism?⁴¹

Compare 2 Maccabees 4:13-15 (NABRE):

The craze for Hellenism and the adoption of foreign customs reached such a pitch, through the outrageous wickedness of Jason, the renegade and would-be high priest, that the priests no longer cared about the service of the altar. Disdaining the temple and neglecting the sacrifices, they hastened, at the signal for the games, to take part in the unlawful exercises at the arena. What their ancestors had regarded as honours they despised; what the Greeks esteemed as glory they prized highly.

Nor is this biblical hyperbole. Diodorus Siculus records the words of the 1^st century BCE philosopher Posidonius about the "impious" Jews' "hatred toward mankind" and "altogether contrary customs . misanthropic and transgressive laws."⁴²

 

Negotiated resistance

In the story world, however, Daniel is no passive subject in this denaturalization. Navigating shrewdly, he proposes a test. Verse 12: "Test your servants for ten days. Let us be given vegetables to eat and water to drink. Then see how we look in comparison with the young men who eat from the royal table." We have been told already in verse nine that God has "given" [vayitên] Daniel favour and sympathy with the chief chamberlain, just as God had given Jerusalem into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar in verse 2, and in verse 17 will give wisdom to Daniel.⁴³

Daniel poses this not as a request but an experiment. He knows his tenuous position and depends on the favour of someone he already thinks is a potential ally.⁴⁴ Note, Daniel defines "success" according to the oppressor's standards, "how we look in comparison," but resists the cultural erasing dietary regimen.⁴⁵ He has taken, if not the upper hand, at least an autonomous hand in the liberal colonial game, further greasing the rails by providing the guards, in verse 16, with the food and wine that was supposed to go to him and his friends. The guards are manipulated into permitting Daniel to select the diet by a ten-day bribe of meat and wine, while assuming the Jews will lose the bet.

Of course, the result of this is verse 15: "After ten days, they looked healthier and better fed than any of the young men who ate from the royal table." They go on to be the king's chief advisers.⁴⁶ What works in a short story bears little resemblance to reality: unlike Daniel and his friends, Carlisle graduates were only equipped for menial jobs and entered white society at bottom.⁴⁷ Already in 1928, a 847-page report by Henry Roe Cloud (Winnebago) found the Indian boarding schools "grossly inadequate": students were trained in "vanishing trades, and others are taught in such a way that the Indian students cannot apply what they have learned in their own home, and they are not far enough advanced to follow their trade in a white community in competition with white workers."⁴⁸ In fact, graduates of Carlisle and the two dozen schools founded on its model failed to master English, but at the same time lost much of their native languages (the speaking of which was forbidden), leaving them unskilled outcasts if they instead returned home.⁴⁹ The resultant disappointment voiced by liberal white people resembles similar sentiment expressed by oppressors over the oppressed and formerly oppressed throughout history.⁵⁰ On the other hand, Carlisle's changed emphasis in the early 20^th century from cultural erasure to football powerhouse, culminating in the person of Jim Thorpe, Sac and Fox NFL star running back and Olympic gold medallist, replicates the acquiescent commoditization of the colonized body we saw in Daniel 1, where both Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel prioritize physical appearance.

The story in Daniel 1 has a message for postexilic Diaspora Jews and for Judean Jews living under foreign domination.⁵¹ In fact, its message is the same as the message of the rest of the book's stories, and the same message as Daniel's apocalyptic sections:⁵² No matter what, do not give up fidelity to the Jewish religion. One can be an observant Jew in a foreign land. God remains in control, and God will deliver his people.⁵³ Nevertheless, although the evil kingdoms of the world will eventually fall to God, rebellion is not encouraged.⁵⁴ Daniel's friends, in fact, retain their Babylonian names throughout the book, and they do become good servants of the emperor, while stubbornly keeping their Israelite piety in the face of fiery furnaces and lions' dens whenever the faith itself is challenged.⁵⁵ For the reader, then, the advice is keep the traditions, trust in the Lord, and code-switch as much as necessary.⁵⁶

 

Bibliography

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1 Edward Said, "Exodus and Liberation: A Canaanite Reading." Grand Street 5, no. 2 (Winter, 1986): 86-106; Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan "How liberating is the Exodus and for whom?" in Exodus and Deuteronomy, edited by Athaliah Brenner and Gale A. Yee (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2012), 3-28.
2 Anathea Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), xxi and passim.
3 C.L. Seow, Daniel, Westminster Bible Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 20.
4 I deliberately avoid the term Postcolonial, both because I do not employ its (European) Deconstructionist underpinnings but more so because it gives agency to the colonizer while reducing the indigenous to merely "colonized." See Niall Reddy and Michael Nassen Smith, "Response to the UCT Curriculum Change Framework." New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy 73 (2019): 22-28.
5 See Marie-Laure Ryan, "From Possible Worlds to Story Worlds," in Possible Worlds Theory and Contemporary Narratology, ed. Alice Bell and Marie-Laure Ryan, Frontiers of Narrative (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 62-64, on story worlds vs. authorial worlds.
6 The episode fits the genre of "court contest story" known in Ancient Near Eastern literature; Lawrence M. Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King, Harvard Dissertations in Religion 26 (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1990), 10-11; Hans-Peter Müller, "Märchen, Legende und Enderwartung." Vetus Testamentum 26 (1976): 77-98.
7 John Samuel, "Economic and Political Justice," in Bible and Theology from the Underside of Empire, ed. Philip Vinod Peacock, Patricia Sheerattan-Bisnauth, and Vuyani Vellem (Stellenbosch: SUN Media, 2017), 129.
8 Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire, 225.
9 Paul J. Kosmin, Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2018), 3, 50, 57, 101; Leah McKenzie, "Patterns in Seleucid Administration: Macedonian or Near Eastern?" Mediterranean Archaeology 7-8 (1994): 62.
10 N. Scott Momaday, The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (New York: St. Martin's, 1997), 59.
11 Shane Kirkpatrick, Competing for Honour: A Social-Scientific Reading of Daniel 1-6, Biblical Interpretation Series 74 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 49.
12 By focusing on this experience of over a century ago, I in no way intend to normalize a narrative "in which Indigenous people are always already gone" and "irrelevant within US modernity"; Joanne Barker, "Territory as Analytic: The Dispossession of Lenapehoking and the Subprime Crisis," Social Text 36 (2018): 25, italics original. There are today over five million Native Americans in the United States alone.
13 My use of the term American Indian outside of quotations (as opposed to, e.g., Native American) is questionable but reflects the predominate usage by Indians themselves (cf., for example, https://indiancountrytoday.com/). The preference would instead be to use the distinct national term: Navajo, Lakota, etc., but in this case, Pratt, Carlisle, and the schools as usual made no distinction among groups.
14 King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 108.
15 Richard Henry Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867-1904, ed. Robert Marshall Utley (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), xxii; Tabitha T. Booth, "Cheaper Than Bullets: American Indian Boarding Schools and Assimilation Policy, 1890-1930," in Images, Imaginations, and Beyond: Proceedings of the Eighth Native American Symposium, South-eastern Oklahoma State University, ed. Mark. B. Spencer (Durant, OK: South-eastern Oklahoma State University, 2010), 55; Clifford E. Trafzer, Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc, Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences, Indigenous Education (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 13; David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1995). For an autobiographical account, see Todd Leahy and Nathan Wilson, "My First Days at the Carlisle Indian School by Howard Gansworth: An Annotated Manuscript," Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 71(2004):491. There were about twenty-five Carlisle-style schools in the United States. In Canada, attendance at residential schools, of which there were some eighty, became compulsory in 1850, with prison the penalty for noncompliance; King, Inconvenient Indian, 113. The total number of Indian children sent to Carlisle-style schools may have been around 200,000 with another 150,000 in Canada. Up to half of them died in the schools from disease, malnutrition, neglect, and abuse. See King, Inconvenient Indian, 120.
16 King, Inconvenient Indian, 101.
17 King, Inconvenient Indian, 103.
18 King, Inconvenient Indian, 110.
19 King, Inconvenient Indian, 102.
20 King, Inconvenient Indian, 109.
21 The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. James P. McClure, December 29, 1813.
22 King, Inconvenient Indian, 107.
23 Njabulo S. Ndebele, "Actors and Interpreters: Popular Culture and Progressive Formalism (1984)," in South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 77-78; see also Ndebele, "The English Language and Social Change in South Africa (1986)," in South African Literature and Culture, 105; Ndebele, "Towards Progressive Cultural Planning (1987)," in South African Literature and Culture, 125.
24 For American Indian examples of such navigation, see J. Kehaulani Kauanui, ed., Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
25 Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, "Daniel," in Introduction to Apocalyptic Literature; Daniel; Additions to Daniel; Hosea; Joel; Amos; Obadiah; Jonah; Micah; Nahum; Habakkuk; Zephaniah; Haggai; Zechariah; Malachi, ed. Leander E. Keck, The New Interpreter's Bible 7 (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000), 1017; Tokunboh Adeyemo, "Daniel," in Africa Bible Commentary, ed. Tokunboh Adeyemo (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 1015-1038.
26 Philip Chia, "On Naming the Subject: A Postcolonial Reading of Daniel 1," in The Postcolonial Biblical Reader, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 176; David M. Valeta, "Court or Jester Tales? Resistance and Social Reality in Daniel 1-6'. Perspectives in Religious Studies 32 (2005): 319.
27 Barbara Landis, "The Names," in Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations, ed. Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 91, who makes the connection to Adam naming animals in Eden.
28 Luther Standing Bear, My People, the Sioux, 2nd ed. (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), xxi. The result was many traditional individual personal names became running Indian surnames, in spite of the linguistic absurdity; Ella Deloria, Speaking of Indians (New York: Friendship, 1944; repr. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 154.
29 Standing Bear, 137.
30 Edmond F. Desueza and Judith Jones, Conversations with Scripture: The Book of Daniel, Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars Study Series (New York: Morehouse, 2011).
31 King, Inconvenient Indian, 112.
32 Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire, 210.
33 Wendy Widder, Daniel, Story of God Commentary 20 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016).
34 See Danna Nolan Fewell, Circle of Sovereignty: Plotting Politics in the Book of Daniel (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), 19.
35 The food does not, therefore, symbolize Babylonian culture in its entirety, as per Kirkpatrick, Competing for Honour, 53.
36 Ndukwe N. Egbuonu of the American Council on African Education, with reference to Africa, Dec 20, 1953; quoted in John Gunther, Inside Africa (Plainview, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1974), 883. See Landis, "The Names," 102, re. deculturalization at Carlisle. Alongside this issue is perhaps also the motif of the eating vessels, taken from Judah in 1:2, finally reappearing in the infamous banquet of 5:2; Mary E. Mills, "Household and Table: Diasporic Boundaries in Daniel and Esther." Catholic Biblical Quarterly 68 (2006): 415-16, although nothing is said about eating vessels in Daniel's exchange here.
37 Rachel Vernon, "A Native Perspective: Food is More Than Consumption." Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 5 (2015): 137-142. For a modern case study and discussion, see Psyche Williams-Forson, "'I Haven't Eaten If I Don't Have My Soup and Fufu': Cultural Preservation through Food and Foodways among Ghanaian Migrants in the United States." Africa Today 61 (2014): 71-87.
38 Amitav Ghosh, "Nashawy," in The Vintage Book of Indian Writing: 1947-1997, ed. Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West (London: Vintage, 1997), 409-421.
39 Steve Biko, I Write What I Like (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 94.
40 Kirkpatrick, Competing for Honour, 51.
41 Biko, I Write What I Like, 94. What Carlisle ignored was the thorough education in responsibility, decorum, and social duty taught in Indian communities of the West, which were also kept impeccably clean; Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 43-45, 63-65.
42 Library of History, 34/35.1.1-15. In the Roman period, Tacitus will repeat such views: "Everything that is profane there is sacred among us, and what is allowed among them is forbidden to us ... Their rites are unfavourable and greatly defiled as a result of their depravity ... Their faith...included hostile hatred against all others" Histories 5.4-5.
43 Kirkpatrick, Competing for Honour, 47; Chia, "A Postcolonial Reading of Daniel 1," 178-80; Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire, 211.
44 Carol Newsom, Daniel, Old Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014), 49.
45 Kirkpatrick, Competing for Honour, 48, instead sees these standards as those of the book's Hellenistic Jewish audience, accepted without argument.
46 Providing further evidence against the claim that the "rejection of the Babylonian food is representative of a rejection of the Babylonian education, as well," as per Kirkpatrick, 55. The young men quite clearly do accept Babylonian education.
47 Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 138; Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940, Bison Books (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 35; Joel Pfister, Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern, New Americanists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 89; Momaday, The Man Made of Words, 102, with recollections by Plenty Horses; Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 133.
48 King, Inconvenient Indian, 115-16.
49 Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 143-44; Momaday, The Man Made of Words, 103, for the experience of Plenty Horses. Again, this history should not reinforce a narrative whereby "Indigenous people have disappeared naturally because they were unable to keep up with the demands of civilizing progress and social evolution"; Barker, "Territory as Analytic," 25.
50 Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things (London: Faber & Faber, 2017), 332.
51 Mills, "Household and Table," 413.
52 Valeta, "Court of Jester Tales?" 309.
53 Hence the echoes of Exodus 15-16 where Israel was first tested regarding food, as noted by Michael Seufert, "Refusing the King's Portion: A Re-examination of Daniel's Dietary Reaction in Daniel 1." Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 43 (2019): 644. There are also numerous links to Exodus 24 (where, e.g., young men also eat and drink), especially between the Septuagint versions of Exodus and Daniel; Paulus Wyns, God Is Judge: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Golden Grove, Australia: Biblaridion, 2011), 29-30.
54 Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire, 229.
55 See Paulin J. Hountondji, "Tradition, Hindrance or Inspiration?" Quest 14 (2000): 6, on how relations of the conquered to their original cultures are biased by "collective self-defence imposed on us by a hostile environment." Thus, in both the Babylonian Exile and Hellenistic period, Judaism became more rigorous in both practice and dogma.
56 Although beyond the scope of this essay, the alternation of Hebrew and Aramaic in the book of Daniel is itself "code-switching ... a meaningful device with particular narratological and ideological functions"; Zoë Wicomb, Race, Nation, Translation: South African Essays, 1990-2013 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 189-90, 193. Portier-Young, Apocalypse against Empire, 227, instead reads the linguistic alternation as an attempt to move audiences from partial accommodation to total rejection.