OG Daniel 11:22 – leader of the covenant?
The Old Greek text of Daniel 11:22 is missing an extra detail included in the Hebrew version, that in addition to the enemy forces being broken, the leader/prince of the covenant will be broken too.
The Old Greek makes no mention of this at all.
The ancient Christians and Jews, at least by the 4th century AD, identified the leader/prince of the covenant in this part of the text with High Priest Onias III, who was murdered in 164 BC in a high-profile series of events.
Why would this detail be omitted from the Old Greek text?
It’s possible that the earlier Hebrew text our Greek translator worked from did not include it, and that it was added to the Hebrew text later. Could that be true? Maybe, but why?
Another possibility is that our ancient Greek translator was working from a Hebrew scroll that had these words entirely missing or damaged and unreadable. Indeed, chapter 11 of the Old Greek has a few possible problems with the text that could be explained by the translator working from a damaged document, causing him to misread things.
Alternatively, the Old Greek text itself could have been damaged in its copying down through the centuries, and lost a few words at the end of this verse. Remember, very few copies of the Old Greek text exist, so silly losses can crop in far more easily than in more widely-distributed texts.
So, in our translation, just in case this is a case of a damaged manuscript, we [add the missing words as a translator insertion] and we link it to this translator note to explain it. There is always a possibility that the Old Greek is correct and original, and that the detail was added to the Hebrew later. We simply don’t know and can’t prove it one way or the other.