OG Daniel 11:20 - Striking the king’s glory?
The Old Greek says that someone will:
‘[A] man who is striking the king’s glory’.
This is entirely different in the Hebrew version, which says (literally):
‘And there shall arise in his place one who imposes [an] oppressor on the glorious kingdom’
What explains the difference?
Well, while sending in a tax collector may indeed feel like a violent strike to many of us, this could easily be either a mistranslation of the Hebrew or a copyist error in the Hebrew source that our Greek translator worked from.
You see, the Hebrew word for oppressor is one letter away from striking (no·ges vs no·geph). So either the Greek translator misread it, or the Hebrew source had a copyist error (or a smudge, or a missing letter).
Well, historically, these events are said to apply to Seleucus IV whose father was famously defeated by the Romans. The Romans imposed a massive fine on them of 15,000 talents of silver. The idea was to cripple them financially so they couldn’t cause trouble again. It worked! The king struggled to find the money, and ended up sending an oppressor (a tax collector) to take it from anywhere he could find it — including from the temple in JeruSalem.
The event is reported in 2 Maccabees, chapter 3.
Shortly afterwards, this king was assasinated, which fits the next part of the verse, which states that the king wasn’t killed in battle.
Taking all of this into account, it seems likely that the Old Greek version is either faithfully reporting what it said in its Hebrew source which contained a copyist error, or that the translator misread it.
As for the other differences in the verse, where it says king’s glory instead of glorious kingdom, that may have been an attempt by the Hebrew copyist or the Greek translator to fix the grammatical problems caused by the incorrect word.