The Psaltery

[Daniel 3:5-6] “As soon as you hear the sound of the horn, pipe, lyre, trigon, harp (psaltery), and bagpipe, and all kinds of music, you are to fall down and worship the golden image that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up. And whoever does not fall down and worship shall immediately be cast into a burning fiery furnace.”

The word “harp” or “psaltery” (瑟, sè) in this passage is a Greek word. Liberal biblical scholars once argued that Greeks could not have lived in Babylon earlier than the 2nd century BC, therefore concluding that the Book of Daniel must have been falsely attributed and written in the 2nd century BC.

Fifty years after Koldewey’s excavation, an archaeology student casually picked a few clay tablets from a bag of unearthed cuneiform texts to practice reading. They discovered these were records from a palace steward in the 6th century BC. The text stated: “Give twenty bags of wheat as payment to the Greek musician hired to play the ‘psaltery’.” This discovery left the liberal biblical scholars speechless, as it directly contradicted their earlier assertions.