Now then, if you have seen her, tell me, Under what tree saw you them companying together? Who answered, Under a mastick tree.
All Commentaries on Daniel 13:54 Go To Daniel 13
Jerome
AD 420
“And a little while after the elder said, ‘Under the mastic tree.’ And Daniel answered him, ‘You have lied well—but against your own head; here in fact is the angel of God with a sword for cleaving you in two.’ ” Since the Hebrews do not accept the story of Susanna asserting that it is not contained in the book of Daniel, we must carefully assess if the words schini and prini (which mean mastic tree and evergreen oak) exist in the Jewish language and what their etymology is—if, that is, in their [i.e., the Hebrew] language schino derives from the word “to cleave” and prino from the word “to divide” or “to saw.” If we do not succeed in this attempt, we are necessarily forced to accept those whose position is that this pericope only exists in Greek because it contains etymology that is found only in the Greek and not in the Hebrew. But if someone finds that the words “to cleave” and “to divide” also have the same etymological root as those two trees in the Hebrew, then we will be able to accept this pericope as Scripture as well.
