ḥokhmah

Biblical Aramaic חָכְמָה occurs eight times in seven verses: seven in the Aramaic of Daniel (2:20, 2:21, 2:23, 2:30, 5:11 twice, 5:14) and once in the Aramaic rescript of Artaxerxes preserved in Ezra 7:25. It is the direct cognate of Hebrew חׇכְמָה, from the common West Semitic root ḥkm, and the lexica are unanimous on the sense: HALOT (Aramaic section, s.v. חָכְמָה), BDB (Aramaic appendix, s.v. חָכְמָה) and Vogt's Lexicon of Biblical Aramaic all give simply "wisdom" with no subdivision of senses, and TDOT's entry on חכם locates the Aramaic noun within the wider Semitic field. The attestations fall into two groups by who holds the wisdom: it is predicated of God in the doxology of Daniel 2:20, 2:21 and 2:23 (and, on the queen mother's lips, of the gods in 5:11), and it is resident in a human being in 2:30, 5:11 and 5:14. Commentators on Daniel (Montgomery, ICC; Goldingay, WBC; Collins, Hermeneia; Newsom, OTL) treat the hymn of 2:20 to 2:23 as the theological center of the chapter: the vocabulary of Babylonian mantic expertise is taken over and referred to the God of heaven, who alone reveals what is deep and hidden (2:22), and the pairing חָכְמְתָא וּגְבוּרְתָא in 2:20 and 2:23 is a hymnic word pair with Hebrew parallels (Job 12:13). This is the material H.-P. Müller classified as magical-mantic wisdom, wisdom demonstrated by the interpretation of dreams, omens and inscriptions rather than by instruction; von Rad's discussion of Daniel in Wisdom in Israel raised the question, still debated, of how far that mantic strand can be integrated with the wisdom of Proverbs and Job. In 5:11 and 5:14 the noun stands in a triad with נְהִירוּ and שָׂכְלְתָנוּ describing Daniel's qualifications, the same list twice, once from the queen mother and once from Belshazzar. Ezra 7:25 stands apart in genre and in function: כְּחָכְמַת אֱלָהָךְ דִּי בִידָךְ closely echoes the phrasing of 7:14 about the law of God in Ezra's hand, and Williamson (WBC), Blenkinsopp (OTL) and Fensham (NICOT) accordingly understand the wisdom of 7:25 to refer largely to the law Ezra brings, functioning as the authorizing standard for appointing judges over the province Beyond the River. The authenticity, Persian chancellery idiom and legal scope of the rescript are all debated; the sense of the noun is not.