Susannah, HISTORY OF, The Judgment of Daniel, also Susannah and the Elders, are the different titles of a well-known story, which forms one of three apocryphal additions to the book of Daniel; the other two being The Song of the Three Holy Children and The History of Bel and the Dragon. It relates how Susannah, the wife of Joacim, and daughter of Hilkiah, celebrated alike for her beauty and her virtue, was falsely accused of adultery by two of the elders, whose own unchaste proposals she had spurned; and how, being condemned to death on their evidence, she was saved by the wise young Daniel, who made the elders confound each other in separate examination, and doomed them to the same fate they had designed for her. In most MSS. this story precedes the first chapter of the Book of Daniel, and so we find it in the old Latin and Arabic versions; but the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Complutensian Polyglot, and the Hexaplar Syriac place it at the end of the present book, and reckon it as the 13th chapter. There are two Greek versions varying considerably—that of the LXX. and that of Theodotion. There is no satisfactory evidence that it ever had a Hebrew or Aramaic original at all. Africanus had a controversy with Origen on the authenticity of Susannah and Bel and the Dragon, and pointed out that their original could only have been a Greek one, as the example of paronomasia in the words of Daniel depended on the Greek. Porphyry based his attack on Daniel partly on the Greek origin of Susannah. Jerome is careful to distinguish it from the rest of Daniel, as not possessing the authority of Scripture. At the same time the story is used by Hippolytus, Origen, Tertullian, Ambrose, Gregory Nazianzen, and Chrysostom. The object of the story may have been to correct the procedure of the Sanhedrim, by insisting on the proper use of evidence and the examination of witnesses.
See Churton's edition of the Apocrypha (1884), and Wace's Commentary on the Apocrypha (1888).