Susannah’s Virtues
The Prayer of Distress & the Cause of Justice
by Patrick Henry Reardon
When Dr. Martin Luther decided to limit the books of the Old Testament to those contained in the classical rabbinical canon, one of the eventual casualties of his decision was the memorable account of chaste Susannah, a dramatic and fast-moving story that forms chapter 13 of the Book of Daniel in the traditional Latin version of the Bible. For Protestants the Susannah narrative, along with all other Old Testament material not contained in the Hebrew/Aramaic canon, was thenceforth transferred to what became known as the “Apocrypha,” thus effectively guaranteeing that many later Christians would take it less seriously and probably read it less often. In our own country, in fact, where most Protestant Bibles have traditionally been published sans the Apocrypha, it is arguable that a good number of ardent Bible readers at present are quite unfamiliar with the story of Susannah.
A pity, surely. It is no exaggeration to say that all generations of Christians before Luther, and most Christians even after him, were very familiar with the biblical account of the beautiful and wise Susannah—the tale of the two lustful elders who attempted to seduce this virtuous lady by threats, their perjured testimony against her when she refused them, the death sentence imposed for her alleged adultery, and the dramatic emergence of young Daniel to vindicate her innocence and confound her accusers. Whatever the theological merits of Dr. Luther’s canonical preference (and this discussion is not to my purpose here), I believe the consequent fading of Susannah’s story from the Christian popular imagination to be a genuine loss.
In the following reflections, I hope to make three points about the story of Susannah. First, the narrative is well worth pursuing for both literary and spiritual purposes. Second, the meandering veins and mother lode of the Christian exegesis of the Susannah account are especially rich with doctrinal themes and moral teaching. Third, the Christian theological tradition has especially relied on the Susannah story in regard to a specific feature of the divine omniscience—God’s knowledge of future events.
Susannah’s History
First, this story of Susannah was most dear to earlier generations of Christian believers. Already early in the second century we find the first of six mural icons drawn from the Susannah story on the walls of the Roman catacombs.1 Spread throughout Italy and Gaul, there are seven extant examples of scenes from the Susannah chapter in bas relief on Christian sarcophagi from the first few centuries.2 Moreover, in all of Christian history there is preserved not a single Christian manuscript of the Book of Daniel without the story of Susannah. When Julius Africanus in the third century objected that the Susannah chapter was uncanonical because it did not stand in the Hebrew Bible, Origen responded that the story was “found in every church of Christ in that Greek copy that the Greeks use.”3
At the time when Origen wrote this, nonetheless, not many Jews seem to have been reading Susannah, at least not as Holy Scripture. Although the tale had clearly been part of the earlier Semitic form of Daniel (Aramaic more likely than Hebrew, as in the bulk of Daniel) that was translated into the Septuagint, it is not contained in any of the seven Semitic copies of Daniel discovered among the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran. Moreover, the story is found neither in Josephus in the first century nor in the second-century translation of the Hebrew Scriptures by the Jew Aquila. We have the further witness of Jerome speaking of a Jewish critic who considered the story a piece of Greek fiction.4 As to why the account of Susannah was no longer to be found in the rabbinical canon of the Sacred Scriptures, Hippolytus in Rome and Origen in Egypt were perhaps speaking for a common Christian view in the third century when they advanced a rather simple explanation. The reason that the story of Susannah had not been included in that canon, they said, was that the latter was established by Jewish elders who would not look favorably on a narrative that made villains of two of their number!5
With respect to the Christian reading of the Greek version of Daniel, including Susannah, there is a further and most curious feature of textual history to be mentioned here. After Origen, in his famous Hexapla, placed Theodotion’s fairly recent (late second century) translation of Daniel in a parallel column with that of the Septuagint, Christian readers compared the two renderings and decided that they much preferred Theodotion. Thus, in spite of the traditional and venerable authority of the Septuagint in the Church, Theodotion’s translation of Daniel came to predominate among Christian copyists.6 His version was adopted as the Danielic text of the Byzantine liturgical lectionary, and the Latin (Vulgate) translation of Theodotion’s Susannah was incorporated into the Roman lectionary. So great was the dominance of Theodotion in this respect that the ancient Septuagint translation of Daniel almost disappeared, not a single copy of it being known until the discovery of the Chisianus Codex in 1772. Similarly, it was Theodotion’s translation of Daniel that was rendered into almost all the other ancient Christian versions (the Peshitta Syriac, both the Boharic and Sahidic Coptic, the Ethiopic, the Armenian, the Arabic, and the Slavonic), as well as virtually all modern translations.7
Given this massive dominance of Theodotion in the textual tradition of Daniel, it is this version of Susannah that we will be following in the present article, except where otherwise noted. Moreover, a comparison of the two accounts of Susannah shows Theodotion’s to be by far the more colorful and detailed. Consequently, one suspects that, even if their choice of Theodotion had not pertained to Daniel as a whole, it is no wonder that Christian copyists preferred his rendering of Susannah.8
Furthermore, notwithstanding Luther’s relegation of Susannah to the Apocrypha, it is arguable that her story has always been better known to Christians in the West than in the East. It is quoted far more frequently by the Latin writers than by the Greeks, and the reason for this phenomenon almost certainly had to do with a traditional liturgical practice. Since at least the fifth century the Roman eucharistic lectionary prescribed that the Susannah narrative be read at Mass each year on the Saturday before the Fourth Sunday of Lent ( Laetare Sunday). The origins of this prescription go back even further, to the venerable custom of Roman “stational churches,” a liturgical arrangement in which the pope would visit and preside at the Eucharist at the various parish churches of the Eternal City in a specific order. As it happened, the parish church traditionally selected for the Saturday before the Fourth Sunday of Lent was dedicated to St. Susannah, a consecrated virgin martyred under Diocletian. What, then, could be a more appropriate biblical reading for that annual occasion than the story of the earlier Susannah from the Book of Daniel? This propriety was heightened, moreover, by the striking circumstance that both women suffered persecution in the safeguarding of their chastity. This established reading endured in the West for nearly a millennium and a half, until the lectionary reforms associated with Vatican II only a few decades ago.9
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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