ii. We might, with Theodoret, Jerome, and Kimchi, account for the mention of Daniel's name at all in this connection by the peculiar circumstances of his life;[18] but there is little probability in the suggestions of bewildered commentators as to the reason why his name should be placed _between_ those of Noah and Job. It is difficult, with Hävernick, to recognise any _climax_ in the order;[19] nor can it be regarded as quite satisfactory to say, with Delitzsch, that the collocation is due to the fact that "as Noah was a righteous man of the old world, and Job of the ideal world, Daniel represented immediately the contemporaneous world."[20] If Job was a purely ideal instance of exemplary goodness, why may not Daniel have been the same? To some critics the allusion has appeared so strange that they have referred it to an imaginary Daniel who had lived at the Court of Nineveh during the Assyrian exile;[21] or to some mythic hero who belonged to ancient days--perhaps, like Melchizedek, a contemporary of the ruin of the cities of the Plain.[22] Ewald tries to urge something for the former conjecture; yet neither for it nor for the latter is there any tittle of real evidence.[23] This, however, would not be decisive against the hypothesis, since in 1 Kings iv. 31 we have references to men of pre-eminent wisdom respecting whom no breath of tradition has come down to us.[24] iii. But if we accept the Book of Daniel as literal history, the allusion of Ezekiel becomes still more difficult to explain; for Daniel must have been not only a contemporary of the prophet of the Exile, but a very youthful one. We are told--a difficulty to which we shall subsequently allude--that Daniel was taken captive in the third year of Jehoiakim (Dan. i. 1), about the year B.C. 606. Ignatius says that he was twelve years old when he foiled the elders; and the narrative shows that he could not have been much older when taken captive.[25] If Ezekiel's prophecy was uttered B.C. 584, Daniel at that time could only have been twenty-two: if it was uttered as late as B.C. 572,[26] Daniel would still have been only thirty-four, and therefore little more than a youth in Jewish eyes. It is undoubtedly surprising that among Orientals, who regard age as the chief passport to wisdom, a living youth should be thus canonised between the Patriarch of the Deluge and the Prince of Uz.