Daniel | Atlas | Theologos Media

The exile in the Babylonian court who saw the kingdoms rise and fall

Daniel is deported as a teenager in the first wave of exiles, around 605 BC. He spends the rest of his life — sixty, seventy years — in the courts of Babylon and then Persia. He never returns to Jerusalem. He never builds a family the text mentions. He becomes the figure the Hebrew tradition holds up as the model of faithfulness under empire: how to keep covenant when you live inside someone else's pagan kingdom.

The opening chapter (Daniel 1) is the founding miniature of the book. Four young Jewish noblemen are taken into Nebuchadnezzar's palace school. They are given new names — Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego — names that contain Babylonian deities. They are assigned royal food: meat that has been offered to Babylonian gods, wine from royal stores. Daniel refuses the food and persuades the steward to test them on vegetables and water for ten days. At the end of ten days the four look healthier than the cohort eating the royal food. They keep eating vegetables. Three years later they top their class. The lesson is set: the exile keeps covenant in the small place where covenant can be kept, and the LORD honors it.

The interpretation of dreams is what gives Daniel access to the throne room. Nebuchadnezzar has a dream he cannot recall but knows was terrifying. He demands his wise men tell him both the dream and the interpretation, on pain of death. Daniel prays, receives the vision, and tells the king: he saw a statue with a head of gold, chest and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, feet of iron and clay. A stone cut from a mountain without hands struck the statue's feet and the whole thing collapsed. The stone became a mountain that filled the earth. Daniel interprets: four kingdoms will rise — yours is the gold — and after them "the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed." (Daniel 2:44) The vision sets the apocalyptic frame the rest of the book will work in.

The fiery furnace (Daniel 3) and the lions' den (Daniel 6) are the two narrative pillars of the book's witness theology. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse to bow to Nebuchadnezzar's gold statue. They answer the king with one of the canon's bravest professions: "Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods." (Daniel 3:17–18) The *but if not* is the line the Christian tradition has held closest. They do not have a guarantee. They have a confession. The fourth figure walking in the furnace with them — "like a son of the gods," the king says — is read by the patristic tradition as the pre-incarnate Son of God, and the iconography has held that reading for fifteen centuries.

The lions' den (Daniel 6) repeats the structure under Darius. Daniel keeps praying toward Jerusalem three times a day even after the law against it. He is thrown to the lions. The lions do not eat him. The king pulls him out at dawn. Daniel's accusers go in instead. The story is, in the Hebrew tradition's reading, a parable of how the LORD's faithfulness travels with the exile into the cage and back out.

The second half of the book (chapters 7–12) shifts to apocalyptic vision. The four beasts coming out of the sea. The Ancient of Days seated on the throne with his clothing white as snow and the hair of his head like pure wool. *Behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him.* (Daniel 7:13–14) This is the verse Christ takes up. The title *Son of Man* — the one that confuses the disciples and infuriates the council — comes from Daniel 7. When Christ stands before the Sanhedrin and answers Caiaphas, he quotes Daniel: "You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven." (Mark 14:62) The high priest tears his robes. He knows what verse Christ has just claimed.

Daniel's apocalyptic visions also include the seventy weeks (Daniel 9:24–27), the prince of Persia and the prince of Greece resisting the angel sent to Daniel (Daniel 10) — one of the canon's clearest references to the divine council reading of geopolitics — and the resurrection of the just at the end of days (Daniel 12:2–3). The book is the bridge from the prophetic literature into the apocalyptic register that the New Testament will inherit and that Revelation will work in.

The book also uses extra-canonical Jewish apocalyptic vocabulary that is worth flagging. The visions in Daniel 10 of a man clothed in linen with a face like lightning and eyes like flaming torches, the contested princes of nations resisting the messenger, the timeline of seventy weeks — all of this is the same apocalyptic register that 1 Enoch and the Qumran literature also work in. The Christian reading takes Daniel as canonical and the others as deutero-canonical or extra-canonical, but the editorial honesty is that Daniel is the book that opened the door the other apocalyptic literature walked through.