Daniel

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Daniel is the visionary protagonist of the biblical Book of Daniel: a young Judean carried into exile after the fall of Jerusalem, who rises at the Babylonian and Persian courts on the strength of an uncanny gift — the reading of dreams no one else can read — and who, in the book’s second half, becomes the one to whom dreams are given. The figure stands at the hinge between two kinds of religious literature, the wisdom tale and the apocalypse, and the book is named for him because he carries both.

The text falls into two unlike halves. Chapters one through six are stories told about Daniel: he refuses the king’s rich food, interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a great statue made of four metals, reads the writing that appears on Belshazzar’s wall, and survives a night in the lions’ den. Chapters seven through twelve are visions reported by Daniel himself — beasts rising from the sea, a figure “like a son of man” coming with the clouds, an angel who explains what the images mean and how long the present distress will last. The court tales are set under the Babylonian and Persian empires; the visions look past them to a sequence of kingdoms ending in a final, decisive reversal.

Historical scholarship reads this seam closely. The visions describe the persecution of the Jews under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV with a precision that breaks down only when it reaches his death — the standard sign, to historians, that the apocalyptic chapters were composed during that crisis, around 165 BCE, and project their author’s own moment back into the mouth of a much earlier sage. On this reading Daniel is a literary and emblematic figure rather than a documented exile, and the book is a work of resistance written to console a community under a tyrant by insisting his time is measured.

The traditions that received the book held it otherwise, and held it as prophecy. Jewish readers preserved further Daniel material — the stories of Susanna and of Bel and the Dragon — in the Greek tradition, where they stand among the Apocrypha. Christian readers placed Daniel among the prophets and mined the “son of man” and the four kingdoms for a map of history’s end; those images run straight into the Book of Revelation and through the whole later literature of the last days. Among the esoteric and apocalyptic currents the visions kept their force as a cipher: a scheme of empires, sealed numbers, and an appointed term, awaiting the reader who could count.

What the book itself keeps insisting on is interpretation — that hidden meaning is real, that the wise can be given to see it, and that the powers of the present age do not have the last word about their own duration. The dream of the great statue ends with a stone, cut from a mountain by no human hand, that strikes the image and grinds it to chaff. The book does not say when the stone falls.

→ In the library: Charles — The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913) · Charles — The Book of Enoch (1912)

→ Related: Angel · Lucifer · Divination · Mesopotamia