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. His Hebrew name, Daniyyel, means God is my judge — a fitting label for a man whose whole story turns on the conviction that judgment is being kept, that the books of heaven are open, and that the verdict on every empire has already been recorded.

The exile and the court

The narrative opens with deportation. Jerusalem falls; the Temple vessels are carried off to the house of the conqueror’s god; and among the captives a handful of well-bred Judean youths are selected for the king’s service, schooled in the learning and language of the Chaldeans, and renamed — Daniel becomes Belteshazzar, his three companions Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah become Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The renaming is the first test of the book’s central pressure: an empire that can rename a man can, it implies, remake him. Daniel’s first act of resistance is a refusal at the table. He declines the king’s rich food and wine, asks for vegetables and water, and at the end of ten days he and his companions are found healthier and brighter than those who ate the royal fare. The wisdom that follows — the gift for which he is famous — is granted, in the book’s own accounting, because of that fidelity: to the four youths is given knowledge and skill in all learning, and to Daniel alone, understanding in all visions and dreams.

What unfolds across the first six chapters is a cycle of court contests in which the exile, armed only with that gift and with prayer, repeatedly out-reads the empire’s own diviners. The genre is ancient and well attested across the Near East — the wise foreigner who rises to vizier by interpreting what the native sages cannot, a pattern Joseph already carries in Genesis — but here it is bent to a single argument: the God of the captives knows the future the kings cannot read, and the kings are made to say so themselves.

The four court tales

The dream of the statue is the keystone. Nebuchadnezzar wakes troubled by a dream he cannot recover, and demands on pain of death that his magicians not merely interpret it but first tell him what he dreamed. They protest that no one on earth can do such a thing; Daniel, given the secret in a night vision, does. The king had seen a colossal statue: head of gold, breast and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, feet of iron mixed with clay. A stone, cut from a mountain by no human hand, struck the image on its feet and shattered the whole of it to chaff that the wind carried away, and the stone became a great mountain that filled the earth. Daniel reads the metals as a succession of kingdoms, each lesser than the last, the whole sequence destined to be ground to nothing by a kingdom that God will raise up and that will never be destroyed. The four-metal scheme is the book’s first statement of a thesis it will restate in stranger forms: that history is a descending series of empires with a fixed term, and that a final sovereignty stands outside the series, waiting.

The furnace follows. Nebuchadnezzar sets up a golden image and commands all peoples to fall down before it at the sound of the orchestra; the three companions will not, and are bound and thrown into a furnace heated sevenfold, so hot it kills the men who cast them in. The king looks and sees four figures walking unbound in the fire, the fourth like a son of the gods, and the three come out without the smell of smoke on them. The episode is the book in miniature: an empire that demands worship as the price of belonging, a refusal that should be fatal, and a deliverance that turns the king himself into a witness.

Then Nebuchadnezzar’s madness. A second dream — a great tree felled by a heavenly watcher — warns the king that he will be driven from men to live as a beast until he learns that heaven rules. The sentence falls; for seven seasons he eats grass like an ox, his hair grown like eagles’ feathers, until he lifts his eyes and his reason returns, and he blesses the Most High whose dominion is everlasting. The proudest king in the world is made to confess the very thesis of the book.

The writing on the wall belongs to his successor. At a feast, Belshazzar profanes the sacred vessels carried from the Temple, and a hand appears and writes on the plaster: mene mene tekel upharsin. The diviners cannot read it; Daniel can. Mene — numbered: God has numbered the days of the kingdom and finished it. Tekel — weighed: the king is weighed in the balances and found wanting. Peres — divided: the kingdom is given to the Medes and Persians. That night Belshazzar is killed and the empire changes hands. The scene fixes in three words the conviction that drives the whole book — that the powers of the present age are numbered, weighed, and divided, and that the writing is already on the wall for any reader who can read it.

The lions’ den closes the cycle. Under the new Persian order, jealous officials trap the king into a decree that no one may petition any god or man but the king for thirty days; Daniel keeps praying, windows open toward Jerusalem, three times a day as before. He is thrown to the lions, the den is sealed, and at dawn the king finds him alive — an angel, Daniel says, has shut the lions’ mouths. The accusers are thrown in his place, and the king publishes a decree across his realm that the God of Daniel is the living God whose kingdom shall not be destroyed.

The seam: from wisdom tale to apocalypse

At chapter seven the book changes register entirely. The stories told about Daniel give way to visions reported by him, in the first person, and the serene confidence of the court tales gives way to terror, sleeplessness, and a seer who must be lifted from the ground and steadied by an interpreting angel. This is the moment the book crosses from the wisdom tale into the apocalypse — the genre, just then taking form in Jewish hands, in which a human recipient is granted, through an otherworldly mediator, a disclosure of what is normally sealed: the structure of the heavens, the calendar of history, and the judgment toward which everything bends. Daniel is one of the two apocalypses to enter the biblical canon, the other being the Revelation of John; alongside them ran a wider stream of such writing, the Enoch literature preserved in the Book of Enoch, the apocalypse ascribed to Baruch, and the visions attributed to Ezra. Among these, Daniel is the fountainhead — the earliest and the only one the canon kept on both the Jewish and Christian sides.

The book is also bilingual in a way no other Hebrew scripture matches. It opens in Hebrew, shifts into Aramaic in the middle of chapter two, and returns to Hebrew at chapter eight, so that the seam between languages does not fall where the seam between genres falls. The Aramaic core, chapters two through seven, is built as a concentric ring: the dream of four kingdoms and the vision of four kingdoms stand at the outer edges, the two deliverances — furnace and lions’ den — just inside them, and the two royal humblings of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar at the center. The architecture binds the court tales and the visions into one composition, the wisdom of the first half and the revelation of the second held in a single frame.

The visions

The vision of the four beasts re-tells the dream of the statue in a darker key. Daniel sees four great beasts rise from a churning sea — a lion with eagle’s wings, a bear with ribs in its teeth, a four-headed leopard, and a fourth beast dreadful and terrible, with iron teeth and ten horns, among which a little horn springs up, speaking great things, with eyes like a man’s. Then the scene shifts to a throne room. Thrones are set, and the Ancient of Days takes his seat, his garment white as snow, his throne flames of fire, a river of fire flowing out before him; the court sits in judgment and the books are opened. The beasts are stripped of their dominion. And with the clouds of heaven there comes one like a son of man, who is brought before the Ancient of Days and given dominion and glory and a kingdom that shall not pass away. The interpreting angel tells Daniel that the four beasts are four kingdoms, that the little horn is a king who will speak against the Most High and wear out the holy ones and think to change the sacred times and the law, and that the kingdom under the whole heaven will at the last be given to the people of the holy ones of the Most High.

The ram and the goat sharpen the same picture. A two-horned ram is overrun by a he-goat from the west with a great horn between its eyes; the great horn is broken at the height of its power and four horns rise in its place, and out of one of them a little horn grows exceedingly great toward the south and the east and the beautiful land, casting down some of the host of heaven and taking away the daily sacrifice. The angel Gabriel — named here, the first angel given a personal name in the Hebrew scriptures — comes to explain: the ram is the kings of Media and Persia, the goat is the king of Greece, the great horn the first king, and the four that follow the kingdoms into which his empire breaks. The little horn is the persecutor who will defile the sanctuary, and the angel tells how many evenings and mornings will pass before the sanctuary is cleansed.

The seventy weeks turn the apparatus on prophecy itself. Daniel, reading in the book of Jeremiah that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years, prays in mourning and fasting; and Gabriel comes to tell him that the seventy years are seventy weeks — seventy times seven, four hundred and ninety years — decreed upon his people and the holy city, to finish transgression and seal up vision and prophecy and anoint the most holy. Within them an anointed one is cut off, a coming prince destroys the city and the sanctuary, and in the midst of a final week sacrifice ceases and an abomination that makes desolate is set up, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator. The vision turns prophecy into a sealed sum, a number to be counted by the wise — and it leaves the counting to the reader.

The last vision spells the history out almost without cipher: kings of the south and kings of the north, marriages and betrayals and campaigns, narrowing to a contemptible king who profanes the sanctuary, sets up the abomination of desolation, and exalts himself above every god. And it ends with the disclosure that gives the book its last weight. Michael, the great prince who stands for Daniel’s people, shall arise; there shall be a time of trouble such as never was; and many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. The wise — the maskilim — shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars forever. This is the plainest statement of bodily resurrection in the Hebrew scriptures, and it arrives here as the resolution of history’s crisis: the dead are raised so that the verdict the books record can be carried out on those the tyrant killed and on the tyrant alike. Daniel is told to seal the book until the time of the end, and to go his way to his rest, for he shall stand in his lot at the end of the days.

The two registers of its setting

On the visions’ setting the registers diverge, and the book sustains both. It presents itself as the work of a sixth-century exile who served from Nebuchadnezzar to Cyrus, and the traditions that received it read it as genuine prophecy spoken centuries before the events it names. Read from inside that frame, the precision of the visions is exactly the point: the future is fixed, the empires are counted in advance, and the seer is shown a calendar that runs from his own captivity to the end of days.

The documentary record places its composition elsewhere. The visions describe the persecution of the Jews under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes — his desecration of the Temple, the cessation of the daily sacrifice, the “abomination that makes desolate” set upon the altar in 167 BCE — with a precision that holds through the events of the 160s and then breaks down. The final chapter predicts that the king will fall in the land between the seas; instead Antiochus died in Persia in 164 BCE. To historians that break is the seam itself: the apocalyptic chapters were composed during the crisis, around 165 BCE, accurate where they report what had happened and wrong where they foretell what had not. On this reading the four kingdoms are Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece; the little horn is Antiochus; and the book is a work of resistance, written to console a community under a tyrant by insisting his time is measured and his fall already decreed. Notably, the deliverance the visions await comes from heaven alone, by the arising of Michael and the raising of the dead — not from the armed Maccabean revolt that was, in the same years, actually winning back the Temple. The wise who shine like stars are the teachers who endure and instruct, not the soldiers who fight.

These two readings are not reconciled here so much as both kept whole: the world the book renders, in which a sixth-century sage is shown the shape of all that will come, and the second-century crisis in which that rendering did its work. This double life — a vision of eschatology framed as ancient prophecy and forged in a present emergency — is precisely what made Daniel the model for every apocalypse that followed within Second Temple Judaism and after.

Afterlives

The traditions that received the book carried it forward in three directions. Jewish readers preserved further Daniel material in the Greek tradition that never entered the Hebrew text: the story of Susanna, falsely accused by two elders and cleared when the young Daniel cross-examines them apart and catches them naming different trees; and Bel and the Dragon, in which he exposes the priests who secretly eat the offerings laid before an idol by scattering ashes to show their footprints, and destroys a living serpent worshipped as a god. These survive in the Septuagint and the later Theodotion Greek versions, stand among the deuterocanonical writings for Catholic and Orthodox churches and among the Apocrypha for Protestants and Jews, and show the figure in a new mode — Daniel the detective, vindicator of the innocent and unmasker of false gods.

Christian readers placed Daniel among the major prophets — where Jewish tradition had kept the book among the Writings rather than the Prophets — and mined its visions for a map of history’s end. The phrase one like a son of man passed into the Gospels as the title Jesus Christ takes for himself, and the scene of one coming on the clouds to receive everlasting dominion became central to how the early communities read his identity and his return. The four-kingdom scheme and the seventy weeks ran straight into the Revelation of John and through the whole later literature of the last days; the kingdom of God that the stone inaugurates, cut from the mountain by no human hand, became a name for the reign the Gospels announce.

Among the esoteric and millenarian 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. The angel’s instruction to seal the book until the time of the end was read not as a closure but as an invitation: that the meaning was deposited, intact, for the generation able to break the seal. Across two thousand years readers have located their own moment within the four kingdoms, recalculated the seventy weeks against the calendars of their day, and treated the numbered days as a lock to which history itself would, in time, supply the key.

Text and scholarship

The standard critical commentary in English is John J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel, in the Hermeneia series (Fortress Press, 1993), with the chapters on the Greek additions contributed by Adela Yarbro Collins; it remains the fullest treatment of the book’s symbolism, its relation to the wider apocalyptic and pseudepigraphic corpus, and the Dead Sea Scrolls (see the publisher record at Fortress Press). Carol A. Newsom’s Daniel: A Commentary, with Brennan W. Breed (Westminster John Knox, Old Testament Library, 2014), is the leading more recent study, attentive to the book’s literary shape and its bilingual seam, with a reception history appended to every chapter; the listing is at Christianbook. On the vision of the four beasts and its setting in the crisis under Antiochus, Michael Segal of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem gives a concise scholarly account in “Daniel’s Vision of the Four Beasts: The Prehistory of Chanukah”. For the apocalyptic genre that Daniel founds, John J. Collins’s The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (3rd ed., Eerdmans, 2016) is the standard orientation. The Greek additions are gathered, with the wider apocryphal corpus, in R. H. Charles’s The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1913), held in full in the Library; the kindred Enochic apocalypse, the closest companion to Daniel’s visions, is in Charles’s The Book of Enoch (Oxford, 1912), likewise held.

What the book itself keeps insisting on is interpretation — that hidden meaning runs beneath events, 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: Book Of Daniel · Apocalypse · Eschatology · Book Of Enoch · Second Temple Judaism · Babylon · Gabriel · Jesus Christ · Kingdom Of God · Ezra · Angel · Lucifer · Divination · Mesopotamia