Who was Daniel?
When they lived The Babylonian exile, sixth century BC
In short
Daniel was a young Jewish captive taken to Babylon who became an interpreter of dreams and a senior official under more than one empire. He refused the king’s food, read the writing on the wall during a banquet and spent a night in the lions’ den for going on praying. The book has two very different halves.
- Written by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 9 min read
Daniel is the biblical figure with the most children’s stories and the fewest adult readings. Everyone knows the lions’ den and the furnace; almost nobody works through the second half of the book, which is made of visions of beasts, horns and calculations of time, and which ranks among the hardest texts in the Bible.
The book divides very cleanly. The first six chapters are court narratives, told in the third person, about Jews serving foreign kings without giving up their own practice. From chapter seven onward Daniel himself speaks, and the subject becomes the future of empires.
The deportation and the king’s table
The book opens with a siege of Jerusalem and a selection: young men of the nobility, without physical defect, well favoured, able to learn the language and literature of the Chaldeans. Daniel and three companions are chosen, given Babylonian names, and put through a three-year training programme for palace service.
The first crisis is not religious in the obvious sense: it is dietary. Daniel decides not to touch what came from the royal table, food or wine, and negotiates — he asks for a ten-day trial on vegetables and water, with a comparative assessment at the end. His resistance begins as an administrative proposal.
It is worth noticing what the book does here. It does not paint the foreign court as enemy ground to be abandoned: Daniel learns the language, holds office, serves more than one king and rises through the hierarchy. What he refuses is one specific point, and on that point he does not move.
8But Daniel resolved in his heart that he would not be polluted with the king’s meal, nor with the wine he drank, and he requested of the chief of the eunuchs that he might not be contaminated.
Note the verb: he resolved it in his heart before speaking to anyone. And note what follows — he asks permission rather than simply disobeying. The whole scene is about negotiating a limit, not about breaking with the system.
The furnace, which is not Daniel’s story
Chapter 3 is the best known in the book and the only one in which Daniel does not appear. The men who face the golden statue and the furnace are his three companions, called in the text by their Babylonian names: Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
The answer they give the king is the high point of the chapter, and it is harder than the version usually told. They state that God is able to rescue them, and then add a clause that changes everything: even if he does not, they will not worship the statue. Their obedience does not depend on the outcome.
In this edition chapter 3 has a hundred verses, and most of that space is taken up by a prayer and a song sung inside the furnace, present in the ancient Greek translation. A Bible translated from the Aramaic has thirty verses here.
16Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and said to king Nebuchadnezzar, “It is not right for us to obey you in this matter.
17For behold our God, whom we worship, is able to rescue us from the oven of burning fire and to free us from your hands, O king.
18But even if he will not, let it be known to you, O king, that we will not worship your gods, nor adore the gold statue, which you have raised up.”
Three verses containing the whole structure of the argument: a refusal to debate, an affirmation that God is able, and the reservation that the decision stands even if he does not act. It is that third step that almost always disappears from summaries.
The writing on the wall
Years later, at a banquet where wine is being drunk from vessels looted from the temple in Jerusalem, fingers of a human hand appear writing on the plastered wall, by the light of the lampstand. King Belshazzar sees the hand that writes and loses control of his own body — the text describes his knees knocking together.
None of the court’s wise men can read it. Daniel is summoned, refuses the rewards offered, delivers a harsh speech about the previous king and then translates the inscription word by word: numbered, weighed, divided.
The phrase "the writing on the wall" entered modern languages as a sign of imminent collapse, and this scene is literally where it comes from. That same night, the chapter reports, the king was killed.
5In the same hour, there appeared fingers, as of the hand of a man, writing on the surface of the wall, opposite the candlestick, in the king’s palace. And the king observed the part of the hand that wrote.
The image is precise and strange: not a whole hand but fingers, and the scene has its lighting specified. The text takes the trouble to say where the lampstand was.
25But this is the writing that has been decreed: MANE, THECEL, PHARES.
26And this is the interpretation of the words. MANE: God has numbered your kingdom and has finished it.
27THECEL: you have been weighed on the scales and found lacking.
28PHARES: your kingdom has been divided and has been given to the Medes and the Persians.
In this edition the inscription has three words, and each is given its own interpretation. Bibles translated from the Aramaic carry four, with the first repeated. Worth checking which form yours has.
The lions’ den
The most famous episode happens under Persian rule, when Daniel is one of the three chiefs set over the hundred and twenty governors of the kingdom, and stands out among them. That matters for the scene: he is not a boy, he is an elderly official at the top of his career, and what triggers the trap is professional envy.
The law is tailor-made. His rivals persuade the king to forbid, for thirty days, any petition addressed to anyone but himself. They knew exactly what Daniel did every day — and the text reports that, knowing about the decree, he went home, opened the windows towards Jerusalem and went on praying three times a day, as he always had.
There is no confrontation, no speech, no attempt at concealment. His disobedience consists in not changing his routine. The king, who is fond of Daniel, spends the night without food and without sleep, and at first light runs to the den.
10Now when Daniel learned of this, namely, that the law had been established, he entered his house, and, opening the windows in his upper room towards Jerusalem, he knelt down three times a day, and he adored and gave thanks before his God, as he had been accustomed to do previously.
The whole verse is a list of things that stayed the same: the house, the windows, the direction, the number of times a day. Resistance is described as an absence of change.
22My God has sent his angel, and he has closed the mouths of the lions, and they have not harmed me, because before him justice has been found in me, and, even before you, O king, I have committed no offense.”
The explanation comes from Daniel’s own mouth, and he does not speak of courage: he speaks of an angel sent and of mouths shut. He adds that he has committed no offence against the king either.
The second half: the visions
From chapter 7 onward the book changes genre and narrator. Daniel begins to report, in the first person, night visions populated by hybrid animals, speaking horns, heavenly courts and counts of time. This is apocalyptic literature, and it works by coded imagery rather than by direct description.
The book’s most influential image is here: a figure of human appearance who comes with the clouds and receives a kingdom that does not end. The expression reappears in the Gospels as a self-designation of Jesus, and it is one of the most quoted bridges between the two Testaments.
One open question deserves recording, because it turns up in any serious study of the book: the date of composition of Daniel is disputed among scholars, with positions ranging from the sixth to the second century BC. Anyone presenting the question as settled, in either direction, is claiming more than the evidence supports.
13I watched, therefore, in the vision of the night, and behold, with the clouds of heaven, one like a son of man arrived, and he approached all the way to the Ancient of days, and they presented him before him.
14And he gave him power, and honor, and the kingdom, and all peoples, tribes, and languages will serve him. His power is an eternal power, which will not be taken away, and his kingdom, one which will not be corrupted.
Two verses that shaped the entire history of biblical interpretation. Note that the figure does not seize the kingdom: it is given to him, and what the text underlines is how long it lasts.
Two sizes of Daniel
As with Esther, the book of Daniel circulates in two lengths, and the difference is material. The edition displayed on this page has fourteen chapters. A Protestant Bible has twelve.
The part that exists only in the longer edition comes from the ancient Greek translation: the song inside the furnace, in chapter 3, and two entire chapters at the end. Chapter 13 tells the story of Susanna, falsely accused by two elders and saved by a young Daniel who interrogates the witnesses separately. Chapter 14 tells the case of Bel and the dragon — and brings a second lions’ den, this time lasting six days.
There is a practical consequence worth knowing: because of the song added to chapter 3, the numbering of chapter 4 is displaced by three verses between the two editions. What is Daniel 4:30 here sits at 4:33 in a Bible translated from the Aramaic. If a reference does not line up, this is probably why.
45And when she was led away to death, the Lord raised up the holy spirit of a young boy, whose name was Daniel.
46And he cried out with a loud voice, “I am clean of the blood of this one.”
Daniel’s entrance into the story of Susanna, in a chapter that exists only in editions following the Greek translation. He interrupts an execution already under way.
What the text does not say
Biblical figures gather layers of tradition that Scripture does not support. Telling the two apart does not diminish the story — it gives back what is actually written.
What is commonly said
Daniel was a boy when he was thrown to the lions.
What Scripture says
The lions’ den is in chapter 6, already under Persian rule, decades after the deportation narrated in chapter 1. There the text describes him as one of the three chiefs set over the governors of the kingdom. He is a man at the end of a long public career, and the trap is driven by professional envy.
What is commonly said
Daniel was thrown into the furnace along with his three friends.
What Scripture says
These are two distinct episodes, three chapters apart. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego face the furnace in chapter 3, where Daniel does not appear in a single verse. Daniel faces the lions’ den in chapter 6, alone.
What is commonly said
The writing on the wall was four words, with the first one repeated.
What Scripture says
That depends on the edition. The one displayed here has three words, and each is given its own interpretation in the dialogue that follows. Bibles translated from the Aramaic have four. The message is the same; the shape of the inscription is not.
What is commonly said
Daniel refused to live in Babylon and rejected everything that came from the court.
What Scripture says
The text shows him learning the language and literature of the Chaldeans, accepting a Babylonian name, serving successive kings and reaching the top of the administration. What he refuses are specific points — the food from the royal table and the ban on prayer — and there he does not give way.
Where this person appears
8But Daniel resolved in his heart that he would not be polluted with the king’s meal, nor with the wine he drank, and he requested of the chief of the eunuchs that he might not be contaminated.
The decision about the king’s food, taken inwardly and negotiated outwardly.
16Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and said to king Nebuchadnezzar, “It is not right for us to obey you in this matter.
17For behold our God, whom we worship, is able to rescue us from the oven of burning fire and to free us from your hands, O king.
18But even if he will not, let it be known to you, O king, that we will not worship your gods, nor adore the gold statue, which you have raised up.”
The three companions’ answer to the king, with the clause that makes it unconditional.
25But this is the writing that has been decreed: MANE, THECEL, PHARES.
26And this is the interpretation of the words. MANE: God has numbered your kingdom and has finished it.
27THECEL: you have been weighed on the scales and found lacking.
28PHARES: your kingdom has been divided and has been given to the Medes and the Persians.
The inscription on the wall and its interpretation, word by word.
10Now when Daniel learned of this, namely, that the law had been established, he entered his house, and, opening the windows in his upper room towards Jerusalem, he knelt down three times a day, and he adored and gave thanks before his God, as he had been accustomed to do previously.
The prayer routine kept up after the decree — disobedience as an absence of change.
13I watched, therefore, in the vision of the night, and behold, with the clouds of heaven, one like a son of man arrived, and he approached all the way to the Ancient of days, and they presented him before him.
14And he gave him power, and honor, and the kingdom, and all peoples, tribes, and languages will serve him. His power is an eternal power, which will not be taken away, and his kingdom, one which will not be corrupted.
The vision of the human figure receiving a kingdom, the most quoted passage in the second half of the book.