Daniel

What Daniel is about

Daniel divides neatly in two. The first six chapters are stories, and they are among the best known in the Bible: four young men deported to Babylon and trained for imperial service, a king’s dream nobody can interpret, a golden statue and a furnace, writing on a wall at a banquet, and a den of lions.

The second six are visions — beasts rising from the sea, a ram and a goat, a figure like a son of man coming with the clouds and receiving an everlasting kingdom — written in the symbolic idiom of apocalyptic literature, which readers of the time knew how to handle and modern readers usually need help with.

Both halves make one point. Empires look permanent and are not; the God of heaven sets up kingdoms and removes them, and his kingdom is the one that lasts.

The most important detail in the stories is easy to skip. Before the furnace, the three men tell the king that God is able to rescue them — but if not, they still will not bow. Their faithfulness is not conditional on the rescue. That sentence is the theological centre of the book, and it is why Daniel has meant so much to Christians facing costs that were not lifted.

Where it sits in the story

Daniel is set in the Babylonian and Persian courts during the exile, alongside Ezekiel. It is the Old Testament’s fullest apocalyptic writing, and Revelation is unintelligible without it — the beasts, the thrones, the son of man, and much of the imagery come from here. Jesus takes Son of Man, his most frequent self-description, from Daniel 7.

Scholars differ over the book’s date of composition, some placing it in the sixth century BC with Daniel himself and others in the second century during the Maccabean crisis. Christians hold both positions in good faith; the site follows traditional attribution. Neither view changes what the book says about God and empire.

How to read it

Read chapters 1 to 6 as the stories they are — they are gripping, and they carry the message. Then read 7 to 12 with a commentary, and be careful with the detailed timetables that have been built out of them. Sincere Christians have read these chapters in several long-established and quite different ways, and the site takes no position among them. What the visions plainly assert is what the creeds confess: that Christ’s kingdom will have no end.