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Daniel
📖 Daniel
דָּנִיֵּאל Daniyyel — 'God is my judge' (or 'God has judged'). The book is named for its hero, a young Judean exile in the Babylonian and Persian courts — and it is unique in the Old Testament for being written in TWO languages, Hebrew (1:1-2:4a; 8-12) and Aramaic (2:4b-7:28).
Δανιήλ (Daniel) — The Greek versions of Daniel carry THREE sections not in the Hebrew-Aramaic text — the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men (within ch 3), Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon — which Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include and Protestants place among the Apocrypha. There were also two quite different Greek translations (the Old Greek and Theodotion), an unusual textual situation.
A young exile in a pagan court, and the God who 'removes kings and sets up kings' — court tales of faith under empire (chs 1-6) and visions of the world-kingdoms giving way to the kingdom of God (chs 7-12).
Chapters
4 of 12 chapters translated · 33.3%
Gold chapters are published — click one to read it. The rest are still ahead.
Chapter by chapter
Daniel 1Babylon takes its first captives — four renamed youths, a ten-day test of vegetables and water, and 'ten hands better' than the magicians.Daniel 2Nebuchadnezzar's dream, and an impossible test — tell me the dream I will not tell you, or die. Daniel prays, the mystery is revealed, and he sings: God 'removes kings and sets up kings.' Then the dream itself: a great statue of gold, silver, bronze, and iron, its feet iron mixed with clay — and a stone cut without hands that shatters it all and grows into a mountain filling the earth. The four kingdoms, and the everlasting fifth; and the chapter where the book turns from Hebrew to ARAMAIC.Daniel 11The angel's scroll of wars — Persia, Alexander, the kings of south and north, the abomination that desolates — and the seam where history becomes hope.Daniel 12The sleepers in the ground of dust wake — everlasting life named for the first time, the sealed book, two numbers nobody has decoded, and a lot promised at the end of the days.
About the book
Where it sits
In the Christian Old Testament, grouped with the Major Prophets (after Ezekiel). In the HEBREW canon, notably, Daniel stands not among the Prophets but among the WRITINGS (Ketuvim) — a placement much discussed, often tied to the book's date and its apocalyptic rather than classically-prophetic character.
Genre
Two genres in one book. Chapters 1-6 are COURT TALES — narratives of Daniel and his friends keeping faith under Babylonian and Persian kings (the dream-statue, the fiery furnace, the writing on the wall, the lions' den). Chapters 7-12 are APOCALYPTIC — symbolic visions of beasts, horns, and the end, the Old Testament's fullest example of the genre that flowers in Revelation.
Author
Traditionally DANIEL himself, a Judean of noble birth taken to Babylon in the first deportation (605 BC) and serving into the Persian period. The book mixes third-person narrative (chs 1-6) with first-person visions (chs 7-12, 'I, Daniel'). Critical scholarship widely holds that the book reached its final form in the 2nd century BC (see the debates).
Date written
The great crux of the book. The TRADITIONAL date is the 6th century BC (the events' own setting, 605-536 BC), making chapters 7-12 genuine long-range prophecy. The CRITICAL consensus dates the final book to c. 165 BC, during the persecution of the Jews under Antiochus IV Epiphanes — reading the 'prophecies,' especially the detailed history of chapter 11, as a review of past events down to the author's own day (a recognized ancient genre). The question turns on the precision of chapter 11, the book's Persian and Greek loanwords, its place in the Hebrew canon, and one's view of predictive prophecy. Laid out with pedigrees; no vote.
Place
Babylon and the Persian court — the exile and its aftermath, from Nebuchadnezzar through Belshazzar to Darius the Mede and Cyrus of Persia.
Audience
The people of God under a hostile empire — whether sixth-century exiles in Babylon or second-century Jews under Antiochus, the message is the same: the pagan powers are real and terrible, but their days are numbered, God is sovereign over every throne, and faithfulness under pressure will be vindicated.
How it's laid out
1The court education — Daniel and his three friends refuse the king's food and are found ten times wiser.
2Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the four-metal statue and the stone — the four kingdoms and the everlasting fifth.
3The golden image and the fiery furnace — Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and a fourth 'like a son of the gods.'
4Nebuchadnezzar's madness and restoration — the king who learns 'heaven rules.'
5Belshazzar's feast and the writing on the wall — 'weighed and found wanting'; Babylon falls that night.
6Daniel in the lions' den under Darius.
7The vision of the four beasts and the 'one like a son of man,' given dominion forever.
8-12Further visions — the ram and goat, the seventy weeks, the kings of the north and south (ch 11), and the resurrection and the end (ch 12).
What it's about
- GOD IS SOVEREIGN OVER EMPIRES — 'he removes kings and sets up kings' (2:21); the lesson every proud king must learn, that 'the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will' (4:17).
- FAITHFULNESS UNDER PRESSURE — the food, the image, the prayer, the lions: God's people keep faith without power, and are vindicated (though ch 11's martyrs show that vindication is not always rescue).
- THE KINGDOM OF GOD — the stone that becomes a mountain (ch 2), the everlasting dominion given to 'one like a son of man' (ch 7): the world-empires give way to a kingdom that never ends.
- REVELATION OF MYSTERIES — God 'reveals the deep and hidden things' (2:22); the RAZ (mystery) made known, the sealed book, the interpreting angel — the apocalyptic conviction that the shape of history is known to God and can be disclosed.
- RESURRECTION AND JUDGMENT — Daniel 12:2 is the Old Testament's clearest word of a resurrection to 'everlasting life' or 'everlasting contempt,' the horizon the whole book leans toward.
Key words & people
Words this book turns on — each links to its dictionary entry:
People & places — each links to the encyclopedia:
The source text
Translated from the pointed Masoretic text (as printed by Mechon-Mamre). ⚠️ Daniel is the Old Testament's BILINGUAL book: it opens in Hebrew (1:1-2:4a), switches to ARAMAIC — the international language of the empires — for 2:4b-7:28, then returns to Hebrew for chapters 8-12. The Aramaic chapters are the ones about the Gentile world-powers, and the seam falls mid-sentence at 2:4. The Greek tradition adds material not in the Hebrew-Aramaic (the Song of the Three, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon) and survives in two divergent translations; this translation follows the Masoretic Hebrew-Aramaic and notes the major issues where they fall.
Looking forward
Two images from Daniel became central to how the New Testament speaks of Christ. The STONE 'cut out without hands' that breaks the empires and grows to fill the earth (ch 2) is heard behind Jesus' 'stone the builders rejected' and the kingdom of God that starts small and grows (Matthew 21:42-44; 13:31-33). And the 'ONE LIKE A SON OF MAN' who comes with the clouds and is given everlasting dominion (7:13-14) is the title Jesus most often takes for himself — 'the Son of Man' — and quotes at his own trial (Mark 14:62). Daniel 9's 'seventy weeks' and 12's resurrection also run deep in New Testament expectation.
Where the debates are
The DATE is the master-question (6th-century prophecy vs 2nd-century review-as-prophecy — see above), and nearly everything else attaches to it: the identity of the four kingdoms (Rome vs Greece as the fourth), of 'Darius the Mede' (unattested in other sources), the meaning of the 'seventy weeks' (9:24-27), and the referent of the 'abomination that makes desolate' (Antiochus IV, a future antichrist, or both). The book's Persian and Greek loanwords, its place in the Writings, and the extraordinary precision of chapter 11 down to about 165 BC are the main data. Laid out with pedigrees; the library prints the text and does not cast a vote.