Daniel in Babylon
Daniel was of the seed royal of Judah, taken to Babylon among the youths who could stand in the king's palace. He and his three companions — Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah — refused the king's…
Biblical Narrative
Daniel was of the seed royal of Judah, taken to Babylon among the youths who could stand in the king's palace. He and his three companions — Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah — refused the king's meat and the king's wine, and ate pulse and water; and at the end of ten days their faces were fairer than all the children that did eat of the king's portion. The Lord gave Daniel understanding in all visions and dreams.
When Nebuchadnezzar dreamed and could not remember, Daniel told him both the dream and the meaning: a great image of gold, silver, brass, iron, and clay, struck down by a stone cut without hands. Empires would rise and fall, but the kingdom of heaven would stand forever. The king fell upon his face and called Daniel's God a God of gods and a Lord of kings.
Years passed, and the kingdom passed to Belshazzar. He drank from the vessels of the House of the Lord, and a hand wrote upon the plaster of the wall: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin — numbered, weighed, divided. Daniel read it: God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it. That night the Chaldean king was slain, and Darius the Mede took the kingdom.
Under Darius, jealous officials snared Daniel by a decree against prayer; he was cast into the den of lions, but the Lord shut their mouths. He came forth alive, and the king proclaimed that all should fear the God of Daniel — for He is the living God, steadfast forever, whose dominion shall never be destroyed.
I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like the pure wool.Daniel 7:9
Archaeology · History · Genetics
Modern scholarship places the composition of Daniel in two stages: the court tales of chapters 1–6 likely circulated in the eastern diaspora during the late Persian or early Hellenistic period, while the apocalyptic visions of chapters 7–12 were redacted under the persecution of Antiochus IV Epiphanes around 165 BCE. John J. Collins, in his Hermeneia commentary (1993), reads the book as a paradigm-shift in Jewish literature: the birth of historical apocalyptic.
The figure of Belshazzar was long thought a biblical fiction — no Babylonian king-list named him. The Nabonidus Cylinder from Sippar, however, names Bel-šar-uṣur as the eldest son of Nabonidus, and the so-called 'Verse Account of Nabonidus' (BM 38299) confirms that Nabonidus 'entrusted the kingship' to him while withdrawing to Tema in the Arabian desert. Belshazzar functioned as co-regent, which explains Daniel 5's offer of 'third place in the kingdom' — first place being Nabonidus, second himself.
The 'Darius the Mede' of Daniel 6 has no parallel in the cuneiform record. Cyrus the Great, not a Mede, took Babylon in 539 BCE. Scholars have proposed various identifications — Gubaru the governor, Cyaxares II, or a literary composite — but the simplest reading is that Daniel reflects a later, telescoped memory of the transition from Babylonian to Persian rule.
The Aramaic of Daniel 2–7 belongs to Imperial Aramaic with later Eastern features; the loanwords from Greek (kitharos, psalterion, sumponiah for musical instruments in Daniel 3) indicate a Hellenistic-era hand on at least the final form. The Qumran community treasured Daniel: eight manuscripts (1QDan, 4QDan a–e, 6QDan, pap6QDan) were among the Dead Sea Scrolls — second only to the Psalms in copies preserved.
The book of Daniel is the only full-blown apocalypse in the Hebrew Bible, and the prototype of a genre that would shape Jewish and Christian imagination for two millennia.John J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary (Hermeneia, 1993)