Daniel 10
After three weeks of mourning and fasting, Daniel sees a figure of unearthly splendour beside the Tigris — a heavenly messenger delayed by a battle with the prince of Persia.
Summary
The tenth chapter of Daniel opens the longest sustained vision in the book — chapters 10 through 12 are a continuous unit, ending only with the resurrection passage and the sealing of the book. The prologue to the vision is the most elaborately described theophany in the book: the heavenly figure Daniel sees beside the Tigris combines imagery from Ezekiel's vision of the divine glory (Ezekiel 1, 10) with the metallic symbolism of the rest of Daniel. The description — garment of linen, belt of gold, body like beryl, face like lightning, eyes like torches, arms and legs like bronze, voice like a multitude — became one of the most influential passages for the iconography of angels in Jewish and Christian tradition, and is directly echoed in the description of the risen Christ in the opening chapter of Revelation (1:12-16). Daniel's physical response — falling on his face, being reduced to trembling, touched and raised by the heavenly hand — is the fullest account of the overwhelmed seer in any of the four visions and follows the established pattern of prophetic encounter (compare Isaiah 6, Ezekiel 1-2).
The most theologically significant element of the chapter is the account of the messenger's delay. The messenger tells Daniel that he came in response to the prayer Daniel prayed at the beginning of the three weeks, but was withstood for twenty-one days by the prince of the kingdom of Persia — and would not have broken through without the help of Michael, described as one of the chief princes and identified in 12:1 as the great prince who has charge of Daniel's people. The concept of angelic princes corresponding to earthly nations is not entirely new in the Hebrew Bible — Deuteronomy 32:8 (in its Septuagint and Dead Sea Scrolls form, now generally considered original) assigns the nations to the sons of God, while the LORD takes Israel as his own portion — but the narrative development of those princes as agents in active conflict with one another, requiring Michael's military assistance, is a significant development of the tradition. It provides the metaphysical architecture for the historical account that follows in chapters 11-12: the wars of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms on earth are simultaneously a battle among their corresponding heavenly princes, and the outcome of both is determined by God's judgement. The chapter ends with the messenger touching Daniel and strengthening him for the revelation to come.
- Daniel 1Chapter 1 is the book's introduction and sets the terms for everything that follows.
- Daniel 2Chapter 2 is the first and longest of the book's dream-interpretation episodes and the one that most directly announces the book's theological vision of history.
- Daniel 3Chapter 3 is the most celebrated of the court tales and one of the most compressed and powerful narratives in the Hebrew Bible.
- Daniel 4Chapter 4 is the only chapter in the Hebrew Bible narrated, in large part, in the first person by a foreign king — a literary curiosity that has generated much discussion.
- Daniel 5Chapter 5 is the most compressed and dramatically intense of the court tales.
- Daniel 6Chapter 6 is the structural companion to chapter 3: the pattern is the same — the decree, the continued fidelity, the threatened death, the miraculous deliverance, the royal acknowledgement — but the protagonist is Daniel alone, the king is Darius the Mede, and the threat is the lions' den rather than the furnace.
- Daniel 7Chapter 7 is the central chapter of the book and one of the most consequential in the entire Bible.
- Daniel 8Chapter 8 is set in the third year of Belshazzar and is the second of Daniel's four apocalyptic visions.
- Daniel 9Chapter 9 is unique among the visionary chapters of Daniel in that it begins not with a dream or a night vision but with a prayer.
- Daniel 10Chapter 10 is the prologue to the long vision of chapters 10-12, setting up the encounter between Daniel and the heavenly messenger before the content of the vision is delivered.
- Daniel 11Chapter 11 is the most extended example of vaticinium ex eventu — prophecy after the fact — in the Hebrew Bible, and the chapter most universally used by scholars to establish the second-century dating of the book.
- Daniel 12Chapter 12 is the shortest chapter in the book and the one with the longest theological afterlife.