Daniel 6

The sixth chapter of Daniel closes the court-tale section and does so with the tale most symmetrical to chapter 3. The structural parallels are precise: the decree designed to trap the faithful, the continued observance in full awareness of the cost, the punishment inflicted by a king who is personally reluctant (Darius's distress is among the most humanising details in the chapter — he tries all day to find a way to deliver Daniel before being compelled by his own courtiers to comply), the miraculous deliverance, the punishment of the accusers, the royal acknowledgement. The detail that Daniel prays three times a day with his windows open toward Jerusalem is the chapter's most concrete spiritual observation: Daniel maintains his practice in full visibility, not in secret, as a deliberate act of public witness. The lions' den has become, with the fiery furnace, the canonical image of faithful endurance under mortal threat in the Hebrew Bible's court tales.

The historical difficulty of the chapter is substantial and well-documented. Darius the Mede has no clear historical referent — the historical conqueror of Babylon was Cyrus the Great, not a Median king named Darius, and the Persian Darius I came to the throne decades later and was not Median. The figure may be a literary conflation or a confusion introduced in the process of composition and transmission. The law of the Medes and Persians that cannot be revoked — a feature of both chapter 6 and chapter 1 of Esther — appears to be a literary convention rather than a historically documented feature of Persian law. The persecution scenario (the law against prayer, the trap laid by jealous courtiers, the threat of death for religious observance) maps directly onto the Antiochan persecution of the second century BCE, in which Jewish prayer and sabbath observance were banned under pain of death. On the second-century reading, Daniel's continued prayer toward Jerusalem is a coded encouragement to the Jewish community to maintain its observances regardless of Antiochus's edicts. The chapter's final verse — Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius and in the reign of Cyrus the Persian — provides the bridge to chapters 7-12, which are set in the reign of Belshazzar (chapters 7-8), Darius the Mede (chapter 9), and Cyrus (chapters 10-12).