Daniel 1
Four exiles refuse the king's table
Chapter 1 is the book's introduction and sets the terms for everything that follows. Nebuchadnezzar has besieged Jerusalem and carried away a first cohort of hostages — among them four young men from Judah's nobility: Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, given the Babylonian names Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The royal training programme is three years long, conducted in the language and literature of the Chaldeans, and fed by the king's own provisions. Daniel determines not to defile himself with the king's food or wine and persuades the official overseeing the four to allow a ten-day trial on vegetables and water. At the end of ten days they appear healthier than all the young men who had eaten the king's food. God gives the four knowledge and skill in all literature and wisdom; Daniel alone is given understanding of all visions and dreams. At the examination before the king they are found ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in the realm. The chapter frames the entire book: the Jewish exile is fully capable of competing in the court of the empire, and the observance of the commandments is not an obstacle to success but its condition.
Daniel 2
A statue of empires, crushed by a stone
Chapter 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. Nebuchadnezzar has a dream so disturbing that he demands his court magicians and wise men not only interpret it but first tell him what the dream was — a test designed, as the Chaldeans immediately point out, to be impossible for any human. Daniel asks for time, prays with his three companions, and receives the dream and its interpretation in a night vision. The dream: a great image with a head of gold, chest and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, feet partly iron and partly clay. A stone cut without hands strikes the feet and the entire image collapses; the stone grows into a great mountain and fills the earth. The interpretation: four successive kingdoms — Babylon (the gold), a lesser kingdom after it (silver), then a third (bronze), then a fourth strong as iron but mixed with weakness like clay. In the days of those kings, God will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed. Daniel presents the interpretation to the king, who falls on his face, commands an offering, and acknowledges that Daniel's God is God of gods. Daniel is made ruler over the whole province of Babylon and chief of the wise men; Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego receive administrative posts.
Daniel 3
Three men walk out of the fire
Chapter 3 is the most celebrated of the court tales and one of the most compressed and powerful narratives in the Hebrew Bible. Nebuchadnezzar erects a golden image sixty cubits high on the plain of Dura and decrees that at the sound of music every nation and language must fall down and worship it, on pain of immediate death in a burning fiery furnace. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse. Denounced before the king, they are given a second chance; their reply is the theological centre of the chapter. Their God is able to deliver them. But if not — be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods. The king has the furnace heated seven times hotter and orders the strongest men in his army to bind the three and throw them in; those men are killed by the heat. Nebuchadnezzar looks in and sees four men walking, unbound and unharmed, and the form of the fourth is like a son of the gods. He calls them out; the fire has had no power over their bodies; their hair is not singed; their cloaks are not harmed; there is not even the smell of fire on them. Nebuchadnezzar issues a decree that any who speak against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego shall be destroyed, and promotes the three. Daniel is notably absent from this chapter — a textual puzzle that has generated considerable comment.
Daniel 4
A king dreams of a tree, then goes mad
Chapter 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. Nebuchadnezzar describes a dream of a great tree whose top touches heaven, under which every beast finds shade and in whose branches every bird nests, and which a watcher — a holy one — commands to be cut down, its stump left bound with iron and bronze, the man reduced to the mind of an animal for seven periods of time, until he knows that the Most High rules the kingdom of men. Daniel interprets: the tree is the king himself; the madness will come until he acknowledges that heaven rules. A year later the king is walking on the roof of his palace, congratulating himself on his achievement, and the voice falls from heaven. He is driven from men, eats grass like an ox, his hair grows like eagles' feathers and his nails like birds' claws, and he lives with the animals for seven seasons. At the end his reason returns; he praises the Most High; he is restored. The chapter closes with a hymn to God from Nebuchadnezzar's own mouth. The narrative has no clear historical grounding; the closest parallel is a story about Nabonidus (not Nebuchadnezzar) found in the Dead Sea Scrolls Prayer of Nabonidus, which may represent an earlier version of the tradition.
Daniel 5
The writing on the wall at Belshazzar's feast
Chapter 5 is the most compressed and dramatically intense of the court tales. Belshazzar, presented as the son of Nebuchadnezzar and king of Babylon, makes a great feast for a thousand of his lords and, in the middle of it, commands the gold and silver vessels taken from the Jerusalem temple to be brought in. They drink from the vessels and praise the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone. At that hour the fingers of a man's hand appear and write on the plaster of the wall, opposite the lampstand. The king's face changes; his thoughts alarm him; his limbs give way; his knees knock together. No one in the court can read or interpret the writing. The queen — probably the queen mother — reminds him of Daniel, the man who interpreted Nebuchadnezzar's dreams. Daniel is brought in, refuses the king's gifts, and reads: mene mene tekel upharsin. The words are Aramaic weights or monetary units (mina, mina, shekel, half-minas), and Daniel's interpretation is that each is also a verb: God has numbered your kingdom and finished it; you have been weighed and found wanting; your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians. That very night Belshazzar is slain, and Darius the Mede receives the kingdom. The chapter is the source of the English idiom writing on the wall and mene tekel, and of the phrase weighed and found wanting.
Daniel 6
Daniel prays, the king fasts, the lions do not eat
Chapter 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. Darius has reorganised the kingdom with three presidents, of whom Daniel is the first; jealous colleagues seek grounds against him and find none except his religious observance. They persuade the king to sign a decree that for thirty days no one may pray to any god or man except the king, under pain of the lions' den. Daniel continues to pray three times a day with his windows open toward Jerusalem. He is reported, and the king — distressed, but bound by the Persian law that cannot be revoked — throws him in. The king passes the night fasting, with no diversions brought to him, and rises at dawn to call into the den. Daniel answers: God has sent his angel and shut the lions' mouths. He is taken up unharmed; his accusers (with their wives and children) are thrown in and broken before they reach the floor. Darius issues a decree that all peoples must tremble before the God of Daniel, who is the living God, whose kingdom shall not be destroyed and whose dominion shall be to the end. The chapter closes with the notation that Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius and in the reign of Cyrus the Persian.
Daniel 7
Four beasts, the Ancient of Days, the son of man
Chapter 7 is the central chapter of the book and one of the most consequential in the entire Bible. It is set in the first year of Belshazzar and introduces the book's second half — the apocalyptic visions, written in first person. Daniel sees four great beasts come up from the sea: a lion with eagle's wings (its wings plucked, it is made to stand and given a human mind), a bear with three ribs in its mouth (raised on one side, told to devour much flesh), a leopard with four wings and four heads (given dominion), and a fourth beast — terrible and dreadful, with iron teeth, ten horns, and a little horn among them with eyes like a man's and a mouth speaking great things. Then the scene shifts: the Ancient of Days takes his seat on a throne of fiery flames, the court sits in judgement, the books are opened, the fourth beast is killed and burned, the others are stripped of their dominion. One like a son of man comes with the clouds of heaven to the Ancient of Days and is given dominion, glory, and a kingdom — everlasting, not to be destroyed. An angelic interpreter explains: four kingdoms will arise; the saints of the Most High will receive and possess the kingdom for ever. The little horn makes war with the saints and prevails — until the Ancient of Days comes and judgement is given for the saints. The son of man passage became the most-used self-designation in Jesus's own speech and one of the most influential images in the history of the Bible.
Daniel 8
A ram, a goat, and a boastful little horn
Chapter 8 is set in the third year of Belshazzar and is the second of Daniel's four apocalyptic visions. The vision moves from the sea of chapter 7 to the river Ulai beside Susa; the imagery shifts from the bestial and the cosmic to a more controlled symbolic allegory. Daniel sees a ram with two horns (one higher than the other) charging west, north, and south, doing as it pleases; then a goat with a conspicuous horn between its eyes comes from the west without touching the ground, strikes the ram, breaks both its horns, and stamps on it. At the height of the goat's power, the great horn is broken, and four horns come up in its place. From one of them comes a little horn that grows toward the south, the east, and the beautiful land, magnifies itself to the host of heaven, takes away the regular burnt offering, and casts down the sanctuary. The angel Gabriel interprets the vision for Daniel explicitly: the ram is the king of Media and Persia; the goat is the king of Greece; the great horn is the first king (universally identified as Alexander the Great); the four horns are the four kingdoms that arose after his death; the little horn is a king who will arise at the end of their rule, bold and skilled in intrigue, who will destroy the mighty and the holy people and rise against the Prince of princes — and be broken, not by human hands. In the second-century context, the little horn is Antiochus IV Epiphanes.
Daniel 9
Seventy weeks decreed for the holy city
Chapter 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, reading Jeremiah's prophecy that Jerusalem's desolation would last seventy years (Jeremiah 25:11, 29:10), prays a formal confession of Israel's sins and a petition that God will turn away his anger from Jerusalem. While he is still speaking, the angel Gabriel comes to him in swift flight and delivers the oracle of the seventy weeks. Gabriel announces that seventy weeks have been determined upon Daniel's people and the holy city: to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place. The seventy weeks are divided: seven weeks, then sixty-two weeks (during which Jerusalem shall be rebuilt), then a final week in which an anointed one shall be cut off; in the middle of the final week sacrifice and offering shall cease and an abomination shall be set up until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator. The oracle has generated more chronological calculations and interpretive controversy than any other single passage in the book. The dominant scholarly reading takes the seventy weeks as seventy weeks of years (490 years), running from the end of the exile to the Maccabean crisis, with the abomination identified as Antiochus IV's desecration of the temple in 167 BCE. Christian messianic interpretation has consistently read the anointed one cut off as Jesus.
Daniel 10
The heavenly messenger arrives after three weeks
Chapter 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. In the third year of Cyrus, Daniel has been mourning for three full weeks, eating no delicacies, drinking no wine, anointing himself with nothing. Beside the great river Tigris he looks up and sees a man clothed in linen with a belt of gold from Uphaz, his body like beryl, his face like the appearance of lightning, his eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like gleaming bronze, the sound of his words like the sound of a multitude. Daniel falls on his face; the men who were with him do not see the vision but great trembling falls on them and they flee. A hand touches Daniel and raises him to his hands and knees; the messenger explains: Daniel's prayer was heard from the first day, but the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood the messenger for twenty-one days, until Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help. The heavenly messenger has come to make Daniel understand what will happen to his people in the latter days. He must return to fight against the prince of Persia, and after him the prince of Greece will come. The chapter introduces the concept of angelic princes corresponding to earthly nations — a development of the divine council theology of Deuteronomy 32 and Isaiah 24, and the basis of what would become the demonology of later apocalyptic literature.
Daniel 11
The king of the south and the king of the north
Chapter 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. The heavenly messenger traces four kings of Persia after Cyrus, then a mighty king who will rule with great dominion (Alexander the Great), whose kingdom will be broken and divided toward the four winds but not to his posterity. Then the narrative follows the wars between the king of the south (the Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt) and the king of the north (the Seleucid kingdom) through a series of campaigns, alliances, and reversals that correspond with remarkable precision to the history of the Hellenistic kingdoms from Alexander's death in 323 BCE to the Antiochan persecution in 167 BCE. The account of the king of the north in 11:21-45 corresponds to Antiochus IV Epiphanes with a precision that is one of the book's most striking features: the contemptible person who obtains the kingdom by flatteries; his two campaigns into Egypt; the ships of Kittim that turn him back (the Roman fleet that confronted Antiochus at Alexandria in 168 BCE); his fury and his profanation of the temple fortress; the abomination that makes desolate; his persecution of those who abandon the holy covenant and his support of those who violate it. The narrative breaks off before a clear historical parallel after 11:40, which most scholars take as the point where the author shifts from vaticinium ex eventu (recounting what has already happened) to actual prediction (about what the author hopes or expects will happen).
Daniel 12
Many who sleep in the dust shall awake
Chapter 12 is the shortest chapter in the book and the one with the longest theological afterlife. It is the conclusion of the vision begun in chapter 10, and its content moves from the Antiochan persecution to the final eschatological events in a few verses. At that time Michael shall arise — the great prince who has charge of Daniel's people — and there shall be a time of trouble such as there has never been. At that time Daniel's people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky; those who turn many to righteousness shall be like the stars for ever. The passage is the first explicit affirmation of bodily resurrection in the Hebrew Bible. The wise are told to seal up the book until the time of the end. Daniel asks about the end, and receives two cryptic time periods — twelve hundred and ninety days, and twelve hundred and thirty-five days — that have generated the same kind of chronological speculation as the seventy weeks of chapter 9. The chapter closes with Daniel personally: You shall rest, and you shall stand in your lot at the end of the days. The last sentence of the book, addressed to the seer personally, is also a resurrection promise — Daniel himself will be raised at the end.