Justified True Belief

(●) A teenage hostage who spent seventy years inside the governments of two empires, and never once pretended their gods were real. + Most people who have held a job for any length of time know the feeling of working for an organization they cannot entirely defend. You do the work well, you are loyal to the people around you, and then one Tuesday somebody asks for a small thing you cannot give, and you have to decide in about four seconds whether this is the hill. Usually it is not. Occasionally it is, and the strange part is how ordinary the moment looks from outside: a form not signed, a meeting not attended, a sentence not said. Daniel spent his whole adult life in that position, at the top of the civil service of the empire that had burned his country. He was carried off from Jerusalem to Babylon around 605 BC as a boy of the Judean nobility, trained at royal expense for the imperial administration, and he was still holding office in his eighties when the Persians took the city and kept him on. Four kings appear in his book, and he served under all four. Twice the record shows him refusing something, and both refusals were small enough to fit in a sentence: he would not eat certain food, and he would not stop praying at a certain hour. Each nearly killed him. For Christian readers there is a plainer reason to know him than his career. Two of the load-bearing ideas of the New Testament are stated in his book before they are stated anywhere else in the Old Testament with the same clarity: that the dead will be raised, some to everlasting life and some to shame, and that a figure described only as "one like a son of man" will come with the clouds of heaven and receive a kingdom that never ends. Jesus of Nazareth used that second phrase of himself more often than any other title, and quoted the verse it comes from at his own trial. Neither his birth year nor his death year is recorded. The dates on his name are simply the first and the last events his book puts a year to: the deportation in the third year of Jehoiakim, and a vision in the third year of Cyrus, about seventy years apart. One more thing a reader tends to remember: the book is written in two languages. It opens in Hebrew, and then, in the middle of chapter 2, at the moment the Babylonian courtiers open their mouths, it switches into Aramaic, stays there through the seventh chapter, and switches back at chapter 8. Aramaic was the working language of the whole Near East in those centuries, the language of treaties, receipts and business between people whose mother tongues were different, roughly what English is in an international airport today. Hebrew was home. Aramaic was the office. Only Ezra changes languages partway through in anything like the same way, and nowhere near that length.

(●) 605 BC: He was taken from Jerusalem to Babylon as a boy of the royal household, and given a new name and a new education. + In the spring of 605 BC a Babylonian crown prince named Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Egyptian army at Carchemish on the upper Euphrates, and the whole corridor from the Euphrates to the Egyptian border changed hands in a season. Jerusalem submitted. Along with tribute, the new master took hostages: "youths without blemish, of good appearance and skillful in all wisdom, endowed with knowledge, understanding learning, and competent to stand in the king’s palace" (Daniel 1:4). Daniel was one of them, and so were three others named Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. What happened next was not cruelty; it was policy, and it was more dangerous than cruelty. They were enrolled in a three-year course in "the literature and language of the Chaldeans," fed from the king’s own table, and renamed. Chaldean was the name of the ruling people of Babylon, and in this book it doubles as the name of a profession: the palace scholars who kept the omen lists and watched the sky on the king’s behalf. Learning their literature meant learning cuneiform, the wedge-shaped script Mesopotamian scribes pressed into wet clay with a cut reed, which is a harder thing to learn than an alphabet and took years. Daniel, whose name means "God is my judge," became Belteshazzar. Hananiah became Shadrach, Mishael became Meshach, Azariah became Abednego, a name built on Nebo, the Babylonian god of writing and wisdom (Daniel 1:7). An empire that kills its captives makes martyrs. An empire that educates them, promotes them and renames them usually gets what it wants within a generation. It very nearly worked. The book calls Daniel by his Babylonian name for the rest of his life, other people use it, and he answers to it. What did not go through was the food. "Daniel resolved that he would not defile himself with the king’s food, or with the wine that he drank" (Daniel 1:8), and instead of a confrontation he proposed an experiment to the anxious steward who would lose his head if the boys came out thin: ten days of vegetables and water, then compare (Daniel 1:12). The steward agreed. The text does not spell out what made the royal menu a problem, and guesses have ranged from meat offered to idols to the simple fact that eating at a king’s table in the ancient world was how you accepted his patronage. What the story is clear about is the shape of the refusal: quiet, specific, negotiated, and absolutely firm. The year itself is worth a moment, because two books of the Bible look at first as though they disagree about it. Daniel 1:1 dates the siege to the third year of Jehoiakim, and Jeremiah 25:1 puts Jehoiakim’s fourth year alongside Nebuchadnezzar’s first. Both can stand only if the two writers are counting from different starting lines, and that is exactly what they are doing. Think of a manager who takes over a department in October. One office dates his first year from that October; the other treats the last three months as a formality and starts the count in January. Babylonian scribes worked the second way, and they were rigorous about it: they did not count a king’s partial first year at all, calling it his accession year and beginning "year one" at the next new year. Judean scribes did count it. So a writer living in Babylon and using Babylonian reckoning lands one number lower than a writer at home in Judah would, which is exactly what Daniel 1:1 does.

(●) c. 603 BC: He told the king a dream the king had refused to describe, and was put in charge of a province. + In the second year of his reign Nebuchadnezzar had a dream that would not let him sleep, and he handled it the way a suspicious man handles consultants. Babylon kept a standing body of dream interpreters at court, a guild of scholars whose trade was reading dreams, omens and the movements of the stars for the crown, and the king summoned them and demanded that they tell him the dream before they interpreted it. They protested that no king had ever asked such a thing and that only the gods could do it, "whose dwelling is not with flesh" (Daniel 2:11), which was a perfectly reasonable objection and also, in the circumstances, a confession. The king ordered the entire guild executed. Daniel, still a junior member, was on the list. He spoke to the captain of the guard, went in and asked the king for time, then went home and told his three friends to pray, and the dream came to him in the night. Then he did something worth pausing over. Standing in front of a king who had just tried to have him killed, with his life restored to him by the answer in his hands, he opened by saying that no one in his profession could have done this: "No wise men, enchanters, magicians, or astrologers can show to the king the mystery that the king has asked, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries" (Daniel 2:27-28). He took no credit at the one moment when credit was free. The dream was of an enormous statue in four metals, gold at the head and iron mixed with clay at the feet, struck at the feet by a stone "cut out by no human hand" that ground the whole thing to chaff and then grew into a mountain that filled the earth (Daniel 2:34-35). Four kingdoms, Daniel said, and then a kingdom set up by the God of heaven that will never be destroyed. Nebuchadnezzar, being told to his face that his empire was the first of four and none of them permanent, made the young man ruler of the province of Babylon and chief prefect over the very guild he had just been sentenced to die with (Daniel 2:48). He was perhaps twenty.

(●) Some time before 562 BC: He warned the most powerful man alive that he was going to lose his mind, and waited a year to be proved right. + The fourth chapter carries no date, only a king who was still on the throne when it happened, so it belongs somewhere in the forty-three years Nebuchadnezzar reigned. It is also the strangest document in the book, because it is framed as a royal circular in the king’s own voice, an official proclamation of his own humiliation, opening and closing in the first person and dropping into the third for the years he was not himself. The dream this time was a tree so tall the whole earth could see it, sheltering birds and beasts, and a voice ordering it cut down and its stump bound with iron and bronze, to be wet with the dew of heaven until seven periods of time passed over it. Daniel, the text says, was dismayed for a while and his own thoughts alarmed him, and what he managed at first was a wish that the dream belonged to the king’s enemies instead (Daniel 4:19). Then he said it: the tree is you, and you will live in the fields like an animal "till you know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will" (Daniel 4:25). And then he added counsel nobody had asked for, which is the most human line in the chapter: "break off your sins by practicing righteousness, and your iniquities by showing mercy to the oppressed, that there may perhaps be a lengthening of your prosperity" (Daniel 4:27). Perhaps. He does not promise. He is a court official telling an emperor to be kinder to the poor on the chance that it buys him time. Twelve months later the king was walking on the roof of the palace saying, "Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?" (Daniel 4:30). It is not an invented sentiment. Nebuchadnezzar’s own building inscriptions, baked into the bricks of the city and dug up by archaeologists, say much the same thing at greater length. The sentence fell as it had been described, and the chapter ends with the king restored and blessing the Most High. One nearby text is worth knowing about. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls is a short Aramaic fragment called the Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242), in which a Babylonian king is afflicted for seven years at the oasis of Teiman and is finally set right after a Jewish exile tells him to give glory to God. It is a different king, a different affliction and a different story, and no one should flatten the two together. What it does show is that stories of this shape were circulating in the same world, about the same dynasty, and that a Jewish exile at a Babylonian court was a recognizable figure rather than a literary invention.

(●) c. 553 BC: After fifty years of explaining other men’s dreams, he began to have his own, and they frightened him. + Halfway through the book the point of view turns around. Chapters 1 to 6 are stories told about Daniel in the third person, and in every one of them he is the calm man in the room, the one who can explain what is happening to everybody else. From chapter 7 on he speaks in the first person, and he is the one who does not understand, cannot sleep, and needs someone to explain. The first of the visions came in the first year of Belshazzar, which is usually placed around 553 BC. Nebuchadnezzar was dead by then, Babylon had passed to his successors, and Belshazzar was the man ruling in the city. The book does not run in a straight line: it groups the court stories first and the visions second, so this vision falls some fourteen years before the banquet that the fifth chapter describes. Four winds churned "the great sea" and four beasts came up out of it, each stranger than the last, the fourth with iron teeth and ten horns, and among the ten a little horn with a mouth speaking great things (Daniel 7:2-3). Then the scene changed to a courtroom: thrones set, the Ancient of Days seated with clothing white as snow, and books opened. A second vision two years later, in Belshazzar’s third year, showed a ram and a goat and gave him the names of two of the kingdoms outright, Media and Persia, and Greece. The old man’s reaction is recorded both times, and it is not serenity. "As for me, Daniel, my thoughts greatly alarmed me, and my color changed, but I kept the matter in my heart" (Daniel 7:28). After the second: "And I, Daniel, was overcome and lay sick for some days. Then I rose and went about the king’s business, but I was appalled by the vision and did not understand it" (Daniel 8:27). He went back to work. That last detail is easy to skim past and worth holding onto: a man who has just been shown the rise and fall of empires gets up, is ill for a while, and returns to the paperwork of a government that will be gone within twenty years.

(●) 539 BC: He read the writing a hand left on a palace wall, and the kingdom fell that night. + Belshazzar gave a feast for a thousand of his lords and, in the middle of it, sent for the gold and silver vessels his predecessor had carried out of the temple in Jerusalem, so that the party could drink from them. Then "the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace, opposite the lampstand" (Daniel 5:5). The king’s reaction is described in four clauses, one of them purely physical: his color changed, his thoughts alarmed him, his limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together (Daniel 5:6). Daniel had been out of favor and out of office for years by then; it took the queen mother, who remembered him from the old reign, to say that there was a man who could read it. He came in, an octogenarian summoned to a drunken banquet, and began by refusing the payment: "Let your gifts be for yourself, and give your rewards to another" (Daniel 5:17). Then he read the writing. There were only four words on the plaster, numbered, numbered, weighed, divided, and he turned each of them into a sentence: God has counted the days of your kingdom and finished it; you have been weighed and found wanting; your kingdom is given to the Medes and Persians (Daniel 5:26-28). "That very night," the chapter says, Belshazzar was killed. Two details make this chapter unusually testable, and both were once used against it. The first is Belshazzar himself, who appears in no Greek or Roman account of Babylon and was for centuries known from this book alone. In 1854 a British consul named John George Taylor dug four inscribed clay cylinders out of the corners of a ziggurat at Ur, the stepped temple tower that stood at the center of a Mesopotamian city, and on them Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, asks the moon god for a long life for himself and then for reverence in the heart of "Belshazzar, the eldest son, my offspring." Belshazzar was his son and co-regent, ruling in Babylon while his father was away in Arabia. That also explains a detail nobody could account for before: Belshazzar offers Daniel the third place in the kingdom (Daniel 5:16), not the second, because the second place was already his own. The second detail is the date. A Babylonian tablet in the British Museum known as the Nabonidus Chronicle records that on the sixteenth day of the month Tishri the army of Cyrus entered Babylon without a battle, which converts to 12 October 539 BC.

(●) c. 538 BC: At about eighty he went on praying at his open window, and they put him in with the lions for it. + The new administration kept him. Daniel became one of three men set over the satraps, the provincial governors of the Persian system, and the book says the king planned to set him over the whole kingdom. That is the setting for the most famous story of his life, and the motive in it is not religion but office politics. His colleagues went looking for a charge and found nothing, "because he was faithful, and no error or fault was found in him" (Daniel 6:4), so they said to each other, in what may be the most backhanded compliment in Scripture, that the only place they would find a charge against this man was in the law of his God (Daniel 6:5). So they wrote a flattering decree: for thirty days, petitions to any god or man except the king are forbidden. The king signed it, apparently without thinking. And then Daniel did the thing that makes this story what it is. He did not stage a protest and he did not go underground. "When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem. He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously" (Daniel 6:10). As he had done previously. He changed nothing, which is precisely why they had him. The king, who had been maneuvered into it, spent the day trying to find a way out and could not, because the decree could not be revoked. He spent the night fasting, "no diversions were brought to him, and sleep fled from him," and went to the den at first light (Daniel 6:18-19). Daniel was alive. The chapter then reports, without comment or approval, that the accusers were thrown in with their wives and children, which is the sort of thing an ancient king did and the sort of thing the Bible records without recommending. Who "Darius the Mede" was is an open question. He is described as receiving the kingdom at about sixty-two years old (Daniel 5:31), and no ruler of that name is known in the Persian records for that year. The main proposals are that he is Gubaru, the general who took the city and governed it for Cyrus, or that "Darius the Mede" is a throne name for Cyrus himself, since Daniel 6:28 can be read either as "the reign of Darius and the reign of Cyrus" or as "the reign of Darius, that is, the reign of Cyrus." Nobody has settled it, and it is honest to say so.

(●) c. 538 – 536 BC: He found the end of the exile in an old scroll, prayed for his nation, and was told to go his way and rest. + In the same first year of Darius, Daniel was reading. "I, Daniel, perceived in the books the number of years that, according to the word of the Lord to Jeremiah the prophet, must pass before the end of the desolations of Jerusalem, namely, seventy years" (Daniel 9:2). Jeremiah had written to the deportees decades earlier, telling them to build houses and plant gardens because the term was seventy years and not two. Daniel had gone out with the first wave of all, before that letter was ever sent. He could count, and the arithmetic said soon. What he did with the discovery is the surprising part. A man who has just learned that the sentence is nearly served might be expected to celebrate, or at least to wait. Instead he fasted and prayed one of the longest prayers in the Old Testament, and it is a confession: "we have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and rules" (Daniel 9:5). We. The one man in the book of whom no fault is recorded puts himself inside the guilt of a nation that had been dead a generation, and asks for nothing on the basis of anyone’s merit. The answer came while he was still speaking, and it went far past the seventy years to a further span of "seventy weeks" in which transgression would be finished, iniquity atoned for, and an anointed one cut off (Daniel 9:24-26). The last vision came in the third year of Cyrus, around 536 BC, after three weeks in which he ate no delicacies and no meat or wine passed his lips (Daniel 10:2-3). It is the longest and most detailed in the book, running to three chapters, with a full chapter of wars between kings of the north and south, and it ends with the resurrection promise of chapter 12. He did not understand it. He said so: "I heard, but I did not understand. Then I said, O my lord, what shall be the outcome of these things?" (Daniel 12:8). He was told the words were sealed until the time of the end, and given a personal word instead, which is the last sentence of the book. Nothing is recorded of his death, and no tomb of his is known, though several cities have claimed one. Cyrus had by then issued the decree letting the exiles go home. Daniel was in his eighties, and the road to Jerusalem was nine hundred miles. The book does not say whether he went, and the odds are against it. He had prayed for a return he probably never saw, which is a thing worth noticing about him.

What He Taught

(T1) Heaven rules, and empires are handed out and taken back. + Consider what the fall of Jerusalem looked like to anyone standing in the ruins in 586 BC. In the ancient world a war between nations was understood as a war between their gods, and the scoreboard was the battlefield. Babylon’s armies had come, the temple of the God of Israel had burned, and the vessels from it were now in a Babylonian treasury. Marduk had won. That was not a cynical reading; it was the obvious one, and it is what the Babylonians themselves said in their inscriptions. Daniel’s answer runs through the whole book and it is not a denial of the facts. It is a reversal of who did it. The God of Israel had not lost; he had handed the win over. One sentence keeps returning, three times inside Nebuchadnezzar’s own circular letter and once more when Daniel repeats it to Belshazzar: "the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will" (Daniel 4:17, 4:25, 4:32; compare 5:21). The empires in the visions are not accidents and not rivals. They are given, they are numbered, and they are taken back on a schedule. Even the little horn that makes war on the saints is allowed a fixed term and not a day more. This is where Daniel is at his least comfortable and most useful. It is easy to say that God rules history when your side is winning. Daniel said it as a deportee, to the man who had deported him, about a kingdom that had every appearance of permanence. The New Testament says the same thing in the same posture: Paul telling a church in the capital of an occupying empire that there is no authority except from God (Romans 13:1), and Jesus telling the Roman governor holding his death warrant that he would have no authority at all unless it had been given him from above (John 19:11).

(Q) "Blessed be the name of God forever and ever, to whom belong wisdom and might. He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings; he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding; he reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what is in the darkness, and the light dwells with him." + Source: Daniel 2:20-22 (English Standard Version). Prayed in the night, in Aramaic, in the hours between the death sentence on the wise men of Babylon and Daniel’s appearance before the king. He is thanking God for an answer that has just saved his life, and the first thing he says about him is that he removes kings (T1).

(T2) A man can serve a government wholeheartedly and still refuse it at one point. + There are two easy positions available to a believer inside a hostile institution, and Daniel took neither. The first is to keep your head down and let the small compromises pile up until there is nothing left to compromise. The second is to treat the whole institution as the enemy and refuse it on principle, which feels braver and costs less than it looks, because it removes the daily work of discernment. Daniel did the harder thing: he gave the empire genuinely excellent service and drew one line, in a place of his own choosing, and would not move. Look at how narrow the lines were. He would not eat the king’s food, and he negotiated even that with a ten-day trial rather than a scene. He would not stop praying at his window three times a day. That is the whole list of the times the book shows him refusing an order, across seventy years. He never denounced the empire as such, never plotted against a king, never withheld an interpretation because the hearer did not deserve it, and served Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Darius and Cyrus in turn with the same competence. His enemies had to admit they could find no fault in his work; the only charge available was his God. Jeremiah had told the exiles exactly this: build houses, plant gardens, and "seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile" (Jeremiah 29:7). Daniel is that instruction lived out for a lifetime. What keeps it from being mere accommodation is that the two small refusals were absolute, and he knew what they cost. His three friends put the principle in words when the furnace was already hot: our God is able to deliver us, and he will, "But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods" (Daniel 3:17-18). The obedience does not depend on the rescue.

(Q) "When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem. He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously." + Source: Daniel 6:10 (English Standard Version). The decree forbidding petitions to any god or man but the king had just been signed and could not be revoked. The windows opened toward a city that had been a ruin for nearly fifty years, in the direction Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the temple had told exiles to face (1 Kings 8:46-49). The last four words carry the whole point: nothing about his routine changed, which is why the charge stuck (T2).

(T3) The kingdoms of the world come up out of the sea as beasts, and the kingdom that lasts is given to one like a son of man. + The seventh chapter is the hinge of the book and the single passage of the Old Testament that the New Testament reaches for most often when it talks about the return of Christ. It rewards slow reading. The four empires come up out of "the great sea," and in the imagery of the ancient Near East the sea is not scenery. It is the standing picture of chaos, the formless thing that has to be pushed back before there can be a world at all. What comes out of it is a lion with eagles’ wings, a bear with ribs in its teeth, a leopard with four heads, and a fourth beast so unlike the others that Daniel has no animal to name it with. Then the vision cuts to a throne room: "thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days took his seat," clothing white as snow, hair like pure wool, a stream of fire, and the books opened (Daniel 7:9-10). Judgment is given, and the beast is destroyed. And then a figure arrives, and two things about him are worth teaching carefully. First, what he is called. The Aramaic is bar enash, and by itself it means nothing more exalted than "a human being," a son of man in the ordinary sense that any of us is. The empires came up out of the churning water as animals; this one comes as a man, and that contrast is doing real work. Second, how he arrives and what he receives. He comes "with the clouds of heaven," and riding the clouds is something the Old Testament says about God and about nobody else (Psalm 104:3; Isaiah 19:1). He is given dominion and glory and a kingdom, and all peoples "should serve him." The Aramaic verb translated "serve" there is pelach, the same one the book uses for the religious service the three young men give their own God and refuse a golden image (Daniel 3:12, 14, 17-18), and in Biblical Aramaic it is never anything but that kind of service. A human figure comes on the clouds and receives the worship of the nations, and the kingdom is everlasting. Jewish readers before Christ already found this figure hard to place, and their attempts survive. Christians have a straightforward answer, and it is not one the church thought up afterward and read back into the text. Jesus of Nazareth used this phrase of himself some eighty times, and when a high priest put him under oath and asked him who he was, the verse he answered with was this one.

(Q) "I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed." + Source: Daniel 7:13-14 (English Standard Version). From the first vision, in the first year of Belshazzar, in the Aramaic half of the book. Jesus quoted this verse joined to Psalm 110:1 when the high priest asked him directly whether he was the Christ, and the answer was treated as blasphemy on the spot (Mark 14:62) (T3).

(T4) The dead will wake out of the dust, some to everlasting life and some to shame. + Ask an ordinary churchgoer where the Bible teaches the resurrection of the dead and you will get New Testament answers. The Old Testament says less about it than most readers expect. Its usual word for the place of the dead is Sheol, the shadowy common grave of everybody, and a great deal of Israel’s hope is directed at what God will do for the nation in this world rather than at what he will do for each person afterward. "The dead know nothing," says Ecclesiastes 9:5, describing the view from under the sun. Job 19:26 reaches for something more and has been argued over ever since, Isaiah 26:19 reaches further still with dead who live and bodies that rise, and Ezekiel 37 uses a valley of dry bones coming together as a picture of a nation coming home from exile rather than as a promise about individuals. Daniel 12:2 is different in three ways at once, and the three together are why it matters. It is individual, not national: many who sleep in the dust, awakening one by one. It is bodily: they wake out of the earth, not out of it into a bodiless somewhere. And it runs in two directions, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt, which is stated nowhere else in the Old Testament so plainly. There is no other passage in the Hebrew Bible that puts all three together. You can watch the effect of it. By the time of Christ, resurrection is not a specialist doctrine but ordinary belief among most Jews, argued over publicly with the Sadducees who denied it, and taken for granted by people who had never studied. When Jesus arrives four days late at a funeral in Bethany, the dead man’s sister says without prompting, "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day" (John 11:24). She is not quoting a rabbi. She is saying what everybody in the village knew, and the road from Daniel’s sealed scroll to Martha’s ordinary sentence runs through five centuries.

(Q) "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. And those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above; and those who turn many to righteousness, like the stars forever and ever." + Source: Daniel 12:2-3 (English Standard Version). From the close of the last vision, spoken to Daniel by the man clothed in linen after a long account of wars that had not yet happened. The promise arrives immediately after "a time of trouble, such as never has been," which is where the book puts it: not instead of the trouble, but on the other side of it (T4).

(T5) Prayer for a nation begins with confessing its sin as your own. + There is a way of praying about a country’s wrongs that is really a way of announcing that you are not part of them. It is very easy to do and almost impossible to notice in yourself, and the ninth chapter of Daniel is the standing rebuke to it. He had more warrant than anyone to stand apart. He was a child when the sins that destroyed Jerusalem were being committed, he was carried off before the worst of them, and the book states flatly that his own enemies could find no fault in him (Daniel 6:4). He prays "we." We have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled. We have not listened to your servants the prophets. To us belongs open shame. The whole prayer is built in the first person plural, and he never once steps outside the guilty party to comment on it. The second thing to notice is what he asks on. Not a record, not a track record, not even the promise he has just read in Jeremiah, though he could have. "For we do not present our pleas before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy" (Daniel 9:18). The same shape returns in the two other great confessions of the return, Ezra’s and Nehemiah’s, both of which pray this way about sins they did not personally commit (Ezra 9:6-7; Nehemiah 1:6-7). Christians have the same grammar built into the prayer they were taught: give us, forgive us, lead us, deliver us, never once in the singular.

(Q) "O my God, incline your ear and hear. Open your eyes and see our desolations, and the city that is called by your name. For we do not present our pleas before you because of our righteousness, but because of your great mercy. O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive. O Lord, pay attention and act. Delay not, for your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people are called by your name." + Source: Daniel 9:18-19 (English Standard Version). The end of the prayer, in the first year of Darius, prayed in fasting and ashes after reading Jeremiah’s seventy years. The answer arrives before he has finished speaking, and the messenger tells him it went out "at the beginning of your pleas for mercy" (Daniel 9:23) (T5).

(Q) "But go your way till the end. And you shall rest and shall stand in your allotted place at the end of the days." + Source: Daniel 12:13 (English Standard Version). The last sentence of the book, spoken to Daniel himself after he has asked what the outcome will be and been told the words are sealed. He is an old man who will not see any of it, and the answer he gets is not an explanation but a place reserved. The church that later painted him on the walls of its burial chambers was reading that promise at face value.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Jesus took the name he used for himself most often out of Daniel’s seventh chapter. + "The Son of Man" appears more than eighty times in the four Gospels, and the distribution is peculiar. It is almost always on Jesus’ own lips, and almost nobody else in the New Testament uses it of him. Outside the Gospels it survives in one dying man’s vision: Stephen, being stoned, says he sees "the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:56). The church quickly settled on other titles, which is itself evidence that this one goes back to Jesus rather than to the churches that came after him. Where the decisive use comes is the trial. The high priest, having got nowhere with the witnesses, asks him directly whether he is the Christ, and the answer is Daniel 7:13 welded to Psalm 110:1: "you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven" (Mark 14:62). The high priest tore his robes. He had heard what was in the verse, which was a man riding the clouds into the presence of God and receiving a kingdom. Jesus also cites the book by name for the sign of the coming crisis, "the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel" (Matthew 24:15). The rest of the New Testament keeps drawing on the same well. Revelation opens with one like a son of man whose hair is white like wool, which is Daniel 7:9 and 7:13 combined into a single figure; its beast from the sea is a composite of Daniel’s four; and Paul’s king who exalts himself above every god in 2 Thessalonians 2 is speaking the language of Daniel 11:36. When the New Testament reaches for words about the end, Isaiah and Ezekiel and Daniel are the three it goes back to, and for the figure who comes on the clouds it goes to Daniel alone.

(†) The oldest surviving Christian commentary on any book of the Bible was written on his. + Around AD 204, while Christians in Rome and North Africa were being arrested under Septimius Severus, one of the elders of the Roman church, a presbyter named Hippolytus, wrote a commentary on Daniel. It is the oldest Christian commentary on a book of Scripture that has come down to us complete, and the reason he chose Daniel is written all over it. He is not producing a scholarly monograph. He is telling frightened people that the three young men who walked into a furnace and the old man who was thrown to the lions are their own portraits, and that a Christian standing in front of a magistrate is standing where they stood. He also used the book’s numbers to argue against the date-setters of his own day, who kept announcing that the end was upon them. Two centuries later Jerome wrote his own commentary on Daniel, in AD 407, and he wrote it for a specific reason. The philosopher Porphyry, a Platonist of the school later called Neoplatonism, had devoted the twelfth book of his Against the Christians to arguing that Daniel was not written in the sixth century BC at all, but by someone in the second century BC who was describing the persecutions of Antiochus IV as though they were still to come. Jerome answered him line by line, and one result is that most of what survives of Porphyry’s argument survives only because Jerome quoted it in order to reply. That dispute about the book’s date has been running ever since, and it is a real one; it is also older than most people assume, and the church has had an answer to it in print since the fifth century. The passage that occupied both of them, and everyone else, is the seventy weeks of Daniel 9:24-27: seventy sevens decreed to finish transgression, atone for iniquity and bring in everlasting righteousness, with an anointed one cut off before the city and the sanctuary are destroyed. Julius Africanus was already calculating the years in the early third century. Christian readings of the arithmetic have differed sharply and still do. What they have in common, from Africanus to the present, is the reading of the central sentence: an anointed one is cut off, and has nothing, and it happens before the temple falls.

(†) On the walls of the catacombs he is a man standing between two lions with his arms raised. + Go down into the Christian burial galleries under Rome and the same few pictures keep appearing on the plaster: Noah in his box, Jonah coming out of the fish, the three young men in the furnace, and Daniel in the lions’ den. The Daniel figure is nearly always drawn the same way, standing between two lions with his arms lifted and his palms out. That posture, called orans, was simply how people prayed in the ancient world, standing with the hands raised, and it is how the earliest Christian art shows a person at prayer. Consider who chose those pictures and where they put them. These are not illustrations for a children’s Bible; they are what families painted on the walls of the rooms where they laid their dead, often in the decades when being a Christian could still cost a person their life. Every one of the scenes is a rescue from a situation with no way out, and Daniel’s is the one where the man is not saved from the danger but kept alive inside it. An old Latin prayer for the dying, the commendatio animae, asks God to deliver this soul as he delivered Daniel from the lions and the three young men from the fire, which is the same list, in words, that the painters had put on the walls. The pairing was older than the church. In the second century BC, at the start of the Maccabean revolt, the dying Mattathias reminded his sons that Hananiah, Azariah and Mishael were saved from the flame and that Daniel was delivered from the mouths of the lions (1 Maccabees 2:59-60). The letter to the Hebrews puts the same two into its roll of the faithful in a single breath, of those who "stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire" (Hebrews 11:33-34). Long before there was Christian art, these stories were already what people said to each other when courage was needed.

(†) The one thing to weigh against him is the office he took in Nebuchadnezzar’s court, and his own book argues it both ways. + The ledger on Daniel is unusually clean. The book records no sin of his, and it says so in the strongest terms available: hostile colleagues combing his administration for a charge "could find no ground for complaint or any fault, because he was faithful, and no error or fault was found in him" (Daniel 6:4). It would be dishonest to manufacture a failing to fill the column. There is one real question, though, and a careful reader gets to it by the end of chapter 2. Nebuchadnezzar makes Daniel "chief prefect over all the wise men of Babylon" (Daniel 2:48), and sixty years later the queen mother still remembers him as the man Nebuchadnezzar had put in charge of the magicians, enchanters, Chaldeans and astrologers (Daniel 5:11). That guild practiced divination, astrology and the reading of omens, which is precisely the list the law of Moses forbids: anyone "who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer" is an abomination to the Lord (Deuteronomy 18:10-12). Daniel accepted the appointment, and he held it, and he was still connected to that department decades later. The book’s own defense is worth stating at full strength, because it is not thin. He is never once shown practicing any of those arts. When the chance comes to be credited with them he refuses it in front of the king, saying that no member of the guild can do what he is about to do and that the disclosure comes from a God in heaven (Daniel 2:27-28). He turns the reward down the one time a king dangles it in front of him before he speaks (Daniel 5:17). And Jeremiah had told the exiles of his own generation to seek the welfare of the city they had been carried to, which is what a competent civil servant does. Against all that stands the plain fact of the title and the payroll. So the honest verdict is a divided one, and it is divided in the sources rather than in the reader. Daniel took a post he could have refused, in a department whose trade his own law called an abomination, and kept it for the length of a working life. He also never practiced the trade, said so in public at the one moment when saying so cost him something, and used the position to keep speaking to kings who did not want to hear it. The book itself never raises the question, which may be its own answer, and it certainly never lets him settle it by results. What it shows instead is a man who took the appointment and then spent sixty years making sure it did not own him.