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Belshazzar's Feast (Rembrandt)

Old Testament · Book 27 of 66

Daniel

A Hebrew exile at Babylonian and Persian courts sees empires rise and fall, a Son of Man coming with clouds, and seventy weeks locating Messiah in time. The canon's densest apocalyptic text, and its most interpretively contested.

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Belshazzar's Feast (Rembrandt): public domain

Belshazzar's Feast (Rembrandt)

Belshazzar's Feast (Rembrandt): public domain

  • 12
    Chapters
  • 6+6
    Narrative + vision
  • 70 weeks
    Prophetic frame

“I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.”

Daniel 7:13–14

If you only read a few chapters

Court and Vision · Daniel · The Study Guide

The Kingdom That Cannot Be Shaken

From inside the palace of the empire that burned Jerusalem, Daniel watches every kingdom that will ever tower over Israel rise, strut, and shatter against a stone cut out without hands. The thesis is stated four times so it cannot be missed: the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and it is proved twice over: in a furnace and a lions' den where God shows up, and in a timetable that counts the years down to Messiah the Prince.

Summary

The book's own structure carries the argument: two halves by genre and three bands by language, folding into a chiasm across chapters 2-7. The page also lays out the contested dating debate, sixth-century versus Maccabean, at full strength, with the strongest textual and archaeological evidence on each side.

  • Genre splits the book at chapter 6/7 (court narrative, then vision); language splits it differently (Hebrew, Aramaic 2:4b-7:28, Hebrew), and chapters 2 and 7 sit in the overlap, saying the same thing twice.
  • Chapters 2-7 form a chiasm: the same four kingdoms open and close it, with two judged kings, one restored and one not, at the center.
  • Christ appears six times: the stone cut without hands, the fourth man in the furnace, the Son of Man, the Ancient of Days, Messiah the Prince, and the two-outcome resurrection.
  • The dating debate, sixth-century Daniel versus a Maccabean-era composition, is given both cases at full strength, including Qumran's tight canonization window and the Belshazzar vindication.
  • The prophetic spans (the seventy sevens, the 2,300 evenings-mornings, the 1,290 and 1,335 days) are laid out as a ledger, without probability arithmetic.
Author
Daniel: Belteshazzar of Babylon
Span of events
605–536 BC
Genre
Court narrative + apocalyptic vision
Languages
Hebrew · Aramaic 2:4b–7:28
Shape
12 chapters · 2 halves · 1 chiasm

The Spine

two halves, two languages: and the seams do not line up

Daniel is cut two ways at once. By genre it falls in half, six chapters of court narrative, six of apocalyptic vision. By language it falls differently, a Hebrew opening, an Aramaic core running from 2:4b to the end of chapter 7, then Hebrew again. Lay the two bands over one twelve-chapter track and the design shows itself: the Aramaic section, in the empire's own tongue, carries the fate of the Gentile world-kingdoms; the Hebrew sections carry Israel's particular future, and chapters 2 and 7 sit in the overlap, saying the same thing twice in two idioms.

Court narratives, chs. 1–6
Apocalyptic visions, chs. 7–12
1The test of the table605 BC2The image & the stone603 BC3The fiery furnace—4The king humbled—5The writing on the wall539 BC6The lions' den539 BC7Four beasts · the Son of Man553 BC8The ram & the goat551 BC9The seventy weeks539 BC10The angelic conflict536 BC11Kings of north & south536 BC12The end & the resurrection536 BC
Hebrew
Aramaic, 2:4b–7:28 (the Gentile world-empires, in the empire's tongue)
Hebrew, chs. 8–12 (Israel's own future)
The hinge

Chapter 7 is Aramaic and apocalyptic: it belongs to both structures at once. That is why the beast-vision of chapter 7 is the interpretive key to the great image of chapter 2, and why the two panels are read together rather than apart.

Daniel in a Nutshell

Four captives keep faith in an empire that owns them, and the visions given to one of them show every kingdom of men rising, falling, and giving way to a kingdom that never ends.

A boy is marched off to Babylon, renamed for a foreign god, and spends the rest of his long life telling the empire's kings who actually runs the world.

  1. 01

    Nebuchadnezzar takes Jerusalem, carries off the temple vessels, and picks promising young men to be trained in the learning of the Chaldeans. Four of them are given Babylonian names. They let the names stand, but Daniel will not eat the king's food, and asks for ten days of vegetables and water instead. At the end of the ten days the four look healthier than everyone else, and God gives them learning, with visions and dreams for Daniel. The king tests them and finds them ten times better than all his magicians.

  2. 02

    The king then dreams and demands that his wise men tell him the dream itself, on pain of death. Daniel asks for the night, receives the secret, and gives God the credit: he changes the times and the seasons, he removes kings and sets up kings. The dream was a huge statue with a head of gold, chest of silver, belly of brass, legs of iron and feet of iron mixed with clay. A stone cut out without hands hits the feet, grinds the whole statue to dust, and becomes a mountain that fills the earth.

  3. 03

    Nebuchadnezzar, told he is the head of gold, builds an image of gold sixty cubits high and orders everyone to bow at the sound of the music. Three of the young men refuse. Our God is able to deliver us, they say, and if he does not, we still will not serve your gods. The furnace is heated seven times hotter and kills the men who carry them, but the king stands up astonished and counts four men walking loose in the fire, the fourth like a son of the gods. Not a hair is singed.

  4. 04

    Later the king dreams of a great tree cut down to a stump, and Daniel tells him plainly what it means. Twelve months on, boasting about his Babylon from the palace roof, Nebuchadnezzar loses his reason and lives with the animals until he looks up to heaven and it comes back. His son Belshazzar goes further and drinks wine from the temple vessels. A hand writes on the plaster, Daniel reads it, and that night the king is killed. Under Darius, jealous officials trap Daniel with a law against praying, and God shuts the lions' mouths.

  5. 05

    Halfway through, the book turns from stories to visions. Daniel sees four beasts come up out of a stormy sea, the last one dreadful, with ten horns and a little horn that speaks great things. Then thrones are set, the Ancient of Days sits down, and one like a son of man comes with the clouds of heaven and is given dominion that will not pass away. Jesus claims that title for himself at his trial. A ram and a goat follow, named as Media, Persia and Greece, with a horn that stops the daily sacrifice.

  6. 06

    Reading Jeremiah, Daniel counts seventy years for the ruin of Jerusalem and prays through them in fasting and ashes. Gabriel answers with seventy weeks, at the end of which the anointed one is cut off and has nothing, and a later prince destroys city and sanctuary. In the last vision a man clothed in linen tells Daniel his words were heard on the first day, and that a prince of Persia held the answer back until Michael came. Kings war for chapters, Michael stands up, the dead awake, and the wise shine like the sky.

Written from the book's own text (BSB) and MannaFest's chapter summaries of Daniel; the shape follows the guide's spine, the six stories and the six visions.

What Daniel Alone Teaches

The Most High rules in the kingdom of men

The book states its thesis four times, in almost the same words, and every time it is a pagan king who has to learn it. The heavenly sentence on Nebuchadnezzar is passed 'so that the living will know that the Most High rules over the kingdom of mankind and gives it to whom He wishes' (4:17). It is repeated to his face (4:25), repeated again when it falls (4:32), and rehearsed to his successor as history (5:21). The king who says 'Is this not Babylon the Great, which I myself have built' (4:30) ends his own chapter with the correction in his mouth: 'He is able to humble those who walk in pride' (4:37). The title carrying that claim, Most High, stands in thirteen verses of the book, more often on Gentile lips than on Jewish ones. The claim covers everything: 'He does as He pleases with the army of heaven and the peoples of the earth. There is no one who can restrain His hand or say to Him, What have You done?' (4:35).

Daniel 4:17 · Daniel 4:35 · Daniel 5:21

One kingdom outlasts all the others

Two visions say the same thing twice in two languages. In chapter 2 a statue of four metals is broken by something nobody made: 'a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon its feet' (2:34), and then 'the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth' (2:35). The interpretation is given plainly: 'And in the days of those kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed' (2:44). In chapter 7 the same sequence returns as four beasts, and the kingdom is handed to a person: 'his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed' (7:14), and then to a people, 'his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him' (7:27). The word kingdom carries the whole argument, appearing in forty-one verses of the book. Even the kings inside the story end up saying it. Darius signs a decree that Daniel's God 'is the living God, and stedfast for ever' (6:26).

Daniel 2:44 · Daniel 7:14 · Daniel 7:27

How to live in an empire without belonging to it

The first six chapters are a working manual for faith under a government that does not share it, and they draw the line in a specific place. Daniel takes the Babylonian schooling, the Babylonian name, and the Babylonian office. He does not take the food: 'But Daniel made up his mind that he would not defile himself' (1:8). His three friends serve the state until the state asks for worship, and then they answer with no argument at all, 'we have no need to answer you in this matter' (3:16), and with a confidence that does not depend on the outcome: 'If the God whom we serve exists, then He is able to deliver us from the blazing fiery furnace and from your hand, O king' (3:17), followed at once by 'But even if He does not, let it be known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods' (3:18). Those two words carry the weight. Daniel does the same with prayer when prayer is made a crime, and the detail the text keeps is that nothing changed: 'three times a day he got down on his knees, prayed, and gave thanks to his God, just as he had done before' (6:10).

Daniel 1:8 · Daniel 3:18 · Daniel 6:10

Prayer that is heard on the first day, and the war behind the map

Daniel prays four times in the book, and twice the text lets the reader watch what the prayer sets moving. In chapter 9 he confesses on behalf of a whole nation, 'we have sinned and done wrong. We have acted wickedly and rebelled' (9:5), and pleads on no merit at all, 'we are not presenting our petitions before You because of our righteous acts, but because of Your great compassion' (9:18). The covenant name, printed the LORD, occurs six times in Daniel, and all six stand in this one chapter, in this one prayer. In chapter 10 the answer to a three-week fast comes with an explanation attached. The messenger tells him 'from the first day that you purposed to understand and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard' (10:12), and then says what delayed the delivery: 'However, the prince of the kingdom of Persia opposed me for twenty-one days. Then Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me' (10:13). The same conflict continues after the vision, 'I must return at once to fight against the prince of Persia, and when I have gone forth, behold, the prince of Greece will come' (10:20), and the book names Israel's own guardian in it, 'Michael your prince' (10:21), who stands up again at 12:1. Heaven has its own courts and its own reporting: a decision reaches Nebuchadnezzar as 'the decree of the watchers, the verdict declared by the holy ones' (4:17). Daniel is the book where Scripture first gives an angel a name, and it gives two, Gabriel at 8:16 and 9:21 and Michael at 10:13, 10:21, and 12:1.

Daniel 9:18 · Daniel 10:12 · Daniel 10:13

The dead will rise, and it will not go the same way for everyone

The Old Testament hopes for resurrection in several places and states it flatly here: 'And many who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life, but others to shame and everlasting contempt' (12:2). Two outcomes are named in one sentence, and the vocabulary of everlasting is attached to both. The next verse gives the shape of the first outcome: 'Then the wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness will shine like the stars forever and ever' (12:3). Jesus takes the same two outcomes and the same order in John 5:29, 'those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.' The book then applies the promise to one old man by name and makes it personal: 'You will rest, and will arise to your inheritance at the end of the days' (12:13). Rest first, then standing, then a portion held for him.

Daniel 12:2 · Daniel 12:3 · Daniel 12:13

God tells secrets, and then seals the rest

Babylon employed an entire professional class to read dreams and omens, and chapter 2 puts that class in an impossible position and lets it say so: 'there is no other that can show it before the king, except the gods, whose dwelling is not with flesh' (2:11). The answer comes back to Daniel in a night vision, and his response is a doxology rather than a claim: God 'revealeth the deep and secret things; he knoweth what is in the darkness, and the light dwelleth with him' (2:22), and 'there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets' (2:28). Daniel keeps nothing for himself, telling the king plainly that 'this secret is not revealed to me for any wisdom that I have more than any living' (2:30). Some of it stays closed. The last chapter shuts the file: 'shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end' (12:4), repeated at 12:9, 'the words are shut up and sealed till the time of the end.' Daniel himself is left without the interpretation of his own vision more than once, 'I wondered at the vision, but none understood it' (8:27), and the book says who will eventually read it: 'none of the wicked shall understand; but they that are wise shall understand' (12:10).

Daniel 2:22 · Daniel 12:4 · Daniel 12:10

Christ in Daniel

  • ProphecyOne like unto a son of man, and the title Jesus took for himself. Daniel 7 puts a human figure in the middle of a throne room. First the throne: 'thrones were set in place, and the Ancient of Days took His seat. His clothing was white as snow, and the hair of His head was like pure wool' (7:9), with 'ten thousand times ten thousand' standing before him and the books opened (7:10). Then the figure: 'I saw One like the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into His presence' (7:13). What he receives is universal and permanent: 'And He was given dominion, glory, and kingship, that the people of every nation and language should serve Him' (7:14). He looks human, arrives the way God arrives in the Old Testament, on the clouds, and is served by every nation. Jesus took this passage for his own name. Standing under oath before the high priest he answered, 'I am, and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven' (Mark 14:62), which Matthew records in nearly the same words (Matthew 26:64). The court understood him exactly and tore its robes. Stephen sees the same figure standing (Acts 7:56), and Revelation shows the same figure twice, 'One like the Son of Man' at 1:13 and 'seated on the cloud was One like the Son of Man' at 14:14, giving him the description Daniel gave the Ancient of Days: 'The hair of His head was white like wool, as white as snow, and His eyes were like a blazing fire' (Revelation 1:14). The two figures of Daniel 7 are shown wearing one glory. Daniel 7:13
  • TypologyThe fourth man in the fire. Three men go into a furnace bound and a king counts four walking loose: 'I see four men, unbound and unharmed, walking around in the fire, and the fourth looks like a son of the gods' (3:25). The reading held across the church's long tradition, and taught here at full strength, is that the fourth is the Son of God himself, present in the fire before he was present in the flesh, the same appearing that Genesis and Exodus and Judges record when the Angel of the LORD speaks and is worshipped as God. The details support it. The fourth is seen only inside the fire and is never counted coming out (3:26). The fire that killed the men who threw them in does nothing at all to those it was heated for, so that 'the fire had no effect on the bodies of these men' (3:27). And the confession the episode produces is directed at the God of Israel by name (3:28-29). What the three said before they went in was that they would refuse the image whether or not they were rescued (3:17-18). They were given the rescue, and they were given company inside the fire while it lasted. Daniel 3:25
  • ProphecyThe anointed one, cut off. Gabriel gives Daniel a span with a purpose attached: 'Seventy weeks are decreed for your people and your holy city to stop their transgression, to put an end to sin, to make atonement for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness' (9:24). Those are atonement words, and the passage attaches them to a person and a date. A count runs 'until the Messiah, the Prince' (9:25), and then that person is removed: 'Then after the sixty-two weeks the Messiah will be cut off and will have nothing' (9:26). The Hebrew word rendered 'Messiah' here is mashiach, the ordinary word for an anointed king or priest, and this is the passage that gives the word its future tense. A person is announced, counted toward, and then killed with nothing in his hands, and after him the city and the sanctuary go down. Christian reading from the earliest centuries has heard the cross in that line, and heard 9:24's list of finished transgression and completed reconciliation answered in it. How the count itself is measured is a separate and genuinely open question, set out in the difficulties below. Daniel 9:26
  • TypologyThe stone cut out without hands. Nebuchadnezzar sees an image of gold, silver, brass, iron, and iron mixed with clay, and it is destroyed by something that arrives with no human agency behind it: 'Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon its feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them in pieces' (2:34). The metals blow away like chaff, 'and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth' (2:35). Daniel's interpretation names the builder: 'shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed' (2:44), and he closes by telling a pagan king that this is not a guess, 'and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure' (2:45). Two features make this a portrait of Christ's kingdom rather than of any of the empires it breaks. It begins outside human making, and it ends the sequence rather than taking its turn inside it. Gabriel says of that kingdom in Luke 1:33, 'and of his kingdom there shall be no end.' Daniel 2:34
  • QuotationJesus quotes Daniel and puts the clock forward. Daniel's phrase for the desecration of the sanctuary is exact: 'they shall set up the abomination that maketh desolate' (11:31), repeated at 12:11, with a related line at 9:27, 'upon the wing of abominations shall come one that maketh desolate'. Antiochus IV answered that description in 167 BC when he stopped the sacrifice and defiled the temple, and the Maccabean revolt and rededication followed. Centuries after that had happened, Jesus took the same phrase and pointed it forward: 'When therefore ye see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of through Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place (let him that readeth understand)' (Matthew 24:15), with Mark recording 'standing where he ought not' (Mark 13:14). Paul describes something in the same shape at 2 Thessalonians 2:4, of a figure 'so that he sitteth in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God.' Jesus names Daniel as a prophet, treats an oracle already answered once as answerable again, and tells his hearers to read the book for themselves. Matthew 24:15

The Aramaic Chiasm

chapters 2–7 fold in on themselves

the same four kingdoms, twicedelivered in the trialpride abased, mercy, then judgment2A3B4C5C′6B′7A′

A ↔ A′

Daniel 2Four kingdoms, the image and the stoneDaniel 7Four kingdoms, the beasts and the Son of Man

B ↔ B′

Daniel 3The faithful delivered from fireDaniel 6The faithful delivered from lions

C ↔ C′

Daniel 4A king judged, humbled, and restoredDaniel 5A king judged, and not restored

The symmetry was set out in a classic 1972 analysis by A. Lenglet. Its payoff is not decoration: it binds the book, pairing the two four-kingdom panels at the outside and setting two judged kings, one restored, one not, at the center.

Themes

01

The Most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whom He will (4:17, 25, 32; 5:21)

02

The kingdom of God that shall never be destroyed, the stone that becomes a mountain

03

Faithfulness under empire: the table, the image, the window (1:8; 3:18; 6:10)

04

God reveals the deep and secret things, history has a disclosed terminus

05

The unseen realm: named angels, warring princes, geopolitics with a back-side

06

Wrestling, Scripture-fed prayer, Daniel reads Jeremiah and Gabriel is sent

07

The resurrection of the dead, to life or to contempt (12:2)

08

Messiah's timetable, a countdown written into the calendar of empires

The Prophetic Spans

a ledger of the book's measured times

SpanReferenceWhat it measures
Seventy sevens (490)Daniel 9:24Decreed on Daniel's people and city; mirrors Jeremiah's seventy years, which Daniel was reading (9:2).
A time, times, and half a timeDaniel 7:25Three and a half: the horn's licence over the saints; repeated at 12:7.
2,300 evening-morningsDaniel 8:14Until the sanctuary is cleansed: anchored by most readers to the Antiochus desecration and the 164 BC rededication.
1,290 daysDaniel 12:11From the taking away of the continual burnt-offering and the setting up of the abomination.
1,335 daysDaniel 12:12"Blessed is he that waiteth": a further forty-five days, unexplained.

How this site handles the numbers: the spans are presented as the text gives them, and the competing schemes are shown side by side. MannaFest does not run probability theatre, no tallies of “odds of one in ten to the N”, because the force of Daniel is the claim itself, not a computed improbability, and because the book’s date is the very thing under dispute.

Author
Daniel (traditional, Jesus cites ‘Daniel the prophet’ in Matt 24:15); critical scholarship dates composition to the 2nd c. BC Maccabean period (both positions surfaced)
Date
Traditional: 6th c. BC. Critical: c. 165 BC. Site default: traditional; critical view surfaced at depth 2
Audience
Jewish exiles in Babylon; the inter-testamental Jewish community; all readers facing empires they did not choose

As the earliest witnesses report them; positions and holders under Who Wrote It.

The world behind this book

The book of Daniel
Where
The royal court of Babylon, and then of Persia after Babylon fell, training schools, throne rooms, the plain of Dura, and a lions' pit.

The history, and what it meant to them

The history

After Carchemish in 605 BC, Nebuchadnezzar swept south and took hostages from Jerusalem's leading families, a standard imperial move that turned a conquered nation's brightest teenagers into loyal administrators. Daniel and his three friends were put through a three-year course in the language and learning of Babylon, given Babylonian names, and assigned places at the king's table.

Nebuchadnezzar ruled forty-three years and rebuilt his capital on a scale nobody had attempted before. His own building inscriptions boast about it in almost the exact words the book puts in his mouth: "Is not this great Babylon, that I have built?" (4:30). Bricks stamped with his name still turn up across the site.

Belshazzar, the king of the feast in chapter 5, was for a long time the book's supposed mistake, no Greek historian had ever heard of him. Then cuneiform tablets turned up naming him as the son of King Nabonidus, left running Babylon while his father lived away at Tema. That is why the best reward he can offer Daniel is third place in the kingdom (5:16): first and second were taken. Cyrus of Persia took the city in October 539 BC, and within about a year issued the decree that let deported peoples, Judah included, go home.

Daniel served across that whole turnover, Babylonian kings, then Persian ones, as a foreign official who kept praying toward a ruined Jerusalem three times a day. That habit is what got him thrown to the lions.

What it meant to them

For exiles the first six chapters were survival training. You can eat differently, refuse the statue, keep praying with the window open, and serve an empire honestly without worshiping it, and the God who let Jerusalem fall is still able to walk into a furnace with you.

The visions answered the bigger question. Empires look permanent from the inside; Daniel was shown them as a sequence of beasts with an expiration date, judged before an Ancient of Days, replaced by a kingdom given to "one like a son of man" that never ends. It even set a clock on the Messiah's arrival (9:24-27). To people whose nation had been erased from the map, the message was that history has an author, the timetable is already written, and the last kingdom standing is God's.

Sources cited

  • D. J. Wiseman (ed.), Notes on Some Problems in the Book of Daniel
  • Edwin M. Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible
  • Sir Robert Anderson, The Coming Prince
  • Keil & Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament: Daniel

Every work MannaFest builds on →

Who Wrote It, and When

Author
The book names a man and then hands him the pen. Daniel is introduced among four Judean youths of the royal and noble houses carried to Babylon, 'Among these young men were some from Judah: Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah' (1:6), and renamed Belteshazzar by the palace (1:7). The first six chapters tell his story from outside, in the third person. From chapter 7 the voice turns, and the visions are reported by the man who saw them and wrote them down: 'He wrote down the dream, and this is the summary of his account' (7:1), 'In the third year of the reign of King Belshazzar, a vision appeared to me, Daniel' (8:1), and at the close a direct order, 'But you, Daniel, shut up these words and seal the book until the time of the end' (12:4). Whether the finished book comes from that sixth-century courtier or from a second-century writer telling his story is the oldest and largest question about it, and both readings are set out here.

  • Daniel the exile wrote the visions, and the book comes from the sixth century BC

    held by the book's own first-person vision reports (7:1-2, 15; 8:1; 9:2; 10:2; 12:5) and its command to seal the words (12:4); the words of Jesus, who speaks of the abomination of desolation 'which was spoken of through Daniel the prophet' (Matthew 24:15); Keil and Delitzsch (Biblical Commentary on the Book of Daniel, English translation 1872); Edward J. Young (The Prophecy of Daniel: A Commentary, 1949); K. A. Kitchen ('The Aramaic of Daniel,' in Notes on Some Problems in the Book of Daniel, 1965); Joyce Baldwin (Daniel: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries, 1978); and Gleason Archer (A Survey of Old Testament Introduction, 1964)

    Kitchen's study of the Aramaic is the load-bearing linguistic argument on this side. He classed the Aramaic of chapters 2 to 7 as Imperial Aramaic, the chancery language of the Persian empire, and judged that within roughly 600 to 330 BC it cannot be dated closely enough to settle anything. On that reading the language neither proves nor disproves an early book, which removes the strongest plank of the case against it.

  • A second-century writer composed the book during the persecution under Antiochus IV, around 167 to 164 BC

    held by Porphyry, the third-century philosopher whose argument survives only because Jerome answered it at length in his Commentary on Daniel (AD 407); S. R. Driver; H. H. Rowley (Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the Book of Daniel, 1935); Louis Hartman and Alexander Di Lella (The Book of Daniel, Anchor Bible, 1978); and John J. Collins (Daniel, Hermeneia, 1993)

    The case rests on four things: the precision of chapter 11, which tracks the Ptolemies and Seleucids closely and then reads differently at 11:40-45 from how Antiochus actually died; three Greek loanwords among the instruments of 3:5; the place of Daniel in the Ketuvim, the Writings, rather than among the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible; and the absence of Daniel from Ben Sira's roll of Israel's famous men in Sirach 44 to 50, written around 180 BC.

  • The book preserves older material that reached its present form later

    held by a mediating reading found across the commentary tradition, taking the court narratives of chapters 1 to 6 as early and separately transmitted, since they circulate in different forms in the Greek versions, while placing the visions of 7 to 12 nearer the crisis they address

    This position is worth naming because the two halves of the book are demonstrably different in language and genre and travel differently in the manuscripts. It satisfies neither of the two main positions and is held by fewer scholars than either.

Date
Two dates are in play and they are separate questions. The book's own setting runs from the deportation under Nebuchadnezzar, 'In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah came Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon unto Jerusalem, and besieged it' (1:1), to the Persian court a lifetime later, 'In the third year of Cyrus king of Persia a thing was revealed unto Daniel' (10:1). That span is roughly 605 to 536 BC, and Daniel is said to have lasted the whole of it: 'And Daniel continued even unto the first year of king Cyrus' (1:21). When the book reached its present written form is the disputed question, and the answers run from the late sixth century to the middle of the second.

  • Late sixth century BC, in Daniel's own lifetime or just after

    held by the traditional position above, with the last dated vision at 10:1 setting the floor

  • Around 167 to 164 BC, during the Seleucid persecution

    held by the critical consensus since the nineteenth century, following Porphyry's much older argument

    The Qumran manuscripts constrain this dating hard, and the constraint is set out under the dating question in the difficulties below.

  • The dating question cannot be settled by the language either way

    held by K. A. Kitchen (1965) on the Aramaic, and the observation that the Persian administrative loanwords in the book run the argument in the opposite direction from the three Greek instrument names

    The Persian vocabulary is governmental and technical, and several of those words were already obscure to the Greek translators, who guessed at them. Words that had gone dark by the second century are difficult to explain in a book written in the second century. The Greek words, by contrast, are all names of instruments, the kind of trade goods that moved ahead of armies.

Audience
The first readers were Jews living under a power that had beaten them, taken their king, and emptied their temple: 'And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with part of the vessels of the house of God' (1:2). The question pressing on such readers is whether the God of a defeated people still runs anything, and the book answers it in a sentence repeated four times over: 'the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will' (4:17, and again at 4:25, 4:32, and 5:21). The book also addresses people who must survive inside a foreign system without dissolving into it. Daniel and his friends are put through a Babylonian education, taught 'the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans' (1:4), given Babylonian names, and set to work for a Babylonian king, and the book shows exactly where they bend and where they will not.
Occasion
Chapter 9 gives the book its clearest occasion, and it begins with a man reading Scripture. Daniel finds a figure in Jeremiah and works out what it means for his own moment: 'I, Daniel, understood from the sacred books, according to the word of the LORD to Jeremiah the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years' (9:2). The seventy years were nearly up. He set himself to pray and fast (9:3), and the answer that came back was larger than the question he had asked: seventy weeks instead of seventy years, running past the return from exile to an anointed one and past him to the end. The rest of the book does the same thing on a wider scale. It shows a God who 'removes kings and establishes them' (2:21), and it tells a man whose life is nearly over that his own share in that outcome is secure: 'But as for you, go on your way until the end. You will rest, and will arise to your inheritance at the end of the days' (12:13).

The Years of Daniel

Daniel timeline

  1. 605 BC

    Nebuchadnezzar defeats Egypt at Carchemish, becomes king of Babylon, and takes hostages from Jerusalem, Daniel among them.

    Daniel 1:1

  2. 597 BC

    Jerusalem is taken and Jehoiachin is deported; the ration tablets from the Babylonian palace record him by name a few years later.

  3. 586 BC

    Jerusalem and the temple are destroyed, beginning the desolations Daniel later counts in Jeremiah.

    Daniel 9:2

  4. c. 553 BC

    The first year of Belshazzar, to which Daniel dates the vision of the four beasts and the Ancient of Days.

    Daniel 7:1

  5. c. 551 BC

    The third year of Belshazzar, and the vision of the ram and the goat by the Ulai canal at Susa.

    Daniel 8:2

  6. 539 BC

    Babylon falls to Cyrus. Belshazzar is killed the same night, and Darius the Mede receives the kingdom.

    Daniel 5:30

  7. 538 BC

    Cyrus authorizes the return of deported peoples to their sanctuaries; the first exiles go home to Judah.

  8. c. 536 BC

    The third year of Cyrus, the date of Daniel's last recorded vision and the book's latest fixed point.

    Daniel 10:1

  9. 167 BC

    Antiochus IV stops the sacrifice and desecrates the temple, the event Daniel 8 and 11 are read against.

  10. 164 BC

    The temple is cleansed and rededicated after the Maccabean revolt.

  11. c. 125 BC

    The earliest of the eight Qumran copies of Daniel is written, and the Cave 4 Florilegium cites the book as Daniel the prophet.

  12. AD 407

    Jerome finishes his Commentary on Daniel, answering Porphyry's argument for a second-century book and preserving it in the process.

The Voices on Daniel

each in his own words, on a verse of this book

  • So he consented to this and tested them for ten days.Daniel 1:14-15

    And so Scripture says, "And the chief eunuch heard them and tested them for ten days and after the end of the ten days their appearances appeared better and stronger in body compared to the boys who ate at the table of the king." [Daniel 1:14-15] And so these boys, though nourished with bread and water alone, were equipped with heavenly wisdom, and they had grace beyond all the boys their same age.
    Hippolytus of Rome, 3rd century, Commentary on Daniel 1.12.1-2

  • Then the iron, clay, bronze, silver, and gold were shattered and became like chaff on the threshing floor in summer. The wind carried them away, and not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that had struck the statue became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.Daniel 2:35

    If therefore the great God showed future things by Daniel, and confirmed them by His Son; and if Christ is the stone which is cut out without hands, who shall destroy temporal kingdoms, and introduce an eternal one, which is the resurrection of the just; as he declares, "The God of heaven shall raise up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed,"-let those thus confuted come to their senses, who reject the Creator (Demiurgum), and do not agree that the prophets were sent beforehand from the same Father from whom also the Lord came, but who assert that prophecies originated from diverse powers.
    Irenaeus, 3rd century, AGAINST HERESIES 5:26.2

  • And whoever does not fall down and worship will immediately be thrown into the blazing fiery furnace.”Daniel 3:6

    The literal image of Nebuchadnezzar is a typical prophecy of "the image of the beast," connected with mystical Babylon, in Re 13:14. The second mystical beast there causeth the earth, and them that dwell therein, to worship the first beast, and that as many as would not, should be killed (Re 13:12, 15). furnace--a common mode of punishment in Babylon (Jer 29:22).
    Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, 1871, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible

  • “Look!” he exclaimed. “I see four men, unbound and unharmed, walking around in the fire—and the fourth looks like a son of the gods!”Daniel 3:25

    The Son of God - Probably he had heard David speak of him. Jesus Christ, the Angel of the covenant, did sometimes appear before his incarnation. Those who suffer for Christ, have his gracious presence with them in their sufferings, even in the fiery furnace, even in the valley of the shadow of death, and therefore need fear no evil.
    John Wesley, 1765, Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament

  • But at the end of those days I, Nebuchadnezzar, looked up to heaven, and my sanity was restored to me. Then I praised the Most High, and I honored and glorified Him who lives forever: “For His dominion is an everlasting dominion, and His kingdom endures from generation to generation.Daniel 4:34-35

    NO one has ever numbered Nebuchadnezzar with the Prophets, or believed his language to be inspired. We have before us simply a statement made by an uninspired man, after passing through the most extraordinary experience. He had been among the greatest and proudest of men—he suddenly fell into the condition of a grass-eating ox, by losing his reason. And upon being restored, he acknowledged publicly the hand of the Most High.
    Charles Spurgeon, 1870, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 949: “The Unconquerable King” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)

  • TEKEL means that you have been weighed on the scales and found deficient.Daniel 5:27

    THERE IS A WEIGHING TIME for kings and emperors, and all the monarchs of earth, albeit some of them have exalted themselves to a position in which they appear to be irresponsible to man. Though they escape the scales on earth, they must surely be tried at the bar of God. For nations there is a weighing time. National sins demand national punishments.
    Charles Spurgeon, 1859, The New Park Street Pulpit, Sermon No. 257: “The Scales of Judgment” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)

  • As I continued to watch, thrones were set in place, and the Ancient of Days took His seat. His clothing was white as snow, and the hair of His head was like pure wool. His throne was flaming with fire, and its wheels were all ablaze.Daniel 7:9

    Let him then be standing for you that you may not be afraid of him sitting; for when sitting he judges, as Daniel says, "the thrones were placed, and the books were opened, and the Ancient of Days did sit." But in Psalm 81 [82] it is written, "God stood in the congregation of gods and decides among the gods." So then when he sits he judges, when he stands he decides, and he judges concerning the imperfect but decides among the gods.
    Ambrose of Milan, 4th century, LETTER 63:6

  • So I turned my attention to the Lord God to seek Him by prayer and petition, with fasting, sackcloth, and ashes.Daniel 9:3

    Nor is it merely a change of nature, or aversion of perils or obliteration of sins but likewise the recognition of mysteries that fasts will merit from God. Look at Daniel's example.… In the first year of King Darius, when, after careful and repeated meditation on the times predicted by Jeremiah, he set his face to God in fasts and sackcloth and ashes. An angel was sent to him and immediately stated this had been the cause of the divine honor; he said, "I came to show you, wretched as you are," namely, because he had been fasting.
    Tertullian, 3rd century, ON FASTING 7

  • “Do not be afraid, Daniel,” he said, “for from the first day that you purposed to understand and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them.Daniel 10:12-13

    As unusual as it sounds, the angel sent to answer Daniel’s prayers had been delayed for 21 days by the demonic resistance in the spiritual realm.
    Dutch Sheets, 2023, Give Him 15 daily devotional, "The Prince of Persia" (October 12, 2023)

  • “Do not be afraid, Daniel,” he said, “for from the first day that you purposed to understand and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them.Daniel 10:12-13

    In Daniel 10 we see Daniel's prayers fueling a heavenly battle in which Gabriel is sent with a prophetic message but is delayed until Michael, the archangel, comes and fights this Persian principality.
    Jane Hamon, 2026, Resisting the Prince Of Persia

  • “And I, in the first year of Darius the Mede, stood up to strengthen and protect him.Daniel 11:1

    I have not the slightest doubt of my present power to restrain these kings, lest they should pour forth their fury upon the people. The full meaning is this, the king of the Persians is nothing, and can do nothing except through me. I was God's servant in transferring the monarchy of the Medes and Chaldeans to the Persians, as well as that of the Babylonians to the Medes.
    John Calvin, 1554, Commentaries

  • And many who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life, but others to shame and everlasting contempt.Daniel 12:2

    To all who reason rightly, the heaviest of punishments is shame. We also have learned this in the case of the judgment, when "some" shall rise "to everlasting life and some to everlasting shame and contempt."
    Basil of Caesarea, 4th century, LETTER 260:4, TO OPTIMUS THE BISHOP

Voices still in copyright, quoted briefly

Chuck Missler

Each verified against the source; go to the work for the rest.

  • “Daniel 9 is probably one of the most pivotal chapters in the entire Bible for understanding end-time prophecy.”
    Chuck Missler, The Book of Daniel: Daniel 9 (Koinonia House) (2018) · on Daniel 9:24

More works on Daniel

4 works this site reads
  • Sir Robert Anderson, The Coming Prince (1894)
  • Keil & Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Book of Daniel
  • John Calvin, Commentaries on the Book of the Prophet Daniel
  • Charles Spurgeon, Sermons on Daniel 3 and Daniel 6, Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit

Original Language

the keynote words of a bilingual book

מַלְכוּ
malku
kingdom, reign, dominion (Aramaic), the book's keyword
מָשִׁיחַ
mashiach
Anointed One / Messiah (9:25, 26)
שָׁבוּעַ
shabua
week, seven, the seventy sevens of 9:24
raz
mystery, secret (2:18–19, 27–30), a Persian loanword; the Greek New Testament's mystērion answers to it
bar enash
son of man (7:13), a human one, given divine dominion
attiq yomin
Ancient of Days (7:9, 13, 22), literally 'advanced in days'
shiqquts shomem
abomination that maketh desolate (9:27; 11:31; 12:11)
qets
the end, the appointed terminus of history (8:17; 12:4, 9)

Contested Points

both cases at full strength, then the flag

Two datings of Daniel

This is the Daniel question, because it decides whether chapters 8 and 11 are predictive prophecy or history written after the fact. Both columns are given as their best advocates give them.

The critical case, composed c. 167–164 BC

  • ▪Chapter 11 runs uncannily exact only up to c. 167–164 BC and then diverges from how Antiochus IV actually died: the classic signature of prophecy written after the event, breaking down at the author's own present.
  • ▪Three Greek loanwords name musical instruments in ch. 3, suggesting Greek cultural penetration after Alexander.
  • ▪An explicit two-outcome resurrection (12:2) and a developed angelology with named angels read, on this view, as later theological development.
  • ▪The Hebrew Bible files Daniel in the Writings, not the Prophets: argued to reflect a date after the prophetic corpus had closed.
  • ▪No certain external attestation before the second century; Ben Sira's roll-call of Israel's heroes (Sir 44–49, c. 180 BC) passes Daniel over.
  • ▪The critique is ancient, not modern novelty: the philosopher Porphyry argued the Maccabean reading in the third century AD, and it has been the standard critical position since the nineteenth.

The traditional case, sixth-century Daniel

  • ▪The Aramaic is Imperial Aramaic: judged in K.A. Kitchen's study (in D.J. Wiseman, ed., Notes on Some Problems in the Book of Daniel, Tyndale, 1965) practically undatable within c. 600–330 BC, with E.Y. Kutscher concurring and noting an eastern word order, against a second-century Judean origin.
  • ▪The Persian administrative loanwords point early: several are already obsolete or misunderstood by the second-century Greek versions, which is hard to explain if the book is itself second-century.
  • ▪The Greek loanwords are only instrument-names: portable trade goods; Greek mercenaries and merchandise reached the Near East long before Alexander.
  • ▪Qumran yields eight copies of Daniel (earliest c. 125 BC) and cites it as authoritative Scripture (4Q174 names "Daniel the prophet"): a very tight window for a forgery to be written, circulated, and canonized.
  • ▪The book remembers sixth-century detail that later Greek historians had lost: Belshazzar's co-regency, and the offer of only the third place in the kingdom (5:16).
  • ▪Jesus ascribes the book to "Daniel the prophet" and treats its prophecy as still future (Matt 24:15): decisive for a confessional reader.
  • ▪Honest concession: "Darius the Mede" remains a genuine difficulty for the early date, and is held as such rather than airbrushed.

Where the readings meet: the traditional case, sixth-century Daniel, genuine predictive prophecy rests on Christ’s own ascription, the Aramaic and Persian-loanword evidence, and the Qumran window, and is the reading conservative scholarship broadly holds; the critical case above is held by scholars who read chapters 8 and 11 as history written after the fact. With either dating comes a standing rule: because the date is itself in dispute, Daniel’s precision is never offered on this site as proof of inspiration. That would argue in a circle.

Two different little horns (chs. 7 and 8)

The strongest other case: The ch. 8 horn grows out of the Greek goat's four horns and is Antiochus IV: the persecutor who stopped the sacrifice; ch. 11:2–35 tracks the same Seleucid history in detail. Read consistently, ch. 7's horn could be another figure in the same historical frame.

Where the readings meet: Two horns, two referents: Antiochus is the type (ch. 8); the ch. 7 horn, growing from the fourth beast, is the eschatological antitype: the reading Jesus assumes when He takes an already-fulfilled abomination as still future (Matt 24:15).

The origin of the coming ruler

The strongest other case: Classical dispensationalism locates him in a revived Roman framework. Joel Richardson (The Islamic Antichrist, 2006; Mideast Beast, 2012) reframes the fourth kingdom as the Eastern-Roman / Islamic successor. Richardson's thesis has drawn substantial criticism for over-mapping Islamic eschatology and for its reception; it is carried as one option, not as settled.

Where the readings meet: Roman-framework primary; the Islamic reframing shown as a live in-roster minority, with its critique stated.

The identity of "Darius the Mede" (5:31; 6; 9:1)

The strongest other case: No independent record names a Darius the Mede ruling Babylon between Nabonidus and Cyrus: the strongest single objection to the book's historicity, and on the critical reading evidence of a conflated or legendary figure.

Where the readings meet: A real but underdetermined figure: most plausibly Gubaru the appointed governor, or a second title of Cyrus himself (D.J. Wiseman's dual-titulary proposal); Cyaxares II has also been defended. A genuine difficulty held honestly, not a disproof: and the book's checkable claims (Belshazzar) have repeatedly been vindicated where once they were called errors.

Further Reading on Danielthe works this study is built on
Chuck Misslerbriefly quoted

The Book of Daniel (study series); Learn the Bible in 24 Hours (2002)

the founder's formative teacher. Reads the Seventy Weeks as the master prophecy-chronology, the raz → mystērion bridge, and the bilingual Gentile/Israel design as deliberate architecture.

Sir Robert Andersonpublic domain

The Coming Prince (1894)

The foundational articulation of the Seventy-Weeks arithmetic on a 360-day prophetic year, with the seventieth seven held future and the gap read as the church age.

Charles Spurgeonpublic domain

Sermons on Daniel 3 and 6

The pastoral shallow end: Christ nearest in the furnace, the three who went in bound and walked free. The devotional register for chs. 1–6.

R.C. Sproulbriefly quoted

Reformed exposition of eschatology

The in-roster dissent: treats the dispensational gap-and-parenthesis as biblically and historically untenable. Carried to keep the Seventy-Weeks page honest.

Derek Princebriefly quoted

Teaching on prayer and spiritual conflict

Reads Daniel 9's prayer and Daniel 10's angelic conflict as the charter for watchman intercession and spiritual warfare.

A.W. Tozerbriefly quoted

Deeper-life writings

The furnace as a place of manifest Presence: what the fire destroys is the bonds, and holiness under pressure is the theme.

Jonathan Cahnbriefly quoted

The Harbinger (2011); The Return of the Gods (2022)

Reads Nebuchadnezzar's humbling and Belshazzar's fall as the recurring pattern of God abasing proud nations that forget Him.

Keil & DelitzschPublic domain

Commentary on Daniel

The major conservative philological defense of the sixth-century date and of the messianic reading of 9:26.

John CalvinPublic domain

Commentaries on Daniel

The continuous-messianic reading of the Seventy Weeks, with the prince who is to come read of Rome and Titus.

Matthew Henry · JFB · Albert BarnesPublic domain

Expository commentaries on Daniel

The accessible expository floor for every chapter: the working ballast beneath the studies.

Modern authors are summarized and cited, never quoted at length; public-domain commentators are cited to the work so a reader can go and read them whole.

History and Archaeology

what the ground has said back

Belshazzar, vindicated

Once cited as Daniel's decisive error: Greek historians and Berossus made Nabonidus Babylon's last king: Belshazzar is confirmed by the Nabonidus Cylinder and the Nabonidus Chronicle as Nabonidus's son and co-regent, left ruling in Babylon while his father resided years at Teima. It also explains why he can offer Daniel only the third place in the kingdom (5:16): he himself was second.

The Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242)

A fragmentary Aramaic text from Qumran telling of a Babylonian king afflicted seven years and healed on acknowledging God: a striking analogue to Nebuchadnezzar's madness in ch. 4, read variously as source, variant tradition, or independent memory.

Daniel at Qumran

Eight manuscripts, the earliest around 125 BC, plus citation as authoritative Scripture in the Florilegium (4Q174), which names "Daniel the prophet": the tight canonization window that presses on the dating debate.

The Antiochus background

The Seleucid persecution: plunder and desecration of the temple, the altar to Zeus Olympios in 167 BC, the ban on Torah and circumcision, the Maccabean revolt, and the rededication of 164 BC kept as Hanukkah: the historical anchor of ch. 8 and ch. 11.

Drafted from MannaFest's research brief on Daniel — public-domain commentators (Keil & Delitzsch, Calvin, Henry, JFB, Barnes, Anderson, Spurgeon) and the founder's approved-voices roster (Missler, Sproul, Prince, Tozer, Cahn, Richardson), each cited to its work.

The Book’s Shape

The Aramaic section as a ring (2:4b to 7:28)

proposed structure
  1. AFour kingdoms in a dream: the image of metals and the stone2:4b-49
  2. BThree men delivered out of the fire3:1-30
  3. CA proud king judged, humbled, and restored4:1-37
  4. C'A proud king judged and not restored5:1-31
  5. B'One man delivered out of the lions6:1-28
  6. A'Four kingdoms in a vision: the beasts, the thrones, and the son of man7:1-28

Mapped by A. Lenglet, 'La structure litteraire de Daniel 2-7,' Biblica 53 (1972), the analysis followed in most later commentary on the book's shape.

Key Words, with Doors

  1. רָזrâza secret, from a root meaning to hide

    The word for the dream nobody could recover in chapter 2, where the whole crisis is that a king demands a secret and his professionals cannot produce one. It belongs to the Aramaic chapters. The Greek Bible renders it with mysterion, the word the New Testament then uses for a plan of God kept quiet and now told out loud, which is why Paul can speak of a mystery that is preached.

    Hebrew · H7328 · open the word study →

  2. מַלְכוּmalkûwkingdom, dominion, reign

    The Aramaic keyword of chapters 2 to 7, with its Hebrew twin malkuth carrying the same load in chapters 8 to 12. The English word kingdom stands in forty-one verses of Daniel. The argument of the book is a contest between rival holders of this one noun, and it is settled at 2:44, where the kingdom the God of heaven sets up is the one that never ends.

    Hebrew · H4437 · open the word study →

  3. עִלַּיʻillaythe Most High

    The Aramaic title behind the refrain at 4:17, 4:25, 4:32, and 5:21. It is a title about altitude, the God who is above, and in Daniel it is mostly used by or to Gentile kings, which is the point of putting it there. The saints belong to him too: chapter 7 calls them twice 'the saints of the Most High' (7:18, 7:27).

    Hebrew · H5943 · open the word study →

  4. עִירʻîyra watcher, an angel who keeps guard

    A word for an angel that appears in the Old Testament only in Daniel 4, at verses 13, 17, and 23. The root sense is wakefulness, a being who does not sleep. The sentence on Nebuchadnezzar comes 'by the decree of the watchers, and the demand by the word of the holy ones' (4:17), which shows heaven deliberating over an empire before anything happens on earth.

    Hebrew · H5894 · open the word study →

  5. שָׁבוּעַshâbûwaʻa seven, a week

    The unit of the seventy weeks (9:24-27). The Hebrew word means a sevened thing rather than a calendar week, so it counts sevens without saying what is being counted in sevens, and almost every reader takes the units here as years. The seventy deliberately answers the seventy years of Jeremiah that Daniel had just been reading (9:2).

    Hebrew · H7620 · open the word study →

  6. מָשִׁיחַmâshîyachanointed, an anointed one

    The ordinary Hebrew word for a man set apart with oil, used of kings, priests, and once of Cyrus. In Daniel it appears twice, both times in the seventy-weeks oracle, at 9:25 of 'the anointed one, the prince' who is counted toward and at 9:26 of the anointed one who is 'cut off, and shall have nothing'. Through Greek it becomes Christos and through English, Messiah.

    Hebrew · H4899 · open the word study →

The Hard Questions, Honestly

The places a careful reader stops, with the readings named and their holders.

When was Daniel written?

Everything else about the book sits downstream of this. If the visions come from the sixth century, chapters 8 and 11 are prediction.

The evidence, and the readings

If the book was written during the persecution under Antiochus IV, those chapters are history told as prophecy. The argument is old rather than modern: Porphyry made it in the third century AD, and it survives only because Jerome quoted and answered him in his Commentary on Daniel of AD 407. The evidence pulls in both directions and both directions are shown here. What can be said without dispute is that the manuscript window is tight. Eight copies of Daniel were recovered from the Qumran caves, the earliest assigned to around 125 BC, and the Cave 4 Florilegium already quotes it as the book of Daniel the prophet, so the book was Scripture to that community within roughly forty years of the date the critical reading proposes for its composition.

  • Sixth century BC, from Daniel himself

    held by Keil and Delitzsch (English translation 1872), Edward J. Young (The Prophecy of Daniel, 1949), K. A. Kitchen ('The Aramaic of Daniel,' 1965), Joyce Baldwin (Daniel, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries, 1978), and Gleason Archer (1964); and for a Christian reader the ascription by Jesus at Matthew 24:15

    The supporting evidence is the Imperial Aramaic profile of chapters 2 to 7, the Persian administrative loanwords that were already obscure to the Greek translators, the tight Qumran window, and the book's accurate memory of Babylonian court arrangements that later Greek historians no longer knew, Belshazzar above all.

  • Around 167 to 164 BC, during the Seleucid crisis

    held by Porphyry (third century AD, preserved in Jerome); S. R. Driver; H. H. Rowley (1935); Hartman and Di Lella (Anchor Bible, 1978); John J. Collins (Hermeneia, 1993)

    The supporting evidence is the detail of chapter 11 down to Antiochus and its different character at 11:40-45, three Greek instrument names at 3:5, Daniel's place among the Writings rather than the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible, and the omission of Daniel from Sirach 44 to 50.

  • The linguistic evidence settles nothing on its own

    held by K. A. Kitchen (1965), who judged the Aramaic undatable within the whole Persian period, a conclusion both sides have to work around

Daniel, argued in full →

Who was Darius the Mede?

The book says that when Babylon fell, 'Darius the Mede received the kingdom, being about threescore and two years old' (5:31), and it dates the lions-den chapter and the seventy-weeks prayer to his reign (6:1; 9:1). No cuneiform record or Greek historian names a Darius the Mede ruling Babylon between Nabonidus and Cyrus, and this is the single strongest objection to the book's historical accuracy. It should be stated that plainly. It should also be stated that the same book's other unverifiable name, Belshazzar, was called an error for centuries and then turned up in the cuneiform record as Nabonidus's own son, which is a reason to hold this difficulty open rather than closed.

  • Gubaru, the governor Cyrus set over Babylon

    held by John C. Whitcomb (Darius the Mede, 1959), reading Darius as a throne name or official title for the man the Nabonidus Chronicle records taking the city and appointing its governors

  • Cyrus himself, under a second title

    held by D. J. Wiseman ('Some Historical Problems in the Book of Daniel,' in Notes on Some Problems in the Book of Daniel, 1965), who read 6:28 as a single statement rather than two reigns, that Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius, that is, the reign of Cyrus the Persian

    Ancient kings routinely carried more than one title, and the Aramaic of 6:28 permits the explanatory reading as easily as the sequential one.

  • Cyaxares II, the Median king to whom Cyrus deferred

    held by readers who follow Xenophon's Cyropaedia, which describes a Median king reigning alongside Cyrus at the fall of Babylon, an account most classicists treat as part romance

  • A figure assembled from later memory

    held by H. H. Rowley (Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the Book of Daniel, 1935) and the critical tradition, taking the name as evidence of distance from the events

How are the seventy weeks counted?

The oracle at 9:24-27 gives a total of seventy sevens, splits it into seven, then sixty-two, then one, and hangs the whole count on 'the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem' (9:25). Two variables decide every reading: which decree starts the clock, and whether the last seven follows the sixty-ninth immediately or stands apart from it. The candidate decrees are the decree of Cyrus in 538 BC (Ezra 1), the seventh year of Artaxerxes in 458 BC (Ezra 7), and the twentieth year of Artaxerxes in 445 BC (Nehemiah 2), the last of these being the only one whose stated business is the city rather than the temple. Honored readers land in different places on this passage, and the readings are given here without a verdict.

  • The sixty-nine sevens run to Christ's public presentation, and the seventieth is still to come

    held by Sir Robert Anderson (The Coming Prince, 1894), who counted 69 sevens as 483 prophetic years of 360 days from the decree of Artaxerxes to the triumphal entry; and the dispensational tradition after him, including Chuck Missler (The Book of Daniel, cited only)

    On this reading the anointed one is cut off after the sixty-ninth seven rather than during the seventieth, and the covenant-maker of 9:27 is a later figure who breaks his word at the midpoint. Its strength is that it reads 9:26's 'after the threescore and two weeks' as the text places it, outside the count.

  • The seventy run unbroken to Christ, and it is Christ who confirms the covenant

    held by John Calvin (Commentaries on Daniel, 1561) and Keil and Delitzsch (English translation 1872), with much of the Reformed tradition

    On this reading the anointed one is cut off in the middle of the seventieth seven, and his death is what causes 'the sacrifice and the oblation to cease' (9:27) by fulfilling them. The prince whose people destroy the city and the sanctuary is then Titus and the armies of Rome in AD 70. Its strength is that it needs no interval between the sixty-ninth seven and the seventieth.

  • The count terminates at Antiochus IV

    held by the critical reading, including Hartman and Di Lella (1978) and John J. Collins (1993), who identify the anointed one cut off at 9:26 with the murdered high priest Onias III and the covenant-breaker with Antiochus

    Its strength is the book's own focus on Antiochus in chapters 8 and 11. Its difficulty is arithmetic: no decree yields a clean 490 years to 164 BC, and this reading has to treat the numbers as approximate.

  • The numbers are theological rather than chronological

    held by readers who take seventy sevens as a figure for completeness, in the way Jesus uses seventy times seven at Matthew 18:22, and find the oracle fulfilled in Christ's first coming

    Its strength is that it refuses to build a date out of a symbol. Its difficulty is that the passage itself divides the total into unequal parts and attaches events to the divisions, which is the behavior of a count.

The Seventy Weeks→

Who is the fourth man in the fire?

Nebuchadnezzar looks into a furnace heated seven times and counts one man more than he threw in: 'the fourth looks like a son of the gods' (3:25). The reading carried here, and held across the church's long tradition, is that the fourth is the pre-incarnate Son of God, the same appearing the Old Testament records when the Angel of the LORD speaks as God and receives worship as God. The words on the king's lips are those of a pagan reaching for language he does not have, and what he describes is a divine figure standing inside the sentence he had just passed. The three had already said they would refuse the image whether they were delivered or not (3:17-18), and the answer they were given was the presence of God in the fire with them. A second reading is honorably held and is named here in its own terms.

  • The fourth man is the pre-incarnate Christ

    held by the reading of the church across its history, carried by the Puritan and later expository tradition, preached by Charles Spurgeon in his sermons on this chapter, and held here as the site's tradition

    Its grounds are the description itself, which reaches for divine language on the lips of a man who had none; the fourth man appearing only inside the fire, never counted coming out (3:26); and the pattern of divine appearings elsewhere in the Old Testament, where the Angel of the LORD both speaks as God and is worshipped.

  • The fourth man is a created angel

    held by John Calvin (Commentaries on Daniel, 1561), taking Nebuchadnezzar's own later account as the plainest description available, 'Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, who hath sent his angel, and delivered his servants that trusted in him' (3:28)

    Calvin held the deliverance to be entirely God's work and was reading the text's own summary sentence. The same book uses the same expression for the lions-den rescue, 'My God sent His angel' (6:22), which is the strength of this reading.

Christophany→

Daniel says the third year of Jehoiakim; Jeremiah says the fourth

Daniel opens 'In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it' (1:1). Jeremiah dates the same moment differently: 'in the fourth year of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah, which was the first year of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon' (Jeremiah 25:1). The two verses count the same king's reign by two systems that were both in use. The traditional harmonization is straightforward and is led here.

  • Two regnal-year systems, one date

    held by the standard conservative harmonization, resting on the Babylonian court practice documented in D. J. Wiseman's edition of the Babylonian Chronicles (Chronicles of Chaldaean Kings, 1956)

    Babylonian scribes counted the months before a king's first New Year as an accession year and began year one afterwards; Judean practice in this period counted that first partial year as year one. A book written in Babylon by a man trained in the Babylonian chancery would use the Babylonian count, and Jeremiah, writing in Judah, would use the Judean one. The same event then carries two numbers without either being wrong.

  • A genuine discrepancy, showing the book stands at a distance from the events

    held by the critical reading, which treats 1:1 as a later writer's approximation drawn from Jeremiah and 2 Kings

Are Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and the Song of the Three part of Daniel?

The Greek Daniel is longer than the Hebrew one. It carries the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men inside chapter 3, the story of Susanna, and the story of Bel and the Dragon, and the Latin Bible carried them after it. They are absent from the Hebrew and Aramaic text, and no copy of them was found among the Daniel manuscripts at Qumran. Jerome translated them but marked them as coming from the Greek rather than from the Hebrew he was working from, and his note is the ancestor of the Protestant arrangement of twelve chapters. This site holds them as labeled study resources, honestly named, read for what they show about how Daniel was heard in the Greek-speaking world, and never presented as canon.

  • Canonical, as part of the book of Daniel

    held by the Roman Catholic tradition, formally settled at the Council of Trent in 1546, and the Eastern Orthodox churches, which receive them in their Greek text

  • Edifying, but outside the canon

    held by Jerome, who flagged their Greek origin in his prefaces, and the Reformers after him, who printed them separately as writings useful to read and not to establish doctrine

The Jewish writings, read in full→

The Text and the Spade

  • The Masoretic Textc. AD 900 (Leningrad and Aleppo Codices)

    The standard Hebrew and Aramaic text behind English translations. Its most striking feature in this book is the language seam: Hebrew from 1:1 to 2:4a, Aramaic from 2:4b through 7:28, then Hebrew again to the end. The switch happens mid-verse, at the moment the Babylonian wise men open their mouths, 'Then the astrologers answered the king in Aramaic' (2:4), and the Aramaic then runs on for five and a half chapters after the speech has ended.

  • The Qumran Daniel scrollsearliest copies c. 125 BC

    Eight manuscripts of Daniel were recovered from Caves 1, 4, and 6. They preserve material from most of the book and, where they overlap, agree closely with the Masoretic consonantal text, including the Hebrew-to-Aramaic switch at 2:4b. Their date is what carries weight in the composition debate: the earliest of them stand within a few decades of the date the critical reading assigns to the book's writing.

  • 4Q174, the Florilegium from Cave 41st century BC

    A witness to standing rather than to text. This anthology of scriptural passages introduces a quotation with a formula naming the source as the book of Daniel the prophet, which shows a community already treating Daniel as prophetic Scripture, not as recent literature. The same collection places Daniel beside passages from the Psalms and Isaiah without distinction.

  • The Old Greek Daniel, and Papyrus 967translation probably 2nd century BC; Papyrus 967 copied in the 3rd century AD

    The Old Greek translation of Daniel differs from the Hebrew substantially, especially in chapters 4 to 6, where it is longer in places and shorter in others and tells parts of the story differently. Papyrus 967 is its most important early witness and orders the chapters 1 to 4, then 7 to 8, then 5 to 6, then 9 to 12, keeping the two four-kingdom visions together. It also carries the Greek additions.

  • Theodotion Danielthe version the church adopted, in use from the 2nd century AD

    The Greek Daniel that Christians actually read is the version associated with Theodotion, which stands much closer to the Hebrew than the Old Greek does. Jerome notes in his preface to Daniel that the churches read the book in Theodotion's version rather than in the Septuagint, and gives no reason beyond the fact of it. The Old Greek survives in a single Greek minuscule and in the Syriac Hexaplaric translation, which is why its readings were largely unknown until Papyrus 967 was published.

  • The Nabonidus Cylinder from Ur6th century BC; recovered at Ur in the 19th century

    The single most cited vindication of Daniel. Belshazzar, the king of chapter 5, was unknown outside the Bible: the Greek historians and the Babylonian priest Berossus knew Nabonidus as Babylon's last king and preserved no Belshazzar at all, and the name was treated for centuries as the book's clearest mistake. Clay cylinders of Nabonidus deposited in the ziggurat at Ur carry a prayer for the king and for Bel-shar-usur, named as his firstborn son. The name is real, and it is royal.

  • The Nabonidus Chronicle (BM 35382)cuneiform tablet, copied later from 6th-century records

    The chronicle records that Nabonidus stayed years at Teima in Arabia while the crown prince remained in Babylon with the army, which is the arrangement Daniel 5 assumes: a king holding the capital while another man held the throne. It also explains the strangest detail in the chapter. Belshazzar offers Daniel the third place in the kingdom (5:16, 5:29), an odd reward from a monarch, and exactly the right one from a co-regent who was himself only second. The chronicle also dates the fall of the city to Cyrus's forces in 539 BC.

  • The Cyrus Cylinder (BM 90920)539 BC, from Babylon

    Cyrus's own account of taking Babylon and of returning deported peoples and their gods to their home sanctuaries. It gives the imperial policy under which the exiles went home and under which Daniel's career continues past the change of empire, 'So this Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius, and in the reign of Cyrus the Persian' (6:28). It bears on the book's frame, since Daniel dates his last vision to the third year of that reign (10:1).

  • Koldewey's excavation of BabylonGerman excavations 1899 to 1917

    The Ishtar Gate, the Processional Way, the great Southern Palace with its throne room, and mile after mile of bricks stamped with Nebuchadnezzar's name and building claims. This is the physical setting of chapters 1 to 5, and it is also the commentary on 4:30, where the king looks over his work and says 'Is not this great Babylon, which I have built for the royal dwelling-place, by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?' The excavation shows that the boast was accurate. The chapter is about what happened next.

  • The Babylonian Chronicle for Nebuchadnezzar's early years (BM 21946)cuneiform tablet, published by D. J. Wiseman in 1956

    This tablet fixed the dates that Daniel 1:1 turns on. It records Nebuchadnezzar's victory at Carchemish and his campaign into Syria and Palestine while still crown prince in 605 BC, his accession that same year, and his capture of Jerusalem in 597. Both the setting of Daniel 1 and the two-system explanation of its regnal date rest on the chronology this tablet established.

  • The Jehoiachin ration tabletscuneiform tablets from Babylon, c. 592 BC; published by Ernst Weidner in 1939

    Administrative records of oil and barley issued from the royal stores to captives held in Babylon, among them Yaukin, king of the land of Yahud, and his sons. They are not about Daniel, and they document his world exactly: deported Judean royalty kept at the palace on rations, which is the situation Daniel 1:3-5 describes from the inside for a different set of young men.

The Story of Ahiqar

Aramaic, with an Assyrian court settingthe oldest surviving copy is a 5th-century BC papyrus from the Jewish colony at Elephantine in Egypt; the tale is older

The parallel

A wise counsellor serves an Assyrian king, is slandered by a member of his own household, is condemned, is preserved alive, and returns to the court vindicated and honored, with a body of proverbs attached to his name. The shape matches Daniel 3 and 6 closely: a foreign courtier of exceptional wisdom, envious colleagues, a legal trap, a sentence, deliverance, and restoration to office.

Read honestly

The parallel is genre, and it is genuine. Stories of the wise courtier vindicated circulated widely in the Aramaic-speaking Near East, and Daniel 1 to 6 is recognizably written in that form. That tells us what kind of writing the chapters are, not whether their events happened, in the same way that a battle account written in the conventions of a royal annal may still record a battle. What the Ahiqar tradition has no counterpart to is the theological content Daniel puts inside the form: a God who governs the empire the courtier serves, and who is confessed by the king at the end of each episode.

The Prayer of Nabonidus (4Q242)

Jewish Aramaic, from Qumran Cave 4the surviving copy 1st century BC

The parallel

A fragmentary Aramaic text in which Nabonidus, king of Babylon, tells how he was struck with an affliction for seven years while at Teima in Arabia, prayed to gods of silver and gold without effect, and was healed after a Jewish exorcist told him to give honor to the Most High God. The seven years, the royal affliction, the useless idols, and the final acknowledgment all correspond to Nebuchadnezzar's madness and confession in Daniel 4.

Read honestly

The closest known parallel to any part of Daniel, and it is genuinely close. What it proves is disputed and should be left disputed. It is read as a source Daniel adapted, as an independent version of the same tradition, and as a Jewish memory of a real episode in Nabonidus's reign that Daniel attaches to a different king. Two facts constrain any of those readings: Nabonidus did in fact spend about ten years at Teima, which the Babylonian records confirm, and the Qumran text is later than the events it describes by centuries, as Daniel is on any dating.

The four-metal and four-empire schemes

Greek and RomanHesiod c. 700 BC; Aemilius Sura before the 1st century BC

The parallel

Hesiod's Works and Days describes successive races of men made of gold, silver, bronze, and iron, each worse than the last. Aemilius Sura, quoted by Velleius Paterculus in his Roman History (1.6.6), lists a succession of world powers passing from the Assyrians to the Medes, the Persians, and the Macedonians, and then to Rome. Daniel 2 uses declining metals and Daniel 7 uses a succession of empires ending in a fourth.

Read honestly

Two separate conventions, both real, and Daniel uses both. The declining-metals figure and the four-empire sequence were available ways of talking about history in the ancient world, which is worth knowing before anyone calls the structure of Daniel 2 unique. Neither parallel accounts for what Daniel does with them. Hesiod's sequence runs downhill and stops; Sura's ends in Rome and celebrates it. Daniel's ends with a stone nobody cut, and the empire that fills the earth belongs to God.

The Aqhat epic and its Danel

Ugaritic, from Ras Shamra on the Syrian coasttablets copied c. 1400 to 1200 BC

The parallel

A Canaanite epic about a king named Danel who judges the cause of the widow and the fatherless at the gate, and who loses and mourns a son. Ezekiel, writing in the same generation as the exilic Daniel, names a Daniel between Noah and Job as a byword for righteousness (Ezekiel 14:14, 20) and again for wisdom, 'Behold, you are wiser than Daniel; no secret is hidden from you' (Ezekiel 28:3).

Read honestly

The parallel is a name and a reputation for just judgment, and the question it raises is worth stating fairly. Some scholars take Ezekiel's Daniel as this older figure, on the ground that Noah and Job are both ancient and non-Israelite, which would make a set of three ancients. Others take it as Ezekiel's own contemporary, who was by then decades into a career at the Babylonian court famous for exactly the two things Ezekiel names, righteousness and access to secrets, and note that Ezekiel 28:3 addresses a Phoenician king who would have known the Babylonian court's reputation. The Ugaritic Danel is not a match on the second point: his epic gives him justice at the gate and no revealed secrets at all. The question is open, and neither answer settles anything about the book of Daniel.

Babylonian dream omens and the mantic professions

Mesopotamianthe omen series copied throughout the 1st millennium BC

The parallel

Babylon maintained trained specialists in celestial omens, dream interpretation, and exorcism, working from vast written series of recorded signs and their outcomes. Daniel names those professions repeatedly and accurately: 'the magicians, and the enchanters, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans' (2:2), the corps Daniel is trained into (1:4) and later set over (2:48).

Read honestly

Background rather than borrowing, and it is exact background. The book knows what a Babylonian court did with a dream and stages its own contest inside those rules. The court method needed the dream before it could work the omen lists, which is why the demand of 2:5 to produce the dream itself breaks the profession, and why the wise men answer that only gods 'whose dwelling is not with flesh' (2:11) could meet it. The chapter is built on a working knowledge of the system it defeats.

Prophecy and Fulfillment

Visible Return in the Clouds

The promise · Daniel 7:13

I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven.

Where it landed · Revelation 1:7

Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him.

The Messiah will return visibly in the clouds.

Resurrection of Old Testament Saints

The promise · Daniel 12:2

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.

Where it landed · John 5:28-29

Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment.

All the dead will be resurrected for judgment - some to life, some to condemnation.

Reign Forever

The promise · Daniel 7:14

And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion.

Where it landed · Revelation 11:15

The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.

The Messiah's reign will be eternal.

The Great Tribulation

The promise · Daniel 12:1

At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book.

Where it landed · Matthew 24:21

For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be.

A period of unprecedented trouble will come upon the world before Christ's return.

Given All Authority

The promise · Daniel 7:13-14

And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him.

Where it landed · Matthew 28:18

And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.

The Messiah would receive all authority and dominion.

The Antichrist Revealed

The promise · Daniel 9:27

And he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering. And on the wing of abominations shall come one who makes desolate, until the decreed end is poured out on the desolator.

Where it landed · 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4

Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.

A final world ruler will arise who opposes God and demands worship.

Abomination of Desolation

The promise · Daniel 11:31

Forces from him shall appear and profane the temple and fortress, and shall take away the regular burnt offering. And they shall set up the abomination that makes desolate.

Where it landed · Matthew 24:15-16

So when you see the abomination of desolation spoken of by the prophet Daniel, standing in the holy place (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.

A final desecration of the temple will signal the beginning of the worst tribulation.

Messiah Cut Off But Not for Himself

The promise · Daniel 9:26

And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end thereof wars and desolations are determined.

Where it landed · Romans 4:25

Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.

Daniel prophesied that Messiah would be 'cut off' (a Hebrew term often meaning violent death), but crucially 'not for himself'—meaning His death would be substitutionary. The subsequent ongoing role of Messiah in Daniel's 70 weeks framework implies resurrection.

Daniel carries 13 more prophecy pairs. See the full ledger.

The Pulpit on Daniel

  • The Unconquerable King

    The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 949: “The Unconquerable King” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)

    Charles SpurgeonDaniel 4:34-35

  • The Scales of Judgment

    The New Park Street Pulpit, Sermon No. 257: “The Scales of Judgment” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)

    Charles SpurgeonDaniel 5:27

  • The Lions' Den

    The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 2859: “The Lions' Den” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)

    Charles SpurgeonDaniel 6:20

  • Daniel's Band

    The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 2256: “Daniel's Band” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)

    Charles SpurgeonDaniel 10:11

  • Knowledge Commended

    The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Sermon No. 609: “Knowledge Commended” (lightly modernized text, CCEL edition)

    Charles SpurgeonDaniel 11:32-33

Where Daniel leads

The heaviest chapters and the distinctive words of Daniel

1,862 cross-references flow out of its 5 heaviest chapters · 8 words are distinctively its own · 6 featured studies cite it.

Counted from this book's own cross-references, its words, and the studies that cite it.

Heaviest chapter

Daniel 2Sends 435 cross-references outward: the most connected chapter in the book.

Distinctive word

שׇׁלְטָן“empire (abstractly or concretely)” (H7985): 14 of its 14 occurrences in all of Scripture fall in this book (100%).

People and Places

the court, the plain, the river

DanielBelteshazzar: the statesman-seer; "God is my judge"NebuchadnezzarBabylon's greatest king: pride, madness, confession
Shadrach, Meshach, AbednegoHananiah, Mishael, Azariah: the three of the furnace
BelshazzarCo-regent son of Nabonidus; the feast and the wall
Darius the MedeReceiver of the kingdom at Babylon's fall (5:31; 6)
Cyrus the PersianThe third-year datum (10:1); liberator of Ezra 1
Gabriel & MichaelThe first named angels in Scripture
Antiochus IV EpiphanesUnnamed, but the referent of ch. 8's little horn
BabylonThe plain of Dura (3:1)Shushan by the Ulai (8:2)The Hiddekel / Tigris (10:4)Jerusalem: offstage, and prayed toward (6:10)
Daniel in the Lions' Den: Gustave Doré
My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions' mouths. Gustave Doré, Doré’s English Bible (1866), public domain · Daniel 6:22

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