Daniel 6 · An Iconic Story
The Old Man at the Window
The most famous children's story in the Bible is about a man of about eighty who had outlived two empires — and who, on the day praying became a capital crime, opened his windows and did exactly what he had done every day of his life.
Rivière does one thing that almost no other painter of this scene does: he turns Daniel around. The old man stands with his hands bound behind him and his back to the animals, facing the one shaft of light coming down the pit's mouth — so the lions are behind him and the light is in front of him, which is the chapter's own arrangement. The lions are painted from life and are not tame; two of them are watching him. Nothing in the picture explains why they do not move, and that is precisely what Daniel says at dawn: My God sent His angel.
The Day Praying Became a Capital Crime
Daniel 6, told plainly
Babylon had fallen. A new empire ran the world, and it kept Daniel on — an old Jewish exile so good at his job that the new king planned to put him over the whole kingdom. The other officials could not stand it. They went looking for something to charge him with, went through his administration line by line, and found nothing. So they said it out loud to each other: the only way to get this man is through his God.
Thus the administrators and satraps sought a charge against Daniel concerning the kingdom, but they could find no charge or corruption, because he was trustworthy, and no negligence or corruption was found in him. Finally these men said, “We will never find any charge against this Daniel, unless we find something against him concerning the law of his God.”They audited him and came up empty. That is the sentence the whole chapter turns on.
They talked the king into a law. For thirty days, nobody may ask anything of any god or man except the king; anyone who does goes into the lions' pit. The king signed it, and under Median and Persian law a signed decree could not be unsigned — not even by the man who signed it. Daniel heard the news, went home, opened the windows of his upper room toward Jerusalem, and knelt down and prayed and gave thanks three times that day, just as he had always done.
Now when Daniel learned that the document had been signed, he went into his house, where the windows of his upper room opened toward Jerusalem, and three times a day he got down on his knees, prayed, and gave thanks to his God, just as he had done before.No protest, no escalation, no change of routine — and no attempt to hide it either.
They threw him in and sealed the stone with the king's own ring. The king went home, refused his dinner, sent away the music, and lay awake all night. At first light he ran to the pit and shouted into it. And a voice came back up: My God sent His angel and shut the lions' mouths.
At the first light of dawn, the king got up and hurried to the den of lions. When he reached the den, he cried out in a voice of anguish, “O Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you serve continually, been able to deliver you from the lions?” Then Daniel replied, “O king, may you live forever! My God sent His angel and shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt me, for I was found innocent in His sight, and I have done no wrong against you, O king.”The king runs; the old man answers from the bottom of the pit, and answers politely.
Seventy Years in Babylon
One life, drawn to scale. The powers he outlived run along the top; his own book runs along the bottom. The lions come at the far right.
Scripture gives the fixed points: the deportation in the third year of Jehoiakim (Daniel 1:1), Babylon's fall (Daniel 5:30), Daniel still in office in Cyrus's first year (Daniel 1:21) and receiving his last dated vision in Cyrus's third (Daniel 10:1). The reign spans along the top follow the standard Babylonian chronology. The ages are arithmetic, not revelation — the text never gives his age, and “about fifteen” at the start assumes the usual age of a court cadet. Shift that assumption a few years either way and he is still an old man at the pit.
Seven Places the Retellings Drift
what the text actually says, against what the story has become
“DANIEL WAS A YOUNG MAN”
Do the arithmetic the text hands you. He is deported in the third year of Jehoiakim, 605 BC. Babylon falls in 539 BC, and this chapter belongs to the reign that follows. That is roughly sixty-six years in Babylon before anyone mentions lions — and he is still in office in Cyrus's first year, still receiving visions in Cyrus's third. He is around eighty.
“DARIUS THE GREAT”
The text says Darius the MEDE, and says he received the kingdom at about sixty-two. Who he was is honestly disputed: Cyaxares II, on Xenophon's account, which is what the older commentators assume; Gubaru, the officer who took the city for Cyrus and then governed it; or a throne-title of Cyrus himself, reading 6:28 as “the reign of Darius, that is, the reign of Cyrus.” The page names the three and picks none.
“HE STARTED PRAYING BECAUSE OF THE LAW”
Verse 10 says he prayed as he did aforetime. He did not add a prayer, escalate into a protest, or move his mat to a window facing the palace. He went home and did the ordinary thing at the ordinary hour. The trap worked precisely because everybody already knew what he would do.
“FACING JERUSALEM WAS HIS OWN IDEA”
It is Solomon's instruction. At the dedication of the temple Solomon asked God in advance for exactly this case: when they are carried away captive, and they pray toward this house, hear from heaven. Daniel at his window is not improvising piety — he is obeying a prayer prayed two hundred years before he was born.
“A DEN OF LIONS” MEANS AN ARENA
The Aramaic word is gubba — a PIT. It has a mouth you cover with a stone and seal with a ring (6:17). It is a hole in the ground with a lid, not a Roman amphitheatre with tiers of spectators. Nine of the word's ten occurrences in the Bible are in this one chapter.
“THE LIONS WEREN'T HUNGRY”
Verse 24 answers that, and this page does not soften it: the accusers went into the same pit, and the text says they did not reach the floor. Whatever kept Daniel alive was not a full stomach. The chapter credits an angel, and says so in Daniel's own mouth.
“IT'S A STORY ABOUT DANIEL'S NERVE”
Verse 23 gives the reason in the text's own words: because he had trusted in his God. The Aramaic is heiman — and the same root is the word for what the auditors found in his administration in verse 4: trustworthy. Hebrews 11:33 files the episode under faith, not courage.
When they sin against You—for there is no one who does not sin—and You become angry with them and deliver them to an enemy who takes them as captives to his own land, whether far or near, and when they come to their senses in the land to which they were taken, and they repent and plead with You in the land of their captors, saying, ‘We have sinned and done wrong; we have acted wickedly,’ and when they return to You with all their heart and soul in the land of the enemies who took them captive, and when they pray to You in the direction of the land that You gave to their fathers, the city You have chosen, and the house I have built for Your Name, then may You hear from heaven, Your dwelling place, their prayer and petition, and may You uphold their cause. May You forgive Your people who have sinned against You and all the transgressions they have committed against You, and may You grant them compassion in the eyes of their captors to show them mercy.Solomon's prayer at the temple dedication — the exile is foreseen, and the direction of the captives' praying is asked for in advance.
As he did aforetime - He did not abate his prayers for the king's command, nor did he break the law purposely, because he did no more than he was wont to do in serving his God.
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765), on Dan 6:10
An Empire, a Law That Could Not Be Unmade, and a Royal Menagerie
the machinery the first readers took for granted
Now it pleased Darius to appoint 120 satraps to rule throughout the kingdom, and over them three administrators, including Daniel, to whom these satraps were accountable so that the king would not suffer loss. Soon, by his extraordinary spirit, Daniel distinguished himself among the administrators and satraps. So the king planned to set him over the whole kingdom.Satraps under presidents: the layered provincial administration is exactly how the Persian empire was run, and the Aramaic here uses the Persian words for it.
Start with the paperwork, because the plot is a paperwork plot. The kingdom is organised under satraps with three presidents over them, and Daniel is one of the three. His colleagues want him gone, so they audit him — and the Aramaic word for what they were forced to conclude about his administration is the same root as the word the chapter later uses for his faith. His record and his religion turn out to be one word, which is why the only charge they could bring was the one they brought.
Blessed indeed is a life so led that even enemies can find no cause for accusation, except perhaps in matter pertaining to God's law.
Jerome· Commentary on Daniel, Chapter Six (420), on Dan 6:5
It is the highest testimony to a godly man's walk, when his most watchful enemies can find no ground of censure save in that he walks according to the law of God even where it opposes the ways of the world.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on Dan 6:5
The law they wrote could not be taken back, and that is not a storyteller's device. Esther runs into the same wall twice — the king's written word cannot be revoked, so a second decree has to be written alongside the first (Esther 1:19; 8:8) — and the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus records a Persian king unable to recall a death sentence he had already spoken (Library of History17.30). The one honest caution comes from Adam Clarke, who doubted the rule applied to every enactment a king ever made. Either way, the chapter's king is trapped by his own signature, and the text says he spent the day trying to find a way out.
As soon as the king heard this, he was deeply distressed and set his mind on delivering Daniel, and he labored until sundown to rescue him.The king labours until sundown to deliver him. The villain of this chapter is not Darius.
As for the lions: kings of the ancient Near East kept them. The Assyrian lion-hunt reliefs from Nineveh, now in the British Museum, show animals released from cages into a royal enclosure for the king to shoot. A palace with a pit of lions in it is not a fairy tale detail; it is what a royal menagerie looked like, and it is where an execution by lions comes from.
Then the king went to his palace and spent the night fasting. No entertainment was brought before him, and sleep fled from him.No supper, no music, no sleep. A pagan king keeps a vigil for a Jewish civil servant.
How sincere was the king's good will, when he would not touch food night or day or grant his eyelids sleep, but as long as the prophet was in danger he himself remained in a state of sympathetic suspense. But if a king who knew not God did such a thing for another man whose deliverance he desired, how much more ought we to implore God's mercy for our own sins with fastings and watchings.
Jerome· Commentary on Daniel, Chapter Six (420), on Dan 6:18
Two disciplines stand side by side in this chapter — Daniel's fixed hours of prayer, three times a day for a lifetime, and the king's one night without food or sleep. Derek Prince built an entire book on the first of them, Shaping History Through Prayer and Fasting (1973), arguing from Daniel that the praying of ordinary believers moves the history of nations. The practice itself has its own page: fasting.
Four Things the Chapter Will Not Tell You
the silences named as silence, never filled
Daniel 6 is a tightly reported chapter. It gives the number of satraps, the wording of the decree, the seal on the stone, and the king's sleepless night — and then goes quiet on the four questions readers most want answered. Each silence has gathered centuries of good guessing around it, and a guess should be labelled a guess.
How old was Daniel?
The text gives dates, not ages. It says he was deported in the third year of Jehoiakim, that he was still in office in Cyrus's first year, and that his last dated vision came in Cyrus's third. Lay those against the fall of Babylon and the answer is an old man — around eighty when he goes into the pit — but the number is arithmetic, and this page shows the arithmetic rather than asserting the number. What the chapter does insist on is the length of the record: a career long enough that his enemies could audit decades of it and find nothing.
Who was Darius the Mede?
Scripture names him, says he received the kingdom at about sixty-two, and tells us nothing else about his family, his capital, or his death. Three identifications are held by serious readers — Cyaxares II on Xenophon's account, which is what the older commentators quoted on this page assume; Gubaru, the officer who took the city for Cyrus and governed it after; and a throne-name of Cyrus himself, reading the chapter's last verse as one reign described two ways. None of the three is the text's own claim, and this page does not pick for the reader.
Did Daniel have a family?
Not a wife, not a child, not a household — nothing beyond the upper room with the windows in it. The book follows him through four reigns and never once looks sideways at a private life. Whether that is because there was none or because the book was not interested, Scripture does not say.
What became of him?
The last dated word in the book is Cyrus's third year, and the last word spoken to him is a personal promise about the end of the days — that he will rest, and stand in his allotted place. There is no deathbed scene and no grave. The man who spent seventy years explaining other people's endings does not get one written for him.
In the third year of Cyrus king of Persia, a message was revealed to Daniel, who was called Belteshazzar. The message was true, and it concerned a great conflict. And the understanding of the message was given to him in a vision.The book's last date: Cyrus's third year. After this, silence.
One Word Ties the Fire and the Pit Together
the New Testament's own reading first, then the word the two deliverances share
who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions,The New Testament files this chapter under faith, in one clause, with no elaboration: “stopped the mouths of lions.”
That is where the beat starts, because that is where the New Testament starts: the den is evidence of faith, not of nerve. And then there is a detail in the Aramaic that the English cannot show you.
Two deliverances · one word · two verses
THE FURNACE
Nebuchadnezzar declared, “Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent His angel and delivered His servants who trusted in Him. They violated the king’s command and risked their lives rather than serve or worship any god except their own God.Nebuchadnezzar's own confession after the fire.
THE PIT
The king was overjoyed and gave orders to lift Daniel out of the den, and when Daniel was lifted out of the den, no wounds whatsoever were found on him, because he had trusted in his God.Daniel comes up without a scratch — and the text gives the reason: he had trusted in his God.
Two rescues, sixty years apart, in two different empires — and the book reaches for the same word both times, a word it uses nowhere else. Whoever stood in the fire is who stood in the pit. Where the site follows that figure through the Old Testament: the Angel of the LORD.
His angel - The same that was with the three children in the fiery furnace, whose presence made even the lion's den a strong-hold, his palace, his paradise. See the power of God over the fiercest creatures! See the care God takes of his faithful servants, especially when they are called to suffer for him!
John Wesley· Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765), on Dan 6:22
But the Lord stood by me and strengthened me, so that through me the message would be fully proclaimed, and all the Gentiles would hear it. So I was delivered from the mouth of the lion.Paul reaches for Daniel's language about his own trial — written by a man who was, that time, not spared the sword.
The page holds both without flinching, because the Bible does. Daniel came up out of the pit; Paul was delivered out of the lion's mouth and then executed anyway, and counted both as rescue. It is the “but if not” of the furnace chapter, said again in an apostle's voice.
So the king gave the order, and they brought Daniel and threw him into the den of lions. The king said to Daniel, “May your God, whom you serve continually, deliver you!” A stone was brought and placed over the mouth of the den, and the king sealed it with his own signet ring and with the rings of his nobles, so that nothing concerning Daniel could be changed.A stone laid over the mouth, sealed with the king's own signet.
Christians have loved this pair of verses for centuries: a stone over the mouth of a pit, sealed with a royal seal, a ruler arriving at first light, and a man alive on the other side of it — laid beside the sealed tomb of Matthew 27:66 and the dawn of Matthew 28:1. That reading belongs to the church's devotional tradition, and this page presents it as exactly that: treasured tradition, not a claim the chapter makes about itself. What the chapter claims for itself is the angel, and it claims it in Daniel's own mouth.
Be sober-minded and alert. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.The den shut one set of lions' mouths for one night. Peter names the lion still walking about.
THE ARTWORK
Tanner refuses the spotlight entirely. His Daniel is an old man sitting in the near-dark with the lions around him, small against the pit wall, hands folded, waiting — no halo, no shaft of glory, no heroic pose. It is the truest painting of this chapter's actual night: hours of darkness with nothing visible happening, which is all Daniel had until the king shouted down the shaft at dawn.
Henry Ossawa Tanner, Daniel in the Lions' Den (c. 1907-1918), Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
How the Great Commentators Read the Pit
the window, the faith, and the verse most retellings skip
Why the window mattered — and why it was not superstition
The obvious modern question about the open window is whether Daniel thought God was somehow located in Jerusalem. Theodoret answered it sixteen hundred years ago, and answered it the way the temple itself answers it — not a God confined to a place, but a God who had chosen a place to make Himself known:
When blessed Daniel in Babylon prayed, he opened the windows facing Jerusalem, not under the impression that God was confined there but from his knowledge that the divine manifestation occurred there.
Theodoret of Cyrus· Commentary on Psalm 28:2 (458), filed at Dan 6:10
Why he came out alive
The commentators are careful here in a way retellings usually are not. Daniel is not recorded as expecting a miracle. He is recorded as having decided, long before the decree, what he would do at the hour of prayer — and having left the outcome alone:
"Faith" is stated in Heb 11:33 to have been his actuating principle: a prelude to the Gospel. His belief was not with a view to a miraculous deliverance. He shut his eyes to the event, committing the keeping of his soul to God, in well-doing, as unto a faithful Creator (1Pe 4:19), sure of deliverance in a better life, if not in this.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on Dan 6:23
The furnace and the den, read together
Preaching through Hebrews 11, Chrysostom put the three men in the fire and the old man in the pit into the same sentence, and drew from both the same conclusion — that faith is what holds when the situation is not improving:
See how they were in death itself, Daniel encompassed by the lions, the three children abiding in the furnace, the Israelites, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, in diverse temptations; and yet not even so did they despair. For this is faith. When things are turning out adversely, then we ought to believe nothing adverse is done but all things in due order.
John Chrysostom· On the Epistle to the Hebrews, Homily 27:4 (407), filed at Dan 6:23
The two stories are told side by side, stage by stage, on Faith Under Fire.
Verse 24, which the children's books leave out
The chapter does not end with Daniel coming up. It ends with the men who engineered the decree going down, and with their households going down with them — and any honest reading has to say something about that. Clarke says the two things that need saying, and does not soften either of them:
It was perfectly just that they should suffer that death to which they had endeavored to subject the innocent; but it was savage cruelty to destroy the women and children who had no part in the transgression.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible (1832), on Dan 6:24
At the command of the king, the men who had falsely accused Daniel were brought and thrown into the den of lions—they and their children and wives. And before they had reached the bottom of the den, the lions overpowered them and crushed all their bones.Reported, not endorsed: the text records what a Persian king did to conspirators, in the manner of his own age.
Read the Great Books
the works that have carried this teaching — go further than this page
Commentary on Daniel
Jerome · 420
Written to answer the philosopher Porphyry, who argued the book was a forgery — which makes it the oldest sustained defence of Daniel in existence, and the source of two of the quotations above.
READ IT FREE AT TERTULLIAN.ORG →Commentary on the Whole Bible
Matthew Henry · 1710
Henry walks Daniel 6 verse by verse with a pastor's eye on the decree, the window, and the king's sleepless night — the classic English exposition of the chapter.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →Commentary on Daniel
Theodoret of Cyrus · 5th century
The great Antiochene reading of the book, unusually attentive to the historical setting; available in Robert C. Hill's modern English translation.
In print — find it wherever books are sold.
The Book of Daniel
Chuck Missler · verse-by-verse commentary
Pastor Marc's formative teacher works straight through the book with the chronology and the Medo-Persian setting laid out plainly — the best modern entry point for a reader who wants the whole of Daniel, not one chapter.
In print — find it wherever books are sold.
The Decree That Outlasted the Decree
I hereby decree that in every part of my kingdom, men are to tremble in fear before the God of Daniel: For He is the living God, and He endures forever; His kingdom will never be destroyed, and His dominion will never end. He delivers and rescues; He performs signs and wonders in the heavens and on the earth, for He has rescued Daniel from the power of the lions.” So Daniel prospered during the reign of Darius and the reign of Cyrus the Persian.The thirty-day law was written to abolish prayer to any god. It ends with the king publishing an empire-wide decree about the living God.
The men who wrote the law wanted one old man dead. What they got was a royal proclamation, sent to every people and nation and language in the empire, announcing that the God of the Jewish exile is the living God whose kingdom will never be destroyed — the same Aramaic root, at the end, that Daniel used at the bottom of the pit when he said the lions had not harmed him. Nothing had harmed him; nothing will harm the kingdom. And the man at the centre of it never argued, never organised a protest, and never changed his routine. He went upstairs at the usual hour, opened the windows, and knelt down, as he had done every day of a very long life.
GO ON FROM HERE
Built from MannaFest's research brief on the great stories of the exile and the gate-verified Daniel 6 quote pool — public-domain commentary quoted verbatim (Jerome, Theodoret of Cyrus, John Chrysostom, John Wesley, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Adam Clarke). Aramaic word data floor-verified against the site's word-level text of Daniel 6. Scripture BSB, fetched from the floor. The irreversible Medo-Persian decree is attested in Esther 1:19 and 8:8 and in Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 17.30; the identification of Darius the Mede with Cyaxares II follows Xenophon's Cyropaedia; royal lion-keeping is documented by the Ashurbanipal lion-hunt reliefs in the British Museum. Chuck Missler's The Book of Daniel is cited for the chronology. Artwork: Briton Rivière (1872) and Henry Ossawa Tanner (c. 1907-1918), both public domain, license-verified at Wikimedia Commons.