Daniel

Half of this book is stories about surviving an empire and half is visions about outlasting one, and both halves make the same claim: the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whomever he will. The stories are famous — the diet test, the fiery furnace, the writing on the wall, the lions' den — and they are not children's tales but case studies in how to serve a government you cannot approve of. Daniel eats the vegetables and takes the promotion; the three refuse the statue and say they do not need to know whether they will be rescued; Daniel keeps his windows open and prays anyway. The visions that follow are the Old Testament's most sustained apocalyptic, and their imagery — beasts from the sea, a horn that speaks great things, one like a son of man coming with the clouds, seventy weeks, a resurrection of some to everlasting life and some to shame — runs straight into the New Testament, which quotes or alludes to Daniel more than almost any other book. It is also the Old Testament's most contested book: its date, its four kingdoms, its little horn and its seventy weeks are all read in more than one serious way, and this bundle sets out the readings without choosing between them.

Themes

• The Most High rules — Stated by pagan kings more often than by Daniel — Nebuchadnezzar says it after losing his mind, Darius after a sleepless night. The book's thesis is put in the mouths of the people it is aimed at.
• But if not — The three refuse the statue without claiming to know the outcome (3:17-18): our God is able to deliver us, and if he does not, we still will not worship. Obedience decoupled from the result.
• Kingdoms that end — Every image in the book is a sequence: metals, beasts, horns, kings of north and south — and every sequence ends the same way, with a kingdom that is given rather than seized and that does not pass to anyone else.
• One like a son of man — The figure in 7:13 who comes with the clouds and receives dominion — the phrase Jesus uses of himself more than any other, and the passage quoted at his trial.
• Dreams and their interpreters — Four times a foreign expert fails and a Jewish exile succeeds, and each time the credit is refused: this secret is not revealed to me for any wisdom I have more than anyone living.
• Prayer under pressure — Daniel prays before an impossible deadline in chapter 2, three times a day with the windows open in chapter 6, and for his people with Jeremiah's scroll open in chapter 9 — all of them while holding office.
• Resurrection — 12:2 is the clearest statement in the Old Testament that the dead will rise, some to everlasting life and some to shame — and it arrives at the end of the darkest chapter in the book.

Outline

• 1. Ten days of vegetables — Deportation, re-education and renaming — and a quiet test that keeps four young men out of the king's food without a confrontation.
• 2. A stone cut without hands — A king demands the dream as well as its meaning; a statue of four metals is shattered by a stone that grows into a mountain.
• 3. But if not — A statue of gold, an orchestra, and three men who refuse to bow without claiming to know whether they will be rescued.
• 4. The tree cut down — Nebuchadnezzar's own memoir: a dream about a felled tree, a year of grace ignored, seven periods of madness, and a doxology.
• 5. Weighed in the balances — A feast using the temple vessels, a hand writing on plaster, and a king who knew the story of chapter 4 and learned nothing from it.
• 6. The lions' den — A law designed around one man's habits, an emperor caught by his own irrevocable decree, and windows that stay open.
• 7. The Ancient of Days — Four beasts out of the sea, a court that sits, and one like a son of man given a kingdom that will not pass away.
• 8. The ram and the goat — A vision explicitly identified — Media-Persia and Greece — and a small horn that stops the daily sacrifice.
• 9. Seventy weeks — Daniel reads Jeremiah, prays the book's great confession, and is given an answer measured in sevens that has been read in more ways than any other passage here.
• 10. A man clothed in linen — A three-week fast, a figure by the Tigris, and an angel delayed twenty-one days by a prince of Persia.
• 11. Kings of the north and south — The most detailed prophecy in the Old Testament — two centuries of Ptolemaic and Seleucid warfare in forty-five verses.
• 12. Many who sleep in the dust — Michael stands up, the dead rise to life or to shame, and the wise shine — with the book sealed and the last word to Daniel personally.

Chapters

• Daniel 1 — A programme of assimilation done properly: take the promising young men, teach them the language and literature, feed them from the king's table, and change their names. Three of those four are accepted without complaint. The fourth is where the line gets drawn, and it is drawn quietly, by negotiation, over food.
• Daniel 2 — A king demands the impossible — tell me the dream as well as its meaning — and the experts say plainly that no one on earth can do it, only the gods, and they do not live among us. That sentence is the setup: the rest of the chapter is God living among people and telling a foreign king what is coming.
• Daniel 3 — The king who was told he was the head of gold builds a statue that is gold from top to bottom — ninety feet of it — and requires the empire to bow to it on cue. Three men decline, and their answer removes the one thing that would have made the refusal safe: they do not claim to know whether they will be rescued.
• Daniel 4 — The only chapter in the Old Testament written as a foreign emperor's own testimony, circulated to all peoples, nations and languages. He tells the story against himself: a dream he could not read, a warning he ignored for a year, and seven periods living like an animal until he looked up.
• Daniel 5 — A king throws a feast with the vessels his grandfather looted from the temple, and a hand appears and writes four words on the plaster. The point of the chapter is stated in the middle of Daniel's speech: you knew all this — you knew what happened to Nebuchadnezzar — and you did not humble your heart.
• Daniel 6 — The most carefully engineered trap in the Bible. Daniel's rivals cannot find a fault in his administration, so they legislate against the one thing they know he will not stop doing — and they use the empire's own boast, that its decrees cannot be changed, to catch the emperor as well as the man.
• Daniel 7 — The book's centre. Four monstrous animals come up out of a churning sea, the last one with a horn that speaks great things — and then the scene changes to a courtroom, thrones are set, and one like a son of man is brought before the Ancient of Days and given a kingdom that does not end.
• Daniel 8 — The one vision in the book whose animals are named outright: the ram is Media and Persia, the goat is Greece, and the great horn broken at the height of its power is its first king. The little horn that follows desecrates the sanctuary and stops the daily sacrifice — and the chapter's own interpretation places all of it in the Greek period.
• Daniel 9 — The chapter begins with Bible study. Daniel is reading Jeremiah, works out that the seventy years are nearly up, and responds not by waiting but by praying the longest confession in the book — and the answer he gets reframes seventy years as seventy sevens.
• Daniel 10 — The long final vision begins with three weeks of mourning and a figure by the Tigris so overwhelming that the men with Daniel run without seeing anything. What the messenger then says is the strangest disclosure in the book: he was delayed twenty-one days by the prince of the kingdom of Persia, and Michael had to come and help.
• Daniel 11 — The most detailed forecast in the Old Testament: two centuries of warfare between the king of the north and the king of the south, told without a single proper name, and matching the Ptolemaic and Seleucid conflicts so closely that it has been the centre of the argument about this book's date ever since Porphyry raised it in the third century.
• Daniel 12 — The book ends with the clearest statement of resurrection in the Old Testament — many who sleep in the dust will awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame — and then declines to answer the question the reader most wants answered. How long? A time, times and half a time. Go your way, Daniel; the words are shut up until the end.

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