Writers of the Bible
Daniel
c. 620–536 BC · Deported nobleman · interpreter of dreams · statesman under four kings · man of the open window
Hebrew דָּנִיֵּאל (Daniyyel) — "God is my judge"; in Babylon he was renamed Belteshazzar, after a Babylonian god
A teenage captive who served two empires and four kings without once bending — and at over eighty chose the lions over a closed window.
The Books They Wrote (1)
From chapter 7 onward the book speaks in the first person — "I, Daniel" — and its visions are date-stamped to the reigns of named kings; Jesus himself cites it as the words of "the prophet Daniel" (Matthew 24:15). Because its prophecies trace the rise and fall of empires with such precision, many modern scholars date the book to the second century BC, after the events; believers reply that prediction is rather the book's point — its own repeated claim being that "there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries" (2:28).
Life Story
A teenager in the first wave
In 605 BC Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem's submission and skimmed off its best: young men "from the royal family and the nobility… without any physical defect, handsome, showing aptitude for every kind of learning" (1:3–4), to be reprogrammed through three years of Babylonian language, literature, and omen-lore, and renamed after Babylon's gods. Daniel — "God is my judge" — became Belteshazzar. He was perhaps fifteen years old, eight hundred miles from home, inside the most sophisticated assimilation machine on earth. His first recorded act is tiny and decisive: "Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the royal food and wine" (1:8). He did not refuse the pagan education or the pagan name — those he could carry — but somewhere a line had to exist, and he drew it early, politely, and immovably, proposing a ten-day test of vegetables and water to the nervous chief official. The whole architecture of the book rests on that verse: the man who would face the lions at eighty first learned, at fifteen, to be faithful in a lunch. God, for his part, gave the four young exiles knowledge and understanding, "and Daniel could understand visions and dreams of all kinds" (1:17).
Interpreter of dreams
Nebuchadnezzar dreamed of a colossal statue and demanded the impossible: his wise men must recount both the dream and its meaning, or die. Daniel asked for time, gathered his three friends to pray, and received the mystery in a vision of the night — then stood before the most dangerous man alive and gave the credit away in his opening line: "No wise man… can explain to the king the mystery he has asked about, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries" (2:27–28). The dream: a statue of gold, silver, bronze, and iron — a parade of empires — shattered by a rock "cut out, but not by human hands," which grew into a mountain and filled the whole earth. The pattern held for the rest of his career; he interpreted the king's dream of the felled tree, and had the courage to plead with the tyrant to repent before the madness fell on him (chapter 4). Decades later, on the empire's last night, Babylon's regent Belshazzar toasted his nobles from the gold goblets of Jerusalem's temple — and the fingers of a human hand wrote on the plaster: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN. The queen mother remembered an old man in whom "is the spirit of the holy gods." Daniel, by now near ninety, declined the purple robe and the gold chain before reading out the sentence: "You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting" (5:27). "That very night Belshazzar, king of the Babylonians, was slain" (5:30), and Persia took the city without a siege. Daniel had outlived the empire that deported him.
The lions' den at eighty
Under Darius the Mede, Daniel — now past eighty — was one of three administrators over the whole realm, about to be set over the other two. His rivals audited him and struck bedrock: "They could find no corruption in him, because he was trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent" (6:4). So they weaponized the only thing left — his praying — and flattered the king into a thirty-day ban on petitioning anyone but himself. Daniel read the decree and did exactly what he had always done: "he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before" (6:10). No protest, no hiding, not so much as an adjusted window latch. We file this story with the children's stories, but it is not a young man's story. It is the integrity of old age — a habit of prayer kept for nearly seventy years, now simply continued at the price of death. The king who loved him fasted through a sleepless night; at first light came the voice from the pit: "My God sent his angel, and he shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt me, because I was found innocent in his sight" (6:22). The decree Darius then published reads almost like a psalm: "he is the living God… he rescues and he saves" (6:26–27). The boy who would not eat the king's food had become the old man the lions would not eat.
The visions: "I, Daniel"
Halfway through, the book changes voice — the court stories give way to "I, Daniel," and the statesman becomes a seer whom the visions leave pale and exhausted ("I was appalled by the vision; it was beyond understanding," 8:27). He saw four great beasts rise from a churning sea — the empires again, now shown from heaven's side, as predators; then thrones set in place, the Ancient of Days seated amid fire, the court convened, the books opened; and then the verse Jesus loved best in all his Bible: "one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven," led into God's presence and given "authority, glory and sovereign power… an everlasting dominion that will not pass away" (7:13–14). Human empires climb out of the sea like beasts; the everlasting kingdom arrives like a man. Chapter 9 shows us the engine room of the man's life: he is reading. "I, Daniel, understood from the Scriptures, according to the word of the LORD given to Jeremiah the prophet, that the desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years" (9:2) — one prophet studying another prophet's scroll, Scripture already functioning as Scripture. And the reading produced not a calendar but a prayer: fasting, sackcloth, and one of the Bible's great confessions — "we have sinned… We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of your great mercy" (9:18). The angel Gabriel arrived while the prayer was still in the air, calling him by heaven's own name for him — "you who are highly esteemed" — and unveiled the seventy "sevens" counting down to "the Anointed One" (9:23–26).
He never went home
Daniel served some seventy years across two empires and at least four rulers — Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Darius the Mede, and Cyrus the Persian — and the book notes quietly that he "remained there until the first year of King Cyrus" (1:21): still at his post when the decree went out that sent the exiles home. He had read that return in Jeremiah's scroll and prayed it toward reality; then, as far as we know, he watched the caravans leave without him — a man in his mid-eighties, too valuable, or too frail, or simply not called to go. His last vision came in Cyrus's third year, by the Tigris (10:1); after that, silence. He almost certainly died in exile, at Babylon or Susa — where a famous Tomb of Daniel is venerated to this day, though the site rests on tradition, not Scripture. His book gives him something better than a homecoming: the last words spoken to him are a personal promise. "As for you, go your way till the end. You will rest, and then at the end of the days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance" (12:13). Daniel never saw Jerusalem again — but he had already seen further: the Ancient of Days on his throne, the books opened, the kingdom that fills the earth, and "multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth" awaking "to everlasting life" (12:2). He lies in the dust of Babylon on precisely that promise. Few lives in Scripture argue so completely that a person can serve pagan empires with total excellence and total integrity — at home nowhere, faithful everywhere.
Key Verse · Daniel 7:13–14
“There before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven… His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.”
Pointing to Christ
Jesus' favorite self-designation — "the Son of Man," used more than eighty times in the Gospels — is lifted straight from Daniel 7:13–14, the human figure who comes with the clouds and receives an everlasting dominion; Jesus quoted the verse at his trial, and it cost him his life (Mark 14:62–64). Nebuchadnezzar's dream had already told the same story in stone: a rock "cut out, but not by human hands" shatters the empires and grows into a mountain that fills the whole earth (2:34–35, 44) — a kingdom not of this world, which has been filling the earth since a Galilean carpenter announced it. The seventy "sevens" of chapter 9 run their countdown to "the Anointed One," who "will be put to death and will have nothing" (9:26) — Messiah cut off, and not for himself. And Daniel in the lions' den — condemned by the malice of accusers, sealed under a stone, found innocent by God, and brought up alive at first light while his accusers perish — is as clean an Old Testament sketch of vindicated innocence, of Easter morning, as we possess. The prophet of the everlasting kingdom drew its King from every angle; the Gospels supply his name.
Questions People Ask
Is Daniel history or legend?
The book plants itself in verifiable history, and the ground has repeatedly firmed under it. Belshazzar was once dismissed as fictional because the king-lists named Nabonidus as Babylon's last king — until cuneiform tablets showed that Nabonidus had left his son Belshazzar ruling as regent, which even explains the odd detail that Daniel was made "third highest ruler in the kingdom" (5:29): the top two seats were taken. Jesus treated Daniel as a real prophet (Matthew 24:15), and Ezekiel, his contemporary, already cites Daniel as a byword for righteousness (Ezekiel 14:14). Legends do not usually carry administrative titles, Persian loan-words, and a regent it took archaeology twenty-four centuries to confirm.
Was Daniel written after the events it predicts?
That is the mainstream critical view: because chapter 11 tracks the wars of the Greek kings down to about 165 BC with startling accuracy, many scholars conclude the book was written then — encouragement under persecution, with prophecy after the fact. Believers offer a two-part reply. First, the evidence runs earlier than the theory comfortably allows: Daniel appears among the Dead Sea Scrolls in multiple copies already treated as Scripture — quick work for a book supposedly composed only decades before — and its Aramaic and court detail fit the Babylonian-Persian era. Second, and more honestly: the objection assumes in advance that detailed predictive prophecy cannot happen. The book's own thesis is that it can — that "there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries," who "changes times and seasons; he deposes kings and raises up others" (2:21, 28). Your verdict on Daniel will largely follow your verdict on that claim.
What is the "son of man" vision, and why does it matter?
In Daniel 7, after four beast-empires rise from the sea, Daniel sees "one like a son of man" — a human figure, in contrast to the beasts — come with the clouds of heaven into the presence of the Ancient of Days and receive authority, glory, and an everlasting kingdom over all peoples (7:13–14). It matters because "Son of Man" became Jesus' favorite name for himself — over eighty times in the Gospels — and he meant this text by it. At his trial, asked under oath whether he was the Messiah, he answered by quoting Daniel 7: "you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven" (Mark 14:62) — and the high priest tore his clothes, because he understood exactly what was being claimed: not a modest title, but the figure to whom God gives the everlasting dominion.
Did Daniel ever go home?
No — and the book seems to want us to feel it. Deported at about fifteen, he prayed toward Jerusalem three times a day for some seventy years, read in Jeremiah's scroll that the exile's term was up, and interceded until the decree of Cyrus opened the road home (Ezra 1:1) — then stayed at his post while others returned; his final vision comes in Cyrus's third year, still in Babylonia (10:1). He likely died there or at Susa, where tradition — not Scripture — venerates his tomb. But the book refuses to end in homesickness: its last sentence is God's personal word to an old man who never saw Jerusalem again — "go your way till the end. You will rest, and then at the end of the days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance" (12:13). Daniel's true ticket home was resurrection.