Who was Daniel in the Bible?

A captive at the king’s court

The book of Daniel opens with Babylon taking Jerusalem’s best young men: “youths in whom was no defect,” of royal and noble families, to be schooled for three years in “the learning and the language of the Chaldeans” (Daniel 1:4). Daniel is one of them, and the first thing Babylon takes from him is his name.

Now among these of the children of Judah were Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. The prince of the eunuchs gave names to them: to Daniel he gave the name Belteshazzar; to Hananiah, Shadrach; to Mishael, Meshach; and to Azariah, Abednego.

Daniel means “God is my judge.” Belteshazzar, Nebuchadnezzar says, was given “according to the name of my god” (4:8); scholars connect it to a Babylonian phrase meaning “protect the life of the king.” Don’t confuse it with Belshazzar, the ruler who saw the writing on the wall: two letters apart in English, two different men. Daniel kept the new name and drew his own line elsewhere. He refused the king’s food and wine, and won a ten-day test on vegetables and water.

What he is known for

• Dreams. He tells Nebuchadnezzar both the king’s dream and its meaning: a statue of gold, silver, bronze and iron on feet of iron and clay (Daniel 2). The king makes him ruler over the province of Babylon.
• The tree. He warns the king that his pride will cost him his reason (Daniel 4), a story with a puzzle of its own.
• The wall. An old man by now, he reads MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN at Belshazzar’s feast (the writing on the wall).
• The lions. He keeps praying toward Jerusalem against a royal decree and spends a night in the den (why he was thrown in).
• The visions. Chapters 7 to 12 are told in the first person: four beasts from the sea, “one like a son of man” coming with the clouds (7:13), seventy weeks of years, and the Hebrew Bible’s clearest promise of resurrection (12:2).

The fiery furnace, often pinned on him, belongs to his three friends; Daniel never appears in chapter 3.

A career of sixty years

A single line spans his life: “Daniel continued even to the first year of King Cyrus” (1:21). If he came to Babylon as a teenager in 605 BC, he was around eighty when Babylon fell to Persia in 539 BC. He served Nebuchadnezzar, saw the empire end in one night, and then rose again under the new rulers, a survivor of every regime change.

The other Daniel

The prophet Ezekiel, an exile in Babylon in the same years, names a Daniel three times.

though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they would deliver only their own souls by their righteousness

He also mocks the king of Tyre as “wiser than Daniel” (Ezekiel 28:3). Traditional readers take this as Daniel of Babylon, already famous. Many scholars point out that Ezekiel spells the name Dan’el, and that clay tablets from Ugarit, in Syria, tell of an ancient just king named Danel. A hero of righteousness beside Noah and Job may be that older figure.

Beyond the Hebrew book

Catholic and Orthodox Bibles add Greek chapters: Susanna, where young Daniel exposes two lying elders in court, and Bel and the Dragon, with a second night among the lions. Most scholars date the book’s final form to the 160s BC; traditional readers hold that Daniel wrote it (when Daniel was written). His traditional tomb stands at Susa, in today’s Iran, under a tall white dome, and pilgrims still visit it.