Why was Daniel thrown into the lions’ den?

A trap for an honest man

Babylon has fallen to Persia, in 539 BC, and the book’s new ruler, Darius the Mede, sets 120 governors and three presidents over the kingdom. Daniel, now about eighty, is one of the three, so good at the work that the king plans to set him over everything (Daniel 6:1–3). His colleagues go looking for dirt and find none.

Then these men said, “We won’t find any occasion against this Daniel, unless we find it against him concerning the law of his God.”

So they flatter the king. For thirty days, they propose, anyone who asks a petition “of any god or man” except the king goes to the den of lions. And they ask him to sign it “according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which doesn’t alter” (6:7–8). The book of Esther knows the same rule: a decree sealed with the king’s ring “may not be reversed by any man” (Esther 8:8). Darius signs, and traps himself.

What Daniel did

Daniel neither hides nor protests. He goes home and does what he has always done.

When Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house (now his windows were open in his room toward Jerusalem) and he kneeled on his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did before.

Both details are old. When Solomon dedicated the Temple, he asked God to hear exiles who prayed “toward their land,” toward “the city which you have chosen” (1 Kings 8:48), and a psalm prays “evening, morning, and at noon” (Psalm 55:17). Jews still face Jerusalem to pray, three times a day. His enemies only had to watch the window.

The night in the den

The king works until sunset to save him, but his own law cannot be changed. Daniel is thrown in. A stone is rolled over the mouth of the pit and sealed with the king’s signet. Darius spends the night fasting, without music, unable to sleep. At first light he runs to the den and calls down, “Daniel, servant of the living God, is your God, whom you serve continually, able to deliver you from the lions?” (6:20). The answer comes up from the dark.

My God has sent his angel, and has shut the lions’ mouths, and they have not hurt me, because innocence was found in me before him; and also before you, O king, I have done no harm.

How did he survive? The verse gives two reasons: an angel, and innocence. No harm was found on him, “because he had trusted in his God” (6:23). The Letter to the Hebrews later lists among the heroes of faith those who “stopped the mouths of lions” (Hebrews 11:33).

What happened to his accusers

The ending is grim. The king has the accusers thrown into the den with their wives and children, and the lions overpower them before they reach the bottom (6:24). Readers have long been uneasy here, since the Torah forbids putting children to death for a parent’s crime (Deuteronomy 24:16). But this is a Persian king’s justice, not Israel’s law, and Persian kings did punish whole families; Herodotus says Darius I executed the nobleman Intaphernes with nearly all his male kin (Histories 3.119). Then Darius orders his whole empire to “tremble and fear before the God of Daniel” (6:26).

No record outside the book names Darius the Mede, and who he was is still debated. The lions themselves were real enough: Assyrian kings hunted lions released from cages, as the reliefs from Nineveh in the British Museum show. Rubens painted Daniel among them around 1615, hands clasped and eyes raised to heaven. And the scene gave English an idiom: to walk into the lion’s den is to face hostile ground alone.