The Book of Daniel
The book of Daniel is the great book of the resistance of faith. It stages believers exiled in Babylon, forced to choose between fidelity to their God and submission to a power that wants to dominate everything, even consciences. Through famous stories, the furnace and the lions’ den, and powerful visions of the end of time, it proclaims one same certainty: the empires pass, but the reign of God remains, and he will one day send a Son of Man to whom belongs everlasting dominion. The book is thus read on two planes at once: in the first, the exile in Babylon, six centuries before Christ; in the background, a far more recent trial, that in which the Greek king Antiochus Epiphanes, two centuries before Jesus, sought to force the Jews to deny their faith, profaned the Temple, and unleashed the persecution of the Maccabees. By speaking of the past, Daniel arms the believers of the present.
A book of exile, a word for the persecuted
The book is set in Babylon, at the time of the exile, at the court of the kings who destroyed Jerusalem. But under this ancient setting, it speaks to believers of a much later age, tried by a persecution that sought to force them to deny their faith, that of the Maccabees. By recounting how exiles once stood firm, it gives the persecuted of every age the courage to resist: better to die faithful than to live betraying God. It is a book written for the dark days, when faith costs dearly, and it teaches to hope beyond death itself. The persecutor demanded that they eat forbidden meats, worship his idols, renounce the Law on pain of death. Many gave in; others, the martyrs, preferred to perish. It is to these above all that Daniel speaks: through the furnace and the lions’ den, he shows them men who said no to the king and whom God delivered, and he promises them, even if they die, a greater deliverance, that of the resurrection.
Daniel, the faithful sage
The hero of the book bears a name that is already a whole program: Daniel means "God is my judge." A young exile taken to the court of Babylon, he there receives a pagan education and a service beside the king, but he passes through this foreign world without ever letting himself be absorbed by it. God fills him with gifts: “God gave knowledge and skill in all literature and wisdom; and Daniel understood all visions and dreams.” Daniel 1:17 Interpreter of the kings’ dreams, wiser than all their diviners, he shows that true wisdom comes not from the stars nor from the magicians, but from God alone, who governs history: “It is he who changes times and seasons, who removes kings and sets them up, who gives wisdom to the wise.” Daniel 2:21 Daniel thus becomes the model of the believer faithful in the midst of a world that ignores God: present, competent, esteemed, but without compromise on the essential.
Two books in one
Daniel divides into two very different halves. The first (chapters 1 to 6) gathers stories: Daniel and his companions at the court of Babylon, the kings’ dreams, the furnace, the lions’ den. The second (chapters 7 to 12) unfolds Daniel’s visions of the future of the world and the end of time. To this are added pages received by the Church as deuterocanonical, absent from the Hebrew Bible: the song of the three young men in the furnace, the story of Susanna, and the mockery of the idols of Bel and the dragon. The whole composes a book unique in its kind, half narrative, half prophecy, where the stories of the beginning prepare the visions of the end. Rare in the Bible, it is even written in two languages: one part in Hebrew, another in Aramaic, the tongue then spoken throughout the East. This double language reflects its double reach, one turned toward the people of God, the other toward the nations and their empires. The stories teach how to live faithfully under a hostile power; the visions unveil where history is going. Together they weave a single message: hold firm today, because the future belongs to God.
The apocalyptic genre
The second half of the book inaugurates a new genre, the apocalyptic, that is, the revelation, by visions and symbols, of what God holds in store for history. Monstrous beasts, metals, numbers, heavenly figures: this veiled language is not meant to bewilder, but to console the persecuted. It tells them that history does not escape God, that the powers crushing them are numbered and limited, and that in the end evil will be conquered and the righteous raised up. There where the present seems given over to brute force, the apocalypse unveils the other side of the scene: God holds the helm, and the victory belongs to him. This genre will find its fulfillment in the last book of the Bible, Revelation, which will take up the images of Daniel to tell the victory of the Lamb.