Book of Daniel

Overview

• The Book of Daniel is an Old Testament book set during the Babylonian exile in the sixth century before Christ. It tells the story of the prophet Daniel and his companions, who keep faith with God inside a hostile foreign court, and it records visions of the rise and fall of empires and the everlasting kingdom of God.
• The Church reads it as one of the great prophetic books: its vision of "one like a son of man" coming on the clouds (Daniel 7) is the very title Christ takes for Himself.

Summary

Daniel was among the young Judeans carried off to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar after the fall of Jerusalem, and he rose to a high place in the royal court through a God-given gift for interpreting dreams and visions.[^1] The book falls into two halves: the familiar stories of faithfulness under pressure — the three young men in the furnace, Daniel in the lions' den — and the apocalyptic visions of four successive kingdoms and of the kingdom of God that outlasts them all. Christ Himself names Daniel a prophet (Mark 13.14; Matthew 24.15), and His most frequent title for Himself, "the Son of Man," is drawn from Daniel's vision of one who comes on the clouds of heaven to receive an everlasting dominion. In the Church's Greek Old Testament, Daniel is the one book that does not keep the original Septuagint translation: the old Greek version was judged so poor that Christians adopted the later, more faithful rendering of Theodotion — "in almost all manuscripts of the Greek Bible it is Theodotion's Daniel, not the original Septuagint version, that appears."[^3] The Orthodox Daniel also preserves three portions absent from the Hebrew and Protestant canon: the Song of the Three Holy Children, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon.[^2] The Prophet Daniel is commemorated on December 17.[^1]

Sources

[^1]: OrthodoxWiki, Prophet Daniel — Daniel as a captive in Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar, interpreter of dreams and visions, named a prophet by Christ (Mark 13:14; Matthew 24:15), commemorated December 17. [^2]: OrthodoxWiki, Septuagint — the "additions to Daniel" (the Song of the Three Holy Children, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon) belong to the Septuagint/Orthodox Old Testament and are absent from the Masoretic and Protestant canons. [^3]: F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture, p. 50.