Daniel

Daniel is a Jewish exile carried to Babylon and the central human figure of the book that bears his name, a courtier and visionary whom the text also calls Belteshazzar, the name given him in Babylonian service (Daniel 1:7). The Hebrew name Daniel means “God is my judge,” from dan, judge, and el, God; the Babylonian name is usually analyzed as containing the divine name Bel (Marduk), though its exact sense is uncertain and scholars do not agree on the reconstruction.

What Scripture says of him is consistent across the book: he is a young man of Judah taken into the royal service, who rises by interpreting dreams and reading cryptic writing. In Daniel 2:47 a king confesses that Daniel’s God is “the God of gods, and the Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets.” He counsels the king to “break off your sins by righteousness” (Daniel 4:27), and he confronts Belshazzar for exalting himself against “the Lord of heaven” while failing to glorify “the God in whose hand your breath is” (Daniel 5:23). His devotion is depicted concretely: with windows open toward Jerusalem he kneels and prays three times a day (Daniel 6:10), and when thrown to the lions he answers the king that God sent his angel and shut the lions’ mouths because “innocence was found in me before him” (Daniel 6:22). The book also presents him as a recipient of visions and angelic speech, told that his words were heard from the first day he set his heart to understand (Daniel 10:12). Outside the book, Ezekiel names him twice, once alongside Noah and Job as men whose righteousness delivers only themselves (Ezekiel 14:14), and once as a byword for wisdom.

Two matters of established history and language are worth noting. The form of the name in Ezekiel lacks the final consonant of the Daniel of the book, which has led some scholars to ask whether Ezekiel refers to a differently attested ancient figure of legendary wisdom, while others take the reference to be to the same Daniel; the question is genuinely unsettled. Canon placement is also a matter of record rather than dispute: in the Hebrew Bible Daniel stands among the Writings rather than the Prophets, whereas Christian Old Testaments commonly place it with the prophetic books, and Catholic and Orthodox canons include the additional Daniel material (the Greek additions, including Susanna and Bel and the Dragon) that Protestant Bibles do not.

Christian traditions read Daniel differently without disagreeing about the basics of his character. Patristic and later interpreters often treated him as a type of Christ, the righteous one delivered from the pit; the visions have been read historically, as a forecast of successive empires, and eschatologically, as a map of the end, with historicist, preterist, futurist, and idealist approaches each finding support in different communions. Traditional readings accept a sixth-century figure writing in his own time, while most critical scholarship dates the book’s final form to the second century before Christ and treats Daniel as a literary hero shaped for a persecuted community. These are live disagreements, and the entry states them without adjudicating between them.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.