Daniel

Summary of the Book of Daniel

Written: 6th century BC (traditional)

Daniel opens in 605 BC with young Judean nobles deported to Babylon and pressed into Nebuchadnezzar's service. Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah keep their integrity from the first test — declining the king's food — and the court narratives that follow show God's people both thriving and suffering under empire: Nebuchadnezzar's statue dream interpreted, the fiery furnace, the king's madness and restoration, Belshazzar's feast interrupted by writing on the wall, and Daniel in the lions' den under Darius the Mede.

Chapter 7 pivots to Daniel's own visions: four beasts rising from the sea until one like a son of man comes with the clouds of the sky and receives everlasting dominion; the ram and the goat; the seventy weeks revealed while Daniel prays and confesses his people's sin; and a final long vision of warring kings ending in unprecedented distress, deliverance for everyone written in the book, and the awakening of many who sleep in the dust of the earth — the Old Testament's clearest resurrection text. A large portion of the book (2:4–7:28) is written in Aramaic, the language of the empires it addresses.

One conviction binds the stories and the visions together: the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whomever he will. Every human empire — gold, silver, bronze, and iron — crumbles before a kingdom that will never be destroyed. Jesus' favorite self-designation, Son of Man, and much of Revelation's imagery come straight from Daniel, making this book the Old Testament's great manual for faithful life under hostile powers.

Daniel was written to assure God's people living under foreign empires that the Most High rules history and will establish a kingdom that never falls.