Daniel in the Lions' Den and the Stew That Flew to Babylon

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Nothing They Could Use

Daniel had outlived Babylon. When Darius the Mede took the empire he set Daniel over it, one of three men placed above three hundred and sixty provinces, and handed him everything. The rest of the court hated him for it and went looking for a charge.

They found none. He took no money. He would not accept a present even when a present was owed to him honestly. Month after month of watching a man who left them no handle to grip.

So they stopped looking for a crime and built one. They came to Darius with a proposal shaped like a compliment. For thirty days let nobody in the empire petition any god or any man except the king. Whoever does goes into the pit with the lions. Darius signed it.

He Did Not Move the Furniture

Daniel heard about the decree that same afternoon. He walked home, went up to his upper room, opened the windows that faced Jerusalem, and prayed three times, the way he had prayed every day of his life. He did not close the shutters. He did not lower his voice. The men who had written the law were standing where they could see in, which was the whole point of writing it, and he did not make their work any harder.

They carried it straight to the king. Darius spent the rest of the day hunting for a way around his own signature and found nothing, because what a Persian king signs cannot be unsigned. At dusk they took Daniel out to the pit.

The king walked out with him and told him to bear it cheerfully, that his God would bring him up again. Then a stone was rolled across the mouth of it and Darius pressed his own ring into the seal, and his lords pressed theirs beside his. He went back to the palace and refused his supper, and sent his musicians away, and did not lie down all night.

An Angel Took Habakkuk by the Hair

That same day, a long way west in Judea, the prophet Habakkuk was lifting a pot of food to carry out to the men working his field. An angel stopped him in the doorway and told him to take it to Daniel in Babylon instead.

Habakkuk said the obvious thing. It is too far. A man cannot carry a pot of stew that distance.

The angel took him by the hair of his head, and Habakkuk flew, pot and all, from a doorway in Judea to the floor of the lions' den in Babylon, where he was set down in front of Daniel.

So the two of them ate the field hands' dinner together, with the lions lying around them like furniture, and then the angel picked the prophet up again by the same handful of hair and put him back in his own field, where the workers were still waiting to be fed. Nobody had touched the stone. The seal over the pit was exactly as the king had left it.

Morning at the Unbroken Seal

At first light Darius came out and looked at the stone before he touched it. His ring's impression was whole. He broke it himself and called down into the dark.

Nothing came back.

He called again. Daniel had spent the whole night praising God and was in the middle of the Shema (שמע), the declaration that God is one, and a man does not break off in the middle of it to answer a king.

Then the voice came up out of the pit. "My God sent his angel and shut their mouths, and they have done me no harm."

They hauled him out. There was not a mark anywhere on him.

The Lions Were Fed First

His accusers refused to call it God. They said the lions had been fed. Fill a lion and it will step over a man; somebody had seen to it in advance, and the king himself had encouraged Daniel to go down because the king knew.

Darius did not argue with them. He ordered meat thrown into the pit, a great deal of it, and stood at the edge while the lions ate until they wanted nothing more. Then he had the accusers brought out, and their wives, and their children, and dropped them in among full animals.

The lions tore every one of them as hungry as if they had not eaten in a week. A hundred and twenty-two men went down, and their households after them, and someone kept the count: two hundred and forty-four persons, and fourteen hundred and sixty-four lions.

Darius wrote to every province after that, ordering the empire to tremble before the God of Daniel, who delivers and rescues and works signs in heaven and on earth, and calling on his people to go up to Jerusalem and help build the Temple. Hannah had sung once about the poor lifted out of the dust and the needy lifted off the ash heap and seated with princes, and the sages heard two men inside that line. Joseph, taken up out of a pit and set over Egypt in a single day. Daniel, taken up out of this one.

He did not stay up there long. He was old, and he asked the king to release him from office because he could no longer carry it. The king agreed on one condition, that he name a successor worth having, and Daniel named Zerubbabel. They loaded him with gifts, honored him in front of the whole court, and let him go. He settled in Shushan and stayed there to the end. He had been given knowledge of the end of time that had been withheld from Haggai and Zechariah and Malachi, and in his last years he could not remember any of it.