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Daniel Walked Out of the Lions' Den Into a City That Still Hated Him

The lions licked Daniel's hands. The priests of Bel, the jealous princes, and the empire's appetite for idols all waited outside the den.

Curated by Arthur · Told by Maggid ·
Table of Contents
  1. The Feast Ended at the Door
  2. The Idol That Ate Because Priests Were Hungry
  3. Promoted, Then Betrayed
  4. The Prophet Carried Through the Air
  5. After the Den, Honor and Secret Knowledge

The Feast Ended at the Door

The lions were easier than the court. Teeth were honest. A lion wanted food and nothing more. The men around the throne wanted honor, control, revenge, and a way to make prayer look like treason. That hunger had more patience than any beast, and it did not stop when Daniel walked out of the den unharmed.

Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews places Daniel's danger immediately after Belshazzar's death. The king who desecrated the Temple vessels at his feast dies by the logic of his own command: he told the guards to admit no one to the royal apartments, even a man claiming to be king. Belshazzar returns from the feast and is killed at the door by guards obeying him perfectly. Daniel has already read the writing on the wall. He flees to Shushtar, where Cyrus receives him and makes a bargain: if Daniel will pray for victory over the king of Mosul, Cyrus will return the Temple vessels to Jerusalem. Daniel prays. Cyrus wins. The vessels begin moving toward home.

The Idol That Ate Because Priests Were Hungry

Cyrus could return vessels and still misunderstand worship. The story of Bel, preserved in the deuterocanonical addition to Daniel and elaborated in the Midrashic tradition, shows the king genuinely confused about why Daniel will not bow before the great idol. Bel consumed enormous quantities of flour, oil, and livestock every day. The king took this as proof that the idol lived.

Daniel asked for the right to scatter ashes on the temple floor before the doors were sealed for the night. In the morning the doors were unsealed and the food was gone. The king pointed to the empty table as evidence. Daniel pointed to the ash. It was covered in footprints, the tracks of the priests and their families who had entered through hidden tunnels under the floor to eat the offerings and create the appearance of divine consumption. The idol had never eaten anything. The priests had been eating on behalf of a stone that could not hunger.

Darius appointed Daniel to the highest administrative position in the empire. The other officials, who had served longer and wanted the authority Daniel now held, began looking for a charge against him. They found none. Daniel had no corruption in him, no negligence, no private arrangement with any faction. The only vulnerability they could identify was his prayer: three times a day, facing Jerusalem, the windows open.

They persuaded Darius to sign a decree forbidding petition to any god or man except the king for thirty days. Darius signed it. Daniel opened his windows anyway. The officials watched him pray, reported him to the king, and reminded Darius that the law of the Medes and Persians could not be altered even by the king who had signed it. Darius spent the night without sleep, without food, without the ability to undo what he had sealed. At dawn he ran to the den.

The Prophet Carried Through the Air

Ginzberg preserves a tradition from the deuterocanonical addition to Daniel in which the prophet Habakkuk was in the field preparing soup and bread for the harvesters when an angel appeared and told him to take the food to Daniel in Babylon. Habakkuk said he had never been to Babylon and did not know where the den was. The angel lifted him by the hair and carried him over the distance between Judah and Babylon in one breath's time. Habakkuk stood at the edge of the den and called down to Daniel. Daniel ate. The harvesters' lunch crossed half the ancient world to feed a man in a pit full of lions.

After the Den, Honor and Secret Knowledge

Daniel came out. The men who had accused him went in, along with their families, as Darius commanded. Daniel was honored and promoted again. He continued in office through the reign of Cyrus, and the tradition records that Cyrus consulted him, and that Daniel was given the sealed vision of what would come at the end of days. The book of his name contains the visions he received and could not fully understand. The angel Gabriel came to explain portions of them. Other portions were sealed until the time of the end.

The exile had not ended Daniel's usefulness. The den had not ended it. Every attempt to remove him from the court's center had returned him to higher authority. The tradition reads this not as good luck or political skill but as the consequence of prayer maintained through every pressure the empire could apply.

DanielGehennaBabylonCyrusPersecution
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From the tradition

Sources

6 sources

The texts this telling draws on, in full. Open a card to read inline, or expand it for a wider, quieter read.

Legends of the Jews 11:9Legends of the Jews

Belshazzar had ordered the royal doors guarded on the night he profaned the vessels of the Temple in Jerusalem. In Ginzberg's retelling from Legends of the Jews, the order was absolute. No one could enter the palace, even if he claimed to be the king himself.

The command trapped him. Belshazzar left his apartments for a short time, and the guards, Cyrus and Darius, did not notice him pass out. When he returned and demanded admission, they followed the king's own decree. He insisted on his identity. They refused to believe him. While he was still swearing that he was Belshazzar, they struck him dead at the palace gate.

Daniel, who had already read the writing on the wall, fled from the fallen court to Shushtar. Cyrus received him kindly and made a bargain with him: pray that God grant success in the war against the king of Mosul, and Cyrus would send the Temple vessels back to Jerusalem. Daniel prayed. God answered. Cyrus won, and the vessels began their road home.

The punishment fits the shape of the crime. Belshazzar had used holy vessels as props for royal arrogance. By morning, his own royal order had turned against him, and Daniel stood with the ruler who would restore what Babylon had taken.

Full source
Legends of the Jews 11:13Legends of the Jews

Cyrus could look like a savior and still keep a ruler's suspicion. Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews remembers that he allowed the Jews to rebuild the Temple, but only with wood. Stone would last. Wood could burn if Jerusalem rebelled.

The same mixed portrait appears in the story of Bel. Cyrus pressed Daniel to bow before the idol because the god seemed to eat the dishes placed before him. Each night the offerings vanished. To the king, that was proof enough that Bel was alive.

Daniel saw the fraud hiding under the miracle. The priests of Bel entered through underground passages after dark, ate the food themselves, and let the idol receive the credit. Daniel did not argue with the king's appetite for proof. He gave him proof of another kind. He scattered ashes across the temple floor before the doors were sealed.

By morning, the god had eaten again. But the ashes held the truth. Footprints crossed the floor, marking the secret path of the priests who had crept in under cover of night. Cyrus could no longer pretend the idol had consumed anything. Daniel had turned the temple itself into a witness.

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Chronicles of Jerahmeel LXXIIChronicles of Jerahmeel (Gaster, 1899)

Darius summoned Daniel to test his wisdom and found him seven times wiser than any report had claimed. According to the Chronicles of Jerahmeel, a 12th-century Hebrew chronicle translated by Moses Gaster in 1899, Darius appointed Daniel as his personal counselor, just as the previous king had done. But one day the king tried to convert Daniel to his own religion.

The idol Bel was the great god of Babylon, and his appetite was legendary. Every day the priests laid out one bullock, ten rams, ten sheep, one hundred doves, seventy loaves of bread, and ten barrels of wine on his table. By morning, it was all gone. "Would that thou didst believe in the glory of our god Bel," the king told Daniel, "who consumes what is laid upon this table."

Daniel was unimpressed. "Let not the heart of the king be deceived," he replied. "There is no breath in it. It is simply the work of the craftsman. It is the priests of Bel who eat the contents of this table." He offered to prove it, and the king agreed.

Daniel had the temple locked and sealed with only one entrance open. Then the king ordered ashes scattered across the floor of the temple while the priests were kept in ignorance. The doors were sealed with the king's ring and Daniel's ring, and they retired for the night.

The next morning, the seals were untouched. When they opened the doors, the table was bare, every morsel consumed. Darius fell prostrate before Bel in awe. But Daniel pointed to the floor. There in the ashes were the footprints of men, women, and children. The seventy priests of Bel were hauled before the king, and under threat of death, they revealed their secret entrances: hidden passages through which they crept in every night to feast on the god's offerings.

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Legends of the Jews 11:16Legends of the Jews

Daniel rose until only Darius stood above him. Following Daniel's advice, the king placed three officials over the empire and made Daniel chief of the three. The honor made him powerful. It also made him visible to every jealous man at court.

His enemies could not beat him openly, so they built a law around his devotion. They persuaded Darius to decree death for anyone who prayed to any god or person other than the king. The order did not command Daniel to bow to an idol. It asked for something quieter: stop praying for a while, survive, and return to God later.

Daniel refused that bargain. Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews says he preferred to give his life for the honor of the one God rather than omit his devotions. His enemies found him at prayer and dragged him before Darius. The king tried to save him, but Daniel made concealment impossible. When the hour of minchah, the afternoon prayer, arrived, Daniel prayed in the presence of the king and his princes.

The law closed around him. Daniel was thrown into a pit of lions, and a rock rolled there from Palestine to seal the entrance and protect him from any further harm his enemies planned. Inside the pit, the beasts did not tear him apart. They greeted him like loyal dogs, licking his hands and wagging their tails before the man who would not interrupt his prayer.

Full source
Bel and the Dragon 1:28-42Additions to Daniel

Babylon was seething. Their god was rubble, their dragon was dead, their priests were gone, and the people blamed the king for siding with a Jew. Hand over Daniel, they demanded, or we tear down your house with you in it. The cornered king gave way, and Daniel was thrown into the lions' den. Seven lions waited inside, deliberately starved for six days so they would tear him apart.

Far away in Judea, the prophet Habakkuk had no idea any of this was happening. He had just cooked a stew and broken bread into a bowl, on his way to feed the harvesters in the field. An angel of God stopped him with a strange errand: carry that meal to Daniel, in the lions' den in Babylon. Habakkuk protested that he had never even seen Babylon and had no idea where the den was.

The angel did not argue. He simply seized Habakkuk by the hair of his head and, with one rush of wind, set him down directly above the pit in Babylon. Daniel, Daniel, take the dinner that God has sent you, the prophet called down. Daniel ate, blessing the God who had not forgotten him, and the angel returned Habakkuk home in an instant.

On the seventh day the grieving king came to mourn and found Daniel calmly alive among the lions. He pulled him out and praised the God of Daniel above all others.

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Legends of the Jews 11:19Legends of the Jews

When Daniel came out of the lions' den alive, the miracle did not stay private. The king sent word through the empire proclaiming what God had done, and he called on his people to help rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Daniel's survival became a public summons.

But Daniel was old. The honors that followed the miracle could not make his body young again. He asked the king to release him from office because he no longer felt fit for the burden. The king agreed only if Daniel chose a successor worthy of the work.

Daniel chose Zerubbabel. The court loaded Daniel with gifts and honored him before the people, and then the old statesman withdrew from public life. He settled in Shushan, where he remained until his death.

Ginzberg preserves one last strange detail. Daniel was not counted among the prophets, but God gave him knowledge of the end of time that had not been granted to Haggai, Zechariah, or Malachi. Even that gift did not stay with him forever. In the fullness of his years, Daniel lost the memory of the revelation. The man who had read the writing on the wall and walked out of the lions' den ended his life honored, diminished, and still held by God.

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