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

The lions that refused to eat Daniel were not the end of his trouble. They were a pause in it. The account preserved in Legends of the Jews, drawing on traditions that reach back through the Talmudic academies of Babylonia, records what happened next with a particular lack of sentimentality. Belshazzar was killed by his own doorkeepers. Cyrus and Darius had been assigned to guard the entrance to the royal apartments the night of the great feast, and they had received instructions to admit no one, regardless of who the person claimed to be. When Belshazzar stepped outside and was denied re-entry on his own orders, they killed him before he could explain the misunderstanding.

Daniel had already left. He fled to Shushtar, where Cyrus received him well and made a promise: if Daniel would pray for divine assistance in the war against the king of Mosul, Cyrus would return the Temple vessels to Jerusalem. Daniel prayed. God answered. Cyrus kept his word, which put him in a small and distinguished category among the foreign rulers who had made promises to Israel.

But Cyrus was not the simple benefactor the tradition sometimes makes him appear. The same collection of legends notes that when he granted permission to rebuild the Temple, he specified that only wood could be used, so the structure could be easily destroyed if the Jews proved disloyal. He also pressured Daniel to pay homage to the idol Bel, advancing as proof the common argument that the idol consumed the dishes set before it every night. Daniel, who had survived the fiery furnace and the lions' den and the entire reign of Nebuchadnezzar, was not going to be fooled by priests eating through a tunnel. He had ash spread across the Temple floor. The footprints were there in the morning. The priests confessed. Cyrus was convinced of the idol's worthlessness and apparently required the experience to believe something Daniel had never doubted.

The promotion that followed the lions' den was dramatic. Darius appointed a council of three to govern his realm, and Daniel was made chief of the three, second only to the king. The men around him responded to this exactly as men in that position always respond: they plotted his ruin. Their method was elegant in its simplicity. They persuaded Darius to sign a decree forbidding prayer to any god or any man except the king himself, under penalty of death. The decree did not require Daniel to commit any positive act of transgression. It simply made his existing practice illegal.

Daniel knew about the decree. He continued his devotions three times a day, facing Jerusalem. When his enemies found him mid-prayer, he did not stop. He was still praying when they dragged him before the king. The afternoon hour arrived while he stood in the throne room, and Daniel performed that prayer in front of Darius and all his princes. This made his execution legally unavoidable. Darius had to enforce his own decree, regardless of his feelings about the man he was executing.

The pit was full of lions. A rock rolled itself from Palestine to cover the entrance. The lions greeted Daniel like dogs waiting for their master, licking his hands, wagging their tails. The tradition records this with the same tone it uses for the manna in the wilderness: specific, matter-of-fact, not apologetic about the miracle.

What the tradition finds remarkable is not the survival but the aftermath. Daniel emerged from the pit more honored than before. Darius published the news of the miracle throughout his empire and called upon people to help rebuild the Temple. Daniel asked for retirement. His advanced age, he said, made him unfit for the demands of administration. The king agreed, on the condition that Daniel name his successor. Daniel chose Zerubbabel.

He settled in Shushan and lived there until the end. God had given him knowledge of the end of time, the tradition says, something not even granted to the prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. In the fullness of his years he forgot it. The revelation that had been vouchsafed to him in his prime dissolved in old age, and he died knowing only what any man knows: that he had lived long, that he had survived what had been meant to destroy him, and that the city he had faced in prayer three times a day was being rebuilt.

The detail about the forgotten revelation is the strangest in the entire Daniel tradition, and the tradition includes some genuinely strange details. Daniel survived a fiery furnace and a pit of lions. He interpreted dreams for three kings across two empires. He watched the fall of Babylon from inside it. And at the end, the knowledge of when history would conclude, which had been sealed up and given to him in (Daniel 12:9), simply left him. The tradition draws no moral from this. It does not say the forgetting was a punishment, or that Daniel had failed, or that the knowledge was withdrawn for any particular reason. It records the fact of the forgetting and moves on. What the tradition seems to believe is that the knowledge of the end of time is not the kind of knowledge that ages well in a single mind. It belongs to prophecy, which belongs to a particular moment, a particular vessel, a particular necessity. When the necessity passed, when the vessels of the Temple were on their way home and Zerubbabel was in place and the work of restoration had begun, the knowledge of endings was no longer what the moment required. Daniel forgot it because the time for knowing it had passed. What the rebuilding needed was not eschatology. It needed Zerubbabel.