Daniel Kept Studying While the Lions Waited

The Decree and the Open Window

The decree was precise and it was aimed at one man. No one in the kingdom may pray to any god or man except King Darius for thirty days. The penalty is the lions' den. Daniel heard the decree and went home and opened the windows of his upper room toward Jerusalem and prayed three times, as he had always done, as if the decree did not exist.

This is not defiance for its own sake. He did not go to the city gate and pray where the officials could see him in order to make a point. He went home. He opened the windows toward Jerusalem because that was the direction of prayer, the direction of the Temple, the direction that had been home longer than Babylon had been his address. The palace had changed the law. It could not change the direction.

The Law That Became a Trap

The officials who had engineered the decree were watching. They found him praying and went to the king. Darius liked Daniel. He had raised him high in the administration. He spent the entire day trying to find a legal path to save him, and there was none: the decree had gone out with the king's seal and by Persian law could not be revoked. At sunset Daniel went into the den. Darius stayed up all night. He fasted. He could not sleep. At dawn he ran back to the den and called into the dark.

The answer came from below. Daniel said: O king, live forever. My God sent his angel and shut the lions' mouths. They have not hurt me, because I was found innocent before him, and also before you, O king, I have done no harm. The king had him brought up. There was no injury on him.

A Boy Who Stopped a Court From Killing Susanna

Long before the lions, when Daniel was still young, two elders in Babylon had conspired to kill a woman named Susanna. She was the wife of a wealthy man and was known throughout the community for her piety. The elders had tried to coerce her and she had refused, and they accused her publicly of adultery to punish her for the refusal. The court believed them. She was condemned.

Daniel was in the crowd when she was led out to execution. He was a young man and had not yet made his name, but he stopped the proceedings. He demanded that the elders be separated and questioned individually. He asked each one: under which tree did you see this happen? One said a mastic tree. One said an oak. The contradiction exposed them both as liars. The court reversed its verdict. Susanna lived. The elders were executed for bearing false witness.

He had not learned to do this from the lions' den. He had been doing it since before the lions. The habit of examining evidence, of asking the question that breaks a false story open, of refusing to let a verdict stand on testimony that has not been tested: that was already his way of being in the world.

The Furnace and the Fourth Figure

Three young men, thrown into a furnace heated seven times hotter than usual because they refused to worship the king's image, walked around inside it untouched. A fourth figure appeared inside the fire with them. Nebuchadnezzar looked through the furnace door and said: the fourth has the appearance of a son of the gods.

The angel cooled the furnace to a whistling wind while they walked inside it. They came out without the smell of smoke on them. Not a hair was singed. What the furnace could not touch was not magic: it was the same thing the lions' den had been unable to touch in Daniel. The decision had already been made, in the ordinary days of study and prayer and open windows facing Jerusalem, that the fire and the pit were not the worst things that could happen to a person, and that the king's decree was not the highest authority in the room.