Daniel the Man Who Survived Because He Kept Studying

The lions in Daniel's pit had been starved. Later tradition, recorded in Louis Ginzberg's compilation of the Legends of the Jews, notes that they had been deprived of food for two days before Daniel was thrown in, so that when he descended into the pit, the hunger should have finished what Darius's counselors started. The lions circled him. They smelled human. They did nothing.

This is the miracle everyone remembers. But the Book of Maccabees, composed in the second century BCE when the descendants of those who admired Daniel were fighting Antiochus IV for the right to remain Jewish, chose a different emphasis when it invoked the story. The author of First Maccabees did not cite Daniel's rescue from the lions as evidence that God stops lions. He cited it as evidence that Daniel, for his innocency, was delivered from the mouth of lions.

Innocency. Not miraculous intervention. Innocency.

The same passage invokes Ananias, Azarias, and Misael, who by believing were saved out of the flame. These are the three young men of Daniel chapter 3, who were thrown into a furnace heated seven times hotter than usual and came out without even the smell of smoke on their clothes. The author of Maccabees does not say: God cooled the furnace. He says: by believing.

This is a significant rhetorical choice. The Maccabean books were written for people who were being killed. Antiochus had ordered the execution of Jews who refused to eat pork, who refused to bow to idols, who continued to circumcise their sons. Families were being burned alive. The author of Maccabees needed to tell these people something about why Daniel and the three young men had survived, and more importantly, something about what faithfulness looks like when survival is not guaranteed.

His answer was: none of those who put their trust in God shall be overcome. This is not a promise of physical survival. It is a claim about something else, something the Greek word for "overcome" carries in its military sense, which is closer to "conquered," closer to "made to stop being themselves." Daniel was not conquered. The furnace did not conquer the three young men. They came out of their trials still themselves, still the people they had been going in, and that is what the author of Maccabees called deliverance.

The young men in the court of Nebuchadnezzar had refused the king's food, the food that came from animals sacrificed to idols, and lived on vegetables and water, and after ten days they looked healthier than all the young men who ate the king's portion. Daniel spoke truth in the case of Susanna when every other man in the room had chosen silence or complicity, when two elders of Israel had conspired to destroy an innocent woman rather than admit their own guilt. He stood up and said: return to the court and see that these men have lied.

In each instance, the pattern is the same: everyone around Daniel is calculating what survival requires and concluding that the calculation requires compromise. Daniel does not make the calculation. He knows what is true, what is right, what God requires, and he does it, and the consequences that follow are not his business to manage. This is not recklessness. This is the thing the Maccabean author calls innocency, and he holds it up to a generation being killed for keeping Jewish law as the reason Daniel was delivered.

The young men in Babylon who were Daniel's companions demonstrate this principle in another register. When Nebuchadnezzar demanded they bow to the golden idol he erected in the plain of Dura, an idol that stood sixty cubits tall, they refused. They did not petition for an exemption. They did not argue that the statue was not really a god. They said, simply: let it be known to you, king, that we will not worship your gods. The consequences of that refusal were immediate and severe. The furnace was heated seven times its normal temperature. Men died from the heat just carrying the three young men to its mouth. And the three walked out unchanged, with the smell of nothing on their clothes, not even smoke. The apocryphal tradition preserves their names as models for every generation that would face the same demand in a different form.

Fear not then the words of a sinful man, the passage continues, for his glory shall be dung and worms. Today he shall be lifted up, and tomorrow he shall not be found, because he is returned to his dust, and his thought is come to nothing. Antiochus IV Epiphanes would die of a stinking disease on a road far from Jerusalem, his bowels falling out of him, his glory already decomposing before his body caught up. The author of Maccabees knew this when he wrote it, or hoped it when he wrote it, and either way he was pointing the young men of his generation toward Daniel: be valiant, show yourself men in behalf of the law, for by it shall you obtain glory.

Not survival. Glory. The distinction is important. Daniel studied Torah. He kept himself innocent. He spoke truth in impossible rooms. He was thrown to lions and came out alive, and the tradition that commemorated him did not say that God guaranteed his survival. It said that what he carried through the pit could not be taken from him. It said: by believing, they were saved. And it held him up as proof that the law was worth dying for, precisely because Daniel had not had to die.