What's DANIEL about?

Resisting pressure to assimilate

The book of Daniel was written about a hundred years before Jesus was born, long after the Jews had returned from captivity in Babylon. However, it's likely that in Babylon many Jews had struggled with how far to assimilate into the impressive Babylonian culture and religion. Indeed, if they hadn't been allowed to return to Jerusalem it's very likely the Jewish faith and culture would have been assimilated into the Babylonian and Judaism would have died out and disappeared from history.

When Daniel was written, the Greek empire had expanded and was in control of the land of the Jews, and much the same pressures were underway about Judaism being assimilated into the highly sophisticated and educated Greek culture and religion. The book was written to encourage Jews in how to live alongside a successful world culture without being assimilated by it.

The first half of the book consists of a series of imaginary stories, all set in the time of the ancient Babylonian capture of Israel, and features a faithful hero, Daniel, who refuses to join Babylonian culture, but who respects it, and is respected in turn. The most famous of these stories is that of Daniel in the lion's den and his three companions in the fiery furnace. In these stories God repeatedly protects faithful Jews from the worst punishments the foreign culture could devise to press them to assimilate into compliance and to renounce the justice-God of Judaism. Such stories would have been of great encouragement to Jews being pressured by Greek rulers to conform to Greek religion and to trust in the Greek pantheon of gods.

The second half of the book takes this lesson about faithful Jews being protected by God and applies it to the international warfare of the time and how God will rescue the entire country from those who are conquering it. The various international conflicts happening two hundred years before Jesus, particularly those between Greece and Egypt, are presented as savage attacks between mystical beasts, experienced by Daniel as visions revealed to him in heaven.The details of these horrific beasts, when decoded by modern research, are an accurate account of that part of ancient history and people of the time, who understood the references, would have been impressed and would have trusted the predictions about the ultimate defeat of the occupying empires.

The importance of the second half of the book is that a divine figure, called “Son of Man” is presented to God who gives the “Son of Man” the authority to defeat the Greek empire. This part of the book was particularly popular during Jesus' life-time, because it could be understood as a prediction that someone would defeat the Roman empire then occupying the land. Jesus' followers later interpreted his significance to be the “Son of Man,” referred to in Daniel, through whose death and resurrection they understood the Roman empire had been overcome.

How Daniel is helpful to us

For people of our time, there are similar pressures from our surrounding culture. It's easier to not take Jesus' demands for radical love seriously, or take the hope in God's sacrificial cosmic love seriously, but to simply accept that exploitation of workers in poor parts of the world is inevitable, just as is oppression of the less educated in our own countries. That's the pressure to assimilate into our culture of greed and to abandon God's call to sacrificial love. The book of Daniel can provide us with an alternate vision of how to resist those powerful forces and with the assurance that God will give us courage and protection when we find ourselves called to be in opposition to our culture, and when there appears to be no way in which we can escape the various destructive forces of our time.