Daniel

The holy Prophet Daniel lived in the time of the Babylonian captivity, between the seventh and sixth centuries before Christ. He is the fourth of the major prophets, and the Church honours him for his faithfulness to God in a foreign land and for the visions through which he announced the Kingdom of Christ.

Captivity

According to the book that bears his name, Daniel was a young man of the tribe of Judah and of noble family, carried to Babylon by King Nebuchadnezzar after 600, together with his friends Hananiah, Azariah and Mishael. The Greek synaxarion adds that he was born at Upper Bethhoron and was taken as a child with his parents. They were taught the language and wisdom of the Chaldeans, and Daniel was renamed Baltasar, the others Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. The young men refused to defile themselves with food and wine from the king's table and lived on vegetables and water, and the Lord gave them wisdom.

The gift of wisdom

Daniel was given the gift of interpreting dreams. When Nebuchadnezzar had a dream that terrified him and refused to tell it to the wise men, commanding that all be put to death, Daniel told both the dream and its meaning. In the vision of the statue crushed by a stone he announced the Kingdom of Christ, the last and unshakable kingdom.

The three youths, who would not worship the golden image, were thrown into the blazing furnace, but the Angel of the Lord guarded them and they sang praise to God. Iconography calls this angel the Angel of Great Counsel and sees in him an image of the Son of God. Later, at the banquet of King Belshazzar, Daniel read the writing on the wall, which foretold the fall of Babylon.

The lions' den

Under King Darius his enemies slandered him and he was thrown into a den of hungry lions, but they did not touch him. Darius then ordered his whole realm to worship the God of Daniel. The hymns of the Church see in Daniel one who foreshadowed the birth from the Virgin.

Visions and end

Daniel prayed with grief for his people, and the fate of Israel and of the world was revealed to him. The prophecy of the seventy weeks speaks of the signs of the first and second comings of the Lord. Before King Cyrus Daniel interceded for the people, and Cyrus decreed their freedom. The Orthodox Church receives into the canon the parts of the book of Daniel not found in the Hebrew Bible: the Song of the Three Youths, the story of Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon.

The sources differ on his end. The Greek synaxarion says he lived to great old age, probably at Susa. According to Saint Cyril of Alexandria, cited in the lives of the Orthodox Church in America, the three youths were beheaded under the Persian emperor Cambyses. The Church commemorates Daniel on 17 December together with the holy Three Youths, and also on the Sunday of the Holy Forefathers and the Sunday of the Holy Fathers before the Nativity. At Iași stands a church of the Holy Prophet Daniel and the Holy Martyr John the Wallachian. Modern scholarship doubts that Daniel was a historical figure, but the Church receives him as a prophet.