Daniel (biblical figure)

Lore & Background

Daniel and his companions Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were taken to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar and given new names: Daniel became Belteshazzar. They refused the king's food and wine to avoid defilement, and God granted them wisdom surpassing all magicians and enchanters. Daniel interpreted Nebuchadnezzar's dreams of a statue made of four metals and a great tree, and later interpreted the mysterious handwriting on the wall for Belshazzar, foretelling the kingdom's fall to the Medes and Persians. Under Darius the Mede, Daniel was thrown into a den of lions for worshiping God instead of the king, but an angel saved him, and his accusers were destroyed.

Reader's Guide

Daniel's significance lies in his role as the central figure of the Book of Daniel, a work that blends court tales and apocalyptic visions. While conservative scholars hold that Daniel existed and his book was written in the 6th century BCE, most scholars agree the character was not historical, and the book is a cryptic allusion to the reign of the 2nd century BCE Hellenistic king Antiochus IV Epiphanes. In Judaism, Daniel is not a prophet but is considered the most distinguished member of the Babylonian diaspora, unsurpassed in piety and good deeds. In Christianity, he is regarded as a prophet. Muslim sources describe him as a prophet, though he is not mentioned in the Quran. The legends surrounding him, including his tomb claimed by six cities, reflect his enduring legacy across multiple religious traditions.

Did You Know?

• Daniel's name means 'God (El) is my judge'.
• The Book of Ezekiel refers to a legendary Daniel famed for wisdom and righteousness.
• Six cities claim the Tomb of Daniel, the most famous being in Susa, Iran.
• The Greek text of Daniel includes the tale of Susanna, where villains are Jews instead of heathens.

Daniel's Theological World

The biblical figure of Daniel exists within the Hebrew Bible, a text that presents a God explicitly named YHVH in Hebrew and referred to as Allah in Arabic. This deity is conceived as unique, perfect, and free from all deficiencies—omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and completely infinite in every attribute. Daniel's narrative is set against a backdrop where God is the sole creator of everything in existence, with no partner or equal. The God of Daniel's story is transcendent, existing outside of space and time, yet simultaneously personal—intimately involved, listening to individual prayer, and reacting to the actions of his creatures. This tension between transcendence and immanence forms the theological architecture within which Daniel's devotion operates, grounding his faith in a deity who is both utterly beyond human comprehension and intimately present in the lives of his people.

A Shared Divine Heritage

The God whom Daniel served is not confined to a single religious tradition. The Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, alongside Samaritanism, the Druze faith, the Baháʼí Faith, and the Rastafari movement—all share a common belief in the God of Abraham. Each of these traditions traces its roots to Abraham as a common genealogical or spiritual patriarch, and their theological traditions are, to some extent, influenced by the depiction of the God of Israel in the Hebrew Bible. Daniel, as a figure within that Hebrew Bible, thus occupies a position that resonates across multiple faiths. The God he worshipped is the same deity conceived as one, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and the creator of the universe across these traditions, referred to with masculine grammatical articles and held to possess holiness, justice, omnibenevolence, and omnipresence.

Strict Monotheism and the Prophet's Faith

Daniel's story is embedded in a Jewish theological framework characterized by strictly exclusive monotheism. In this tradition, God is never portrayed in any image, and the idea of God as a duality or trinity is considered heretical—akin to polytheism. The Torah specifically forbade ascribing partners to share God's singular sovereignty. Daniel's God is the absolute one without a second, indivisible, and incomparable, similar to nothing in the world and beyond all forms of human thought and expression. The Shema prayer, a cornerstone of Jewish devotion, declares the LORD as Israel's God and the LORD as One. In this context, Daniel's faith is directed toward a deity who is the ultimate source of morality, an actual ontological reality rather than a mere projection of the human psyche, and a personal yet transcendent being capable of intervening in the world.

Echoes in Later Theological Movements

The Hebrew Bible, which contains Daniel's narrative, profoundly shaped the theological landscape of later Abrahamic faiths. Christianity, originating in first-century Judea from a sect within Second Temple Judaism, inherited most of the beliefs about God found in these texts—his omnipotence, omniscience, role as creator, personality, immanence, and transcendence. The primary innovation was the identification of Jesus as the fulfillment of ancient biblical prophecies and the incarnation of God himself. Meanwhile, Gnosticism, emerging in the late first century CE from non-rabbinical Jewish and early Christian sects, introduced a radical distinction between the highest, unknowable God and a lesser creator figure called the Demiurge. While Daniel's own narrative predates these developments, the theological soil from which it grew continued to generate diverse and sometimes conflicting interpretations of the divine across centuries.