Who Was Daniel?

A Brief Sketch About His Life and Times

On the Tuesday before His crucifixion, Jesus gathered His disciples together on the Mount of Olives and talked about the end of the world. During the "Olivet Discourse," which ensued, Jesus called attention to something said by Daniel almost 600 years earlier. In doing so, Jesus referred to him as "the prophet Daniel" (Matthew 24:15).

Daniel was indeed a prophet—a prophet of a special kind. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel were prophets who spent their lives teaching and preaching. They were "minister" prophets. Daniel, however, was a layman prophet. Exiled to Babylon in his late teens, he spent his adult years as a statesman and government consultant. His daily contacts with international politics gave his writings an extra quality of practicality. How God handled things so that this boy prisoner became the principal adviser to the king who captured him makes good reading!

Daniel the prophet was born into an upper-class Jewish family living in Palestine around 622 B.C. (Remember that "B.C." means "Before Christ," and that B.C. dates get smaller, not larger, as the years go by because they represent less and less time remaining until the birth of Christ.) Daniel passed his childhood in Judea, or the kingdom of Judah, and his adulthood in Babylonia. Thus he spent his entire life in the dynamic Middle East—an area prominent in current TV news.

A glance at the map (page 10) will help. Judea was located along the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea, occupying approximately the southern half of the territory that modern Israel occupies today. Babylon was located on the River Euphrates, close to the site of the modern city of Baghdad, Iraq. The twin rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, watered a flat valley edged on the east by mountains and on the west by desert. This flat valley is called "Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers."

Using the map again, trace with your eye a kind of semicircle from Judea, up the seacoast, across to the Euphrates, and down through Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf. This semicircle has always been suitable for agriculture, in contrast to the ocean, mountains, and desert that lie beside it. Because of its shape and fruitfulness, it has long been known as the Fertile Crescent.

The Assyrian and Babylonian Empires, figuring prominently in the Bible, occupied more or less the territory in and adjacent to the Fertile Crescent. Babylon, even at its height, was in fact mostly restricted to the Fertile Crescent. Yet Assyrian and Babylonian kings spoke of the territories they ruled as if they were the whole world. We can easily understand. Even today "world" is not always the same as "planet Earth." We speak of the business world, the music world, the new world, the third world, worlds apart, this world, and the next world. We realize that an illiterate person's "entire world" may be limited to his isolated village.

Daniel was born into a world that was undergoing great change. The terribly cruel Assyrian Empire, which had dominated the Fertile Crescent for about 300 years, was grinding to its close. The newest contender for "world" power was Babylon.

Strictly speaking, Babylon was a single city, or a city-state that included adjacent towns. It was also known as Akkad, and as "The Land of the Chaldeans." Nimrod the Mighty Hunter founded it (Genesis 10), and it was anciently the site of the well-known Tower of Babel (Genesis 11). It achieved prominence around 1800 B.C. under the leadership of the famous lawmaker Hammurabi, some three and a half centuries before Moses, another famous lawmaker, led the Israelites out of Egypt. After Hammurabi's death, Babylon was eclipsed by other city-states in Mesopotamia. In time it and the other states were amalgamated unhappily into the Assyrian Empire. Between 626 and 612 B.C.—the period during which Daniel was born—Nabopolassar, the king of Babylon, crushed what was left of Assyria and became the founder of the Empire of New Babylon (Neo-Babylonia). His son, Nebuchadnezzar II, brought Babylon to its golden age.

Nebuchadnezzar II is the Nebuchadnezzar (NEB-you-kud-NEZ-er) of the book of Daniel. Sometimes in the Bible, his name is spelled Nebuchadrezzar (see, e.g., Jeremiah 21:2 and Ezekiel 26:7). In Babylonian, his name was Nabu-kudurri-usur, a term that expressed a prayer to the god Nabu for protection.

New Babylon, even under Nebuchadnezzar, did not control all the territory that Assyria had once controlled. The Medes, for example, who had helped the Babylonians revolt against Assyria, insisted on their independence. In Daniel's day, four principal nations controlled the Middle East: Egypt, Lydia, Media, and Babylonia. But during Nebuchadnezzar's lifetime, Babylonia was clearly dominant. At Nebuchadnezzar's death, Media asserted itself further; and when Media was joined to Persia, the Medo-Persian Empire annexed Babylon, Egypt, and Lydia.

In Daniel's boyhood, Egypt was still a force to reckon with. The kingdom of Judah, Daniel's homeland, repeatedly sought mutual alliances with Egypt in order to gain protection from the encroaching Babylonians. When, in his empire-building, Nebuchadnezzar gained control of Jerusalem for the first time, in 605 B.C., he compelled the incumbent Jewish king, Jehoiakim, to break with Egypt and sign a treaty with Babylon instead. Not long after Nebuchadnezzar departed, however, Jehoiakim renewed his special relationship with Egypt. International diplomacy was unstable in the Middle East even then.

Nebuchadnezzar made three trips to Jerusalem, inflicting a stricter punishment each time. On his first visit, the one to which we just referred, he carried off many of the precious utensils that he found in the magnificent temple which Solomon had built there. He also took hostage a number of carefully selected Jewish youth. On his second visit, in 597 B.C., he was pleased when King Jehoiachin (not to be confused with King Jehoiakim) gave up his rebellion and surrendered to him, but he confiscated a large quantity of temple utensils and took 10,000 captives. Later, after a serious revolt by Judah's King Zedekiah, Nebuchadnezzar returned to Jerusalem for a third visit; and, in 586 B.C., at the conclusion of an extended siege, he leveled the city to the ground, completely destroying the temple. He also took almost all the remaining residents of Judea into captivity, leaving behind only the "poorest of the land" (2 Kings 24; 25).

Ezekiel the prophet was taken captive on Nebuchadnezzar's second visit. Daniel was taken on the first.

Nebuchadnezzar also transplanted to Babylon the citizens of many of the other countries that he conquered. Jeremiah the prophet promised, on the word of the Lord, that "after seventy years" God would see to it that at least the Jewish captives would have a chance to return home (Jeremiah 29:10, K.J.V.). This reminds us (Daniel 1:21) that Daniel lived in Babylon until "the first year of King Cyrus" (538/537 B.C.), when the seventy years were nearly completed.

King Cyrus the Great was the conqueror who ended the Babylonian Empire and established the Medo-Persian (or Persian) Empire. To many people, Cyrus seemed always to do and say the right things. For centuries after his untimely death, he was regarded throughout the Middle East as the Ideal Man, a kind of Abraham Lincoln perhaps. Isaiah 44:28 and 45:1 speak well of him too.

One of the first and finest things King Cyrus did after he defeated Babylon was to issue a decree allowing all exiles and their descendants to return to their homelands if they desired to do so. Not the Jews only, but also all the other people whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried away were thus given their freedom. Cyrus further offered to return all of their gods that Nebuchadnezzar had taken away. In the case of the Jews, who of course had no image of God, this meant the return of the sacred temple utensils and even a promise to rebuild the Jerusalem temple at state expense!

Thus "the first year of King Cyrus" was a good year to be alive—a memorable year for all the exiled peoples and their religious leaders. It was a wonderful thing to live long enough to enjoy the first year of King Cyrus. Actually, Daniel lived even longer. His last vision is dated in the third year of King Cyrus (Daniel 10:1), by which time he must have been around eighty-seven years of age.

In this final vision, God promised that Daniel's writings would be well understood at "the time of the end," and that thus in a special sense Daniel would fill his "allotted place" at "the end of the days" (Daniel 12:4, 13).

Daniel the prophet was by now too old to take advantage of the opportunity to return to Palestine. But he had lived a good life, one that God had blessed from beginning to end. And he had the warm assurance that the book which God had inspired him to write, and which would provide immense comfort in every subsequent century, would be found particularly appropriate for the generation that would live at the end of the world.

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