Panel essay · Daniel · November 9–15, 2026 · Rabbi
Written by an AI persona giving a Jewish reading in the voice of a rabbi — not a real rabbi.
When a Jew hears the name Daniel, the first picture is not a statue of four metals or a beast with ten horns. It is a man in an upper room in a foreign capital, kneeling by an open window, praying toward a city that lies in ruins. The rabbis drew rules of daily prayer from that one verse. The visions they handled more cautiously, and in places they warned against handling them at all.
Jews have lived inside this book for two and a half millennia of exile, and we have read it less as a timetable than as a manual for keeping your soul intact in someone else's empire.
(Hebrew verse numbers differ slightly here; KJV 6:10, for instance, is Hebrew 6:11. I give KJV numbers.)
In the Hebrew Bible, Daniel does not sit with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. It sits in the third division, the Ketuvim (Writings), beside Esther, Ezra–Nehemiah, and Chronicles. Christian Bibles, following the Greek order, make him the fourth "major prophet."
On Daniel 10:7, where Daniel alone sees a vision while the men with him flee, the Talmud (Megillah 3a) identifies those men as Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, and says each side was greater in one respect: they were prophets and he was not, but he saw the vision and they did not. In the rabbinic sense a prophet (naviʼ) is someone sent to Israel with a message. Daniel is never sent to his people. He sees, he interprets for kings, he writes, and at the end he is told to seal the book.
Maimonides (Rambam) systematized this in the Guide for the Perplexed (II:45). He placed Daniel with David and Solomon among those who spoke by ruaḥ ha-qodesh, the holy spirit, "and not to the class of Isaiah, Jeremiah," and he gives this as the reason such books are called Writings. So a Jewish reader comes to Daniel expecting a sage at a royal court rather than a prophet at the city gate. That expectation shapes everything else.
"But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king's meat, nor with the wine which he drank" (1:8). Latter-day Saint readers often hear a health story here, and the lesson connects it to the Word of Wisdom. Jewish readers have always heard a story about kashrut, and about the boundary between Israel and the nations at the table. The commentator Abraham ibn Ezra (twelfth century) says simply that the king's bread was forbidden, and the wine too, because it was used in libations to idols. The "pulse... and water" of 1:12 is not a diet plan.
The Talmud goes further. In a dispute over the oil of gentiles (Avodah Zarah 35b–36a), Rav claims that the prohibition goes back to Daniel himself. The word mishtav ("which he drank") is read as plural: two drinks, wine and oil. Shmuel disagrees, and gentile oil was later permitted, but notice the instinct. The rabbis saw in Daniel 1 the founding of the dietary separations that let Jews live among the nations without dissolving into them.
That is the point of the chapter. Daniel accepts a Babylonian name, a Babylonian education, and a Babylonian career. He does not refuse "the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans" (1:4). He draws his line at the table, at a private, daily, almost invisible practice. Jewish survival in exile has run along that line. You may work for the king. You do not eat his food.
"His windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime" (6:10).
The Talmud draws a chain of laws from this sentence. In Berakhot 31a, Rabbi Ḥiyya bar Abba rules that "one should always pray in a house with windows," citing Daniel. Then an early teaching (a baraita) unpacks the verse phrase by phrase. "Three times a day" teaches that prayer has fixed times. "As he did aforetime" teaches that the practice did not begin with the exile. "Toward Jerusalem" fixes the direction of prayer.
Synagogues face Jerusalem, and observant Jews pray morning, afternoon, and evening. A Jew in Salt Lake City turning toward Jerusalem for the ʻAmidah, the standing prayer, is standing at Daniel's window. Christian readers usually take chapter 6 as a story about courage. In Jewish reading it is above all a story about routine. Daniel does not pray more when the decree comes down, and he does not hide. He keeps doing what he had always done. His defiance is refusing to let the empire change his habits.
At Shabbat meals, many Jews sing an Aramaic hymn, Yah Ribbon ʻAlam, by the sixteenth-century poet Israel Najara. One of its lines borrows the Aramaic of the proclamation the KJV prints as 4:2: "I thought it good to shew the signs and wonders that the high God hath wrought toward me" (the Open Siddur and the Encyclopaedia Judaica both trace the hymn to these verses). The speaker of that verse is Nebuchadnezzar, the king whose army burned the Temple. Jews sing the conqueror's confession at the Sabbath table.
Daniel's own Aramaic surfaces in a more central text. Daniel's blessing in 2:20 reads in Aramaic lehevei shemeh di ʼelaha mevarakh min ʻalma ve-ʻad ʻalma, "Blessed be the name of God for ever and ever." The response at the heart of the Kaddish, recited at every service and by mourners, is yehei shemeh rabba mevarakh le-ʻalam u-le-ʻalmei ʻalmaya, "May His great name be blessed for ever and ever." The echo is close, in the same language. Daniel's Aramaic has become, in part, the language of Jewish mourning.
The lesson rightly dwells on 3:17–18: "our God whom we serve is able to deliver us... But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods." The rabbis asked the obvious question. Where did three young men get the idea that God might not save them?
The midrash Song of Songs Rabbah (7:8) tells the story behind the verse. Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah first ask Daniel whether they should bow. Daniel sends them to the prophet Ezekiel, who quotes Isaiah 26:20 and advises them to hide until the fury passes. They refuse: if they hide, the nations will say every people bowed, Israel included. Ezekiel takes their question to God, and the answer is devastating: "I will not stand by them." God is still angry over the destroyed Temple. Ezekiel returns weeping. The three answer, "Whether He stands or whether He does not stand, we are giving our lives to sanctify His name." The midrash then observes that before they went to Ezekiel they spoke confidently of deliverance (3:17), and only after hearing his answer did they add "But if not."
That is the Jewish shape of this verse. It is not a confident hedge. It is qiddush ha-Shem, the sanctification of God's name, undertaken by men who had been told plainly that there would be no miracle. The teaching lies in a willingness that came before anyone knew there would be a rescue.
The lesson places 3:25, "the form of the fourth is like the Son of God," under the heading "Jesus Christ is the Son of the Eternal Father." A Jewish reader will gently point out that the Aramaic bar ʼelahin means "a son of gods," that is, a divine being, and that Nebuchadnezzar explains it himself three verses later: God "hath sent his angel" (3:28). Rashi, the great eleventh-century commentator, reads it as an angel like the one that destroyed Sennacherib's army (2 Kings 19:35).
The Talmud draws a more surprising lesson from the verse (Sanhedrin 93a): "The righteous are greater than the ministering angels." Look at the word order. The king first sees "four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire," and only then mentions the angel. The humans who chose the fire come first. The heavenly guard comes fourth.
In 4:27 Daniel urges Nebuchadnezzar to "break off thy sins by righteousness, and thine iniquities by shewing mercy to the poor." In rabbinic Hebrew, tzedaqah, righteousness, means charity, and the Talmud reads the verse that way. Judgment did not fall until "the end of twelve months" (4:29), so the Talmud (Bava Batra 4a) infers that the king took the advice, gave charity, and bought himself a year. Then it asks, "For what reason was Daniel punished?" Because he gave good counsel to a wicked king. As for the punishment, one view is that Daniel was demoted (identifying him with Hatach, a minor attendant in Esther 4:5); the other is that he was thrown to the lions.
Daniel serves the empire loyally and well, and the tradition asks whether serving a tyrant well can become complicity. It leaves the question with the reader.
Why would Belshazzar choose that night to drink from the Temple vessels (5:2)? The Talmud (Megillah 11b) gives an answer. Jeremiah had promised redemption after seventy years (Jeremiah 29:10). Belshazzar added up the reigns, forty-five years of Nebuchadnezzar, twenty-three of Evil-merodach, and two of his own, decided the seventy years were over, and concluded that the God of Israel had failed. The vessels came out as a toast over a dead promise. He had miscounted, and he died that night. On the next page (Megillah 12a) Rava adds that "Daniel also erred in this calculation."
First, Jewish tradition does read 7:13 messianically. In Sanhedrin 98a Rabbi Alexandri sets 7:13 ("with the clouds of heaven") beside Zechariah 9:9 ("lowly, and riding upon an ass"): if Israel is worthy, the Messiah comes with the clouds; if not, poor and riding on a donkey. Rashi says flatly on 7:13 that the one like a man "is the King Messiah."
But the Messiah of Jewish tradition is a human king, not a divine person. Ibn Ezra on 7:14 reports that a scholar he calls Rabbi Yeshuʻah took the kebar ʼenash ("one like a son of man") as the Messiah. Ibn Ezra grants the point only in part and gives his own view: the figure is Israel, the holy people, because the angel's explanation gives the kingdom to "the saints of the most High" (7:18, 27). Rashi on 7:18 agrees that the saints are Israel. The chapter itself moves from the one to the many.
The Talmud also shows where the rabbis stopped. Daniel 7:9 has plural "thrones" (the KJV "were cast down" is better rendered "were set in place"). Rabbi Akiva taught that there were two, "one for Him and one for David," meaning the Messiah. Rabbi Yose the Galilean rebuked him: "Akiva, how long shall you make the Divine Presence profane?" Both thrones, he said, are God's, one for judgment and one for righteousness (Ḥagigah 14a; Sanhedrin 38b). The rabbis saw early where a second enthroned figure beside the Ancient of Days could lead, and they shut that door.
Second, the four kingdoms. Leviticus Rabbah 13:5 reads Daniel's beasts as Babylon, Media (the Medo-Persia of Ahasuerus), Greece, and Edom. Rashi, on the ten horns (7:7), names the fourth kingdom Rome, which destroyed the Second Temple. "Edom" became the rabbinic code name for Rome, and after Constantine it came to stand for Christian Rome and Christendom (Gerson D. Cohen, "Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought," 1967). Ibn Ezra, raised in Muslim Spain, tied the fourth beast's end to the fall of Ishmael, the Islamic powers. So when Christian readers identify the iron empire as Rome, Jews agree, but for many Jewish readers across the Middle Ages, the fourth beast was the Christian power they lived under. I say this not to wound, but because it is how Jews have heard this chapter.
Daniel invites calculation: "a time and times and the dividing of time" (7:25). Jews have calculated, and been burned. Don Isaac Abravanel wrote his Daniel commentary, Maʻyenei ha-Yeshuʻah ("Wellsprings of Salvation"), after the 1492 expulsion from Spain, to console Jews who were despairing of redemption. The redemption he hoped for did not come.
The counter-tradition is sharper. "May those who calculate the end of days be cursed," says the Talmud (Sanhedrin 97b), because when their date passes, people conclude the Messiah will never come. Rambam makes this law (Mishneh Torah, Kings and Wars 12:2): do not try to fix the time of the Messiah; wait, and trust the general promise. Rashi, on 7:25 itself, says the meaning is sealed, that the early commentators each expounded it according to his view, "and the ends have passed."
To a Latter-day Saint reader who sees the stone "cut out without hands" (2:34) as a kingdom already rolling forth, Jewish tradition offers no rebuttal, only a caution earned by experience. Daniel's own refrain is that "the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men" (4:17, 25, 32). Nebuchadnezzar learns it on all fours in a field. Belshazzar learns it too late. Daniel learns it kneeling at his window three times a day, in good years and bad, in a city that was not his.