Daniel

Daniel has two very distinct parts. The first is narrative and famous: young Jews taken to the Babylonian court who refuse the king's food, the fiery furnace, the writing on the wall during Belshazzar's banquet and the lions' den. These are stories about keeping faith without withdrawing from the world. The second half is apocalyptic: visions of beasts, kingdoms and times, written in symbolic language that requires careful reading. One image from that section — "one like a son of man" — is taken up by Jesus in the Gospels. Much of the book was written in Aramaic, the empire's common language, rather than Hebrew.