Daniel 6 - Introduction

DANIEL IN THE LIONS" DEN

Darius the Mede appoints over his kingdom 120 satraps with three presidents over them, one of the latter being Daniel (Daniel 6:1). On account of the regard shewn to him by the king, the satraps and presidents, being moved with envy, seek an opportunity to ruin him (Daniel 6:3). They accordingly persuade Darius to issue a decree, forbidding any one to ask a petition of God or man, except the king, for thirty days (Daniel 6:5). Daniel, however, continues as before to pray three times a day at his open window towards Jerusalem. The king, upon information being brought to him, reluctantly yielding obedience to the law, orders Daniel to be cast into a den of lions (Daniel 6:10). Next morning, to his astonishment and joy, he finds him uninjured; and publishes a decree enjoining men, in all parts of his dominion, to stand in awe of the God of Daniel, who had given such wonderful evidence of His power (Daniel 6:18).

Daniel has hitherto been uniformly prosperous: success and honours have attended him under each monarch with whom he has had to do (Daniel 1:19-20; Daniel 2:26 ff., Daniel 2:48-49; Daniel 4:19-27; Daniel 5:17 ff., Daniel 5:29), even including Darius (Daniel 6:2-3). But, in his old age, his trial also comes. His loyalty to his God, his determination not to disown the public profession of his faith, is put severely to the test. It is not, as with his three companions in ch. 3, a question of a positive sin which he will not commit, but of a positive duty which he will not omit. He finds himself placed in a position in which, if he worships the God of his fathers in his accustomed manner, he will become guilty of a capital offence. The situation is, in all essential features, the same as that of the faithful Jews under the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes (see 1Ma 1:41-64). The story of Daniel's deliverance, notwithstanding certain improbabilities which (quite apart from the details which are avowedly miraculous) it seems, to some minds, to present, is a vivid exemplification of the value, in God's sight, of courageous loyalty to Himself. Of course, in the ordinary operation of Providence, God's servants are not delivered from bodily peril by a direct miraculous intervention of the character here described: but the narrative, like that in ch. 3, must be judged by the principle laid down in the Introduction (p. lxxii): the lesson, not the story in which it is embodied, is the point which the narrator desires to impress, and on which the reader's attention ought to be fixed.