Book of Daniel

A biblical book combining court tales about Jewish exiles in Babylon with visions of successive kingdoms and a final divine judgment. It is traditionally attributed to Daniel.

Apocalyptic literature: A literary genre that reveals divine realities and future judgment through symbolic visions. Daniel’s visions are among the Bible’s most influential examples of this genre.
Daniel 1: The opening chapter of Daniel, describing the Judean youths’ training at the Babylonian court. It establishes exile, court service, and resistance as recurring concerns.
Babylon: An ancient Mesopotamian city that served as the capital of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. The book’s court tales locate Daniel’s exile and service in this imperial center.
Daniel (biblical figure): A Jewish exile and interpreter of dreams portrayed in the biblical Book of Daniel. The traditional attribution identifies this character as the book’s author.
Hebrew Bible: The collection of Jewish scriptures that forms the Old Testament in Christian Bibles. Daniel belongs to this scriptural collection, though its canonical position varies.
Daniel 2: A chapter in which Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a statue representing successive kingdoms. Its statue vision introduces the book’s sequence of empires and divine kingdom.
Antiochus IV Epiphanes: A Seleucid king whose rule over Judea included the suppression of Jewish practices in the second century BCE. Many scholars relate Daniel’s final visions to the crisis under his reign.
Historical-critical method: An approach to biblical texts that investigates their historical settings, sources, and development. It often distinguishes the tales’ narrated setting from the visions’ composition in the second century BCE.
Aramaic: A Northwest Semitic language used across the ancient Near East and in parts of the Bible. Large portions of Daniel are written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew.
Daniel 7: A vision of four beasts, a heavenly court, and one like a son of man receiving dominion. It recasts the empire sequence in the book’s central symbolic vision.

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