Daniel 14

¹ When King Astyages joined his ancestors, Cyrus of Persia succeeded him.

² Daniel was very close to the king who thought more of him than of any other of his friends.

³ Now in Babylon there was an idol called Bel,[*a] to which twelve bushels of the finest flour, forty sheep and six measures of wine were offered every day.

⁴ The king took part in this cult and used to go and worship the idol every day. Daniel, however, worshipped his own God.

⁵ ‘Why do you not worship Bel?’ the king asked Daniel. ‘I do not worship idols made by the hands of men,’ Daniel replied ‘I worship the living God who made heaven and earth and who has power over all living creatures.’

⁶ ‘You believe, then,’ said the king ‘that Bel is not a living god? Can you not see how much he eats and drinks every day?’

⁷ Daniel laughed. ‘My king,’ he said ‘do not be taken in; he is clay inside, and bronze outside, and has never eaten or drunk anything.’

⁸ This made the king angry; he summoned his priests, ‘Tell me who eats all this food,’ he said ‘or die. Prove to me that Bel really eats it, and I will have Daniel put to death for blaspheming him.’

⁹ Daniel said to the king, ‘Let it be as you say’. There were seventy of these priests, to say nothing of their wives and children.

¹⁰ The king went to the temple of Bel, taking Daniel with him.

¹¹ The priests of Bel said to him, ‘We are now withdrawing, as you can see; but we will leave you, O king, to set out food and prepare the wine and leave it there. Then you can shut the door and seal it with your own seal. If, when you return in the morning, you do not find that everything has been eaten by Bel, then let us be put to death; if not, then Daniel, that slanderer!’

¹² They were thinking-hence their confidence-of a secret entrance which they had made under the table, by which they came in daily and took the offerings away.

¹³ When the priests had gone and the king had set out the food for Bel,

¹⁴ Daniel made his servants bring ashes and spread them all over the temple floor, with no other witness than the king. Then they left the building, shut the door and, sealing it with the king’s seal, went away.

¹⁵ That night, as usual, the priests came with their wives and children; they ate and drank everything.

¹⁶ The king was up very early next morning; so was Daniel.

¹⁷ ‘Daniel,’ said the king ‘are the seals intact?’ ‘They are intact, O king’ he replied.

¹⁸ The king then opened the door and taking one look at the table he exclaimed, ‘You are great, O Bel! There is no deception in you!’

¹⁹ But Daniel laughed. And restraining the king from going further in, he said, ‘Look at the floor and examine these footprints’.

²⁰ ‘I can see footprints of men, of women and of children’ said the king,

²¹ and angrily ordered the priests to be arrested, with their wives and children. They showed him then the secret door through which they used to come and remove what was on the table.

²² The king had them put to death and handed Bel over to Daniel who destroyed both the idol and its temple.

²³ There was a big dragon in Babylon, and this was worshipped too.

²⁴ The king said to Daniel, ‘You are not going to tell me that this is no more than bronze? Look, it is alive; it eats and drinks; you cannot deny that this is a living god; worship it, then.’

²⁵ Daniel replied, ‘I worship the Lord my God; he is the living God. With your permission, O king, without using either sword or club I will kill this serpent.’

²⁶ ‘You have my permission’ said the king.

²⁷ Whereupon Daniel took some pitch, some fat and some hair and boiled them up together, rolled the mixture into balls and fed them to the dragon; the dragon swallowed them and burst. Daniel said, ‘Now look at the sort of thing you worship!’

²⁸ The Babylonians were furious when they heard about this and began intriguing against the king. ‘The king has turned Jew,’ they said ‘he has allowed Bel to be overthrown, and the dragon to be killed, and he has put the priests to death.’

²⁹ So they went to the king and said, ‘Hand Daniel over to us or else we will kill you, and your family’.

³⁰ They pressed him so hard that the king found himself forced to hand Daniel over to them.

³¹ They threw Daniel into the lion pit, and there he stayed for six days.

³² In the pit were seven lions, which were given two human bodies and two sheep every day; but for this period they were not given anything, to make sure they would eat Daniel.

³³ Now the prophet Habakkuk was in Judaea: he had been making a stew, and breaking up bread small to put in a basket. He was on his way to the fields, taking this to the harvesters,

³⁴ when the angel of the Lord spoke to him, ‘Take the meal you are carrying to Babylon and give it to Daniel in the lion pit’.

³⁵ ‘Lord,’ replied Habakkuk ‘I have not even seen Babylon, and know nothing about this pit.’

³⁶ The angel of the Lord seized his head and carried him off by the hair to Babylon where, with a great thrust of his spirit, he set Habakkuk down on the edge of the pit.

³⁷ ‘Daniel, Daniel,’ Habakkuk shouted ‘take the meal that God has sent you.’

³⁸ And Daniel said, ‘You have kept me in mind, O God; you have not deserted those who love you’.

³⁹ Rising to his feet he ate the meal, while the angel of God lost no time in returning Habakkuk to his own country.

⁴⁰ On the seventh day the king came to lament over Daniel; on reaching the pit he looked inside, and there was Daniel, quite unperturbed.

⁴¹ ‘You are great, O Lord, God of Daniel,’ he exclaimed ‘there is no god but you!’

⁴² Then he released Daniel from the pit and had the plotters of Daniel’s ruin thrown in instead, where they w`ere instantly eaten before his eyes.