Daniel and the Night with the Lions

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There is a very large stone lying across the mouth of a pit, and there are two seals pressed into the wax on it. One is the king's ring. The other is the ring of his nobles, so that nobody can say the king did something in secret, and nobody can say the nobles did.

The king is standing in front of the stone, in the dark, in his good clothes. He has not eaten. He has sent away the musicians. He is not going to sleep tonight, and he knows it, and he has just said a thing to the man inside the pit that he has never said to anyone before, and that I will tell you about in a moment.

From inside the pit, there is a sound.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is from the sixth chapter of the book of Daniel, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture. A few of the small conversations, and a good deal of the furniture, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and nothing we add changes what happens or what it means. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

First, who is Daniel?

He is a prophet, and he is also, which people forget, a civil servant. A very good one. The kind of person you would want running the office that deals with your taxes: careful, honest, on time, and not at all interested in anything shady.

Here is how he got there. Daniel was a young man in Jerusalem when the armies of Babylon came, many years before our story. The Babylonians took away a number of the brightest young people of the kingdom of Judah, and brought them to Babylon to be trained for the king's service. It was a sad thing, and a frightening one. They were far from home, in a foreign city, with foreign names given to them, and nobody could tell them whether they would ever see Jerusalem again.

And yet, the book of Daniel tells us, Daniel kept his faith, and kept his habits, and kept his head. He learned everything they taught him. He worked hard. And God gave him wisdom, and the ability to understand dreams, and he rose.

By the time of tonight's story, Daniel is an old man. The empire has changed hands. The great kingdom of Babylon has fallen, and a new king rules, whom the book calls Darius the Mede. Scholars have talked for a very long time about exactly who Darius the Mede was, and which king of the history books he matches, and I am not going to settle it for you at bedtime. What matters for us is that he is a king, he is new, and he has a very large kingdom to run.

Now, how do you run a very large kingdom?

If you are Darius, you do it with a list. The book tells us he set up a hundred and twenty governors, called satraps, one over each region. And over the satraps he put three presidents, and one of the three presidents was Daniel. Think of it as a company with a hundred and twenty branch managers, and three regional directors, and a king who would like very much to know that his money was not walking out of the door.

That was the point of Daniel. The satraps reported to the presidents so that the king would not suffer loss. And Daniel, the book says, distinguished himself above all the other presidents and satraps, because there was an excellent spirit in him. So much so that the king was thinking of putting him in charge of the whole kingdom.

You can see the problem coming. It is the problem of every office that has ever existed.

Imagine you are one of the other two presidents. Or one of the hundred and twenty satraps. You have been doing the job a certain way for a long time. It is not exactly crooked, but it is not exactly spotless either. A little rounding up here, a little favour there, a little friend of a friend who gets the contract. And then along comes a very old man, who has been in the country for most of a lifetime and who still has a funny accent, and the king is about to put him in charge of you.

You would be nervous. And some of them did what nervous people do. They went looking for something to use against him.

This is the first scene, and it is a very short one, because it is a failure.

The presidents and the satraps went looking for a charge against Daniel. They went through his accounts. They went through his reports. They went through his conduct, his dealings, his appointments, his expenses, probably his lunches. They were thorough. They were motivated. And they found nothing.

The book says so in a sentence I love. They could find no ground for complaint or any fault, because he was faithful, and no negligence or fault was found in him.

Imagine that. A man searched, with enthusiasm, by people who wanted him gone, and the finest thing they could report was that there was nothing to report.

So the plotters sat down together somewhere, and one of them said what they were all thinking. "We are not going to find anything against this Daniel unless we find it in the law of his God."

They did not say it as a compliment. But it was one. It is a very good thing when the only way your enemies can think of to catch you is by your faithfulness.

And so they came up with a plan. It was an extremely clever plan, and I want to be fair to them, because it was cleverer than most plans that are written down in the Bible.

They did not go to the king and say, "Daniel is a bad man." The king would have laughed, and perhaps sent them to the accountants. They went to the king, all together, with a great crowd of them, and they were very respectful. And they said, "King Darius, live for ever!"

That is how people greeted kings in those days. It is a bit like saying "Good morning, Your Majesty," only with more optimism about his health.

And then they said, "All the presidents of the kingdom, the governors, the satraps, the counsellors and the deputies are agreed. We think the king should make a royal decree, and put a firm order in place. For thirty days, whoever makes a petition to any god or any man, except to you, O king, shall be thrown into the den of lions."

Now. Listen to how that is dressed up. It is not that the king should be worshipped for ever. It is only thirty days. It is not that anyone should be forced. It is only that, for a month, the people should look to the king, and no one else, for everything they need. A kind of national loyalty month. It sounds almost harmless. It sounds, if you are a king, rather flattering.

And they added the little hook that made the trap. "Now, O king, establish the interdict and sign the document, so that it cannot be changed, according to the law of the Medes and the Persians, which cannot be revoked."

You could not take back a law like that. That was the whole point of the law of the Medes and the Persians. Once the king had signed, even the king could not undo it.

Did the king see what was happening? The book is gentle with him. It says only, "Therefore King Darius signed the document and the interdict." He liked being asked. He liked being loved. He did not look at who was asking, or why, or what it might cost an old man with an open window.

I think that is worth sitting with for a moment. Many bad things in the world have started with someone being flattered into signing something.

Now we come to Daniel, and this is the part that I find the most beautiful in the whole chapter. Because of what he does not do.

The book says that when Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house. Now, in his house, in his upper room, there were windows that opened toward Jerusalem. And he knelt down on his knees three times a day, and prayed and gave thanks before his God, just as he had done previously.

Just as he had done previously.

I want you to notice what is not in that sentence. He does not hold a meeting. He does not write a letter of protest. He does not gather a crowd, or lead a march, or announce that he will pray more often than ever as a gesture. He does not close the shutters and pray quietly in the cellar, either, which most sensible people would have understood. He does not stop.

He goes upstairs, as he has gone upstairs every day for decades, opens the windows toward the city he can't see and may never see again, and kneels down in the same place, and says thank you.

The windows are an old custom, and a lovely one. Long before Daniel, when King Solomon built the Temple in Jerusalem, he prayed that God would hear the prayers of anyone who prayed toward that city, even from a far country, even in exile. Daniel is doing exactly that. He is a long way from home, and he turns his face toward it, and he is sure that someone is listening.

And he does it with the windows open. That is the detail that makes me smile, in a rather sad way. A cleverer man would have shut them. Daniel just did what he always did. It had never occurred to him that his prayers were something to hide.

The plotters, of course, were waiting.

Imagine them gathered in the street under the window. It is not hard to imagine, because they had clearly been there for a while. The book says, "Then these men came by agreement and found Daniel making petition and supplication before his God."

Notice the "by agreement." It was all arranged. It was a team effort. They were not even surprised. They knew it, the way you know that the kettle is going to boil.

They did not go straight to Daniel. That would be rude. They went to the king, and they did it carefully, in order. First they reminded him of his decree. "O king, did you not sign an interdict, that anyone who makes petition to any god or man within thirty days, except to you, O king, shall be thrown into the den of lions?"

And the king said, because he had to, "The thing stands fast, according to the law of the Medes and the Persians, which cannot be revoked."

You can almost see them smile. And then they said it.

"Daniel, who is one of the exiles from Judah, pays no heed to you, O king, or to the interdict you have signed, but makes his petition three times a day."

I would like you to notice one small word in how they put it. They did not say, "Daniel, your best president." They said, "Daniel, who is one of the exiles." They had a way of making a good man smaller before they began.

And now the king.

The book says that when the king heard this, he was much distressed. Those are not the words of a man who has been outwitted and is annoyed about it. The word is real distress. He saw it all at once: what he had signed, who had asked him, and what they had been after. He set his mind to deliver Daniel. And he laboured till the sun went down to rescue him.

All day. That is the part that matters. The king did not simply shrug and say, "The law is the law." He was a king. He had advisers. He had lawyers, such as they were in those days. He sat there for the whole of that day, turning the decree over and over, looking for a way out. Perhaps there was a clause. Perhaps there was a loophole. Perhaps if he changed the wording of this phrase, or said this part didn't apply to that kind of person. He worked until the sun went down.

And there was nothing. It was exactly as watertight as the plotters had made it. They had done their job very well.

And then, at sunset, the same men came back. And you can hear the change in them now, because they are not polite any more. The book says they came "in a throng" to the king. They had been waiting all day, and they were not going to let the evening go by. "Know, O king, that it is a law of the Medes and the Persians that no interdict or ordinance that the king establishes can be changed."

And the king gave the order.

It is a very quiet moment. The book does not say what Daniel said, or whether he said anything. It says the king gave the command, and they brought Daniel, and cast him into the den of lions.

But the king spoke to Daniel. And it is the thing I promised I would tell you. He said, "May your God, whom you serve continually, deliver you."

Think about what that is. This is a king who has never, as far as we are told, prayed to the God of Israel. He has been serving his own gods, if he served any, the whole of his life. And now he is standing at the edge of a pit, his chief minister is about to go down it, and there is nothing in the whole kingdom that he can do. His power is entirely used up. He has an army, and treasure, and every servant in the empire at his command, and none of it is any use at all.

And so he says to the old man, "May your God, whom you serve continually, deliver you."

Notice the word. Continually. Daniel has been serving his God continually, three times a day, for decades, in good times and bad, whether anybody was watching. And the king, who has watched him do it, who has seen him come to work every morning for years with a steady look and an honest ledger, understands now what that was. It was not ornament. It was not a hobby. It was the whole of the man.

And then they brought a stone, and laid it on the mouth of the den, and the king sealed it with his own signet ring, and with the signet rings of his lords, so that nothing might be changed concerning Daniel.

I told you about the two seals. Now you see why they were there. No one was to be able to say that Daniel had been taken out in the night, or that anything had been done for him. Whatever was going to happen, it would have to be exactly what God did, and nothing else.

So. The king went home to his palace.

And here the book gives us a few quiet lines, about the saddest night in a palace you will ever read about. He spent the night fasting. No diversions were brought to him. That means no music, no dancers, no entertainers, no one to tell him a joke or a story. A king who normally had everything. And sleep fled from him.

I always think of that sleeplessness. The king lying in his great bed, on the best linen in the country, looking at the ceiling. In the room down the hall, there is nobody. Outside, the city is quiet. Everyone has gone to bed, except a few watchmen, and the cooks getting ready for the morning bread, and a hundred and twenty satraps, who I hope are sleeping very badly.

And somewhere under the ground, in the dark, there are some lions and an old man.

This is a bedtime story, and so I will say plainly what the book says plainly. We are not told what Daniel did that night. The book does not give us a single line of it. But we know what he did all the other nights. He prayed. And we may guess that the lions, who are also God's creatures, and who are not mentioned as saying anything, were doing what God had told them to do, which was nothing at all.

I find that I like to picture the lions lying down. Big, dusty, golden animals, with the heavy paws and the thick manes, and nothing to do. A little puzzled. One of them might have yawned. Lions yawn a great deal. They sleep for twenty hours a day, you know, which is more than any of us. It is the one place in the whole story where the king and the lions are in complete disagreement. He cannot sleep. They can't think why anyone would want to be awake.

Daniel, we are told afterwards, was not hurt. We will hear his own account in a moment. But it seems to me that the most comfortable creature in the whole kingdom that night may have been a prophet in a lions' den, with the lions lying around him like very large cats, and an angel somewhere near, and the stone shut tight, so that for once there was nobody at all to argue with.

Breathe out slowly. Let your hands go soft.

At the first light of dawn, the king got up and went in haste to the den of lions.

He did not take a procession. The book says he hurried. He had been awake all night. I imagine his servants running after him, trying to keep up, one of them still holding a lamp that was no longer needed, the sky going grey over the roofs.

And as he came near to the den, he cried out in a voice full of anguish. I want you to hear that. It is not a royal proclamation. It is a man calling down a hole. "O Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you serve continually, been able to deliver you from the lions?"

Servant of the living God. In the whole story, that is the first time Darius has used those words. He had been told for years that Daniel served the God of heaven. But he says it now, in his own voice, in the morning, as a question and also as something that is more than a question. The living God. Not one of the many. Not one of the useful ones. The living one.

And there is a pause. I imagine it was not long, but it must have felt very long to the king.

And then out of the den, Daniel's voice. And it is perfectly calm. It is the voice of a man who has had a good night, considering.

"O king, live for ever!"

Do you hear it? It is the same greeting the plotters used. But they said it as a trap. Daniel says it as a blessing, and he means it. He has been in a pit all night with a pack of lions, and the first thing he says to the king who put him there is, in effect, "Good morning. I hope you are well."

And then he says the thing that the whole chapter has been leading to.

"My God sent his angel and shut the lions' mouths, and they have not hurt me, because I was found blameless before him; and also before you, O king, I have done no harm."

I want to stay on that for a moment.

Daniel does not say, "I was clever." He does not say, "I was brave." He does not say, "I knew all along that it would turn out all right." What he says is: God sent his angel. And the angel is exactly where the angel belongs in the story, which is as God's messenger, doing what God sent it to do, and shutting the lions' mouths. Not a hero. Not a wizard. An angel, which is a servant.

And he says, "I was found blameless before him." That does not mean that Daniel was perfect. Daniel himself prays elsewhere, with great humility, about his own sins and the sins of his people. It means that, in this matter, he had done nothing wrong. He had kept faith. And, he adds, with a gentle courtesy that I find very moving, "before you, O king, I have done no harm."

That last line is for Darius. He is telling the king, who has been in agony all night, that it is all right. The king hadn't wronged him. Daniel had not broken the king's law out of contempt for him. He had prayed because he could not do otherwise, and the king had done what the law required, and none of it had been Daniel's quarrel with Darius at all.

I do not think a better line was ever said to a man who had accidentally ruined your evening.

And the king was exceedingly glad. And he commanded that Daniel be taken out of the den.

So the servants came and rolled the stone away. They broke the seals, I suppose. Perhaps they hesitated over that, because the seals were the king's and the nobles', and the whole point of them was that no one would touch them. But the king had said so, and so they did.

And they drew Daniel up out of the den. And no kind of harm was found on him, because he had trusted in his God.

Not a scratch. Not a torn sleeve. Not a bruise. The book says no kind of harm was found on him, which means that someone looked. They looked him over carefully, front and back, the way you would check a child who has fallen out of a tree. And there was nothing at all.

I wonder what the guards thought, who had to pull him out. Strong men, who knew very well what lions were. Imagine you are one of them, hauling on the rope, and up out of the shadow comes an elderly man in a long robe, blinking in the light, brushing a bit of straw off his sleeve. He is probably a little stiff from the floor. He might say thank you.

And the book says it again, in the very same breath, in case we missed it: because he had trusted in his God.

Now there is a part of the story that I am going to tell you very briefly, and very quietly, because it is not the part that a bedtime story is for. The book does not linger on it either.

The men who had plotted against Daniel were dealt with by the king's justice, under the same law that they themselves had made. The book tells it in a single hard sentence, and then moves on, as the Bible often does when something is serious and sad and not the point. We will leave it there. It is enough to say that the plot they had made came back upon them. The book wants us to see that the trap was theirs, and that the one who was kept safe was the one who had done no wrong.

And then comes a happier thing, and it is the real ending.

King Darius wrote to all the peoples, nations and languages that dwelt in all the earth. It was the grandest letter that he ever sent, the sort that gets copied and carried to the corners of an empire. And it began like all the great letters of the time. "Peace be multiplied to you."

And then he said: "I make a decree, that in all my royal dominion people tremble and fear before the God of Daniel."

Think what has happened. A few days ago, he had signed a decree that all prayer should be directed to him. Now he signs another one, and it directs everyone to the God of Daniel. He had set himself up as the only one to be petitioned. And now he sends the whole kingdom to Someone else.

And his reasons are a lovely little creed. "For he is the living God, enduring for ever; his kingdom shall never be destroyed, and his dominion shall be to the end. He delivers and rescues, he works signs and wonders in heaven and on earth, he who has saved Daniel from the power of the lions."

That is the king's own testimony. It is not a long one. But it was said by a man who had stood in front of a stone all night in the dark, and he knew what he was talking about.

And Daniel? The book closes the chapter with one sentence. "So this Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius and in the reign of Cyrus the Persian."

That is all. He went back to work.

I find that this is the best ending of all. He did not become a prophet in a tower. He did not retire to a cave or write a book about his adventures, or demand a statue. He went back to the office. He kept the accounts, and the king's money did not walk out of the door, and he went upstairs in the afternoon, and opened the windows that faced Jerusalem, and he knelt down, as he had done previously.

The only thing that had changed was that there was now a king who knew what he was doing up there.

Now, slowly, the end of the story.

The book of Daniel has a great deal in it that we haven't told tonight. It has other stories, of a fiery furnace and a handwriting on a wall, and it has visions of the end of the world and the coming of a figure like a son of man. It is a book that Christians have read with great love, and Jews before them, for a very long time. Tonight we have only taken one chapter out of it, the sixth, and told it as slowly as we could.

And there is a gentle thing that follows the story down through the centuries. The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews, in the New Testament, sets out a long list of people of faith, the great roll of those who trusted God through everything. And in it, among those who through faith conquered kingdoms and enforced justice, he says that they "stopped the mouths of lions." Most readers have always taken that, among others, to be Daniel.

The Orthodox Church keeps the feast of the Holy Prophet Daniel, together with the Three Holy Youths, who were his companions, on the seventeenth of December, in the weeks of preparation before Christmas. And the Catholic Church remembers the prophet Daniel in December too, in the Roman Martyrology. It is a good time of year for him. The nights are long, and the windows are dark, and we are all waiting, in our own way, for light.

I think that is why the story has lasted. It is a story about being faithful when it is not safe. But it is also, quietly, a story about being faithful when it is perfectly ordinary. Daniel's courage, in the end, is not a dramatic act. It is the continuing of a habit. He kept doing what he had always done, three times a day, with the window open, and the whole drama of the night with the lions was only the rest of the world finding out about it.

If you have a habit like that, of prayer, or of honesty, or of kindness to people who do not deserve it, then tonight is a good night to be thankful for it. You may never be asked to go into a den of lions. But you are asked every day to go upstairs, so to speak, and open the window.

So close your eyes. The stone is shut tight, and the seals are in place. There is an angel on duty. There are some large and sleepy animals that have been told to be gentle. And the king, who couldn't sleep, is going to be perfectly all right in the morning.

Breathe out slowly. Let your shoulders go soft. If there is anything you are afraid of tonight, put it down, in the dark, with the lions, who have been told what to do with it. It will not hurt you. And in the morning, someone will come, very early, in a great hurry, calling your name.

Now, notes for the curious, which we do at the end of every episode, so that you know what you have just been told.

Everything in the main story comes from the sixth chapter of the book of Daniel, which both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches receive as Scripture. We have followed it closely, and where we quoted, we gave the sense of the standard English translations, in our own wording for the ear. Where the chapter is silent, as it is about what Daniel did in the night, we have said that it is silent.

The book of Daniel has also been discussed by scholars for a long time, about when it was written, and how its different parts relate to one another, and who exactly Darius the Mede was. The Church receives the book with reverence, and we have left those questions to the scholars and the Church, and told the story as the chapter tells it.

What the episode made up is the colour: the conversations of the plotters, the imagined servants and the lamp, the lions yawning, and the narrator's pictures of the palace and the street. We have not added any event or any meaning. We have also been brief about the end of the plotters, as the book is, because it is not what a bedtime story is for.

One last note. The practice of praying toward Jerusalem is older than Daniel, and is mentioned in Solomon's prayer in the first book of Kings. And the Letter to the Hebrews does not name Daniel when it speaks of those who stopped the mouths of lions, so that is the way readers have taken it, rather than something the letter says outright.

That's the story of the prophet Daniel for tonight. The Orthodox Church keeps his feast on the seventeenth of December, and the Catholic Church remembers him in December in the Roman Martyrology. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. And may the Lord, who delivers and rescues, who shut the mouths of the lions for the sake of one faithful man, keep you through this night, wake you gently in the morning, and give you the grace to go on doing, quietly and without fear, whatever you have always done in his name. Goodnight, and God bless.

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