NOTES for Dan 3:14-20

The persecutions that fell upon the faithful after Nebuchadnezzar's decree are associated both with the events at the end of King Nebuchadnezzar's reign and with the events of the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, when the Book of Daniel was written. Today it can be considered established that the last ruler of the Neo-Babylonian Kingdom, Baaltezer, Belshazzar in the Greek texts, did in fact carry out a certain religious reform that caused dissatisfaction among the local priesthood. Some historians suppose that in the course of the reform he, among other things, put sacred statues on public display, thus making worship of the gods a public ceremony; previously sacred statues and images had been hidden deep inside the temples, where access for the uninitiated was closed. Apparently this led to conflict not only with the Babylonian priestly corporation, but also with the Synagogue. It is possible that its most active members, who refused to take part in this kind of public pagan religious event, were indeed subjected to persecution, although today we have no exact information about them.

It is not excluded, however, that certain traditions about those persecutions were preserved in the Synagogue, and the author of the Book of Daniel made use of them, attributing the reforms themselves not to Belshazzar but to his predecessor on the throne, Nebuchadnezzar, called Nebuchadnezzar in the Greek texts. Meanwhile, under Antiochus Epiphanes something similar was repeated on a much larger scale, and we know quite enough about the persecutions of Antiochus, in particular thanks to the Books of Maccabees preserved to our time. Antiochus, who seriously considered himself a son of Zeus, ordered altars of Zeus to be set up in all the cities of the country, including, of course, Jerusalem, and at the same time his own altars as well: he considered himself, if not a god, then at least a demigod. In Jerusalem, of course, he found no place for his altars other than the temple courtyard. It is not hard to imagine the reaction of the Jews to such sacrilege: there was a clear desecration of the Temple, and therefore of the city, and the times of the Babylonian exile came to mind, along with the preaching of the ancient prophets about the coming of the Messiah and the onset of the messianic Kingdom after the persecutions that would fall upon the faithful shortly before those events. Yet the author of the book is by no means an exalted enthusiast: his Daniel is not a hero of ancient traditions for whom miraculous rescue is guaranteed by the laws of the genre. He knows only one thing: his task is to keep faithfulness to God, and whether God will save him from death in a particular situation is God's affair, not something dependent on man. But it is precisely such faithfulness, and not the expectation of an inevitable miracle, that proves to be the pledge of salvation.