NOTES for Dan 3:1-23

Today it is hard to say with certainty what stands behind the whole story with the golden image. Some historians have suggested that either at the end of Nebuchadnezzar's reign or during the reign of Belshazzar, a religious reform was carried out on the king's initiative, during which the altars of royal sanctuaries, previously closed to ordinary people, were opened, to the great displeasure of the priests.

After this, the official Babylonian cults, such as the cult of Bel-Marduk, the patron of Babylon, became public and obligatory for worship. Earlier it had been assumed that all inhabitants of the country adhered to the state religion by default; now it was required to demonstrate loyalty to the gods of Babylonia publicly. It is possible that during this period, toward the end of the exile, a conflict between the Synagogue and the Babylonian authorities on religious grounds also took shape, vague echoes of which can be found in the second part of the Book of Isaiah. Soon, however, Babylonia fell under the blows of the Persian army, and the situation changed radically.

Of course, in the Book of Daniel, written much later than the events mentioned, they are reflected more as legend than as a historically reliable event. But the legend proved more than timely when the book was written, because it was written during the persecutions of the Synagogue under the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes. These persecutions were organized and systematic. Antioch himself demanded unwavering public veneration of Zeus by all his subjects without exception, under different names in different lands, as often happened in antiquity; he seriously considered Zeus his father.

Each person in his turn had to offer a public sacrifice to Zeus, or to Baal-Shamem, as he was officially called in Judea, and for every believing Jew this was equivalent to apostasy. It was then that many martyrs appeared in the Synagogue, but also many apostates. The story of the confession of the three youths was meant to support those who wanted to keep faithfulness to the God of Israel and to the faith of their fathers. Of course, first of all this is a story about a miracle, about God's miraculous intervention, supporting His witnesses and preserving their lives.

But in the text of the story there sounds an understanding that the miracle might not have happened. God Himself knows when to intervene in a situation, if such intervention is needed at all. But faithfulness to God is unconditional; it does not depend on miracles. Such an attitude toward miracles becomes understandable if we remember that in the time of the Maccabees, when the book was written, faith in the universal resurrection on the day of Judgment and the coming of the Messiah was already widespread. Death for the faith was not the end of the road, but only its beginning. And this was the road into the Kingdom, from which one must not turn aside, even if the price is earthly life.

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.