Daniel

Daniel The biblical hero, living in the sixth century BCE in Babylon, where his people had been exiled, and whose story is told in the book of Daniel. The first six chapters of the book of Daniel tell of how Daniel and his companions, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, were faithful to their religion despite the allurements and threats they were offered to forsake it. The second part of the book contains the visions of the future seen by Daniel, and their interpretation. Part of the book is in Hebrew but most of it is in Aramaic.

The stories in the book of Daniel are among the best known in the Bible: the three young men cast into the fiery furnace for refusing to bow to the image of the king but emerging unscathed (ch. 3); King Belshazzar and the writing on the wall, which only Daniel can interpret (ch. 5); and Daniel in the lions' den (ch. 6).

The visions of Daniel were believed to contain hints of the time when the Messiah will come but generally the Rabbis discouraged attempts to discover from the book the time of the advent of the Messiah, since it might lead to loss of faith if the date said to be predicted came and went without the anticipated event happening.