Canter Bridge

Daniel stands out in a superficial reading of the book that bears his name as a Golden Boy, a larger-than-life Man of Principle who was destined before time to stare down the powers and prove the superiority of Israel’s God in a pagan environment.

No reading undercuts the true nature of the text more easily than this facile understanding of heroism as a thing that simply had to be.

Real human beings never experience heroism as predetermined, an indelible script written into their days. After the glorious deed, the heroic figure is often more surprised than anyone that he turned out to be … well … a hero.

Daniel and his famous friends—Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were their given names, though not the names upon which glory would fall—did not live in promising times.

In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came to Jerusalem and besieged it.And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with some of the vessels of the house of God. And he brought them to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his god. (Daniel 1:1–2 ESV)

Judah was not merely in decline. The nation lay shattered and decapitated.

YHWH himself, it seemed and would have been loudly proclaimed by some, had turned against his people. The stark detail of the text is unforgiving in this regard: YHWH gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into (Nebuchadnezzer’s) hand.

The time for heroism had passed when some of Judah’s sons lay torn by Babylonian spears, others having fled ignobly for their lives.

Now was the time for exiles, for meek accommodation to the oppressor’s rules. It is a time for laying low, for keeping one’s head down, for guarding one’s principles behind silence, whispers, and averted glances.

Daniel and his company of eventual heroes were selected for special training because of their brains and their legs, not their hearts. Indeed, they were given their famous Babylonian names—Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego—precisely so that their hearts would finish dying. Men without chests would be groomed as Babylonians. The nation’s unremembered carcass would eventually disappear from history’s roadside, picked clean by vultures, washed away by winter’s rains, pressed deep into Babylonian soil by the trudging march of uncounted feet.

It was not a propitious moment for heroes. The times never favor heroes in the making. Such people are anomalies, surprising first themselves and then onlookers like us.

The four men could scarcely have imagined that we would one day venerate their names, that we would speak them softly over our newborn sons.

We know their moment was coming. They did not.

Heroes never do. The future of an eventual hero is always still unwritten when he whispers to his friends, surprising even himself,

What if we don’t eat Nebuchadnezzar’s meat?