Texts in Conversation
In Daniel, God sends an angel to shut the mouths of the lions and bring Daniel out of their den unharmed. A prayer in 3 Maccabees echoes that moment of rescue among God’s past deliverances as the Jewish people of Egypt face death.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Daniel 6:22
Hebrew Bible
21 Then Daniel spoke to the king, “O king, live forever! 22 My God sent his angel and closed the lions’ mouths so that they have not harmed me because I was found to be innocent before him. Nor have I done any harm to you, O king.” 23 Then the king was delighted and gave an order to haul Daniel up from the den. So Daniel was hauled up out of the den. He had no injury of any kind because he had trusted in his God.
Date: 200–101 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
3 Maccabees 6:7
Deuterocanon
6 When the three friends in the land of Babylon of their own will exposed their lives to the fire rather than serve vain things, you sent a moist coolness through the fiery furnace, and brought the fire on all their adversaries. 7 It was you who, when Daniel was hurled, through slander and envy, as a prey to lions down below, brought him back again unharmed to light. 8 When Jonah was pining away in the belly of the sea-born monster, you looked at him, O Father, and recovered him to the sight of his own.
Date: 100 BCE – 70 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
... The deliverance of two more characters in the Hebrew Bible rounds out the quick tour of salvation history. The well-known story of Daniel's rescue appears in Daniel 6 and with bizarre additional details in Bel and the Dragon 31-42. Daniel serves particularly well as an example of deliverance in the present context because the destruction that threatened him involved beasts (verse 7). The same word was used by Philopator in his threatening grant against Hermon (5:31) and a similar word has been used repeatedly for Philopator's elephants (5:23, 29, 42, 45, 47). In addition, as in the case of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the punishment that was intended for Daniel was ultimately inflicted on his opponents (Daniel 6:24; Bel 42), again foreshadowing the retribution in 3 Maccabees. ...
N. Clayton Croy, 3 Maccabees (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 100.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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