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 Jews 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.
3 Maccabees 6:7
Pseudepigrapha
6 The three companions in Babylon who had voluntarily surrendered their lives to the flames so as not to serve vain things, you rescued unharmed, even to a hair, moistening the fiery furnace with dew and turning the flame against all their enemies. 7 Daniel, who through envious slanders was thrown down into the ground to lions as food for wild animals, you brought up to the light unharmed. 8 And Jonah, wasting away in the belly of a huge, sea-born monster, you, Father, watched over and restored unharmed to all his family.
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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. ...
* 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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