Daniel

The book of Daniel is set at the court of Babylon during the exile of the Jews in the sixth century BC; in the Vulgate it comes among the prophets. Jerome translated the Hebrew and Aramaic text in the late fourth century, and added from the Greek version of Theodotion the song of the three young men in the furnace and the stories of Susanna and of Bel and the Dragon, which form chapters 13 and 14.

Daniel and three companions are taken to Babylon and trained at the court of Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel interprets the king's dream of a great statue of gold, silver, bronze and iron with feet of clay. The three companions refuse to worship a golden image and are thrown into a fiery furnace, from which they emerge unharmed. Nebuchadnezzar dreams of a great tree cut down and is driven mad for a time. At Belshazzar's feast a hand writes on the wall, and Daniel reads its doom; under Darius the Mede he is thrown to the lions for praying to his God and survives. The second half contains Daniel's visions: four beasts and one like a son of man, a ram and a goat, the prophecy of seventy weeks, and the wars of the kings of the south and the north until the time of the end. Finally Daniel saves the virtuous Susanna from two lying elders and exposes the priests of Bel.

The court stories are among the most vivid in the Bible. The Latin of the narrative chapters is simple; the visions are harder.