Daniel and the Three Holy Youths

Daniel and his three companions — Ananias, Azarias, and Misael — are kept together on 17 December, four young captives of Babylon who kept the faith in a pagan court. This file treats the furnace and the Song of the Three (an addition of the Septuagint, and the source of two of the Nine Odes), Daniel’s apocalyptic visions and their christological reading, and the source-critical debate over the book’s date, reported both-sides and deferred to the Scripture collection.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Four Youths in Babylon

Among the captives Nebuchadnezzar carried to Babylon were four youths of the royal house of Judah — Daniel and his companions Ananias, Azarias, and Misael, given the Babylonian names Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (Daniel 1). The Church commemorates all four together on 17 December (Prophet Daniel; and the Three Holy Youths Ananias, Azarias, and Misael, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, 17 December), and honors them especially on the two Sundays before the Nativity, since their preservation was read as a type of the Incarnation (see The Prophets as Saints of the Church). Refusing to defile themselves with the king’s food, the four are found wiser than all the Chaldeans; the story unfolds as a series of confrontations between the faith of the youths and the idolatry and pride of the empire.

The Fiery Furnace and the Song of the Three

The central scene is the fiery furnace (Daniel 3). When the three youths refuse to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image, they are cast, bound, into a furnace heated sevenfold — and are seen walking unharmed in the flames, joined by a fourth “like the Son of God” (Daniel 3:25), so that the fire does not so much as singe their garments. The Church reads the fourth figure in the furnace as the pre-incarnate Word or His angel, and the whole scene as a type of many things: of the Nativity (the fire that does not consume, as the Godhead in the Virgin’s womb and the burning bush), of the Church preserved unharmed amid the fire of persecution, and of the descent into the “furnace” of Hades from which Christ delivers the righteous. The furnace is one of the most frequent subjects of Orthodox hymnography and iconography, and the youths, hands raised in the flames, are a standing image of confession under trial.

Within the furnace narrative the Septuagint (and the Old Greek/Theodotion text the Church uses) contains a passage absent from the Hebrew-Aramaic Masoretic text: the Prayer of Azarias and the Song of the Three Holy Children (Daniel 3:24–90 LXX), in which Azarias prays for mercy from the midst of the fire and then all three break into a great hymn of praise summoning all creation to bless the Lord — “O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord: praise and exalt him above all for ever” (the Benedicite). This passage belongs to the wider Old Testament that Orthodoxy receives — the books and portions the tradition calls the anagignoskomena (“those that are read”), present in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew canon, and reckoned by the Church as genuinely part of her Scripture (their status is treated at length in the Scripture collection; see The Wider Old Testament and the Anagignoskomena). The Song of the Three has a further and profound liturgical afterlife: it supplies the seventh and eighth of the Nine Biblical Odes on which the canon of Matins is built — Ode 7 from the Prayer of Azarias and Ode 8 from the Song (“Bless the Lord, all ye works of the Lord”) — so that the youths in the furnace are sung at every canon (the mechanics of the Odes are treated in The Prophets in Orthodox Worship, and, for the form of the canon, in the wave-sibling collection on hymnography; see John of Damascus and Cosmas of Maiuma).

Daniel’s Visions

Daniel himself is the Old Testament’s great figure of the wise man and the seer of apocalyptic visions. He interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the great image of four metals shattered by a stone cut without hands that becomes a mountain filling the earth (Daniel 2) — read by the Church as the kingdom of Christ, and the “stone cut without hands” as a type of Christ born of the Virgin without seed (a standard Marian-christological reading). He is preserved in the den of lions (Daniel 6), a type of Christ in the tomb and of the martyrs. And in his night visions he sees the four beasts and then the throne of the Ancient of Days, before whom “one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven… and there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom” (Daniel 7:9–14) — the vision of the “Son of Man” that Christ took as His own title and applied to Himself at His trial (Matthew 26:64; Mark 14:62), and that grounds the Church’s confession of His eternal kingdom. Daniel’s seventy weeks (Daniel 9:24–27) and his prophecy of the resurrection — “many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life” (Daniel 12:2) — round out a book that stands, in the Orthodox reading, as one of the richest wells of Messianic and eschatological prophecy.

The Date of Daniel — Reported Both Sides

The book of Daniel is the sharpest source-critical case among the prophets, and the honest course per METHODOLOGY §4.2 is to report the two positions and to defer the adjudication, with the method, to the Scripture collection.

The traditional view takes the book as the work of Daniel himself, a sixth-century BC figure of the Babylonian exile, so that its detailed foretelling of the succession of empires down to the Hellenistic age is genuine long-range prophecy. This is the reading presupposed by the Church’s liturgical usage, which honors Daniel as the prophet and author.
The critical consensus dates the book (in its final form) to the second century BC, in the crisis of the persecution of the Jews by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes (167–164 BC). The chief arguments are the book’s precise knowledge of Seleucid history down to about 167 BC but not of Antiochus’s death in 164; its late linguistic features (Persian and Greek loanwords, the character of its Aramaic and Hebrew); its placement among the “Writings” rather than the “Prophets” in the Hebrew Bible; and the silence of earlier Jewish literature about Daniel until the second century — leading most critical scholars to read the “prophecies” as vaticinia ex eventu, prophecy after the fact composed to encourage the faithful under persecution (John J. Collins, Daniel, Hermeneia, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993, the standard critical commentary, for the second-century dating and its grounds).

[Disputed: the date and character of the Book of Daniel. (a) The traditional position — sixth-century BC composition by Daniel, the empire-prophecies genuinely predictive — is the reading assumed by the Church’s veneration and defended by a minority of conservative scholars on linguistic and historical grounds. (b) The critical consensus — final composition c. 167–164 BC under Antiochus IV, the survey of empires being prophecy after the fact — is held by the great majority of academic scholars (Collins, Daniel, Hermeneia, 1993). This is a source-critical and factual question; per §4.2 this collection names the positions, does not adjudicate, and defers the fuller treatment and the Orthodox reception of critical scholarship to the Scripture collection — see The Historical-Critical Method.]

Whatever the date of its composition, the book of Daniel is received by the Church as canonical Scripture and read christologically: the stone cut without hands, the Son of Man coming on the clouds, the three youths in the furnace, and the resurrection of the dead are honored as Spirit-given prophecy of Christ and His kingdom, and Daniel and his companions are venerated as saints. The critical dating bears on how the book came to be, not on whether the Church reads it as the word of God — the same distinction the Scripture collection draws for the whole encounter with modern criticism (see The Historical-Critical Method).

References

The Holy Bible, KJV, with the Septuagint additions (Daniel 1–12; the Prayer of Azarias and the Song of the Three, Daniel 3:24–90 LXX; Daniel 7:9–14; Matthew 26:64; Mark 14:62).
Prophet Daniel; and The Three Holy Youths: Ananias, Azarias, and Misael (17 December), Orthodox Church in America, oca.org. (The feast; the lives; the commemoration on the Sundays before Nativity.)
Collins, John J. Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. (The critical second-century dating and its arguments.)
Pentiuc, Eugen J. The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. (The anagignoskomena; the Orthodox reception of Daniel.)
The Benedicite / Song of the Three as Odes 7–8 of the biblical canticles, standard liturgical usage (Biblical Odes, OrthodoxWiki).