Start Here: A Walk Through the Book of Daniel

Another book on Daniel.

I know how that sounds. If you laid every book written about Daniel end to end, you could probably pave a decent stretch of highway, and a good number of them would have a cover with arrows on it. I have owned some of those. I have read them cover to cover and underlined them, so this is not me throwing stones from a safe distance.

So let me be honest about why I have added one more to the pile, and why I would like to spend the next forty-four weeks going through this with you.

I love the book of Daniel and had a great time studying this book, and my study, I'm sure, is not done. In my opinion, Daniel is the book of the Bible that people are most confident about and least likely to have read slowly.

I am quite aware that almost everyone has an opinion on it. The statue with the feet of clay. The little horn. The seventy weeks. The abomination of desolation. Most of us picked those opinions up somewhere along the way, from a sermon, a chart on an overhead projector, a paperback, a video, a confident friend, and we have carried them ever since without going back to check them against the page.

In this series, we will go back to the text. All of it, in order, one block of verses at a time, for the next forty-four weeks.

What we are actually doing

Starting next week, we will open Daniel chapter one, verse one, and walk. I don't want to do a highlight reel, and I don't want to take only the famous bits or the passages that happen to support a point I have already decided to make. I would like us to take the whole book, from the deportation in the opening line to the sealed words at the very end, and then spend five weeks on how Jesus and the apostles read Daniel, because they quote him rather more than I think most of us realize.

That means sixteen weeks in the first story. A teenager renamed by an empire. A dream nobody can recover. A furnace. A king on his hands and knees in a field. Fingers writing on a wall in the middle of a party. Lions.

Then the visions, which are harder and stranger, and which is where most of the arguments live. Beasts coming up out of the sea. A courtroom in heaven. A horn that speaks great things. Numbers that people have been arguing about for two thousand years.

You will need one thing to follow along: a Bible. No Hebrew, no Greek, no seminary, and no particular denomination. Where a word in the original actually matters, I will explain it in plain English, and where it doesn't matter, I will leave it alone.

Two things I am going to try not to do

I want to be upfront about these, because I would rather you held me to them.

The first is that I am not going to read Daniel from a newspaper. I am not going to match the little horn to whoever happens to be unpopular this year, or identify the ten toes with the latest political alliance. I have watched that done for most of my life, and in my opinion, its track record is not good. We will look at why in some detail when we get to the visions.

The second is that I am going to try not to decide in advance what Daniel is allowed to say. Whatever framework you arrived with, and I think you did arrive with one, it doesn't get to hand out the answers before the text has spoken. Some of what you already believe will survive that. Some of it may not. That is the deal, and I want to be clear that it applies to me just as much as it does to you. It certainly did while I was writing the book.

What I would rather we do is unglamorous. Look at what the text says. Put it in the situation it was written into. Ask what it would have meant to the people who first heard it. And then, after all of that, ask what it means for us. In my opinion, applications should never jump the queue, though I will admit that it is easier said than done.

The shape of the next ten months

So you know what you are signing up for, here is the road.

Weeks two to seventeen are the court, which is Daniel 1 through 6. Daniel and his friends arrive in Babylon, refuse a menu, interpret a dream nobody else can even recover, survive a furnace, watch a king lose his mind and then get it back, read the writing on the wall, and end up in a den of lions. These are the chapters most of us met in Sunday school, and I think they are considerably stranger and sharper than the felt-board version I grew up with.

Weeks eighteen and nineteen are a pause for tools, right at the point where the book gets harder. Two posts on how Daniel gets misread and how to read it without getting fooled. I have put them there rather than at the front on purpose, because by then you will have watched the method work for four months, and in my experience, a rule you have already seen in action is worth about ten rules you have only been told.

Weeks twenty to twenty-seven are the visions of chapters 7 and 8, which are where most of the arguments in Christian history actually live. Weeks twenty-eight to thirty-two are the seventy weeks of Daniel 9, which is the most contested passage in the book and, I will admit, the one I found hardest to work through. Weeks thirty-three to thirty-nine take the last vision through to the end of chapter 12. And the final five weeks examine how Jesus and the apostles used Daniel, including the moment when Jesus quotes him under oath at his own trial.

Every post will stand on its own, so if you land here in week thirty-one, you haven't missed anything you can't pick up. But it is built to be walked in order, and I think you will get more out of it that way.

Where does this come from

This series draws on a book I have just finished, The Prophecies of Daniel: An Exile's Vision of the Kingdom of God and the Fall of Empires.

It did not start out as a book. It started as a personal study, and my goal was fairly modest. I wanted to read Daniel carefully, in its own historical setting, and understand what it says about the succession of kingdoms and the coming of God's own kingdom. If I am honest, I expected to come out the other side more confident in what I already held.

That is not what happened. A good deal of what I had absorbed about Daniel over the years, from sermons, from prophecy conferences, from popular books, from identifications I had been handed and told to accept, did not survive direct contact with the text. Not all of it. But enough that a study meant to confirm what I believed became a study that changed what I believed.

That was uncomfortable. I also think it was good for me, and I would not want to go back.

The book is the long version: two hundred and eighty pages, thirty-one chapters, the Aramaic word studies, the historical verification trail, a timeline running from 722 BC to AD 70, and an appendix listing the readings I considered and rejected, with my reasons. There is also a chapter on the questions I could not close, because in my opinion, a book that answers everything has stopped being honest somewhere.

These posts are the shorter, more readable versions. You will not need the book to follow them, and I am not going to spend forty-four weeks selling it to you. There will be a brief note at the end of each post, and that is all. But if something here makes you want the full argument with the sources attached, that is what the book is for.

Why bother with Daniel at all

Because it is not a puzzle box, whatever we have turned it into.

Daniel was written for people whose world had ended. The Temple was looted. The royal family in chains. The city that everybody had been assured of was untouchable burned to the ground. Everything they had been promised could not happen, happening on schedule, right in front of them.

And into that, a young man in a foreign court kept being shown the same thing from different angles. That the empires currently deciding his life were running on a clock they had not set. That the God everyone assumed had been defeated was quietly removing kings and installing new ones. And that a kingdom was coming that none could break.

That is not trivia. That is a book written to people who had every reason to believe God had lost, telling them that He had not. I have needed to hear that more than once over the years, and I suspect you have too.

Near the end of the book's preface, I wrote a line I keep coming back to. The stone that struck the image was cut without hands. It has become a mountain, and the mountain is still filling the earth.

Next week: Daniel chapter one, verse one. A king arrives, a city falls, and four young men are given new names.

About the Book

This series follows The Prophecies of Daniel: An Exile's Vision of the Kingdom of God and the Fall of Empires by Dwaine Senechal (Berean Post, 2026). The book carries the full argument, the source trail, and the Aramaic and historical work these posts stand on. Available on Kindle from Amazon. Visit daniel.bereanpost.ca to pre-order the hardcover or paperback.

Buy the Kindle edition · see both editions and reserve the paperback