A forty-four week walk through the book of Daniel, one block of verses at a time — the stories first, the method where a reader needs it, and the visions read in the situation they were written into.
Daniel is the book people are most confident about and least likely to have read slowly. Over the next forty-four weeks, we go back to the page and walk the whole thing, in order, one block of verses at a time.
The book of Daniel opens with an inventory: temple vessels and teenagers, itemized and carried off. But one verb in verse two refuses the obvious reading of what has just happened.
Daniel accepted the deportation, the curriculum, the career and even a name that invoked Marduk. Then he refused a meal. Working out why he drew the line exactly there is most of the wisdom in the chapter.
We have just watched a teenager get renamed by an empire. The obvious question is how he got there. The answer is a hundred years of collapse, from the fall of Samaria to the burning of Solomon's Temple.
Nebuchadnezzar refuses to tell his wise men the dream. The threat is savage, but the demand underneath it is not unreasonable at all. He has designed the one test his own religion could not survive.
Daniel receives the answer that will save every scholar in Babylon, and his first move is not to run to the throne room. It is to worship. The song he sings is the theological engine of the entire book.
Daniel's first request is that the men who failed should live. His first words to the king give away all the credit. Then he describes a statue that is magnificent and terrible at once, and a stone that nobody cut.
Daniel names the head. An angel names the second and third. The fourth kingdom is never named anywhere in the book. And the ten toes everyone counts are not counted by the text at all.
The statue is built up for four verses so that its collapse will register. But the stone that replaces it does not simply win. It appears, strikes, grows, and fills -- and those are four stages, not one moment.