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The account about Daniel and his friends
(1:1–6:28)
1 In the third year of Yehudah’s King Yehoyakim’s reign, Babylon’s King Nevukadnetstsar (Nebuchadnezzar) came to Yerushalem (Jerusalem) and besieged the city.[ref] 2 After two years, the master allowed King Yehoyakim to be defeated by Nevukadnetstsar who then took some of the items out of the temple and took them to Shinar (Babylonia) where he placed them in his god’s temple storerooms.[ref]
3 Some time later, King Nevukadnetstsar commanded his chief official Ashpenaz to bring him some of the young Israeli men, from both their royal family and from some of the prominent families. 4 They had to be good-looking young men without obvious defects, wise and well-educated, who would be competent for future work in the palace. They would be taught the language and literature of the Chaldeans, 5 and king assigned a daily portion of food and wine for them from his own table. They would be trained for three years before entering the king’s service. 6 Among the young men from Yehudah who were chosen were Daniel, Hananyah, Misha’el, and Azaryah, 7 but Ashpenaz named them Belteshatstsar, Shadrak, Meyshak, and Avednego respectively.
8 However Daniel decided that he wouldn’t eat the king’s fancy food or drink his wine because it wasn’t all ‘kosher’, so he requested permission from Ashpenaz to eat an alternative diet. 9 Now God had caused the chief official to like and respect Daniel, 10 but he queried, “I’m afraid of my master the king, who’s assigned your food and drink—if he saw you guys looking worse than the others of your own age then I’d risk losing my head if the king got angry.”
11 So Daniel asked the steward that Ashpenaz had assigned over the four of them, 12 “Please test your servants for ten days: let us be given some vegetables to eat and water to drink, 13 then after that, see how we look compared to the other young men who eat the king’s choice food. Then you can make the best decision from the evidence.”
14 So the steward agreed to that and started the ten-day trial. 15 At the end of the ten days, they looked better and healthier than all the young men who’d been eating the king’s fancy food, 16 so after that, the steward just gave them vegetables to eat instead of the choice food and wine.
17 So God gave those four young men knowledge and insight into all literature, and wisdom, and Daniel was able to interpret any dreams and visions.
18 At the end of the three years[ref] when the king ordered them to be brought in, the chief official Ashpenaz brought them in to King Nevukadnetstsar. 19 The king talked with each of them and realised that none of the others were as capable as Daniel, Hananyah, Misha’el, and Azaryah, so they ended up in the king’s service—20 in every matter of wisdom and understanding which the king asked them about, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and astrologers from throughout his entire kingdom. 21 Daniel continued serving there through to the first year of the reign of King Koresh (Cyrus).
1:4 OSHB variant note: מאום: (x-qere) ’מוּם֩’: lemma_3971 a morph_HNcmsa id_27hh7 מוּם֩
Daniel 1; 2 Kings 24-25; 2 Chronicles 36; Jeremiah 39; 52
One of the most significant events in the story of the Old Testament is the exile of Judah to Babylon in 586 B.C. This event–actually the third in a series of exiles to Babylon (the others occurring in 605 B.C. and 597 B.C.)–precipitated several crises in the nation and in Judaism. The northern kingdom of Israel had already been exiled to Assyria over a century earlier in 722 B.C. (2 Kings 15:29; 17:1-6; 1 Chronicles 5:26; see also “Israelites Are Exiled to Assyria” map), and in some ways that exile was even more devastating. Nevertheless, the Temple of the Lord remained intact in Jerusalem as a place where the faithful could continue to offer their sacrifices. With the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple of the Lord at the hands of the Babylonians, however, sacrifices could no longer be offered at the Tabernacle or Temple of the Lord (Leviticus 17:2-4; Deuteronomy 12:5-7), and the Lord’s promise to provide a land for his people and a descendant on the throne of David no doubt seemed abandoned. At the same time, however, the Judean exiles were allowed to maintain their religious traditions in Babylon, and many even began to thrive there, including Daniel and his friends, who served at the royal court (Daniel 1; see also “The Land of Exile” map). One of the last kings of Babylon expanded Babylonia further by capturing the desert oases of Dumah, Tema, Dedan, and Yathrib (see “Oases of the Arabian Desert” map), but eventually the Median Empire to the north merged with the Persian Empire to the southeast and conquered the Babylonian Empire. King Cyrus of Persia then decreed that the exiled Judeans, now called “Jews,” could return to their homeland if they desired (2 Chronicles 36:22-23; Ezra 1-2; see also “Jews Return from Exile” map).