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).