Book of Daniel Resources

This is a TV movie production of the stories from the Book of Daniel, released in 2013.

Martin Luther King Jr's famous letter to clergymen compares the trials and sufferings that the people working for civil rights will need to undergo to those of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

The famous Protestant reformer wrote a great deal about Daniel, authoring an extensive commentary on the book.

Okay, you have one last chance to watch this video. It burrows its way into your brain with its charm and its strangeness—a talking pickle, playing Nebuchadnezzar, sings a hymn to his preferred idol: a giant chocolate bunny.

This jazz hit from the 1930s narrates the story of the whole fiery furnace episode.

Johnny Cash's country song—performed here with June Carter and John Prine—is another pretty straightforward retelling of the fiery furnace story.

This is a performance of the twentieth-century British classical composer Benjamin Britten's musical parable about the fiery furnace story. It originally aired on the BBC, with singers from the English Opera Group.

Here's a really recent performance of William Walton's choral piece on the "Writing on the Wall" incident. (Walton was another famous twentieth-century British composer.)

The nineteenth-century British artist, Briton Reviere, painted this picture of Daniel in the Lions' Den, which is more accurate than a lot of other ones since it shows Daniel as an old man (which would've been the case.)

Here's a painting from an anonymous medieval artist, dating to around the fourteenth century. The statue appears to be supporting some sort of weird stone wheel between its knees.

Simeon Solomon was an eccentric British artist—one of the nineteenth-century "Pre-Raphaelites" who were known for their dangerous and outlandish lifestyles. Solomon was of Jewish descent, and liked to paint subjects from the Hebrew Bible—like this one of the fiery furnace scene.

Here's is another depiction of the fiery furnace, from a manuscript belonging to a Byzantine Emperor (dating to sometime around the 1st Millenium, CE).

Hans Holbein the Younger's, a famous fourteenth-century German artist, painted his own interpretation of the four beasts from Daniel's first vision.

Rembrandt's excellent painting captures Belshazzar's shock and surprise at the feast.

This political cartoon from the early nineteenth-century ties the Belshazzar story into events from the artist's own time, showing the Emperor Napoleon as a man forced to see the "writing on the wall."

Peter Paul Rubens paints Daniel as a somewhat younger man in the lions' den—not all that historically accurate, but a really powerful image.

Here's another classic painting of the lions' den scene, this time from Eugene Delacroix, another heavy-hitter in the art world.

This is Michelangelo's version of Daniel, from the walls of the Sistine Chapel.

William Blake's painting of "The Ancient of Days" from Daniel's first vision isn't meant to depict God, surprisingly. It's actually meant to depict the human mind's tendency to try to cut everything down to its own size and make it measurable (in a bad way), which is why the Ancient is holding a compass. Nevertheless, it's become known as one of the classic paintings of God the Father, despite Blake's intentions.