Speaker 1: We remember him as the man who never bowed before
Speaker 1: an empire. And yet Daniel let Babylon change his name,
Speaker 1: change his food, change the language he thought in, and
Speaker 1: even the profession he would devote the rest of his
Speaker 1: life to. He yielded on almost everything, And even so
Speaker 1: he spent seventy years inside the nation that raised his
Speaker 1: city and burned his temple, and he came out of
Speaker 1: there without having stopped being who he was. Seventy years,
Speaker 1: almost an entire human life under the roof of the
Speaker 1: enemy that had taken everything from his world. That's the
Speaker 1: contradiction of Daniel. How do you let them change almost
Speaker 1: everything about you for decades and not end up turned
Speaker 1: into someone else? The answer is more uncomfortable than it seems.
Speaker 1: There was a single line, one small and almost invisible,
Speaker 1: that he refused to cross. Everything else he handed over,
Speaker 1: and most people miss exactly that part. Everyone knows the
Speaker 1: fiery furnace, everyone knows the den of lions, But between
Speaker 1: miracle and miracle, decades past decades of something much harder
Speaker 1: to survive than a lion or a flame. Daily life
Speaker 1: inside the most powerful empire on earth, the day to day,
Speaker 1: the routine, the slow pressure, year after year of a
Speaker 1: system designed to make you forget who you are. What
Speaker 1: was it really like to live in there? What did
Speaker 1: he eat? What did he see when he woke up?
Speaker 1: What did he study? What did the city smell like?
Speaker 1: How does a man stay faithful to his God for
Speaker 1: seventy years in the capital of foreign gods. That's what
Speaker 1: we're going to reconstruct today, peace by piece, and not
Speaker 1: with pious legends, but with what the Biblical text says
Speaker 1: in one hand and what the archaeologists have unearthed in
Speaker 1: the other, because there are clay tablets buried for two thousand,
Speaker 1: five hundred years that confirm the exact world in which
Speaker 1: Daniel opened his eyes every morning. Before we go on,
Speaker 1: let me ask you something quick. If you like this
Speaker 1: kind of history, the real kind, with the Bible and
Speaker 1: archaeology in hand and no inventions, give me a like.
Speaker 1: If you don't like it, no problem, Really, I understand perfectly,
Speaker 1: and we keep going here. But if you give it,
Speaker 1: you help me know that this family wants more of this,
Speaker 1: of the serious of the well made. And that's all.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to Babylon to understand Daniel's life there. First,
Speaker 1: you have to understand how he arrived and the way
Speaker 1: he arrived already says almost everything. The book that bears
Speaker 1: his name opens with a precise date, in the third
Speaker 1: year of the reign of Jehoiakim, king of Judah. Says
Speaker 1: the first verse of the first chapter, nebuchad Neza, King
Speaker 1: of Babylon, came against Jerusalem and besieged it. This happens
Speaker 1: in the sixth century before Christ, more than six hundred
Speaker 1: years before the birth of Jesus, and it's not a
Speaker 1: loose fact. That same year, the Babylonian army had crushed
Speaker 1: the Egyptians in a decisive battle in the north at
Speaker 1: a place called Krkamish, and in a single stroke, the
Speaker 1: young prince nebukud Neza had become the most powerful man
Speaker 1: in the known world. What's interesting is that we don't
Speaker 1: know this only from the Bible. There exists a set
Speaker 1: of Babylonian tablets written by the empire's own scribes that
Speaker 1: historians call the Babylonian Chronicles. They are official records, year
Speaker 1: by year of the military campaigns, and those chronicles describe
Speaker 1: exactly this. Nebukud Nezar's campaigns toward the west, toward the
Speaker 1: land of Judah, the enemy that destroyed Daniel's world, left
Speaker 1: written record that it did. So. The two accounts, the
Speaker 1: Hebrew and the Babylonian shake hands, now pay attention to
Speaker 1: a detail that changes the whole story. The fall of
Speaker 1: Jerusalem did not happen all at once. There were several waves.
Speaker 1: The first, the one that took Daniel, was the earliest
Speaker 1: and the mildest. Judah was not yet raised. It simply
Speaker 1: surrendered and became a vassal state, and as proof of submission,
Speaker 1: Babylon took two things, some treasures of the temple and
Speaker 1: a select group of young men. Years later, a second
Speaker 1: deportation would come much harsher, when another king of Judah
Speaker 1: rebelled and thousands of people were torn from the land,
Speaker 1: and later still a third, the worst of all, the
Speaker 1: one that ended with the Temple of Solomon, turned to
Speaker 1: ashes and the city reduced to rubble. The Second Book
Speaker 1: of Kings, in its chapter twenty four, describes these waves
Speaker 1: in chilling detail. But Daniel was not in either of
Speaker 1: those two. He left in the first, in the earliest,
Speaker 1: when there was still no total war, when Jerusse was
Speaker 1: still standing, which means something extremely hard to imagine. When
Speaker 1: Daniel arrived in Babylon. His city still existed, his temple
Speaker 1: still smoked with incense, not with fire. His family probably
Speaker 1: was still alive far away, and he, from the distance
Speaker 1: over the years, had to learn little by little how
Speaker 1: all of that everything he had left behind was being destroyed.
Speaker 1: He didn't live it, he knew it, which is sometimes worse,
Speaker 1: and why him. The text is very specific about who
Speaker 1: they took. In the fourth verse of the first chapter,
Speaker 1: the King's Order describes the exact profile. They were looking for.
Speaker 1: Young men without physical defect, handsome, intelligent, wise, with the
Speaker 1: capacity to learn, and of noble family, of royal or
Speaker 1: aristocratic lineage. Stop a second on that, because its chilling
Speaker 1: in its coldness, They did not take the weakest. They
Speaker 1: took the best, the flower of a generation, the sons
Speaker 1: of the important families, the brilliant young men who would
Speaker 1: one day have led Judah. The Empire did not want
Speaker 1: slaves to haul bricks. It had whole peoples for that.
Speaker 1: What it wanted was to steal a nation's future and
Speaker 1: put it to work for itself, To empty Judah of
Speaker 1: its potential leaders and turn them into Babylonian leaders. It
Speaker 1: was a strategy not a whim. You take the most
Speaker 1: promising young men of the conquered people, you educate them
Speaker 1: in your culture, You give them your language, your gods,
Speaker 1: your customs, and in one generation you have loyal officials
Speaker 1: who understand that people from the inside but think like you.
Speaker 1: Hostages turned into ambassadors, captives turned into cadres of the empire.
Speaker 1: And the young man this happened to, along with three
Speaker 1: others from his land, was named Daniel. Now imagine the journey.
Speaker 1: The distance between Jerusalem and Babylon, following the routes of
Speaker 1: the time, which skirted the desert rather than crossing, it
Speaker 1: was more than nine hundred miles weeks and weeks of marching,
Speaker 1: a teenager torn from everything, walking day after day toward
Speaker 1: a place he had only heard rumors of. And at
Speaker 1: the end of that exhausting road, something rose up from
Speaker 1: the horizon that no boy from the province of Judah
Speaker 1: could even conceive. Because you have to understand what Babylon was.
Speaker 1: It was not simply a big city. It was almost
Speaker 1: certainly the largest city in the world of its time,
Speaker 1: the center of the known universe, probably the first city
Speaker 1: in history to approach the great population figures that seemed
Speaker 1: normal to us to day. For a young man who
Speaker 1: came from Jerusalem, a respectable but small city perched on
Speaker 1: its hills, arriving in Babylon must have been as if
Speaker 1: you to day left a quiet town and were suddenly
Speaker 1: dropped alone in the heart of the most imposing metropolis
Speaker 1: on the planet. The river Euphrates ran through the middle
Speaker 1: of the city, splitting it into two halves joined by
Speaker 1: a bridge. Imagine the noise, the smell of the river water,
Speaker 1: mixed with the smoke of a thousand kitchens, with the
Speaker 1: sweat of the multitudes, with the incense of the temples,
Speaker 1: merchants shouting in languages. Daniel didn't understand soldiers, priests with
Speaker 1: shaved heads, chariots, the constant din of hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of people living piled up between walls. And the walls
Speaker 1: are The walls of Babylon were legendary even in antiquity.
Speaker 1: The Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote about the city a
Speaker 1: century after Daniel, claimed they were so wide that two
Speaker 1: war chariots could run side by side along the top,
Speaker 1: and so tall that they seemed to touch the sky. Now,
Speaker 1: let's be fair. Many historians today consider Herodotus's figures exaggerated,
Speaker 1: and archaeology suggests more modest measurements than the ones he gave.
Speaker 1: But even discounting the exaggeration, Babylon's defenses were one of
Speaker 1: the engineering wonders of their age, a double line of
Speaker 1: walls that made the city, in the eyes of any enemy,
Speaker 1: simply impregnable. And then there was the gate, the one
Speaker 1: young Daniel crossed as he entered the Ishtar Gate. Stop here,
Speaker 1: because this is not a conjecture or an imaginary reconstruction.
Speaker 1: That gate exists. You can go and see it. The
Speaker 1: German archaeologists excavated it at the beginning of the twentieth century,
Speaker 1: recovered its bricks, and today a reconstruction of the Ishtar
Speaker 1: Gate stands inside a museum in Berlin, thousands of miles
Speaker 1: from where it once stood. And when you stand before it,
Speaker 1: you understand the shock that boy must have felt. It
Speaker 1: was a mass covered with glazed bricks of a deep, intense,
Speaker 1: brilliant blue, a blue that, in that world of mud
Speaker 1: and desert, must have seemed torn from the sky itself.
Speaker 1: And over that blue, in relief rows and rows of animals,
Speaker 1: dragons with scaly bodies, dedicated to the god Marduk and
Speaker 1: powerful bulls. The gate led to a great avenue, the
Speaker 1: processional way, down which on the great festivals the statues
Speaker 1: of the gods paraded among crowds in ecstasy. A boy
Speaker 1: from Judah, raised in a faith that strictly forbade making
Speaker 1: images of God, that forbade statues reliefs of gods sacred animals,
Speaker 1: entered his new life by passing through a gate covered
Speaker 1: precisely with that images of gods everywhere. It was in
Speaker 1: every brick the Empire's message. Here other gods rule, and
Speaker 1: you now live in their house, and dominating it all.
Speaker 1: Visible from almost any corner of the city, rose thing
Speaker 1: even more imposing, a gigantic zigarat, a step tower of
Speaker 1: seven levels that climbed toward the sky like a mountain
Speaker 1: made by human hands. Its name was Etemenanki, which in
Speaker 1: the language of the place meant more or less the
Speaker 1: house of the foundation of heaven and Earth. It was
Speaker 1: dedicated to Marduk, the chief god of Babylon, and many
Speaker 1: scholars have noted the inevitable Echo, a colossal tower on
Speaker 1: the plain of Babel that aimed to join heaven with Earth.
Speaker 1: Any reader of the scriptures who arrived there could not
Speaker 1: help thinking of that other tower, the one in the
Speaker 1: Genesis account, the one men built to make a name
Speaker 1: for themselves and reach the sky. Daniel lived literally in
Speaker 1: the shadow of that idea. And now we come to
Speaker 1: the most famous thing about Babylon, the thing every one
Speaker 1: associates with the city, the hanging gardens, one of the
Speaker 1: seven wonders of the ancient world, green lush terraces that,
Speaker 1: according to legend, cascaded over the city like a mountain
Speaker 1: of vegetation in the middle of the desert. Well, here
Speaker 1: I have to be completely honest with you, because this
Speaker 1: channel doesn't sell you fairy tales. Of all the wonders
Speaker 1: of the ancient world, the hanging gardens are the only
Speaker 1: one for which not a single firm archaeological proof has
Speaker 1: ever been found, not one in Babylon, No remains of
Speaker 1: them have been discovered. And what is more surprising, nebucad
Speaker 1: Neza left hundreds of inscriptions boasting of his works, his temples,
Speaker 1: his walls, his palaces, and in none of them does
Speaker 1: he ever mention a garden. A researcher at the University
Speaker 1: of Oxford, Stephanie Dali has even proposed that the famous
Speaker 1: gardens were never in Babylon, but much farther north, in
Speaker 1: the Assyrian city of Nineveh, built by another king a
Speaker 1: century earlier, and that the Greek authors over the centuries
Speaker 1: confused the two cities. Does that mean Daniel didn't see
Speaker 1: beautiful gardens? No, Babylon was rich and surely had palaces
Speaker 1: with trees and water. But the postcard image of the
Speaker 1: hanging gardens floating over the city, the one you have
Speaker 1: in your head, has to be treated for what it is.
Speaker 1: A beautiful legend, possibly real, possibly exaggerated, possibly located somewhere else.
Speaker 1: And I prefer to tell you that straight than to
Speaker 1: paint you a pretty scene that may be never existed.
Speaker 1: But a city is not only its monuments. It is
Speaker 1: above all its daily life, what is touched and smelled
Speaker 1: and eaten each morning. And the material life of the
Speaker 1: great city had a very concrete texture, because in that
Speaker 1: plain between the rivers, there was no stone, no quarries,
Speaker 1: no nearby mountains from which to take blocks. Everything, absolutely
Speaker 1: everything was built with the one thing. There was plenty
Speaker 1: of mud, clay bricks dried in the sun for humble
Speaker 1: houses and bricks fired in kilns, much more resistant for
Speaker 1: the palaces, the temples, and the defenses. And as mortar
Speaker 1: in the great works, they used bitumen, that natural tar
Speaker 1: that seeped from the soil of Mesopotamia. The Genesis account,
Speaker 1: when it describes the construction of the Tower of Babele,
Speaker 1: says it with an astonishing precision, they used brick instead
Speaker 1: of stone, and bitumen instead of mortar. Whoever wrote that
Speaker 1: knew first hand how cities were built in that land.
Speaker 1: Imagine then, the color of the young captives every day
Speaker 1: whorled a sea of fired clay, a golden brown under
Speaker 1: the sun. Flat roofed houses crowded along narrow alleys, organized
Speaker 1: around inner courtyards, where the family lived in the cool
Speaker 1: of the shade and the heat, a real heat, the
Speaker 1: heat of the Mesopotamian plain, which in the summer months
Speaker 1: turns into an oven and pushes people to sleep on
Speaker 1: the rooftops, seeking the night air. And everywhere the gentle
Speaker 1: water of the canals, Because that land between the Tigris
Speaker 1: and the Euphrates was a marvel of hydraulic engineering, a
Speaker 1: network of irrigation canals that distributed the water of the
Speaker 1: rivers across the fields and turned a parched valley into
Speaker 1: one of the most fertile and richest regions of the
Speaker 1: ancient world. That abundance was the secret of Chaldean power.
Speaker 1: Whoever controls the water in that land controls the bread,
Speaker 1: and whoever controls the bread controls everything. And what was
Speaker 1: eaten in those houses, not the delicacies of the palace,
Speaker 1: of course, but the solid diet of the valley barley
Speaker 1: bred above all the king of grains in the region
Speaker 1: dates thousands of dates from the palms that grew everywhere,
Speaker 1: and that gave sugar, fruit and even a kind of syrup.
Speaker 1: Fish from the river and the canals, onions, garlic, leeks, lentils, sesame,
Speaker 1: oil for cooking, and beer, a thick barley beer drunk
Speaker 1: through a reed to get past the dregs, and so
Speaker 1: basic to daily life that work was often paid for
Speaker 1: with it. That was the everyday flavor of the city
Speaker 1: where the boy from Judah had to learn to exist.
Speaker 1: Clothing also marked the new world. People wore tunics of
Speaker 1: wool and linen, often with fringes at the edges, and
Speaker 1: men of a certain standing or their hair long and
Speaker 1: their beards groomed, curled into ringlets in the fashion of
Speaker 1: the court, just as we see them portrayed in the
Speaker 1: reliefs that have survived. To dress each morning for a
Speaker 1: young Hebrew official was to put on literally the appearance
Speaker 1: of another culture. And there was something else that was everywhere,
Speaker 1: and that defines that civilization. Writing Babyl wrote. It recorded everything, receipts, contracts, letters, lists, omens, prayers.
Speaker 1: Everything was inscribed with a stylus on clay tablets that
Speaker 1: were then kept by the thousands. It was a society
Speaker 1: obsessed with leaving record. Remember this detail because at the
Speaker 1: end of the story it will return, and in a
Speaker 1: way that raises goosebumps. And there was one day on
Speaker 1: the calendar, the most important of all, when that civilization
Speaker 1: poured itself entirely into the street, the great New Year festival,
Speaker 1: which in the language of the place was called the Akitou,
Speaker 1: and which was celebrated in spring over about twelve days.
Speaker 1: It was the religious heart of the entire year, and
Speaker 1: it mobilized the whole population. According to the ritual texts
Speaker 1: that have been preserved during those days, the statue of
Speaker 1: the god Marduk was the absolute center of everything. There
Speaker 1: were ceremonies, recitations of the great Babylonian poet him about
Speaker 1: the origin of the world, and endless sacrifices. The king
Speaker 1: had a central and indispensable role. The festival could not
Speaker 1: be celebrated without him, because it was he who, inside
Speaker 1: the temple took the hand of the statue of Marduk,
Speaker 1: and thus received year after year the confirmation of his
Speaker 1: right to reign. There is also a famous right which
Speaker 1: we know mainly from a much later ritual text from
Speaker 1: several centuries afterward, and which some scholars dispute whether it
Speaker 1: was actually practiced in this era. In it, the monarch
Speaker 1: was stripped of his insignia, a priest struck his face
Speaker 1: and pulled his ears, and the king declared before the
Speaker 1: God that he had not sinned against the city. However
Speaker 1: that detail may be, what is beyond doubt is the climax,
Speaker 1: an immense procession in which the statues of the divinities
Speaker 1: went out on parade, came down the processional way, passed
Speaker 1: through that ishtar gate of blue bricks, and were carried
Speaker 1: in triumph amid a fervent crowd to a special house
Speaker 1: on the outskirts now put yourself in the place of
Speaker 1: the boy from Judah. Every spring, year after year, for decades,
Speaker 1: the whole city exploded into this celebration past where he
Speaker 1: lived and worked, went on shoulders, the idols of the
Speaker 1: city amid music, shouts, and the bows of a kneeling people.
Speaker 1: The whole capital worshiped, the whole court bowed, and in
Speaker 1: the midst of that human tide, there was one man,
Speaker 1: and a few more like him, who did not bend
Speaker 1: his knee, not out of arrogance, not out of contempt,
Speaker 1: but because his loyalty was placed in another. That's a
Speaker 1: very particular kind of solitude, that of being surrounded by
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of people given over to something in
Speaker 1: which you, in conscience can not take part. And that
Speaker 1: solitude did not last a day, It lasted a whole life. This,
Speaker 1: all of this is what that newly arrived teenager had
Speaker 1: before his eyes, a city that was a blow to
Speaker 1: the senses and at the same time a blow to
Speaker 1: his faith. On every corner and within that city, the
Speaker 1: Empire was going to set to work on him. It
Speaker 1: was going to begin to take him apart. And for
Speaker 1: that it pulled four levers, four tools to turn a
Speaker 1: son of Judah into a son of Babylon. Let's look
Speaker 1: at them one by one, because by understanding those four
Speaker 1: levers you understand exactly what his life was like. The
Speaker 1: first lever was the most intimate of all, the name.
Speaker 1: To day we find it hard to feel the weight
Speaker 1: of this, because for us a name is almost a label.
Speaker 1: But in that world, the name was the soul of
Speaker 1: a person put into words. The name said who you were,
Speaker 1: whose you were, so, what God you belonged? And the
Speaker 1: names of those four young men of Judah were all
Speaker 1: four small confessions of faith listened to them. The main
Speaker 1: character was named Daniel, which means God is my judge.
Speaker 1: He carried God in his name every time someone called
Speaker 1: him his friend. Hanna Andiah meant something like, the Lord
Speaker 1: has been gracious, the Lord has shown kindness. Michael meant,
Speaker 1: according to the most common reading, who is like God?
Speaker 1: It questioned? That is really a declaration. And as Araiah meant,
Speaker 1: the Lord is my help, the Lord sustains me. Do
Speaker 1: you see the pattern. All four names ended or began
Speaker 1: pointing to the God of Israel. Each one was a
Speaker 1: seed of faith that parents had planted in their son.
Speaker 1: Every time those young men heard their own name. They
Speaker 1: heard a reminder of who truly governed them, and that
Speaker 1: exactly that was the first thing the empire took from them.
Speaker 1: The seventh verse of the first chapter records it with
Speaker 1: a bureaucratic coldness that's frightening. The chief of the officials says,
Speaker 1: the text gave them new names. Daniel, he called Beltishazar,
Speaker 1: Hannanaiah Shadrak, Michael Meishak, and Azariah Abdnigo. Now notice what
Speaker 1: really happened there, because it's brilliant and cruel at the
Speaker 1: same time. They did not give them just any names.
Speaker 1: They took four names that pointed to the god of
Speaker 1: Israel and replaced them with four names that pointed to
Speaker 1: the gods of Babylon. Beltashazar invokes the god Bell, which
Speaker 1: was another name for Marduk, the supreme god of the city.
Speaker 1: In fact, later in the fourth chapter of the book,
Speaker 1: in the eighth verse, nebukud Neza himself says it, without
Speaker 1: mincing words, they called him Beltashaza after the name of
Speaker 1: my god. And the name Abdnigo contains the god Nego,
Speaker 1: a form of the name of Nabu, the Babylonian god
Speaker 1: of wisdom. And of scribes, who was also the king's
Speaker 1: favorite god. Allow me a note of honesty, because here
Speaker 1: you have to be careful. The exact meaning of some
Speaker 1: of these Babylonian names, especially Shadrach and Mayshak, is still
Speaker 1: a subject of debate among the specialists. We don't know
Speaker 1: with total certainty what they meant, word for word, and
Speaker 1: whoever affirms it to you with absolute certainty is selling
Speaker 1: you more confidence than the evidence allows. But the general
Speaker 1: pattern is crystal clear, and no one disputes it. The
Speaker 1: Empire changed names that said the god of Israel for
Speaker 1: names that said the gods of Babylon. The operation was
Speaker 1: not administrative, it was theological. It was an attempt to
Speaker 1: rewrite in the very language with which those young men
Speaker 1: were called each day, whose they were. And then something
Speaker 1: happens that seems to me one of the most moving
Speaker 1: things in the whole account, because the book, through out
Speaker 1: its pages, is going to keep calling him Daniel, again
Speaker 1: and again and again Daniel. The text refuses, in practice
Speaker 1: to use the name the Empire imposed on him, as
Speaker 1: if the scriptures themselves were saying, they can call you
Speaker 1: whatever they want in their palaces, but we know what
Speaker 1: your name really is the name by which your God
Speaker 1: knows you. Think about it applied to you for a moment.
Speaker 1: There are names the world puts on you, labels. People
Speaker 1: decide who you are, classify you, assign you a role.
Speaker 1: But there's a name beneath all those, the true one,
Speaker 1: the one that really defines you. Daniel lost the name
Speaker 1: in the official records of the empire, he did not
Speaker 1: lose the name in his heart. The second lever was
Speaker 1: more subtle, but deeper still, Language and education. That same
Speaker 1: fourth verse of the first chapter, the one that describes
Speaker 1: which young men they will look for, also says what
Speaker 1: they wanted them for to teach them. It says the
Speaker 1: language and the literature of the Chaldeans. And they were
Speaker 1: to spend three full years in that training before presenting
Speaker 1: themselves to the king. Three years of intensive re education.
Speaker 1: And you have to understand what that really meant, because
Speaker 1: it was not a little language class The language of
Speaker 1: the Chaldeans was Akkadian, written in that wedge script on
Speaker 1: clay that we call Cuneiform, one of the oldest and
Speaker 1: most difficult forms of writing in human history. It did
Speaker 1: not have an alphabet of twenty some letters like ours.
Speaker 1: It had hundreds of signs, each with several possible values.
Speaker 1: Mastering it took years. It was the knowledge of a
Speaker 1: tiny elite, and the literature of the Chaldeans was not
Speaker 1: innocent poetry. It was the entire body of Babylonian knowledge,
Speaker 1: which was soaked in religion everywhere. The Chaldeans were famous
Speaker 1: throughout the ancient world as the great masters of observing
Speaker 1: the stars. They studied the sky night after night, recorded
Speaker 1: the movements of the planets, the eclipses, the positions of
Speaker 1: the stars, and from all of that they drew omens
Speaker 1: about the future of the king and the kingdom. They
Speaker 1: had entire series of texts, copied and recopied over centuries
Speaker 1: on clay tablets, dedicated to interpreting signs. What an eclipse meant,
Speaker 1: what the flight of a bird foretold, what the entrails
Speaker 1: of a sacrificed animal revealed, What a strange birth pretended.
Speaker 1: I want you to stop and feel the brutal tension
Speaker 1: of this. A young man who worshiped the One True God,
Speaker 1: a young man who believed that the future was in
Speaker 1: the hands of the God of Israel and not in
Speaker 1: the stars, was seated for three years to memorize, copy,
Speaker 1: and master the sacred texts of Babylonian divination, the manuals
Speaker 1: of the astrologers, the wisdom of the magi, everything his
Speaker 1: own faith, considered at best vanity and at worst abomination.
Speaker 1: And to truly understand what that was, you have to
Speaker 1: understand how it was learned. Writing in that world was
Speaker 1: a craft transmitted with the patience of years, almost always
Speaker 1: from master to apprentice, and from parents to children, within
Speaker 1: a handful of families who guarded that knowledge like a treasure.
Speaker 1: The one who learned began as a child with the
Speaker 1: most basic things, copying over and over long lists of signs,
Speaker 1: lists of words, of names of gods, of animals, of trades,
Speaker 1: of rivers, and of peoples, until they were engraved in
Speaker 1: his memory and in his hand. Then came the proverbs,
Speaker 1: the hymns, the ancient stories, and only at the end,
Speaker 1: the few who made it to the top accessed the
Speaker 1: most complex texts, the Treatise on the Sky, the manuals
Speaker 1: of Omens, those scholarly series that were copied with an
Speaker 1: almost obsessive care, so that not a single sign would
Speaker 1: be lost along the way. Because that was the other
Speaker 1: face of that culture. In a society where the vast
Speaker 1: majority of people could not read or write a single line,
Speaker 1: the one who mastered the clay and the wedge belonged
Speaker 1: to a tiny and extremely powerful circle. The great collections
Speaker 1: of tablets, the archives kept in temples and palaces, preserved
Speaker 1: the accumulated knowledge of more than a thousand years of civilization,
Speaker 1: and the key to that entire treasure was held by
Speaker 1: a few. To learn to write was not to learn
Speaker 1: just another trade. It was to enter the control room
Speaker 1: of one of the oldest cultures on earth, and into
Speaker 1: that room, by order of the king, four teenagers of
Speaker 1: a defeated people had just been pushed so that they
Speaker 1: would master it from within. Let me reconc struct a scene,
Speaker 1: and I want to be clear that it's a reconstruction
Speaker 1: an image, so you can see the world, not a
Speaker 1: word for word account of the text. And it's worth
Speaker 1: clarifying something up front, because the image of a school
Speaker 1: we have in our heads doesn't fit that world. The
Speaker 1: teaching of writing was not given in large classrooms full
Speaker 1: of students, but in small groups under the hand of
Speaker 1: a master scribe. The case of these four was also
Speaker 1: special because it was a palace training paid for by
Speaker 1: the King to prepare his chosen young men. So imagine
Speaker 1: a room in the royal compound, the mud floor, the
Speaker 1: heavy heat of the valley, in the hands of the
Speaker 1: boy from Judah, a tablet of soft clay and a
Speaker 1: reed stylus before him, a master who recites in Acadian
Speaker 1: sign by sign, row after row of wedges. Nearby, a
Speaker 1: few more young men, sons of powerful families, repeating, engraving, erasing,
Speaker 1: starting over. By day, the Hebrew learned thoroughly the science
Speaker 1: of the city, and we can imagine by night, in
Speaker 1: a low voice, he prayed to the God of Jerusalem
Speaker 1: in a language none of those masters understood. And then
Speaker 1: comes the first great twist of the story, one that
Speaker 1: almost no one notices. What did Daniel do with all
Speaker 1: that pagan education? Did he reject it? Did he refuse
Speaker 1: to study? Did he cover his ears? No? He learned it.
Speaker 1: He mastered it. In fact, the text says he mastered
Speaker 1: it better than any one. When they finally presented themselves
Speaker 1: to the king at the end of those three years,
Speaker 1: Nebukanzer examined them and found them ten times superior to
Speaker 1: all the magi and astrologers of his kingdom. The foreigner
Speaker 1: beat the locals at their own game. This is hugely
Speaker 1: important for understanding who Daniel was because it dismantles a
Speaker 1: simplistic idea. Daniel was not faithful by shutting himself off,
Speaker 1: by refusing to learn, by despising the culture that surrounded him.
Speaker 1: He was faithful in the midst of it. He studied
Speaker 1: the language, mastered the literature, understood the system better than
Speaker 1: its own priests. And yet in the center of his
Speaker 1: heart he did not convert. He learned to read the
Speaker 1: omens of the stars without believing, not for an instant,
Speaker 1: that his destiny was written in them. And it turns
Speaker 1: out that that excellence, that superior capacity, was exactly what
Speaker 1: opened the doors of the palace to him, And what,
Speaker 1: again and again over his long life, saved his life.
Speaker 1: The system they wanted to use to convert him he
Speaker 1: used to survive. That's one of the great silent lessons
Speaker 1: of his story. And before moving on to the third lever,
Speaker 1: I want to ask you a question, and your answer
Speaker 1: really matters to me. Daniel yielded on them the name,
Speaker 1: he yielded on the language, he yielded on the education.
Speaker 1: He learned everything they put in front of him. And
Speaker 1: yet there was one point, a very concrete one, at
Speaker 1: which he said, enough, which do you think it was?
Speaker 1: Where do you put the line between adapting to a
Speaker 1: world that isn't yours and betraying yourself? Think about it,
Speaker 1: because Daniel's answer is surprising, because the third lever, the
Speaker 1: place where he did draw the line was the table food.
Speaker 1: The eighth verse of the first chapter contains one of
Speaker 1: the most important sentences in the whole book. Daniel, it says,
Speaker 1: purposed in his heart not to defile himself with the
Speaker 1: portion of the king's delicacies, nor with the wine that
Speaker 1: he drank. Purposed in his heart. Notice the language. It
Speaker 1: was not an outburst, It was not a teenage tantrum.
Speaker 1: It was a thought out, inner, deliberate decision. And what
Speaker 1: he decided was to refuse the king's food. Now this
Speaker 1: needs context, because at first glance it seemed strange. The
Speaker 1: empire had taken his name and he didn't protest. It
Speaker 1: had put the wisdom of the astrologers into his head
Speaker 1: and he didn't protest, and he's going to make a
Speaker 1: whole problem out of dinner, out of food. To understand it,
Speaker 1: you have to know what. The king's portion was the
Speaker 1: best food in the whole empire, choice meats, refined wine,
Speaker 1: the finest that the richest land in the world produced.
Speaker 1: To eat from the king's table was an honor, a privilege,
Speaker 1: a sign of favor. For most of those young men,
Speaker 1: it must have been a dream. But for a faithful
Speaker 1: jew that food brought three problems wrapped in its delicious aroma.
Speaker 1: The first, it most likely included meats that the Law
Speaker 1: of Moses forbade unclean animals that a son of Israel
Speaker 1: should never eat. The second, the meat of the ancient
Speaker 1: world was almost never prepared according to the rules the
Speaker 1: Hebrew law demanded regarding blood. And the third, perhaps the
Speaker 1: most important of all. In Babylon, the palace food was
Speaker 1: offered first ritually to the gods before reaching your plate.
Speaker 1: Those delicacies had been dedicated to Marduk, to Bell, to Nabu.
Speaker 1: To eat from that table was not only to fill
Speaker 1: your stomach, It was in some way to take part
Speaker 1: in an act of worship to foreign gods. And there
Speaker 1: right there Daniel said, no, I learned your language, I
Speaker 1: memorized your omens. I answered to the name you gave me.
Speaker 1: But I am not going to put into my body
Speaker 1: that which makes me a participant in your gods. What
Speaker 1: he did next also reveals his character, because it was
Speaker 1: neither arrogant nor reckless. He didn't make a scene, he
Speaker 1: didn't insult the king. He negotiated with respect, with intelligence.
Speaker 1: He proposed a test to the official in charge of them,
Speaker 1: a man who, according to the text, feared losing his
Speaker 1: head if those young men weakened and the king got angry.
Speaker 1: Daniel proposed a simple deal. Give us only vegetables to
Speaker 1: eat and water to drink for ten days, and then
Speaker 1: compare our appearance with that of the young men who
Speaker 1: eat from the King's table, and if we're worse off,
Speaker 1: do whatever you want ten days an experiment. And at
Speaker 1: the end of those ten days, says the text, the
Speaker 1: faces of Daniel and his three friends looked better and
Speaker 1: healthier than those of all who ate the royal delicacies.
Speaker 1: So the steward simply withdrew the king's food and left
Speaker 1: them with their simple diet. Now a necessary warning, because
Speaker 1: I know how this passage is sometimes used. This is
Speaker 1: not an ad for a miracle diet. The point of
Speaker 1: the account is not that vegetables make you better looking,
Speaker 1: nor is it a nutrition manual. The point is theological
Speaker 1: God honored the faithfulness of some young men who, in
Speaker 1: a small and every day matter, chose not to defile themselves.
Speaker 1: The miracle is not in the letters, It's in the
Speaker 1: blessed faithfulness. But the underlying question is still there, pulsing,
Speaker 1: and it's the one that truly matters. Why the table?
Speaker 1: Why did Daniel yield on so many things and draw
Speaker 1: the line precisely there on what he ate? I believe
Speaker 1: the answer is profound. The name others put on you,
Speaker 1: it doesn't depend on you. The language they teach you,
Speaker 1: the things they force you to study come from outside.
Speaker 1: You receive them passively. But what you decide to put
Speaker 1: into your own body that is yours. That is an act,
Speaker 1: an active, daily, intimate choice. Food was the last territory
Speaker 1: that depended entirely on his will. It was the place
Speaker 1: where the empire could not compel him without his consent.
Speaker 1: And that's why it was precisely there that he planted
Speaker 1: the flag, not in the great and visible, but in
Speaker 1: the small and every day that still belonged to him.
Speaker 1: And that's why I want to ask you again, how
Speaker 1: seriously to go down to the comments and answer me.
Speaker 1: If they took almost everything from you, the name, the work,
Speaker 1: even the language you think in, where would your line be.
Speaker 1: What is that thing, perhaps small, perhaps invisible to others,
Speaker 1: that you would not hand over for anything in the world.
Speaker 1: Write it below. I really do read them, and I
Speaker 1: think the answers to this are going to be one
Speaker 1: of the most interesting things in this video. We come
Speaker 1: to the fourth lever, and with it we enter the
Speaker 1: true day to day of Daniel over decades. Because the
Speaker 1: first three, the name, the language, the food, were the
Speaker 1: battle of his youth, of those first years. The fourth
Speaker 1: was the battle of his whole life, the constant and
Speaker 1: daily pressure of living and working inside a world given
Speaker 1: over entirely to other gods. Because Daniel was not a
Speaker 1: captive locked in a dungeon, that's one of the great misunderstandings.
Speaker 1: After his training, Daniel became a high official of the empire,
Speaker 1: a sage of the court, a counselor to the king,
Speaker 1: a man with a position with responsibilities, with an office.
Speaker 1: To put it in modern terms, he spent his days
Speaker 1: in the palace or near it, surrounded by the other sages,
Speaker 1: the magi, the astrologers, the diviners, that intellectual class the
Speaker 1: texts call the wise men of Babylon. Daniel worked shoulder
Speaker 1: to shoulder every day with the priests of the gods
Speaker 1: his faith rejected. And let me make you aware of
Speaker 1: the emotional weight of this, because it's easy to overlook.
Speaker 1: Daniel served the empire that had destroyed his people. Every
Speaker 1: day he got up, dressed in the Babylonian manner, walked
Speaker 1: through streets deadd to Marduk, and went in to advise
Speaker 1: the king whose armies had reduced the Temple of Jerusalem
Speaker 1: to ashes. He had to be loyal, competent, useful to
Speaker 1: a system that he, in his deepest heart knew was
Speaker 1: under the judgment of God. That's attention lived in the
Speaker 1: soul day after day and for years. It's not a
Speaker 1: miracle of a moment. It's a marathon of faithfulness. And
Speaker 1: I want you to see up close what that workplace
Speaker 1: was like, because it was at once the most prestigious
Speaker 1: and the most dangerous in the kingdom. The book itself,
Speaker 1: in describing the experts of the court, does not speak
Speaker 1: of a single guild, but of several distinct groups that
Speaker 1: coexisted and competed with one another. The magi, the enchanters,
Speaker 1: the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans, who were the caste of
Speaker 1: astrologers specialized in reading the sky. It was a whole
Speaker 1: eco system of specialists in the invisible, each with their methods,
Speaker 1: their tes exts, and their claims to knowledge, and above
Speaker 1: all of them, over the years, the young Hebrew came
Speaker 1: to occupy a post of the highest responsibility, because that's
Speaker 1: how an empire was governed. In that world, the great decisions, war, politics,
Speaker 1: public works were not made with cold calculation alone. The
Speaker 1: gods were consulted, signs were sought, and eclipse could delay
Speaker 1: a military campaign. A dream of the monarch could shake
Speaker 1: the whole kingdom. The entrails of a sacrificed animal could
Speaker 1: tip the destiny of thousands. There existed entire series of tablets,
Speaker 1: copied and recopied over centuries, that cataloged omens, what this
Speaker 1: or that position of a planet meant, what a strange
Speaker 1: birth foretold, what a spot on the liver of a
Speaker 1: sheep revealed, And the trade of those sages. The profession
Speaker 1: the boy from Judah was part of consisted in deciphering
Speaker 1: all that and telling the king what the heavens supposedly
Speaker 1: wanted from him. It sounds like a job of luxury,
Speaker 1: of office, library and prestige, but it had a dark
Speaker 1: and deadly side. You served a man with absolute power,
Speaker 1: and often with an unpredictable temper. If the sovereign had
Speaker 1: a nightmare and no one managed to interpret it to
Speaker 1: his liking, if a prediction failed, if he suspected a
Speaker 1: deception or a betrayal, his wrath could fall on the
Speaker 1: whole guild at once. In fact, the second chapter of
Speaker 1: the book narrates a chilling episode in which the King,
Speaker 1: beside himself, dictates an execution order against all the sages
Speaker 1: of the capital without exception, and the soldiers go out
Speaker 1: to find them to put them to death. The young
Speaker 1: foreigner and his companions were on that blacklist for the
Speaker 1: simple fact of belonging to the court. I won't tell
Speaker 1: you now how that was resolved, because that's a whole
Speaker 1: story for another day. But hold on to the fact
Speaker 1: that truly matters for understanding his daily life. The post
Speaker 1: that had saved him from slavery was at the same
Speaker 1: time a post in which your head could roll from
Speaker 1: one day to the next. At the whim of a monarch.
Speaker 1: Every dawn in that palace was in a way to
Speaker 1: walk on the edge. And in the midst of that
Speaker 1: double pressure, the intellectual and the deadly, the Sage of
Speaker 1: Judah did something that set him apart from all the rest.
Speaker 1: He did not pretend. He did not invent answers to please.
Speaker 1: Again and again over the years, when it was his
Speaker 1: turn to speak before the throne, he gave credit not
Speaker 1: to his own cleverness, nor to the stars, but to
Speaker 1: the God of Heaven, who reveals mysteries. At the very
Speaker 1: summit of the most sophisticated divination system of the ancient world,
Speaker 1: the man who mastered it best was at the same
Speaker 1: time the only one who didn't believe a word of it.
Speaker 1: He worked among diviners without being a diviner. He made
Speaker 1: his living reading the sky, without putting his faith in
Speaker 1: the sky, but in the one who made it. Now,
Speaker 1: to truly understand what Jewish life in Babylon was like,
Speaker 1: you have to leave the palace for a moment and
Speaker 1: look downward toward the common people. Because Daniel was the
Speaker 1: golden exception, most of the deportees of Judah did not
Speaker 1: live in palaces. How did they live, and once again
Speaker 1: archaeology gives us an astonishing window into the past. There
Speaker 1: exists a set of clay tablets, about two hundred of them,
Speaker 1: that scholars call the al Yahoodoo tablets. The name says
Speaker 1: it all. Al Yahoodoo means the city of Judah or
Speaker 1: the town of the Jews. It was literally a village
Speaker 1: of deportees from Judah in southern Babylon. And those tablets
Speaker 1: are the everyday documents of that community over two generations.
Speaker 1: And what do they reveal? Something precious. They reveal that
Speaker 1: the common Jews in Babot were not chained in labour camps.
Speaker 1: They lived, They farmed the land, they bought and sold,
Speaker 1: They paid taxes, they lent money, some prospered and accumulated goods.
Speaker 1: They had contracts, debts, businesses, a normal economic life and
Speaker 1: a beautiful detail. Many of them kept their Hebrew names,
Speaker 1: names that carried within them the God of Israel. Written
Speaker 1: by the Babylonian scribes on their tablets. The community did
Speaker 1: not evaporate, It put down roots, and that fits perfectly
Speaker 1: in a way that raises goosebumps. With a letter, the
Speaker 1: prophet Jeremiah had sent them from Jerusalem to those very exiles.
Speaker 1: It's in the twenty ninth chapter of his book. Jeremiah
Speaker 1: writes to them, on God's behalf, an instruction that must
Speaker 1: have sounded scandalous. Build houses and live in them, plant
Speaker 1: gardens and eat their fruit, marry, have children, multiply there.
Speaker 1: Do not diminish, and seek the peace of the city
Speaker 1: to which I have carried you, and pray for it,
Speaker 1: because in its peace you will have peace. Do you
Speaker 1: realize how radical that message is. God does not tell
Speaker 1: them resist, sabotage, live with your bags packed, waiting to
Speaker 1: return to morrow. He tells them, live, plant, build, flourish
Speaker 1: even here, even in the enemy empire, even far from home.
Speaker 1: And the Alyyahudouo tablets are the archaeological proof that this
Speaker 1: is exactly what they did. Houses, gardens, businesses, families, a
Speaker 1: community of faith, surviving and even prospering in a foreign land.
Speaker 1: Let's reconstruct another scene again, with the honesty of telling
Speaker 1: you that it's an image, an illustration of the world,
Speaker 1: and not a verse. Imagine the irrigation canals of southern Babylon,
Speaker 1: that flat and fertile land crossed by waters. Imagine a
Speaker 1: family of Judah two generations after the deportation, working a
Speaker 1: field that is now theirs. The grandparents perhaps still remember Jerusalem.
Speaker 1: The grandchildren know it only from the stories. It's evening
Speaker 1: the sun sets over the still water of a canal,
Speaker 1: and someone in a low voice sings a song of
Speaker 1: their land, perhaps that same lament that was engraved forever
Speaker 1: in Psalm one hundred thirty seven by the rivers of Babylon.
Speaker 1: There we sat down and we wept when we remembered Zion,
Speaker 1: a community that lived, that worked, that laughed at its weddings,
Speaker 1: and wept at its dead, and that, in the depth
Speaker 1: of its heart, beside the waters of a foreign empire,
Speaker 1: never stopped remembering where it came from. But there's a
Speaker 1: question those tablets cannot answer, and it's perhaps the most
Speaker 1: important of all. If the exiles lived, planted, and prospered,
Speaker 1: how did they manage to keep worshiping their God far
Speaker 1: from home? Because there was a problem there that shook
Speaker 1: the faith of Israel to its foundations. Their whole religion
Speaker 1: revolved around a single sacred place, the Temple of Jerusalem.
Speaker 1: There and only there, the sacrifices were offered. There, the
Speaker 1: presence of God dwelt in the midst of his people.
Speaker 1: And what happened when that temple had been reduced to ashes,
Speaker 1: and you were more than nine hundred miles from its ruins,
Speaker 1: in a foreign land, with no hope of returning soon.
Speaker 1: You could not sacrifice, You had no altar, you did
Speaker 1: not have the place. For many, it must have felt
Speaker 1: as if God himself had been left behind, buried under
Speaker 1: the rubble of Zion. And yet exactly the opposite happened
Speaker 1: in the exile, far from the sanctuary. The faith of
Speaker 1: Israel did not go out. It transformed, And many historians
Speaker 1: see precisely in these years of captivity the origin of
Speaker 1: a change that would mark that faith forever. Without a
Speaker 1: temple where they could sacrifice, the center of gravity of
Speaker 1: the religion shifted towards something else. Toward the written word
Speaker 1: to read, copy, and remember the scriptures in the Law
Speaker 1: became the heart of spiritual life. Toward prayer as a
Speaker 1: way of drawing near to God without the need of
Speaker 1: a stone altar. Toward the Sabbath, that holy day that
Speaker 1: depended on no place and that could be kept in
Speaker 1: any corner of the world. And toward the marks of
Speaker 1: identity that a Jew could carry with him wherever he went,
Speaker 1: within his own body and his own house, without the
Speaker 1: need of a building, the faith became for the first
Speaker 1: time in a full way portable. It stopped depending on
Speaker 1: a temple, to depend on a people who remembered, read,
Speaker 1: and prayed wherever they found themselves. Not a few scholars
Speaker 1: place here in these communities of the exile, the remote
Speaker 1: roots of what would later be the synagogue, the place
Speaker 1: of gathering and reading, and the deep reason why this
Speaker 1: people would come to be called the people of the Book.
Speaker 1: And the Sage of the Palace is the perfect image
Speaker 1: of that new and portable faith. Later, in another chapter
Speaker 1: of the book, we find him already old, with a
Speaker 1: custom that says it all three times a day. He
Speaker 1: withdrew to an upper room of his house, opened the
Speaker 1: windows in the direction of Jerusalem, that city which by
Speaker 1: then had spent decades turned to ruins, knelt and prayed
Speaker 1: without a temple, without an altar, without sacrifices, only a
Speaker 1: man a window opened toward the lost land, and prayer
Speaker 1: rising in silence. That was the faith no empire in
Speaker 1: the world could confiscate, because it was not made of stones,
Speaker 1: but of memory and loyalty. They had torn the temple
Speaker 1: from him, they could never tear from him the direction
Speaker 1: toward which he knelt. And archaeology gives us one more piece,
Speaker 1: one that touches royalty directly. When those German archaeologists excavated
Speaker 1: the Palace of nebuchad Nezer, they found in an underground
Speaker 1: room near the Ishtar gate, an enormous archive of administrative tablets.
Speaker 1: They were basically receipts records of rations of oil and
Speaker 1: balley delivered to prisoners, workers, and dignitaries of conquered lands
Speaker 1: who lived in Babylon, hundreds of them. And among all
Speaker 1: those tablets four mention a figure by his name and
Speaker 1: his title Yaukin, King of the land of Yahoodo, that
Speaker 1: is Jehoyakin, King of Judah, That same Jehoyakin, whom the
Speaker 1: Second Book of Kings tells us was deported to Babylon.
Speaker 1: He appears by his name in the palace's pantry records,
Speaker 1: receiving his rations from the royal kitchen along with his sons,
Speaker 1: a king of Judah recorded by the empire's accountants eating
Speaker 1: the bread of Babylon. The Bible said he was there.
Speaker 1: The clay tablets confirm it, with his name and his title. Intact,
Speaker 1: those documents are to day also kept in a museum
Speaker 1: in Berlin, and they were first published by a scholar
Speaker 1: named Widner back in the first half of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: I want to stop a second on what all these
Speaker 1: stones and tablets really mean, because it's the heart of
Speaker 1: this channel. I don't tell you about them to impress
Speaker 1: you with data. I tell you about them because they
Speaker 1: prove that the world in which Daniel lived is not
Speaker 1: a world of fantasy. It's a verifiable world. There are
Speaker 1: tablets that mention a king of Judah who was deported
Speaker 1: just as the Bible says. There's a whole village of
Speaker 1: Jews documented in the Clay living just as Jeremiah wrote
Speaker 1: to them to live. There are Babylonian chronicles that record
Speaker 1: Nebuchadnezz's campaigns against Judah. The setting is real. The play
Speaker 1: was performed in a theater we can still touch now.
Speaker 1: In the name of that same honesty, let me tell
Speaker 1: you something many channels hide from you about the Book
Speaker 1: of Daniel itself, about when exactly it was written and
Speaker 1: by whom. There is a real debate among scholars. And
Speaker 1: I'm not going to pretend to you that it doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: But that debate, whatever your position on it, does not
Speaker 1: touch what we are seeing to day. That the portrait
Speaker 1: of the Babylonian world, the book paints the city, the customs,
Speaker 1: the titles of the court, the mechanics of the exile,
Speaker 1: fits in a remarkable way with what archaeology has pulled
Speaker 1: from the earth. Daniel's world is historical. Of that, there
Speaker 1: is no reasonable doubt. There's even a precious detail that
Speaker 1: joins two books of the Bible through a single tablet.
Speaker 1: When Daniel and his companions were placed under the care
Speaker 1: of a high official, the text in the third verse
Speaker 1: of the first chapter calls him by a title, the
Speaker 1: chief of the Eunuchs. It was a concrete post of
Speaker 1: the Babylonian court. Well. In the year two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: a specialist named Michael Jerser, rummaging among the more than
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand tablets kept in a museum in London,
Speaker 1: found a small clay receipt. It was a most mundane transaction.
Speaker 1: An official was donating a quantity of gold to a
Speaker 1: temple in Babylon. But that official bore a name and
Speaker 1: above all a title that is extremely rare in ancient
Speaker 1: documents chief of the eunuchs, and that same name and
Speaker 1: that same title appear in the Book of Jeremiah in
Speaker 1: its chapter thirty nine among the Babylonian officers who entered
Speaker 1: Jerusalem when the city fell, a man mentioned in passing
Speaker 1: in the Bible, confirmed two thousand, five hundred years later
Speaker 1: by a gold receipt written in clay, and that extremely
Speaker 1: rare title chief of the Eunuchs is exactly the post
Speaker 1: of the man who received Daniel. Daniel's world fits even
Speaker 1: down to its most obscure bureaucratic titles. Speaking of that title,
Speaker 1: there's an uncomfortable question that's fair to raise, and I
Speaker 1: raise it with care. Those deported young nohubles were placed
Speaker 1: under the authority of the Chief of the Eunuchs. And
Speaker 1: there's an old discussion among scholars about whether the youths
Speaker 1: of the royalty taken to Babylon, according to the custom
Speaker 1: of the ancient courts, with their palace servants, might have
Speaker 1: been made eunuchs themselves. There are even those who connected
Speaker 1: with a harsh prophecy that the prophet Isaiah had spoken
Speaker 1: to King Hezekiah generations earlier, announcing to him that some
Speaker 1: of his descendants would be taken and would serve as
Speaker 1: eunuchs in the palace of Babylon. I want to be clear,
Speaker 1: this is not affirmed anywhere about Daniel directly. It is
Speaker 1: a debated possibility and not a fact, and we cannot
Speaker 1: know it with certainty. I mention it because it's part
Speaker 1: of the serious conversation about his life, but I leave
Speaker 1: it where it belongs, in the realm of the uncertain,
Speaker 1: not the affirmed. And now we come to the dimension
Speaker 1: that makes Daniel's life simply astonishing time duration, because until
Speaker 1: now we have spoken of his youth, his arrival, the
Speaker 1: four levers, but all of that was only the beginning.
Speaker 1: Come back with me to the number we started with,
Speaker 1: seventy years. Where does that figure come from? The book
Speaker 1: itself gives us the two ends of the thread. At
Speaker 1: the end of that first chapter, in verse twenty one,
Speaker 1: the text drops a fact that's easy to read past.
Speaker 1: And Daniel continued until the first year of King Cyrus.
Speaker 1: Cyrus the Persian king, the one who would conquer Babylon,
Speaker 1: And later in chapter ten, in its first verse, we
Speaker 1: find him still active, receiving a vision in the third
Speaker 1: year of that same Cyrus. Do the math with me slowly.
Speaker 1: Daniel arrived in Babylon as a teenager in the first
Speaker 1: deportation in the sixth century before Christ, and he was
Speaker 1: still standing serving receiving revelations when the Persian Empire already
Speaker 1: ruled in the third year of Cyrus. Between those two
Speaker 1: points there are close to seventy years, which means that
Speaker 1: that boy of fifteen or whatever age he was reached
Speaker 1: the end of his life turned into an old man
Speaker 1: of more than eighty. He served throughout his entire adult
Speaker 1: life without interruption, within the same system. And now comes
Speaker 1: the fact that makes it almost unbelievable. Think about how
Speaker 1: many kings and how many empires passed over Daniel while
Speaker 1: he was still there firm. He arrived under nebcud Neza,
Speaker 1: the Great King, the Builder, the Conqueror, and nebicud Nezar
Speaker 1: he buried. Then came other Babylonian kings, weaker successors, conspiracies,
Speaker 1: assassinations at the summit of power. Daniel saw them all
Speaker 1: pass by, and he lived long enough to see the
Speaker 1: knight when the whole empire, that Babylon that seemed eternal,
Speaker 1: that city of impregnable walls, fell all at once before
Speaker 1: the armies of Cyrus and the Persians. The superpower that
Speaker 1: had taken Daniel away as a child collapsed, and Daniel
Speaker 1: was still there to see it. Let that hit you well.
Speaker 1: The empire that kidnapped Daniel to turn him into a Babylonian,
Speaker 1: to erase him, to dissolve him in its culture. That
Speaker 1: empire went extinct, and Daniel outlived it. The captive buried
Speaker 1: his captors. The foreigner they wanted to make disappear was
Speaker 1: still standing when the nation that captured him was already history.
Speaker 1: And then an old man, he served the new empire too,
Speaker 1: the Persian, with the same integrity with which he had
Speaker 1: served the previous one. That's the definitive twist, the greatest
Speaker 1: of all, and I want you to see it clearly.
Speaker 1: The assimilation machine failed. It failed completely. The plan was
Speaker 1: to take a young man of Judah and through the name,
Speaker 1: the language, the food, and the pressure of a whole lifetime,
Speaker 1: turn him into a man of the empire who would
Speaker 1: forget his origin. And the result, seventy years later was
Speaker 1: exactly the opposite. Daniel did not become a Babylonian. He
Speaker 1: became the most constant, most reliable, most respected man in Babylon,
Speaker 1: without ever ceasing to be who he was. He was
Speaker 1: the only thing that stayed the same, while everything else,
Speaker 1: the kings, the dynasties, the whole empire rose and crumbled
Speaker 1: around him. And here there's a final irony that seems
Speaker 1: to me one of the most beautiful things in this
Speaker 1: whole story. And with it I want to close. Do
Speaker 1: you remember the second lever language cuneiform writing, that three
Speaker 1: year re education in the tongue and literature of the Chaldeans,
Speaker 1: which the Empire imposed on Daniel to absorb him, to
Speaker 1: turn him into one of them. Do you remember, well,
Speaker 1: look at what happened over time, that same writing culture,
Speaker 1: that Babylonian obsession with recording everything in clay, with leaving
Speaker 1: record of every ration of oil, of every name, of
Speaker 1: every transaction, of every military campaign. That same machinery of
Speaker 1: scribes they wanted to use to swallow up Daniel is
Speaker 1: precisely what has allowed, two thousand, five hundred years later
Speaker 1: that we can confirm the world in which he lived.
Speaker 1: The tablets with the name of Jehoyakin, King of Judah,
Speaker 1: the village of al Yahudu, full of Hebrew names, the
Speaker 1: receipt of the chief of the eunuchs, the chronicles of
Speaker 1: nebuicut Nezz's campaigns. All of that exists because Babylon wrote.
Speaker 1: The empire that wanted to erase a son of Judah
Speaker 1: ended up without meaning to, writing him into stone forever.
Speaker 1: The culture that tried to make him disappear is the
Speaker 1: one that guaranteed he would never disappear. So when someone
Speaker 1: tells you that Daniel's life was two spectacular miracles, a
Speaker 1: furnace and a den of lions, remember it. Those were
Speaker 1: the moments. But the true story of Daniel was the
Speaker 1: years in between, the decades, the daily routine of getting
Speaker 1: up in a city that was not his, wearing clothing
Speaker 1: that was not his, answering to a name that was
Speaker 1: not his, working for an empire that was not his,
Speaker 1: surrounded by gods that were not his, and in the
Speaker 1: silent center of all that, day after day for seventy years,
Speaker 1: not letting go of the one thing that truly belonged
Speaker 1: to him. They changed his name, They changed his food,
Speaker 1: they changed his language, They changed his city, his king,
Speaker 1: his empire, his century. They changed for seventy years, absolutely everything,
Speaker 1: everything except what he decided not to hand over. And
Speaker 1: if you want to see what happened the night when
Speaker 1: three of those young men of Judah daniel friends stood
Speaker 1: up to that same empire, refused to kneel before the
Speaker 1: king's statue and were thrown into a furnace heated seven
Speaker 1: times more than normal. That video is waiting for you
Speaker 1: there on the screen. What happened inside that fire is
Speaker 1: even harder to explain than everything you've just heard. Subscribe
Speaker 1: and I'll see you in there.