Daniel 10

536 BC. Persian King Cyrus absorbed Babylon in 539 BC. That’s about 66 years after Babylonians took Daniel from Judah in 605 BC. So, Daniel would have been well into his 70s by the time Cyrus arrived.

Daniel doesn’t say why he was mourning. Perhaps it’s because it was the season of Passover, when many Jews used to go to Jerusalem to celebrate the festival. But with Jerusalem leveled and the Jews in exile, they couldn’t do this anymore. See Passover note for Daniel 10:4.

More literally, Daniel says he had not anointed himself. People used olive oil to anoint kings and priests. And it seems the term became a way of describing what many did in this hot and dry land to cool and moisturize themselves and to deal with body odor. It was a common grooming practice, like our practice of putting on hand lotion in the dry winter months or sunscreen in the summer.

It was probably in April. The Jewish month of Nisan ran from about mid-March to mid-April. Passover took place on the 15^th day of Nisan. Daniel may have been fasting through the back-to-back festivals of Passover and of Yeast-free Bread (Unleavened Bread). Jews followed a lunar calendar, with every month starting at the first tiny crescent after the new moon. A new moon is when the moon is hidden behind earth’s shadow for one day. The sun, moon, and earth are aligned, with earth in the middle.

The text says only “topaz,” which comes in many colors, including brown—which would match the description of the man’s “polished bronze” legs.

More literally, like a “crowd.”

We don’t know who or what this man is. But the writer is probably not trying to describe a camel salesman or any other human being. Linen is what spiritual people like priests wore. But the over-the-top description here fits celestial beings described elsewhere in the Bible. See Ezekiel 1. The description of glowing and shining light often involves fire because in their day, that’s where light came from. “Fire” was a way of saying something glowed bright as a flame.

Paul described something similar when he saw a vision of Jesus while Paul was on his way to arrest Christian Jews in Damascus. Men traveling with him “could hear the voice, but they didn’t see anyone” (Acts 9:7).

The blocker was more literally “the prince of the kingdom of Persia.” No clarification there. Who was he? Was he a border agent stopping a human messenger from reaching Daniel? Was he a guardian angel following orders, protecting Persia since God had temporarily abandoned Israel to exile and was now protecting Persia (Ezekiel 10)? Was he an evil spirit that Michael had to defeat in a violent battle (10:13)? Not likely the latter, most scholars seem to agree. Fortunately, who or what the blocker was isn’t the point. But that doesn’t help satisfy our curiosity.

From Daniel’s day forward, Michael, became one of the leading celestial beings in ancient Jewish writings, showing up as an archangel. He appears in the Qumran library better known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were rediscovered in the 1940s. He’s also in the ancient Jewish book of Enoch, which is included in some Christian Bibles, as “Deuterocanonical.” Meaning, not as reliable.

“When all of this is over” is more literally and cryptically, “at the end of days.” What days? That’s the unanswered question. The end of these days or of all days?

What’s in the Book of Truth? The truth is the facts are apparently on a need-to-know basis. And we don’t need to know. Or Daniel forgot to tell us. Many scholars guess that the Book reveals what’s going to happen to Israel in the coming years and to the rest of the world when humanity becomes extinct. Others say the Book is less likely about the end of the world and more likely about what is on Daniel’s mind: the future of Israel in the coming decades. We can guess. But it seems we can’t know.