Bel and the Dragon: The Footprints in the Ashes

At a Glance

Who wrote it: An unknown Jewish writer, or writers. Two short stories about Daniel were added to the end of the book of Daniel in Greek.

When: Probably the 100s BC.

Where it fits: Set in Babylon after the Persian king Cyrus took it in 539 BC, with Daniel at the king’s side. Written to mock the gods of the nations for Jews who lived among them.

Which Bibles keep it: Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, as part of Daniel (in Catholic Bibles, Daniel 14). Protestant Bibles moved it to the Apocrypha.

Where you hear it in your Bible: Nowhere quoted. Its Daniel in the lions’ den is a second telling of Daniel 6. Its dragon that bursts may grow from Jeremiah 51:44, where God says he will bring out of his mouth that which he has swallowed up.

How close it stays to me: Close in exposing priests who live off the offerings. Far in feeding enemies, and their families, to death.

If you only read three chapters: It is one chapter of forty-two verses. Read it all.

Words to Know

Bel — a title meaning lord. In Babylon it meant Marduk, the city’s chief god.

Idol — a statue worshipped as a god, or as the home of one.

Habakkuk — a prophet of Judah. A short book of his prophecy is in your Bible.

Firkin — an old measure for liquids, about forty liters.

The Book in Brief

Bel. Cyrus of Persia has become king of Babylon, and Daniel is his close friend. The Babylonians worship a statue of Bel, and set out for him every day great quantities of flour, sheep and wine. The king asks Daniel why he does not worship Bel, who plainly eats and drinks. Daniel laughs: the statue is clay inside and bronze outside and has never eaten anything. The seventy priests of Bel propose a test. The food is set out, the temple door is sealed with the king’s own seal, and if Bel has not eaten it all by morning, the priests will die; if he has, Daniel will. But Daniel secretly has his servants scatter ashes on the floor. In the night the priests come in through a hidden door under the table, with their wives and children, and eat everything. In the morning the seals are unbroken and the food is gone, and the king praises Bel, until Daniel shows him the footprints in the ashes. The king kills the priests and their families and gives Bel to Daniel, who destroys the statue and the temple.

The dragon. The Babylonians also worship a great living dragon. Daniel kills it without a sword by feeding it cakes of pitch, fat and hair, and it bursts. The people rise up against the king and demand Daniel, and he is thrown into a den of seven starving lions for six days. Far away in Judea, an angel picks up the prophet Habakkuk by the hair, with a bowl of stew he was taking to his reapers, and carries him to Babylon to feed Daniel. On the seventh day the king comes to mourn and finds Daniel alive. He praises the God of Daniel, pulls him out, and throws his enemies to the lions, who devour them at once.

Every day the Babylonians set out food for the god Bel: twelve great measures of fine flour, and forty sheep, and six firkins of wine (Bel and the Dragon 3). Every morning it was gone.

Thinkest you not that Bel is a living god? the king asks Daniel. See you not how much he eats and drinks every day?

Then Daniel laughed (Bel and the Dragon 6–7).

That laugh is the best thing in this little book. Daniel knows exactly where the food goes, and he means to prove it.

A locked room

The priests of Bel, seventy of them, are confident. Let the king set out the food himself, shut the door, and seal it with his own ring. If the food is not eaten by morning, they will die.

They are confident because under the table they had made a privy entrance, whereby they entered in continually, and consumed those things (Bel and the Dragon 13).

But before the door is sealed, Daniel has his servants scatter ashes across the floor of the temple, with only the king watching. In the night the priests come in through their secret door with their wives and children, as they were wont to do, and did eat and drink up all (Bel and the Dragon 15).

In the morning, the seals are whole. The food is gone. The king shouts, Great are you, O Bel (Bel and the Dragon 18). And Daniel laughs again and holds him back at the door. Behold now the pavement, and mark well whose footsteps are these.

I see the footsteps of men, women, and children (Bel and the Dragon 19–20).

It is one of the oldest detective stories in the world: a locked room, a test, a trap, and a clue in the dust. And its point is plain. The god does not eat. The priests do.

The god who feeds the priests

That is what the story is about, underneath the comedy. A great temple, a great god, a daily offering that would feed a village, and all of it going into the bellies of the priests and their families through a door under the table.

The Letter of Jeremiah said the same thing about the priests of Babylon: they take the offerings and to the poor and to the impotent will they give nothing thereof (Letter of Jeremiah 6:28). This story turns it into a trap and springs it.

It is easy to laugh at the priests of Bel. It is harder to look at your own house. In my day, the Temple of the true God in Jerusalem had its own hidden doors under the table: money changers and sellers of sacrificial animals doing business in its courts, and, many historians think, a high priest’s family grown rich on it. I overturned their tables and said, My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations? But you have made it a den of robbers! (Mark 11:17).

Any religion can have a door under the table. Ask where the offerings go. Look for footprints.

Go deeperBel was Marduk

Bel was not a made-up god. Bel is a title, lord, the same word as the Canaanite Baal, and in Babylon it meant Marduk, the great god of the city. His temple, the Esagila, stood in the heart of Babylon beside the great stepped tower that may lie behind the story of the tower of Babel.¹

The Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote about a century after Cyrus took Babylon, describes Bel’s temple. He says there was a great golden statue of the god seated beside a golden table, and that the Babylonians said the god himself came at night to the room at the top of the tower, where a woman of his choosing waited on a couch. Herodotus says plainly that he does not believe it.¹

So the stories of the god who eats and sleeps in his temple were told about Bel by the Babylonians themselves. The writer of this book took them and turned them into a joke.

The prophets of my people had mocked Bel before. Bel bows down. Nebo stoops. Their idols are carried by animals (Isaiah 46:1). And Jeremiah: I will execute judgment on Bel in Babylon, and I will bring out of his mouth that which he has swallowed up (Jeremiah 51:44). Many scholars think the story of the dragon who swallows Daniel’s cakes and bursts grew out of that one verse.²

The dragon and the lions

The second story is wilder. The Babylonians worship a living dragon, a great serpent, and this one really does eat. Daniel offers to kill it without sword or staff. He boils pitch, fat and hair together into cakes and feeds them to it, so the dragon did eat and burst in sunder (Bel and the Dragon 26–27).

Now the people are furious. The king is become a Jew, and he has pulled down Bel, and slain the dragon, and put the priests to the sword (Bel and the Dragon 28). They demand Daniel, and he goes into a den of seven lions that have been starved so they will eat him.

Then comes my favorite moment. Far away in Judea, the prophet Habakkuk has made stew and is carrying it out to the men harvesting his fields. An angel tells him to take it to Daniel in Babylon. Lord, I never saw Babylon; neither do I know where the den is (Bel and the Dragon 35). So the angel of the Lord took him by the crown, and lifted him up by the hair of his head and set him down over the lions’ den (Bel and the Dragon 36).

O Daniel, Daniel, take the dinner which God has sent you. And Daniel answers, You have remembered me, O God: neither have you forsaken those who love you (Bel and the Dragon 37–38).

A prophet carried by his hair across the desert to bring a bowl of stew to a man in a pit. It is a ridiculous picture, and I love it. God remembers the man in the pit, and sends someone with food. I said that on the last day the King will say, I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat (Matthew 25:35). Habakkuk would have understood.

Go deeperTwo tellings of the lions’ den

Your Bible already has Daniel in the lions’ den, in Daniel 6. There the king is Darius the Mede, Daniel is thrown to the lions for praying to his God against the king’s decree, he spends one night in the den, and an angel shuts the lions’ mouths.

This book tells it again, differently. The king is Cyrus. Daniel is thrown in for destroying Babylon’s gods. He is in the den six days, with seven lions, and he is fed by Habakkuk. Both stories end the same way: the king rejoices and throws Daniel’s enemies to the lions instead.

Scholars think there were many stories about Daniel circulating among my people, and that the book of Daniel in your Bible collects some of them while the Greek Bible preserved a few more. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls there are pieces of other Daniel stories that are in neither: a Prayer of Nabonidus, in which a Jewish exile heals a Babylonian king, and several fragments of visions in Daniel’s name.³

Some ancient copies of the Greek begin this book differently, calling it from the prophecy of Habakkuk son of Joshua, of the tribe of Levi, and making Daniel a priest. That tells you how freely these stories were told and retold before anyone thought of fixing them in a canon.

Where Bel and I part

The book laughs at false gods and lying priests, and that laughter is good. But read its endings.

When the trick is exposed, the king killed them, the priests, with their wives and children (Bel and the Dragon 21–22). When Daniel comes out of the den, the king cast those that were the cause of his destruction into the den: and they were devoured in a moment before his face (Bel and the Dragon 42). Your own lions’ den story in Daniel 6 ends the same way, and adds their children, and their wives (Daniel 6:24).

The children in the ashes did not build the secret door. They ate the dinner their fathers brought them.

I did not ask for the money changers to be killed. I overturned their tables. I did not ask God to feed my accusers to the lions. I asked him to forgive them. You can expose a lie without killing the liar’s children.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Bel and the Dragon 1–22.

You will find: the daily offering, the sealed door, the ashes, and the footsteps of men, women, and children.

Then read Jeremiah 51:44 and see if you can find the dragon in it, and Mark 11:15–17.

The Short Version

• Bel and the Dragon is two short stories added to Daniel in Greek. Catholic Bibles print them as Daniel 14.
• The priests of Bel eat the god’s offerings every night through a secret door, until Daniel scatters ashes and shows the king their footprints.
• Daniel kills a dragon with cakes of pitch, fat and hair, is thrown to the lions, and is fed by the prophet Habakkuk, carried by an angel by his hair.
• Its lesson is mine: ask where the offerings go. I overturned the tables of a den of robbers.
• It ends by killing the priests’ wives and children and throwing the accusers to the lions. That is not mine.