Read Daniel the way it was written to be read

If you have picked up a commentary on Daniel and found yourself either lost in academic abstraction or frustrated by prophetic speculation, I want you to know — that frustration is legitimate, and it points toward something real. Daniel is one of the most intellectually demanding, theologically charged, and interpretively contested books in the entire biblical canon. It has been poorly served by both extremes: the sensationalism that treats it as a prophecy decoder for current events, and the purely academic approach that dissects it without ever asking what it might mean to live inside its convictions.

This school exists in the space between those failures. My aim is to take the text as seriously as it takes itself — which means engaging its ancient contexts, its literary forms, its contested history, and its extraordinary theological claims with equal care. We will spend real time in the court narratives of chapters 1–6, not because they are simple, but because they are not. Daniel's refusal to eat the king's food, the three men in the furnace, Daniel in the lions' den — these stories address the hardest questions any person of faith faces when the empire they live inside demands a loyalty that belongs to God alone. That is not an ancient problem.

The visions of chapters 7–12 deserve the same disciplined attention. The four beasts, the Ancient of Days, the one like a Son of Man, the seventy weeks — these images have generated centuries of interpretation, some of it brilliant, some of it reckless. I will not hand you a system. I will give you the tools to read the genre as the genre, to evaluate the major interpretive traditions honestly, and to follow Daniel's theological vision into the New Testament and into your own context. The Son of Man tradition alone, tracing from Daniel 7 through the Gospels, is one of the most significant threads in all of biblical theology.

What I most want you to leave with is not a set of positions on contested questions, but a way of reading — historically informed, literarily attentive, theologically serious, and pastorally alive. Daniel was written for communities under pressure. It shaped Jews surviving Hellenistic persecution, early Christians navigating Roman power, and believers across the centuries who needed to hear that divine sovereignty is not refuted by present suffering. That word is still worth hearing. And it is worth hearing well.

If you are ready to engage Daniel with the depth it deserves — to sit with its complexity, to hold its tensions honestly, and to let its theology speak to real questions of faith and public life — then this is the school for you. I am glad you are here.