God’s Word for You

Daniel 6:19 Dawn over Babylon

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Wednesday, November 5, 2025

19 The king rose at dawn, just as daylight broke, and hurried off. He went to the lions’ den.

This scene anticipates and foreshadows that of the women in the Gospels. How clearly we see them: “Early (Greek proi) on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb” (John 20:1). Luke says that it was “very early in the morning,” Greek orthrou batheos “in the deep of early dawn” (Luke 24:1). Mark, speaking of the group and not only of Mary Magdalene, says “just at the rising of the sun” (Mark 16:2), which matches Matthew’s epiphoskouse “as the day was dawning” (Matthew 28:1). These different ways of speaking about the sunrise are similar to what Daniel reports about his dawn in the den: “At the early dawn” (Aramaic be-shaparpar, Greek proi—compare John 20:1), “as daylight broke.”

The cool morning air, the hurrying walk to get to the tomb or to the pit (in Daniel’s case), and the question of the stone, are all similar. And another point of comparison is that there was an angel in each case; more about that in verse 22.

There are three verbs in the verse, but the first one, “rose,” is subordinate. If we take the verse as two sentences, which is possible, then the two main verbs are “hurried (off)” and “went.” If we take the entire verse as one sentence, then the final word, “went,” remains as the main verb and the main action. In other words, there is no emphasis at all on the word “rose.” I’m making this point to show that we don’t need to contradict verse 18, where we were told that “sleep escaped him.” It isn’t as if, after a couple of troubling hours, he drifted off to sleep anyway. We are told he had a sleepless night. Then, either rising from a chair or rising in the narrative sense (Ezekiel 3:22; Matthew 2:20), he hurried, and he went to the lions’ den.

Here as throughout the Scriptures the references to time in a narrative account like this have no symbolic value; they are literal and not allegorical at all. Dawn, the early part of the day, or daybreak, is clearly what Daniel is describing. For the prophet down in the pit with the lions, the sky was beginning to grow lighter. We see the same use of common and clear language here that we do in Genesis, where Moses uses simple words like “day” and “evening” without any hidden or symbolic meaning, but the change of light that comes with the everyday turning of the earth. While it would be wonderful and clever to say that in Matthew 28:1, Christ’s resurrection was the “dawn” of “a new day” for mankind, and the beginning of the Holy Christian Church, this is not what the context of the verse is telling us. So it is in Genesis. When Moses says that evening came and then morning came, and it had been “day one” (yom echad, Genesis 1:15), he does not mean a symbolic day, such as an era or epoch or age of the world, but rather a regular day, a 24-hour spin of the world on its axis. And so it is here with Daniel: the “daybreak” was not something we should twist into a symbolic “new era” in Daniel’s life, but simply the sunrise when the sun’s rays or streaks “do lace the severing clouds in yonder east,” and, plainly said, it gets light out.

We come now to a serious question. Is this verse to be classified as Law or as Gospel? Properly speaking, we should turn ourselves to 2 Timothy 3:16-17, “All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that for every good work the godly person may be fully equipped.” This verse, technically law for Darius and Gospel for the Christian reader when added to verse 20, is “useful for teaching.” We have seen that it foreshadows and casts a fine light on the account of the women approaching the tomb of Jesus on Easter dawn, and also it is a useful verse for supporting the interpretation of the days of Creation as ordinary days. Therefore we are doubly blessed—and ancient Daniel was blessed even more so—by this morning moment in the crepuscular dawn over the den of the lions of Babylon.

 

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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