"Bible Week" continues.

 “Bible Week” at The Ambiguities 

Thursday’s child has far to go. A story of Daniel, who will later be thrown into the lion’s den.

This is about Daniel when he was a servant of Cyrus of Persia and a favorite of the king. And it’s about a voracious Babylonian god, called Bel, who ate enormous quantities of food, who drank enormous quantities of wine, and who managed to die before he’d lived. It happened this way.

Bel the Great, after supper, feelin' good.*

     The king worshiped the great Bel; he went to see it every day; but Daniel never went with him. The king wondered why, and Daniel said it was because he didn’t worship idols, created by human hands but the God of all that created hands, bodies, brains, the heavens and the earth, God of all because he created all things – the living God.

     Then the king said, “Do you think Bel is not a living God? Don’t you see how much he eats and drinks every day?”

          “He doesn’t eat or drink anything,” Daniel said. “Ask his priests.”

So the king sent for the priests and told them what Daniel had said that Bel was eating or drinking nothing. If so, where was it going?

     The priests asserted that Daniel was a blasphemer, if Bel wasn’t eating and drinking all that was brought to him, Daniel should die. And the king agreed. “Only,” he said, “if Daniel is somehow right, you die.”

The king went with Daniel into the temple of Bel, and Bel’s priests went with them – there were 70 priests and all had families, and the families came into the temple, too. And the chief priest said to the king, “Here is the meat and the bread and the wine for Bel. We’ll leave it hear with him; we’ll go out; you can seal the door and mark the seal with your signet. Come back tomorrow, and see what you see.”

     And so it went, and they went out, first the priests, then the king and Daniel. But the king and Daniel did not go out before Daniel had spread a fine coating of ashes on the floor around Bel and his feast. But when all were out and the door was shut, the door was sealed with the king’s signet.

Night came, and the priests with their wives and their children entered the temple through a trap door, and they ate and they drank as they always did. While Bel looked on, they ate till they were full and more than full. Then they went out the way they had come in.

     And morning came, and the king came to the temple with Daniel. And they saw that the seals had not been broken. The broke them, opened the door, and the king saw the table, empty except for plates and cups and bones and crumbs soaking up spilled wine.

     And the king said, “See.” And Daniel laughed. “Yes, see,” he said. “Look at the floor.” And there the king saw the smear of foot-prints and buttocks-prints all around Bel’s table. These led Daniel to the trap door, which he opened for the king.

What happened next to the priests of Bel and their wives and their children, what happened to Bel and his temple, is it not written in the annals of Cyrus of Persia, kept by his servant Daniel?
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* artist's misrendering

04.21.16