Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 81 · March 22
Where Daniel Drew It
“But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king’s meat, nor with the wine which he drank: therefore he requested of the prince of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself.”
Jerusalem, in the third year of Jehoiakim. Nebuchadnezzar takes the city, empties part of the temple treasury into the house of his own god, and takes a selection of the aristocracy's teenagers back to Babylon with him.
Daniel is one of them. Young, well favoured, quick, handed over to the master of the eunuchs. He is given a three-year education in the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans, meaning the literature, the omen texts and the astrology of the empire that had just burned his country. He is given a new name, Belteshazzar, built out of the name of a Babylonian god. He is being trained for the civil service of the men who deported him.
He accepts all of it. No protest is recorded about the language, the curriculum, the name or the career, and he goes on serving in that administration through a long life and more than one empire.
The one line he draws is the table. Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king's meat, nor with the wine which he drank. He draws it quietly, too. He requested of the prince of the eunuchs, and when the official explains that his own head is on the line, Daniel proposes a ten-day trial with a way out for everybody in the room.
The chapter withholds something, and the warning sits in what it withholds. It never says why the food was the line. Whether the meat had been offered to idols, or was simply unclean, or amounted to becoming the king's man by sitting at the king's table, Daniel 1 does not say, and every confident explanation you have heard is somebody filling a gap. What the chapter does show is a line small enough to keep for a lifetime and specific enough to be noticed in the first week, drawn by a boy who had already worked out which fights he was not going to pick. A line chosen for how brave it looks rarely survives the month.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 81 is Everything Provided (2 Peter 1:3).