Introduction to the Interlinear
Daniel is the book of a man who spent his whole adult life inside an empire that had burned his city, and who kept his windows open toward it anyway. It opens with a siege and closes with a resurrection. In between it does something no other book of the Hebrew Bible does: it changes languages mid-sentence, hands the narration over to a pagan king for an entire chapter, and lays out a map of the coming centuries in enough detail that readers have argued about it ever since.
The book opens in 605 BC. Nebuchadnezzar comes against Jerusalem, and among the young men of good family carried back to Babylon are four with Hebrew names that carry God in them — Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, Azariah — who are promptly given Babylonian ones that carry Bel and Nebo and Aku instead. That renaming is not incidental. It is the whole pressure of the book in miniature: an empire that does not persecute so much as absorb, offering the best education, the best food, and a new name to go with it.
A note on the date in 1:1. Daniel places the siege in Jehoiakim's third year; Jeremiah 25:1 places Nebuchadnezzar's first year in Jehoiakim's fourth. This is the best-known chronological snag in the book, and it has a straightforward answer: Babylonian scribes counted a king's partial first year separately as an accession year, so that his "first year" began the following spring, while Judean reckoning counted it as year one. Daniel, trained in the Babylonian system, counts the Babylonian way. Jeremiah, writing in Jerusalem, counts the Judean way. Both are describing the same season.
Daniel begins in Hebrew, turns to Aramaic partway through 2:4 — at the moment the Chaldeans open their mouths to speak — and stays in Aramaic until the end of chapter 7, where it returns to Hebrew for the rest of the book.
The division is not arbitrary. The Aramaic half addresses what the nations are and where they are going; the Hebrew half addresses what happens to Daniel's own people inside that history. Aramaic was the diplomatic and commercial language of the ancient Near East for centuries — the language a Babylonian official and a Persian satrap and a Judean exile could all use. The book speaks to the empire in the empire's tongue.
The Aramaic section also turns out to be built as a mirror. Chapter 2 and chapter 7 both present four kingdoms followed by an everlasting one. Chapters 3 and 6 both tell of faithful men delivered out of a death sentence. Chapters 4 and 5 both tell of a proud king weighed and humbled. The center of the structure is not a vision at all but the humbling of Nebuchadnezzar and the fall of Belshazzar — which is to say, the book's argument is that the God of heaven rules in the kingdom of men, and it says so twice from the outside in.
This is the contested ground, and a reader deserves to see it plainly rather than to be handed one side with the other left out.
Daniel writes in the first person from chapter 7 onward ("I, Daniel"), presents himself as an exile of the sixth century, and is treated as an author by later Jewish and Christian tradition. The book knows things a much later writer would be unlikely to know. Belshazzar is the clearest instance: unknown to Herodotus, absent from the king lists, and dismissed in 1850 as an invention — until 1854, when four cuneiform cylinders from a ziggurat foundation at Ur turned up carrying Nabonidus's prayer for his eldest son, Bel-shar-usur. Later texts filled in the rest: Nabonidus spent years away in Arabia and left the kingship of Babylon in his son's hands. That also explains a detail no inventor would think to include — Belshazzar can only offer Daniel third place in the kingdom (5:16), because second place was already his own.
The Aramaic itself is Imperial Aramaic of the Persian administrative type rather than the later Western Aramaic of the second century. The Persian loanwords are Old Persian, and several are terms that had fallen out of use by the Hellenistic period. And for a book supposedly composed under Greek rule, the Greek vocabulary is startlingly thin — three musical instruments in chapter 3, and nothing else, no Greek political or military terms at all.
The majority position in academic scholarship dates the book, or at least its visions, to about 165 BC, during the persecution under Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The central argument is chapter 11: the account of the wars between the kings of the north and the south tracks Seleucid and Ptolemaic history in remarkable detail, and then becomes noticeably less exact at the point of Antiochus's death — which is read as the signature of prophecy written after the fact, breaking down where the author's own knowledge ran out. Supporting arguments point to Daniel's placement among the Writings rather than the Prophets, to features of the Hebrew that seem late, and to the historical difficulty of Darius the Mede, for whom no independent record exists.
Two things are worth knowing. First, Daniel was popular at Qumran: eight fragmentary manuscripts survive, more than most books of the Torah, and they represent essentially every chapter. If the book were composed in 165 BC, it had to be written, circulated, copied into more than one textual family, and accepted as Scripture within a very short window. That is not impossible, but it is a lot to ask of fifty years.
Second, the dating of those manuscripts moved recently. A 2025 study combining radiocarbon analysis with machine-learning handwriting models produced a new date for 4QDan-c (4Q114), the Daniel scroll containing parts of chapters 10 and 11. It had been assigned on handwriting grounds to a period after 164 BC. The radiocarbon result came back earlier — a range of roughly 230 to 160 BC. The researchers present this as the first case of a biblical manuscript dated to the lifetime of its presumed author. Defenders of the traditional date read the same number differently: a copy that may predate Antiochus IV's death is difficult to square with a book written in response to it. The study is recent, the calibration ranges are wide, and the argument is live. It is mentioned here not to settle anything but because a reader who goes looking will find it, and should know what it does and does not show.
For the believing reader there is one further consideration, which is not an archaeological argument and should not be dressed as one: Yeshua speaks of "the abomination of desolation, spoken of through Daniel the prophet" (Matthew 24:15), and draws His most frequent self-designation, the Son of Man, from Daniel 7. Whatever weight a reader gives that, it belongs in the open alongside the rest.
The book says that after Belshazzar's death "Darius the Mede received the kingdom, being about sixty-two years old" (5:31), and dates events to his reign. No Babylonian or Persian source names such a king. Three explanations have serious support:
The first has the fewest moving parts and the strongest grammatical footing, and it is the reading this edition finds most economical. It is not, however, a settled question, and the reading line does not press it: Darius is rendered as the text has him, and the identification is left to the reader.
The image (chapter 2). Gold, silver, bronze, iron, iron mixed with clay — four kingdoms, then a stone cut without hands that shatters the whole statue and becomes a mountain filling the earth. The interpretation of the fourth kingdom is the fault line: readers who date the book late generally count Babylon, Media, Persia, Greece; the traditional reading counts Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece, Rome, on the grounds that the book itself treats the Medes and Persians as one power (5:28, 8:20).
The beasts (chapter 7). The same sequence in a darker key — four beasts out of a churning sea, a little horn with a mouth speaking great things, thrones set in place, and the Ancient of Days seated in fire. Then one like a son of man comes with the clouds of heaven and receives dominion that shall not pass away. This chapter is the hinge of the book and arguably of biblical eschatology.
The ram and the goat (chapter 8). The only vision the book explicitly names for us: the ram is Media and Persia, the goat is Greece, the great horn broken and replaced by four (8:20–22). Out of one of them comes a horn that takes away the daily sacrifice and desolates the sanctuary — read almost universally, on every dating scheme, as Antiochus IV.
The seventy sevens (9:24–27). Daniel is reading Jeremiah, counting the seventy years of exile, and praying; the answer he receives extends the count. The passage is among the most disputed in the Hebrew Bible, and the disputes are structural rather than lexical — which decree starts the clock (Cyrus in 538, Ezra's commission in 458, or Nehemiah's in 445), whether the "sevens" run continuously or admit a gap before the last one, and whether the anointed one who is cut off is Messiah, a high priest murdered in the second century, or both by pattern. Readers should know that the traditional messianic reading, the Antiochene reading, and the dispensational futurist reading each have serious defenders, and that the arithmetic is doing a great deal of work in all three.
The last vision (chapters 10–12). A man clothed in linen, an angelic conflict behind the visible one, and then the long account of the kings of the north and south. It closes with what may be the clearest resurrection text in the Hebrew Bible: many who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, some to reproach — and those who turn many to righteousness shall shine like the stars. The final words to Daniel are not an explanation. He is told to go his way, that the words are sealed until the time of the end, and that he will rest and stand in his lot at the end of the days.
The hand writes four words (5:25): מְנֵא מְנֵא תְּקֵל וּפַרְסִין — mene, mene, teqel, and pharsin. They are weights. A mina, a mina, a shekel, and half-pieces. On the surface the wall reads like a line out of an accounts ledger, which may be exactly why the wise men of Babylon could see the letters perfectly well and make nothing of them.
Daniel does not read them as amounts. He reads them as verbs, and each one turns: mene, God has numbered your kingdom and finished it; teqel, you have been weighed in the scales and found lacking; peres, your kingdom is broken in two. Then the last word turns once more, because the consonants of peres are also the consonants of Paras — Persia. The sentence that ends the kingdom names the kingdom that ends it, and it does so in the same breath in which it says "divided."
None of that survives translation, and this edition does not pretend otherwise. The reading line gives the three interpretations plainly and leaves the four words transliterated; the roots sit in the chips for anyone who wants to follow them. It is among the clearest cases in Scripture of a passage whose whole point lives in the consonants — and it is a fair answer to the question of why anyone should read with the Hebrew and Aramaic in front of them rather than only read about them.
This is worth noticing before you read. The Tetragrammaton appears eight times in Daniel, and Adonai eleven — and with a single exception, every one of them is in chapter 9. The exception is 1:2, where Adonai gives Jehoiakim into Nebuchadnezzar's hand. Everywhere else in the book, across twelve chapters of kings and courts and visions, God is the God of heaven, the Most High, the Ancient of Days, the one whose dominion is everlasting — titles a Babylonian or a Persian could hear and understand.
Then Daniel opens Jeremiah, turns his face toward the Lord, and prays. And the covenant Name comes back. It is one of the quietest and most deliberate things in Scripture: the exile speaks the language of the empire everywhere except in prayer.
The Greek Daniel — both the Old Greek and Theodotion's version — contains material absent from the Hebrew and Aramaic: the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men, placed inside chapter 3; and Susanna and Bel and the Dragon, appended as further episodes. These are canonical for Catholic and Orthodox readers and are read as apocryphal by Jewish and Protestant readers. This edition presents the Hebrew and Aramaic text of the Leningrad Codex, so they do not appear. Their absence here reflects the text being tagged, not a judgment passed on them.
Every page carries three layers, and it helps to know what each of them is.
The Hebrew and Aramaic is the Leningrad Codex, with cantillation shown by default and a toggle to strip the accents down to vowels only. The chips beneath each word — transliteration, gloss, and the grammar in the detail sheet — are the TAHOT tagging from STEPBible and Tyndale House, Cambridge. The reading line in italics beneath each verse is Epiphany Press: an original rendering in the register of the King James and American Standard versions, written from the glosses rather than adapted from any modern translation.
Aramaic is decoded as Aramaic. The two languages share letters for their verb stems but not meanings — the same code that marks a Hebrew verb qal marks an Aramaic verb peal, and the stem that would be hiphil in Hebrew is haphel. Interlinears frequently run Daniel's Aramaic through a Hebrew decoder and mislabel it throughout. Here the decoder selects its stem table by the language of the word, so peal, pael, haphel, ithpeel and the rest are named correctly, including in the prefixed and suffixed segments where the language marker is not repeated.
Chapter and verse numbering follows the English tradition, which differs from the Hebrew in three places. English 4:1–3 is Hebrew 3:31–33; English 5:31 is Hebrew 6:1; and English 6:1–28 is therefore Hebrew 6:2–29. Where the two disagree, the Hebrew number is printed beside the verse as a small tag, so nothing is silently harmonized.
Qere readings are flagged. Where the traditional read form differs from the written consonantal text, the word carries a note saying so. Daniel has 123 of them — Malachi, by comparison, has none.
Proper nouns are transliterated; descriptions are translated. Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, Abed-nego, Arioch and Shinar stand as names. The Ancient of Days, the watchers, the abomination that desolates and the prince of the covenant are rendered in English. Established loanwords — Torah, shofar — follow the practice of the rest of the library.
The Masoretic text is preserved, seams and all. Where the Hebrew shifts person mid-verse, or where a vision report gives way abruptly to its interpretation, the reading line keeps the joint visible rather than smoothing it into modern English. And at 7:13, כְּבַר אֱנָשׁ is rendered "like a son of man" — indefinite, lowercase — because that is what the Aramaic says. What the Gospels do with that phrase is one of the most important things in the New Testament, and it is not the tagging layer's business to do it for you.
The library you are reading — this book, the rest of the Hebrew and Aramaic, and the Greek New Testament alongside it — was built and posted on Google Sites as a proving ground. Sites is a free consumer tool. It was never the destination. It was the place to find out whether the thing worked at all: whether the fonts held, whether the accents rendered on a phone, whether the bookmarks survived, whether a reader could actually get from a Hebrew word to its grammar without being handed a manual first.
The permanent home is GertrudeRadio.com. Everything here moves there, and everything stays free — no paywall, no account, no app, no advertising. Creative Commons, as the rest of the Epiphany Press catalog is. If you are reading this on Google Sites, you are reading the beta, and you are welcome to it.
Corrections are ongoing, and they are not cosmetic. This edition has already been through one round of them. Angle-bracket markers in the tagging — the small editorial signals for the direct-object marker, the attached article, the plural — were being silently swallowed by the browser instead of displayed, and in thirteen places one of them switched on a strikethrough that never switched off. Worse, the grammar decoder was mislabeling the construct state as "common" throughout, because the two share a letter in the tagging scheme and the decoder was reading it in the wrong order. That is 1,046 nouns in Daniel alone, wearing the wrong label — and the construct state is precisely the relationship a learner most needs the tagging to name. Both are fixed. Others will surface. When they do they will be fixed too, and the fix will be applied across every book rather than patched in one place and forgotten.
Some things about this edition are, so far as we can find, genuinely unusual:
Daniel was a young man when the gates closed behind him and an old one when the Persian court still had his name on its rolls. He never went home. He is, so far as the record goes, the only major figure in the Hebrew Bible against whom nothing negative is recorded — and the book that bears his name spends less time on his virtue than on the God he kept his windows open toward. Read it slowly. It rewards that.