Which Angels Appear in the Book of Daniel, and What Do They Do?

Which angels appear in each chapter of Daniel?

Angels appear or speak in every one of Daniel's twelve Hebrew and Aramaic chapters except 1, 2, and 5, and only two of them are ever named.

The NABRE numbers several of these verses differently. It prints the Greek passage inside chapter 3, so the furnace verses 3:25 and 3:28 become 3:92 and 3:95; it follows the Aramaic count elsewhere, so the watcher's verses become 4:10-14 and the lions' den verse 6:23. The words are the same; only the numbers move.

What did the holy watcher announce in Nebuchadnezzar's dream?

The angel of chapter 4 delivers a court verdict. In his dream Nebuchadnezzar sees "a holy watcher coming down from heaven" who orders a great tree cut down to its stump (4:13-14).

The watcher also names who made the decision: "The sentence is rendered by decree of the watchers, the decision is given by order of the holy ones," so that all who live may know "the Most High is sovereign over the kingdom of mortals" (4:17).

Daniel then explains that the tree is the king himself, who will live among the animals until he admits that rule (4:25), and he calls the sentence "a decree of the Most High" (4:24). The watcher does nothing more after speaking, and the sentence falls on the king twelve months later (4:29-33).

Chapter 4 is the only place the Bible uses the Aramaic word ir, a wakeful one, for an angel. The Watchers who come down and take human wives belong to 1 Enoch; nothing in Daniel 4 has the watcher disobey.

Did an angel shut the lions' mouths?

Yes, by Daniel's own report, and his report is the only evidence the chapter gives. When Darius calls into the den at dawn, Daniel answers: "My God sent his angel and shut the lions' mouths so that they would not hurt me, because I was found blameless before him" (6:22).

No one sees this angel. The rescue happens overnight behind a stone that the king has sealed with his own signet (6:17), so unlike the furnace scene, there is no fourth figure for anyone to count.

Daniel ties the rescue to his innocence, and the king treats it as a verdict. The men who accused Daniel are thrown into the same den with their families (6:24).

Hebrews 11:33 remembers the scene without the angel, listing among the faithful those "who through faith... shut the mouths of lions."

Who is the man clothed in linen in Daniel 10?

Daniel describes him from head to foot and never learns his name. On the bank of the Tigris, Daniel sees "a man clothed in linen, with a belt of gold from Uphaz," his body "like beryl," his face "like lightning," his eyes "like flaming torches," and his arms and legs "like the gleam of burnished bronze" (10:5-6).

The men with Daniel see nothing, yet they tremble and run to hide (10:7). Daniel loses his strength, falls face down in a trance, and has to be lifted to his hands and knees (10:9-10).

Linen is the dress of priests on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16:4). In Ezekiel 9 a man in linen carries a writing case and marks the foreheads of the faithful in Jerusalem.

Daniel's figure returns at the end of the book, standing above the river and swearing "by the one who lives forever" (12:7).

Readers have identified him in three main ways.

• Gabriel. Many commentators take him to be Gabriel, since 9:21 already calls Gabriel "the man" and this figure again explains a vision. Chapter 10 itself never uses the name.
• An unnamed high angel. Some readers separate the radiant figure of 10:5-6 from the "one in human form" who touches Daniel's lips and strengthens him (10:16, 18).
• Christ before the incarnation. Some Christian commentators note that Revelation 1:14-15 gives the risen Christ eyes "like a flame of fire" and feet "like burnished bronze." The usual objection is 10:13, where this figure is held back for 21 days and needs Michael's help.

Whoever he is, he states his own errand: to help Daniel "understand what is to happen to your people at the end of days" (10:14).

Why did the prince of Persia delay the answer for 21 days?

The messenger explains the delay himself. Daniel's words were heard "from the first day," he says, but "the prince of the kingdom of Persia opposed me twenty-one days" until Michael, "one of the chief princes," came to help (10:12-13).

The 21 days match Daniel's three weeks of mourning, when he ate no rich food, meat, or wine and did not anoint himself (10:2-3). The answer was sent on the first day and reached him on the twenty-fourth day of the first month (10:4).

Most scholars read the prince of Persia as the angelic patron of the Persian empire. The NABRE footnote calls him "the angelic guardian of Persia" and Michael "the patron angel of Israel," and it notes that where older texts speak of the gods of the nations, Daniel speaks of princes.

The older text that footnote points to is Deuteronomy 32:8, where the Most High divides the nations "according to the number of the gods" in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Greek text; the Masoretic Hebrew reads "the Israelites."

Sirach 17:17 says it outright: "He appointed a ruler for every nation, but Israel is the Lord's own portion."

Daniel adds that the patrons fight, and that their battles track events on earth; after Persia, "the prince of Greece will come" (10:20), as Greek rule followed Persian.

Christian readers have disagreed about his character for centuries: Thomas Aquinas reports Jerome taking him as the angel who opposed Israel's release and Gregory the Great as a good angel guarding Persia (Summa I, q.113, a.8). Many modern evangelical and charismatic writers read him as a fallen angel, and the teaching on "territorial spirits" draws heavily on this verse.

Daniel never calls the prince evil or fallen, and Daniel hears of the fight only from the messenger, who says he must now go back to it (10:20).

Why do Daniel's angels have names and ranks when earlier angels do not?

Earlier in the Bible, angels who are asked their names decline to give them. When Manoah asks, the angel of the Lord calls his name "too wonderful" to tell (Judges 13:18), and the one who wrestles Jacob turns the same question back on him (Genesis 32:29).

Daniel supplies two names and a ranking.

Calling Michael "one of the chief princes" implies other chief princes, and the Jewish Encyclopedia calls Daniel's author "the first by whom angels were individualized and endowed with names and titles."

A rabbinic explanation ties the names to the exile. Genesis Rabbah 48:9 records Resh Lakish saying that the names of the angels, Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel, came up with the Jews from Babylon, where Daniel's story is set.

Some historians of religion link named, ranked angels to contact with Persia and its Zoroastrian heavenly beings; others find the evidence thin because the Persian sources are hard to date.

The vision form alone does not explain the names. Zechariah, whose visions are dated to the reign of Darius (Zechariah 1:7), is guided through them by "the angel who spoke with me" (1:9) and never learns his name. In Daniel a name comes where an angel takes a side: Michael is named only in the last vision (10:13 to 12:1), the one that sets him against the princes of Persia and Greece.

Daniel holds the first named angels in the Jewish and Protestant canon, but not in Jewish writing as a whole. The Book of Watchers in 1 Enoch, usually dated to the third century BCE, already names Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel.

Catholic and Orthodox Bibles also include the Book of Tobit, in which Raphael names himself as "one of the seven angels who stand ready and enter before the glory of the Lord" (Tobit 12:15).

Daniel never uses the word archangel, and "chief princes" is its nearest term. The Greek archangelos appears in the New Testament only at 1 Thessalonians 4:16 and Jude 9, and Christian theology later made it the name of a rank of archangels within an ordered hierarchy.

When was Daniel written, and does the date change how its angels read?

Jewish and Christian tradition dates the book to the sixth century BCE and to Daniel himself, a Judean exile serving at the Babylonian and Persian courts. Most academic scholars date its final form to 167-164 BCE, when the Seleucid king Antiochus IV banned Jewish practice and defiled the Temple.

The Jewish canon places Daniel among the Writings rather than the Prophets, and the Babylonian Talmud (Bava Batra 15a) credits the Men of the Great Assembly, not Daniel, with writing the book down.

For the angels, the choice matters most in chapter 10, which is set in the third year of Cyrus of Persia (10:1). On the traditional dating, the prince of Greece (10:20) is announced about two centuries before Alexander conquered Persia. On the critical dating, readers living under Antiochus IV, a Greek king, hear that their war has a heavenly counterpart and that Michael will arise for them (12:1).