Daniel דָּנִיֵּאל

The book of Daniel is two books that refuse to be separated. The first half (chapters 1–6) tells court tales of exile: four youths who will not defile themselves with the king's food; a dream of empires told to the dreamer himself; three men walking unharmed in a furnace with a fourth 'like a son of the gods'; a king driven to eat grass until he learns that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men; fingers writing MENE MENE, TEKEL UPHARSIN on the plaster of a doomed feast; and a sealed den of lions opened at dawn. The second half (chapters 7–12) turns the same history inside out — no longer tales about Daniel but visions through his eyes: the four beasts and the Ancient of days, one like a son of man coming with the clouds of heaven, the ram and the he-goat, the seventy weeks unfolded from Jeremiah's seventy years, the man clothed in linen above the waters, and the clearest promise of resurrection in all of the Hebrew Bible — 'many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake.' Daniel also carries a structural surprise: from the Chaldeans' first answer in 2:4 through the end of chapter 7 — straddling both halves — the book runs in Biblical Aramaic, the language of the empire it describes, before returning to Hebrew for the final visions.

This edition presents each verse word by word: the Hebrew or Aramaic, its transliteration, its root, its gematria, and a form-true English gloss, beneath a complete modern English translation adapted from the public-domain Jewish Publication Society version of 1917. Six classical commentaries accompany the text — Rashi, the Ibn Ezra, the Metzudat David and Metzudat Zion, the Malbim, and Joseph ibn Yahya's commentary from his Perush on the Ketuvim (Bologna, 1538).