Today is the 25th day of November. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It's great to be here with you today.

On a day all over the world, I think all over the world. Known as Black Friday, definitely it's known that way around these parts.

Big shopping day, big sales. It's like Christmas just descends upon us and now here we are.

One month from today is Christmas Day. So that's where we are in the year. That's where we locate ourselves and gather around the global campfire.

And let's take the next step forward together. And our next step has us squarely at the threshold of a brand new book, the Book of Daniel, which is really one of the most interesting books in the Old Testament. It's because of its imagery.

So Daniel is respected for its historical accounts, but it's very very famous for the sweeping prophetic visions that are contained in the book.

And those prophetic visions have been poured over and studied and consulted over thousands of years in the studies of the End Times, Eschatology.

And Daniel is a hotly debated book in that regard. There are biblical scholars that would argue that the things that Daniel are writing about are things that he has experience of and is speaking to.

And so Daniel then is rooted in the Babylonian exile because that's the perspective that the story is written from. Then there are other biblical scholars that would argue very convincingly and like all biblical scholars very passionately.

The Daniel is a much more recent book than the Babylonian exile. And this debate even crosses over to Hebrew biblical scholars and not only Christian biblical scholars.

And if it's more recent and that is the argument than the interpretation for what Daniel's saying then becomes a product of debate. If it's a more recent writing, when I say more recent, I'm like not like last year or in the last decade, I'm like within a century ish of Jesus as opposed to centuries earlier than that at the time of Babylon.

And there are huge amount of debates about is what Daniel saw no matter when he saw it is what he saw about the future.

But like a distant future as in like it's been thousands of years since this book has been written. Are we still looking to the future for what he is is saying symbolically?

Or was he speaking more to a more immediate context and using symbolic apocalyptic language that would be apparent to the reader what the symbols are?

And way way way smarter people than me continue the debate.

Nevertheless, the imagery in Daniel is written about the time of the exile contemporary with books like we just read the book of Ezekiel.

We know from history as well as from the Bible that when exile when Jerusalem fell and was destroyed and the people were carried into exile, that was very very difficult.

And Daniel is one of the exiles who remarkably finds favor. He finds favor with God but he finds favor with those around him.

He was a gifted man who became an influential advisor in the Babylonian kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar and then beyond.

But here's where it kind of gets interesting. Daniel was an exile. He was a Hebrew. He was prophetic. But he wasn't a prophet for or against Israel.

The things that Daniel sees that we're going to read, the visions that he sees aren't Jewish particularly, which makes Daniel have a unique voice in the Bible.

And so as we begin the book of Daniel, the first half of the book roughly will be reading the story of Daniel's life. And within that we're retelling are some of the most famous stories, like stories that are Sunday school stories.

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