Bel & The Dragon

[ In which our hero Daniel busts a corrupt pagan priesthood; then slays a dragon with cake ]  

"Bel and the Dragon" sounds like a whimsical children's adventure story, but it is actually a pair of cautionary fairy tales buried at the end of the inscrutable and unhinged Book of Daniel. This narrative couplet occurs after the more famous “Daniel in the Lion’s Den” interlude, a different version of which is also found immediately AFTER Bel and the Dragon. This is to say: there are two versions of the lion’s den -  similar but not the same - in the Book of Daniel. 

To make that info more confusing: this duplication is due to the fact that Bel and the Dragon are not found in all bibles because only Catholic and Eastern Orthodox authorities consider them legit. Protestants and (ironically) Jews don’t recognize this section of scripture as canonical.*

Let’s get to the stories:

As the narrative opens, we discover that King Cyrus of Babylon is an acolyte of the god Bel / Baal Marduk.** He asks his pal Daniel (an exiled Jew) why he doesn’t worship Bel’s bronze sculpture in the temple. Daniel laughs and describes Bel as a fake icon fashioned out of clay by mortals.*** 

The king disagrees. As evidence of Bel’s power, Cyrus points out that the idol eats and drinks a lot: twelve bushels of fine flour, forty sheep, and six vessels of wine EVERY DAY. Daniel nevertheless insists that Bel isn’t the individual scarfing the mutton and washing it down with wine each night. He claims that someone else is consuming the divine victuals.

This makes Cyrus very angry and he vows to get to the bottom of Daniel's claim. He personally sets up Bel’s daily feast; at the same time he allows Daniel and his servants to scatter a layer of ashes throughout the temple floor. Daniel is clearly onto something. The king then has the temple doors locked and sealed with his personal mark. These are the stakes: If Bel devours the feast, then Daniel will die. If someone else is eating the daily feast, they will be put to death.

Around dinner time, seventy priests of Bel creep into the temple with their families by way of a secret door underneath the dining table. They chow down and leave, closing the hidden trap door behind them. 

In the morning, the doors are opened and the food and drink are all gone. At first, the king is triumphant: this seems to confirm that Bel has spent the night in gluttonous abandon. But not so fast: a grimly amused Daniel points out footprints in the ashes all around the temple floor. These tell tale prints are traced to the priests, their wives and kids. 

The perps are arrested and executed. The seventy priests and their families – about three hundred people – learn the hard way not to sneak in and eat a deity’s dinner.*** Having been exposed as a fraudulent god, Bel’s image is destroyed by Daniel, along with the temple.****

The next story opens with the news that there is a great dragon around Babylon.**** To fill the sudden vacancy left by Bel, the king tries to persuade Daniel to revere the dragon, pointing out that the beast is clearly a living god. Daniel again takes exception, insisting that his god – the Lord – is the only living god. To prove it, Daniel tells the king that he can kill the dragon without even using a weapon. The king tells him to go for it.

Daniel then mixes up a recipe of pitch, fat and hair to make cakes for the dragon. The dragon eats them and he bursts open and dies. Dragons are dangerous, but not smart. Daniel takes this opportunity to taunts the dragon believers a little bit, which was probably ill-advised.

Then Daniel said “See what you have been worshiping!” - Dan. 14:27,

This is now the second god Daniel has deprived the Babylonians of, and they are very unhappy. They accuse the king of becoming a Jew and demand he throw Daniel into the lion’s den. 

And into the lion’s den he goes again, just as he did back in Daniel 6. There are signification variations between the two versions, but Daniel comes out OK in both. 

One fun detail in the Dan. 14 version is that the B-List prophet Habakkuk is ordered by the Lord to bring Daniel stew to the lion's den. When the prophet tries to get out of the assignment (he has never heard of Babylon, he claims), the angel grabs him by his hair and flies him the six hundred miles from Jerusalem to Babylon. An involuntary divine door dash, if you will.( See Daniel and the Lions Den(s) and the story of Susanna.)

One interesting component of the Bel story is the fact that the priests were tricking the rubes into providing dinner for them, a religious tax if you will. No real surprise: this has been common practice for thousands of years. It is a well attested historical fact that priests, shaman and clergy have used various illusions and mechanisms to fool their worshipers into believing their particular god is alive. 

One such real life inventor of temple trick machinery was Hero of Alexandria (10–70 CE) who even wrote a book on it. Pneumatics describes, for example how an idol connected to the altar by a tube enable a cup to be magically filled. A modern Catholic service with its garish outfits, candles and fragrant smoke censors is much the same thing.

It should be noted that Israel’s Old Testament Yahwist priests were running a similar con, although it was not a secret. The burnt offerings detailed in the Torah are basically a barbeque for the Lord's shamans, who also ate the “show bread.” The weekly offering in your garden variety Christian churches serves the same function. Priests get hungry too.

 * Otherwise known as deuterocanonical.  If you are looking to read Bel and the Dragon for yourself, you will need the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition. There are also 14 so called apocryphal books in the Bible. 

** Bel or Baal is the familiar Old Testament god worshiped by many Ancient Middle Eastern peoples, including Canaanites and, in this case, Babylonians. Biblically, he is El/YHWH’s main competitor (although he is sometimes portrayed as El's son) and is the poster deity for leading otherwise decent Israelites astray. 

*** As for the daily cleanup up and cooking involved with all this mutton, flour and wine, we have questions. How did the priests make the bread from the flour? How did they slaughter and cook the sheep? What did they do with the bones? We can only speculate.

**** Daniel points out that the icon was fashioned by humans, but at some point the king must be aware of that. Idols get manufactured and temples get built. In the real world, a lot of people have to be involved in that process. Abraham's own father was a purveyor of household idols.

***** Add dragons to the pantheon of magical bible beasts: Leviathan the sea monster, unicorns, giant Nephilim, angels, cherubim, Behemoth, some combo beasts etc.

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