The book of Daniel presents us with the words and visions of the prophet Daniel, who lived and worked in the Babylonian empire during the exile of the Jewish people there in the sixth and fifth centuries BC. Obviously, that was a difficult time for God's people, but, oh, by the way, the book of Daniel itself was probably put in its final form perhaps 300 years later during the persecution of the Jewish people under Antiochus IV Epiphanes circa 165 BC. So the book is probably best understood to be addressing the trying times and the context of the Jewish people in the second century BC.
This is the only time we get to read from Daniel in the whole three-year lectionary cycle, but we have a very chopped-up reading that skips eleven verses. In this truncated and disjointed form the passa…