Chapter 100

¹ When this, then, had been done, the king went away to his house and lay down without supper, and they brought him no food, and sleep departed from him.—

² How great a thing a righteous man who fears God accomplishes, that the king, grieved over him, would not even take nourishment!

³ And the satraps for the whole night made merry, as having won the prize against Daniel, but the king for the whole night lay awake mourning, having unjustly destroyed such a man, and being wary lest on his account he himself too might come into danger.

⁴ For there did not escape him the things that had befallen Nebuchadnezzar and the things that had happened in the case of Belshazzar—the one having been driven out of his kingdom, the other, on account of the holy vessels, having been slain on that very night.

⁵ Then, accordingly, he rose early at dawn and came in haste to the den of lions, and crying out with a loud voice he said: “Daniel, servant of the living God, has your God, whom you serve continually, been able to deliver you from the mouth of the lions?”

⁶ From what impulse, then, did the king utter this word, if not that he had heard the things that befell the young men, who, unwilling to submit to the command of the king, were saved out of the furnace of fire? […] the like would happen in his case, in return for which he had feared God but had set at nothing the law of the Medes and Persians.