The symbolic significance of Daniel’s diet

Risking offense to the king by rejecting his meat and wine for vegetables has nothing to do with Mosaic ceremonial cleanness.

In Daniel 1:8ff, Daniel and his friends purpose not to eat the king’s food. Rather than having his fancy morsels, they instead ask, literally, for “seeded things,” zero’im, from the word zera, seed.

Seed features rather prominently in the very first provision of food, by the first King, in Genesis 1:29; in fact, this prominence is introduced with the creation of plants, which are described with a strange repetitious emphasis on seed, zera. It is an emphasis so awkward that translators, out of embarrassment for God’s verbal stumblings, try to smooth it over, rather than preserving it on the assumption that he might have done it on purpose because it matters:

And God said, “Let the land sprout sproutings, herbage seeding seed, fruit tree making fruit unto its kind thats seed is in it, upon the land.” And it was so, and the land brought forth sprouts, herbage seeding seed unto its kind, and tree making fruit thats seed is in it unto its kind; and God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1:11–12)

Obviously God need not have written this way: herbage (edible plants) “seeding seed,” and fruit tree “making fruit thats seed is in it.” (I trust, dear reader, that you can accommodate my efforts to render the terseness of Hebrew more closely by admitting “thats” as the possessive form of the word “that.”) We already know that plants produce seeds, and that fruits have seeds in them. But God calls our attention to these things with the repetition. Seed is a fundamental theme of scripture well before we even get to the fall.

Returning to Daniel, a second thing to note is that the king’s food is not just “food.” It is referred to as food and wine twice; and the word “drink” is used four times. Daniel does not merely ask for seeded things in contrast to the king’s food; he asks for water to drink in contrast to “the wine of his drink” (v 8).

Thirdly, he and his friends are described as yeledim (v 17). This literally means “boys,” and almost always refers to children—but they are surely young men. The incongruity is further emphasized as we continue to read, and immediately discover that God gives to these “boys” all “knowledge and mastery:” two words first used in scripture in Genesis 2 and 3 to describe the forbidden tree. It is the tree of knowledge (Gen 2:9); and this knowledge is mastery:

And the woman saw that good was the tree for eating, and that a delight it was to the eyes, and a desirable tree to make one masterful, and she took from its fruit, and ate; and she gave also to her man with her, and he ate. (Genesis 3:6)

The traditional translation is that the tree is desirable to make one “wise,” but this is not the usual word for wisdom, chakham—which is ubiquitous, for instance, in Proverbs from 1:2 and onwards. It is a rarer word, sakhal, which is translated much more diversely in most Bibles because it is used in a more diverse way, referring to what in English we might call “having a handle on things” (cf. Dt 29:9; Dt 32:29; Josh 1:7–8).

What is Daniel thinking?

It is natural to read Daniel 1 and puzzle over why Daniel and his friends take such a risk in rejecting the king’s food. Most assume that they do not want to be ritually defiled. But this is very implausible, for three reasons:

1. The word that is used in Daniel 1:8, where he purposes in his heart not to, in my translation, “sully himself,” is not tame, the word standardly used for ceremonial uncleanness; it is ga’al, a rare word used only in the prophetic literature. It doesn’t refer to being ceremonially unacceptable to God in a way that can be corrected by washing, but being unacceptable to him in oneself due to having broken his commandments (see especially Isa 59:3; Lam 4:14; Zeph 3:1; Mal 1:7, 12).

2. The diet they request is extraordinary—there is nothing in the Mosaic food laws to explain it. If they had been concerned about ritual defilement, they could have simply asked for a Torah-compliant diet; but Torah certainly did not require them to eat a vegetarian diet.

3. The text specifically mentions that he does not want to sully himself with the wine of the king. This is nonsensical if ritual defilement is the concern, because wine does not ritually defile.

Daniel’s concern is incomprehensible in terms of Torah observance—but it is fully comprehensible in terms of sacramental patterning. We need hardly do a study to know that the essence of the king’s food was meat; the provision of meat was central to a king’s feasting of his people.

Nor do we need to spend time tracing out how scripture depicts wine as a kingly drink. I will give only the briefest summary below; for more, see the latter part of my sermon here:

How should we worship? Part 10: the sacrificial significance of bread and wine

Wine was the one thing priests could not partake of in the sacrfices at the temple, on pain of death (Lev 10:9; Ezek 44:21); it poured out instead for God. This is because God’s people as a whole were as children, under a tutor, under the law, and “so long as the heir is a child, he differeth nothing from a servant” (Gal 4:1). Priests are servants, palace attendants in God’s earthly court, as the cherubs are in his heavenly one: they follow instructions. This is why they never sat down. But kings are rulers, seated on thrones; they go beyond instructions; they have developed wisdom to rightly apply the law in new ways. This is why God is so pleased with Solomon when he asks for wisdom to rule—because it is the one thing absolutely necessary to rule (Pr 8:15). It is also why immediately, the first case described is one that has no precedent in the Law to instruct him (1 Ki 3)—a king must have the mastery of the law to go beyond it.

This brings us back to wine, because wine, too, takes wisdom. Even if you follow the instructions when you make it, you are quite likely to end up with something much closer to vinegar. Many people make their own bread; few make their own wine, and fewer still want to drink it.

So wine is connected in these ways with kings and with judgment; hence Ahasuerus is always depicted in Esther as judging in connection with drinking wine. Similarly, wine first appears in Genesis 9, when man is first given the right to exercise judicial, kingly judgment:

Your blood for your lifebreath I shall require; from the hand of every living thing I shall require it, and from the hand of adam, from the hand of a man’s brother I shall require it, the lifebreath of adam: whoso poureth out the blood of adam, by adam his blood shall be poured out, in that in the image of God made he adam. (Genesis 9:5–6)

Eliding for now the subtle significance of the distinction between ish, “man,” and adam, which I leave untranslated on account of not having another word in English, note for now that Noah is being given authority to prosecute capital crimes: to put people to death for murder. This is kingly authority. Cain is not put to death for murdering Abel; God in fact prevents it because it is not yet given to man to exercise this kind of authority.

Now what immediately precedes this giving of kingly authority to Noah? It is the giving of all animals for food. Endless meat, in the words of Scar’s hyenas—the first time meat is explicitly given in scripture. And the next thing Noah does after this is plant a vineyard and make wine, a kingly drink—the first time wine appears in scripture also. These are not coincidences.

Daniel’s sacramental logic fulfills (and explains) Genesis 1 and 9

Daniel and his friends know their scriptures much better than most of us do. In light of their knowledge, they recognized two things: firstly, they were not yet ready for the task the king desired of them, being his advisers. They would need to prepare themselves by seeking God before they could partake in the king’s judgments (cf. Jas 1:5). Secondly, they were not yet authorized for the task the king desired of them. They would need to prove themselves faithful to God before they could partake in the king’s judgments. They were Adams, not yet Noahs. To accept the king’s food and wine would be akin to taking upon themselves kingly authority—which is the very thing Adam tried to do by taking from the tree of knowledge, rather than waiting on God to give it to him. He tried to “become Noah” on his own behalf, rather than God’s.

(Hopefully it is obvious that the tree of knowledge was never intended to be forbidden permanently to Adam—the whole point of it is that it represents the wisdom he needs to actually fulfill the creation mandate given to him, of ruling in God’s stead. It provided the same good thing that God gave Solomon and Daniel: knowledge and mastery. But the very act of taking it wrongly, on his own behalf, made Adam unable to actually use it on God’s behalf.)

Indeed, since the king of Babylon is a serpent figure, being under a demonic master who rules over him (cf. Isa 14:4, 12), to partake of his food and wine prematurely would, sacramentally speaking, be akin to taking from the tree of knowledge and putting themselves under Satan, just as Adam did. Thus, Daniel and his friends refuse the kingly food, and insist upon an Adamic, creational diet. They know they must first prove themselves priests, before they will be raised to the position of kings; and only God has the authority to raise them to that position, not the serpent or his lackey. They aren’t going to make the same mistake Adam did.