40-reme but it’s just forty guys swishing the steering oar back and forth like a shark tail.

If you want the nichest possible answer to this question, it's "Daniel is the fourth man in the fire."

I can't tell you where I found it, and I might be hallucinating it, but I'm pretty sure that somewhere in the ancient literature on Dan 3, this is a take.

Something something "with tears"

Four legs good; two legs BETTER

OHHHHHHH

WAIT I was just looking at the hardcover price!

One of the big realisations for me in reading Daniel and the prophets was that these books had to mean something when they were written down, rather than being gibberish for several hundred years.

Particularly helps when you’re trying to understand what Jesus and the gospel writers are trying to do with Daniel.

Like, it’s really helpful to read the final kingdom as Rome, but only if you’ve read it as Antiochus first.

I’ve been kind of surprised to find myself coming back to the more traditional Western schema, not as authorial intent (it’s definitely not what the book was originally about), but as a theological overlay.