Daniel in Exile. Like you’ve never experienced before. An interview of Brian Godawa on View From the Bunker
Imagine you’re a teenage boy kidnapped by a foreign army and dragged from your home to a land far far away, placed in a school to indoctrinate you in the ways of your pagan, polytheist captors.
Trying to survive while remaining faithful to the One True God.
That’s the beginning of the story of the prophet Daniel, and that is the focus of the new novel by this week’s guest and regular contributor to our monthly Iron and Myth series, Brian Godawa (godawa.com).
Brian, an award-winning screenwriter and best selling novelist, applies his gift of storytelling to the one of the most compelling characters of the Bible.
Daniel saw the progression of the neo-Babylonian kingdom from the time of Nebuchadnezzar until it fell to the Persian king Cyrus the Great.
Daniel: Exile in Babylon is the first of a trilogy that tells the story of Daniel, his life, and the warfare in the unseen realm between God’s loyal angels and the fallen rebels who compete with one another for power, even as they strive against their creator, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
The Book of Daniel explicitly pulls back the curtain on a terrifying cosmic reality that is rarely preached from modern pulpits: a literal spiritual war is raging behind the scenes of human history.
When earthly empires clash and kings fall, the text reveals that these events are actually direct reflections of unseen, violent battles between God’s archangels and ancient, demonic principalities—like the Prince of Persia or the gods of Babylon—who are actively jockeying for power and control over the nations.
Another issue. The first chapter of the book of Daniel briefly notes that he and his friends were educated in the language and culture of the Chaldeans, eventually being declared ten times better than all the magicians and sorcerers in Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom.
However, this raises a profound and often overlooked dilemma: how could a devout Jewish teenager master the dark arts of Babylonian divination—such as astrology and reading livers—to become the top wise man in a pagan empire, while simultaneously remaining completely faithful and obedient to God?
