Daniel’s story is like Harry Potter meets God at the Babylonian School of Magic.
When I started mapping Daniel, I realized the ‘elephant in the room’ wasn’t only prophecy—it was Daniel’s training. He’s forced into Babylon’s three-year pipeline for wise men: enchanters, diviners, court magicians. Those practices are forbidden by Torah, yet Daniel comes out ‘ten times better’ than all of them. How does an uncompromising kid survive that system without being spiritually contaminated? That’s why Daniel: Exile in Babylon focuses on those three years.
This first novel is basically Harry Potter meets God—not because I’m endorsing occultism, but because Daniel is thrown into a hostile school of Babylonian ‘magic’ and has to learn their language and literature while staying loyal to Yahweh. Those missing three years in Daniel 1 aren’t filler; they’re the crucible that forges who he becomes for everything that happens later.
I went looking for a small chance Daniel wasn’t made a eunuch—because I wanted a love story that wouldn’t contradict Scripture. The deeper I researched Neo‑Babylonian sources, the more convinced I became he most likely was not a eunuch: the wise-man class had family lineages, and I found requirements that excluded eunuchs. That opened the door for a separation-and-exile romance that also lets me show Jerusalem’s side of the story.
I don’t just ‘Bible-fantasy’ this era—I try to build it on the actual world of Babylon: real documents, real omen literature, real politics, real priestly rituals. Then I take creative license to make it an epic page-turner: Daniel and his three friends as a band of misfits in exile, bullied, pressured, tempted, yet forming the brotherhood that will later stand in fire and lions’ dens. My goal is depth and entertainment.
