The Story of Daniel is Like Harry Potter Meets God. Think about it.
“The Bible book of Daniel doesn’t read like a full biography—it’s highlights across 70 years. So I asked the question the Bible leaves hanging: how does a teenage exile become the wisest man in Babylon? This novel lives in those missing years—Daniel’s first three years inside the school of the Magi, where the curriculum is literally magic, sorcery, astrology, and divination… and he has to survive it without surrendering his soul.”
“People say ‘Daniel was ten times better’—but how do you become the best in a pagan system without becoming pagan? That’s the tension I wrote from: a young man with his future shattered by deportation, thrown into Babylon’s elite training program, learning their texts, their omens, their gods… and still finding a way to be uncompromising. It’s like ‘Harry Potter meets God’, except the darkness is real and the cost of faith is your life.”
“Here’s what shocked me in the research: the ‘Daniel was a eunuch’ assumption may be backwards. When you dig into the Neo-Babylonian material, the wise-men vocation had standards—‘without blemish’… including no eunuchs. That one detail changes everything about how you picture Daniel’s humanity, his relationships, even the kind of story you’re allowed to tell. This isn’t Bible fan-fiction—it’s a thriller built from the historical world Daniel actually walked through.”
This is a great interview with Jenny Miles about my new novel, Daniel: Exile in Babylon.
