Comment by cjameskeller
5 days ago
To be fair, the description of the dragon incident is pretty mundane, and all he does is prove that the large reptile they had previously been feeding (& worshiping) could be killed:
"Then Daniel took pitch, and fat, and hair, and did seethe them together, and made lumps thereof: this he put in the dragon's mouth, and so the dragon burst in sunder: and Daniel said, Lo, these are the gods ye worship."
I don't think it's mundane to cause something to "burst in sunder" by putting some pitch, fat, and hair in its mouth.
The story is pretty clearly meant to indicate that the Babylonians were worshiping an animal though. The theology of the book of Daniel emphasises that the Gods of the Babylonians don't exist, this story happens around the same time Daniel proves the priests had a secret passage they were using to get the food offered to Bel and eat it at night while pretending that Bel was eating it. Or when Daniel talks to King Belshazzar and says "You have praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do not see or hear or know, but the God in whose power is your very breath and to whom belong all your ways, you have not honored". This is not to argue for the historical accuracy of the stories, just that the point is that Daniel is acting as a debunker of the Babylonian beliefs in these stories while asserting the supremacy of the Israelite beliefs.