Biblion Bible Commentary
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Mourning Three Whole Weeks
Daniel 10:1-3
1 In the third year of Cyrus king of Persia a message was revealed to Daniel, whose name was called Belteshazzar; and the message was true, even a great warfare. He understood the message, and had understanding of the vision. · WEB
The last vision comes to an old man in the third year of Persia — after the exiles have gone home and the work has stalled — and it comes to him fasting.
In the third year of Cyrus king of Persia a message was revealed to Daniel, whose name was called Belteshazzar; and the message was true, even a great warfare Daniel 10:1.
The book's last vision, and the latest date in it. Daniel had been taken as a youth in the first deportation Daniel 1:1; he is now in his ninth decade, serving a third empire, and the exile is technically over — Cyrus's decree had gone out two years earlier and the first company had returned to Jerusalem Ezra 1:1–3 Ezra 2:1. Daniel himself did not go. He was too old for the journey and evidently still useful where he was, and his prayers had helped open the door he would not walk through.
What the returning exiles found was not a triumph. The foundation was laid and the work stopped, obstructed for years by hostile neighbors and imperial red tape Ezra 4:4–5 Ezra 4:24. A prophecy fulfilled had produced a struggling settlement of a few thousand people around a ruin, and that is the setting for a revelation described as a great warfare — a conflict, and the chapter is about to show where the real one is being fought.
He understood the message, and had understanding of the vision. After chapter eight had closed with a prophet who did not understand Daniel 8:27, and chapter nine had sent an angel to remedy it Daniel 9:22–23, this one opens with comprehension already granted. The sequence is deliberate.
In those days I, Daniel, was mourning three whole weeks. I ate no pleasant food. No meat or wine came into my mouth. I didn't anoint myself at all Daniel 10:2–3.
Twenty-one days of grief, and the details are those of a man who has stopped attending to himself — plain food, no wine, no oil. Something was wrong, and the chapter never says outright what; the likeliest cause is in front of him, since he is mourning at the very season the restoration had faltered, and the first month he names Daniel 10:4 is Passover month, when the returned community should have been keeping the feast in a finished house.
The pattern is now familiar in this book. The two greatest revelations Daniel received both came to a man on his face — the seventy weeks to one fasting in sackcloth Daniel 9:3, and this one to a man three weeks into mourning. And he will be told that the answer had been dispatched on day one Daniel 10:12, which means the three weeks of apparent silence were not silence at all.
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