Week 29 Daniel
Today I read Psalm 137: beside the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept as we thought of Jerusalem. A picture of a melancholy guy on the bank of a sluggish Babylonian river watching the fish go by, depressed and thinking about home.
I’m pretty sure Daniel didn’t write psalm 137. But he could have. He’d been exiled to Babylon too. But he didn’t have much time to be disconsolate.
He was a very smart and capable guy and part of an elite group of Jews the Babylonian state decided to groom into the habits of the new country. So starting right now: a new educational program, new literature, new language, new names, new customs, new and better ways to think about things, a new scheme to overwrite the old. Let’s reprogram these Jews, make them just like us. Stock the big Babylonian lake with a school of little Jewish fish that’ll become big Babylonian ones.
And so Daniel swam, swam as well as the others, better than the others, learning all about the Babylonian lake. The thing the Babylonian state didn’t count on was a little Jewish fish staying a Jewish fish. Why would you want to?
In chapter one a conflict came up over kosher food, which seems like a pretty minor issue. But there was a bigger thing behind the smaller thing, and it was that Daniel wasn’t planning to evolve into an authentic Babylonian fish.
Note: quote from Psalm 137:1 (NLT)