… as surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, even if Noah, Daniel and Job were in it, they could save neither son nor daughter. They would save only themselves by their righteousness. – Ezekiel 14:20

Today's Scripture Reading (August 7, 2026): Ezekiel 14

In the ancient Ugaritic texts, there is a story about a wise man named Danel. Danel is described as a good and just man, one who judges the cause of the widow and defends the rights of the orphan. The text itself comes from Ugarit in Northern Syria and was written around the fourteenth century B.C.E. It has many parallels with Hebrew writing, including Hebrew poetic parallelism and the use of the word El to describe God. El is also used to describe God in some portions of the Books of Moses. But the Ugaritic texts are not Hebrew. The last Ugarit King, Ammurapi, reigned around 1215 to 1180 B.C.E. At that time, the king wrote a letter describing the dire situation of the Near Eastern peoples, who were struggling under threat from the Sea Peoples, seafaring raiders from the Aegean Sea in southern Europe. Apparently, the help never came, and the city was destroyed around 1178 B.C.E., about 600 years before Ezekiel was written. And yet, even though Ugarit was gone, the story of this wise man named Danel continued to be told throughout the Middle Eastern cultures. Danel became the pattern and description of a just man.

The original Hebrew text of this passage mentions the name Danel, and not Daniel. Translators have most likely made the change to Daniel because Danel is not a wise man from Hebrew literature (both Noah and Job are heroes of the Hebrew Bible). But there is a problem with the interpretation that the wise man mentioned in this passage is Daniel, the survivor of the lion's den. Daniel was a contemporary of Ezekiel. In fact, large portions of the story of Daniel occur long after the events being described here by Ezekiel. And the reality is that the story of Daniel and the captivity would not be complete, nor a part of the wisdom literature of Israel, until well after the time of the writing of Ezekiel. Including Daniel on this list really doesn't make sense. And the placement of the name Danel between Noah and Job would also seem to indicate that Danel was a man from antiquity, just as Noah and Job were. This chronology would seem to rule out Daniel and leave us with the Ugarit Danel as the best option in our attempt to identify the man that Ezekiel was describing.

However, all three of these men are also linked by their inability to save their cultures. Noah's righteousness was only good enough to save himself and his family during the time of the flood, Job's righteousness was only good enough to save himself, he lost all of his children in the tragedy at the beginning the story told by the book that bears his name, and while Danel might have been concerned about the widows and the orphans and had become the pattern of a just man, in the end Danel could not save his culture either. His city was burned, and his culture died. All that was left was this story of a wise man who had once lived in northern Syria. Ezekiel's message is clear. Each of these exiles needed to be righteous to be saved; they could not depend on anyone else. However, incredible men like Daniel, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah would not be able to save Israel any more than Noah, Danel, and Job could save theirs. Each person needed to develop their own relationship with God. And each person still does.      

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 15