Daniel Exile In Babylon – Brian Godawa

He pointed to a star-shaped cluster of wedges meaning king. “This is shar.” Then to another more complex pattern. “This is Bābili— Babylon.” To Daniel, the cuneiform marks looked like a flock of birds had trampled on wet clay. Each sign could mean a word or a syllable or even an idea, a system vastly more complex than their flowing Hebrew alphabet or Aramaic blocky letters.

He prayed that their current multilingual knowledge would help when adding another to their skills. He squinted at the tablet, his mind racing to decode the wedges. He recognized patterns from Aramaic loanwords. He asked, “How do you know if sar—I mean shar—means king or prince?” “Context, boy,” scolded the irritable instructor. “You learn by memory and practice.” Azariah seemed determined through sheer willpower to keep up with his brother’s skill.

Hananiah recognized and recited words with uncanny speed. “Shar. Bābili. Rabu.” Daniel felt good for his shy, troubled friend. It seemed whatever annoyance the instructor had for Hananiah’s strange social inadequacy was made up for by the boy’s amazing language ability. Mouth agape, Nabu- aplu-iddina exclaimed, “You have the memory of Nabu.” “Yahweh,” corrected Hananiah without pause. Meanwhile, Mishael was lost. He whispered angrily to Daniel, “These are just scratches. I want to throw this thing at the wall.”

The instructor retorted from behind him, “The path of anger does not arrive at the destination of wisdom.” “I’m sorry, master,” Mishael murmured. As the lesson dragged on, Hananiah’s brilliance shone. But his rigid focus frustrated Nabu-aplu-iddina, who demanded flexibility. Azariah helped by translating the instructor’s brusque commands into gentle cues, but his own work suffered as a result. Daniel could see that Mishael’s clumsy attempts were an increasing agitation to the instructor, whose subtle digs at him became more obvious.

And Daniel wasn’t confident of his own ability to keep up with the pace that the instructor was setting. The warning made by Ashpenaz hung over all their heads like a dark shadow of fear. Failure to become a scribe would result in being made a eunuch in the palace. Daniel grappled with more than linguistics. Akkadian was the language of their captors, the voice of Nebuchadnezzar’s decrees, the script of the forbidden wisdom they were about to learn.

Every word felt like a betrayal of Daniel’s upbringing. But Jeremiah’s words echoed in his mind. Serve the king of Babylon and you will live. They were here to survive. To preserve their people amid exile. Or die by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence.

Daniel: Exile in Babylon Part 1 of the Daniel Trilogy Chronicles of the Watchers Book 6 1st Edition a Copyright © 2026 Brian Godawa All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews.

Warrior Poet Publishing www.warriorpoetpublishing.com ISBN: 978-1-963000-90-0 (paperback) ISBN: 978-1-963000-94-8 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-1-963000-94-8 (eBook) ISBN: 978-1-963000-95-5 (Large Print) Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001. Excerpts from the Enuma Elish taken from William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, The Context of Scripture (Leiden; New York: Brill, 1997–), 391-403.

OceanofPDF.com Get a Free eBooklet about the Gods Referred to in This Novel. Limited Time Offer FREE Marduk, Ishtar, Nabu, and others vie for power in their territory allotted to them by Yahweh. Sadly, many ancient Jews had been deceived into worshipping the gods of Babylon during Daniel’s life. Learn about these pagan opponents of Yahweh. https://godawa.com/free-gods-of-babylon/ OceanofPDF.com DEDICATION This novel trilogy is dedicated to the memory of Assyriologist D.J.

Wiseman. OceanofPDF.com Before You Read This Novel, Get the Picture Book of Its Characters for Visual Reference Includes Characters from The Novel Trilogy of Daniel! Full-color picture booklet includes exotic characters and creatures from the novel trilogy so the reader can visualize them as they read. These full-color pictures will boost your imagination as you read the novels. COMING Late 2026: (in Paper or Ebook) Until then, see the characters online: https://godawa.com/cast-of-character/daniel/ OceanofPDF.com ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To Yahweh: My Everything.

To Kimberly: My Every Woman. To Jeanette: My Editorial Magus. OceanofPDF.com NOTE TO THE READER The Daniel trilogy is a standalone novel set. But it is also part of the Chronicles of the Watchers series whose books all share what late biblical scholar Michael S. Heiser has called “the Deuteronomy 32 worldview”[1] and what I call “the Watcher paradigm.”

For purposes of clarity, I will lay it out here in brief summary. For more detailed biblical support and explanation, I recommend reading my booklet, Psalm 82: The Divine Council of the Gods, the Judgment of the Watchers, and the Inheritance of the Nations (affiliate link). It is the foundation of all three of my novel series: Chronicles of the Nephilim, Chronicles of the Watchers, and Chronicles of the Apocalypse.

Deuteronomy 32 is well-known as the Song of Moses. In it, Moses sings of Israel’s story and how she had come to be God’s chosen nation.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: bb7e124a4aba3bfc
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 4,613,486 bytes (4.4 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781963000900, 9781963000948, 9781963000955
• Pages: 354
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 566.03 minutes
• Total Words: 113,206
• Total Characters: 650,709
• Average Words per Page: 319.79
• Average Characters per Page: 1838.16

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