Susanna and Bel and the Dragon are the two narrative "Additions to Daniel" — chapters found in the ancient Greek versions of the Book of Daniel but not in the Hebrew and Aramaic text, likely composed in the second century BC. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles print them as Daniel 13 and 14; Protestant Bibles place them in the Apocrypha. Between them they contain two of the most entertaining stories in ancient Jewish literature: history's most famous cross-examination, and what is often called the world's first locked-room detective story.
Most readers know the lions' den, the fiery furnace, and the writing on the wall. Far fewer know that for most of Christian history, Daniel was three episodes longer — and that the extra chapters show the prophet in a different role: not a visionary decoding dreams, but an investigator exposing false witnesses and fraudulent priests. This guide tells both stories properly, then explains where the chapters came from and why your Bible may or may not include them.
When the Book of Daniel was translated into Greek for the Septuagint — the Greek Old Testament used by Greek-speaking Jews and then by the early church — it circulated with three passages that have no counterpart in the surviving Hebrew and Aramaic text:
Two distinct Greek versions of Daniel survive — the Old Greek and a later revision attributed to Theodotion — and both include all three additions. The early church overwhelmingly adopted Theodotion's version, which is why his wording of Susanna and Bel became the standard text read for centuries. Whether the additions were originally written in Greek or translated from lost Hebrew or Aramaic originals is still debated by scholars; no ancient Semitic manuscript of them has ever been found.
Susanna is the beautiful, devout wife of Joakim, a wealthy Jew living in Babylon during the exile. His house is a gathering place for the community, and two elders — recently appointed judges — frequent it. Both become obsessed with Susanna. One hot day she decides to bathe in the walled garden, sends her maids away, and the two old men, each secretly lingering, spring their trap: lie with us, they demand, or we will testify that we caught you committing adultery with a young man.
Susanna refuses. She reasons that it is better to fall into their hands innocent than to sin before God, and she screams. The elders shout their accusation, and the next day, in front of the whole assembly, the two judges testify in detail: they saw her under a tree with a young lover who was too strong to hold. Because they are elders and judges, the assembly believes them without question. Susanna — facing the death penalty for adultery — is condemned unheard.
As she is led away, a young man named Daniel cries out that he wants no part in her blood, and shames the crowd: have they condemned a daughter of Israel without examining the evidence? Granted authority, he does something the court had not thought to do — he separates the two witnesses and questions them independently.
He asks each man one question: under which tree did you see them together? The first answers a mastic tree — a small shrub. The second answers an evergreen oak — a massive tree. Two eyewitnesses to the same event, two irreconcilable answers. In the Greek text the scene lands with grim wordplay, as Daniel tells each elder that an angel stands ready to cut or saw him in two — puns on the Greek tree names. The assembly turns on the false witnesses, and under the law of Moses, which prescribes that a false accuser suffer the penalty he sought for the accused, the two elders are executed. Susanna walks free, and the text notes that from that day Daniel's reputation was made.
Lawyers still cite this story. The technique it dramatizes — sequestering witnesses and testing their accounts against each other for contradictions — remains a foundation of cross-examination, and legal writers regularly point to Susanna as its earliest famous depiction in literature. It is also sharp social criticism: the villains are respected insiders, and the injustice happens because a community defers to status instead of evidence.
Chapter 14 opens in the reign of Cyrus of Persia. The Babylonians serve an idol called Bel, and its appetite is legendary: every day the temple provides it twelve bushels of fine flour, forty sheep, and six measures of wine — and every morning the food is gone. The king asks Daniel why he refuses to worship so obviously a living god. Daniel laughs and answers that he worships the living God, not bronze and clay that never ate anything.
The king puts it to the test. The offerings are laid out, and the temple is sealed shut with the royal signet — a locked room. But before the doors close, Daniel has his servants do one small thing: scatter fine ashes across the entire temple floor, with only the king watching. In the morning the seals are unbroken and every scrap of food is gone. The king exults, and the text gives him a line dripping with irony: "You are great, O Bel, and with you there is no deceit at all!" Then Daniel, laughing again, holds the king back at the threshold and points at the floor — footprints of men, women, and children, everywhere. The seventy priests of Bel, with their families, had a hidden door under the offering table and had been eating the god's dinner every night. The furious king has the priests put to death, and Daniel destroys the idol and its temple.
Historians of detective fiction treat this as a landmark — a sealed chamber, a baffling disappearance, a planted trap, physical evidence, a rational solution — which is why Bel and the Dragon is often called the world's first locked-room mystery and has been anthologized in collections of detective stories.
The second tale follows immediately. The Babylonians also revere a great dragon — a living serpent — and the king challenges Daniel: you cannot say this god isn't alive. Daniel asks permission to kill it without sword or club, then boils pitch, fat, and hair into cakes and feeds them to the creature, which bursts open. The point is deliberately unglamorous: the "god" was just an animal with an appetite.
Destroying Bel and the dragon enrages the populace, who mutter that their king has gone over to the Jews and threaten his household until he hands Daniel over. Daniel is thrown into the lions' den — a second, independent version of the famous story — with seven lions deliberately left unfed, for six days. Then comes the strangest and most charming scene in the Additions: far away in Judea, the prophet Habakkuk is carrying stew and bread to his field workers when an angel tells him to deliver the meal to Daniel in Babylon instead. Habakkuk protests that he has never seen Babylon and knows nothing about any den, so the angel picks him up by the crown of his head and carries him through the air to Babylon, where he calls down that God has sent Daniel his dinner. Daniel eats; Habakkuk is whisked home. On the seventh day the king finds Daniel unharmed, praises Daniel's God, and throws the men behind the plot to the lions — who are, this time, hungry.
Both stories plus the Prayer of Azariah in clear modern English, faithfully translated from the Greek Daniel. Members read and listen free online.
Read Susanna, Bel and the Dragon →30-day money-back guarantee · Instant digital deliveryThe honest answer is about languages and lists, not suppression. When Jewish authorities consolidated the Hebrew Bible in the centuries around 100 AD, the Daniel they recognized was the twelve-chapter Hebrew and Aramaic book. Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and the Prayer of Azariah survived only in Greek — and a text with no place in the Hebrew canon started every later canon debate at a disadvantage.
Christians noticed the discrepancy early. Around 240 AD the scholar Julius Africanus wrote to the great theologian Origen questioning Susanna's authenticity, pointing out — among other things — that Daniel's climactic puns only work in Greek, which is odd for a story supposedly set in Babylon. Origen wrote a long reply defending the church's use of the additions — one of history's first recorded debates in biblical textual criticism.
The decisive figure was Jerome. Translating the Latin Vulgate around 400 AD, he worked from the Hebrew text of Daniel, but rather than delete the Greek additions he kept them — translated from Theodotion — while marking them with critical symbols (the obelus, a dagger-like sign) and stating plainly in his preface that they were not found in the Hebrew. For a thousand years, Western Bibles carried Susanna and Bel inside Daniel, flagged but included.
The Reformation turned Jerome's footnote into a dividing line. The Reformers adopted the principle that the Old Testament canon should match the Hebrew Bible, so Luther's German Bible and the early English Bibles moved the Greek additions — along with books like Tobit and Judith — into a separate section between the Testaments labeled Apocrypha: worth reading, but not Scripture. The Catholic Church responded at the Council of Trent in 1546 by definitively affirming the longer Daniel as canonical. From the nineteenth century onward, most Protestant Bible printings dropped the Apocrypha section entirely, which is why these chapters now read like books removed from the Bible — though "never included in the Hebrew canon" is the more precise history.
It depends on the tradition. For Catholics they are fully canonical — "deuterocanonical" in technical language — printed as Daniel 13 and 14 in every Catholic Bible. Eastern Orthodox churches likewise receive the longer Greek Daniel as Scripture, and the Ethiopian Orthodox canon, built on the Septuagint tradition, includes the full Daniel with all three additions. Protestant traditions classify them as Apocrypha; the Church of England's classic position is that such books are read for instruction and example, but not used to establish doctrine. No major tradition treats them as forgeries to be shunned — the disagreement is entirely about canonical rank.
Susanna became one of the most painted subjects of the Renaissance and Baroque, and two treatments stand out. Artemisia Gentileschi's Susanna and the Elders (1610), painted when she was about seventeen, strips the scene of any voyeuristic charm: her Susanna twists away in visible distress from two conspiring men looming overhead — many critics read it as the first painting of the subject from the woman's point of view. Rembrandt painted Susanna more than once, most famously in 1636 and 1647, catching the moment of ambush with characteristic psychological weight. Tintoretto, Veronese, and Rubens painted her too; for centuries, viewers who never read the Apocrypha knew Susanna's story from gallery walls.
Read alongside the Hebrew book, the additions round out Daniel's character. Susanna gives him an origin story: the Spirit-stirred boy whose first public act is saving an innocent woman with pure forensic reasoning. Bel and the Dragon turns the court visionary into a court skeptic — a man who tests claims, plants evidence traps, and laughs twice at credulity. Both stories also sharpen the book's central satire: idols do not eat, and authority — whether a Babylonian priesthood or a pair of respected judges — deserves scrutiny, not automatic trust. And the Prayer of Azariah supplies what the furnace story never had: the words prayed inside the fire.
Yes — and they may be the easiest entry point in all the deuterocanonical literature. Each story takes about ten minutes. They are self-contained, vividly plotted, frequently funny, and they let you watch ancient Jewish storytellers working in genres — legal thriller, detective story — that would not be named for another two thousand years. If you have wondered what the books between the Testaments are like, start here, then work outward to longer narratives like Judith and Tobit.
The Complete 88-Book Ethiopian Bible includes the full Greek Daniel — Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and the Prayer of Azariah — alongside dozens of other books most Bibles leave out. $49.95 USD.
Get The Complete 88-Book Ethiopian Bible →30-day money-back guarantee · Instant digital deliveryKeep exploring. Library of Alexandria Press publishes the lost and disputed books of the biblical world in clear modern English. Browse all our reader guides — from Enoch to the Dead Sea Scrolls — on the guides page.