They could not find a crime.So they made his habit one.

Babylon falls, Persia takes it, and the banners change overnight. The new king is Darius — a soldier, brisk, and by the standards of the job a decent enough man. He reorganises the whole empire in about three sentences: a hundred and twenty provincial governors, and three administrators over the top of them to stop the money going missing. Daniel 6 : 1–2

And one of the three is Daniel — a man in his eighties, from the regime the Persians have just overthrown, who is so obviously better at the job than everyone else that the king starts thinking about putting him over the entire empire. The other two administrators do that arithmetic in real time, and their faces do the thing faces do when someone is congratulating a rival: the smiles arrive, and stop at the eyes. Daniel 6 : 3–4

So they go looking, and they do it properly. Every ledger, every contract, every grain requisition — sixty years of a public career pulled out of the records room and gone through line by line by people who want very badly to find something. And they find nothing. They could find no occasion nor fault, because he was faithful, neither was there any error or fault found in him. Daniel 6 : 4

They find a witness who might know something, and he does not. They strike through line after line. And then they change method entirely: they stop auditing the man and start watching his house, from the street, through the lattice — which is how they finally find what they are looking for. Not a crime. A habit. Daniel 6 : 5

We shall not find any occasion against this Daniel, unless we find it against him concerning the law of his God. That sentence is the highest compliment anyone is paid in the entire book, and it is paid by his enemies, in private, while planning his death. There is exactly one thing in this man's life that can be used against him, and it is that he goes upstairs three times a day and prays at an open window. Daniel 6 : 5

So they draft a law whose only purpose is to make one old man's daily habit a capital offence: for thirty days, no one may petition any god or man except the king. They bring it to Darius as a compliment — a loyalty measure, a fine idea, everyone agrees — and they get him to seal it before he has stopped to ask who exactly it is aimed at. Under Persian law, once it is sealed, not even the king can unmake it. Daniel 6 : 6–9

By dusk the whole quarter knows. Every house on that street could close its shutters tonight and nothing would happen to anybody — the law only catches you if you are seen. And in among all of them, one upstairs window is standing open, the way it has stood open every evening for sixty years, with a lamp lit behind it so that you could not miss it if you tried. Daniel 6 : 10

His household have read the decree and they are frightened, and he tells them not to be — and the picture holds on his feet going up the stairs, old sandals on worn steps, at exactly the pace he climbed them yesterday. That is the whole argument of the scene. Nothing is being staged and nothing is being rushed. He is going upstairs at the usual time to do the usual thing. Daniel 6 : 10

And then the sentence the whole chapter turns on, with its four quiet words at the end: he kneeled on his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did before. Not more devoutly. Not defiantly. Not less. He opens the shutters wider rather than narrower, lights the lamp, kneels, and prays exactly as he has always prayed — and the reason it is unanswerable is that there is nothing new in it at all. Daniel 6 : 10

They are in the street below and they have been there since sunset, and they get what they came for in under a minute. Then they go to the palace in a body, wearing grief like a coat, and remind the king first of all that a Persian decree cannot be revoked — and only then mention, with enormous regret, who has broken it. The trap is not the law. The trap is the order they say it in. Daniel 6 : 11–13

And Darius is horrified — not at Daniel, at himself. He laboured until the going down of the sun to rescue him. A whole working day of an emperor hunting for a loophole in a law he was flattered into signing that morning. There is none. And at the mouth of the pit it is the king, not Daniel, who needs to say something out loud — and he is trying to convince himself. Daniel 6 : 14–16

The stone goes over the pit and is sealed twice — once with the king's ring and once with his lords', so neither side can interfere. Then Darius walks back alone, refuses his supper, sends away the musicians, and does not sleep. And somewhere in the small hours the man whose own decree made praying to anyone else a capital crime says something out loud, in the dark, to a God who is not himself. Daniel 6 : 17–18