Catholic Commentary
Daniel's Three-Week Fast and Preparation
2In those days I, Daniel, was mourning three whole weeks.3I ate no pleasant food. No meat or wine came into my mouth. I didn’t anoint myself at all, until three whole weeks were fulfilled.4In the twenty-fourth day of the first month, as I was by the side of the great river, which is Hiddekel,
Daniel 10:2–4 describes the prophet's three-week fast of mourning, during which he ate no fine food, meat, or wine, and refrained from anointing himself, likely because of distress over Israel's difficult return from exile. On the twenty-fourth day of Nisan, standing by the Tigris River, Daniel positions himself at a threshold between the earthly and heavenly realms, prepared to receive divine revelation.
Daniel fasted three weeks beside a sacred river not to earn God's attention but to make himself empty enough to receive it—and the heavens opened.
Daniel 10:2 — "In those days I, Daniel, was mourning three whole weeks." The opening phrase "in those days" anchors Daniel's experience in historical time (the third year of Cyrus, 10:1), but the Hebrew ʾănî Dāniyyēʾl — "I, Daniel" — carries unusual autobiographical weight, a first-person insistence that underscores the visionary's personal agency in seeking God. The word rendered "mourning" (miṯʾabbēl, from ʾābal) is not merely emotional grief but a formal, ritualized lamentation — the same root used of the mourning for the dead. Daniel does not specify the precise cause, though the broader context (10:1) refers to a "great conflict," almost certainly a contemplative distress over the fate of Israel, whose return from exile under Cyrus was proceeding with painful difficulty (cf. Ezra 4). Three weeks — šəlōšâ šāḇûʿîm yāmîm, literally "three weeks of days" — is a rhetorically precise duration. It echoes the forty-day fasts of Moses and Elijah and will be later mirrored in the Church's own penitential cycles, particularly the three weeks of Advent's deeper preparation and the sacred Triduum.
Daniel 10:3 — "I ate no pleasant bread. No meat or wine came into my mouth. I didn't anoint myself at all." This verse provides the ascetic content of Daniel's mourning with striking specificity. "Pleasant bread" (leḥem ḥămûḏôṯ) refers to fine, desirable food — leavened wheaten bread, delicacies — as opposed to the plain, coarse bread permitted. The threefold abstinence — no fine food, no flesh, no wine — recalls the very food Daniel refused at the Babylonian court (Dan 1:8), creating a narrative inclusion: Daniel began his prophetic career with fasting, and he deepens it here at its climax. The refusal to anoint (sāk lōʾ-saktî) is the most searching detail. Anointing with oil was not luxury in the ancient Near East but a daily act of hygiene, comfort, and social dignity. To withhold it was to mark oneself publicly as one in mourning (cf. 2 Sam 12:20; 14:2). The Fathers read the refusal of anointing as a figure of the prophet deferring his own consolation until he had heard from God — a mortification of spiritual impatience.
Daniel 10:4 — "In the twenty-fourth day of the first month, as I was by the side of the great river, which is Hiddekel." The date is theologically loaded: the "first month" is Nisan, the month of Passover. The fast ran from approximately Nisan 3 to Nisan 23, straddling Passover (Nisan 14–15) itself. This means Daniel fasted through the great feast of Israel's liberation — either because he was in Babylon and could not celebrate it properly, or as an intensification of intercession for a liberation not yet fully realized. The Hiddekel is the Tigris (cf. Gen 2:14), one of the four rivers of Eden. That Daniel stands beside an Edenic river at the moment the heavens open before him is a profound typological marker: the river-bank becomes a threshold between fallen history and paradisal vision. It recalls Ezekiel's inaugural vision beside the Chebar canal (Ezek 1:1) and anticipates John on Patmos receiving the Apocalypse beside "many waters" (Rev 1:15). The prophet is located at the edge — between the earthly and the heavenly, between exile and homecoming.
Catholic tradition uniquely illuminates these verses through the lens of ascetical theology, sacramental preparation, and the theology of intercession.
Fasting as Spiritual Warfare. The Catechism teaches that fasting, almsgiving, and prayer together constitute the essential rhythm of penitential life (CCC 1434–1438). Daniel's fast is not self-punishment but an act of ordered love — a deliberate dis-ordering of bodily comfort so that the soul's capacity for God is enlarged. St. John Chrysostom, in his homilies On Fasting, identifies Daniel as the supreme Old Testament exemplar of fasting as a weapon in cosmic conflict: "He fasted, and the mouth of lions was shut; he fasted again, and the angel descended." The passage in chapter 10 is the very fast Chrysostom has in mind — fasting that precedes not a physical deliverance but a prophetic revelation of cosmic warfare (10:13, 20–21).
Mourning and Intercession. Pope Benedict XVI in Verbum Domini (§48) speaks of the prophets as those who "made themselves porous to the Word of God" through suffering and prayer. Daniel's ʾābel (mourning) is precisely this: a prophet making himself porous, hollowing himself out on behalf of his people. The Church Fathers, particularly Origen (Commentary on Daniel) and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, read this fast as a figure of Christ's own kenotic self-emptying on behalf of humanity — the true mourner who abstains, descends to the river-bank, and opens the heavens.
The River as Baptismal Threshold. St. Jerome, in his Commentary on Daniel, notes that the Hiddekel's Edenic association (Gen 2:14) transforms the river-bank into a symbolic font: vision follows immersion in sacred waters. Catholic typology sees in Daniel's riverside vigil an anticipation of baptismal preparation — the catechumenate's weeks of fasting and renunciation before the sacrament opens the heavens above the candidate.
For contemporary Catholics, Daniel 10:2–4 offers a concrete grammar of preparation for any serious encounter with God — whether liturgical (Advent, Lent, Holy Week), sacramental (preparing for Confession, First Communion, or Marriage), or personal (a retreat, a major life discernment).
Notice what Daniel does not do: he does not simply intensify his prayer while keeping his ordinary comforts intact. He attacks the problem on every front — food, drink, bodily self-care — understanding that the body is not a prison from which the soul prays but a partner in prayer that must be brought into alignment. The three-week duration also speaks against the contemporary tendency toward truncated spiritual effort. Real preparation takes sustained time.
Practically: a Catholic might undertake a "Daniel fast" — abstaining from fine food, alcohol, and non-essential comforts for a defined period — not as a substitute for Mass and sacraments but as a bodily intensification of intercessory prayer for a specific need: a wayward child, a parish in crisis, a nation. The three-week frame, Daniel's precedent, and the Church's own tradition of extended penitential seasons all authorize this practice. The goal is not achievement but readiness: a posture of stripped-down attention before the God who is about to speak.