Catholic Commentary
Setting of the Vision: Susa and the River Ulai
1In the third year of the reign of King Belshazzar, a vision appeared to me, even to me, Daniel, after that which appeared to me at the first.2I saw the vision. Now it was so, that when I saw, I was in the citadel of Susa, which is in the province of Elam. I saw in the vision, and I was by the river Ulai.
Daniel 8:1–2 records that in the third year of King Belshazzar's reign, Daniel receives a vision transporting him in spirit to Susa, the river Ulai in Elam, establishing the prophetic setting for revelation concerning the rise of Persian and Macedonian empires. The doubled assertion "to me, even to me, Daniel" authenticates his personal witness testimony and links this vision to the complementary revelation in Daniel 7.
Daniel receives divine revelation not in Jerusalem's temple but beside a pagan river in Susa—God's word reaches his people precisely where they are exiled and displaced.
Daniel 8:1 — Chronological Anchoring and the Continuity of Revelation
"In the third year of the reign of King Belshazzar" places this vision approximately two years after the vision of the four beasts in chapter 7 (which occurred in Belshazzar's first year). Daniel is therefore still living under Babylonian power, even as that empire's days are numbered — Belshazzar will be slain in chapter 5 before the chapter's underlying historical drama fully unfolds. The deliberate dating is characteristic of classical Hebrew prophecy (cf. Ezekiel's meticulous dates) and signals that divine revelation is not timeless abstraction but enters concretely into human history.
The phrase "a vision appeared to me, even to me, Daniel" carries a remarkable insistence on personal witness. The doubled "me" (in Hebrew, lî… lî, echoed in the LXX) is not stylistic redundancy; it is an authenticating signature, echoing the legal requirement of reliable testimony and anticipating the credibility claims Daniel will make in 8:15–27. The explicit backward glance — "after that which appeared to me at the first" — links this vision to chapter 7, inviting the reader to interpret them together as a progressive, complementary revelation. Catholic tradition, from Jerome onward, reads Daniel's visions as an interlocking prophetic architecture, each vision expanding and refining the one before.
Daniel 8:2 — The Vision Within a Vision, and the Significance of Susa
Verse 2 contains a subtle but theologically pregnant literary structure: Daniel says first "I saw the vision," then explains that in seeing it he found himself transported. This "vision within a vision" idiom (cf. Ezekiel 8:3 and 40:2, where the prophet is likewise carried in the spirit to a distant location) distinguishes Daniel's experience from ordinary dreaming. He is not merely a passive recipient; he is, in spirit, present at a real place.
Susa (Hebrew Shûshan) is identified as being "in the province of Elam," the ancient territory northeast of the Persian Gulf, in modern-day southwestern Iran. At the time of the vision's composition, Susa was not yet the famed capital of the Persian Empire — it would become so under Darius I and Xerxes. Yet Daniel sees himself transported there prophetically. This is deeply significant: the vision concerns the rise of Persia and the Macedonian-Greek power that would succeed it (the ram and the goat of 8:3–8). Daniel is placed at the seat of the very empire whose rise will displace Babylon. God situates the seer inside the unfolding drama of history.
The River Ulai (Ûbāl, also rendered Eulaeus in Greek sources) was a major artificial canal connecting the Choaspes and Coprates rivers near Susa, well-attested in ancient Persian inscriptions. Rivers in biblical vision literature are not incidental scenery. They mark liminal, sacred space — the border between the ordinary and the transcendent — as in Ezekiel's visions on the Chebar (Ezek 1:1), Daniel's later vision on the Tigris (Dan 10:4), and John's visions in Revelation. Jerome, in his Commentary on Daniel, notes the parallel between Daniel's river-side visions and those of Ezekiel, suggesting a prophetic typology in which the exilic seer, displaced far from Jerusalem and the Temple, nonetheless receives divine revelation because God is not bound to any one place.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
Patristically, Susa carries a subtle typological resonance: it is the city of Esther, the Jewish queen who interceded for her people from within the heart of pagan empire. That Daniel, too, is spiritually present in Susa underscores a recurrent biblical pattern — God's faithful ones placed inside the structures of worldly power, not to be absorbed by them, but to bear prophetic witness within them. For Catholic interpreters, this prefigures the Church's own calling: present in the world, even within its institutions, yet oriented toward a Kingdom not of this world.
Catholic tradition brings several distinctive lenses to this passage. First, the Church's teaching on prophecy as a gift ordered to the community (CCC §2004) is illustrated here: Daniel's vision is not private mysticism but a revelation entrusted to him for the instruction of God's people across generations. The Catechism, drawing on Vatican II's Dei Verbum §16, affirms that the Old Testament prophecies find their unity and fullness in Christ — and the Church Fathers consistently read Daniel's visions as pointing toward the ultimate kingship of Christ and the eschatological triumph of the Church.
St. Jerome's Commentariorum in Danielem (c. 407 AD) — the most thorough patristic treatment of Daniel — stresses that the precise geographical and chronological details of Daniel 8:1–2 argue against allegorical dismissal of the prophecy: the God who names real rivers and real kings is the God who acts in real history. This is fundamental to the Catholic understanding of Scripture, which rejects both a purely spiritualizing reading and a merely literalist one.
St. Thomas Aquinas (ST I, q.171–174), treating the nature of prophetic vision, would classify Daniel's experience here as visio imaginaria — a supernatural elevation of the imagination by God to perceive truths beyond ordinary sense — distinct from both ordinary dreams and the highest visio intellectualis. The prophet is genuinely transported "in spirit" (cf. Rev 1:10), meaning the Spirit of God redirects the prophetic consciousness toward what God wills to reveal.
Finally, the setting in Elam carries resonance in light of Acts 2:9, where Elamites are among those who hear the apostolic proclamation at Pentecost — a detail that early commentators like Origen saw as signaling the universal scope of redemption, touching even the lands of Israel's ancient exile.
Daniel 8:1–2 opens with a man of faith who is simultaneously embedded in a hostile, powerful civilization and receiving visions from God beside a foreign river. This is not an escape from the world but a deeper engagement with it through the eyes of the Spirit. For Catholics today — navigating secular workplaces, polarized politics, and a culture that often seems indifferent or hostile to faith — Daniel's posture is instructive. He does not retreat from Babylon to receive his revelation; he receives it within Babylon, while remaining oriented toward God.
The careful dating of the vision challenges the modern tendency to compartmentalize faith as a private, timeless interior experience. Daniel insists on when and where God spoke. Catholics are called to the same concrete attentiveness: to discern how God is speaking in this moment of history, in this political and cultural configuration. Lectio Divina with prophetic texts like Daniel is not an exercise in decoding abstract puzzles; it is training in prophetic perception — learning to see, from within the structures of our own age, where God's purposes are moving.