Apocrypha Major ProphetsDeuterocanonical · KJVA

Bel and the Dragon

Two short, satirical anti-idolatry tales. In the first, Daniel proves that the Babylonian god Bel is a lifeless idol by sprinkling ash on the temple floor and showing the priests' footprints in the morning. In the second, he kills a dragon worshipped as a god by feeding it cakes that burst it open. Thrown into the lions' den for a week as punishment, Daniel is fed when an angel transports the prophet Habakkuk from Judea by his hair.

Author
Anonymous (Greek addition to Daniel)

Daniel 14 in the Greek and Vulgate. Two short narratives joined together.

Date Written
c. 150 BC
Audience
Diaspora Jews surrounded by idol-worship
Length
1 chapter

Bel and the Dragon is part of the Apocrypha, so the reader opens in KJVA by default — KJV doesn't include it.

Major Themes

Anti-idolatry Wisdom Providence Deliverance

Cross-references for Bel and the Dragon aren't available yet

Our cross-reference dataset comes from OpenBible.info (CC-BY) — a community-curated resource that covers the Old and New Testaments only. The Apocrypha isn't yet in their dataset, so we don't have an arc-map for Bel and the Dragon on this page.

Bel and the Dragon is still richly connected to the rest of Scripture — the early church quoted it, later writers built on it, and scholarly cross-reference editions (e.g. the Jerusalem Bible, the Nova Vulgata) catalogue those links. We're tracking the gap and will add Apocrypha cross-references when a permissive open dataset becomes available.

Key Verses

Read by Chapter

1 chapters
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