He was shown the morning.And then told to go and rest.

The old man is still standing in the river when the surface of it changes — goes flat and bright and begins to carry something like writing. He is past eighty and he has been shown a great deal in his life: a furnace, a hand on a wall, a den, four beasts, a ram and a goat. This is the last one, and it is the one that reaches furthest. Daniel 12 : 1

What comes up out of the water first is history: kingdoms rising and going under, one after another, faster than anyone could name them — the whole thing he has spent his life serving, shown as weather on a river. And in among all that rising and falling, a scattering of small lights that keep burning when the empire around them goes out. He has been one of those lights since he was fifteen. Daniel 12 : 1

At that time your people will be delivered, everyone who is found written in the book. Not a ledger of what people managed to do — a list of who they are. For a man who was renamed by a foreign court at fifteen and called Belteshazzar for the rest of his working life, a book that keeps the real names is not an abstraction. It is the answer to something he has carried a very long time. Daniel 12 : 1

Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake. And this is drawn with astonishing restraint: no graves, no bodies, nothing to flinch from. Only a grey dust plain going nowhere in every direction — and then one point of light lifting out of it on a thread of dust. Then another. Then a hundred. Then the entire floor of the world rising, quietly, like a field of lamps being carried upward. Daniel 12 : 2

They keep rising, and the sky above the plain goes from night to dawn while it happens, until you cannot tell any more whether the light in the air is sunrise or the people. That is the point of the shot. It is not a crowd being counted. It is a morning made out of everyone who ever waited. Daniel 12 : 2

And some of the lights are small ones. The picture does not make a speech about it; it just lets you see them going up with everybody else, at the same speed, with the same brightness. Every reader who has lost a child understands what that shot is for, and it does not need a single word of explanation. Daniel 12 : 2–3

And through all of it, Daniel's face — and he is weeping. He came here as a boy in a column of prisoners. Everyone he was marched out of Jerusalem with is gone — four kings, two empires, and every friend he ever had, including three he once watched walk into a furnace. And he is being shown the far side of all of it. Daniel 12 : 2–3

Then he is told to close it. Shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end. He asks what the outcome will be — of course he does — and he is told, kindly, that it is not for him. He is going to carry a sealed scroll to the end of his life and never learn the answer. And the book records that he accepted it, which may be the most mature thing anybody does in it. Daniel 12 : 4–9

And the last thing anyone in heaven ever says to Daniel is the gentlest sentence in the book. Go your way till the end; for you will rest, and will stand in your inheritance at the end of the days. Go on with your life. Then rest. Then stand up again, and there will be something waiting that has your name on it. That is the whole of it: an old man given permission to be tired, and a promise about the morning. Daniel 12 : 13

And then the thing he counted on his fingers actually happens. Cyrus of Persia takes Babylon, and in his first year issues a decree — in writing, kept in the archive — that the Jews may go home and rebuild the house of their God in Jerusalem. Daniel is handed the scroll. He is very old. He does the arithmetic one last time and it comes out at seventy years, to the letter. Ezra 1 : 1–4

The news goes through the Jewish quarter in an afternoon, and the quarter comes apart with it. Most of the people packing have never seen Jerusalem — they were born here, they speak Aramaic, their whole lives are in this city. And they are going anyway, because their grandparents told them about a place, and a word nobody has said out loud in seventy years is suddenly being shouted in the street. Ezra 1 : 5

The songs come back before the walls do — sung in a Babylonian street by people who learned them from parents who learned them in captivity. And somebody brings Daniel a small box with a handful of earth in it, carried out of Jerusalem seventy years ago and kept all this time so that it could one day go back. He is far too old to make the journey. He holds the box anyway. Ezra 1 : 6–11