(continued from previous scroll)
With permission granted through the court’s outer scribes, and a signed scroll allowing my presence, I sought an audience with the Hebrew elder and presented a proposition: that I might conduct a series of morning interviews and assemble, from his testimony, a proper record—a kind of biography for future record-keepers and historians. My proposal was not novel. Scribes often recorded the deeds of governors or priests. But Daniel was neither. He was a man of God—and that, perhaps, was more dangerous than any title.
He agreed.
For fifteen mornings—each from the third hour until the sixth—we met beneath the colonnade east of the Palace of Records, not far from the Ishtar Gate. We paused for rest on the sixth and seventh days, and again on the thirteenth and fourteenth. I carried wax tablets and a reed stylus, and I listened as the old man unspooled his memories: dreams and judgments, kings and visions, silence and fire. He did not preach. He did not command. He simply spoke—as if to a peer, even a son.
There was one among my classmates, a clever but caustic scribe named Bel-iddin, who mocked the entire effort. “You seek truth from a relic,” he said. “Better to question the stars or read the river’s murmur than chase the riddles of an exile.” He followed my work with disdain, yet he never turned away completely. He appears in this scroll not as villain or rival, but as a mirror—one who saw, yet did not understand.
I began the project intending only to build a record of Daniel—for the House of Tablets, for the archives, for history. But over time, as his words etched themselves into me like a stylus into wax, I realized the record was also shaping me. His voice stirred questions I had not dared to ask. His God, whom I had once dismissed, had begun to press upon my soul.
What started as a chronicle became a transformation. This is the scroll of those conversations.