Bel and the Dragon is the last text of the Greek Daniel, and it is unlike anything else we have read. It is playful and pointed at the same time, and underneath the fun it is doing something serious. This is the Bible’s most devastating attack on the great god of Babylon, and it is the narrative payoff of a theme the prophets had been hammering for centuries: that the idols of the nations are dead, fraudulent, powerless things, and that there is only one living God. What Isaiah and Jeremiah declared in poetry, Daniel proves here on a stage, in front of a king.