Susanna (Book of Daniel)
character in the deuterocanonical additions to the Book of Daniel (for the section of the additions to Daniel, use Q35555488)
Susanna ( soo-ZAN-ə; Hebrew: שׁוֹשַׁנָּה, Modern: Shoshána, Tiberian: Šōšannā, lit. 'Lily'), also called Susanna and the Elders, is a narrative included in the Book of Daniel (as chapter 13) by the Catholic Church, Oriental Orthodox Churches, Eastern Orthodox Churches, and the Assyrian Church of the East. It is one of the additions to Daniel, placed in the Apocrypha by Protestants, with Anabaptists, Lutherans, Anglicans and Methodists regarding it as non-canonical but useful for purposes of edification. The text is not included in the Jewish Tanakh and is not mentioned in early Jewish literature, although it does appear to have been part of the original Septuagint from the 2nd century BC, and was revised by Theodotion, a Hellenistic Jewish redactor of the Septuagint text (c. AD 150).
Summary
A fair Hebrew wife named Susanna bathes privately (having sent her attendants away) in her locked and walled garden. Two elders, having previously said goodbye to each other, bump into each other again when they spy on her bathing. The two men realize they both lust for Susanna. When she makes her way back to her house, they accost her, demanding she have sexual intercourse with them. When she refuses, they have her arrested, claiming that the reason she sent her maids away was to be alone as she was having intercourse with a young man under a tree.
She refuses to be blackmailed and is arrested and about to be put to death for adultery when the young Daniel interrupts the proceedings, shouting that the elders should be interrogated to prevent the death of an innocent.
After being separated, the two men are cross-examined in detail about what they saw and contradict each other about the tree under which Susanna supposedly met her lover.
The public source identifies “Susanna (Book of Daniel)” as character in the deuterocanonical additions to the Book of Daniel (for the section of the additions to Daniel, use Q35555488). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Susanna, Book and Daniel.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q756861. VIAF identifies the subject as 4119887. The Library of Congress control number is n92004748. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Susanna (Book of Daniel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.