“O Lord, to us belongeth confusion of face, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against thee.”
My Notes
What Does Daniel 9:8 Mean?
"O Lord, to us belongeth confusion of face, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against thee." Daniel's prayer in chapter 9 is one of the great confessional prayers in Scripture. He doesn't pray "they have sinned" — he prays "we have sinned." The first-person plural includes Daniel himself in the national guilt.
The phrase "confusion of face" (boshet panim) means shame, the kind of embarrassment that shows on your face. The shame belongs to every level of Israelite society: kings (political leaders), princes (officials), and fathers (ancestral generations). Nobody is exempt from the shame. It applies universally.
Daniel prays this as a righteous man — one of the most faithful individuals in the entire Old Testament. He has no personal sins comparable to the nation's idolatry. Yet he identifies with the guilty and confesses as if their sins were his. This is intercessory confession — bearing the shame that belongs to your community.
Reflection Questions
- 1.Can you identify with your community's sins and confess them as 'ours'?
- 2.What does it mean to carry shame that belongs to your group, not just your individual self?
- 3.How does Daniel's intercessory confession differ from individual confession?
- 4.What communal sin do you need to bring to God using the word 'we'?
Devotional
To us belongs the shame. Daniel — righteous Daniel, faithful Daniel, lions'-den-surviving Daniel — says: we have sinned. Not they. We. The shame is ours.
This is one of the most important prayer models in Scripture because it teaches intercessory confession: identifying with the sins of your community even when they're not your personal sins. Daniel didn't worship idols. He didn't break covenant. He didn't offer his children to Molech. But he says "we have sinned" because he's part of the community that did.
The inclusion of every social level — kings, princes, fathers — means the shame isn't concentrated in one class. The political leaders sinned. The officials sinned. The ancestral generation sinned. The shame belongs to every layer of society, and Daniel claims it all as belonging to "us."
"Confusion of face" describes the shame that shows — the blush, the inability to make eye contact, the facial expression of someone who knows they're guilty. Daniel is saying: if we could see our own faces, they would look ashamed. Because we should be ashamed.
Can you pray like this? Can you say "we have sinned" about your community, your nation, your church — identifying with guilt that isn't personally yours but belongs to the group you're part of? Daniel's prayer works because he refuses to separate himself from his people's failure. The righteous man carries the community's shame to God.
Commentary
Trusted original commentary from respected historical Bible scholars and theologians.
O Lord, to us belongeth confusion of face,.... Which is repeated, to show how much the mind of the prophet was affected…
O Lord, to us belongeth confusion ... - To all of us; to the whole people, high and low, rich and poor, the rulers and…
We have here Daniel's prayer to God as his God, and the confession which he joined with that prayer: I prayed, and made…
to our kings, &c. Cf. Jer 44:17 (quoted on Dan 9:9).
Cross References
Related passages throughout Scripture