Babylon Changes Their Names, but Not Their Allegiance

The third year of Jehoiakim is 605 BC, the year Nebuchadnezzar beat Egypt at Carchemish. Jeremiah 25:1 calls the same year Jehoiakim’s fourth; Babylon counted a king’s partial first year as an accession year, Judah did not, and the two figures meet on that difference.

“Shinar” is an old name, the plain of Genesis 10:10 and 11:2 where the tower of Babel went up, and the Book of Daniel reaches for it instead of saying Babylon. Only “part of the vessels” goes now; the rest follow in 597 and 586 (2 Kings 24:13; 25:13–15), and these ones come back out at Belshazzar’s feast in chapter 5.

Ashpenaz is “master of his eunuchs”, rab saris. Saris can mean a court officer without implying castration, since Potiphar is called one in Genesis 39:1 and has a wife. Isaiah 39:7 had told Hezekiah that sons of his would serve as eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon. “Princes” is partemim, a Persian word for nobles, found elsewhere only in Esther.

“No blemish” uses the word for a defect that disqualified a sacrificial animal or a priest (Leviticus 21:17–23). “Science” in 1611 meant knowledge of any kind, from the Latin scientia. “The tongue of the Chaldeans” points to Akkadian and its cuneiform literature, the omen texts and incantations of Babylonian scholarship.

“Meat” is the old English word for food of any sort, not flesh only. The Hebrew for “the king’s meat” is pat-bag, a Persian loanword meaning a portion or allotted fare. Three years was the length of the course; “stand before the king” is court language for entering his service, the phrase the chapter will close its loop on in verse 19.

Each Hebrew name carries the God of Israel inside it: Daniel, God is my judge; Hananiah, the LORD has been gracious; Mishael, who is what God is; Azariah, the LORD has helped. “Children of Judah” names the tribe, and verse 3 had already placed them among the royal seed and the nobility.

The Hebrew says the official “set” names on them, and verse 8 uses the same verb for Daniel: he “set” upon his heart. Belteshazzar is usually taken as Babylonian for protect his life, and 4:8 ties it to Bel. Abed-nego, servant of Nego, looks like a deliberate bending of Nabu, the god of scribes.

“Defile” is ga’al, to stain or pollute, the word used of priests whose genealogy could not be found (Ezra 2:62) and of polluted bread on the altar (Malachi 1:7). Daniel refuses the wine as well as the food, and he asks leave of the chief official rather than simply leaving the dish untouched.

“Favour and tender love” are chesed and rachamim, words that usually describe God’s own covenant kindness and mercy. Here God places them in a Babylonian official’s heart toward a captive, the thing Solomon had asked for in 1 Kings 8:50: that the exiles would find compassion before those who carried them away.

“Worse liking” is Tudor English for looking in poorer condition. The Hebrew zo’aphim means drawn or downcast, the word used of the troubled faces of Pharaoh’s baker and butler in Genesis 40:6. “Of your sort” is your age group. The official does not refuse; he describes what refusing would cost him.

The King James takes Melzar as a name, but the Hebrew has the article, “the melzar”, and most readers now take it as a title from the Akkadian for a guard or steward. Turned down by the man at the top, Daniel takes his proposal one rung lower, to the man who actually brings the food.

“Prove” is to test, as metal is proved. “Pulse” is zero’im, from the verb to sow: anything grown from seed, vegetables and grains as well as beans. Ten days is short enough that no official could be much blamed if it failed, and the number returns at the end of the chapter as “ten times better”.

The word “countenance” is mar’eh, appearance, and seeing runs through the whole exchange: the king would see their faces (verse 10), the steward is to look, and “as thou seest” he may act. Daniel leaves the verdict and the next step entirely in the steward’s hands.

“Consented” is literally that he hearkened to them in this word. The steward agrees on the spot, and nothing says Ashpenaz is told. For ten days the risk the chief official feared sits on his subordinate’s shoulders.

“Fatter in flesh” is the same Hebrew phrase as the “fatfleshed” cattle in Pharaoh’s dream (Genesis 41:2, 18). Like Joseph, the four will stand before a pagan king as interpreters, and the Book of Daniel lets the vocabulary of Joseph’s Egypt sound in Babylon before that happens.

The Hebrew participle suggests an ongoing arrangement: the steward kept taking the royal portions away and kept giving them vegetables. Some have wondered, as an inference only, whether the royal food then found its way to his own table; the text says nothing about where it went.

“Children” in the King James means youths, yeladim, probably in their teens. “Skill” is haskel, the root that gives the maskilim, “they that be wise”, of 11:33 and 12:3. The book that opens with four young men made wise ends with the wise shining as the brightness of the firmament.

“The end of the days” is the three years of verse 5, now complete. Daniel 2:1 then dates the next crisis to Nebuchadnezzar’s second year, which fits only if the accession year and the first years of the course overlap, as Babylonian reckoning allowed.

“Communed” is simply talked with. The goal set in verse 5, that they might stand before the king, is met in the same words: “therefore stood they before the king.” The four are named again together by their Hebrew names, not their court names.

“Magicians” is chartummim, the word Genesis 41 and Exodus 7 use for Pharaoh’s experts, and “astrologers” is ashshaphim, from the Akkadian for incantation priests. “Ten times” is an idiom for many times over, as when Jacob complains that Laban changed his wages ten times (Genesis 31:7).

The first year of Cyrus as ruler of Babylon is 539 BC, about sixty six years after verse 1. A youth taken in 605 would be past eighty. The chapter that opened with Babylon at Jerusalem’s gate closes on the name of the king who will take Babylon.