A Secret the Empire Cannot Command

The king dreams “dreams”, plural, though from verse 3 on there is one dream. “His spirit was troubled” uses the verb Genesis 41:8 used of Pharaoh on the morning after his dreams, and the Book of Daniel is again laying Babylon over Joseph’s Egypt. His sleep, the Hebrew says, went out from him.

Four guilds are summoned. Two appeared in 1:20. “Sorcerers” is mekashshephim, the practitioners Exodus 7:11 set against Moses and Deuteronomy 18:10 forbade in Israel. “Chaldeans” here is not an ethnic name but a professional one, the learned caste of Babylonian omen scholars.

The king does not say he forgot the dream. He says his spirit is troubled “to know the dream”, and the phrase can be read as wanting to understand it. Whether he is hiding it or has lost it is the question the next verses keep turning over.

“In Syriack” is a label in the Hebrew text, Aramith, and from the next word the book is written in Aramaic, the international language of the empire, all the way to the end of chapter 7. “O king, live for ever” is the fixed court greeting, heard again in 3:9, 5:10 and 6:21.

“Cut in pieces” is literally made into limbs, dismemberment. “A dunghill” is a refuse heap or a latrine, and the same threat against houses turns up in the decree of Darius in Ezra 6:11. The penalty falls on their families and property as well as their bodies.

“Gifts and rewards” gives two words for the same thing, the second, nebizbah, possibly a Persian loan. The king closes with the demand for a third time in two verses: the dream, and the interpretation thereof. The carrot is offered exactly as large as the stick.

The experts can only repeat themselves. Their answer is verse 4 almost word for word, and the Aramaic marks it as their second attempt. A guild that works from a dream report has nothing else to offer when the report is withheld.

“Gain the time” is literally buy the time, a merchant’s verb: the king accuses them of bargaining for delay. It is an ironic line to set down seven verses before Daniel asks the king for time and receives it.

“One decree” means there is only one sentence left for them. “Prepared” means agreed among yourselves, a conspiracy. They hope to talk “till the time be changed”, until the king’s mood or the season turns, and Daniel will answer that phrase in verse 21: it is God who changes the times.

The argument moves from ability to precedent. First no man on earth could do it; then no king, lord or ruler has ever asked it. Babylonian dream manuals, which list dreams and their meanings, assume the dreamer tells the dream, so the claim about custom is simply true.

“Rare” in 1611 meant uncommon and precious; the Aramaic yaqqir means heavy, hard to lift. The experts’ theology is candid: the gods who could answer live apart from flesh, the frail human stuff that cannot reach them. The whole chapter will argue with that one sentence.

Two words for the king’s temper, angry and very furious, and one sweeping order: all the wise men of Babylon, not only the four guilds in the room. The decree takes in scholars who never heard the demand, which is how it reaches Daniel.

Daniel and his friends were not called in verse 2, perhaps still juniors or just finishing their training, and they are hunted anyway. The verb sought turns the scholars into quarry. A decree against a class does not ask who was in the room.

“Counsel and wisdom” are prudence and discretion; the second word, te’em, means taste and judgment. Arioch holds the title of chief executioner, literally chief of the slaughterers, the same rank Genesis 39:1 gives Potiphar and 2 Kings 25:8 gives Nebuzaradan, who burned Jerusalem.

“Hasty” is harsh or urgent. Daniel’s question shows he had heard nothing of the audience that condemned him. Arioch answers it, and the executioner becomes, for a moment, the man who informs.

Daniel asks the king for time, the very thing the king in verse 8 had accused the experts of buying. He also promises an interpretation before he has a dream. The Book of Daniel does not explain why the request is granted; it only records that he went in.

The three are called by their Hebrew names, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah, even in the Aramaic court account. Daniel goes home first, not to the temple of any god or to a library, and the friends are told the whole matter before anything is asked.

“The God of heaven” is a title favoured in Ezra, Nehemiah and the Persian-era books, and it comes four times in this chapter. “Secret” is raz, a Persian loan that the Greek renders mysterion, the word Paul later uses for a mystery once hidden and now made known.

The secret comes in a “night vision”, not in a dream of his own. The two halves of the verse are both “then”: the revelation and the blessing arrive back to back, and the blessing comes before any word to Arioch or the king.

The opening line echoes Psalm 113:2, “Blessed be the name of the LORD from this time forth and for evermore.” Wisdom and might are the two things the king has just shown he lacks: he could not know the dream, and his power could only kill.

The experts hoped “the time” would change (verse 9); here God changes the times and the seasons. The same pair returns in 7:25, where the little horn will “think to change times and laws”, a claim to a power this verse gives to God alone.

The verb gela, to uncover, is the chapter’s working word: revealed in verse 19, revealeth here, again in verses 28, 29 and 30, and “revealer” in the king’s own mouth at 47. “Deep” things are things too deep to fathom, like water no line can sound.

“God of my fathers” ties a Babylonian civil servant back to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The wisdom and might that verse 20 said were God’s are now “given me”. The pronouns slide from me to we to us within one sentence.

Daniel goes first to the man holding the sword, not to the king. Arioch had been “ordained”, appointed, to carry out the killings, and Daniel speaks as if that commission can simply be halted: destroy not. His plan for the secret begins with the lives of rivals.

Arioch introduces him as one “of the captives of Judah”, literally of the sons of the exile. The same phrase will label Daniel in 5:13 and, from his accusers, in 6:13. In the palace he is the gifted exile; the exile is always mentioned.

The Aramaic chooses this moment to add “whose name was Belteshazzar”: the king addresses him by the name the court gave him. “Art thou able” is literally is there with thee ability. The king still asks for both halves, dream and meaning.

“Soothsayers” is a new term, gazerin, from a verb meaning to cut or to decide: the men who determine fates. Verse 34 uses the same verb for the stone “cut out” without hands. The deciders cannot tell the king; the thing cut out decides the matter.

“The latter days” is an old phrase from Jacob’s blessing (Genesis 49:1) and Balaam’s oracle (Numbers 24:14), meaning the time to come, with a reach toward its end. “Visions of thy head upon thy bed” is Aramaic idiom for dreams, used again of the king in 4:5 and of Daniel in 7:1.

Daniel tells the king not only his dream but what he was thinking before he fell asleep: he lay wondering what would come after him. No one but the king could check that detail, which makes it the proof that the rest is true.

“For their sakes” is the King James rendering of an impersonal Aramaic plural. It means “so that the interpretation may be made known to the king”, not for the sake of certain other people. The verse ends on the king’s own heart, which the dream was sent to show him.

“Image” is tselem, and in 3:1 the same word names the golden statue the king sets up. “Brightness” is ziw, dazzling splendor, and “terrible” means fear-inspiring. It “stood before thee”: the king faces a figure of his own size, looking back.

“Brass” in 1611 meant any copper alloy; the metal is bronze. Gold, silver, bronze and iron as a descending order of ages also appears in Hesiod’s Works and Days in Greece, so the scheme would not have sounded strange in the ancient world. Value falls as the eye moves down.

The clay is chasaf, the fired earthenware of the potter (verse 41). The metals grow harder as they fall in value, gold to iron, and then the hardest metal is fused with the most brittle stuff there is. The weakest point is the one the whole figure stands on.

“Without hands” marks something no human made or moved, and the book will use it again at 8:25, where the arrogant king is “broken without hand”. The stone does not hit the golden head. It strikes the feet, and a figure struck at the feet comes down whole.

The list runs upward, iron to gold, and the word “together” matters: kingdoms that followed one another fall at one stroke. Revelation 20:11 borrows the close of the verse, “there was found no place for them.” The stone that was cut from a mountain becomes one.

“We will tell” is plural. It may be a courteous form, or it may include the three who prayed; the text leaves it there. The dream half of the test is now passed, and no one in the room could have produced it.

“King of kings”, shar sharrani, was a real title of Mesopotamian monarchs, and Ezekiel 26:7 gives it to Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel grants it and then gives the reason: four gifts, kingdom, power, strength and glory, all of them received.

The beasts of the field and the fowls of heaven given into his hand come straight from Jeremiah 27:6, where God says he has given Nebuchadnezzar even the beasts of the field to serve him. Chapter 4 will turn this into a tree sheltering beasts and birds, and then cut it down.

“Inferior” is ar’a, literally lower, earthward, the word used later for the ground. It may mean lower in worth or simply lower on the statue. The third kingdom gets one line, “over all the earth”, and the second gets no description at all.

The verb daqaq, to crush fine, runs through the verse, and it returns in chapter 7 for the fourth beast that “brake in pieces” (7:7, 19, 23). The iron kingdom is defined only by what it does to others.

The toes enter only now; verse 33 mentioned feet. “Divided” is pelig, split within itself, yet it keeps “of the strength of the iron”. “Miry clay” is clay of the mud, the same earthenware called potters’ clay a few words before.

“Partly broken” is better brittle, easily shattered. The iron makes the kingdom strong in places; the clay means it can crack anywhere. The verse is a summary before the explanation that follows.

Mingling “with the seed of men” is usually read as marriage alliances between royal houses. The book shows exactly that later, in the king’s daughter sent north in 11:6 and the “daughter of women” in 11:17, both marriages that fail to bind. That link is an interpretation, but a close one.

“Set up” is the Aramaic heqim, the verb chapter 3 will use again and again for the image Nebuchadnezzar sets up. God sets up a kingdom; the king sets up a statue. “In the days of these kings” leaves open whether the kings are the toes or all four kingdoms.

Only now do we learn where the stone came from: cut out “of the mountain”, the very thing it becomes in verse 35. “Sure” is from the root of amen, faithful and reliable. Daniel closes the interview on the certainty of the source, not on his own accuracy.

“Worshipped” is segid, the prostration chapter 3 will demand of the whole empire before the image. An oblation and sweet odours are the words for grain offering and incense. The text does not say Daniel accepted them, or refused.

“God of gods” comes from Deuteronomy 10:17, “God of gods, and Lord of lords”; the king, fittingly, says Lord of kings. His reason is modest: seeing thou couldest reveal this secret. The confession is real, and it rests on one demonstration.

“Made Daniel a great man” is one verb, he magnified him. Like Joseph in Genesis 41:41–43, he is lifted from captive to ruler in a day. He is set over the whole guild of wise men, the same men he saved from Arioch in verse 24.

The three are called Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego here, their court names, and chapter 3 will use nothing else. “The gate of the king” was where royal business and judgment were done, and Mordecai also sat in the king’s gate (Esther 2:19).