The King Who Must Learn What His Kingdom Cannot Teach

In Aramaic and Hebrew Bibles, verses 1–3 are the last three verses of chapter 3, so the letter follows straight on from the furnace. It opens like an ancient letter, sender, addressees, greeting. “Peace be multiplied” is the greeting Darius uses in 6:25, and 1 Peter 1:2 opens with the same wish.

“I thought it good” is the phrase of a royal pronouncement, it seemed good before me. “Signs and wonders” is the vocabulary of the Exodus (Deuteronomy 4:34; 6:22), and a king of Babylon uses it for what God did to him personally: “toward me”.

The second half is nearly Psalm 145:13: “Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and thy dominion endureth throughout all generations.” The king will say it again in verse 34, so his letter opens and closes on the same confession.

“At rest” is untroubled, at ease. “Flourishing” is ra’anan, green and leafy, the word Psalm 52:8 uses for “a green olive tree”. Before any dream is told, the king has described himself in the language of a tree in full leaf.

In chapter 2 his spirit was troubled; here he is afraid, and this time he remembers the dream and tells it. “The visions of my head” is the idiom of 2:28, dreams seen on a bed.

The king who once decreed the death of all the wise men of Babylon now decrees that all of them be brought in. It is the book’s third royal decree, and the first that threatens no one.

The dream is told this time, and they still cannot interpret it. The failure in chapter 2 could be blamed on the missing dream; this one cannot. The guilds are listed again, with the soothsayers of 2:27 now among them.

“At the last” is how the king records Daniel’s arrival, as if the chief of the wise men always comes in after the rest have failed. Pharaoh said of Joseph, “a man in whom the Spirit of God is” (Genesis 41:38); the king reaches for the same thought in his own plural terms.

“Master of the magicians” is the office of 2:48. “No secret troubleth thee” uses a verb meaning to press hard, to be too heavy for. The request keeps the old shape, the visions and the interpretation, but he has already told the dream.

A tree “in the midst of the earth” is a world tree. Ezekiel 31 had drawn the Assyrian king as a cedar with birds in its boughs and beasts beneath, felled for its pride, and Babylon’s own king now dreams the same image of himself.

The height “reached unto heaven”, the ambition of the builders of Babel in Genesis 11:4, whose top may reach unto heaven. “The sight thereof” means it could be seen from everywhere. Three verbs of growth pile up: grew, was strong, reached.

Shade for the beasts, branches for the birds and food for “all flesh”. The picture recurs in Ezekiel 17:23, where every fowl dwells in the shadow of a planted cedar. This tree is not only large; everything around it lives off it.

“Watcher” is ir, from the verb to be awake: one who does not sleep. It appears in the Bible only in this chapter (verses 13, 17, 23). Later Jewish writings, 1 Enoch above all, made “the Watchers” a name for angels, drawing on this word.

“He cried aloud” is the same Aramaic phrase used for the herald on the plain of Dura in 3:4. Heaven has its herald too. Four verbs of destruction follow in order, hew, cut, shake, scatter, and then the creatures that lived off the tree run.

The band of iron and bronze round the stump may protect it from splitting, or it may be a fetter; readers have taken it both ways. Mid-sentence the stump becomes “his”, with a portion among the beasts, and the dream has stopped being about a tree.

It is the heart that is changed, the seat of mind and understanding, not the body. The verb is shanah, the same used for the king’s face changing in 3:19 and for God changing the times in 2:21.

“Decree” is gezerah, from the verb for cutting and deciding that named the soothsayers in 2:27. “The basest of men” means the lowliest. The dream’s own speaker gives the reason for it, a thing no Babylonian omen text would have done.

These are the king’s last words in the first person until verse 34. From verse 19 the letter speaks of him as “the king” and “Nebuchadnezzar”, as though he could not narrate his own madness, and he picks up the “I” only when his understanding returns.

“One hour” is sha’ah, the same word as “the same hour” in 3:6: a moment, not sixty minutes. Daniel’s wish is a courtly curse deflected onto enemies, as when the Cushite told David, “The enemies of my lord the king... be as that young man is” (2 Samuel 18:32).

Daniel repeats the dream before he explains it, and he picks out the four words he is about to apply: grew, strong, height, sight. The retelling is a setting of the table for verse 22.

The retelling follows verse 12 closely but leaves one line out: “all flesh was fed of it.” Daniel keeps the leaves, the fruit, the shade and the birds, and moves straight to the identification.

Each tree verb from verse 11 is reused of the king: grown, strong, reached unto heaven. “Thy dominion to the end of the earth” was close to true; Nebuchadnezzar’s empire ran from the borders of Egypt to the Persian Gulf.

Daniel quotes the watcher, and one verb has been added that was not in verse 14: “destroy it”. He then sets the dew, the beasts and the seven times into one breathless sentence, the whole sentence of heaven at once.

“Is come upon” is the verb meta, to reach, the same verb used when the tree’s height reached heaven (verses 11, 20, 22). The tree reached up to heaven; now a decree from heaven reaches down to the king.

“They shall drive thee” is an Aramaic idiom with no actual subject, a way of saying you will be driven. The dream said his portion would be with the beasts; the interpretation specifies grass, “as oxen”. The refrain about who gives kingdoms is heard for the second time.

“The heavens do rule” is the only place in the Old Testament where heaven stands in for God’s name. Later Jewish usage made the substitution common, and it lies behind “the kingdom of heaven” in Matthew’s Gospel.

“Break off” may also mean redeem or ransom, and “righteousness” came in later Aramaic to mean almsgiving, which is how later Jewish readers took the verse. “Tranquillity” is from the root of “at rest” in verse 4: the ease the dream disturbed might yet be lengthened.

Six words sum up the whole fulfilment before it is told. The verb is again meta, reached: it all reached the king. The third person continues; the letter is still speaking of its author from outside.

Twelve months pass between warning and fulfilment. The Aramaic has him walking “upon” the palace, most likely on its roof, looking out over the city, as David walked on his roof in 2 Samuel 11:2 before his own fall.

Nebuchadnezzar’s surviving building inscriptions boast of rebuilding Babylon, its walls, its temple Esagila and its gates, in terms very like these. Revelation 14:8 takes up the phrase: “Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city.”

“There fell a voice” uses nefal, the verb of falling down to worship all through chapter 3. The king who ordered the world to fall before his image hears a voice fall on him. For the first time heaven speaks to him directly, with no dream and no interpreter.

The voice repeats the sentence Daniel gave in verse 25 almost word for word, and this third telling drops the dew. What never drops out, in any of the three, is the purpose clause: until thou know.

The hair like feathers and nails like claws are what happens to a man left in the open with no barber. No Babylonian record describes such a madness. A text found at Qumran, the Prayer of Nabonidus, tells of the later king Nabonidus struck for seven years at Teima, and many think the two accounts are related.

The first person returns with the king’s understanding. He praises “him that liveth for ever”, the words of the court greeting “O king, live for ever” (2:4; 3:9), now given to the one to whom they belong. The doxology of verse 3 comes back almost unchanged.

“Reputed as nothing” echoes Isaiah 40:17. “Stay his hand” is literally strike his hand, to stop a blow. Ecclesiastes 8:4 says of a king, “who may say unto him, What doest thou?” Nebuchadnezzar hands that royal privilege up to God.

“Brightness” is ziw, the splendor of the image in 2:31. The counsellors who deserted him come looking for him. “Excellent majesty was added”, more than before, as Job’s later days were blessed more than his beginning (Job 42:12).

“King of heaven” appears nowhere else in the Old Testament. The man Daniel called “king of kings” in 2:37 ends his letter under a greater title. These are his last recorded words; the book does not mention him again except as Belshazzar’s father.