Daniel 2 Footnotes

2:1 How could Daniel have finished a three-year training program by Nebuchadnezzar’s second year if he was captured in the year that Nebuchadnezzar became king (605 BC)? During this period the Babylonians used the accession-year dating method whereby the king’s first year did not begin until after the new year. Thus, Daniel’s first year of captivity corresponded to Nebuchadnezzar’s accession year, his second year of captivity to the king’s first regnal year, and so forth. Moreover, Daniel did not have to train three full years; according to Hebrew usage a part of a year could be counted as a whole (see the “three days” between Jesus’s death and resurrection [Jn 2:19-21], which was actually on the third day [1Co 15:4]).

2:4 From this point through 7:28 the book was written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew. The term Chaldeans may indicate that the would-be dream interpreters spoke to the king in Aramaic, the diplomatic language of the Babylonian and Persian Empires and throughout the region.

2:5 Herodotus, the Greek historian, related a similar instance in which Darius I (about one hundred years later) massacred his wise men with the result that the group was almost annihilated (Histories 3.79). Examples of houses and temples being made into refuse sites or public toilets as a mark of contempt are also known from ancient times; Jehu did the same to the temple of Baal in Samaria (2Kg 10:27).

2:28 Daniel’s statement “But there is a God in heaven,” the overriding theme of the Bible, was a direct challenge to atheism and agnosticism. God’s reality is attested by his creation (e.g., Rm 1:19-20), his wondrous acts in history, his supernatural revelation—the Bible—and the Spirit’s witness in the hearts of those who know him (e.g., 1Co 2:9-10).

2:31-43 The different materials of the statue represent four world empires. Interpreters who view Daniel as taking a long-range view have usually identified these kingdoms as the Babylonian, Medo-Persian, Greek, and Roman. Critical scholars who view Daniel as a work from the second century BC generally consider the empires to be Babylon, Media, Persia, and Greece—the empire of Alexander the Great of Macedonia, whose far-flung empire was divided into four major parts (see “a divided kingdom,” v. 41) after his death in 323 BC. On this view the final kingdom, to be crushed and replaced by God’s eternal kingdom, would be the regime of the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes. By this argument these critics assign the writing of Daniel to the period of Antiochus’s persecution. To make the Greek Empire the last in the series, they claim that Daniel’s author artificially partitioned the Medo-Persian Empire into two consecutive world empires, the Median and the Persian. The traditional interpretation (Babylon, Medo-Persian, Greece, Rome) conforms to the text of Daniel, which considers the Medo-Persian Empire as one (e.g., “law of the Medes and Persians” in 6:8,12,15; see 8:20). It is supported by other OT testimony (2Ch 36:22-23; Ezr 1:1-4), the historical record, and more than two millennia of Jewish (Talmud, medieval Jewish commentators, etc.) and Christian (church fathers, Jerome, Calvin, etc.) interpretation.

2:44 According to some critics, the author of Daniel predicted that God’s kingdom “that will never be destroyed” would appear with the collapse of the Seleucid Dynasty. As the record of history shows that did not occur, therefore these commentators assert that this prophecy was in error. But if the fourth kingdom referred to Rome, not Greece, the difficulty disappears. Jesus Christ set up his spiritual kingdom (Jn 18:36-37) in the Roman period and will establish a direct rule at his second coming (which some suggest will involve a later form of the Roman Empire).