Daniel 1–6 (Part 2)

Richard Belcher continues exploring the book of Daniel, focusing on the themes of integrity and faith under trials as demonstrated by Daniel and his companions in their Babylonian exile. He emphasizes the importance of steadfast faith and God’s protective guidance in adversarial circumstances.

The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.

This audio lecture is brought to you by RTs on iTunes U at the virtual campus of Reformed Theological Seminary. To listen to other lectures and to access additional resources, please visit us at itunes.rts.edu. For additional information on how to take distance education courses for credit towards a fully accredited Master of Arts in Religion degree, please visit our website at virtual.rts.edu.

Yeah, building of Babylon, which is chapter four, verse 30. Now the dream is actually a warning to Nebuchadnezzar. The dream comes in verses ten and following:

¹⁰ The visions of my head as I lay in bed were these: I saw, and behold, a tree in the midst of the earth, and its height was great. ¹¹ The tree grew and became strong, and its top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the end of the whole earth. ¹² Its leaves were beautiful and its fruit abundant, and in it was food for all. The beasts of the field found shade under it, and the birds of the heavens lived in its branches, and all flesh was fed from it. (Daniel 4:10-12, ESV)

That’s the main dream; this tree provides for the whole world. Well, this tree is then cut down and a stump is left.

¹⁴ He proclaimed aloud and said thus: ‘Chop down the tree and lop off its branches, strip off its leaves and scatter its fruit. Let the beasts flee from under it and the birds from its branches. ¹⁵ But leave the stump of its roots in the earth, bound with a band of iron and bronze, amid the tender grass of the field. Let him be wet with the dew of heaven. Let his portion be with the beasts in the grass of the earth. ¹⁶ Let his mind be changed from a man’s, and let a beast’s mind be given to him; and let seven periods of time pass over him. (Daniel 4:14-16, ESV)

So this stump is actually referring to a person, a man. And it’s clear in chapter four, verse 22,

²² It is you, O king, who have grown and become strong. Your greatness has grown and reaches to heaven, and your dominion to the ends of the earth. (Daniel 4:22, ESV)

The dream is a warning to Nebuchadnezzar, and he doesn’t really heed that warning. And so when he is at the height of his power and thinking about his own greatness, and how he has built the kingdom of Babylon and the city of Babylon, he is then cut down. And it even says in verse 30,

³⁰ and the king answered and said, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” (Daniel 4:30, ESV)

In verse 31, while the words were still in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven,

³¹ While the words were still in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, “O King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is spoken: The kingdom has departed from you, ³² and you shall be driven from among men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. And you shall be made to eat grass like an ox, and seven periods of time shall pass over you, until you know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will.” (Daniel 4:31-32, ESV)

The humbling of Nebuchadnezzar, because of his boasting in what he has accomplished, rather than recognizing the greatness and glory of his kingdom, comes from another source, and his condition is described at the end of verse 33.

³³ Immediately the word was fulfilled against Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from among men and ate grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair grew as long as eagles’ feathers, and his nails were like birds’ claws. (Daniel 4:33, ESV)

Now, there’s actually clinical descriptions of things that reflect this description, and you can read about one of them. Commentary by Walvord Walvord is a classic dispensationalist who has a commentary on Daniel, but his classic dispensationalism doesn’t so overpower the commentary that it’s an interesting commentary with a lot of interesting historical details to the commentary. And he, in that commentary, gives a clinical case discovered in a British mental institution in 1946.

And it’s either called philanthropy or I think the other term is lycanthropy, where actual descriptions of patients sort of fit what we read in verse 33 related to Nebuchadnezzar. So that’s kind of an interesting angle to this whole thing. So you can check that out if you’re further interested in that. But again, you can think about what’s the message to the exiles, the message to God’s people? Throughout the ages, no matter how powerful a king is, kings rule under the sovereignty and authority of the true king, the God that Israel worships, God raises up kings.

God disposes of kings. There’s only one king, and that’s what Nebuchadnezzar comes to recognize in verse 25, and especially verse 37. Actually, back in verse 34 through 35, he says,

³⁴ At the end of the days I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored him who lives forever, for his dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom endures from generation to generation; ³⁵ all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, and he does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, “What have you done?” (Daniel 4:34-35, ESV)

Verse 37, I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honor the king of heaven, for all his works are right and his ways are just. And those who walk in pride, he is able to humble. That’s the point. Those who walk in pride he is able to humble the most mighty, powerful kings of the earth, rule under the authority and sovereignty of God, and must one day answer to that God.

³⁷ Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honor the King of heaven, for all his works are right and his ways are just; and those who walk in pride he is able to humble. (Daniel 4:37, ESV)

Nebuchadnezzar answers to that God while he’s living because of what happens in his life. Others may not give an answer to the king of heaven until the day of judgment, but the exilic community serves the king of heaven, who is more powerful and is sovereign over the mighty kings of the earth. Now, there’s also a question related to this passage, and I don’t know if this question made your notes or not, as to whether the confession of Nebuchadnezzar here is evidence of true belief. In other words, is he a true believer, or is he just adding the king of heaven to the pantheon of gods that he worships?

And I don’t know if we can fully answer this question. You have good people lining up on both sides of the issue. For example, Calvin argues that Nebuchadnezzar does not become a true believer. He believes it’s easier to conceive of Nebuchadnezzar worshipping Israel’s God as a part of his pantheon, not as the one, only true God. And Calvin would emphasize that Nebuchadnezzar continues to operate out of sort of a pagan perception, but certainly is willing to recognize the power of the God that Israel serves.

On the other side of the coin, EJ young thinks that Nebuchadnezzar’s confession is the confession of a true believer. And he thinks you can see in the first four chapters of Daniel a progression in Nebuchadnezzar’s understanding. To Daniel, he says, your God. In Daniel 3:28-29, it’s the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Whereas in Daniel 4:34-35, Nebuchadnezzar himself praises God, the most high God. And so EJ young thinks that there is a progression here and that Nebuchadnezzar actually comes to worship God as the living and true God.

Again, I don’t know if we can fully answer that question. I think we’d need more information. But the point in the text, maybe, is not whether or not Nebuchadnezzar becomes a monotheistic believer in only the true God of Israel. But the point is this powerful king acknowledges the existence and the power and the authority of the God of Israel. That’s the point. And maybe rest of it is sort of speculation as to how much he fully comprehends about Israel’s God. Yes, sir.

Like we’ve been seeing Israel’s, I guess, rebellion, unwillingness to submit to Yahweh before the exile. What’s their attitude towards God at this point? A variety, I would imagine, in the book of Ezekiel at the beginning of the prophecies of restoration. It doesn’t seem like they’ve changed very much. We don’t know for sure how the community changes over time. We have Jeremiah’s letter to them that just encourages them how they are to act and behave. But I don’t know if we have a lot of information about the spiritual condition of that exilic community. Just don’t. Just don’t think we have any further. A lot of information about that. Anything else?

All right, we come to chapter five, Belshazzar’s feast and God’s judgment. Chapter five begins with King Belshazzar making a feast. We’ve got to fill in a little bit of historical background. We’re not going to spend a lot of time here. Nebuchadnezzar dies in 562. They were still in the context of Babylon and the nation of Babylon. So Nebuchadnezzar dies in 562. He succeeded by his son, evil Merodach. And every time, I can’t.

Every time I hear this name, I always remember an event. Early on in my life, I was in high school, and I was working as a bellman at a hotel in Collinsville, Illinois. And we’re pretty near St. Louis; sometimes, not very often, we get some celebrities staying at our Howard Johnson’s at that time. And so we had someone come who’s fairly famous, and I had to call him up because I was going to pick him up and take him somewhere. I forget. So I dial his room, and he picks up the phone. “Evil speaking.”

You can probably guess who it was: Evel Knievel. This is back in the early mid-seventies. And so I get in the car and go down to pick him up, and he comes out of his hotel room. He must have just had one of his motorcycle accidents. But Evel Knievel, this is Evil Merodach, whatever that’s worth. It’s an interesting story, but this king was responsible for releasing Jehoiachin from prison. So there is some connection to scripture. There are several other kings, but let’s focus on Nabonidus, 555 to 539. 539 is actually when Babylon falls.

Nabonidus was the next important king. He was a pious devotee of the moon God. The name of the moon God, Sin. So, you got some interesting names going on here. Now, that was a problem that he was a devotee of the moon God’s Sin because the priests of Babylon were devotees of the chief deity of Babylon, Marduk. And so, this set up a conflict between Nabonidus, the king, and the priests of Babylon. So in 550, Nabonidus went into a self-imposed exile because the situation became so intense.

In other words, he left the city of Babylon and he left in charge, his son Belshazzar, to run the everyday affairs of government. And that’s what we see in chapter five. We see Belshazzar. Now, critical scholars used to call into question this whole account in Daniel chapter five. And they doubted the existence of Belshazzar until his name showed up in the Nabonidus chronicle, which was discovered. And now the historicity of chapter five is, well, it’s hard to doubt it now because his name has appeared in history. This is kind of an interesting background.

The events of chapter five take place the very night Babylon falls. The city of Babylon falls. It’s kind of interesting. You got a banquet going on in chapter five, and you wonder, why are they having a banquet the very night that the city falls? What’s going on here? And apparently, the city fell without much of a struggle, without much of a fight. There might be several things we could say to this. Nabonidus was not a greatly beloved king.

Belshazzar appears from our texts and other places to be a rather incompetent ruler, so that things may have deteriorated internally and externally. Plus, the city of Babylon had been under siege. But the reason the people in the city of Babylon are not concerned is because the Euphrates river flowed through the city of Babylon. So they had an unfailing water supply and they had stores of food laid up and they had gardens and food they actually planted in the city of Babylon. They apparently had enough food that could last them ten years.

So the city was under siege. But the people weren’t that concerned about the siege because they were able to produce food and they had water supply. Usually, what a siege does is it keeps food and water from coming into the city, and that leads to extremely bad conditions within a city. But Babylon had a water supply. There were farms within the city walls. The walls were 300ft high and 75ft thick. They felt pretty secure. And so here they’re having a great feast, maybe to rally the troops, maybe as a diversionary tactic.

Whatever reason they’re having this feast, this is the very night that Babylon falls. It’s interesting how Babylon does fall. Cyrus and the Persians divert by digging canals, a portion of the river, and they walk underneath the wall, and they take the city of Babylon this very night. So in chapter five, you were at the end of the Babylonian empire, and Cyrus and the Persians, the Media, Cyrus is king of the Medo-Persian Empire, takes the city of Babylon and takes the country of Babylon. And Babylon then comes under the authority of the Persian government.

That’s the context of chapter five. In chapter five, there is a feast going on. This feast deteriorates. There’s a lot of drinking of wine at these feasts. That’s fairly common. A lot of drinking of wine, decadence, self-indulgence. But the problem, the main problem in chapter five, is blasphemy. Belshazzar brings from the temple the vessels. Remember the vessels in chapter one that Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the temple of Jerusalem and brought to Babylon.

Well, he brings out those vessels, those golden vessels from the temple, and he uses them to drink from and to praise the gods of Babylon, sort of in your face toward the God of Israel. And when he does this, it says in verse four,

⁴ They drank wine and praised the gods of gold and silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone. ⁵ Immediately the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace, opposite the lampstand. And the king saw the hand as it wrote. ⁶ Then the king’s color changed, and his thoughts alarmed him; his limbs gave way, and his knees knocked together. (Daniel 5:4-6, ESV)

He’s concerned when he sees this hand and this writing on the wall. The queen mother, which many think is a reference to actually Nebuchadnezzar’s wife, comes in and tells the king about Daniel, because nobody there is able to read the handwriting on the wall. And the queen mother comes in and reminds Belshazzar who Daniel is and suggests to bring Daniel in. Maybe he can read this writing on the wall.

Daniel comes in and rebukes Belshazzar for his impiety, for his blasphemy, but especially for the fact that Belshazzar had an example, and he learned nothing from the example of Nebuchadnezzar. We read about that. We talked about that in chapter four. What happened to Nebuchadnezzar? The pride of Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar humbled before the God of heaven. Belshazzar learned nothing in terms of what happened to Nebuchadnezzar. And Daniel rebukes him for that and rebukes him for his blasphemy. And then interprets the writing on the wall.

And this, I think at least a portion of this is in your notes. And again, we’re still in the Aramaic context, but this is the Aramaic. And then this is the sort of the English. You can’t really call it a translation. Mene, Mene, Tekel, Uparson or Upharsin is sort of the way it comes out. You basically have three nouns. The first one is repeated for emphasis. And then you have the other two, Tekel and Pharson. And apparently, the Babylonian wise men were not able to make sense of this writing on the wall.

Now, the surface meaning of these three nouns. These three nouns refer to three weights. Mena would be a reference to Mina, which may be about 500 grams. Tekel is actually Hebrew shekel. So you probably run across the Hebrew word shekel. It’s about ten or 11 grams. Those of you who’ve had Hebrew recognize this, right? What is that? And it’s. And Hebrew and Aramaic overlap here. The U is the conjunction “and.” And then you have Farsine, which is. Which means a half. And it’s a debate about a half of what.

It’s a half of one of these weights. And. But it also would be a reference to a weight. That’s the surface meaning. you’ve got three nouns that refer to these different weights. What Daniel does is he takes these nouns and relates them to the verb that they come from. And so if you look at 5:26, this is the interpretation: Mena, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end. You see, he connects Mena from the Hebrew verb that means to count. God has numbered. He’s counted.

Actually, it’s the Aramaic verb as well, the days of your kingdom, and brought it to an end. So he connects that weight to the verb, a verb which means to count. He takes and connects it to a verb that means to weigh. In 5:27,

²⁷ Tekel , you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting; (Daniel 5:27, ESV)

And then Farsine, parsing. Or as it comes across in some translations here, Peres, several ways this is taken. It’s from a verb that means to divide or break in half. And 5:28,

²⁸ Peres , your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.” (Daniel 5:28, ESV)

So that’s sort of the angle that Daniel goes there. Some connect Perez as a wordplay on Persia, because it’s the Persian government that brings Babylon to an end that very night. But the meaning now is clear. Your time is up. Your kingdom is coming to an end. And as we see in this chapter, that very night, the city of Babylon falls, and the Babylonian kingdom in the city is conquered by the Persians and comes to an end.

And again, same message that we’ve seen related to the exiles. You know, kingdoms come and fall. That’s part of the message of chapter two. That’s going to be part of the message of chapter seven. These powerful nations, these powerful kingdoms, they are powerful for a while, but then they pass. Another kingdom arises, powerful for a while, it passes. But in chapter two, as we saw, and as we will see in chapter seven, the kingdom of God, permanent powerful. It does not pass, it’s enduring.

And we’ll come and pick up on that again when we come to chapter seven. Now, the end of, actually, the beginning of chapter six briefly mentions the setup after Babylon fell. There’s a couple of questions here. One is pretty straightforward. It says,

¹ It pleased Darius to set over the kingdom 120 satraps, to be throughout the whole kingdom; ² and over them three high officials, of whom Daniel was one, to whom these satraps should give account, so that the king might suffer no loss. (Daniel 6:1-2, ESV)

You see the connection here? You have Darius, and then you have three governors. So you have a governor, you have a governor, you have a governor, and then you have 120 satraps. This was a system set up to collect taxes, to make sure rebellions were minimized, to keep down rebellions, to make sure that the government ran smoothly. And Daniel was one of these governors, which shows you how well he was respected, not only in Babylon but in the Persian government. So he serves in Babylon. He also then serves in the Persian government as well.

Now, one of the major questions, and again, I don’t know if this question made your notes, but who is Darius? It says, “It pleased Darius.” It said, “Over the kingdom 120 satraps.” And so there’s a lot of discussion about who this Darius is mentioned at the beginning of chapter six. Let me just list for you some of the possibilities. Some think that there is historical confusion here in that this Darius is being confused with the Darius of 520. See, this Darius is in 539, but there’s another Darius in 520.

And some think that there is historical confusion going on here and that maybe Daniel is not quite correct. Well, that’s not our view. Another explanation is that Darius is a governor appointed over Babylon by Cyrus, identified by many as Gubaru, who must be distinguished from Ugbaru. But forget, you know, not to worry about that. There was an Ogbaru as well. But so some think that this Darius is a major player, identified as Gubaru, set up by Cyrus. Others entertain the possibility that this Darius, who’s many times identified as Darius the Mede, is actually Cyrus.

Darius the Mede and Cyrus the Persian, some think are the same individual, and that you have Cyrus the Persian, who’s king, and he has a title or another name because he’s king of both Persia and of the Medes. And so the Persians call him Cyrus; the Medes call him Darius. If you take that view, you have to read chapter six, verse 28. There is a conjunction, and in 6:28 that you have to look at as what’s called an exegetical conjunction, and you’d read 6:28.

So this Daniel prospered under the reign of Darius, even the reign of Cyrus the Persian. See, that would be referring to the same individual, and that’s not out of the realm of possibility. You have the same thing. If you look over at 1 Chronicles 5:26, you have the same thing going on in 1 Chronicles 5:26 with another king, where 1 Chronicles 5:26 says,

²⁶ So the God of Israel stirred up the spirit of Pul king of Assyria, the spirit of Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, and he took them into exile, namely, the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh, and brought them to Halah, Habor, Hara, and the river Gozan, to this day. (1 Chronicles 5:26, ESV)

You see, it’s Pul and Tiglath-pileser are both referred to the same individual, and there’s a conjunction there in the text. It’s not brought out in English translation. So, this is a particular use of the “and” conjunction that can identify two individuals, rather than the “and” conjunction that separates two individuals. So that’s a possibility that maybe this Darius is another name for Cyrus, the king of Persia. But I don’t know if we know for sure.

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