Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Daniel · About this commentary
Ten Times Better
Daniel 1:17-21
17 Now as for these four youths, God gave them knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom; and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams. · WEB
God is named as the source of the four youths' learning, they graduate at the top of the empire's own examination, and Daniel outlasts the kingdom that took him.
Now as for these four youths, God gave them knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom; and Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams Daniel 1:17.
The narrator refuses to let the reader credit the students. Three years of the finest curriculum in the world lie behind this sentence, and the sentence says God gave. Both are true and neither is redundant: they worked through Babylon's tablets, and their capacity to do it was a gift — the plain scriptural account of every genuine ability Exodus 31:3 1 Kings 3:12 James 1:17. And one gift is singled out that no Chaldean syllabus offered: Daniel had understanding in all visions and dreams. The empire trained him in the arts of interpreting omens; God gave him the thing those arts counterfeited, and the whole rest of the book runs on it — starting with a dream nobody can retrieve.
Among them all was found no one like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. Therefore they stood before the king Daniel 1:19.
The graduation examination is conducted by Nebuchadnezzar himself, and the four take the first four places. In every matter of wisdom and understanding concerning which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters who were in all his realm Daniel 1:20 — measured not against their classmates but against the empire's established professionals, the men whose failure will fill the next chapter. The verdict comes from a pagan king with no interest in flattering Judah's God, which makes it the strongest kind of testimony. Faithfulness had cost these four the king's table; it did not cost them the king's regard. Scripture does not promise that the two always coincide — Daniel will be thrown to lions for the same integrity — but here the door into the court that the whole book needs is opened by young men who had been willing to lose it.
Daniel continued even to the first year of King Cyrus Daniel 1:21.
A closing line that leaps seventy years and quietly settles the book's argument. The chapter opened with Nebuchadnezzar taking Jerusalem and closes with Daniel still standing when Babylon is gone and Persia's first year has begun Daniel 6:28 Daniel 10:1. The captive outlasts the kingdom that captured him. And Cyrus is not named at random: his first year is the year the vessels of verse two start home and the exiles are told to go with them 2 Chronicles 36:22–23 Ezra 1:1–3. The empire that looked permanent in verse one had a terminal date; the youth who purposed in his heart lived to see it — and to see the seventy years he would later read about in the books run out on schedule Daniel 9:2 Jeremiah 29:10.
settled What this mark means