Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Daniel · About this commentary
Mercies Sought from the God of Heaven
Daniel 2:14-18
14 Then Daniel returned answer with counsel and prudence to Arioch the captain of the king’s guard, who had gone out to kill the wise men of Babylon. · WEB
Daniel answers a death squad with tact, asks the king for time he has no security for, and turns to prayer with three friends before he has anything to say.
Then Daniel returned answer with counsel and prudence to Arioch the captain of the king's guard, who had gone out to kill the wise men of Babylon Daniel 2:14.
The executioner arrives and Daniel manages the conversation. The two words the narrator chooses are worth weighing — counsel and prudence, discretion and good judgment addressed to an armed man carrying out a royal order. No panic, no protest of innocence, no appeal to his examination results. Just a question, and it is the right one: why is the decree so urgent from the king? Daniel 2:15. He asks for information before he asks for anything else, and the officer, disarmed by being spoken to reasonably, explains the whole situation. Wisdom in this book is very often the presence of mind to find out what is actually happening.
Daniel went in, and desired of the king that he would appoint him a time, and he would show the king the interpretation Daniel 2:16.
Then the nerve. The professionals had asked for delay and been called liars for it; Daniel asks a king mid-rage, and gets it. What he does not have when he asks is the dream. No vision yet, no assurance recorded, nothing but the settled knowledge of who his God is — and he pledges an answer on that alone. It is faith in its working clothes: a promise made on God's character before God has said a word, and one that would cost Daniel his life if unmet. He commits himself, then goes to pray. The order is not the reverse.
Then Daniel went to his house and made the thing known to Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, his companions Daniel 2:17.
He does not carry it alone, and the narrator uses the Hebrew names here — not the empire's labels — for the men he calls his companions. Faithfulness in this book is consistently plural: the four who declined the table together, the three who will refuse the image together, the friends who meet a state execution order with a prayer meeting.
That they would desire mercies of the God of heaven concerning this secret Daniel 2:18.
The request is for mercies. Not for vindication, not for the collapse of their rivals, not even, in the first place, for information — for mercy, which is what people ask who know they have no claim. Daniel does not treat his integrity in chapter one as credit to be drawn on here. And when the answer comes, the first thing he does with it is save the lives of the magicians too Daniel 2:24. The God of heaven is the exiles' name for God in a foreign land Ezra 1:2 Nehemiah 1:4 — the God who is not localized in a captured temple, not shelved in a Babylonian treasure house with the vessels, and demonstrably still reachable from Shinar.
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