Biblion Bible Commentary
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Silver, Bronze, and Iron
Daniel 2:39-43
39 “After you, another kingdom will arise that is inferior to you; and another third kingdom of bronze, which will rule over all the earth. · WEB
Three kingdoms follow Babylon in the metal, and the fourth ends not in a fifth empire but in a permanent division that no alliance can weld together.
After you, another kingdom will arise that is inferior to you; and another third kingdom of bronze, which will rule over all the earth Daniel 2:39.
The silver and the bronze are given without names here, and the book supplies both later so that no reader has to guess: the second power is the kings of Media and Persia, the third the king of Greece Daniel 8:20–21 — identified in a vision Daniel received in Babylon before either had risen. Inferior to you does not mean smaller; Persia was vastly larger than Nebuchadnezzar's empire and lasted longer. It means what the descending metals mean: less absolute, a monarchy already bound by the law of the Medes and Persians, which doesn't alter Daniel 6:8 — a king who cannot revoke his own decree is a lesser king than one whose word cuts men in pieces at will Daniel 2:5. Of the bronze the text says only that it will rule over all the earth, and the Greek conquest under one young commander did exactly that.
The fourth kingdom will be strong as iron, because iron breaks in pieces and subdues all things; and as iron that crushes all these, it will break in pieces and crush Daniel 2:40.
No metal follows iron. The fourth power gets the longest description and the hardest vocabulary — breaking, subduing, crushing, three times in one verse — and it is characterized by strength alone, with no word about glory. This is the power that broke the divided Greek successors and was still standing, iron-strong, when the Lord read this book aloud to his own generation Matthew 24:15: Rome. And the prophecy's structure is itself an argument — four world empires and then the end, with no fifth ever appearing in any of the book's four passes over the same ground Daniel 7:1–28 Daniel 8:1–27 Daniel 11:2–45.
It will be a divided kingdom; but there will be in it of the strength of the iron Daniel 2:41.
The iron does not give way to a new metal; it fragments. The feet and toes are the same iron mixed with fired clay, and divided is the dream's own word for the fourth kingdom's afterlife — a plurality of states carrying Rome's iron in their laws, its language in their learning, its shape in their institutions, and never again its unity. So the kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle Daniel 2:42.
They will mingle themselves with the seed of men; but they won't cling to one another, even as iron does not mix with clay Daniel 2:43.
Here the dream predicts the one thing that has been tried most often and has never worked. They will mingle themselves with the seed of men — the marriages, dynastic unions, treaties and confederations by which the fragments have repeatedly attempted to become one again — followed by the flat refusal: they won't cling to one another. Iron and fired clay can be pressed into the same foot and cannot be alloyed; the seam is permanent. Empire after empire has set out to restore the single western dominion by conquest or by contract, and the record of every attempt is in the last four words of the verse. The prophecy's most testable claim is a negative one, and the negative has held — which leaves the image standing on its weakest material, waiting.
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