Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Daniel · About this commentary
The Decree Against the Wise Men
Daniel 2:7-13
7 They answered the second time and said, “Let the king tell his servants the dream, and we will show the interpretation.” · WEB
Babylon's wise men make the truest confession in the chapter — only the gods can do this, and the gods are not with us — and the king's fury sweeps Daniel into a death sentence.
They answered the second time and said, "Let the king tell his servants the dream, and we will show the interpretation" Daniel 2:7.
They repeat themselves, and the king reads it exactly right: I know of a certainty that you are trying to gain time Daniel 2:8. He has caught the professional reflex — stall, and hope the situation changes — and he names the trade's method with precision: you have prepared lying and corrupt words to speak before me, until the situation changes Daniel 2:9. This is a system with an established procedure for having nothing to say. The king has evidently known for some time that his experts improvise; the dream has given him a way to prove it.
There is not a man on the earth who can show the king's matter Daniel 2:10.
Cornered, they tell the truth — and it is the most theologically accurate statement anyone makes before Daniel speaks. First the human limit, stated absolutely. Then the great concession: there is no other who can show it before the king except the gods, whose dwelling is not with flesh Daniel 2:11. Every clause of that is correct. Only deity can disclose the contents of another mind; the men in the room cannot. What they get wrong is the last phrase — the assumption that heaven, whatever it knows, does not speak to men. That is the exact sentence the chapter exists to refute, and Daniel will answer it almost word for word: there is a God in heaven who reveals secrets Daniel 2:28. Pagan wisdom's failure is not chiefly that it lacked information. It is that it had concluded no one was talking.
Because of this, the king was angry and very furious, and commanded that all the wise men of Babylon be destroyed Daniel 2:12.
The rage is disproportionate and entirely characteristic — this king will build a furnace over a bow and lose his reason over a tree Daniel 3:19 Daniel 4:30–33. And the sentence is corporate: a whole professional class condemned for an inability none of them could have cured.
So the decree went out, and the wise men were to be slain. They sought Daniel and his companions to be slain Daniel 2:13.
The execution squads are already moving, and the four exiles are on the list. They had not been consulted, had not failed, had not been in the room — the graduates of chapter one are simply enrolled in the guild's death by association. This is the first appearance of the book's recurring situation: the faithful placed under a sentence produced by someone else's failure and a ruler's temper, with no natural way out of it.
held with reason What this mark means