Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Daniel · About this commentary
A King's Own Proclamation
Daniel 4:1-3
1 Nebuchadnezzar the king, to all the peoples, nations, and languages, who dwell in all the earth: Peace be multiplied to you. · WEB
The chapter is an imperial circular in which Nebuchadnezzar publishes his own humiliation — the strangest state document in Scripture.
Nebuchadnezzar the king, to all the peoples, nations, and languages, who dwell in all the earth: Peace be multiplied to you Daniel 4:1.
The chapter is a royal decree, and its author is the king himself. The whole account that follows — the dream, the warning, the madness, the grass, the nails like claws — is told in the first person by the man it happened to, and circulated over his own seal to the entire empire. Scripture contains prophecy, law, history, poetry and letters; here it preserves a piece of Babylonian state correspondence, and the words to all the peoples, nations, and languages are the same universal address the herald used on the plain of Dura Daniel 3:4. The machinery that once commanded the world to bow to an image is now used to tell the world that its owner was insane for seven times, and why.
No other ruler in the ancient record does anything like this. Kings published victories; the annals of Babylon and Assyria are monuments to selective memory. This one publishes a breakdown and a confession, and the reader should feel the improbability of the document existing at all.
It has seemed good to me to show the signs and wonders that the Most High God has worked toward me Daniel 4:2.
The Most High God — the title the furnace taught him Daniel 3:26, now used without prompting. And the signs and wonders were worked toward me: he understands himself to have been the object of God's attention rather than its instrument. That is new. In chapter two he was told he was the golden head; in chapter three he built a golden statue about it. Here he reports being dealt with personally.
How great are his signs! How mighty are his wonders! His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom. His dominion is from generation to generation Daniel 4:3.
The doxology is placed at the head of the letter, before the story it comes from, so that every reader knows the ending before the beginning. And its content is precisely what this king had spent two chapters resisting. An everlasting kingdom was the phrase attached to the stone that would grind his statue to chaff Daniel 2:44; from generation to generation is the succession he had denied by casting his image in solid gold Daniel 3:1. He is now singing the interpretation he had tried to build over. He will repeat both lines at the end of the chapter, after the grass Daniel 4:34, which is where a reader learns what they cost him.
held with reason What this mark means