Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Daniel · About this commentary
Driven from Men
Daniel 4:28-33
28 All this came on the King Nebuchadnezzar. · WEB
A year of grace passes, one boastful sentence spends it, and the sentence falls while the words are still in his mouth.
All this came on the King Nebuchadnezzar. At the end of twelve months he was walking in the royal palace of Babylon Daniel 4:28–29.
Twelve months. The dream had been explained and the remedy prescribed Daniel 4:27, and then nothing happened for a year — long enough for the warning to feel like a false alarm, which is exactly what a year of silence is for. God's delays are not changes of mind 2 Peter 3:9 Romans 2:4, and the reprieve was the mercy Daniel had hoped for. It was spent walking on a roof, admiring the view.
Is not this great Babylon, which I have built for the royal dwelling place by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty? Daniel 4:30.
One sentence, and every load-bearing word in it is a first-person possessive. I have built — by my power, for my majesty. The claim was not even false: the city's walls, temples, and terraced gardens were substantially his work, and the bricks stamped with his name are the reason the ruins are attributed to him today. What is false is the accounting. He had been told plainly that the God of heaven gave him the kingdom, the power, the strength, and the glory Daniel 2:37, and the pronoun in this sentence takes all four back. Pride in Scripture is rarely a mistake about the facts; it is a mistake about the source Deuteronomy 8:17–18 1 Corinthians 4:7.
While the word was in the king's mouth, a voice came from the sky Daniel 4:31.
No interval at all. The boast is not even finished. The kingdom has departed from you — announced from heaven, in the past tense, to a man standing on his own battlements at the height of his powers. The terms follow exactly as Daniel had given them, down to the phrase Daniel 4:32 Daniel 4:25, and the purpose clause is repeated in full: until you know that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whomever he will. Twice stated, once by the prophet and once by the voice, so that no reader mistakes the point of what follows.
This was fulfilled the same hour on Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from men and ate grass like oxen; and his body was wet with the dew of the sky until his hair had grown like eagles' feathers, and his nails like birds' claws Daniel 4:33.
The details are clinical and merciless. The most powerful man on earth loses the thing that made him human — not his throne first but his mind — and lives outdoors, on all fours, eating what cattle eat. The hair and the nails mark the passage of long, uncounted time; seven times is a measured period and the text does not gloss it further. What is described is a recognizable derangement in which a man believes himself an animal, and Scripture reports it without embarrassment as the judgment it was announced to be. He who had been given dominion over the animals of the field Daniel 2:38 is put out among them, and the reversal is the argument: dominion is on loan, and a man who takes credit for it can be shown in an hour what he is without the loan. The stump, however, is still banded Daniel 4:15. Somebody kept the throne empty.
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