The occasion for the king’s dream was very different from the occasion when God gave Daniel its content and as its meaning. Daniel and his friends prayed to the God of heaven, the God of Israel, knowing that He determined the future and that He alone could reveal it to men.
The king did not pray at all, and certainly not to the God of the Jews. He simply pondered the future. Surely this king was not thinking hypothetically. He must have been wondering what the future held for him. God knew his thoughts and gave him a dream which answered his inner questions.
How the king must have eagerly awaited this time when his dream might be revealed to him, when he would be assured that the interpretation was genuine! In the king’s dream, what he visualized was a great statue of unusual splendor. It had a head of gold, breast and arms of silver, a bronze belly, and legs of iron, with its feet a mixture of clay and iron.
It was not the statue which distressed the king so much as what happened to it as his dream continued. A stone was mysteriously cut out, fashioned without human hands. Striking the statue on its feet, the entire image fell, disintegrating into dust. The winds blew every trace of the statue away as though it never existed. The stone, on the other hand, became a great mountain which filled the whole earth.
Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream Interpreted
(2:36-45)
That was it! That was the dream. Daniel’s description exactly matched the king’s vision. Now it was time for Daniel to tell the king what it all meant. The one statue was a composite, so to speak, of the kingdoms of the Gentiles, beginning with that of Nebuchadnezzar, and continuing through history. Nebuchadnezzar was the head of fine gold, an indication of the superiority of his kingdom to those which followed. Nebuchadnezzar was indeed a great king, but his power, strength, and glory were all from God.4 The extent of his rule (2:38) sounds much like the rule which God gave to Adam and Eve, in the beginning (Genesis 1:26).
After Nebuchadnezzar’s kingdom, three others would follow. Almost nothing is said of the second and third kingdoms, except for one thing: they will become progressively inferior to the kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar. A great deal is said of the fourth (and last) kingdom; more attention is given it than all the rest, which is most interesting because it was the farthest removed from the days of Nebuchadnezzar. Why should this kingdom receive such attention in the interpretation?
I think it is because this is the kingdom struck by the stone; it is the kingdom whose fall topples the entire statue, rendering it virtually non-existent in the end. This kingdom, while it receives much attention from Daniel, is not named, nor are all the details pertaining to it explained. The only detail is that the mixture of iron and clay, which weakens the statue, is that of a racial intermingling (Daniel 2:43).
When this final kingdom comes to power, the end is near. The final days will fulfill the details of this prophecy. The end of this kingdom is brought about by the mysterious “stone made without hands” —the stone which brings about a new, eternal kingdom.
Daniel ends the interpretation by informing Nebuchadnezzar that the vision was from God, indicating to him what would take place in the future. The matter was certain,5 and the interpretation reliable.
THE VISION'S MEANING
In his dream the king saw what he himself would probably have described as a 'god'. It was the image of a man composed of various metals - gold head, silver breast and arms, bronze belly and thighs, iron legs, feet part iron and part clay. This metallic statue stood erect - until some unseen power directed a stone at its feet. The image crashed, its remains were ground to powder and blown away by the wind, while the stone that had done the damage ' became a great mountain and filled the whole earth' (Daniel 2 v 35)
What did all this mean? The clear words of Daniel placed the meaning beyond doubt. The image stood for the kingdoms of men in the ages that were to follow.
The nations of the known world were at the time subject to the king of Babylon, who was represented by the golden head ' Thou art this head of gold' (verse 38). Following this there was to be a second ' silver' empire, then a third and a fourth. The fourth kingdom was to be 'strong as iron', but after the strength was to come weakness: (Daniel 2 v 41-43)
'Whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters' clay, and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided...And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken... they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay'.
The question that must now be answered is, how do the facts of history compare with this prophecy? The correspondence is perfect - so much so that some have tried to say that the second chapter of Daniel was written after the events it describes! This is sufficient testimony to the accuracy of the prophecy, but is plainly impossible for the prophecy is still being fulfilled!
AN OUTLINE OF WORLD HISTORY
Four great empires followed each other. Consult any history book covering the period and you will find described how:
1. Head: Babylon
The first of the four world-empires, then, was the Neo-Babylonian Empire of the Chaldeans that Nebuchadnezzar, whose reign began in 605 B.C., was to rule over for about forty more years--till 562 or 560 B.C. But his empire did not last more than twenty-one years after his death. His son Evil-Merodach (Amel-Marduk in Akkad.) reigned two years only (560-558, or else 562-560, according to another reckoning). Neriglissar (or Nergal- shar- usur) reigned four years (560-556) and Labashi-Marduk only one (556). Nabonidus engineered a coup d'etat in 555 and ruled till Babylon fell to the Persians in 539.
a joint empire in which first the Medes and then the Persians took precedence.
39 Daniel turned next to the other empires. About the second one (represented by silver) he said little except that it was "inferior" (ara minnak, lit., "beneath you") to Babylon. From Nebuchadnezzar's standpoint the restriction on the monarch's authority to annul a law once he had made it (6:12) was less desirable than his own unfettered power. The silver empire was to be Medo-Persia, which began with Cyrus the Great, who conquered Babylon in 539 and died ten years later. His older son, Cambyses, conquered Egypt but died in 523 or 522. After a brief reign by an upstart claiming to be Cyrus's younger son, Darius son of Hystaspes deposed and assassinated him and established a new dynasty. Darius brought the Persian Empire to its zenith of power but left unsettled the question of the Greeks in his western border, even though he did conquer Thrace. Xerxes (485-464) his son, in his abortive invasion of 480-479, failed to conquer the Greeks. Nor did his successor Artaxerxes I (464-424) do this but rather contented himself with intrigue by setting the Greek city-states against one another. Later Persian emperors--Darius II (423-404); Artaxerxes II (404-359); Artaxerxes III (359-338); Arses (338-336); and Darius III (336-331)--declined still further in power. This silver empire was supreme in the Near and Middle East for about two centuries.
Their supremacy was ended by Alexander the Great, who founded
3. the Greek Empire.
As for the third empire (represented by bronze), it was even less desirable from Nebuchadnezzar's standpoint; though Greece was to "rule over the whole earth," its political tradition was more republican than its predecessor. The bronze empire was the Greco-Macedonian Empire established by Alexander the Great, who began his invasion of Persia in 334, crushed its last resistance in 331, and established a realm extending from the border of Yugoslavia to beyond the Indus Valley in India--the largest empire of ancient times. After his death in 323, Alexander's territory soon split up into four smaller realms, ruled over by his former generals (Antipater in Macedon-Greece, Lysimachus in Thrace-Asia Minor, Seleucus in Asia, and Ptolemy in Egypt, Cyrenaica, and Palestine). This situation crystallized after the Battle of Ipsus in 301, when the final attempt to maintain a unified empire was crushed through the defeat of the imperial regent Antigonus. The eastern sections of the Seleucid realm revolted from the central authority at Antioch and were gradually absorbed by the Parthians as far westward as Mesopotamia. But the remainder of the former Greek Empire was annexed by Rome after Antiochus the Great was defeated at Magnesia in 190 B.C. Macedon was annexed by Rome in 168, Greece was permanently subdued in 146, the Seleucid domains west of the Tigris were annexed by Pompey the Great in 63 B.C., and Egypt was reduced to a Roman province after the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C. Thus the bronze kingdom lasted for about 260 or 300 years before it was supplanted by the fourth kingdom prefigured in Nebuchadnezzar's dream-image.
4. Rome
This was unquestionably the strongest and most durable of the four empires.
40-43 Verse 40 describes this fourth empire, symbolized by the legs of iron. From a despotic standpoint, the Roman Republic was of far less value than gold, silver, or bronze; yet iron was most suited to crush opposing powers. Iron connotes toughness and ruthlessness and describes the Roman Empire that reached its widest extent under the reign of Trajan (98-117 A.D.), who occupied Rumania and much of Assyria for at least a few brief years.
For centuries Rome held sway. The world had never known anything to compare with the mighty 'strong as iron' Roman Empire.
What power on earth could ever break it or conquer it? No single power could. Rome was not to be superseded. There was not to be another great empire in the line of Babylon, Medo-Persia, Greece and Rome. The strongest empire was destined to decay and disintergrate, a long drawn process which has been traced in detail in Gibbon's 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
First the empire was split in two; Eastern Rome, ruled from Constantinople, and Western Rome, ruled from Rome itself. (It will be remembered that the image Nebuchadnezzar saw had two iron legs).
Later, both halves gave way by degrees to hostile forces from without and decaying processes within, and over the vast area once ruled by Rome a number of independent kingdoms emerged, some strong, some weak. This has been the state of affairs ever since.
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Verse 41 deals with a later phase or outgrowth of this fourth empire, symbolized by the feet and ten toes--made up of iron and earthenware, a fragile base for the huge monument. The text clearly implies that this final phase will be marked by some sort of federation rather than by a powerful single realm. The iron may possibly represent the influence of the old Roman culture and tradition, and the pottery may represent the inherent weakness in a socialist society based on relativism in morality and philosophy. Out of this mixture of iron and clay come weakness and confusion, pointing to the approaching day of doom. Within the scope of v. 43 are disunity, class struggle, and even civil war, resulting from the failure of a hopelessly divided society to achieve an integrated world-order. The iron and pottery may coexist, but they cannot combine into a strong and durable world-order.
An alternative view of the identity of the fourth empire has been proposed by Otto Zoeckler in his commentary on Daniel (CHS). Identifying the third empire as that of Alexander the Great, he took the fourth empire of Nebuchadnezzar's dream image to be that of the Seleucids--one of the four divisions Alexander's empire was partitioned into (that of Seleucus I, c. 311 B.C.). This would mean that the third kingdom (that of Alexander) lasted only eleven or twelve years, with an additional twelve years during which Perdiccas and Antigonus tried vainly to maintain the unity of the empire. Thus it was from this fourth or Seleucid empire (ignoring the other three realms that continued their existence alongside the Seleucids) that the little horn, Antiochus IV, emerged. But such an identification of the fourth empire can hardly be reconciled with the description of the fourth kingdom (cf. 7:7) as greater and stronger than the third. Could one segment of Alexander's empire be considered more extensive than his entire realm? Or could its power be considered more formidable than that of Alexander himself--Alexander who never lost a battle? This theory cannot be taken seriously.
THERE HAS BEEN NO FIFTH UNDISPUTED EMPIRE IN SUCCESSION TO THE FOUR WE HAVE NAMED. Many attempts have been made but all have faied: Philip II of Spain, Napolean I, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hitler...Today we see the countries of Europe trying to weld themselves together into a united whole. What a task it is proving! True were the prophets words:'They shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay'.
Who could have forseen all this as long as two and a half thousand years ago? Who could have asserted so confidently that there would be four empires, not three, or five, or six? Who, in a few bold strokes, could have delineated the outstanding features of their history, and its sequel with uncanny accuracy? Could any man? From all that we know of human forecasts, we must answer, NO.
We note that Daniel disclaimed all credit for his message: (Daniel 2 v 45)
'The great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter:and the dream is certain, and the interpretation thereof sure'.
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