Nebuchadnezzar's statue vision in Daniel 2
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nebuchadnezzar's statue vision is a story from the Book of Daniel, chapter 2.
According to this story, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylonia, is troubled by recurrent nightmares that he refuses to tell his dream interpreters. Many biblical scholars believe the king can not remember the dreams, and others think he merely wants to test his wise men.[1][2] Either way, he threatens his dream interpreters with death and destruction of their property if they cannot tell him the dream, as well as the interpretation. When they cannot do this, the king then orders the destruction of all wise men in his kingdom.
This apparently includes Daniel, who then goes to the king and begs him for a chance to tell him what his dream was, and the interpretation of it. This is apparently granted, for then the God of Heaven reveals the dream and the interpretation to Daniel, who thereupon explains it to Nebuchadnezzar as presaging "what shall be in the latter days".
Contents |
[edit] The Dream
The dream Nebuchadnezzar had is said by Daniel to have been of a huge, brilliant statue or idol standing before him. This statue had a head made of fine gold, a chest and arms of silver, a belly of brass, legs of iron, and feet made partly of iron and partly of clay. In the dream, the king sees when a stone, cut from a mountain but without the use of hands, suddenly appears and strikes the feet of iron and clay, smashing the idol to pieces until it is dust. Then the wind blows the dust away, while the stone becomes a great mountain that fills the whole earth.
The statue is often depicted by modern artists as a figure with its arms crossed. The origin of this depiction is uncertain.
[edit] Daniel's Interpretation
After telling the king what his dream was, Daniel then tells him what it means. Nebuchadnezzar himself, king of Babylonia, is the gold head of the statue. After Babylonia will come another empire that is of inferior quality to his, presumably represented by the chest and arms of silver. After that empire will come a third one of brass, followed in turn by the fourth empire of crushing iron, that crushes all others. However, this fourth empire will later be divided, and end up as the feet and toes that are partly clay and partly iron.
- "And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever." (v. 44, KJV).
(This is explained as the meaning of the stone cut from the mountain without hands, that smashes the idol to pieces.)
[edit] Analysis
The four empires represented by the statue have often been interpreted by scholars as 1) Babylonia, 2) the Medes, 3) Persia, and 4) Alexander the Great’s Empire. This is in keeping with the scholarly theory that the book of Daniel is a pseudepigraph dated to 168 BC, and refers to Antiochus Epiphanes and the successors of Alexander.
However, some Christians do not accept this interpretation, because Jesus is said in Matthew 24 to have quoted Daniel as a prophet who foretold the "end times" immediately preceding Judgement Day, and not in reference to Epiphanes who had lived nearly 200 years before Jesus. Therefore, their identification of the metals in the statue with empires tends to differ somewhat from the above-mentioned view of the scholars. Instead, the vision is considered to be about the development of Babylon and its successors, from the time of Nebuchadnezzar all the way to the future day when God's Eternal Kingdom will be established.
The identification of the gold head is not in dispute by anyone, for as the text clearly indicates, it represents Nebuchadnezzar himself, and by extension, the Babylonian Empire. However, in this view, the second empire, represented by the chest and arms of silver, is taken to mean not the Medes, who did not actually succeed Babylonia at all in a historical sense, but rather the Persians, who did. Likewise, the third empire, represented by the belly of brass, is thought to be the Hellenic one of Alexander and his successors. The fourth empire of crushing iron legs then becomes the Roman Empire, and the feet and toes of part iron and part clay are sometimes said to be nations that arise from the ashes of the Roman Empire, that will still be ruling when the "end" comes (the rock representing God's kingdom that will strike the idol).
Aside from the scholarly view that the book was written in the time of Antiochus IV, the chapter itself claims to take place in the "second year of Nebuchadnezzar". This could refer to 604 BC, the second year he reigned in Babylon, or it might also possibly mean 587 BC, the second year of his reign over Judah after deposing his last puppet, king Zedekiah.
An interesting feature of the text occurs in verse four, where it says the dream interpreters addressed Nebuchadnezzar in Aramaic, already the official language in use at the time. The remainder of the chapter and the entire text of Daniel through the end of chapter 7 is abruptly continued in Aramaic rather than Hebrew at that point. It could be that the original significance of the words "in Aramaic" in verse 4 was only to indicate what language the text was in, though it is of course possible that it might also refer to what language the dream interpreters spoke.
[edit] LDS Interpretation
The story in Daniel 2 has significant meaning to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who believe that the Kingdom of God (the true Church of Jesus Christ) was restored to the earth in the "latter days" through a modern prophet, Joseph Smith, in 1830.
Spencer Kimball, Joseph Smith's successor, explained in 1976, "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was restored in 1830. ...This is the kingdom, set up by the God of heaven, that would never be destroyed nor superseded, and the stone cut out of the mountain without hands that would become a great mountain and would fill the whole earth." Kimball agreed with the view of most Christians that the third kingdom represented that of Alexander the Great, the fourth represented the Roman Empire, and the feet of iron and clay represented a group of European nations, which were the great political powers at the time the Church was restored.[3] [4]
