Chapter 50 fortune-telling

The next morning, the captain of the Arianosi guards was called to bring Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar.The king was still angry, but he was willing to give the foreign young man a chance to speak. Daniel first recounts the dream, a strange tale of political events that took place four hundred years later. Daniel then interpreted the dream. With his wisdom, Daniel won the eternal gratitude of his royal master, and the king made him the administrator of the city of Babylon, and appointed his three friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to the three rich provinces. the ruler. This result is really very happy, but the good times don't last long.According to the anonymous author of this chapter, the somewhat bewildered Nebuchadnezzar began to indulge in a fanciful belief which neither the well-informed Chaldean nor the Jew had ever seen.

Nebuchadnezzar ordered the construction of a gigantic statue to be nine feet high and nine feet wide, to be gilded all over.The statue should stand on the plain of Duge and should be visible from afar.As soon as the signal (the sound of the trumpet blown by all the people) is heard, the people of the whole country should willingly fall at the feet of the statue and believe in it under the drive of this will. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego could not have done such a thing.They obeyed the second commandment and refused to obey the royal order.All bowed their heads, but Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego stood up straight.

They know that severe punishment awaits them. They were brought before Nebuchadnezzar, who ordered them all to be thrown into a blazing furnace.In order to deny them any chance of survival, the furnace was heated seven times, hotter than usual. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were bound hand and foot and thrown into the flames. But look! When the oven door was opened the next day, three young men came out as if nothing had happened, sweating as if they had just finished a swim. From then on, Nebuchadnezzar was convinced that Yahweh was the greatest of all gods.He forgot about the statue, and treated the Jewish captives better than before.

Unfortunately, shortly after that, the king fell ill with a strange neurological disease. He fantasizes that he has turned into an animal, running around on all fours and mooing.Then he died desolately like an ordinary cow grazing. All of the above are derived from the Book of Daniel.This volume has been attested by painstaking modern scholars to have been written between 167-165 BC.The Jews were lax about their religious duties at the time.The author then told his own story in the time of Nebuchadnezzar with the free hand of a novelist, and he told a series of entirely fictitious stories about the furnace, which he probably intended to tell his contemporaries - who did believe What kind of belief should people hold when Jehovah is by their side? He let Nebuchadnezzar die tragically because such an unfortunate ending could please Jewish readers.

As a teacher of religious morality, it is his right to do so.But we have too many Babylonian sources to know that this was not the final fate of the great Chaldean king.He died in 561 B.C., and six years later the Naboparasar dynasty ended and a general named Nabonides came to the throne. It seems that this Nabonides once had a son or son-in-law named Beshauser who shared the throne with him. In the Book of Daniel, this person is called Belshazzar, and according to Jewish legend, he was the last king of Babylon.But again we encounter conflicting historical evidence.Darius the Mede is mentioned in the same chapter of the Old Testament, probably referring to Darius the Persian, but he was more than a hundred years later than Belshazzar, who was in Babylon to the It was assassinated only a few months after the Persians surrendered.

Both Herodotus and Sinophon recount in their annals a feast held before the city of Babylon surrendered to its enemies, and it was at this tumultuous feast that Daniel earned his reputation as a prophet of foresight. According to the story, Belshazzar invited more than a thousand guests to a meeting. They ate and drank, and the hall was filled with the noise of drunken people.Suddenly, on the wall, facing the king's throne, a hand appeared. Quietly, this hand wrote four words on the stone wall. Then it disappears. Strange to say, these four characters were written in Aramaic, and no doubt the king did not know what they meant.He called his magicians, but none of them could explain it.Then someone remembered Daniel, just as Joseph was remembered ten centuries ago in Pharaoh's palace in Egypt.

Daniel came, and he was very proficient in reading the many kinds of mysterious writing.He read the words from bottom to top, and from top to bottom. He saw some letters and spelled them out. Even so, these spelled letters still fail to explain any real meaning. There is a word for a Jewish coin or weight, roughly equivalent to one shekel.fifty times. There is a word for "shekel". Some letters only serve as conjunctions; another important word may refer to a half coin or half a weight, or a Persian...   Anyway, the words probably mean: "Nebuchadnezzar is a coin, Nebuchadnezzar is a coin (repeated to strengthen the point). Belshazzar you have only one shekel, A Persian is half a coin."

To put it plainly: "The great empire of Nebuchadnezzar has declined into a small kingdom under your leadership, ah! King Belshazzar, you will be divided into two by the Persians!" All of these are philosophical mysteries that we won't touch. Daniel seems to see these things as the past tense of the verbs "count," "weigh," and "count." Next Daniel explains this very frightening mystery. "The LORD has weighed you on the scales, O king Belshazzar, he has found you not worthy!" To reward Daniel for his predictions and to gain favor with the Judaic God, Belshazzar made Daniel his governor.

But this kind of glory has no meaning anymore.The Persians have fought beyond the gates of Babylon, and the end of the empire is numbered. In 538 BC, King Cyrus of Persia entered Babylon through a water gate. He pardoned King Nabonides, but killed Belshazzar, because he was soon after trying to start an uprising against the conqueror. Cyrus transformed the territory of the Babylonian Empire into a province of Persia, just as the Babylonians had made the Kingdom of Judah a part of the Babylonian Empire just half a century earlier. As for Darius the Mede mentioned in the Book of Daniel, we know nothing but his name.Cyrus, on the other hand, was a well-known hero in ancient society and deserves more attention.