Original Meaning

Nebuchadnezzar’s Image of Gold (3:1–7)

THE EPISODE BEGINS with the simple statement that Nebuchadnezzar built a golden image on the plain of Dura.5 The author of Daniel does not inform us whether the image was a god or the king himself? In one sense, this distinction does not matter. Whether deity or the divinized king, the command was to worship and bow down to this statue, to treat it or what it represented as the most important power in the universe. Such a command was impossible for a faithful follower of the true God to obey, and that is the point of the text.

All we learn about the statue is its dimensions and the material out of which it was made. Like many ancient idols it was made from a precious metal, in this case gold. Analogies with other idols known from this time period suggest that the statue was gold-plated and not solid gold. The gold of this statue links the story with Nebuchadnezzar’s recently described dream in which he was the head of gold. Perhaps this is a clue that the statue was indeed of the king, though rarely did Mesopotamian kings present themselves as gods, and we have no other evidence that Nebuchadnezzar broke this tradition.

The size of the image is startling: “ninety feet high and nine feet wide.”6Commentators have grappled with what Young has called the “grotesque” shape of this statue,7 suggesting solutions like a large dais included in the dimensions or pointing to the long, thin (though much smaller) statues of deities and worshipers recovered through archaeology.8 Collins provides the most exhaustive list of large statues known in the ancient world, most notably mentioning the statue of Bel in Babylon as reported by Herodotus (who calls it Bel Zeus), though this statue was only eighteen feet high.9 Other scholars mention the colossus of Rhodes, closer in height to Nebuchadnezzar’s statue and built in the following Persian period.10

Nebuchadnezzar not only built the statue; he demanded a public demonstration of adoration. For this purpose, he issued a call for “the satraps, prefects, governors, advisers, treasurers, judges, magistrates and all the other provincial officials" to attend its dedication. With this rather imposing list of officials, we encounter a lengthy list that is repeated a number of times in the chapter. These lists appear ponderous to us, but their literary effect is to heighten the tension and the feeling of danger toward the three friends, who will soon be singled out of the group. As Fewell states it, “through repetition, the narrator creates a scenario in which conformity is normative, disobedience is unthinkable.”11 The various categories of people in the list are political officials from around the empire, which may signal that this was Nebuchadnezzar’s attempt to solidify control over the diverse elements of his vast empire.

We encounter a second lengthy list as well, which is also repeated (cf. vv. 5, 7, 10, 15: “the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipes and all kinds of music”). This is a list of musical instruments at whose sound everyone was to show their respects to the statue. This list emphasizes the “pomp”¹² surrounding the ceremony and heightens the tension, focusing on the moment of obedience or disobedience.

As reported in these first seven verses, everything seems to be proceeding according to the specifications of the king. The order was given through the musical prelude, and “all the peoples, nations and men of every language fell down and worshiped the image of gold that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up” (v. 7). Or so he thought….

Bridging Contexts

THE PRECIPITATING CAUSE of the action in Daniel 3 is Nebuchadnezzar’s construction of a huge statue with the attendant insistence that all the leaders, indeed the “peoples, nations and men of every language” (v. 4), bow down in worship to this statue.

Near Eastern idolatry. As we have noted, it is impossible to be dogmatic concerning the identity of the statue. Is it the king himself or, as is more likely, one of the gods? And, if the latter, which one? There are two reasons to tip the scale slightly in favor of seeing the statue as that of a deity. (1) It was rare for Mesopotamian kings to be divinized, and there is no evidence that Nebuchadnezzar ever moved in this direction.

(2) If the king were divine, why would he need to build a statue-idol to receive worship when he himself was physically present?18 An idol of a god in Mesopotamian religious conception was a way in which to make the normally invisible god present. The gods were active in the world, often as personified forces of nature, but they were not visible. An idol made a god visible. The idol was not the god, but since it represented the god, it was imbued with the god’s aura. A sophisticated Mesopotamian theologian would have denied an equation between the physical idol and his god; but in another sense, the idol, being the physical manifestation of the god, was treated as if it were the god. We know about elaborate ceremonies of bathing and feeding statues that showed the awe with which these physical objects were approached.19 While the theologian and other sophisticated thinkers in the society approached the idol as a symbol of the god, I suspect that many people were more crass in their identification of god and idol.20

Regardless of whether the idol was royal or divine, the statue was understood to represent a god or even in the minds of some identified with a god. It was a deity represented by a statue constructed from precious materials and intended to represent a deity of some sort. It was therefore the appropriate object of adoration. The three friends knew exactly what the statue stood for, and they also understood that they could not be faithful to the true God and bow the knee to the statue. They also realized that the cost was heavy indeed, namely, their lives.

They understood their God’s will concerning their participation in the ritual on the plain of Dura, because God had expressed that will through the Ten Commandments centuries before and had laid the foundation with the first two commandments (Ex. 20:3–6):

You shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

By not worshiping this deity, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego became role models for God’s people when faced with the seduction or the threat of the worship of deities constructed by human minds and human hands.

This occasion, of course, was not the first time where Israel felt the seduction of idol worship. Indeed, God’s people during the Old Testament period lived constantly in the dangerous world of idols. Their danger was in their seductive power. All the nations around Israel worshiped them, nations more powerful and successful (in a worldly sense) than they were. Indeed, these are the nations that overpowered them. The temptation would be strong to worship the gods of their oppressors for one’s own advancement and because of the apparent superiority of their culture and their military power. Daniel 3 itself illustrates how, at least in this case, the worship of idols would advance one’s career, while refusing to worship this idol could result in death. Many Jewish exiles may have been tempted to worship idols because they would understand Babylon’s political superiority as a reflex of the superior power of their gods.

As we read the story of Israel in the Old Testament, we observe that the people and the leaders did not always successfully resist the temptation to worship those shiny, impressive-looking statues. It is for this reason that the prophets inveigh so heavily against them. Indeed, Isaiah is at his sarcastic and rhetorical best when he ridicules the idols of the surrounding nations. He satirizes idol worship by reducing it to a fetish (Isa. 44:12–20):21

The blacksmith takes a tool and works with it in the coals;

he shapes an idol with hammers,

he forges it with the might of his arm.

He gets hungry and loses his strength; he drinks no water and grows faint.

The carpenter measures with a line and makes an outline with a marker;

he roughs it out with chisels and marks it with compasses.

He shapes it in the form of man, of man in all his glory, that it may dwell in a shrine.

He cut down cedars, or perhaps took a cypress or oak.

He let it grow among the trees of the forest, or planted a pine, and the rain made it grow.

It is man’s fuel for burning; some of it he takes and warms himself, he kindles a fire and bakes bread.

But he also fashions a god and worships it; he makes an idol and bows down to it.

Half of the wood he burns in the fire; over it he prepares his meal, he roasts his meat and eats his fill.

He also warms himself and says, “Ah! I am warm; I see the fire.”

From the rest he makes a god, his idol; he bows down to it and worships.

He prays to it and says, “Save me; you are my god.”

They know nothing, they understand nothing; their eyes are plastered over so they cannot see, and their minds closed so they cannot understand.

No one stops to think, no one has the knowledge or understanding to say,

“Half of it I used for fuel; I even baked bread over its coals, I roasted meat and I ate.

Shall I make a detestable thing from what is left? Shall I bow down to a block of wood?”

He feeds on ashes, a deluded heart misleads him; he cannot save himself, or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?”

Isaiah shows in most graphic and even darkly humorous terms that the worship of an idol (in the case of Dan. 3, the statue in the plain of Dura) was a confusion of the creation with the Creator. In idol worship, a person takes a bit of created matter and says, “You are the most important thing to me in the world. You have all the power and the wisdom!”

Now, it is true that a sophisticated ancient Near Eastern theologian (as opposed to the general populace) would likely have responded to Isaiah, “Don’t be ridiculous. We don’t worship that wood and metal statue! That object is simply a representation of the deity, who is not restricted to the statue but is a power above human power.” But even so, what do the gods of the ancient Near East themselves represent? Who are Marduk and Ishtar, or Baal and Astarte? They are personifications of bits of creation as well. Marduk, the leading god of the neo-Babylonian empire of Nebuchadnezzar, and Baal, his counterpart in Canaan, were the power of fertility, the storm, the dew. Ishtar, also from Mesopotamia, and Astarte, her counterpart in Canaan, personified sexual potency and the violence of war.

In other words, not only the statues but the deities that they represented are bits of creation raised to the level of the Creator. We can hear Paul’s later words ringing in our ears (Rom. 1:21–22):

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

We can see the seriousness of the challenge to the faith of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They are being told to demote their God, the one who created them, by not giving him their exclusive worship. They are also to worship a statue of a god they know does not exist. They cannot simply rationalize their actions, because the act of bowing down and worship indicates that they affirm the statue as equal to their God. By accepting this statue into the category of deity, they will inevitably reduce the ultimacy, authority, and jurisdiction of the true God and demote him in such a way that will make him out to be no more than one of the deities of the polytheistic world. Ultimately, the dilution or diminishment of deity is a denunciation of deity.22

As Christians in the West at the end of the twentieth century, we are not confronted with the same threat as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego—or are we? Certainly no one would build a statue and insist that we all bow down before it. But the threat of idolatry is much more subtle and therefore threatening to us today. To understand this, I find a concept of Paul Tillich, a German-American theologian of the mid-twentieth century, helpful, namely, that of “Ultimate Concern.”23 Tillich pointed out that a person’s god is the thing or person that one is most concerned about, thinks the most about, or affects one’s life the most.

If Tillich’s language is a tad abstract for some, let me introduce a phrase made famous by Bill Bright and Campus Crusade. He used a catchy metaphor to get people to think about what is acting as a god in their lives by inquiring, “Who is on the throne of your life?” If it is not the true God of the Bible, he suggests, then it is an idol. In the Contemporary Significance section we will explore what permutations idolatry takes in our time.

Faithful in the face of death. But harking back to our comments on Daniel 3, we want to observe how the three friends react to Nebuchadnezzar’s insistence that they worship the idol. In many ways, the problem is similar to the one encountered in chapter 1: How are God’s faithful people to act in a faithless world?

In our present chapter, the dangers are heightened at least on the surface. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are compelled to conform to Nebuchadnezzar’s aberrant religious ceremony in a public setting under the threat of death. We are first struck again by the lack of stridency exhibited by the faithful Jewish youths. Unlike the young third-century A.D. theologian Origen, who wanted to throw himself in front of the emperor’s chariot and proclaim Christ, they simply quietly decide not to participate. Apparently, the king does not even notice them; it takes a group of informants who are out to get the three to bring it to the king’s attention. But when they are then brought in for private interrogation, they show that their quiet rebellion earlier does not hide a heart of cowardice. They calmly and boldly proclaim their faith without a moment’s hesitation.

Their courage is remarkable. They do not seek death, but neither do they shirk it. They refuse to betray their God even in the light of the real possibility that they may die for their stand.

Indeed, we must be very careful not to let the optimistic outcome of the story cloud our vision. The friends have no confidence that they will survive the ordeal (“even if he does not [save us], we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up” [v. 18]). They know that that type of confidence is nothing but the most irksome of presumptions.

Their response preserves the story from devolving into a false promise that God will save every faithful person from suffering and death. Such a story would betray the faithful martyrs who have stood faithful but suffered death. Jesus himself honored God’s followers who died during the Old Testament time when he spoke of “all the righteous blood that has been shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah” (Matt. 23:35). The story of church history from its beginnings under the Roman empire to the present has countless stories of faithful witnesses who have stood firm to the end.

The three friends’ courage is all the more amazing when we reflect on what they may have thought concerning life after death. In a word, it is not at all clear that they had a definite idea of a judgment or reward after death, and it is extremely unlikely that, even if they did know of the resurrection of the dead, that they had an extensive picture of the blessings of heaven. They certainly do not appeal to such a hope here, and there is little explicit teaching about the resurrection of the dead, eternal life, or heaven in previous Scripture. The teaching is there implicitly, and later in the book of Daniel it becomes explicit (12:1–3), but something other than future bliss motivates the three friends and invests their potential death with meaning.

Towner at least partially captures their motivation when he states that “their deaths subverted the power of the authorities to crush integrity and to silence truth.”24 In this regard, he compares the meaningfulness of the martyr’s death to the meaninglessness of the death of the guards, who obediently escorted the three friends to the mouth of the fiery furnace.

But a more specific answer to the question is forthcoming when we consider the actual contents of the three friends’ “truth” and “integrity.” They stand firm because they trust their God—no matter what, and no matter what includes death. Victor Frankl, a survivor of German death camps and no stranger to courage in the face of the danger of death himself, quotes Nietzsche’s aphorism that applies to the three friends as well as to himself, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.“25 But the three friends take it far beyond Nietzsche. That philosopher is well known for his statement, “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.” The three friends bear witness to the fact that even death does not defeat them.

Contemporary Significance

MODERN IDOLATRY. At first it is difficult for us as Christians living at the turn of the millennium to identify with the challenge facing the Jewish people on the plain of Dura. But we have suggested that the issue transcends the worship of a particular statue and concerns instead the constant threat to dilute the worship of the true God by elevating anything or anyone else to a comparable place of importance in our life. As John Calvin has provocatively charged, the human mind is a “factory of idols.” We are constantly, even as Christians, in a struggle with this temptation.

The temptation can come from a variety of sources, not all of which seem so bad on the surface of it. Our addictions can make pleasure an idol, so that all our efforts and thoughts are directed toward where we will get our next high, whether through alcohol, drugs, sex, or some other cheap thrill. We might seek power in order to control our world or simply to have the resources of revenge toward those who have hurt us in some way. All our efforts and strength thus become directed toward amassing power and influence in society, our family, or even the church. We may make relationships, or one particular relationship, an idol. We may be gearing our life and decisions not around what we understand to be God’s will, but rather the will of a spouse, a child, or a friend. Seeking knowledge or degrees, writing books, or delivering impressive sermons, these too may become idols.

The list is vast, which is why the danger is so real. The seduction is subtle, which is why we can slip so easily into idol worship.26 But though subtle and varied, I suggest that idolatry, whether of Nebuchadnezzar’s sort or the kind we discover in our own hearts, ultimately has one object. When the masks are ripped away, behind every idol is the self. Frederick Nietzsche, the late nineteenth-century philosopher whose thought has such a huge influence on contemporary postmodern culture, saw this, and in his brutal and honest atheism, advocated the killing of God and the construction of a new idol, the human self. Hear him as he preaches his new doctrine:

Whatever in me has feeling, suffers and is in prison; but my will always comes to me as my liberator and joy-bringer. Willing liberates: that is the true teaching of will and liberty—thus Zarathustra teaches it. Willing no more and esteeming no more and creating no more—oh, that this great weariness might always remain far from me! In knowledge too I feel only my will’s joy in begetting and becoming; and if there is innocence in my knowledge, it is because the will to beget is in it. Away from God and gods this will has lured me; what could one create if gods existed?

But my fervent will to create impels me ever again toward man; thus is the hammer impelled toward the stone. O men, in the stone there sleeps an image, the image of my images. Alas, that it must sleep in the hardest, the ugliest stone! Now my hammer rages cruelly against its prison. Pieces of rock rain from the stone: what is that to me? I want to perfect it; for a shadow came to me—the stillest and lightest of all things once came to me. The beauty of the overman came to me as a shadow. O my brothers, what are the gods to me now?

Thus spoke Zarathustra.27

God is dead; the self must replace it. In a sense, this might seem to be the opposite of Daniel 3, but it is not. It is not so much a ridding the world of God, but a replacing of God by another god—the self. Nietzsche attempted to kill God because he could not tolerate any but himself in that position: “But let me reveal my heart to you entirely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Hence there are no gods.”28

Here is the heart of modern postmodern society: In the absence of the gods we may and must create our own meaning. No longer does Christ provide meaning. No longer do we feel the existential nausea of no meaning. Now we feel the will to power and the joy in constructing our own meaning in the absence of the gods. All substitutes for God are ultimately this idol—the idol of self. And as the end of the twentieth century is in the process of discovering, this idol does not lead to life, but to death—cultural and individual.

As Christians, we may not bow to this idol in any of its manifestations. Our only worship is to be directed to the one and only true and full image of God, Jesus Christ, the one whom Paul called “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15).29 Ultimately, then, the second commandment, which was the heart of the three friends’ resistance to the idolatry of Nebuchadnezzar, when read in the context of the canon as a whole, draws us to Jesus Christ, Word of God and Image of God. It is to this image alone that our worship is properly directed.

Resistance to the point of death. Daniel 3 teaches us that we must not only resist idolatry, but we must be prepared to resist it to the point of death. American Christians, in spite of all their complaints about the infringements on their religion, are rarely, if ever, confronted with that kind of decision. This is not true of Christians in many other parts of the twentieth-century world, where their faith and witness can lead to a prison term or a death penalty. Such Christian witness indicates to us that the courage of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego lives on.

But, of course, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are not the only biblical role models for faithful resistance to powerful and oppressive human governments. We can think of Acts 24–26, when Paul bore witness before Felix and Agrippa, or 5:29, when Peter proclaimed before the high priest, “We must obey God rather than men!” They knew the force of Jesus’ warning, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28).30

Where does the Christian, starting with Peter and the apostles until today, find the moral and religious strength to make such a courageous stand? From Jesus Christ. Jesus himself was put on trial for his religious claim that he was the Messiah. Facing death himself, he refused to capitulate, dying on the cross (cf. Matt. 27:11–14).

But was Jesus at the heart of the hope of the three friends as they faced death in the furnace? It is difficult to say how specifically their hope focused on the coming Savior, the Messiah. They trusted in the saving power of God, but it is provocative to reflect on the way God chose to deliver the three from the fire. Calvin pointed out that if God wanted, he could have extinguished the flames of the fire in order to save the three men. He saved them in the fire, not from the fire.31 They were in the very jaws of death. Moreover, he could have saved them without further fanfare, simply having them walk out of the fire unscathed, but instead he chose to save them by the presence of a “fourth [who] looks like a son of the gods” (v. 25).

Was this “fourth” being Jesus, as many interpreters from the earliest Christian times have suggested? It is impossible to be dogmatic unless one insists that every incarnate appearance of God must be the second person of the Trinity. It is safer to say that what we have here is a reflection of Immanuel, “God with us.” God dwelt with the three friends in the midst of the flames to preserve them from harm. In this sense, the Christian cannot help but see a prefigurement of Jesus Christ, who came to earth to dwell in a chaotic world and who even experienced death, not so that we might escape the experience of death but that we might have victory over it.

While this discussion might be an appropriate place to reflect further on the Christian hope of resurrection, we will reserve our comments until Daniel 12, which takes us even further in the book’s theology of death.

1. The LXX felt the tension and filled in the gap by saying that this episode took place in the king’s eighteenth year. This is likely an attempt to associate the ceremony with a celebration of his taking of Jerusalem (cf. Jer. 52:29) and is improbable.

2. A similar type of narrative occurs in ch. 6, the account of Daniel in the lion’s den. In ch. 11 we read a tale of court contest.

3. J. J. Collins, Daniel; First Maccabees; Second Maccabees, With an Excursus on the Apocalyptic Genre (Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1981), 41.

4. For a translation of this material, see ibid., 38–39.

5. Dura is an Akkadian word meaning “wall” or “fortress” and “is common in the geographical nomenclature of Mesopotamia” (J. S. Montgomery, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1950], 197; cf. Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, vol. 10, p. x). We cannot be dogmatic about a specific location.

6. The Aramaic text reads the measurements in cubits: sixty cubits high and six cubits wide, reflecting the sexgesimal system in use in Babylon.

7. Young, The Prophecy of Daniel, 84, says that all Babylonian sculpture was grotesque, an expression of personal taste not shared by the present writer.

8. Wood, A Commentary on Daniel, 80.

9. Collins, Daniel, 180.

10. Also Wood, A Commentary on Daniel, 80.

11. Fewell, Circles of Sovereignty, 66.

12. Ibid., 68.

13. Wood, A Commentary on Daniel, 84.

14. See Lacocque, The Book of Daniel, 58, fn. 1.

15. A major debate surrounds the translation of this verse from the Aramaic. It is possible on grammatical grounds to defend the translation of the NRSV (“If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us”), but as many commentators have pointed out, this is unlikely from a theological perspective, and the NIV’s translation is also philologically defensible (Miller, Daniel, 119). For a lengthy discussion of the issue, cf. P. Coxon, “Daniel 3:17: A Linguistic and Theological Problem,” VT 26 (1976): 400–405

16. For instance, Miller, Daniel, 115.

17. Young, The Prophecy of Daniel, 94, and most other conservative commentators argue strongly for this view.

18. I want to thank John Walton for this helpful point.

19. An excellent discussion may be found in A. L. Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964).

20. Perhaps similar to the way that icons of Mary and the saints are treated in some regions of the world.

21. Sophisticated Babylonians would not have strictly identified the idol with their god.

22. I would like to thank John Walton for his insightful comments on this topic expressed in this paragraph.

23. See the phrase used throughout P. Tillich, Systematic Theology (3 vols.; Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1951–1963).

24. Towner, Daniel, 54.

25. V. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy (3d ed.; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 84.

26. See D. Allender and T. Longman III, Bold Purpose (forthcoming Tyndale House, 1998).

27. F. Nietzsche, “Upon the Blessed Isles,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Second Part, quoted from W. Kaufmann (ed.), The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1968), 199–200.

28. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 196, quoted in B. Ingraffia, Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 96.

29. It is true we are created in the image of God, but we only reflect the glory of God in a derivative manner. For a further discussion, see D. Allender and T. Longman III, Intimate Allies (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale, 1995), 28–41.

30. I am indebted to Towner, Daniel, 51, for the discussion and Scripture texts quoted in this paragraph.

31. Calvin, Daniel I, 143.

Original Meaning

The Accusation Against the Three Friends (3:8–12)

INDEED, WHEN VERSE 7 reports that everyone worshiped the image, it is probably giving Nebuchadnezzar’s perspective. As his eyes scanned the plain of Dura, he apparently saw only the large crowd obeying his command to prostrate themselves before his golden statue. His contentment was shattered, however, by the report he received from a contingent of astrologers, who accused “some Jews” (v. 12) of disobedience to the king’s direct command in spite of the threatened penalty of a horrible death.

We should note that this is an accusation by some astrologers against some Jews. It is not a class action against a whole people. Indeed, many aspects of this story leave us with various questions. What about the other Jewish people? Were any others present? Did they conform? And, most provocatively, where was Daniel?

We should avoid making dogmatic pronouncements when the text is silent. Wood goes over the edge when he asserts, for instance, that the three friends stood completely alone and every other Jewish person gave in.13 Critical scholars take the silence of the text too far in a different direction when they use Daniel’s absence to speak of a separate tradition that knew of the three friends but not of Daniel, and a later redaction that brought the two strands together in a kind of slipshod manner.14

Perhaps it is correct to treat Daniel 2:49 (“Moreover, at Daniel’s request the king appointed Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego administrators over the province of Babylon, while Daniel himself remained at the royal court”) as an implicit answer to the question of Daniel’s absence. It certainly explains why Daniel and the three friends were not automatically together, but we cannot, again, be dogmatic.

The text is a bit more suggestive, though once again not explicit, about the motivation of the accusing astrologers. The hint comes when they describe the three Jews as those “whom you have set over the affairs of the province of Babylon” (v. 12). These men appear to be motivated out of professional jealousy. They beat them out for best honors in their school (ch. 1), and now they are rapidly rising in the ranks of the government—and they are foreigners to boot!

Close attention to the words of the astrologers reveal their strategy as they stir the king to action against Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. In a phrase, they appeal to his sense of vanity. The disobedience of the three Jews is a personal affront. After all, he was the one who issued the decree and warned of the penalty. These rebels “pay no attention to you, O king. They neither serve your gods nor worship the image of gold you have set up” (v. 12, italics added). With this approach, Nebuchadnezzar’s reaction is predictable.