Daniel 3:1 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Nebuchadnezzar made an image of gold How soon this image was erected, after the dream in his second year, is uncertain. The Greek and Arabic interpreters suppose it to have been in the eighteenth year of his reign, and Dr. Prideaux agrees with them. But whether it was then, or, as some think, later, the design of it probably was, to frustrate the exposition, and defeat the end of the dream: on which account, perhaps, the image was made wholly of gold, and not of different metals, to make an ostentatious display of the abundance of his wealth, and to obviate the jealousies of his people, excited by his favours to Daniel and his friends. Some or all of these motives might influence this haughty and inconstant monarch to desert the true God, whom he had so lately acknowledged, and to yield again to the force of those inveterate habits, from which he had been so miraculously recovered: see Wintle. The height thereof was threescore cubits The proportion of the height of this image seems very unequal to the breadth, unless the pedestal, on which it was placed, be included therein. Houbigant, and some others, on account of this disparity, think it was rather a column or pyramid than an image of the human form: but Diodorus, lib. 2. § 9, giving an account of the plunder Xerxes had taken out of the temple of Belus, mentions an image of massy gold that was forty feet high, which Prideaux conjectures to have been this statue made by Nebuchadnezzar. The statue of Jupiter also, made by Lysippus, at Tarentum, is said to have been forty cubits high. It is probable that the plain of Dura, here mentioned, was some extensive plain near Babylon, and that the image set up in it was erected in honour of Bel, the chief idol of the Babylonians.