Daniel's Advice Consequent on The Dream.
“Wherefore, O king, let my counsel be acceptable to you, and break off your sins by practising righteousness, and your iniquities by showing mercy to the poor, that there may perhaps be a lengthening of your tranquillity.”
Daniel then gives his advice. Let the king change his way of life, by rejecting his selfishness and wrongdoing and doing only what is right and in accordance with divine law, and by showing mercy to the weak and poor. Then perhaps this disturbance of mind might be delayed or might even not come on him. Whether it would have been so we cannot know, for the king did not change his way of life.
‘Break off your sins.' Cast them away by a change of life. It compares with Paul's ‘put off -- the old man' (Ephesians 4:22). A change of life might bring mercy. There is not here the thought of deserving mercy as a result, as though it could be earned, but of receiving it by the mercy and will of God. Notice the ‘perhaps'.