Daniel 2:4 - Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible

In Syriac; that is, in the Chaldee tongue, for Syria or Aram is taken in a large sense sometimes, containing Assyria, Babylon, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Palestine, 2 Kings 18:26, and from hence to the 8th chapter all is written in the Chaldee language, and not Hebrew, because it most concerned that people, and from thence in Hebrew again. O king, live for ever: this was a salutation to princes of old, 1 Samuel 10:24 1 Kings 1:25; their meaning was, Let him live a long happy life, for thus the word live is often taken, Psalms 34:12, and this is agreeable to the desires of all worldly men in their prosperity. We will show the interpretation: it is observed of old to this day, that there is not any sort of men who are such flatterers as impostors. So confident and arrogant are these fortune-tellers, that they promise to interpret a dream which they never knew: this was boldly said of them, seeing the Egyptian magicians could not interpret Pharaoh's dream though he told it them, Genesis 41:8.