Nebuchadnezzar dedicateth a golden image in Dura. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego are accused for not worshipping the image. They, being threatened, make a good confession. God delivereth them out of the furnace. Nebuchadnezzar, seeing the miracle, blesseth God.
Before Christ 587.
THIS chapter contains a history of Nebuchadnezzar's erecting an image of gold of an immense size, as an idol to which he expected all his empire to pay worship. Daniel's three friends, refusing this worship, are cast into a furnace of fire, and by their miraculous delivery thence the king is again brought to an acknowledgment of the one true God.
How soon this image was erected after the dream in his second year is uncertain. Some of the ancient versions begin this chapter with "In the eighteenth year," and Dr. Prideaux agrees with them, though the words are not in the present text: but whether it happened 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 on account of his favours to Daniel and his friends. Some or all of these motives might probably 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.
This statue is thought to have been hollow within, like the Colossus at Rhodes, whose height exceeded that of the statue by ten cubits: the proportion of the height seems unequal to the breadth, unless the pedestal be included therein on which it was placed. Houbigant, on account of this disparity, thinks it was rather a column or pyramid than of the human form: but Diodorus, lib. 2: sect. 9 tells us, that Xerxes took away an image of gold forty feet long when he demolished the temple of Belus in Babylon, which Prideaux supposes may have been this of Nebuchadnezzar. The statue of Jupiter also made by Lysippus at Tarentum is said to be forty cubits. The plain of Dura where it was erected was probably near a town called by Symmachus Dourau, and by Ptolemy Doraba; "Ammianus Marcellinus mentions Dura as not far from the place where Julian died; and in D'Anville's map of the Tigris and Euphrates it is on the Tigris, under 34½ lat. and in Niebuhr's map of his journey (45 of vol. 2:) is Dor." Michaelis. But Jerom considers it as an inclosed place in Babylon, see chap. Daniel 1:2 and the LXX has περιβολον, considering it as an appellative for a sort of circus.