They shall drive thee from men— In the Chaldee and Hebrew the plural active they shall do, signifies no more than thus it shall be, be the cause what it will: so that the meaning is, that Nebuchadnezzar should be punished with madness, which should so deprave his imagination while he yet retained his memory, and perhaps his reason in some intervals, as that he should fancy himself to be a beast, and live as such, till his heart, that is, his apprehension, appetite, or likings, should be changed from man to beast. All this time the stump, which was to be a tree again, is fenced or guarded; no successor was to attempt his life, or step into his throne; which he was to reassume when his reason returned, and his heart was humbled before God. This sort of madness might be the lycanthropy, mentioned by naturalists and medical writers, which makes men go, or imagine they go, out of their houses like wolves, and bite and wound whatever comes in their way. See Chandler's Vindication of the Defence, p. 25 and the first note on the last verse of this chapter.
Daniel 4:25. As oxen— Bochart describes the buffalo or wild ox as a sullen, malevolent, spiteful animal, attacking the unwary traveller with great fierceness. Though these fierce animals are for the most part found in Africa, yet Pliny observes, p. 142 that wild oxen were to be met with in ancient Scythia, and therefore probably on the Armenian mountains, not far from Babylonia. Mr. Bruce observes, that in Abyssinia the buffalo is the most ferocious animal in that part of the country where he resides; and yet that in Egypt it is the only one kept for giving milk; and that they are governed by children of ten years old without any apprehension of danger, though apparently of the same species with the Ethiopian. Vol. 5: p. 82. And Thevenot gives us a curious account of an use which was made of them on the Tigris, which he observed in his voyage from Mosul to Bagdad. I saw, says he, an experiment of the dexterity the people of the country have to cross the water without a bridge. I perceived forty or fifty she-buffles driven by a naked boy, who came to sell their milk; these buffles took the water, and swam in a square body; the little boy stood upright upon the last, and stepping from one to another drove them on with a stick, and that with as much force and assurance as if he had been on dry land; sometimes sitting down upon them.