Daniel 1:18 Commentary and Bible Study

After three years the king ‘communed with them’, interviewed them. The three years have flown by. We assume they had intensive passing out exams, lasting days or weeks: all the young of different nationalities. One writer has suggested there would have been up to fifteen subjects. It was also the final opportunity for king to get his own impression. We might get a mental picture of him walking about among them in this reception hall, but that would be absurd. The emperor of Babylon would never have walked around among these youths who were just graduating in his college as courtiers. They never left their thrones, those kings. You always had to lick the dust before them, and they remained on their elevated positions. This was all directed from the throne. But the king loved to ask hard questions, and had a great reservoir of them in his mind. He seems to have excelled at this and he would bark out his questions that had stumped everyone else before, and stumped all the wise men among the Chaldeans, which they never gave satisfactory solutions to, and he would look at one young man and he would boom out something like this: ‘What if you were ‘regional governor, and people came to you for justice and this was the situation?’ – and out would come the hard problem – ‘What would you do?’ And people would stutter and stammer and say, ‘Well, sir, I suppose the best thing to do would be this or that.’ No, no, no. But these four, schooled in Moses, and the law of Moses, trained to think from the Scriptures, given also special blessing and power and enabling by God; they were clear in their thinking, and they worked these problems out, and they gave good and sound answers, answers so sensible, so intelligent and just, that they exceeded what would normally come to the king from his wise men, and his astrologers. That is what the narrative tells us. ‘Then the king communed with them’, and he threw out his hard questions, and back came sound answers. There were none like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. ‘Therefore stood day before the king, which is a way of describing they were graduated, and they stood with whatever documents may have attended that ceremony. ‘And in all matters of wisdom and understanding that the king enquired of them, he found them ten times better.’ The Hebrew says, ‘ten hands better’, and nobody quite knows what that means. But it may be rather literal. Maybe they had to put their hands up if they had an answer, and the fastest hands were always these four. They had an answer, and a sensible answer, a deep and profound answer. So anyway, whatever it means, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and astrologers in all his realm.‘And Daniel continued [he lived] even unto the first year of King Cyrus.’ The seventy-year captivity would come to an end, and Daniel would still be there. He was in the court seventy years at least. So he would be well into his eighties when he was finally taken from the scene. We know from this book that he lived beyond that. By how long? Well, at least two or three years. There is not a defect in the narrative here; it is just that the first year of King Cyrus was a most astonishingly significant year, because it marked the fall of Babylon, and it was the year of the Cyrus edict, the year proclaiming the return of the Jewish captives. Cyrus would declare religious freedom, and, although it is speculation, the senior officer of state in the civil service of Cyrus was still Daniel who had gone through these dynasties, these reigns, and was still there over seventy years later in Babylon. We are entitled to feel that maybe Daniel drafted the Cyrus edict. Who knows? There it sits in the British Museum; you can see it: that great historic tablet. Astonishing! The proclamation of liberty. There is nothing like it in history before – a pagan king moved by God to do such a thing in the interests of his people; it is unheard of. But with Daniel in the shadows there in the court, you wonder if he had been the drafting agent. So Daniel sets a tremendous example of piety as someone who God has raised up and put in a position really for the benefit of the remnant of his people, to secure their safety and their future, and the coming of the promised seed. Those four would serve in the interests of their people and God’s eye was upon them. Nebuchadnezzar had humiliated their nation, and now they must show there was nothing like these Judaean boys. In their formative years they had found the Lord, known him, and exercised faith in him. They were prepared to be trained. They will not envy or desire what they should not. They will serve, witness, and obey. They will take scorn, discipline themselves, be courteous, diligent, and therefore they will be held in high regard. God raised them up over all the other wise men for his purposes. His reward for obedience and faithfulness is sometimes greater wisdom, even in secular things than our enemies.