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From: Daniel 2:31-45

Daniel Describes the King’s Dream (Continuation)

(Daniel said to Nebuchadnezzar,) [31] “You saw, O king, and behold, a great
image. This image, mighty and of exceeding brightness, stood before you, and
its appearance was frightening. [32] The head of this image was of fine gold, its
breast and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, [33] its legs of iron, its
feet partly of iron and partly of clay. [34] As you looked, a stone was cut out by
no human hand, and it smote the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke
them in pieces; [35] then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold,
all together were broken in pieces, and became like the chaff of the summer
threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them
could be found. But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain
and filled the whole earth.

Daniel Interprets the King’s Dream

[36] “This was the dream; now we will tell the king its interpretation. [37] You,
O king, the king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given the kingdom,
the power, and the might, and the glory, [38] and into whose hand he has given,
wherever they dwell, the sons of men, the beasts of the field, and the birds of the
air, making you rule over them all—you are the head of gold. [39] After you shall
arise another kingdom inferior to you, and yet a third kingdom of bronze, which
shall rule over all the earth. [40] And there shall be a fourth kingdom, strong as ir-
on, because iron breaks to pieces and shatters all things; and like iron which cru-
shes, it shall break and crush all these. [41] And as you saw the feet and toes
partly of potter’s clay and partly of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom; but some
of the firmness of iron shall be in it, just as you saw iron mixed with the miry clay.
[42] And as the toes of the feet were partly iron and partly clay, so the kingdom
shall be partly strong and partly brittle. [43] As you saw the iron mixed with miry
clay, so they will mix with one another in marriage, but they will not hold toge-
ther, just as iron does not mix with clay. And in the days of those kings the God
of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, nor shall its sove-
reignty be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and
bring them to an end, and it shall stand for ever; [45] just as you saw that a
stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand, and that it broke in pieces
the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold. A great God has made
known to the king what shall be hereafter. The dream is certain, and its interpre-
tation sure.”

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Commentary:

2:25-35. Daniel claims no personal credit for knowing the content of the king’s
dream; he makes it plain that God revealed the Secret to him; only God knows
what will happen in the “latter times” (vv. 27-28). We have entered the area of
divine revelation, which is what this book is all about — the world of the End time,
which as yet exists only in the mind of God. Our Lord himself will say that “of
that day and hour no one knows...” (Mt 24:36).

Daniel uses the opportunity to lead the king to the true God, the God of heaven,
who knows all mysteries.

In line with the thread of the story, Daniel first tells the king about the content of
his dream (2:31-35) and then interprets it (3:13-22). The king’s vision is full of sym-
bolism. In the Bible, statues connote idolatry, insofar as they are graven images
(cf Ex 32), even though the passage does not expressly say that the image is an
idol. As one moves from head to feet, the metals used in the statue decrease in
value. In contrast with the materials of the statue are the stone and the mountain,
symbols of solidity and stability. The interpretation reads the metals as represen-
tative of the various kingdoms. This is a classical symbolic image: Hesiod, a
Greek historian of the eighth-to-seventh century BC, in his book “Works and
Days”, 199-201, had used the very same metals and in the same order to signify
periods of history; something similar is to be found in Polybius (”Historia”, 38, 22)
and other classical authors. Now, in Daniel’s vision, the four metals all appear to-
gether, at the same time, so to speak—a sign that, for God, history is all of a
piece.

The image with “feet of clay” (vv. 32-33) is often taken as a reminder that human
nature is frail and that nevertheless it is endowed with precious gifts from God:
“Our Lord and our God: how great you are! It is you who give our life supernatural
meaning and divine vitality. For love of your Son, you cause us to say with all our
being, with our body and soul: ‘He must reign!’ And this we do against the back-
ground of our weakness, for you know that we are creatures made of clay — and
what creatures! Not just feet of clay, but heart and head too” (St. Josemaria Es-
crivá, “Christ Is Passing By”, 181).

2:36-45. Daniel is not being sycophantic by addressing the king as he does in
vv. 37-38; he is simply saying that the king has an impressive empire because
he has been given it by God, who rules over all things; he wants the king to see
that the power and glory that he enjoys are part of God’s plans. The other metals
(silver, bronze, iron), as one can deduce from the rest of the book, stand for the
empires of the Medes, Persians and Greeks, though that interpretation is not
perfectly clear because the silver could stand for the empire of the Medes and
Persians together. The divided kingdom made of clay and iron is a reference to
the Greek empire after the death of Alexander the Great (cf. 11:4) and to the po-
litical marriages made between the Seleucid and Lagid Greeks (Antiochus II
marrying Bernice; Ptolemy V marrying Cleopatra: cf. 11:6, 17) that failed to bring
about unity or union. This passage would have been composed when the Seleu-
cids and Lagids were at loggerheads, and it was against the same background
that the prophecy about the end of time seeing the establishment by God of an
everlasting kingdom was made (God’s action is symbolized by the stone that
strikes the image; there is no sign of any human power at work). It does not say
here who will be given the kingdom, but in the light of 7:26 and the fact that it
says that the kingdom will not be left to another people (v. 44), the implication
is that it will be given to faithful Israelites.

The symbol of the stone has a messianic dimension insofar as it is the means
by which the everlasting kingdom will be established and the previous kingdoms
destroyed. There are echoes here of images in other prophetical works and in
the psalms. Isaiah speaks of God as a “stone of offense”, a stumbling-block for
Israel (cf. Is 8:14) and in Psalm 118:22 the people of God are compared to a
stone which the builders have rejected and which has become the cornerstone.
In the New Testament that stone is Christ, and the kingdom which he ushers
in is the Kingdom of God which will be taken from Israel, to be given to another
people that will produce fruit (cf. Mt 21:42-43); Christ also says that anyone who
falls on that stone will be broken to pieces (cf. Lk 20:17-18). Using this Christo-
logical interpretation of the stone, some Fathers interpret the mountain from
which the stone comes as being the Blessed Virgin, and the stone cut off “by
no human hand” as an image of the conception of Jesus in the Virgin’s womb
without the involvement of a man: “When Daniel says that the one who inherits
the eternal kingdom is like a son of man, who can he mean, if not the Lord him-
self? For he was born of a woman, like a son of man, but he showed that his
life and power were not of human origin. To say that he is a stone that moves
under no external force is a mysterious description: it means that Christ is not
the fruit of the work and will of men; he is the fruit of the providence of God, the
Father of the universe” (St Justin, “Dialogus Cum Tryphone”, 76, 1).

The interpretation of the dream, the message it contains, would interest the rea-
der of the book—but not Nebuchadnezzar, who died centuries earlier. It describes
how, after the kingdoms of this world which succeed one another over the course
of history, an everlasting kingdom will be established by God himself — a kingdom
surpassing any that man could create. A Christian will read this as heralding the
Kingdom of Christ, although that will not be an earthly, political kingdom, but a
spiritual one, as Jesus will tell Pilate at his trial: “My kingship is not of this world”
(Jn 18:36).