Rabban Hormizd Monastery (Syriac: ܪܒܢ ܗܘܪܡܝܙܕ ܥܓ̰ܡܝܐ) is an important monastery of the Chaldean Catholic Church, founded about 640 AD, carved out in the mountains about 2 miles from Alqosh, Iraq, 28 miles north of Mosul. It was the official residence of the patriarchs of the Eliya line of the Assyrian Church of the East from 1551 to the 18th century, and after the union with Rome in the early 19th century, it became a prominent monastery of the Chaldean Catholic Church.
The monastery is named after Rabban Hormizd (rabban is the Syriac for monk) of the Church of the East, who founded it in the seventh century.
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam (To the Greater Glory of God)
From: Daniel 2:31-45
Daniel Describes the King’s Dream (Continuation)
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(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
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[36] ”This was the dream; now we will tell the king its interpretation. [37] You, 0 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 iron, because iron breaks to pieces and shatters all things; and like iron which crushes, 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 together, 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 sovereignty 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 interpretation 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 symbolism 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 representative 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 together, 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 background 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 Escrivá, "Christ Is Passing By", 181).
2:36-45. Daniel is not being sychophantic 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 political 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 Seleucids 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 Christological 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 himself? 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 Cam Tryphone", 76, 1).
The interpretation of the dream, the message it contains, would interest the reader 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).