Four Boys and a Dream Nobody Could Tell

When Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem, he did what conquerors did: he carried off the treasures of God’s house to Babylon and put them in the treasury of his own god. And he carried off people as well — and not the poorest ones. He wanted the best: young men from the royal family and the great families of Judah, handsome and clever and quick to learn, to be trained up for three years and then put to work in his palace. Four of those young men were called Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. They were probably about fourteen or fifteen years old, and they were a very long way from home, and they were never going back. Babylon set out to turn them into Babylonians. They were taught Babylonian writing and Babylonian learning. And they were given new names, with the names of Babylon’s gods buried inside them: Daniel became Belteshazzar; Hananiah, Shadrach; Mishael, Meshach; and Azariah, Abednego. Most people know them by those Babylonian names to this day. And they were given a daily share of food and wine from the king’s own table — the best of everything in the empire.

And that is where Daniel drew his line. He decided he would not make himself unclean with the king’s food and the king’s wine, because a good deal of it was food his own law said he must not eat, and some of it had been offered to Babylon’s gods first. So he went and asked, politely, to be let off. And the man in charge of him liked him — but he was frightened. He said, “I am afraid of my lord the king. He is the one who decided what you are to eat and drink. If he sees you looking thinner and worse than the other young men of your age, it will be my head.” So Daniel went to the guard who actually brought the meals, and made him a fair offer: “Test us for ten days. Give us vegetables to eat and water to drink. And at the end of the ten days, look at our faces, and look at the faces of the young men who are eating the king’s food — and then do whatever you think best.” And the man agreed to try it. And at the end of ten days the four of them looked healthier and better fed than any of the others — so he quietly went on taking their rich food away and bringing them vegetables instead. And God gave those four young men skill in every kind of learning; and to Daniel he gave something extra: he could understand visions and dreams of every sort. And when the three years were up and all the trainees were brought in and questioned by the king himself, he found nobody in the whole intake to touch those four — and in every question of wisdom he put to them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and wise men in his kingdom.

And then, one night, the king had a dream that frightened him so badly he could not sleep afterwards. So he called in all the wise men of Babylon — the magicians and the chanters and the star-readers — and told them to explain it. And they said what wise men always say: “O king, live for ever! Tell your servants the dream, and we will tell you what it means.” And the king said no. He was not going to tell them the dream. They were going to tell him what the dream had been, and then what it meant — and if they could not, they would all be killed and their houses pulled down. It was a monstrous, impossible thing to demand. And they said so: “There is not a man on earth who could do what the king asks. No king, however great, has ever asked such a thing of anybody. Nobody can tell the king this, except the gods — and they do not live among people.” And the king flew into a rage and gave the order: kill every wise man in Babylon. And that order included four young Jews who had not even been in the room.

The captain of the guard came for them. And Daniel — who was perhaps twenty years old, and being arrested — did not panic. He answered the captain with good sense and tact, and asked him one question: why is the king’s order so harsh? And when he had heard the answer, he went in to the king and asked for a little time, and said he would give him the meaning. And then he went home and told his three friends, and asked them to beg the God of heaven for mercy about this secret, so that the four of them would not be killed with the rest of the wise men of Babylon. And that night the secret was uncovered to Daniel in a vision. And before he went to the king, before he saved his own life, he stopped and said thank you: “Blessed be the name of God for ever and ever, for wisdom and power belong to him. He changes the times and the seasons. He takes kings away and he sets kings up. He gives wisdom to the wise, and knowledge to those who understand. He uncovers the deep things and the hidden things. He knows what is in the darkness — and the light lives with him.”

So Daniel went in to the king. And the first thing he said was to make sure nobody thought this was his own cleverness: “No wise man or magician or star-reader can tell the king this secret. But there is a God in heaven who uncovers secrets, and he has shown King Nebuchadnezzar what is going to happen. And it was not uncovered to me because I am wiser than anybody else alive. It was so that you would know.” And then he told him the dream. “You saw a great statue, O king — huge, and bright, and terrifying. Its head was fine gold. Its chest and arms were silver. Its middle was bronze. Its legs were iron, and its feet were part iron and part baked clay. And while you were watching, a stone was cut out of a mountain — but no hands cut it. And it struck the statue on those feet of iron and clay, and smashed them to powder. And then the whole thing went: iron, bronze, silver, gold, all crushed together like chaff on a threshing floor in summer, and the wind took it away until there was nothing left of it at all. But the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.” And it was exactly what the king had seen.

And then Daniel told him what it meant. “You, O king, are a king of kings, and the God of heaven is the one who gave you your kingdom and your power and your glory. You are the head of gold. And after you another kingdom will rise, and it will not be as great as yours. And after that a third, of bronze, which will rule the whole earth. And a fourth, hard as iron — and iron breaks everything. And that one will be divided, part strong and part brittle, like iron mixed with clay, which will never hold together. And in the days of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, and will never be handed over to anybody else. It will break all those kingdoms in pieces, and it will stand for ever. That is the stone you saw, cut out of the mountain by no human hand.” Four empires, one after another, each thinking it would last for ever — and a stone nobody quarried, growing into a mountain that filled the world. And Nebuchadnezzar, the most powerful man on earth, went down on his face in front of a young foreign prisoner and said, “Truly your God is the God of gods and the Lord of kings, and the one who uncovers secrets — since you were able to uncover this one.” And he made Daniel ruler over the whole province of Babylon and chief of all its wise men — the men whose lives Daniel had just saved. And Daniel asked for one favor: that his three friends be put in charge with him. And they were. And Daniel himself stayed on at the king’s court.