They were taken before Nebuchadnezzar,who ordered them to be thrown into a fiery furnace.To make sure that the victims should not escape their fate,the furnace was heated seven times hotter than usual.
Shadrach,Meshach and Abednego were bound,hand and foot,and were thrown into the flames.
But behold!When the doors were opened,the next morning,the three young men walked out as unconcernedly as if they were just returning from a cool swim.
After that,Nebuchadnezzar was convinced that Jehovah was the greatest of all gods.He forgot his idols and favoured his Jewish captors more than ever before.
Unfortunately,he was soon afterwards stricken with a strange nervous malady.
He imagined that he had become an animal.He went around on all fours and mooed,and died miserably in a field,where he had been eating grass,like an ordinary cow.
In all this,we are following the text of the book ascribed to the hand of Daniel.This volume,according to the painstaking investigations of modern scholars,was written sometime between the years 167and 165B.C.when the Jews were very lax in their religious duties.The author,taking the liberty of a novelist,laid his story during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar,He probably introduced the wholly imaginary episode of the fiery furnace to tell his contemporaries what faith can do for those who seriously believe that Jehovah is on their side and he made Nebuchadnezzar die a terrible death because such an unfortunate ending was sure to please his Jewish readers.
To do this was his good right as the teacher of certain religious morals.But we have too many Babylonian sources about the great Chaldean King to be in doubt about his ultimate fate.He died peacefully in the year 561B.C.and six years later the dynasty of Nabopolassar came to an end and a general by the name of Nabonidus made himself master of the throne.
This Nabonidus seems to have had a son or a son-in-law by the name of Bel-shar-usur,who shared the throne with him.
In the book of Daniel he is called Belshazzar and according to the Jewish tradition,he was the last king of Babylon.But once more we are in the midst of very conflicting historical evidence.Darius,the Mede,who is mentioned in this same Chapter of the Old Testament,was probably intended for Darius the Persian,who lived a hundred years later,and Belshazzar was not murdered until several months after the surrender of Babylon to the Persians.
But that some sort of feast was held just before the city was surprised by the enemy is borne out both by Herodotus and Xenophon,and it was at this very noisy celebration that Daniel gained his greatest fame as a prophet of future events.
Belshazzar,so the story goes,had invited more than a thousand nobles to his party.They ate and they drank and the hall was full of the noise of very drunken people.Suddenly,on the wall opposite the King's couch,a hand appeared.
Quietly it wrote four words upon the stones.
Then it disappeared.
The words,curiously enough,were written in Aramaic.No wonder that the King could not understand them.He sent for his magicians,but they too failed to decipher them.Then some one remembered Daniel,just as ten centuries before,at the court of Pharaoh,some one had remembered Joseph.
Daniel came.He was well versed in the different arts of mystic writing.He read the words first down,then up,and then down again.This is what he saw:
MUP
ELH
NEA
EKR
MES
ETI
NEN
And this is what he spelled out:MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN.
Even then,this combination of letters did not make much sense.
A “mene”or “mina”was a Jewish coin or weight,about fifty times the value of a shekel.
A “tekel”was what we call a “shekel.”
The “u”before the next word was merely a connecting particle,and “pharsin”(which became “Peres”in the translation)could mean “half-a-mina”or it could refer to the “Peres”or Persians.
Thus the words could have meant “Nebuchadnezzar was a mina.Nebuchadnezzar was a mina.”(Repeated for the sake of strengthening the argument.)“Belshazzar,you are only a shekel.The Persians are half a mina.”
Or,in plain English:“The big empire of the great Nebuchadnezzar,now dwindled to a small kingdom under your weak guidance,O King Belshazzar!will soon be divided into halves by the Persians.”
All this,however,is a philological puzzle which we shall not try to solve.
Daniel appears to have regarded the substantives as the past participles of the verbs “to count,”“to weigh,”and “to number.”
And he gave the following explanation of this very frightening riddle:
“Jehovah has weighed you in the balance,O King Belshazzar,and he has found you wanting.”
As a reward for his prophecy and hoping to find favour in the eyes of the Jewish God,Belshazzar made Daniel his viceroy.
But this honour meant little.The Persians were at the gates of Babylon.The days of the empire were indeed numbered.
In the year 538,Cyrus entered the city through one of the water-gates.
He spared Nabonidus,the King.He killed Belshazzar when the latter,a short while later,tried to start a revolution against the conquering host.
And he turned the territory of Babylon into a Persian province just as the Babylonians (only half a century before)had turned the kingdom of Judah into a subordinate part of their own empire.
As for Darius the Mede,who is mentioned in the book of Daniel,we know nothing about him except his name.Cyrus,on the other hand,is a famous hero of antiquity and he deserves some attention.
The Persian people over whom he ruled were of Aryan stock.That is to say,they were not Semitic like the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Jews and the Phoenicians,but they belonged to the same general group of people from whom our ancestors are descended.Originally those tribes seem to have lived in the plains on the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea.
At an unknown date they appear to have left their old homestead to begin a great trek.
