Thursday, April 9, 2015

King Nebuchadnezzar's Idol Daniel 3: 1-7

To see Daniel 3:1-7 without my comments click HERE.

The story of the Hebrew children; Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Daniel Chapter 3, is a direct response to the events in Daniel Chapter 2. The new positions of Daniel and his friends made the Babylonian scientists envious, and rather than thanking the Hebrew children for saving their lives they started to plot against them. It's my guess that the scientists still saw the Hebrew children as the slaves they were originally when they first arrived into the Assyrian captivity. This may be the reason that they plotted against Daniel and his friends.

About the idol itself...
Meanwhile, there was an attempted revolt against the Babylonian Empire in 596 B.C. Which set the stage for a wide scale reaffirmation of allegiance to King Nebuchadnezzar. King Nebuchadnezzar had a golden idol made for all to bow to in which they would demonstrate their loyalty to both him and the Babel/Babylonian Empire. The measurements of this idol was 6 by 60 cubits. The actual height of this idol was based upon a measurement called a cubit. A cubit is measured from the elbow to the fingertip on a man and this measurement was somewhere between 14-22 inches, this made the idol about a hundred feet tall. The most important thing I want to point out about the measurements isn't necessarily the height, but rather the base to the height ratio which is ten.

The reason this ratio is important is because most people read in the prior chapter about the dream of the image representing the world empires being a man, and they automatically think that Nebuchadnezzar made a statue of himself or it was a statue of a man that was in his dream representing the different coming world empires. Most overlook the words in Chapter 3:1 where it clearly states that the idol was “an image of gold” and the Bible does not say that the idol was a statue of a man, or anything specific for that matter. The Farrar Fenton Bible describes the idol as “a golden column.”

This is a picture of Victory Column in Berlin, Germany. The ratio of the column's base to height including the statue on top is similar to the height/base ratio of Nebuchadnezzar's idol.

A ratio of ten (base times height) will not produce a recognizable figure of a person. Some also believe that this idol could have just simply have been an obelisk which was a common sight in Babylon.

This idol as with all idols, represent a god of some sort. This is a totally Pagan concept, and of course it's against the second commandment to not make any graven images; Exodus 20:4. I want to remind everyone that there is no man that knows what Yahweh (God) looks like, simply because the Father is spirit and not visible to the naked eye.

In Verse 4 a herald cry was heard aloud...
When you hear the sound of all sorts of musical instruments, you will fall down and worship this idol which was created by the King. The musical instruments described in this passage are the coronet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer. The one instrument I want to focus on in this particular passage is the psaltery. A psaltery according to early definition is a wine bladder. The wine bottles during this time were a bladder made of goat skin. Inflating a goat skin and deflating quickly will not produce music, but rather will produce a noise that would be similar from a modern day Whoopie cushion so pipes were attached to produce music. Today we know a psaltery as bagpipes which are commonly found in Scotland and of course anyone knowing anything about the Scottish Declaration of Independence will know that it clearly states that the Scottish are directly descended from the Israelites of the Bible which sailed to Scotland through the pillars of Hercules (straits of Gibraltar), so to find bagpipes in Scotland is not surprising.

If you look in Strong's Concordance # 5035 The word psaltry comes from the Hebrew word “nay-bel” meaning; “A skin bag (from collapsing when empty); hence, a vase (as similar in shape when full); also a lyre (as having a body of like form): bottle, picture, psaltry, vessel, viol.”


I praise the Lord for the Prophet Daniel and his friends which we know by their Babylonian names of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.



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