Daniel 1:5

1:5 So the king assigned them a daily ration ¹  from his royal delicacies ²  and from the wine he himself drank. They were to be trained ³  for the next three years. At the end of that time they were to enter the king’s service. ⁴ 

Daniel 1:18

1:18 When the time appointed by the king arrived, ⁵  the overseer of the court officials brought them into Nebuchadnezzar’s presence.

Daniel 2:5

2:5 The king replied ⁶  to the wise men, “My decision is firm. ⁷  If you do not inform me of both the dream and its interpretation, you will be dismembered ⁸  and your homes reduced to rubble!

Daniel 3:25

3:25 He answered, “But I see four men, untied and walking around in the midst of the fire! No harm has come to them! And the appearance of the fourth is like that of a god!” ⁹ 

Daniel 10:8

10:8 I alone was left to see this great vision. My strength drained from ¹⁰  me, and my vigor disappeared; ¹¹  I was without energy. ¹² 

¹ tn Heb “a thing of a day in its day.”

² tn Heb “from the delicacies of the king.”

³ tn Or “educated.” See HALOT 179 s.v. I גדל.

⁴ tn Heb “stand before the king.”

⁵ tn Heb “at the end of the days which the king said to bring them.”

⁶ tn Aram “answered and said,” a common idiom to indicate a reply, but redundant in contemporary English.

⁷ tn It seems clear from what follows that Nebuchadnezzar clearly recalls the content of the dream, although obviously he does not know what to make of it. By not divulging the dream itself to the would-be interpreters, he intends to find out whether they are simply leading him on. If they can tell him the dream’s content, which he is able to verify, he then can have confidence in their interpretation, which is what eludes him. The translation “the matter is gone from me” (cf. KJV, ASV), suggesting that the king had simply forgotten the dream, is incorrect. The Aramaic word used here (אַזְדָּא, ’azda’) is probably of Persian origin; it occurs in the OT only here and in v. 8. There are two main possibilities for the meaning of the word: “the matter is promulgated by me” (see KBL 1048 s.v.) and therefore “publicly known” (cf. NRSV; F. Rosenthal, Grammar, 62-63, §189), or “the matter is irrevocable” (cf. NAB, NIV, TEV, CEV, NLT; HALOT 1808 s.v. אזד; cf. also BDB 1079 s.v.). The present translation reflects this latter option. See further E. Vogt, Lexicon linguae aramaicae, 3.

⁸ tn Aram “made limbs.” Cf. 3:29.

⁹ sn The phrase like that of a god is in Aramaic “like that of a son of the gods.” Many patristic writers understood this phrase in a christological sense (i.e., “the Son of God”). But it should be remembered that these are words spoken by a pagan who is seeking to explain things from his own polytheistic frame of reference; for him the phrase “like a son of the gods” is equivalent to “like a divine being.”

¹⁰ tn Heb “did not remain in.”

¹¹ tn Heb “was changed upon me for ruin.”

¹² tn Heb “strength.”