Varsity Christian Fellowship - Daniel 6

My group, Jireh, went through the book of Daniel 6 for Varsity Christian Fellowship cell group session yesterday. I will write about some of the items that were brought up in discussion.

1. What exactly was the kingdom that succeeded the Babylonian empire? Was it the Medes, or the Persians? Or was it an alliance between the two in what is commonly referred to as Medo-Persia? Daniel states clearly that Babylon is conquered by the allied Medes and Persians (Daniel 5:28; Daniel 6:8), but he emphasizes that the new king is a Mede.

In other passages of the bible featuring the words of the earlier prophets (see eg Jeremiah 51:11; Isaiah 13:17), Media was singled out as the nation which God would stir up against Babylon.

According to Wikipedia, the Median state was one of the four major powers of the ancient Near East after the fall of the Assyrian Empire. The Median empire was subsequently conquered in 550 BCE by Cyrus the Great who established the Persian Achaemenid Empire.

We are given the impression from the book of Daniel that the Babylonian kings were succeeded by a Median king and then the Persian kings. But one scholar(R.J.M. Gurney) thinks that Medes and Persians were always a unity. They were of similar racial stock, lived similar steppe-dwelling lives and were geographical neighbours. The reference to the rule by Darius the Mede was intentionally made to emphasize the part played by Media in the early administration of Babylon, following the latter’s defeat, and that when Daniel describes Darius as the king, it is quite possible that he is merely according him the title he was popularly known by in the realm of Babylon, very much like when he calls Belshazzar the ‘king’, when he actually subordinate to his father Nabonidus as demonstrated in the cuneiform records (see my post on Daniel 5). J. C. Whitcomb proposes based on findings of archaeology that there is good reason to believe that Darius the Mede was actually a governor of Babylon named Gubaru.

There are other theories on this. One was that Darius the Mede is the same as Cyrus the Great. It is worth exploring how this theory conciles with the text of Daniel, which seems to indicate that Darius was somebody other than Cyrus (see Daniel 6:28).

2. What is the nature of the government in the reign of King Darius? One thing I heard when I was at a talk by Professor Thio Li-Ann was how there was an increasing decentralization of power as history progresses, from an absolute monarch in the Babylonian empire, to a republic in the roman empire. Medo-Persia fits right in between, with what Professor Thio calls a federalist constitutional monarchy. We see the characteristic of federalism in the appointment of the 120 satraps, and the concept of constitutional monarchy in the fact that King Darius had no power to alter the law he enacted. I suppose constitution in the Medo-Persian empire simply means rule by law with the king as the source of law. Being a constitutional law professor, Professor Thio ascribes this feature of increasing decentralization of power into her interpretation of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Daniel 2.

How does the feature of separation of power work into a constitutional monarchy. In a contemporary government of today’s world where you have the three distinct branches – the legislative, executive, and judicial, the judicial is capable of checking the actions of the other 2 branches via exercise of the constitution to strike down laws deemed unconstitutional. But who is to check the monarchy if it transgresses his constitution/laws? I haven’t been able to find much information online, except for this article by S J Bulsara titled “The laws of the ancient persians”, which talks about a system of parliamentary checks on the sovereigns of ancient Persia whereby the Great King was responsible to the Grand Senate and Popular Assembly for good government and was liable to be tried and deposed. It however states that the king was made independent of the common law and its courts, which baffles me in how then the king can ever be subject to the rule of law. Perhaps the Ancient Persians thought that parliamentary checks were effective enough to enforce the rule of law.

3. Why would King Darius follow the advice of those administrators to issue that decree to throw people into the lion’s den for praying to other gods or human beings except to the king (v. 7)?

 John H Walton, an assistant professor of Old Testament formerly at Moody bible Institute examined the nature of Darius’ decree in his article, “The Decree of Darius the Mede in Daniel 6”.

“Judging by his [Darius] and Daniel’s reactions, it seems unlikely that it [the decree] was actually intended to outlaw the practice that Daniel was engaged in. The nature of the ploy of Daniel’s enemies was that they were able to employ sufficiently ambiguous wording so that Daniel could be prosecuted though Darius would never have considered his prayers a violation.” (pg 279)

Walton highlighted a few problems with the account of Darius issuing the decree prohibiting prayer to any deity and praying to him. At pg 282, “prayer was an important aspect of all of the religious practices of the time. It would risk the wrath of the neglected gods to make such a decree, it would be unenforceable, and it was contrary to Persian policies.”

Walton hence proposed at page 283 that the more tenable view was the king setting himself up as the mediator for prayers going to any deity, and Darius was simply prohibiting the role of other priests. At page 286, “Darius could easily have been persuaded of the benefits of himself acting as mediator in order to urge by example that all Iranians give honor to Ahura Mazda.” Walton continues, “We can also see how the personal practice of Daniel would hardly occur to the king as a violation of the decree. Daniel, after all, was a foreigner. His practice had nothing whatever to do with orthodox or syncretized Zoroastrianism. Nor did it involve the Magi. Nevertheless, the enemies of Daniel could likewise easily make their case that here was a high Persian official who explicitly and knowingly did not carry out the letter of the decree.”

4. A member talked about how we should not take the account of Daniel as signifying that God always save, and that there are times when God allows his follower to suffer or die. Jesus death on the cross, he says, is the most evident example where God does not save. Another member talked about how he thinks that it would be wrong of us to be conditional in loving God based on our circumstances, since God’s love for us is unconditional, and that when God does not save, we should not waver in our faith. I do wish that God save more of the time. Perhaps he does. I have read before how we take for granted the sustenance of life on earth when life can be easily wiped out here on earth with things like a global natural disaster (eg: pandemics) or by a nuclear world war in the modern age. And I have read enough accounts of people dying suddenly at a young age to know that life to fragile too, and to live and be of relatively good health is a blessing. Perhaps it is too easy to infer incorrectly based on a subjective selection of bad events in one’s life or in the world that God does not do anything. But in my personal opinion, the more that God saves and help out in the lives of people in the world, believers or non-believers, the better. Humanity can certainly do with more divine intervention. In my perspective, it is not about being conditional in my love of God based on what he gives, but simply desiring that one way that God would show his love would be to make people happy in life and keep them safe from harm.