Daniel 1:21

“God gave them” is the heart of verse 17. The four had spent three years in the king’s school, where they were to learn “the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans” (Daniel 1:3–5). That course covered language, literature and the running of an empire, and probably some of Babylon’s astrology and divination as well. The verse credits what they gained to God. The name used for him, ʼĕlôhîym, is plural in form, and when it names the true God it is read as a plural of majesty. Here it takes a singular verb, “God gave”.

The gift comes straight after the test told in Daniel 1:8–16. Daniel resolved to keep himself from the king’s rich food and wine, God gave him favour with the prince of the eunuchs, and after ten days on vegetables and water the four looked healthier and better nourished than all the other youths. Now God gives them something far greater. He honours those who honour him (1 Samuel 2:30), and a small act of faithfulness at the table is followed by a gift that will shape the rest of their lives. Their years of study were real work, and God made that work bear fruit far beyond anything study alone could give.

The verse names four things. Knowledge, maddâʻ, is intelligence or knowledge of a subject. “Skill” translates sâkal, a verb meaning to act wisely and prudently, and so to be expert and to prosper. Learning is çêpher, which properly means writing, both the art and the written document, so it points to the written lore of Babylon. Wisdom, chokmâh, is wisdom in the good sense: practical skill, sound judgment and the ability to use knowledge well in real life. It is the kind of wisdom that let the four find their way through the politics of a royal court. The word “all” is set beside learning and wisdom, so the gift reached every field they were taught.

Scripture says the same of wisdom everywhere. The LORD gives wisdom (Proverbs 2:6), and James tells anyone who lacks it to ask of God, who gives to all generously (James 1:5).

Verse 18 brings the training to its close. “The end of the days that the king had said” means the three years Nebuchadnezzar fixed in verse 5. “End” is qᵉtsâth, a termination or close, and the day arrives exactly as the king commanded. Behind the king’s timetable stands God’s own timing, for he had already prepared these four for this moment.

The prince of the eunuchs is Ashpenaz, named in verse 3. The word çârîyç means a eunuch, and it was also used of court officers, the trusted officials who ran the royal household. Ashpenaz had charge of the young men’s education and welfare, so when he brought them in, their supervised training was formally complete. The verb behind both “bring” and “brought” is the same, bôwʼ, to come or go in. “Before” translates pânîym, the face, which with a preposition means “in the presence of”. The four came face to face with the most powerful ruler of their world.

Nebuchadnezzar II reigned over Babylon from about 605 to 562 BC. He had taken Jerusalem in 605 BC, and the book opens by saying that the Lord gave Judah’s king and the vessels of God’s house into his hand (Daniel 1:1–2). The great kings of that day took the ablest young men of conquered peoples and trained them for royal service. This weakened the leadership of the conquered nations and strengthened the empire’s own government, and for Daniel and his friends it meant living in the middle of a pagan, idol-filled court.

“The king communed with them” means that he spoke with them himself. The verb dâbar means to speak, to talk with or tell. Verse 20 shows what the talk was for, as the king put questions of wisdom to them and weighed their answers.

“Was found” is mâtsâʼ, to find or attain. Among all the young men in training, none matched these four. The verse calls them by their Hebrew names, and each one speaks of God. Dânîyêʼl is formed from Dan, “judge”, and ʼêl, “God”, and means “judge of God”. Hananiah means “Jah has favoured”, Mishael “who is what God is?”, and Azariah “Jah has helped”. Their excellence was God’s gift, and now a king had seen it for himself.

“Therefore stood they before the king.” The verb is ʻâmad, to stand, and to stand before the king was to serve in his presence. This was their appointment to the king’s own service, a place of trust and influence in the court. Proverbs says that one who is skilled in his work will serve before kings (Proverbs 22:29). A psalm reminds us that it is God who puts down one and sets up another (Psalm 75:6–7), so the four owed their place to him as much as to the king.

Verse 20 widens the comparison. The four now stand beside the king’s own wise men, the whole learned class of his empire. “Matters” is dâbâr, which means a word or speech and also, as a separate sense, a matter, affair or thing. Here it covers every subject the king brought them where wisdom and understanding were needed. “Wisdom” is the same word as in verse 17, chokmâh. “Understanding” here is bîynâh, so it shares the English word with Daniel’s understanding in verse 17. “Enquired” is bâqash, to search out, and “found” is the same verb as in verse 19, mâtsâʼ.

Babylon was a great military power and also a centre of learning, especially in astrology, divination and the reading of omens. The magicians, charṭôm, were a class of learned men known in the courts of both Egypt and Babylon. They were linked with the priesthood and with magic and divination, and the word describes a horoscopist who drew magical lines or circles. The astrologers, ʼashshâph, were conjurers or enchanters, practisers of spells. Together these men were the king’s advisers, his interpreters of dreams and signs, and the keepers of Babylon’s secret lore.

So the verse sets the wisdom God gave four young exiles against the gathered learning of the greatest empire of the day, and God’s gift far outweighs it. The young men had been carried off from a conquered land, and God raised them above the most honoured scholars of the very empire that had conquered them. The book returns to this again and again. In Daniel 2 and Daniel 4 the wise men of Babylon fail to interpret the king’s dreams, and Daniel, taught by God, succeeds. “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10), and “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25).

The chapter ends by looking ahead across Daniel’s whole life. “Daniel continued” tells us that he remained, with his place in the court, through the reigns of several Babylonian kings and on through the fall of Babylon itself. “First” is ʼechâd, the numeral one, used here as an ordinal, so the verse marks the very beginning of Cyrus’s reign. Cyrus, Kôwresh, is Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who founded the Achaemenid empire and conquered Babylon in 539 BC. The young man brought before Nebuchadnezzar lived to see one empire fall and the next one rise.

That first year mattered to all of God’s people. Jeremiah had foretold seventy years of exile in Babylon (Jeremiah 29:10). Isaiah had named Cyrus as the LORD’s shepherd, who would say of Jerusalem that it shall be built (Isaiah 44:28), and as the one the LORD anointed and held by the hand (Isaiah 45:1–7). Cyrus’s decree let the exiles go home and rebuild the temple (Ezra 1:1–4), and Ezra dates it to this same first year. Daniel, who had been carried away at the start of the exile, lived to see the dawn of its end.

God raises up kings and brings them down as he wills (Daniel 2:21). Babylon looked unshakable when Daniel arrived, and God kept his servant through all its years and set him at the doorway of the return he had promised. The first chapter of the book (Daniel 1) thus lays the ground for all that follows: Daniel’s faithfulness, God’s favour on him, and the long service in Babylon and Persia that chapters 2 to 6 go on to tell.

Daniel’s gift points to the One in whom “are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). Christ is “the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24), the wisdom of God himself become man. Daniel explained a king’s dreams and God’s plans for the ages, and Jesus has made the Father himself known: “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18). He is the faithful and true witness (Revelation 3:14), and he gives his followers the Holy Spirit so that they can be his witnesses to the uttermost part of the earth (Acts 1:8).

None were found like the four among the young men of Babylon, and there is none like Jesus, God’s only begotten Son (John 3:16), the King of kings and Lord of lords (Revelation 19:16), whom God has highly exalted and given a name above every name (Philippians 2:9). The four stood before an earthly king because of the wisdom God gave them. We stand before God through Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29).

The young men were prepared for three years and then presented to the king. God is preparing his people too, conforming them to the image of his Son (Romans 8:29). He has delivered us from the power of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of his dear Son (Colossians 1:13), and Christ is able to present us faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy (Jude 1:24). Peter prays that grace and peace may be multiplied to us through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord (2 Peter 1:2).

Daniel outlasted the empire that carried him away, and the kingdom of Christ outlasts every empire. The Son of Man receives an everlasting dominion (Daniel 7:13–14), God sets up a kingdom that shall stand for ever (Daniel 2:44), and at the last “the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord” (Revelation 11:15).

These verses show a God who gives wisdom to his people, freely and generously, in the very place where they feel most like strangers. The four learned everything Babylon could teach them and kept faith with their God, and he made them wiser than all Babylon’s wise men. He had put Judah’s king into Nebuchadnezzar’s hand, and he put four of Judah’s young men in Nebuchadnezzar’s service.

They also show that God remembers small faithfulness. A quiet choice about food came before knowledge, skill, understanding and a lifetime of influence. And the God who set Daniel before one king kept him through the reign of many, until the first year of Cyrus brought the promised return within sight. Whatever empire we live under, our times are in the same hands. The book of Proverbs puts it in one line that fits Daniel’s whole life: “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart” (Proverbs 3:5–6). As James promises, God gives wisdom to all who ask him (James 1:5).