Daniel 6:2

Verse 3 gives the reason in plain words: “because an excellent spirit was in him.” The word for excellent, yattîyr, means preeminent or exceeding, a quality that stands out far above the ordinary. The word for spirit, rûwach, is the word for wind or breath, and here it means the inner man: Daniel’s mind, his disposition and his character. Together the words describe a man whose whole inner life was of a surpassing kind, so plainly that a heathen king saw it and acted on it.

“Preferred” translates nᵉtsach, which means to become chief or to be preferred. Daniel was recognised as the best of the men who held office beside him, and he rose above both the other presidents and the hundred and twenty princes. “Because” stands for two small words, kôl qᵉbêl, “on account of”, so the verse ties his rise directly to what was in him. The king’s favour followed Daniel’s character.

The verse calls him “this Daniel”, with the pointing word dên, “this”. He is the same Daniel the book has followed from the start: the young captive to whom God gave knowledge and skill in all learning and wisdom, with understanding in visions and dreams (Daniel 1:17), the man who received the secret of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream and praised God for it (Daniel 2:19–23), and the man whose wisdom Belshazzar’s court had seen at his feast (Daniel 5). By now he is an old man with a long record of service under Babylonian kings, and the new ruler finds the same quality in him.

Darius takes the kingdom in Daniel 5:30–31, on the night Belshazzar was slain and Babylon fell, an event traditionally dated to 539 BC. The name Dârᵉyâvêsh is explained as a title borne by several Persian kings. Records outside the book of Daniel do not name a “Darius the Mede” as the ruler who followed Belshazzar, and he has been identified in several ways: with Gobryas (Ugbaru), the general who took Babylon for Cyrus the Great, with a viceroy who ruled under Cyrus, or with Cyrus himself. In Daniel he is the first ruler of the new Medo-Persian kingdom, the man who set its government in order.

The change of empire came as God had shown long before. The kingdom that would follow Babylon appears in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the great image (Daniel 2) and again in Daniel’s vision of the four beasts (Daniel 7). So this quiet opening, full of offices and numbers, sits inside a history God had already announced.

“It pleased Darius” renders shᵉphar, to be acceptable or to think good, joined to qŏdâm, “before”. The plan was good in the king’s sight, and it was his own decision. He had taken over a vast realm of many peoples, and he set over it “an hundred and twenty princes”. The Aramaic word, ʼăchashdarpan, means a satrap, the governor of a main province of the Persian empire. Each held real authority in his region. He kept order, judged cases, oversaw the local economy and collected taxes, and he answered to the king’s central government. Persia was known for this kind of ordered provincial rule, and an empire spread over such distances and so many peoples needed it to stay in one piece.

The number shows the size of the task. Under a later Persian king the book of Esther counts a hundred and twenty-seven provinces (Esther 1:1). The word malkûw, kingdom, means dominion, both the reign itself and the realm it covers, and verse 1 uses it at the start and at the end: the princes are set “over the kingdom”, and they are to be “over the whole kingdom”. Together they reached every part of Darius’s new dominion.

Above the princes Darius placed three presidents. The word, çârêk, comes into Aramaic from another language and means a chief officer, an emir. The presidents formed the highest tier of the new government, standing between the many governors and the king.

“Of whom Daniel was first.” The word chad is the ordinary word for “one”, and it also serves as the ordinal “first”. The KJV takes it as first, making Daniel the chief of the three and the one the king trusted most. On the other reading Daniel was one of the three, and verse 3 then tells how he rose above the other two. On either reading, a Jewish exile now stood at the head of a foreign empire’s government.

The rest of the verse gives the purpose of the arrangement: “that the princes might give accounts unto them, and the king should have no damage.” To give accounts is yᵉhab, to give, with ṭaʻam, a word that properly means a taste and then a judgment or a matter reported. Here it means the reports and reckonings each governor had to bring to the presidents. The word for damage, nᵉzaq, means to suffer loss or hurt. In a kingdom that lived on the revenue of its provinces, the presidents guarded the king against loss of every kind, from embezzlement and corruption to mismanagement and rebellion. Darius built a system of checks, with the governors answerable to the presidents and the presidents answerable to him, and at its head he placed the man he could trust.

Darius made these appointments by his own choice, and behind his choice stood the Lord. “The king’s heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will” (Proverbs 21:1). Daniel himself had praised God because “he removeth kings, and setteth up kings” (Daniel 2:21), and Paul writes that “there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God” (Romans 13:1). Empires rise and fall by God’s purpose, and the passing of Babylon to the Medes and Persians in a single night took place under his hand.

Daniel’s promotion came from the same hand. “For promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south. But God is the judge: he putteth down one, and setteth up another” (Psalm 75:6–7). God placed his servant at the centre of a heathen government, where he could serve with integrity and bear witness to the truth, and where God’s purposes for his people went forward through a change of empire.

Daniel’s rise recalls Joseph’s. Pharaoh asked, “Can we find such a one as this is, a man in whom the Spirit of God is?” and set Joseph over all the land of Egypt (Genesis 41:38–41). In both stories a foreign ruler sees in a captive Hebrew a wisdom and faithfulness he can rely on, and gives him the highest place beneath the throne. Kings did raise foreigners to high office when they proved loyal and able, and Daniel’s record by this time was long and spotless.

Proverbs describes this path: “Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men” (Proverbs 22:29). Daniel served Darius in the everyday work of government, in reports and revenue and the oversight of governors, and Paul tells believers to do whatever they do “heartily, as to the Lord” (Colossians 3:23–24). Daniel’s competence and honesty flowed from his devotion to God, and the same devotion holds firm a few verses later, when he keeps to his prayers under threat of death (Daniel 6:10).

The height God gave him also brought danger, and these orderly verses prepare for everything that follows. The presidents and princes resent the exile placed over them, and the king’s plan to raise him higher stirs their jealousy into a conspiracy. Their search of his conduct turns up nothing, and the plot they make instead ends in the lions’ den.

Daniel, preferred above every other officer and marked for rule over the whole realm, points beyond himself to Jesus Christ. Daniel had an excellent spirit, and of Christ John writes that “God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto him” (John 3:34). In Christ “are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). Darius purposed to set Daniel over one empire for a time. After his resurrection Jesus said, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18). God raised him from the dead, set him at his own right hand far above every rule and authority, and put all things under his feet (Ephesians 1:20–22). God has highly exalted him and given him the name above every name, that every knee should bow (Philippians 2:9–10), and he bears the name KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS (Revelation 19:16). All things were created by him and for him, and by him all things hold together (Colossians 1:16–17).

The kingdom of Darius passed away like the kingdoms before it. The kingdom God sets up is the one the book of Daniel says “shall never be destroyed” (Daniel 2:44), and its King is Christ. Daniel’s coming deliverance from the den, after a faithfulness that put his life at risk, also foreshadows Christ’s obedience unto death and his rising. “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more” (Romans 6:9–10), and through his death he destroyed him that had the power of death and set free those who lived in fear of it (Hebrews 2:14–15).

These verses show a God who rules the great changes of history as surely as the settled order of a kingdom. A conqueror reorganised an empire, and God had his servant ready, the same Daniel who had served him faithfully for a lifetime. The excellent spirit Darius saw was God’s work in Daniel, and it showed itself in honest accounts and careful oversight as much as in visions. God honours faithfulness in ordinary work, and he can give his people favour with the rulers they serve.

The passage also carries a sober comfort. The place God gave Daniel was a place of trial as well as honour, and the God who raised him there went on to keep him there. Believers who serve under rulers who are strangers to God have in Daniel a picture of what God can do through one faithful life, and in Christ a King whose kingdom shall stand for ever.