Daniel and His Use of Numerals
Daniel is a man with a keen interest in names and numbers, so the number of times he employs certain names is significant. He connects Babylon’s rulers with the number four, and Israel’s nobility with the number five, as shown below.
Which is no coincidence. For Daniel, the future of the Gentile world can be summed up in the reigns of four distinct kingdoms, in which Babylon’s rulers are intimately bound up. And these kingdoms, Daniel says, will ultimately be replaced by a fifth kingdom—a heavenly kingdom—, in whose victory Daniel and his people will participate and rejoice.
Note: That even Daniel and his friends’ Babylonian names are associated with the number five is a neat detail. The king of Babylon can change their earthly names, but not their heavenly allegiance or destiny.
Drilling down a level…
Daniel also uses numbers in an instructive way at lower levels of his composition. Take chapter 3, where Daniel’s friends pass through the fires of Babylon.
In Scripture—as in the modern world—, ten is a nice round number. Laban is said to change Jacob’s wages ‘ten times’ (Gen. 31.7). Job’s friends are said to reproach him ‘ten times’ (Job 19.3). And Daniel and his friends are said to be ‘ten times wiser’ than their rivals (Dan. 1.20).
The text of ch. 3, however, is built around the number eleven:
It consists of 33 (3 x 11) verses.
It involves 11 lists.
Nebuchadnezzar’s ‘image’ (צלם) is referred to 11 times.
Nebuchadnezzar’s image is made from a material (gold) with a gematrial value of 11 (‘gold’ = דהב), which is significant (cp. 2.38).
The word ‘man’ (גבר) occurs 11 times.
The verb ‘worship’ (סגד) occurs 11 times.
The verb ‘stand’ (קום) occurs 11 times.
And the word ‘king’ (מלך) occurs 22 (2 x 11) times.
Daniel’s emphasis on the number eleven is significant. Nebuchadnezzar has gone one step too far. Every element of his ceremony is taken to an extreme. The king doesn’t just want Babylon’s natives to be represented on the plain of Dura; he wants every tribe, tongue, and nation represented. He doesn’t just want a few of his more important officials to attend his ceremony; he wants everyone present. And he doesn’t just want a few choice musical instruments played; he wants (quite literally) the whole ensemble. Our text thus reflect a king who’s lost all sense of proportion and perspective.
Its emphasis on the number eleven also reflects the way in which Nebuchadnezzar has overreached himself. Just as, in ch. 7, the beast’s 11th king arouses heaven’s attention (and disapproval), so too does Nebuchadnezzar’s eleven-fold ceremony. And, ironically, the ceremony is finally undone when the king sees ‘one figure too many’ in the furnace. ‘I see four men unbound…in the midst of the fire’, Nebuchadnezzar declares, ‘and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods!’. The words of Proverbs 30.18 come to mind: ‘Three is too wonderful for me; four I don’t understand!’.
Drilling down another level…
We can then drill down a further level and consider the specific details of some of ch. 3’s lists.
The king’s ‘call to worship’ consists of four distinct elements. At its head, we have a Babylonian herald, whose call to worship is answered by:
two relatively familiar instruments (with Semitic roots), viz. the horn and flute,
four exotic instruments (designated by Greek loanwords), viz. the cithara (קיתרוס), sambuca (סבכא), psaltery (פסנתרין), and symphonia (סומפניה), and
a ten-letter catch-all category of instruments (וכל זני זמרא = ‘all sorts of other instruments’),
…which, with a little imagination, can be schematised as shown below.
The king’s summons thus reflects the four-kingdom-schema on which Daniel’s visions are predicated, i.e., Babylon, a two-pronged Medo-Persian alliance, a fourfold Greek empire, and, finally, a catch-all kingdom, summed up in ten toes/kings.