It must not, however, be hence thought, as Auberlen does, “that the Babylonian and Persian religions presuppose more genuine truthfulness, more sacred reverence for that which is divine, deeper earnestness in contending against the evil, in the nations among whom they sprung up, than the Hellenic, which is so much richer and more beautifully developed;” for this distinction is not supported by history. But although this may be said of the Persian, it cannot be held as true of the Babylonian religion, from all we know of it. Kranichfeld (p. 107) is more correct when in the succession of the metals he finds “the thought conceived by the theocrat of a definite fourfold procedure or expression of character comparatively corresponding to them, of a fourfold דּרך (way, Jer 6:27) of the heathen kingdoms manifesting an increasing deterioration.” The two first kingdoms, the golden and the silver, in general appear to him in their conduct as proportionally noble, virtuous, and in their relation to the theocracy even relatively pious; the two latter, on the contrary, which presented themselves to him in the likeness of brass and iron, as among the four morally base, as standing in the moral scale lower and lowest, and in relation to the theocracy as more relentless and wicked (see v. 40)[1].
With this the declaration of the text as to the position of the four world-kingdoms and their rulers with referenced to the people of God stand in accord; for, on the one hand, Nebuchadnezzar, and the first rulers of the second kingdom, Darius the Median and Cyrus the Persian, respect the revelations of the living God, and not only in their own persons give honour to this God, but also command their heathen subjects to render unto Him fear and reverence; on the other hand, on the contrary, from the third and the fourth kingdoms the greatest persecutors of the kingdom of God, who wish utterly to destroy it (Daniel 7, 8), arise. In this
- ↑ Kliefoth (p. 93) in a similar manner says, “From the application which in Dan 2:40 is made of the iron material, we see that the substances representing the different kingdoms, and their deterioration from the gold down to the iron, must denote something else than that the world-power, in the course of its historical formation, will become always baser and more worthless - that also its more tender or more cruel treatment of the nations, and of the men subdued by it, must be characterized. If the bonds which the Babylonian world-monarchy wound around the nations which were brought into subjection to it, by its very primitive military and bureaucratic regulations, were loose, gentle, pliable as a golden ring, those of the Medo-Persian were of harder silver, those of the Macedonian of yet harder copper, but the yoke of the fourth will be one of iron.”)
