Page:06.CBOT.KD.PropheticalBooks.B.vol.6.LesserProphets.djvu/67

602). Wherein, then, does the “easily recognisable” resemblance of these two facta consist? Nebuchadnezzar directed a colossal image of threescore cubits in height and six cubits in breadth to be erected on the plain of Dura, and to be solemnly consecrated as a national image, the assembled people falling down before it doing it homage. Antiochus Epiphanes, on the contrary, did not command an idol-image, as has been supposed from a false interpretation of the βδέλυγμα ερημώσεως (1 Macc. 1:54), to be placed on the altar of burnt-offering, but only a small idol-altar (βωμόν, 1 Macc. 1:59) to be built; no mention is made, however, of its being solemnly consecrated. He then commanded the Jews to offer sacrifice month after month on this idol-altar; and because he wished that in his whole kingdom all should form but one people, and that each should leave his laws (v. 41), he thus sought to constrain the Jews to give up the worship of God inherited from their fathers, and to fall in with the heathen forms of worship. Nebuchadnezzar did not intend to forbid to the nations that became subject to him the worship of their own gods, and to the Jews the worship of Jehovah, but much more, after in the wonderful deliverance of the three friends of Daniel he recognised the omnipotence of the supreme God, he forbade by an edict, on the pain of death, all his subjects from blaspheming this God (Dan 3:28-30).
And wherein consists the resemblance between Antiochus Epiphanes and the Median Darius (Daniel 6)? Darius; it is true, at the instigation of his princes and satraps, issued an ordinance that whoever within thirty days should offer a prayer to any god or man except to the king himself should be cast into the den of lions, but certainly not with the view of compelling the Jews, or any other of his subjects, to apostatize from their ancestral religion, for after the expiry of the appointed thirty days every one might again direct his prayer to his own god. The special instigators of this edict did not contemplate by it the bringing of the Jewish people under any religious restraint, but they aimed only at the overthrow of Daniel, whom Darius had raised to the rank of third ruler in the realm and had thought to set over the whole kingdom. But when Daniel was denounced to him by the authors of this law, Darius became greatly moved, and did all he could to avert from him the threatened punishment. And when, by an appeal of his satraps to the law of the Medes and Persians that no royal edict could be changed, necessity was laid upon him to cause Daniel to be cast into the den of lions, he spent a sleepless night, and was