What Does Daniel 3:1 Mean?
Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold, whose height was sixty cubits, and its breadth six cubits. He set it up in the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold, whose height was threescore cubits, and the breadth thereof six cubits: he set it up in the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon.THE KEY
The king’s power appears here as the power to give an image a place and make it stand.
THE MEANING
Power gives its chosen likeness a body, dimensions, and a place in view. The gold and towering proportions make the image appear weighty, while the verb behind “set it up” makes its upright presence the decisive act. The verse speaks to the present wherever something made is positioned as though its scale alone makes it ultimate.
THE ROOT
וַאֲקִמֵהּ
waʾaqimēh
GROWS FROM
קום
qûm
To rise or stand; in this verb form, to make something stand or establish it.
The Aramaic verb וַאֲקִמֵהּ (waʾaqimēh, he set it up) comes from קוּם (qûm, rise or stand): the king causes the image to stand. Its root family also gives מָקוֹם (māqôm, place or standing place), linking an upright presence with the place it occupies.
ALSO GROWS
qûm: To rise or stand.
קוּם
The image is made to stand as a visible presence.
māqôm: A place or position.
מָקוֹם
The shared root links standing with occupying a place, as the image is set in the plain of Dura.
THE PATTERN
A fashioned image can be given apparent sacred authority when human power adorns it and sets it before others.
And he took them from their hands, and shaped it with a cutting tool, and made it into a poured calf. And they said, These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands.Since then we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think the divine is like gold, or silver, or stone, carved by craft and by human imagining.THE THREAD
You, O king, saw, and look, a great likeness. This great likeness, whose brightness was surpassing, stood before you, and its shape was dreadful.The same Aramaic word צְלֵם (tselem, image) names the figure in both verses. In Daniel 2:31 the image appears in the king’s vision; here, the king gives an image material form and sets it upright, moving from an image seen to an image made.
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