Daniel 4:8

at the last It is difficult to understand how the Aram. can bear this meaning; though no doubt something substantially similar is what is intended. Behrmann renders, -And (so it was) till another came in before me, (even) Daniel"; and Bevan (changing a point), -And yet another came in before me, (even) Daniel."

according to the name of my god viz. Bel. The -Bel" in Belteshazzar is not really the name of the god, but (as explained on Daniel 1:7) is part of the word balâṭsu, -his life"; but it may be only an assonance, not an etymology, which the king is represented as expressing, just as Hebrew writers say, for instance, that Cain or Moses was so called because of the verbs -I have gotten," -I have drawn out," although philologically Cain cannot possibly mean -gotten," or Moses -drawn out."

in whomis the spirit, &c. imitated, it seems, from Genesis 41:38 (of Joseph), -a man in whom the spirit of God is." On the sense of -spirit" in the O.T., see on Joel 2:28 (in the Cambridge Bible).

the holy gods Nebuchadnezzar expresses himself as a polytheist: though in Daniel 4:3; Daniel 4:34he uses language indistinguishable from that of pure monotheism. The same expression occurs in the Phœnician inscription of Eshmunazar, king of Sidon (3 4 cent. b.c.), lines 9 and. 22 [239]. On the sense attaching to the term -holy" (which has here hardly any ethicalconnotation, and means rather what we should express by -divine"), see Hastings" Dict. of the Bible, ii. 395 7; and cf. Sanday-Headlam, Comm. on the Epistle to the Romans, on Daniel 1:7.

[239] Hogarth, Authority and Archæology(1899), p. 137 f.