Babylon’s king Nebuchadnezzar does not come off well in the biblical book of Daniel. It is not difficult to find in the text’s description of his behavior the definition of a neurotic fool.
Yet below the obvious humorous touches in the book’s way of telling a story, a more subtle irony may be detected. Frankly, it is difficult to know whether this kind of thing is really there or whether we read it into the text because we rather like this kind of thing. One such soft-spoken irony is borne along by the Aramaic word gala’ and related forms.
Usefully for the ironist, gala’ means both to exile or to deport and to uncover or to reveal. When Babylon’s royal fool is not erecting a huge statue and spinning out elaborately tedious instructions regarding how his minions are to worship it, he is threatening to exterminate the counselors he so obviously needs unless they can tell him not just the interpretation of his dreams but the story line of the dreams themselves. The man is mad and a mad empire cannot bring itself to lower him from his throne.
The Jewish exile Daniel—a man identified as one of the exiles from Jewish realms, that is, a son of the galut—employs the vocabulary of gala’ to speak with his erstwhile overlord about how the God of the heavens reveals dreams, indeed is the revealer of dreams.
Therefore Daniel went to Arioch, whom the king had appointed to destroy the wise men of Babylon, and said to him, ‘Do not destroy the wise men of Babylon; bring me in before the king, and I will give the king the interpretation.’ Then Arioch quickly brought Daniel before the king and said to him: ‘I have found among the exiles from Judah a man who can tell the king the interpretation.’
Perhaps it is bare linguistic coincidence that gala’ and galut appear in pregnant proximity in the telling of this tale. In that case, the perceived pregnancy is a false one. It will produce no child. The interpreter ought to leave things alone and mine the more obvious material for his interpretative pay-off. To probe more deeply into the imagined thing merely makes him like Nebuchadnezzar, blind to what is real and important because caught up in imaginings with no bearing on reality.
Or perhaps not.
The king said to Daniel, whose name was Belteshazzar, ‘Are you able to tell me the dream that I have seen and its interpretation?’ Daniel answered the king, ‘No wise men, enchanters, magicians, or diviners can show to the king the mystery that the king is asking, but there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries, he has disclosed to King Nebuchadnezzar what will happen at the end of days. Your dream and the visions of your head as you lay in bed were these: To you, O king, as you lay in bed, came thoughts of what would be hereafter, and the revealer of mysteries disclosed to you what is to be. But as for me, this mystery has not been revealed to me because of any wisdom that I have more than any other living being, but in order that the interpretation may be known to the king and that you may understand the thoughts of your mind.’
It would be very much like the cunning literature that places the Jew in the court of the foreign king—a place where a sophisticated touch for nuance and suggestion is most necessary—to play with the sub-surface meaning of words.
It may well be that the perceptive reader is meant to revel in the quiet suggestion that it is by means of Babylon’s pompous prowess at unrooting, deporting, and exiling peoples that the God of one of those peoples achieves his preserving and redeeming purposes. If Nebuchadnezzar had not exiled these sons of Judah, the joke would have been on him. Bereft of the counselors he’d murdered, he would have been more vain and stupid than the man we encounter in these pages.
Yet YHWH—he is not named as such in this foreign court—saves Nebuchadnezzar from himself, indeed makes history and future in the midst of such self-absorbed folly, by continuing to reveal the secrets of men to an honest exile who against the grain serves Him where such worship might lead to deepest loss.
The text is ironic—arguably so, at the least—because things in such a world, governed by such an enigmatic and persistent deity, are almost never what they seem.
In the holy house, when it is allowed to stand back in Zion and far from deporting monarchs, the response to such truth is often a sung ‘Hallelujah’.
If Babylon’s courts provide no space for such noisy praise, no matter: it can still be spoken between the lines of a little story.
Canter Bridge 
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