Daniel's age--for by this time he must have passed the allotted limit of man's threescore years and ten--might have exempted him from envy, even if, as the LXX. adds, "he was clad in purple." But jealous that a captive Jew should be exalted above all the native satraps and potentates by the king's favour, his colleagues the presidents (whom the LXX. calls "two young men") and the princes "_rushed_" before the king with a request which they thought would enable them to overthrow Daniel by subtlety. Faithfulness is required in stewards;[471] and they knew that his faithfulness and wisdom were such that they would be unable to undermine him in any ordinary way. There was but one point at which they considered him to be vulnerable, and that was in any matter which affected his allegiance to an alien worship. But it was difficult to invent an incident which would give them the sought-for opportunity. All polytheisms are as tolerant as their priests will let them be. The worship of the Jews in the Exile was of a necessarily private nature. They had no Temple, and such religious gatherings as they held were in no sense unlawful. The problem of the writer was to manage his _Haggada_ in such a way as to make private prayer an act of treason; and the difficulty is met--not, indeed, without violent improbability, for which, however, Jewish haggadists cared little, but with as much skill as the circumstances permitted.
The phrase that they "made a tumult" or "rushed"[472] before the king, which recurs in vi. 11 and 18, is singular, and looks as if it were _intentionally_ grotesque by way of satire. The etiquette of Oriental courts is always most elaborately stately, and requires solemn obeisance. This is why Æschylus makes Agamemnon say, in answer to the too-obsequious fulsomeness of his false wife,--
"καὶ τἀλλα, μὴ γυναικὸς ἐν τρόποις ἐμὲ ἅβρυνε, μηδὲ βαρβάρου φωτὸς δίκην χαμαιπετὲς βόαμα προσχάνῃς ἐμοί."
"Besides, prithee, use not too fond a care To me, as to some virgin whom thou strivest To deck with ornaments, whose softness looks Softer, hung round the softness of her youth; Ope not the mouth to me, nor cry amain As at the footstool of a man of the East Prone on the ground: so stoop not thou to me!"
That these "presidents and satraps," instead of trying to win the king by such flatteries and "gaping upon him an earth-grovelling howl," should on each occasion have "rushed" into his presence, must be regarded either as a touch of intentional sarcasm, or, at any rate, as being more in accord with the rude familiarities of licence permitted to the courtiers of the half-mad Antiochus, than with the prostrations and solemn approaches which since the days of Deïoces would alone have been permitted by any conceivable "Darius the Mede."
However, after this tumultuous intrusion into the king's presence, "all the presidents, governors, chief chamberlains," present to him the monstrous but unanimous request that he would, by an irrevocable interdict, forbid that any man should, for thirty days, ask any petition of any god or man, on peril of being cast into the den of lions.[473]
Professor Fuller, in the _Speaker's Commentary_, considers that "this chapter gives a valuable as well as an interesting insight into Median customs," because the king is represented as living a secluded life, and keeps lions, and is practically deified! The importance of the remark is far from obvious. The chapter presents no particular picture of a secluded life. On the contrary, the king moves about freely, and his courtiers seem to have free access to him whenever they choose. As for the semi-deification of kings, it was universal throughout the East, and even Antiochus II. had openly taken the surname of _Theos_, the "god." Again, every Jew throughout the world must have been very well aware, since the days of the Exile, that Assyrian and other monarchs kept dens of lions, and occasionally flung their enemies to them.[474] But so far as the decree of Darius is concerned, it may well be said that throughout all history no single parallel to it can be quoted. Kings have very often been deified in absolutism; but not even a mad Antiochus, a mad Caligula, a mad Elagabalus, or a mad Commodus ever dreamt of passing an interdict that no one was to prefer any petition either to God or man for thirty days, except to himself! A decree so preposterous, which might be violated by millions many times a day without the king being cognisant of it, would be a proof of positive imbecility in any king who should dream of making it. Strange, too--though a matter of indifference to the writer, because it did not affect his moral lesson--that Darius should not have noticed the absence of his chief official, and the one man in whom he placed the fullest and deepest confidence.