“After you, another kingdom will rise, inferior to yours. Next, a third kingdom, one of bronze, will rule over the whole earth. 40Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron—for iron breaks and smashes everything—and as iron breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and break all the others. 41Just as you saw that the feet and toes were partly of baked clay and partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom; yet it will have some of the strength of iron in it, even as you saw iron mixed with clay. 42As the toes were partly iron and partly clay, so this kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle. 43And just as you saw the iron mixed with baked clay, so the people will be a mixture and will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay.
Daniel’s interpretation describes four world empires that were to follow in succession. The progression in describing the statue from its golden head to its toes is to indicate progress in time. “After you, another kingdom will rise, inferior to yours.” For all of his power, Nebuchadnezzar would one day die, as would his successors. We know from history that after Nebuchadnezzar’s dynasty came to an end, another empire, the Medo-Persian, would take over the role of world dominance. This new empire would be “inferior,” as silver is inferior to gold, and as the chest and arms are below the head. Nebuchadnezzar ruled as absolute monarch; in the Medo-Persian Empire, which lasted for two hundred years, the power of the king was limited by the growing power of the nobles.
“Next, a third kingdom, one of bronze, will rule over the whole earth,” over the then-known world. That was the Greek Empire of Alexander the Great, which conquered Persia and for several centuries ruled the whole world. What Daniel said would happen did happen.
The fourth kingdom, represented in the king’s dream by the image’s legs of iron and feet of clay, would be strong as iron and would crush and break all the others. From history we know this to be the Roman Empire, which in 146 B.C. replaced Greece as the leading nation of the world. Rome was the leading world power at the time the Son of God came to earth and continued in power for more than six hundred years. The feet and toes of part iron and part clay pointed to the fact that the Roman Empire had elements of strength but also of weakness, which later led to its downfall.
There were a number of reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire. In part, the Roman Empire self-destructed because of the corruption and immorality of its culture. Daniel points to a second reason: “The people will be a mixture and will not remain united.” Another factor that contributed to Rome’s downfall was the migration of Germanic and Slavic peoples from the interior of Europe into areas controlled by Rome. There was intermarriage and intermingling, “a melting-pot experiment—but the resultant stock was not the material that enduring empires are made of” (Leupold, Exposition of Daniel, page 120). The most powerful force that brought about Rome’s collapse, however, was Christianity. The message and the outlook and the life of the Christian community condemned the corrupt Roman Empire and hastened its fall.
At the time when Daniel explained the king’s dream, only the first of the four kingdoms had appeared on the world’s stage; the other three empires did not even exist. How then could Daniel have known about them? Daniel made that clear when he told the king, “There is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries” (2:28). God must have revealed the information to Daniel, for he never could have guessed his way so successfully down the centuries of human history. It may be of interest here to note that what Daniel announced here in broad outline will be elaborated by Daniel’s visions in chapters 7 to 12.