19Then Daniel (also called Belteshazzar) was greatly perplexed for a time, and his thoughts terrified him. So the king said, “Belteshazzar, do not let the dream or its meaning alarm you.” Belteshazzar answered, “My lord, if only the dream applied to your enemies and its meaning to your adversaries! 20The tree you saw, which grew large and strong, with its top touching the sky, visible to the whole earth, 21with beautiful leaves and abundant fruit, providing food for all, giving shelter to the beasts of the field, and having nesting places in its branches for the birds of the air—22you, O king, are that tree! You have become great and strong; your greatness has grown until it reaches the sky, and your dominion extends to distant parts of the earth.
23“You, O king, saw a messenger, a holy one, coming down from heaven and saying, ‘Cut down the tree and destroy it, but leave the stump, bound with iron and bronze, in the grass of the field, while its roots remain in the ground. Let him be drenched with the dew of heaven; let him live like wild animals, until seven times pass by for him.’"
With the understanding the Lord had given him, Daniel realized immediately that the dream was directed against the king.
There is a delicate irony here in repeating Daniel’s Babylonian name (“also called Belteshazzar”). Remember that Nebuchadnezzar had originally given Daniel the name Belteshazzar (“May Bel protect you”) to show the superior power of Bel, the chief god of Babylon. And now this young civil servant, with power given him by the true God, interpreted the dream that the representatives of Babylon’s gods had been unable to understand.
Daniel’s reaction when he heard the king’s dream gives us a good view of the big heart of this man of God. On the one hand, he knew that Nebuchadnezzar deserved the judgment God was announcing through the dream. Yet Daniel was concerned about the king and grieved over what he had to tell him. For a long time he was upset at the prospect of telling his royal master the bad news about what was going to happen to him.
The king encouraged Daniel to speak up, and he did, although reluctantly. “My lord, if only the dream applied to your enemies . . . !” He then repeated the dream in almost the identical words the king himself had used. He made the interpretation of the dream as brief and as clear as possible: “You, O king, are that tree!” The tree in the king’s dream represented the king in all his greatness. At the moment, Nebuchadnezzar was at the peak of his greatness. His empire reached from its capital, near the head of the Persian Gulf, to Asia Minor, in the west (present-day Turkey); in the north it included Armenia and Syria. At one time Nebuchadnezzar also controlled Egypt.
The king has asked to hear the bad news about the dream; now Daniel spelled it out in detail. “You, O king, saw a messenger, a holy one, coming down from heaven and saying, ‘Cut down the tree.’” Although Nebuchadnezzar was the most powerful king of his day, God was going to remove him from his throne. In the language of the dream, the enormous tree, whose top touched the sky and was visible to the ends of the earth and from which birds and beasts were fed, would, under God’s judgment, come crashing to the ground.
The stump of the tree was not to be destroyed but was to remain in the field, bound with iron and bronze. Daniel did not explain the significance of the iron and bronze bands, and opinions concerning this aspect of the dream vary.
Some have thought that after the king’s fall from his throne—and from his sanity—he actually had to be restrained with chains to keep him from destroying himself or harming others. This seems an unlikely explanation, since in speaking to King Belshazzar some years later Daniel recalled that Nebuchadnezzar had “lived with the wild donkeys” (5:21), animals that are not chained but run free. Other scholars think the bands of iron and bronze refer to the special care the royal courtiers would give their master while he was temporarily incapacitated.