Dear Rav Eliyahu Essas

I have a question about Daniel’s interpretation of the dream for Nebuchadnezzar.

1. Why does the dream affect only 4 empires: Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman?

If we only talk about the empires that affected the Jews, then it would be necessary to list almost all the empires. If we talk about the most important ones, then why not Egyptian, Byzantine, etc.?

By what principle does the dream affect only some of the empires?

1.2 - Is there a connection between Nimrod and Nebuchadnezzar?

Thank you.

Eric S.

Moscow

1. First of all, for other readers of the materials on our site, I will clarify that we are talking about a fragment of one of the books of the Tanakh section Ketuvim - the book of Daniel.

Daniel was a prophet. It is known about him that he was born and raised in Jerusalem. As a young man, when the Babylonian army besieged Jerusalem and then invaded the city, he was captured. And shortly before the destruction of the First Temple of Jerusalem (3338 from the Creation of the world, that is, in 422 BC), he, along with other captive Jews, was taken to Babylon.

Since Daniel was good-looking, smart and educated, he was taken into service in the palace of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. Living at the royal court, he remained faithful to the Almighty and the Jewish tradition. In particular, he prayed three times a day and arranged everything so as not to eat non-kosher food, which was served to the king and the royal servants - he ate vegetables and drank only plain water.

There, at court, he showed himself in a special way. When Nebuchadnezzar began to have disturbing “prophetic” dreams, and none of his “astrologers” could explain their meaning, as a result of which the wise men in the country began to be executed one after another, Daniel turned to the Creator with a prayer to reveal to him the meaning of the king’s dreams. To save wise people, including their fellow tribesmen, from imminent death.

In response to the purity of his thoughts and aspirations, the depth of his feelings for his people, the Almighty responded to Daniel’s prayers and endowed him with the ability to see the future hidden in the higher worlds, correlating with the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar, which allowed him to unravel these dreams.

It should be noted that the content of Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams, “deciphered” by Daniel, contains a broad picture of the future, intended not only for the Babylonian ruler, who should have understood that his unwillingness to admit that only the Most High rules the world would lead to the fall of the powerful and prosperous Babylonian Empire at that time . They also describe the path of the Jewish people.

In the interpretation that Daniel presented to the Babylonian king, allegorically, as explained, in particular, in the commentary to his book by Rav Saadia Gaon (10th century), four, in spiritual terms, “root” empires, whose dominion in some At least, on a materialistic level, it determined four periods in the spiritual formation of the people of Israel. In other words, there are four galuts (exiles), four stages (“reduction in the flow of the Light of the Most High”, when the connection with Him is lost to one degree or another), which our people must go through, at each stage - fulfilling the spiritual tasks assigned to them. These galuts are called in our tradition differently, including by the names of the enslaving empires. In the order in which you list them: Babylonian (Bavel), which lasted approximately 70 years, Persian (Paras) - about 40 years, Greek (Yavan) - lasting about 300 years, and Roman (Edom) - has not yet ended .

The children of Israel had already left three Galuts behind. The fourth and last, Roman, the signs of which began to appear approximately 2,100-2,200 years ago, and are still not completed. See the answer on the website “Why is the “Roman” galut the longest?”

2. Our books on the “connection between Nimrod and Nebuchadnezzar” say that some part of the soul of King Nimrod, who ruled Babylon in the time of our forefather Abraham, passed on to Nebuchadnezzar and formed the basis of his behavioral principles.

Lyricist Eliyahu Essas