For this cause the king was angry and very furious, and commanded to destroy all the wise men of Babylon. The Septuagint rendering differs little in sense from the above, but in words it does considerably, "Then the king, becoming gloomy and very grieved, commanded that they lead out,all the wise men of Babylonia."
The main thing to be observed is the softening of the meaning in the hands of the Septuagint translator. This is so great as to suggest that he read לָהוֹזָלה instead of לְהוֹבָדָה. The aphel of אזל is not used in Chaldee, but is used in Syriac.
Theodotion's rendering is, "Then the king in anger and wrath commanded to destroy all the wise meal of Babylon." The Syriac has a shade of difference, "Then was the king vehemently enraged, and in great fury commanded to destroy all the wise men of Babylon."
It is evident that Theodotion read בְנַס (benas), "was angry," as if it were the preposition בand the Syriac noun נַס (has), "anger." He also must have inserted the preposition before קְצַף (qetzaph), "wrath;" in this he is followed by the Peshitta.
The Septuagint is freer in its rendering in this verse, and one cannot argue anything from it. The probability seems to be that נַס; (nas) is used as a noun, and that the Targamic verb was formed from the mistake of a scribe dropping the preposition before קְצַף (qetzaph).
If we are correct in this, we have an additional evidence that the original languagge of Daniel was not Chaldee, but Syriac, or, at all events, Eastern Aramaic. As a grammatical note, we direct attention to the form לְהובָדָה, where the אof the root has totally disappeared before the הof the haphel, the equivalent in Biblical Aramaic of the Chaldee and Syriac aphel with its preformative.
א Professor Bevan says that this distinction is only a matter of orthography. Are we to deduce that Professor Bevan has a cockney disregard for h's? The writer now drops reference to special classes of wise men, and names them generally ḥakeemin.
The king is unconvinced of the truth of these wise men (ḥakeemin), or rather he is convinced that they are traitors and deceivers. They are either concealing from him the knowledge they have, and are, therefore, traitors to him; or the gods have withdrawn from them, and therefore they must have been untrue to the gods.
On both these grounds Nebuchadnezzar thinks them worthy of death. He at once issues the decree that all the wise men in the city of Babylon should be slain. If the LXX. reading of Daniel 2:2 be correct, he had only summoned the Chaldean wise men.
If all the wise men of Babylon were ordered to be slain, the punishment is extended beyond the offence. Possibly he argued, "If even my fellow-countrymen, the Chaldeans, are traitors, much more will the Babylonians be so."
So far as words go, it is doubtful whether this decree applies to the province of Babylonia, as the Septuagint translator thinks, or merely to those in the city. But cruel and furious as was the young conqueror, he was scarcely likely to order the wholesale massacre of those who, in Sippara and Borsippa, had neither refused to do what he wished, nor by implication called him an unreasonable tyrant, as had the wise men in Babylon.