Isaiah 41:15

Hebrew Bible

13 For I am the Lord your God, the one who takes hold of your right hand, who says to you, ‘Don’t be afraid, I am helping you.’ 14 Don’t be afraid, despised, insignificant Jacob, men of Israel. I am helping you,” says the Lord, your Protector, the Holy One of Israel. 15Look, I am making you like a sharp threshing sledge, new and double-edged. You will thresh the mountains and crush them; you will make the hills like straw. 16 You will winnow them and the wind will blow them away; the wind will scatter them. You will rejoice in the Lord; you will boast in the Holy One of Israel. 17 The oppressed and the poor look for water, but there is none; their tongues are parched from thirst. I, the Lord, will respond to their prayers; I, the God of Israel, will not abandon them.

Daniel 2:34

Hebrew Bible

32 As for that statue, its head was of fine gold, its chest and arms were of silver, its belly and thighs were of bronze. 33 Its legs were of iron; its feet were partly of iron and partly of clay. 34 You were watching as a stone was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its iron and clay feet, breaking them in pieces. 35 Then the iron, clay, bronze, silver, and gold were broken in pieces without distinction and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors that the wind carries away. Not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the statue became a large mountain that filled the entire earth. 36 This was the dream. Now we will set forth before the king its interpretation.

 Notes and References

"... This tale, a legend of court contest, demonstrates that the wisdom granted to Daniel by God exceeds that of the magicians of Babylon. The influence of Isaiah, especially Isaiah 40–55, on Daniel 2 has been proposed by many and is generally acknowledged. Daniel 2 gives narrative life to Isaiah’s polemic against the idols and magicians of Babylon, and to the claims about God’s activity attendant upon that polemic. Just as allusion to the Joseph story in Daniel 2 has been widely proposed, so too have some critics judged that Isaiah’s influence on Daniel 2 extends at points to allusion. Especially promising in this regard are the statue-crushing stone which becomes an earth-filling mountain (Daniel 2:34–35, 45) and Nebuchadnezzar’s prostration before Daniel (Daniel 2:46). Both in its telling and in its interpretation, the climactic action of the dream oracle of Daniel 2 alludes to a pair of metaphors found in Deutero-Isaiah ... That the “mountains” in Isaiah 41:15 represent the foreign powers rather than Israel or its ancestors as in Isaiah 51:1–2 need not militate against them being evoked by Daniel 2. Such a “gap” in imagery or narrative between the evoked and alluding texts is a necessary element in the metaphorical power of allusion: if the texts were flatly similar, the evoked text would have little to contribute. That the “mountains” are central to Isaiah 41:15–16 at all provides a point of readerly recognition, one reinforced by the “chaff” into which they are threshed, and the “threshing” floors from which such chaff climbs to the “winds” (all four of these elements shared together with Daniel 2:35). The ironic reversal between the functions of the mountains in each text encourages the reader in the production of “intertextual patterning” ..."

Lester, G. Brooke Daniel Evokes Isaiah: Allusive Characterization of Foreign Rule in the Hebrew-Aramaic Book of Daniel (p. 108) Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015

 User Comments

Do you have questions or comments about these texts? Please submit them here.