Daniel 2:21

Consider when this was said. Nebuchadnezzar had demanded that his advisors tell him both his dream and its meaning, and had ordered all of them killed when they could not. Daniel was on that list. He asked for time, went home, prayed with his friends, and was given the dream in a night vision.

This is what he said on receiving it — before going to the king, before knowing whether the king would accept it, while the execution order was still standing.

And what he praises is not his rescue. He praises God's authority over times and seasons and kings. He removes kings, and sets up kings. Daniel says this about the specific king who could have him killed that morning, in the capital of the empire that had destroyed his city and deported him as a boy.

The political claim is enormous and Daniel spends the rest of his long life on it. Four kings, three regimes, one deportation, and a career spent advising men who did not share his religion. The book's argument, repeated in every chapter, is that the empire is not the top of the chain.

And the second half is quieter but not smaller: he gives wisdom to the wise. Not to the clever. To those already possessing some — which suggests wisdom, in this book, compounds rather than arrives.