John Calvin Commentary Daniel 2:3-4

"And the king said unto them, I have dreamed a dream, and my spirit is troubled to know the dream. Then spake the Chaldeans to the king in the Syrian language, O king, live for ever: tell thy servants the dream, and we will show the interpretation." — Daniel 2:3-4 (ASV)

Daniel first relates the great confidence of the Chaldeans, since they dared to promise the interpretation of a dream still unknown to them. The king says he was troubled through desire to understand the dream; by which he signifies that a kind of riddle was divinely set before him.

He confesses his ignorance, while the importance of the matter may be gathered from his words. Since, then, the king testifies to his desire to inquire about a matter obscure and profound, exceeding his comprehension, and since he clearly expresses himself to be contrite in spirit, some kind of fear and anxiety ought to have touched these Chaldeans; yet they confidently promise to offer the very best interpretation of the dream as soon as they understood it.

When they say, O king, live forever, it is not a simple and meaningless prayer, but they rather order the king to be cheerful and in good spirits, as they claim to be able to remove all care and anxiety from his mind, because the explanation of the dream was at hand.

We know how liberal in words those impostors always were; according to the language of an ancient poet, they enriched the ears and emptied the purses of others. And truly, those who curiously court the breeze with their ears deserve to feed upon it and to be taken in by such deceptions. All ages have proved that nothing exceeds the confidence of astrologers, who are not content with true science, but divine everyone’s life and death, conjecture all events, and profess to know everything.

We must generally hold that the art of conjecturing from dreams is rash and foolish. There is, indeed, a certain fixed interpretation of dreams, as we said yesterday; yet, as we will see later, this ought not to be ascribed to a sure science but to God’s singular gift.

Therefore, just as a prophet will not gather what he has to say from fixed reasonings but will explain God’s oracles, so also he who will interpret dreams correctly will not follow certain fixed rules; but if God has explained the meaning of the dream, he will then undertake the office of interpreting it according to his endowment with this gift.

Properly speaking, these two things—general and perpetual science, and special revelation—are opposed to each other and do not mutually agree. Since God claims for Himself this power of revealing, by means of a dream, what He has imprinted on the minds of men, therefore art and science cannot attain it; instead, a revelation from the Spirit must be awaited.

When the Chaldeans thus boldly promise to become good interpreters of the dream, they not only betray their rashness but also reveal themselves as mere impostors, who pretend to be proficient in a science of which they know nothing, as if they could predict by their conjectures the meaning of the king’s dream.