The First Exile to Babylon: Daniel and His Companions

The first blow was not destruction but a selection. Nebuchadnezzar took some of the vessels of the House of God to the treasury of his god in Shinar, and ordered his chief officer to bring youths of royal seed, "without blemish, of good appearance, skilled in all wisdom," to be taught Chaldean letters and presented to the king after three years. Four from Judah were among them, renamed: Daniel became Belteshazzar; Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah became Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego.

The first thing they did was refuse the royal table. Daniel asked for a ten-day test on grains and water; afterwards they looked healthier than all who ate the king's food.

Then Nebuchadnezzar dreamed of a colossal statue—head of gold, chest of silver, belly of bronze, legs of iron, feet of iron and clay—and demanded that his wise men tell him the dream itself, not only its meaning. Daniel asked for a night, prayed with his companions, and the secret was revealed: the four parts are four kingdoms that follow one another, and a stone hewn "without hands" shatters them all. That vision became the frame of the Jewish reckoning of the four exiles. Later the three companions refused to bow to a golden image and came out of the furnace without a hair singed.

Academic history dates this event differently. In the age of the kings the divergence is not the one familiar from the Persian period, where Seder Olam runs about a hundred and sixty-five years short. Here academic chronology reckons some reigns as overlapping — father and son on the throne together — so its span from the division of the kingdom to the destruction of the Temple comes out nearly three decades shorter. The gap therefore grows: a hundred and thirty-five years at the division, a hundred and fifty-four at Sennacherib, a hundred and sixty-four at the destruction. The anchors of the academic count are external documents: the battle of Qarqar (853), Jehu's tribute on the Black Obelisk (841), the fall of Samaria (722), Sennacherib's campaign (701), Megiddo and Nebuchadnezzar's campaigns in the Babylonian Chronicles (609, 605, 597). Both dates appear on the timeline when the divergence layer is on.