Daniel 1:18

At the end of the days. Some expositors have thought that when the king required his wise men to interpret his dream in his 2nd year (ch. 2:1), Daniel was not called to the meeting because his schooling was not yet completed, and that he and his friends were condemned to share the fate of the wise men because they belonged to the profession, although they were not yet full-fledged members of it. This view cannot be regarded as correct. The young apprentices were to be trained three years in order to “stand before the king” (ch. 1:5); and it was “at the end of the days” specified that they were brought before the king for examination. Then “stood they before the king” (see on v. 19). This statement indicates that the three-year training period ended before the king examined them and “found” that Daniel and his three friends were better than all the other candidates. This could hardly have taken place after one of them, Daniel, had already received high honors and had been promoted to the rule of the province and supervision over all the wise men, and after the other three had been given high office (ch. 2:46-49). The logical sequence, as well as the narrative order, requires that Daniel’s three-year course end before Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in his 2nd year.

All this leads to the conclusion that this was not a period of 36 months; that these three years must be counted inclusively; they represent (1) Nebuchadnezzar’s accession year (see on v. 2), in which the Hebrew captives arrived in Babylon and entered their training; (2) Nebuchadnezzar’s year 1, which was the calendar year beginning at the next New Year’s Day after his accession; and (3) Nebuchadnezzar’s year 2, in which Daniel graduated and stood “before the king,” and the year in which he interpreted the dream (see ch. 2:1; also PK 491).

By applying the commonly used ancient method of inclusive reckoning, which is attested in numerous cases as the usual way of counting time, there is no need to assert, as modern commentators have done, that ch. 1 stands chronologically in contradiction to ch. 2, or to take recourse in the fanciful or forced explanations that are found in many commentaries. For example, Jerome declared that the 2nd year of ch. 2:1 refers to the 2nd year after the conquest of Egypt; and the Jewish scholar Ibn Ezra thought that it was the 2nd year after the destruction of Jerusalem. Later some conjectured that Nebuchadnezzar reigned with his father two years.