“This was the dream, and now we will interpret
it to the king. Your Majesty, you are the king of
kings. The God of heaven has given you
dominion and power and might and glory; in
your hands he has placed all mankind and the
beasts of the field and the birds in the sky.
Wherever they live, he has made you ruler
over them all. You are that head of gold.
“After you, another kingdom will arise, inferior
to yours. Next, a third kingdom, one of bronze,
will rule over the whole earth. Finally, there will
be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron—for iron
breaks and smashes everything—and as iron
breaks things to pieces, so it will crush and
break all the others. Just as you saw that the
feet and toes were partly of baked clay and
partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom;
yet it will have some of the strength of iron in it,
even as you saw iron mixed with clay. As the
toes were partly iron and partly clay, so this
kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle.
And just as you saw the iron mixed with baked
clay, so the people will be a mixture and will
not remain united, any more than iron mixes
with clay.
“In the time of those kings, the God of heaven
will set up a kingdom that will never be
destroyed, nor will it be left to another people.
It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them
to an end, but it will itself endure forever. This
is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out
of a mountain, but not by human hands—a
rock that broke the iron, the bronze, the clay,
the silver and the gold to pieces.
“The great God has shown the king what will
take place in the future. The dream is true and
its interpretation is trustworthy.”