Pharaoh, in the story of Joseph, remembered his dreams, and only asked the professors of necromancy to furnish him with its interpretation. But Nebuchadrezzar is here represented as a rasher and fiercer despot, not without a side-glance at the raging folly and tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes. He has at his command an army of priestly prognosticators, whose main function it is to interpret the various omens of the future. Of what use were they, if they could not be relied upon in so serious an exigency? Were they to be maintained in opulence and dignity all their lives, only to fail him at a crisis? It was true that he had forgotten the dream, but it was obviously one of supreme importance; it was obviously an intimation from the gods: was it not clearly their duty to say what it meant?
So Nebuchadrezzar summoned together the whole class of Babylonian augurs in all their varieties--the _Chartummîm_, "magicians," or book-learned;[273] the _Ashshaphîm_, "enchanters";[274] the _Mekashaphîm_, "sorcerers";[275] and the _Kasdîm_, to which the writer gives the long later sense of "dream-interpreters," which had become prevalent in his own day.[276] In later verses he adds two further sections of the students--the _Khakhamîm_, "wise men," and the _Gazerîm_, or "soothsayers." Attempts have often been made, and most recently by Lenormant, to distinguish accurately between these classes of magi, but the attempts evaporate for the most part into shadowy etymologies.[277] It seems to have been a literary habit with the author to amass a number of names and titles together.[278] It is a part of the stateliness and leisureliness of style which he adopts, and he gives no indication of any sense of difference between the classes which he enumerates, either here or when he describes various ranks of Babylonian officials.
When they were assembled before him, the king informed them that he had dreamed an important dream, but that it produced such agitation of spirit as had caused him to forget its import.[279] He plainly expected them to supply the failure of his memory, for "a dream not interpreted," say the Rabbis, "is like a letter not read."[280]
Then spake the Chaldeans to the king, and their answer follows in Aramaic (_Aramîth_), a language which continues to be used till the end of chap. vii. The Western Aramaic, however, here employed could not have been the language in which they spoke, but their native Babylonian, a Semitic dialect more akin to Eastern Aramaic. The word _Aramîth_ here, as in Ezra iv. 7, is probably a gloss or marginal note, to point out the sudden change in the language of the Book.